A "New York Times" Notable Book for 1999

 Best Fiction of 1999, the "Los Angeles Times Book Review"

 Starred review, "Publishers Weekly"

Finalist for 1998 Dublin IMPAC Literary Award

Still Waters in Niger 

The tale of Paul Stoller's sojourn among sorcerors in the Republic of Niger is a story of growth and change, of mutual respect and understanding that will challenge all who read it to plunge deeply into an alien world. 


In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger

Harmattan Rain follows three generations of women as they cope with family, love and life. A few years before Ghana’s independence, Lizzie-Achiaa’s lover disappears. Intent on finding him, she runs away from home. Akua Afriyie, Lizzie-Achiaa’s first daughter, strikes out on her own as a single parent in a country rocked by successive coups. Her daughter, Sugri grows up overprotected. She leaves home for university in New York, where she learns that sometimes one can have too much freedom. In the end, the secrets parents keep from their children eventually catch up with them.

Harmattan Rain

This comprehensive history of Niger during the colonial period is a work based on primary research which attempts an overall appraisal of the colonial past. Dr Fuglestad questions the assumption that the colonial conquest constituted a clear break in African history. He traces the main trends of the colonial period back to their origins in the pre-colonial past. He also demonstrates that the power of colonial officials was less effective than is generally thought and that, though French colonial rule was the single most important factor in shaping the present-day societies of Niger, it was still only one of the many contributing factors. While the main events of the modern history of Niger and the neighbouring regions of the Central Sudan and the Central Sahara are discussed and analysed in detail, the book focuses on long-term trends.

A History of Niger 1850-1960

Following its creation by President Kennedy in 1961, Peace Corps became an icon of American idealism in action on an international scale. It inspired a generation of American youth, and it continues to attract thousands of youthful Americans to opportunities for international adventures in service to their fellow man. This book recounts the experience of the author, a retired Foreign Service Officer and Ambassador, as Peace Corps director in Niger from 2000 to 2006, leading and supporting 430 Volunteers. He offers vignettes of Volunteer life and adventures, often in their own words, as well as a foreign affairs professional's informed perspective on poverty, development, politics, culture, and security in the world's poorest country, a fascinating land of heat and hunger, squalor and beauty, turmoil and peace, where the unimaginable becomes commonplace.

Adventures in Service with Peace Corps in Niger

Bori, in the Mawri society of Niger, are mischievous and invisible beings that populate the bush. Bori is also the practice of taming these wild forces in the context of possession ceremonies. In "Prayer Has Spoiled Everything" Adeline Masquelier offers an account of how this phenomenon intervenes—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically—in human lives, providing a constantly renewed source of meaning for Mawri peasants confronted with cultural contradictions and socio-economic marginalization. 
	To explore the role of bori possession in local definitions of history, power, and identity, Masquelier spent a total of two years in Niger, focusing on the diverse ways in which spirit mediums share, transform, and contest a rapidly changing reality, threatened by Muslim hegemony and financial hardship. She explains how the spread of Islam has provoked irreversible change in the area and how prayer—a conspicuous element of daily life that has become virtually synonymous with Islamic practice in this region of west Africa—has thus become equated with the loss of tradition. By focusing on some of the creative and complex ways that bori at once competes with and borrows from Islam, Masquelier reveals how possession nonetheless remains deeply embedded in Mawri culture, representing more than simple resistance to Islam, patriarchy, or the state. Despite a widening gap between former ways of life and the contradictions of the present, it maintains its place as a feature of daily life in which villagers participate with varying degrees of enthusiasm and approval. 
	Specialists in African studies, in the anthropology of religion, and in the historical transformations of colonial and postcolonial societies will welcome this study.


Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger

Rhymes from the Niger This is a collection of poems written as rhymes to help children in their nursery and early primary classes gather knowledge about Nigeria. Using common national symbols and the nation's aesthetics, the author helps the child to not only grasp the early concept of reading but also create a sense of patriotism to their nation and continent. Whether as a class textbook or an evening read after dinner, children will find the book to be fun and educational.

Ocharlyie's Rhymes from the Niger: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes for the Nigerian Child

The cities of West Africa's Middle Niger, only recently brought to the world's attention, make us rethink the 'whys' and the 'wheres' of ancient urbanism. They present the archaeologist with a novelty; a non-nucleated, clustered city-plan with no centralized, state-focused power. This book explores the emergence of these cities in the first millennium B.C. and the evolution of their hinterlands from the perspective of the self-organized landscape. Cities appeared in a series of profound transforms to the human-land relations and this book illustrates how each transform marked a leap in complexity.

Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape

In Niger, where access to rail and air travel requires overcoming many obstacles, roads are the nation’s lifeline. For a year in the early 1990s, Peter Chilson traveled this desert country by automobile to experience West African road culture. He crisscrossed the same roads again and again with bush taxi driver Issoufou Garba in order to learn one driver's story inside and out. He hitchhiked, riding in cotton trucks, and traveled with other bush taxi drivers, truckers, road engineers, an anthropologist, Niger's only licensed woman commercial driver, and a customs officer.

 The road in Africa, says Chilson, is more than a direction or a path to take. Once you've booked passage and taken your seat, the road becomes the center of your life. Hurtling along at eighty miles an hour in a bush taxi equipped with bald tires, no windows, and sometimes no doors, travelers realize that they've surrendered everything.

 Chilson uses the road not to reinforce Africa's worn image of decay and corruption but to reveal how people endure political and economic chaos, poverty, and disease. The road has reflected the struggle for survival in Niger since the first automobile arrived there, and it remains a useful metaphor for the fight for stability and prosperity across Africa.

Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa

"Engaging Modernity" is Ousseina Alidou’s rich and compelling portrait of Muslim women in Niger as they confront the challenges and opportunities of the twentieth century. Contrary to Western stereotypes of passive subordination, these women are taking control of their own lives and resisting domination from indigenous traditions, westernization, and Islam alike.
    Based on thorough scholarly research and extensive fieldwork—including a wealth of interviews—Alidou’s work offers insights into the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger. Mixing biography with sociological data, social theory and linguistic analysis, this is a multilayered vision of political Islam, education, popular culture, and war and its aftermath. A gripping look at one of the Muslim world’s most powerful untold stories.

Runner-up for the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association

Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger

Sitting on the cusp between Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa, Niger is in many ways a remarkable place, blending in the harsh Sahelian environment a great diversity of cultures and lifestyles to make up a poor but resilient nation. The country was established in the early 20th century in what used to be the busy crossroad of exchanges between the kingdoms and empires of West Africa and the Arab-Islamic world. The resulting melting pot is a blend of Western Sudanic cultures, manifest in particular in its food, music, and dance, as well as in the enduring rituals and practices of animist religions, along with a good deal of Arab culture imported through the Islamic religion and a dash of French culture. The fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of Niger covers the history of the peoples of the Republic of Niger from medieval times to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries covering elements of pre-colonial and colonial history, recent politics, cinema, literature, religion, economics, and finance. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Niger.

Historical Dictionary of Niger

Twenty years ago, when the author and his best friend, Mike Moe, were eighteen years old, they lit out from Wyoming to explore the world. They washed up in Africa and without forethought or planning set off for the most remote place on earth they could imagine: Timbuktu. Stopped by disease and the desert, they never reached the fabled city. Nonetheless, that first journey taught them the meaning of travel - that to be en route is more important than to arrive, that where your body has been is secondary to where your heart has gone. Fifteen years later they return to Africa, determined to reach Timbuktu. But this time they will do so by water, attempting the first descent of the Niger River. Both men are now married, their wives pregnant, their lives irrevocably altered from their days of youth. With an intuitive African guide and two companions, they search for and find the source of the Niger River high in the mountains of Guinea. The river immediately bears them into the heart of Africa, the Dark Continent; they are attacked by African killer bees, charged by hippos, stalked by crocodiles, borne over waterfalls. They pass through villages where every female child has had a clitoridectomy; stumble upon a brotherhood of blind men living alone in the bush; dance by firelight with a hundred naked women. And yet even after successfully navigating the headwaters of the Niger, the author still has not reached the dream of his youth. He then buys a motorcycle, rides alone through the Sahara, and enters Timbuktu, the mythical city hidden in a sea of white sand. Throughout, the author interweaves the tales of his own journey with the stories of the early explorers who tried to reach Timbuktu,men of unconquerable will, vanity, and perseverance, who would die beheaded, speared, or eaten alive by illness.

Niger

Still Waters in Niger

Kathleen Hill

In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger

Paul Stoller

Harmattan Rain

Ayesha Harruna Attah

A History of Niger 1850-1960

Finn Fuglestad

Adventures in Service with Peace Corps in Niger

James R. Bullington

Prayer Has Spoiled Everything: Possession, Power, and Identity in an Islamic Town of Niger

Adeline Masquelier

Ocharlyie's Rhymes from the Niger: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes for the Nigerian Child

Oribi Charles

Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape

Roderick McIntosh

Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa

Peter Chilson

Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger

Ousseina Alidou

Historical Dictionary of Niger

Abdourahmane Idrissa

To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger

Mark Jenkins