EYLLOU/AFP via Getty ImagesĪ mural by a Dakar artist known as Papisto was a notable example. Pilgrims of the Mouride Brotherhood pray near the Great Mosque of Touba to honor Bamba and the time he spent in exile. As the Roberts note in a 2007 article in the journal Africa Today, the paintings are like visual forms of zikr, or devotional “songs of remembrance.” For Mourides, a follower is to “keep the image of his sheikh before his eyes for spiritual help” while reciting zikr. In that sense, the images bestow the saint’s active blessing, not just his memory, according to Mouride belief. In their bedrooms, people might cover the walls with the saint’s image to have its baraka, or blessing, during all waking and sleeping moments. “A lot of people had commissioned artists or were artists themselves and would paint these environments,” Roberts says. But come in.” Inside they would find an even richer variety. When a homeowner learned why they were interested, invariably they would be invited inside, their hosts saying, “Well that one is okay, that’s outside. For the ones that they found, Gueye made preliminary surveys of a work’s history and then sought permission to photograph key paintings. They covered the neighborhoods of Guel Tapée and Médina in late afternoons, looking for paintings. Roberts and his wife, Mary Nooter Roberts, also a cultural historian at UCLA, were struck by the Bamba images they encountered in Dakar during visits in the 1990s, and collaborated with translator Ousmane Gueye to learn more. “This one is only recognizable by its enigmatic nature.” “That’s what a mug shot is for,” he says. ![]() A mug shot has a purpose-clear identification of its subject. University of California, Los Angeles cultural historian Allen Roberts notes the irony around the 1913 photograph. Sheikh Serigne, as he is widely known, became a West African saint for everyone, regardless of their beliefs. Images of Bamba appear on boats in the port of Saint Louis, Senegal, in memory of a reported miracle that took place as he was being taken to exile. That miracle of resistance is evoked throughout the harbor in Saint Louis today, where his shrouded image appears on the prows of fishing boats to protect crews going out to sea. When the captain of the French ship hauling him into exile in Gabon refused to allow Bamba to perform his prayers aboard ship, it is said, he threw his prayer mat overboard and prayed on the waves. Following his arrest, he was taken to Saint Louis, the old port north of Dakar. His motto was: “Pray to God but plow your fields.” Some of his spiritual power and mystique, though, would later come from his reserved personality and the stories of hardships he endured at the hands of imperial powers.īamba was first imprisoned in 1895 on vague charges-authorities conceded in their own documents that they had “no clear instance of the preaching of holy war,” according to late University of London scholar of Islam in Africa, Donal Cruise O’Brien-and sentenced to exile. He preached submission to God and prized hard work as a source of maintaining dignity. He drew so many followers to his home in central Senegal that by 1891, French colonial officials grew worried about his influence. ![]() Bamba, their leader, stood in a lineage of Sufi marabouts, or holy men, that dates back to 17th-century Morocco. In the late 1800s, the Mourides (meaning “disciple”) emerged as a peaceful resistance movement against French imperialism. ![]() The only known photo of Bamba created an image that endures today in many forms. All of these variations go back to that single, overexposed photo, and to the Mouride legacy that it unintentionally heralded. In murals, Bamba shares space with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and his iconic outline festoons all forms of transport, from trucks and taxis to ships. Rendered variously in ink, paint, and charcoal, his image, based on that photograph, adorns homes and public spaces everywhere in the modern nation, from musician and politician Youssou N’Dour’s Dakar neighborhood of Médina to roadside villages in the interior. It’s the only known photograph of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1854–1927), a spiritual leader of Senegal’s independence movement. More than a century later the image has become unmistakable. Yet the camera did not capture a man trapped so much as a compelling, mythical radiance-the figure is poised, his headscarf glowing in blinding Sahelian sunlight, his face obscured but indelible. The photographer, a bureaucrat of the French colonial government in West Africa, aimed his camera at the standing Senegalese man, who was being kept under house arrest. The photo was meant as a kind of a mug shot, so authorities could keep tabs on him.
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