[BRIEF NOTE] Que sais-je
Apr. 18th, 2006 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldA couple of weeks ago, I picked up one of the Que sais-je? books. Que sais-je? is famous in the Francophone world, an indispensable reference series published since 1941 by the Presses Universitaires de France. It unfortunately doesn't
This particular title was the second edition of journalist Philippe Decraene's 1961 Le panafricanisme. It's a worn edition, the pages having advanced past yellow to brown, the inscription in ink of the name of one Martha Taylor, "28/11/61" in Strasbourg still living, an address in the German city of Köln on the inside back cover written in pencil fading. The detail given to the abortive plans for border changes is interesting--the irredentist longing for a Greater Somalia, the plausibility of a unified Senegambia, the failure of the Federation of Mali, even a United States of Latin Africa proposed by the Central African Republic's first president Barthélémy Boganda, based on French Equatorial Africa, that would stretch at least as far as Portuguese Angola and Belgian Rwanda--not least because none of these projects ever worked out in the end.
This particular title was the second edition of journalist Philippe Decraene's 1961 Le panafricanisme. It's a worn edition, the pages having advanced past yellow to brown, the inscription in ink of the name of one Martha Taylor, "28/11/61" in Strasbourg still living, an address in the German city of Köln on the inside back cover written in pencil fading. The detail given to the abortive plans for border changes is interesting--the irredentist longing for a Greater Somalia, the plausibility of a unified Senegambia, the failure of the Federation of Mali, even a United States of Latin Africa proposed by the Central African Republic's first president Barthélémy Boganda, based on French Equatorial Africa, that would stretch at least as far as Portuguese Angola and Belgian Rwanda--not least because none of these projects ever worked out in the end.
