A Used Book, a Lost Era

It can be a small world, this niche buying of used scholarly books on Amazon. It can also be a sobering one.

I am on the lookout for both rare books in my field and copies of my own publications that are being sold way below list price. The former helps me remain current in my specialty; the latter allows me to rescue cheap castoffs, amass a gift pile of author’s copies, and give my publisher a fighting chance to sell our product. But I didn’t expect that I would find my own signature on the title page of one such castoff, with an inscription to “Kent—Happy Trails!”

The book that I signed for Kent—whoever he is—was a quasi-anthropological memoir of village life in an obscure West African nation. Nearly a quarter of a century before, I had learned the language of that village, thanks to a two-year stint with the Peace Corps. I fell in love with the local culture. When I returned to Niger four years later, in 1983, to undertake Fulbright research, I immersed myself even further in the language and culture of the region.

My bible during that first year as a researcher was R.C. Abraham’s 992-page Dictionary of the Hausa Language, originally published in 1949 by University of London Press. Abraham had been in the colonial employ of Her Majesty in Nigeria as “Anthropological Officer and Government Linguist.” His later academic creds included lecturing in Hamitic philology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, in London. I bought my precious copy in a bookshop in Kano, the metropolis of northern Nigeria.

Abraham’s tome is much more than a dictionary. It is a veritable window into an otherwise inscrutable way of life. Take, for example, the expression ya yi (“he performed”) santi: “While eating in company, he made some ordinary remark which through their enjoyment of their food, sent the others into fits of laughter.” Enlightened by such gems, I could better bridge cross-cultural chasms related to eating in the company of others. I was even emboldened to perform such non-Western practices as santi myself. All of this, mind you, I was experiencing in one of the poorest, but safest, corners of the globe: the overwhelmingly Muslim Sahel.

Over the next decade, I returned several times to Hausaland, my baggage weighted down each trip by Abraham’s massive dictionary. Eventually, my frequent travel to West Africa and frequent use of the dictionary there but not at home in New England brought me to this solemn decision: I would leave Abraham behind in Africa, along with the rest of my stored possessions there. The book would be there for me when I next returned. For years, the space on my bookshelf in Massachusetts previously occupied by the dictionary looked—absent the tragic connotations—like the skyline of lower Manhattan without the Twin Towers.

Until recently, that is, when I saw a copy of Abraham’s dictionary (used, of course) for sale on Amazon, for a mere $25.

I opened the shipping packet with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for reuniting with an old friend. I pulled the book out slowly, carefully, lest I wrinkle or tear the dust jacket. The front cover was as bright an orange as I remembered. But then my heart sank as I processed the meaning of the purple-inked notice on the jacket. There it was again, even more firmly stamped on the front cover and on the book’s first and last pages: “Property of Peace Corps Niger.” In my hands, I realized, I was holding a facsimile of the very same book I had left behind in Africa, this other rare copy having served as a reference for countless volunteers and staff in the Peace Corps headquarters in Niamey. It was also the ultimate, tangible evidence of the end of an era.

Two years ago, in response to an attempted kidnapping of a French volunteer in the capital by the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Peace Corps suspended its program in Niger. The Peace Corps was just months shy of celebrating 50 years of continuous service in the country. That same year, the U.N. Secretary General’s special envoy to Niger, the Canadian Robert Fowler, published A Season in Hell, his account of having been kidnapped by the AQIM in Niger and held in the Sahara Desert of nearby Mali for 130 days. And in May, the unthinkable happened—suicide bombings in two Nigerien towns.

In the meantime, the Peace Corps had pulled out of this formerly tranquil outpost entirely. Now it has liquidated its property and its holdings—including its organic borrow-a-book, donate-a-book library. The same library that generations of Peace Corps volunteers, including myself, had excitedly visited on our rare outings from our posts way out in the bush. Books we borrowed from that library helped keep us company during our long, solitary stints in our host villages; replenishing it with dog-eared books we had brought from home gave us another kind of satisfaction. Now, instead of the Peace Corps in Niger, we have a drone base.

And that is why, thanks to Amazon and Al Qaeda, I found myself refilling the empty space in my bookcase with an artifact from my idealistic past. It hurt me to think of Abraham’s superlative Hausa-English dictionary, which so helped me navigate the complexities of Niger’s culture, being discarded along with the rest of JFK’s brainchild in that unjustly beleaguered nation.

Such is the strange karma of online book selling and international terrorism that has brought Abraham’s book back into my hands to preserve and to protect; and—for Niger and the Peace Corps—to mourn.