Textual LifeTextual Life is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual historical approach to Islam in Africa. The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (18641945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, during a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to