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Dreams of Rural Senegal: Starting a Bio Farm From Ground Zero

by mzabteam

Assietou Diop is a French agronomist, based in La Rochelle specialising in the management of rural territories. Read on as we catch up with her about a project close to her heart. “Sanctuary” … I think it’s important for everyone to be able to introspect, question and not be afraid of loneliness. It is in solitude that we learn to really know ourselves, to improve,...

June 27, 2020

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Adventure, Interviews

Arab Fashion from the Past and Present: An Under-represented Costume Tradition

From soap making and cosmetics to costume in the Abbasid Caliphate, Nehal of the blog Lugatism explores the rich history of adornment through the Middle Ages. Read on to learn why she began an odyssey into Medieval Arabo-Islamic beauty practices and costume culture. Since I was a child, I was an avid consumer of American entertainment. If an average Jane like me wanted to find out how a certain culture dressed in a chosen epoch, they could look up a movie or a show about said culture. The popularity of Hollywood and other global entertainment industries made this effort easier. The majority of Hollywood’s historical films or period-re-enactment dramas are notorious for their, let’s say, “white-centric” portrayal. They either tell the story of a white character in a historical setting or sometimes a story set in a historical period with a white protagonist. The woefully problematic history of Hollywood’s negative portrayal of non-white minorities has accumulated quite a long rap sheet over the years, which has garnered the disparagement of various audiences. Alongside biased and...

Scent As A Sanctuary: Aromatherapy Amongst The Tuareg

by Africana95

Plants have always played a vital role in the physical emotional and spiritual well being of human kind. The Tuareg of Niger are an example of a people for whom scent plays a major role in everyday life, exchange and kinship. The Taureg are a nomadic people largely scattered across North / Northwest Africa. They can be found in Mauritania, northern Nigeria, Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Tunisa, Algeria and Niger. The Tuareg are instantly recognisable as the ‘blue men’ due to the blue cotton turbans/garment (tagelmust) the men wear to protect their faces from the harsh sandy terrain. The Tuareg speak Tamacheq, are largely of Amazigh ethnicity and form a system of clan membership largely practising the religion of Islam. The Tuareg of Niger like many other civilisations before them heavily use the power of aroma, aromatherapy and scent as a part of their sociocultural systems and local sociability. Anthropologist Susan Rasmussen in her 1999 paper ‘Making better scents in Anthropology’ analyses culture from the underexplored standpoint of the circulation of aromas. In her...

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