Duncan Fallowell

Beyond Timbuktu

Michel Leiris’s unforgettable account of travelling the breadth of Africa in the 1930s is finally available in English

issue 09 September 2017

Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages recounting the French expedition from Dakar to Djibouti 1931–33. It doesn’t matter that this travel diary — part field study, part confessional, first published in 1934 — has arrived so late for an English readership.

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