Les Rois Des Tambours Au Haayre

This book is based on an articulate oral rendition of the history of the Haayre by Aamadu Baa Digi, a griot at the court of Dalla. It was made at the request of two anthropologists, Mirjam de Bruijn and Han van Dijk, with permission of the then ruling leader. This fascinating part of history of this lesser known region would have sunk into oblivion, had it not been recorded in 1991, two years before Aamadu Baa Digi passed away. The kings that have ruled over the Haayre in Mali are all descendants of its first king Alu Maana, hence Malians call this region the Haayre of Alu Maana. The word haayre 'rock, mountain' is from Fulfulde, the language of the FulBe majority in this region and it refers to the rocky mountains that dominate the landscape.

Caroline Angenent is a theologian who has worked for the Kaberry Research Centre in Cameroon and the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions.
Anneke Breedveld, Ph.D. (1995) in Linguistics, works for African Languages and Cultures at the Leiden University. She does research on various dialects of Fulfulde. She published on the Maasina-dialect of Fulfulde and on the semantics of ethnic labelling.
Mirjam de Bruijn, Ph.D. (1995) in Anthropology, does fieldwork in Cameroon and Mali, mainly among pastoral people. Her fields of interest are: pastoralism, nomadism, ecology, social (in)security, poverty, urban-rural linkages and interethnic relations. Her last work in Mali was in Menaka (Tamacheck) and in the Mopti area (Fulani/FulBe and Dogon). She works at the African Studies Centre Leiden.
Han van Dijk, Ph.D. (1995) in Agricultural Sciences, is an anthropologist and studied forestry. His research focuses around a number of topics such as political decentralization, land tenure, natural resource management and farmer-herder strategies in response to climate variability and development policy. He works at the African Studies Centre Leiden. Previous publications include Pastoralists under Pressure?, with Mirjam de Bruijn and Anneke Breedveld (Brill, 1999).