Textual Life: Shaykh Musa Kamara and the Politics of Knowledge

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Wendell H. Marsh (Mohammad VI Polytechnic University) to explore his groundbreaking book Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025). Marsh takes us deep into the intellectual world of Shaykh Musa Kamara, a towering figure of West African Islamic scholarship, whose bilingual manuscript History of the Blacks becomes a lens for examining colonial disruption, epistemic resistance, and the literary life of African thought.

We unpack how Marsh reimagines African Islamic texts not as anthropological artifacts but as living documents of literary and philosophical engagement. From Kamara’s struggle to publish in colonial Senegal to the broader implications for postcolonial humanities, this conversation challenges us to rethink what counts as knowledge, who gets to preserve it, and how textual traditions shape futures across continents.