Le désir de calme: L’histoire du mouvement Sawaba au Niger is a welcome French-language translation of Klaas van Walraven’s ambitious 2013 chronicle of Sawaba, a Nigerien political party, anti-colonial movement, and leftist guerilla campaign that emerged in the 1940s and made an illfated attempt to reclaim power in the 1960s. Even if the original English title, The Yearning for Relief, is more poetic than the French one, Rahmane Idrissa did a skillful job of translating this massive tome. The lengthy yet readable prose propels readers through the Sawabists’ epic quest for deliverance from repression, first at the hands of colonizers and later at the hands of post-colonial autocrats who rejected Sawaba’s radical visions for an independent and egalitarian society. VanWalraven set out to write a fundamentally social history, centering the voices and experiences of individual people. This translation will let his work finally reach audiences in Niger (at least in more scholarly circles where French is spoken). It is satisfying to imagine him reporting back to the aging Sawabists he interviewed for his research, reassuring them that their stories will not be forgotten. Readers not already versed in the subject matter might consider van Walraven audacious for asking them to invest in a nearly one thousand-page analysis of an unfamiliar movement, set in an already marginalized country. Even as a scholar of Nigerien social movements, I was skeptical: “Surely,” I thought, “no well-edited monograph needs to be this long!” But one of the powerful contributions of this book is to show, in no uncertain terms, that Sawaba is a topic worthy of such thorough treatment. For readers willing to take the plunge, themain payoff is not a paradigm-shifting theory, but rather the copious concrete details that the author painstakingly documents with secondary sources, original interviews, and previously unavailable archives. We learn, for example, about a class of prostitutes with noble roots in preIslamic Hausa courts, who harnessed their financial and social autonomy to become key activists during Sawaba’s emergence as a political party (79).

中文翻译：

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克拉斯·范·瓦尔拉文 Le désir de Calme：L'histoire du mouvement Sawaba au Niger。雷恩：雷恩大学出版社，2017 年。792 页。地图。插图。参考书目。指数。50.86 美元。纸。ISBN：978-2753553958。

Le désir decalme：L'histoire du mouvement Sawaba au Niger 是 Klaas van Walraven 雄心勃勃的 2013 年 Sawaba 编年史的受欢迎的法语翻译，Sawaba 是 1940 年代出现的一个尼日尔政党、反殖民运动和左翼游击运动。在 1960 年代进行了一次失败的夺回权力的尝试。即使最初的英文书名《对救济的渴望》比法文更富有诗意，拉赫曼·伊德里萨 (Rahmane Idrisa) 在翻译这本巨著方面做得非常出色。冗长而可读的散文推动读者通过萨瓦比主义者从镇压中解脱出来的史诗般的追求，首先是在殖民者手中，后来在后殖民独裁者手中，他们拒绝了萨瓦巴对独立和平等社会的激进愿景。VanWalraven 开始写一部基本的社会历史，以个人的声音和经历为中心。这种翻译将使他的作品最终在尼日尔（至少在更多讲法语的学术圈子中）到达观众手中。想象他向他为研究而采访过的年迈的萨瓦比主义者报告，让他们放心，他们的故事不会被遗忘，这是令人满足的。尚未精通该主题的读者可能会认为 van Walraven 大胆要求他们对发生在一个已经边缘化的国家的陌生运动进行近一千页的分析。即使作为尼日尔社会运动的学者，我也持怀疑态度：“当然，”我想，“没有经过精心编辑的专着需要这么长！” 但是，本书的强大贡献之一是毫不含糊地表明，Sawaba 是一个值得如此彻底处理的主题。对于愿意冒险一试的读者来说，主要的收获不是范式转换理论，而是作者用二手资料、原始采访和以前无法获得的档案煞费苦心地记录的大量具体细节。例如，我们了解到有一类在前伊斯兰豪萨法院出身高贵的妓女，在萨瓦巴成为政党期间，她们利用自己的经济和社会自主权成为关键的活动家（79）。