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Sign up todayWalking with Abel
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreThe Fulani are the largest surviving group of nomads on the planet. In Walking with Abel, Anna Badkhen embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys—nomadic herders in Mali's Sahel grasslands—as they embark on their annual migration across the savannah. It's a cycle that connects the Fulani to their past even as their present is increasingly under threat—from Islamic militants, climate change, and the ever-encroaching urbanization that lures away their young. The Fulani, though, are no strangers to uncertainty—brilliantly resourceful and resilient, they've contended with famines, droughts, and wars for centuries.
Dubbed "Anna B├ó" by the nomads who embrace her as one of their own, Badkhen narrates the Fulani's journeys and her own with compassion and keen observation, transporting us from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani's Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle. Together they cross the Sahel—the savannah belt that stretches from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic—with Fulani music they download to their cell phones and tales infused with the myths that ground their past, make sense of their identity, and safeguard their future.
Anna Badkhen has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her immersive investigations of the world's iniquities have yielded six books of literary nonfiction, most recently Fisherman’s Blues. She has written about a dozen wars on three continents, and her essays and dispatches appear in periodicals and literary magazines such as the New York Review of Books, Granta, The Common, Guernica and the New York Times. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones.
What do you do with a BA in English from Princeton University? You go to New York to pursue an acting career, and end up putting all of your skills together as an audiobook narrator. Elisabeth Rodgers first started recording audiobooks for the National Library Service of the Library of Congress at the American Foundation for the Blind (Talking Book Productions) in New York City. After she had numerous titles under her belt, she branched out, and has since narrated over 100 titles for a variety of publishers. She was the recipient of an Audie Award for the full-cast recording of Sherlock's Secret Life in 2000. Her work on The Last Chinese Chef, Annexed, The Naked Eye, and Mapping the Heavens garnered AudioFile magazine's prized Earphones Awards, and she was lucky enough to join the star-studded cast of Audible, Inc.'s Audie-nominated production of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, as well as the Earphones-winning MetaBook audio-drama production of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Elisabeth continues to work both onstage and in the studio. She lives in the Lower East Side of New York City.
Reviews
“A rare and extraordinary book…More than a window into an ancient, and possibly doomed, way of life; she digs down to the very core of what it means to be human.”
“Displays the skill of a writer accustomed to telling the stories of those living unimaginable lives.”
“With extraordinarily poetic language, Badkhen captures the Fulani pace that dates back thousands of years: ‘a sound of sorrow and hope and loss and desire: the sound of walking.’”
“If you thought commuting to work in Midtown was rough, try Sub-Saharan Africa.”
“An engrossing look into an alien world from the perspective of a writer with a unique story of her own.”
“This lyrical account of that journey eloquently describes the culture of the Fulani and is…[an] exquisitely written book.”
“Badkhen makes intellectual and emotional connections that will appeal to anyone interested in Africa’s nomadic peoples and readers of memoirs such as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.”
“Badkhen’s lyrical, off-the-beaten-path travel memoir also serves as a trenchant sociological study of one of the ‘planet’s largest remaining group of nomads’…[and] vividly captures and communicates an increasingly rare and wondrous experience.”
“The poetry in Badkhen’s prose demands that readers slow down and savor her gentle, elegant story.”
“Many people listen to audiobooks to recapture the intimate pleasure of being read to by a parent or friend. No one makes that connection better than Elisabeth Rodgers. Her rich alto is almost hypnotic as she tells the story of Fulani nomads moving across the Sahel in Mali, embodying ancient traditions in a world transformed by climate change and war…Rodgers masters the pronunciation of the Sahel and the Fulfulde languages. This is a wonderful audiobook for anyone interested in North Africa.”
“Badkhen’s account is a wondrous tableau of survival in one of the planet’s toughest environments, threaded with history, legend, and a wealth of stories.”
“At the end of this riveting tale, the reader not only knows something about the fascinating particularities of Fulani being-in-the-world but is also inspired by the indomitable resilience of the human spirit.”
“A magisterial book which speaks to us as a species in the early twenty-first century—where have we walked from and where are we walking.”
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