Tariq Baggaari

“Yanja” is the child of an illicit relationship between a slave-owner and a woman from a tribe in southern Mauritania following the French occupation. To the slaves “Yanja” is a master while to the masters he is a slave. He struggles to win the heart of “Dimi”, the daughter of a Sufi sheikh and a “moon child”. His courtship would soon be brought to an end by his enslavement, castration and shipment to three areas that were victims of French colonial tyranny (Mauritania, Morocco and Senegal). In the course of these journeys, the story moves beyond how oppressed peoples view the colonizer to an investigation of how the European collective imagination perceives these peoples.