Nourishing Body and Spirit: Family, Food, and Community in Senegal
Preparations for a communal meal served to participants in the Senegal faculty seminar. Photo courtesy Mbye Cham. In this essay, De Anna Reese, a 2019 participant in CAORC’s faculty development seminar to Senegal, discusses West Africa’s rich communal traditions of shared food, music, and dance and how they resonate with the strong family traditions of African-American communities. As one who teaches and studies one of the strongest and most enduring institutions in the Black