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Africans have greatly contributed to modern France, as intellectuals, laborers and, tragically, as soldiers.
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Yet the estimated 1 600 000 French-Africans remain almost invisible. Here is a start to discovery...
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- Our guide is Asta, singer and Cameroonian queen
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 - In an African bar
She takes our visitors to places where compatriots go and she performs.
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- For our groups only, she presents the "bottle dance", here in a Parisian salon
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As subtle rhythms set the mood, Asta majestically enters. The "bottle dance" begins.
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Among Africans, the bottle is filled with beer. For this evening, she preferred grapefruit juice.
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•During or just afterwards...
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For the dance in an African bar, please CLICK
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• An African feast follows ... mmm ...
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 - Damaris brings an entrée.
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Westerners "first eat with their eyes and then with their nose and then try to relate the African dish to what they know already," says Damaris Maa, founder and President of the African immigrant women's association through whom we know Asta.
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They combine presentation, aroma and an elegantly drawn-up menu to herald the succulent dishes to which companies and individuals are turning when they seek to surprise their guests.
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- Another way to discover Africa - unstereotyped history
• Monotheism's black saviors
We present the recent, widely accepted research of a Canadian investigative reporter who indicates that every synagogue, church and mosque owes its very existence to an event that occurred in 701BC.
That's when an army led by Nubians preserved Jerusalem from destruction by Assyrians, thereby saving the Hebrew people from annihilation. This permitted Judaism to blossom several centuries later and enabled Christianity and Islam to emerge as its offshoots. The Nubians in question comprised Egypt's 25th Dynasty.
Many scholars, including the Institut de France's Jean Leclant, former director general of the International Association of Egyptologists, have endorsed the book, The Rescue of Jerusalem, by Henry Aubin.
• Dynamism that the colonial conquest stopped (and not the much earlier Atlantic slave trade)
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 - Conclusions featured in "The National Geographic", February 2008
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 - Illustration in Heinrich Barth, "Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa", 1854
Catherine Aubin's doctorate is in African history (Institute of African Studies, Columbia University). Her
conclusions are unusual.
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Africans in crowd / Dreux Office of Tourism (detail)
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