Panel 1, Session 1: Historical Traditions of Arabic-Script Manuscripts in Africa

Paper Abstract: Until recently, the Islamic manuscripts with annotations in Soninke written in Arabic script remained unnoticed in European libraries and private collections in West Africa. The paratextual materials in these manuscripts, especially references to local intellectuals, give insights into connections between the texts, individuals, and places. A careful study of the paratexts leads to the identifications of distinct groups of manuscripts, aligning them with scholarly networks. Very often the actors of these networks are recognisable in their individual roles as teachers and students. The interplay between the local languages they used in writing point to specific methods of Islamic education that connected various ethnic groups. The paper will demonstrate how manuscript evidence can be used to reconstruct a larger picture of the Islamic learned tradition in the Senegambia and Mali of the 18th–20th centuries.

Paper Abstract: Arabic-script manuscripts in Sub-Saharan Africa represent a huge wealth of material for studying African civilizations and culture. They are countless, spreading over a vast area. Recent catalogues of manuscripts in Sub-Saharan Africa will remain incomplete as long as many manuscripts are kept in private libraries.

This paper seeks to highlight the circumstances and factors that contributed to the creation and spread of the manuscripts culture and its historical traditions, both in Arabic and local “foreign” languages in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on key social changes that gave rise to this big volume of writings, the need to use Arabic script to write in local languages, and the communication channels that contributed to the spread of this trend.

We will look at the main historical periods that saw the rise of these writings, with focus on the nineteenth century given its big production, and examine the Hausa-speaking countries as an example, due to the spread of a variety of Arabic-script local manuscripts in them.

This paper analyses the following:

The key circumstances and factors that contributed to the creation of the manuscripts culture in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The spread of historical traditions of Arabic and foreign manuscripts;
Intellectual, social and political channels that contributed to their spread.
Types of texts and their historical significance.

Paper Abstract: This work took almost ten years (2005-2017). The author was intrigued by local African cultures being belittled by incoming cultures, and their importance and distinct self-expression being disregarded by Arab scholars.
Taking a closer look at the heritage of those cultures, which were called “foreign” to indicate their status as alien to prevalent cultures, the author looks for the basis of this deliberate or undeliberate belittlement of a heritage that has been spread all over the African continent simply because it is written using Arabic script.
The author points out that modern scholars disregarded early Arabic writings in vast areas of Africa since Ibn Khaldun because, apart from references to caves or artefacts, those writings paid no attention to the African heritage that was prevalent in the areas those scholars visited, as the remaining cultural production was verbal and unrecordable. Key national African writers did the same in their areas.
This research is the result of collaboration with a number of specialized scholars from countries chosen by the author to establish the extent to which manuscripts from those countries reflect the heritage of Arabic-script manuscripts. The author selected sixteen manuscripts in sixteen languages from all over Africa and arranged them in two volumes. The first volume includes manuscripts in eight languages in the following order: Malagasy, Swahili, Hausa, Fulani, Wolof, Mandingo, Songhay and Tamashek. The second volume contains manuscripts in Berber, Soninke, Serer, Kanuri, Yoruba, Nobiin, Afar and Afrikaans.