(Il)Literate Africa? The Ajami Tradition, the Manuscript Heritage and the New Knowledge Factory in Sudanic Africa

Amidu Olalekan Sanni 
Distinguished Professor of African & Middle Eastern Studies 
Lagos State University, Nigeria

A dominant but inaccurate proposition in pre-Modern Western discursive tradition was that Sudanic Africa was largely lacking in literacy and history, a written culture (G. W. F. Hegel d. 1831; H. Stanley 1904; Trevor- Roper 1969). However, documentary and archival pieces of evidence from antiquity have proved otherwise. The Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Ethiopian Ge‘e z, the Berber Tifinagh, among other forms of “literacies” have established the fact that Africa was in fact the “cradle of writing”. According to Andogoly Guindo, “Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/world/africa/timbuktu-mali-manuscripts.html). The enormous wealth of manuscripts in formal Arabic and local languages in the modified Arabic script (ajami) provides evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back to centuries. In support may be cited the testimony by Leo Africanus (c. 1485–c. 1554) in his Descrittione dell’Africa (completed in 1526) that “it has been 900 years since Africans use Arabic characters.”. (Leo Africanus 2010, 139 [1896]). The historic ideology of contempt in Eurocentric and Afrophobic scholarship against original works in formal Arabic and ajami by native authors on ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ subjects has since the twilight of the last century been paling into insignificance. The raison d’etre is the increasing realisation of the importance of the West African manuscript heritage as reliable sources for authentic African voices and perspectives on religious, social, and all forms of cultural expressions for which the colonial discursive traditions have offered less than accurate analyses. But then, how can the ajami and manuscript heritage of West Africa align with the imperatives of the Digital Turn and epistemic decolonization? (Cf Stewart 2023). What new insights have the ajami and the Sudanic African manuscript tradition offered in local and global (glocalized) scholarship and how can these be deployed to generate, transmit, and distribute new forms of knowledge in contemporary epistemic factory? These are the issues my presentation intends to address.
 

Die Veranstaltung findet im hybriden Format bei uns am ZMO statt. 

Link zur Teilnahme: https://zfl-berlin-org.zoom.us/meeting/register/E9iYf5ytShuA7zWWD64bIg