Department Research

Boston University African Ajami team, supported by Prof. Fallou Ngom and Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor, has successfully concluded work on a multi-year project, Digital Preservation of Fuuta Jalon Scholars’ Arabic and Ajami Materials in Senegal and Guinea, funded by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library. This initiative has created the largest digital archive of Fuuta Jalon scholars’ Arabic and Ajami manuscripts, preserving 49 collections and 52,415 pages, some dating back to the 18th century. The texts cover a broad range of religious, historical, and intellectual topics. The project has made these invaluable materials accessible to researchers, students, and the public worldwide, shedding new light on the rich intellectual traditions of the Fuuta Jalon region and providing key insights into the literacy and scholarship of enslaved Africans in the Americas.

The Boston University Readers in Ajami (RIA) project, led by Prof. Fallou Ngom and Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor, has developed three African Ajami Readers – of over 600 pages of instructional materials. The Wolof, Mandinka, and Hausa Ajami Readers offer a comprehensive multimedia learning experience in combination with the interactive project website.

The initiative aims to revive and promote African literatures written in Ajami, which refers to the use of Arabic script for non-Arabic languages. These resources help uncover the wealth of cultural, historical, and political knowledge embedded in Ajami texts, which for centuries have been a key medium of literacy in many African societies. Ajami writing, which has remained largely obscure to many due to limited access to its texts, serves as an important tool for grassroots education and communication.

The Ajami Readers and the multimedia website provide a comprehensive learning experience. They contain digitized texts, photo images, video interviews, and interactive exercises in Wolof, Mandinka, and Hausa Ajami, accompanied by Latin-script transcriptions and English translations. The Ajami Readers are authored by Fallou Ngom, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Jennifer Yanco, Elhadji Diagne, Mustapha Kurfi, and Ablaye Diakite, with the assistance of numerous people including Ousmane Cisse, Gana Ndiaye, and Bala Saho. The Geddes Language Center digital humanities team, Alison Parker, Frank Antonelli, Shawn Provencal, and Mark Lewis, provided help with the multimedia website.

Funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the project provides a template for future resources in other African languages, offering a bridge between traditional local knowledge and modern educational tools.

Our Ajami Studies Team has been actively engaged in multiple research projects in recent years, contributing to academic journals, blog sites, and the development of multimedia instructional materials and digital archival collections. Our double special issue in Islamic Africa (volumes 14/2, 2023, and 15/1, 2024) explored the literatures and literacies of four major West African languages—Wolof, Mandinka, Hausa, and Fula—positioning African Ajami studies within the broader context of participatory multimedia and digital archiving approaches. More about our activities can be found in the recent African Studies Center news article.

The Boston University NEH Ajami project, led by Prof. Fallou Ngom (Project Director) and Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor (Project Manager), has developed unique resources in the course of its three-year research engagement, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project, Ajami Literacy and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa, has digitized a selection of manuscripts in Ajami (African language texts written with a modified Arabic script) in four major West African languages (Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof), transcribed and translated them into English and French, prepared commentaries, and created related multimedia resources to be made widely available to the scholarly community and the general public. The Ajami literatures that have developed in sub-Saharan Africa hold a wealth of knowledge on the history, politics, and cultures of the region, but are generally unknown. The history of Ajami refutes the claims that Africa lacks written traditions.

The project is the first systematic comparative approach of several major African languages written in Ajami, examining the different patterns of Ajami development in these four languages and literatures, and the multiple forms and custodians of Ajami literacy. It also marks the first time that such varied African Ajami documents have been translated into two major European languages (French and English) and made accessible to communities and scholars globally. The project facilitates interpretive knowledge about the meaning and purpose of Ajami texts, their social functions, and the voices of the people who have written, own, and use them. Our multi-disciplinary team of scholars and Ajami experts in Africa and the United States has digitized, transcribed and translated several thousand pages of texts and prepared selected video and audio files that can be accessed on our website: https://sites.bu.edu/nehajami/.

Our ongoing Readers in Ajami Project is a three-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Education. It aims to develop specialized Ajami Readers in Hausa, Wolof, and Mandinka with a multimedia companion website to provide American students, language teachers, scholars, and American professionals working in Muslim Africa with the necessary linguistic, cultural and literacy skills to engage Ajami users. The Readers include instructional material on diverse topics, such as The resources of the project will cover a range of fields, including business and economy, health and medicine, agriculture and the environment, and human rights, politics and diplomacy. The project will produce a methodology that can be replicated for other world languages with dual literacy systems (Ajami and Latin script orthographies). It will provide an optimal model of how to build and sustain specialized textual and digital educational resources that incorporate local voices and knowledge recorded in multiple African Ajami scripts – something many academics and professionals have overlooked for centuries. The project draws on the expertise of our NEH Ajami project in social anthropology, African linguistics, pedagogy, and digital technology.

Our new research grant is from the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library for a project “Digital Preservation of Fuuta Jalon Scholars’ Arabic and Ajami Materials in Senegal and Guinea.” The project that will commence in Spring 2023 will digitally preserve 50,000 pages of endangered Arabic and Ajami manuscripts produced by Fuuta Jalon scholars who lived in the 18^th-20^th century in the Republic of Guinea. The project aims to advance scholarly knowledge about the rich bilingual works of Fuuta Jalon scholars, and also contribute to the understanding how some enslaved Africans were educated in Arabic and Ajami literacy skills before their captivity in the Americas. The long-term goals of the project include knowledge transfer and capacity building in African communities, as well as fostering teaching, research, and academic publication.