Digital Preservation of Wolof Ajami Manuscripts of Senegal

July 11th, 2011

This archived post was written by Vika Zafrin.

Professor Fallou Ngom, Director of the African Language Program in the African Studies Center, and Roger Brisson, Head of Metadata Services in Mugar Memorial Library, left for Senegal on July 9 to guide a project funded by the British Library’s “Endangered Archives Programme.”

The project will make digital copies of endangered Wolof Ajami manuscripts written by the Senegalese followers of Ahmadu Bamba (ca 1853-1927), the founder of the Muridiyya Sufi order. The project targets manuscripts written by Bamba’s former teacher Khali Madiakhate Kala (1835-1902), and his followers Mor Kayre (1869-1951), Samba Diarra Mbaye (1870-1971), Moussa Ka (1883-1967), Mbaye Diakhate (1875-1954), Habib Sy (1920-2001), and others. The manuscripts survive in private homes in Senegal. Digital copies of the manuscripts will be preserved and relocated to safer environments.

The materials will reveal Wolof perspectives on religious and secular issues—perspectives that have not yet been fully appreciated in the scholarship on Islamic Africa written in European languages and Arabic. The documents will provide new insights into the underlying cultural, spiritual, pedagogical, historical and political reasons that account for the flourishing of Ajami among Murids (compared to other Senegalese Sufi orders). The materials will offer a unique window into scholars’ own perspectives and teachings at the birth of Muridiyya. The materials will also deepen our understanding of the ways in which Islam has been Africanized in Senegal.

On behalf of the BU Libraries, Brisson is training a team of Senegalese in digitizing and creating metadata for the manuscripts. The first of the manuscript images, created during the training in Dakar, began arriving on July 15, these created during the training. Following the five-day training, Ngom and Brisson will take the team to scholars’ family homes in the cities of Diourbel and Touba, Louga, and Saint-Louis in Senegal where the manuscripts are housed. There they will guide the team to begin digitizing and describing 5000 pages of handwritten Wolof Ajami manuscripts.