African Studies Center Launches Digital Tools for West African Literature
The African Studies Center at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies announced the public launch of its latest digital resources for studying Africa’s Ajami traditions. The Readers in Ajami project website is now accessible to the public, featuring the newly completed 200-page Wolof Ajami Reader – the first in a planned series of three Readers covering Wolof, Mandinka, and Hausa languages.
Professor Fallou Ngom, Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Dr. Jennifer Yanco, and Elhadji Djibril Diagne developed these resources to address a historical gap in accessing African written knowledge. Ajami, which uses modified Arabic script to write non-Arabic languages, has preserved centuries of cultural, political, and social history across Africa.
The newly released Wolof Reader, developed from manuscripts and interviews collected in Senegal, contains six thematic units featuring biographical information, manuscript texts, and translations. Each unit includes images of manuscript authors and their communities, Latin-script transcriptions, English translations, glossaries, and pedagogical exercises.
The project website enhances these materials with video interviews featuring Latin-script and English subtitles, community images with captions, and an embedded Wolof Ajami keyboard for hands-on practice. These resources cover diverse fields including business, health, agriculture, human rights, and politics – particularly valuable for understanding Muslim societies in the Sahel region.
This U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative serves as a template for creating similar resources in other African languages using Ajami scripts.
The African Studies Center at Boston University, established in 1953, stands as one of the nation’s oldest leaders in promoting African language and area studies. As a Title VI National Resource Center funded by the U.S. Department of Education, the Center serves as a hub for excellence in research, learning, and teaching about Africa. More than 100 faculty across 40+ departments engage in Africa-related research and teaching, offering students opportunities across arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to pursue rigorous academic study and research. Learn more at www.bu.edu/africa.