Malian Arabic Manuscript Microfilming Project: Enhancing Access to CRL Digital Reproductions

Tabbed

Description & Rationale

In 2002, CRL digitized all 16 microfilm reels composing an important repository of West African primary sources: the Malian Arabic Manuscript Microfilm Project (MAMMP). These reels were first microfilmed in the late 1970s with the support of the National Endowment for Humanities (RC-*0771-78, 1977-1980). These documents were collected in state repositories in France (Bibliothèque National de France), Senegal (Archives nationales), and especially in private collections in Mali. Yet, despite the significance of the materials, after 40 years the MAMMP manuscripts are still underutilized. Only David Robinson’s classic The Holy War of ‘Umar Tall (Clarendon Press, 1985) and my recent Sultan, Caliph, and the Renewer of the Faith: Aḥmad Lobbo, the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh, and the Making of an Islamic State in West Africa (Cambridge University Press 2020) have substantially employed manuscripts from MAMMP.

The MAMMP manuscript corpus presents challenges for researchers due to the inaccurate order of the reproductions, low quality of some of the original pictures, and most importantly the lack of proper organization and metadata (the only existing handlist, microfilmed and digitized as reel 16, is partially handwritten and partially typed, and is incomplete and inaccurate). In response to these issues, I am seeking CAMP support to fund this project. I aim to make these manuscripts accessible by doing the following:

1) reorganizing the corpus by removing the pictures that are not readable and those that are available online on other platforms (namely reel 1: selected manuscripts from West Africa from the Bibliothèque National de France in Paris, which are now accessible online via the website https://gallica.bnf.fr [2]);

2) collating the manuscripts in proper order; and

3) providing basic metadata for each document (in Appendix 1, I have a sample spreadsheet for the manuscripts).

Given the complexity and scope of the project, which involves c. 10,000 digitized manuscript frames in Tiff format, I am seeking funds for a phase one of the entire project, which will entail three phases to achieve completion. Phase one will involve work on the set of 5 reels 8:1-5, a coherent sub-group of manuscripts collected in Central and northern Mali by the late professor William A. Brown (University of Wisconsin), which comprises c. 3,500 digital manuscript frames mainly dating to the 19th century. Although I will further look for funding for subsequent phases of the project, and anticipate involvement of colleagues at the Univeristy of Illinois Library (in particular, Laila Hussein Moustafa, Associate Professor and Middle East & North African Studies Librarian, and Atoma Batoma, Adjunct Associate Professor and African Studies Librarian), at the end of phase one a self-contained set of manuscripts will be made available to scholars. Through phase one I will also establish the workflow to carry out organizing the rest of the collection, including prioritizations, creating more metadata, and establishing quality controls. If funded, I anticipate a project start date of January 2021.

Reasons for consideration:

In his seminal work The Invention of Africa, philosopher Valentin Y. Mudimbe (1988) stresses that “Africanism,” or discourse about Africa, is mainly based on the “Colonial Library.” Indeed, the colonial archives, as well as oral sources collected by Western-trained academics, have formed the backbone of African Studies since it emerged as an academic discipline in the 1950s. However, the “Colonial Library” is not the only space of meaning in Africa. There is also what Ousmane O. Kane calls in his Non-Europhone Intellectuals (2012) the African “Islamic Library” comprising the literary and scholarly production of African Muslims writing in Arabic and in ‘ajami (African language written with the Arabic alphabet).

MAMMP is an essential part of that Islamic Library, comprising manuscripts that are an indispensable corpus of underexplored sources for the history of West Africa from the 18th to the 20th century. As described above, the digitized manuscripts await proper organization and metadata. This project hence aims to further the previous intellectual efforts and economic investments of scholars and foundations (including CRL) by making these documents fully available. In so doing, Africanists, researchers in related fields, and public will have ready access to source materials that enable more accurate and inclusive scholarship.

Most of the MAMMP manuscripts come from northern and central Mali, a region that is practically inaccessible to scholars due to the chronic instability of the country, which started in 2012 with the Jihadist occupation of northern Mali and that has continued, most recently, with the August 2020 coup that dethroned former presided Ibrahim Boubakar Keita and led to the establishment of a military junta. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic has further stressed the importance of remote access to vital primary sources such as the manuscripts contained in MAMMP.

Author(s):

various

Publisher(s):

Yale University Library

Source Format:

Microfilm

From Digital

Target Format:

Digital

Program:

CAMP

Resource Types:

Archival materials

Other

Regions:

Sub-Saharan Africa

Countries of Origin:

Mali

Proposal Contributors:

Mauro Nobili, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Said Bousbina, Independent Scholar, France

Posted:

Oct 21, 2020 4:19pm

Updated:

Nov 23, 2020 11:15am

Activity

Status	Current	Description
Flagged	no	The proposal is flagged for further research.
Vetted	no	The proposal has been examined and vetted.
Ballotted	no	The proposal is currently on a committee ballot.
Approved	yes	The proposal has been selected for reformatting. Reformatting efforts are pending.
Reformatted	no	The proposal has been reformatted and access information is now posted.
Inactive / Declined	no	No longer under consideration for reformatting.