Change and Retention in Annotated Manuscripts of West Africa

2020–2023

FNT02

*A manuscript with Ibn Mahīb’s* Takhmīs al-ʿIshrīnīyāt annotated in Soninke and Arabic written in the mid-twentieth century using contemporary materials. Private collection of Lassana Traoré, Dembancané, Senegal.

Different domains of manuscript culture transform at different pace. Some manuscript practices sustain through time, while others change or disappear. Thus, the Soninke manuscripts with commentaries on Ibn Mahīb’s poem do not show any significant change in layout and type of annotations over the 19th to 21st centuries, whereas the Qur’an manuscripts with annotations in Old Kanembu ceased to exist in the 19th century despite retention of oral Qur’anic exegesis in a variety of the same language. The project studies the factors behind the transformation of the Soninke and Old Kanembu manuscript cultures, especially in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The project explores which domains of these cultures are more stable and why. Given the largely unrelated nature of the Soninke and Old Kanembu written traditions, the results of the project have a typological importance for the study of dynamics of manuscript cultures in general.

People

Project lead: Dmitry Bondarev

Research Associate: Darya Ogorodnikova