African Manuscripts Rewriting History

Black Buzz News Service
Oblong, Illinois
February 1, 2010
Archives of BBNS.

The below article titled African Manuscripts Rewriting History was written by Ron Grossman, staff reporter for the Chicago Tribune on April 9, 2001.

African Manuscripts Rewritng History

It was the kind of day which every scholar dreams. Professor John Hunwick was in Timbuktu, and a young man who knew of his interest in African History invited him to see the family library.

Leading the professor into a small room in his modest house,the men lifted the lid on an old trunk filled with manuscripts.

"By the third one,my eyes were popping out of my head," recalled Hunwick, sitting in his office at Northwestern University."I'd never seen anything quite like them before."

Nor had any other Westerner---- and , precisely, for that reason ,the contents of the trunk are expected to profoundly alter long-accepted views of African history and civilization ,and many shaped by racial prejudice rather than scientific inquiry.

Even among scholars, Africa often is dismissed as a continent lacking written records, one of the hallmarks of civilization.For decades, Hunwick has been patiently hunting down evidence to the contrary.
Now, with the help of the Timbuktu manuscripts he first saw on Aug. 24, 1999, he is poised to give the death blow to the view that writing was absent in Black societies.

The Ford Foundation is helping too : It recently gave Hunwick and Northwestern $ 1 million to establish an Institute for the study of written traditions in sub-Saharan Africa.

Hunwick himself has too much scholarly reserve to boast of his find, especially publicly. But his academic peers have no such reticence in talking about the hoard :3000 manuscripts ranging from letters and fragments of works to complete books and covering a range of subjects that include theology, jurisprudence, and history.
Sean O'Fahey, a colleague at Northwestern even likens Hunwick's discovery to the recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"Or, you could think of it as like coming upon another Anglo-Saxon chronicle that gave us a new view of the early history of England,"

"It really is monumental, said David Robinson, professor of Africa history at Michigan State University.

Until recently, even distinguished scholars would have pooh-poohed the idea that such a cache of historical documents could exist in the heart of Africa.

To be sure, a tiny group of specialists recognized that Africans had a written tradition.But even such a celebrated historian as H.Trevor-Roper wrote in 1963 :"Perhaps in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none :There is only history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness. "

The centerpiece of Hunwick's find in modern-day Mali was a book by Mahmud al-Kati, an African historian who wrote in the 16th Century.
Timbuktu was then the center of a flourishing culture, and its strategic positions on the Niger River made the city the commercial hub of West Africa.

The version of al Kati's chronicle that Hunwick found contained previously unknown material from al Kati's predecessors--which now pushes our historical knowledge of that part of the continent back to the mid-15th Century.

Ismail Haidara, the young man who showed the work to Hunwick is descended from al Kati, whose, family has handed the manuscripts from one generation to the next ever since his death in 1592.

As his name might suggest ,al Kati was a Muslim, like many people in Timbuktu, and he wrote in Arabic ,the holy language of Islam. But he wasn't an Arab.

He was a Black African---- a fact many Western would find difficult to reconcile with their preconceptions. Black Africans were supposed to be illiterate, at least until 19th Century Christian missionaries taught them how to read and created written forms for native languages.
Oral Traditions
In recent years, anthropologists have helped scholars in other fields to recognize the importance of oral traditions both as markers of culture and as way to establish the history of non- literate peoples.

Yet that very recognition also can contribute to the misconception that peoples with rich oral traditions couldn't, at the same time, have a written history.

"Europeans liked to think of Africa as a continent of song and dance," Hunwick said."Black Africans weren't supposed to know about writing, which is how Trevor-Roper could think them as lacking a record of past and thus without a history. "

As Islam spread across Africa during the Middle Ages, Hunwick said knowledge of writing passed from Arabs of the continent's northern regions to black societies farther south. For the most part ,those converts read and wrote Arabic; but in some cases they also used the Arabic alphabet to create written forms of local languages such as Fulani.

The process ,he noted ,was remarkably similar to the transmission of writing among European peoples.The adapted their alphabet from the Greeks , for example, and in turn the Latin alphabet was adopted by French, Spanish, English, and German speakers and others to give written form to their languages.

But the role of Arabic in African literacy was largely overlooked until recently, even by Africans themselves.

Early in his scholarly career, the British-born Hunwick taught at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. "There was a classics department where Latin was taught, because the University had been established by the British when the country was their colony," Hunwick recalled. "British there was no department of Arabic studies.I convinced the dean to establish one on the argument that Arabic was the Latin of Africa."
Slaves in America
One piece of evidence for that statement is that a number of black Africans brought to North America as slaves were literate in Arabic. One of the earliest autobiographies by an American slave was written in Arabic by Umar ibn Sayyid, who was held in bondage on a North Carolina plantation.

The thought that blacks could read and write was as troubling for American slaveholders as it was for European colonists,Hunwick noted.So if a slave was literate, both ruling groups reasoned that must mean that he or she wasn't really a black African but a " Moor-that is darker skinned Arab.

When a white American published an account of another literate slave,Abdul Rahaman, he went to great pains to establish the slave's identity as a Moor-- in face of contradictory evidence, such as Rahaman's extremely dark skin."Constant exposure to a vertical sun for many years, together with privations incident to the lowest order of community, and an inattention to cleanliness, will produce a very material change in the complexion," the author assured his white readers.
It was the need to combat just that kind of racial prejudice that drew Hunwick into African studies. When he was a young man in the 1950's Great Britain still had compulsory military service, which he served in Somalia, in Eastern Africa.
"I was an officer but not a gentlemen,"Hunwick said, explaining that contrary to prevailing colonialist mores he socialized with the African troops under his command. He was impressed by the egalitarian quality of their society, which contrasted sharply with the rigid class lines he had seen in England.

He also discovered how wide the compass of writing was in Africa, despite what history books of the day said.
400 manuscripts
In 1964, he began traveling through Northern Nigeria, searching out manuscripts in private hands and microfilming them. Eventually, Hunwick located and filmed some 400 such manuscripts, making them available for the first time to Western scholarship.
Hunwick's infectious enthusiasm has influenced two generations of younger Africanists, noted University of Illinois history professor Charles S. Stewart. Those scholars continue to battle the older image of Africa as a continent where civilization was unknown before the coming of the white man.
"Materials like those Hunwick has uncovered,"Stewart said,are the building blocks for redressing the racism still inherent in many westerners'views of Africa."

* Every month at the Black Buzz News Service is so-called Black History Month. In our communication, fact and statement of fact should remain paramount while subjectivity may remain or be relegated to a position of secondary consideration.