History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 94-104 © Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656DOI: 10.1111/hith.10697

WRITING, BOOKS, AND AFRICA

The Trans-saharan Book Trade: ManuscripT culTure, araBic liTeracy and inTellecTual hisTory in MusliM africa. Edited by Graziano Krätli and Ghis-laine Lydon. Series: Library of the Written Word, vol. 8. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. xii, 422.

The TransMission of learning in islaMic africa. Edited by Scott Reese. Series: Islam in Africa, vol. 2. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Pp. xiii, 307.

ABSTRACT

Among most historians of Africa, and others in the humanities concerned with Africa, it has been almost axiomatic that writing and reading arrived in Africa and spread with the coming of European colonialism, especially through the agency of Christian missionaries. Although missionaries did indeed establish schools and introduce various kinds of literacy, there is a much longer history of the book in various parts of the continent. This essay looks at some of the recent work that focuses on the use of the Arabic script in Africa. Although the field of “Islam in Africa” has framed this work, it is necessary to see the uses of this literacy within the frame of the history of the book and related fields. The works discussed are rich in content and analysis and provide the opening for new initiatives on the content of the literacy and the methods of teaching and reading, but also the materiality of the book and the formation of the archive.

Keywords: Africa, Sahara, archives, book history, religion, Islam

The material process of making texts and how these objects were handled—read and reread, often revered, sometimes archived—have been very far from the concerns of historians of Africa. Thus, paper and writing instruments, how texts circulated, how books were held together, and the chain of people involved in the production of texts—from merchants trading in paper, to writers and copyists, through communities of readers—are not found in even modest terms in general or specialist works about Africa.1 Similarly, intellectual history or history of ideas and related approaches to the past are not significant features of the discipline as practiced by “Africanists.” There are, of course, exceptions, but mostly they use the texts found on the continent as sources without exploring the history of the text as an object, born of and part of a network around it.2 The use of texts as

1. Roger Chartier’s argument that there is a triangular relationship among text, book, and reader is conventional wisdom in book history. See his The Order of Books, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stan-ford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

2. A recent exception concerned with everyday writing practices is Karin Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). But studies in this collection look only at the colonial period in selected British colonies and are primarily concerned with Latin-script orthographies.

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sources, of course, is a way of acknowledging and implicitly, if not explicitly, announcing their presence in a place and a specific period.3 The work on literacy has covered the “consequences of literacy” largely in the western parts of the continent, and the concern has been primarily with the impact of writing; in parts of the continent with an Arabic tradition of writing, it has been a “restricted liter-acy.” This work has, however, underestimated the extent, depth, and complexity of “book learning.” This scholarship has been comparative and has taken a long-term historical view, but it has not looked at this literacy as serious scholarship in itself and has had nothing to say about the economics of the book even though it has looked at the effect of the written word on the economy.4

A still pervasive view of the history of Africa is as follows: Writing appeared only recently in African societies. The written word—whether as books or news-papers or other documents—is a product of the spread of education under the impact of European colonial contact, especially through Christian missionary education. Instead of studying thought expressed in texts or studying histories of an object like the book, the historian of Africa has to turn to orality; stories and memories transmitted orally are where historians have to start and, in large part, where they have to end. Techniques to grasp the verbal arts—not philology or the book arts—are the means to understand both the present and the past of societies on the continent. The historian might find nuggets of hard fact and narrative in an oral interview or oral tradition, apart from the rich artistry and performance of oral tradition written about by ethnographers. But written language and texts are relatively recent Western imports, even if Africans made them their own very quickly. Africans have used them to their own ends, but before the late nineteenth century, histories of reading, writing, and book production are not possible. This is very much the dominant view of the relationship between written texts and the African past, at least the past of the continent from the Sahara and south of the desert. Thus it is not hard to see how Peter Burke, a distinguished Europeanist, could confidently assert in 2011 that writing and printing arrived in Africa at the same time and point to two nineteenth-century newspapers from two British colonies as evidence. This kind of thinking suffuses the academic perceptions of Africa, therefore he can confidently make such a bold and patently incorrect statement.5

But what about specialists in the field of book history? The recent overview by the leading experts on the subject should at least provide a more nuanced picture; the work to consult is the recent Oxford Companion to the Book,6 which is meant

3. See, for instance, Ivor Wilks, Wa and the Wala: Islam and Polity in Northwestern Ghana (Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

4. The key figure has been Jack Goody; among his work relevant here are: The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. 99-119; The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. part III; and The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000).

5. Peter Burke, “Communication,” in A Concise Companion to History, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

6. Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. Michael Felix Suarez, S. J., and H. R. Woudhuysen, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); in it, see A. van der Vlies, “The History of the Book in Sub-Saharan Africa,” and Geofrey Roper, “History of the Book in the Muslim World.”

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to be a comprehensive assessment of where the field of book history is globally. In this work a discussion of the book in Africa is limited to printed works in the Latin script produced since the arrival of Europeans on the continent. Other scripts, such as Arabic, used in and south of the Sahara, and Amharic, used in the Horn of Africa, which have been used to write documents and books for centu-ries, are not addressed even in passing in this encyclopedic compendium. On the other hand, an essay dealing with the “Muslim world” does not hint that there could be a history of the book in Africa in the Arabic script beyond such famous cities as Fes and Cairo, which are part of coastal North Africa, and conventionally cast as “Middle Eastern.”7

Both collections under review demonstrate in every essay, with voluminous evidence and robust argument, that this view of the continent is simply wrong and has long been in need of revision. For specialists, such as the contributors to these volumes, it may not be necessary to make the most simple of points such as that intellectual history, histories of the book, and histories of reading are de facto fields of scholarship and await more researchers, more research tools such as catalogues and bibliographies, and debate on theory and methodologies appropriate to the materials scattered in various places virtually throughout the continent. Together these essays dispel the persistent myths that African societies nowhere produced writers and writings and that books did not matter before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time they point to many issues and fields still in need of further research and interpretation.

As tempting as it may be, it would be a mistake to say that scholars of the continent have collectively, completely, and willfully neglected the issue of ideas and books. With these two volumes and the related full-length studies of many of the contributors to these volumes and other scholars, we now have a layered, more nuanced, and more sophisticated understanding of textual produc-tion in addition to the book as object, its uses and the variety of ideas conveyed in large collections of them. There was a trade in books and the transmission of knowledge over spaces both in close proximity, among writers of the same clan, for example, and between extremely distant parts of the continent. So there were people in the book business in, say, eighteenth-century Cairo who would have known that there were writers and readers in towns in West Africa such as Kano, Shinqit, or Timbuktu. Such awareness among intellectual elites on the continent has a long history and was spread throughout a vast expanse of territory, not only in the conventional “Arabic-speaking Africa” along the Mediterranean coast. Most of the writers who are discussed in these volumes were not “Arab,” but they used Arabic as a language to write their works and had to learn the language as a “second” or scholarly language. If we think of modern academic research, then, there is a genealogy of specialist studies, which began with colonial administrator scholars, usually Arabists, who reported on encounters with local Islamic schol-ars and their texts, which they themselves had written or which were composed by other writers. But these studies have often been cast outside the “mainstream”

7. For a corrective to the approach to Africa in the Oxford Companion, see Beth le Roux, “Book History in the African World: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 15 (2012), 248-300.

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of African historiography and have been filed under “Orientalist” or “Islamicist” philology.

Two British historians who were pioneers in the academic research and teach-ing of African history, Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, wrote in Medieval Africa a few lines about the chronicling tradition in West Africa.8 The Tarikhs or Chronicles they mention were massive works—together running to a few hundred folios—produced in the Niger Bend region of West Africa in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries. The chronicle, is of course, a literary and narra-tive form that resonates with European historiography, especially the “medieval” period, which is the period that Oliver and Atmore treat in writing about Africa. In the same region and at the same time as these West African Chronicles many other genres of prose were produced, all connected to a larger tradition of writing. A question that should have followed is: were these Chronicles the only written works produced there? How does a written narrative tradition emerge in a place that appears not to have much or any writing before then or for long after their production? Ruth Finnegan’s major work on oral literature in Africa has a long footnote about the importance of West African Arabic writing, and Alain Ricard has a more extended discussion titled “The Manuscript Heritage,” but his work is concerned with modern literature rather than with history or the idea of the book per se.9 Scholars of literature and literary history recognize that in certain parts of the continent there were (and continue to be) societies in which writing was recognized, respected, and indeed cultivated. However, an amnesia or aversion remains in the general representation of Africa on the subject of writing based on the assumption that it has no or only a very shallow historical presence on the continent.

The Trans-Saharan Book Trade is a volume of ten essays that can only survey parts of a large geographical space; the three other major deserts in the world could all together fit into the Sahara, as Ross notes in his opening contribution. These essays are a few grains of sand compared with the area they cover. Yet this volume touches upon significant issues in the field and points to the need for many further studies.

The essays might be grouped as follows: Eric Ross offers a sweeping view of the Sahara from deep archaeological time into the present; he stresses at the outset that the still-prevalent view of the Sahara as a barrier between two separate “Africas” is a misconception and misunderstanding of history and geography, as so many of the essays in this collection show. Ghislaine Lydon and Terence Walz write about the economies of paper and learning, with Lydon concerned with the northwestern region and Walz with Egypt and the Nile Valley and adjoining areas. Bruce S. Hall and Charles C. Stewart, alongside essays by Murray Last and Stefan Reichmuth, in their different ways, examine the question of the book trade and the relative popularity of various authors and books. Three overview essays by Abdel Kader Haïdara (on collections in Timbuktu), Said Ennahid (on

8. Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

9. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Alain Ricard, The Languages and Literatures of Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2004).

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manuscript collections in Morocco), and Judith Scheele (on recent initiatives to establish private manuscript libraries) make up the last section; Krätli’s essay is a considered summary essay.

Paper features prominently in this volume, as it should; as Last puts it, “ the key factor in book production is the availability of paper” (184). The era of papy-rus and parchment is outside the scope of this work. For the periods addressed, papyrus was no longer in use and there is evidence of only a very limited number of parchment texts sparsely spread over this large region. There was some paper production in Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt from the tenth century through the fif-teenth century but it was then displaced by overseas imports. The period covered is when paper production in parts of urban northern Africa, especially Egypt, was already in decline to the point of near nonexistence, and there was full acceptance and importation of paper offered by European merchants from the other side of the Mediterranean.

Paper from various Italian and French manufacturers displaced local produc-tion; the imported paper was valued for many reasons including its higher-quality texture. When, in the nineteenth century, a local paper industry was started in Egypt, its paper was used alongside paper from overseas; the local varieties were not considered of acceptably high standards by scholars and were used for bureaucratic activity only, not for the writing of scholarly works. Walz notes that paper was second to cloth as the most important article of trade into Egypt. A percentage of the paper imported into Egypt and other Mediterranean states was re-exported to buyers in the Sahara and the Sahel regions. In 1891 a caravan left Tripoli with nineteen of its eighty-one caravans carrying writing paper (49). A merchant in 1801 says that the 20,000 reams of Venetian paper imported will be used “partly in Egypt, partly in Arabia, and in the interior of Africa” (94). Pilgrims returning from or on the way to Mecca also bought paper in Cairo. From Lydon’s essay we learn that writing expanded greatly in eighteenth-century Mauritania, which also meant more extensive use of paper. Although her obser-vation that more writing required more paper is specific, it could be used for other regions as well, in certain cases probably earlier, such as in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Timbuktu.

Evidence to use in writing about the history of paper is elusive, but Walz brings together a wide range of sources to make a number of important observa-tions about the history of paper in Egypt, connecting it to Europe and other parts of Africa. The use of watermarks offers some insight into origins and dates of paper; numerous authors in these volumes remark on this issue. However, the time required for paper to reach users in the interior of the continent was much longer than the estimated three years from the time of production in more acces-sible regions.

Paper was used without theological controversy except for a few rare instances for which there is a question about the permissibility of using paper from Chris-tian European origin. In the early fifteenth century, a fatwa was issued by Ibn Marzuq al-Hafiz (d. 1439) of Tlemcen in northern Algeria on this question, who argued that since use of paper was a necessity it was permissible for Muslims to use paper made by Christian Europeans.

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In early contact between Europeans and African societies, the Europeans keen on entering into the interior of the continent used paper as an item of exchange. Indeed, Lydon writes of a case when the “emirs of southwestern Sahara regularly demanded paper be part of tribute arrangements” (48). Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer, recalled incidents when locals begged him for paper to write on. Lydon concludes: “By the last decades of the nineteenth century, firearms and paper were among the most important trade items transported by way of caravan by local merchants” (50).

Paper was used for a variety of purposes. It was necessary in commercial trans-actions, for writing letters, and for writing widely circulated prayer books and works of scholarship, such as those on jurisprudence, grammar, and sacred biog-raphy. It is the nature of these writings for which paper was traded that occupies Hall and Stewart, Last, and Reichmuth. Hall and Stewart attempt to extrapolate from a set of data of works held in West Africa—over eighty private manuscript libraries with around 21,000 manuscript records in all—what precisely were the books that were written and copied by students and scholars in the region. From their quantitative exercise they conclude that the book market was rather modest over a three-hundred-year period into the first quarter of the twentieth century. The body of materials they worked with allows them to estimate what was com-posed between 1625 and 1775. Very few works from this period have survived, they argue, and even the works for the terminal period underwent copying and recopying at fairly set intervals. They write of “cycles of recopying” (149) neces-sary to the survival of a work; some texts were lost or could not be used because no attention was paid to making copies of them. They do not elaborate on this important issue of copying and the proliferation of knowledge and texts except to imply that there were scholarly centers and key moments of “originality” fol-lowed by expansive copying. The question of copying remains to be systemati-cally studied, and there are many allusions to it in this volume, such as Last’s point that copyists were the people who most demanded paper as it was neces-sary for them to practice their craft. The practice of copying and the figure of the copyist or scribe appear, in this version of book history, not to deserve much interpretation; the copyist is a transmitter of an original, not a creator of anything new in this argument. Yet in reading copies one notes all sorts of insertions, mar-ginalia, and commentaries that make many assumed copies very different, even new, texts. There are even the ironic instances of scribes referring to their copies of a text as better than the original!

Hall and Stewart’s exercise is valuable in establishing what the authors call “the core curriculum” of Muslim students and scholars in West Africa. The “core curriculum” had an inherent oral dimension, for texts were taught and often memorized in full and recited aloud as part of the memorization process. Last suggests that there were cycles of “book-wealth” and “book-famine,” and that during the latter there was greater reliance on oral modes of transmission, very often in the vernacular. Reichmuth, in his essay, found that the scholars in Ilorin, southwestern Nigeria, were strikingly cosmopolitan, coming from various parts of the wider region and engaged in both book and oral learning. Memorization

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was also a key feature of the education of children, after which they proceeded to handle texts in learning to read and write.

Although Last’s insights are suggestive and rich, his approach is more ethno-graphic and qualitative than that of Hall and Stewart’s analyses of various sets of catalogues from a broader region. What will happen to their present conclusions when, say, 200,000 or 400,000 items are added to the current databases and new databases are created remains to be seen. Their interpretation may also shift or change if they were to work from actual books and not only from catalogues.

There is overlap between the two volumes in that they approach Africa in its entirety; “Islamic Africa” here is not the North nor even the North plus the expansive desert. Moreover, in some specifics there are also convergences; a number of the same towns, scholars, and texts come in for discussion or mention. The Transmission of Learning contains eleven essays on networks of learning. Contributors write about Sufis and scholars and Sufi-scholars and networks (Gutelius; O’Fahey); about learned clans (Seesemann); the movement of ideas (Reichmuth’s first essay of two in these volumes) across vast spaces from Morocco, in the northwest of the continent, to Zanzibar, an island off the east coast of Africa (Sadgrove); education of women (Umar); and a travelogue of an East African scholar to the Levant, published in 1915 (Reese). It spans a period from the seventeenth century through the twentieth century. It is concerned to show that Islamic scholars in Africa were not operating in a marginal region, that they were not merely imitators and teachers of basic tenets of faith, but among them were sophisticated scholars learned in all the disciplines that a “traditional” Muslim scholar anywhere had to master. Reichmuth, for instance, writes about the great lexicographer Murtada al-Zabidi (d. 1791) who hailed from South Asia and included twenty-five scholars from Africa in his collection, or Mu’jam, of 600 noted scholars of his time. Reichmuth notes that Zabidi was possibly the first Arabic lexicographer to make an entry for “Timbuktu” in an Arabic diction-ary. In The Transmission there is plenty of evidence of connections between African scholars and their counterparts outside the continent. O’Fahey shows that this connection goes as far as Indonesia and into the twentieth century with the example of A. M. Surkitti (d. 1943), a scholar from Dongola, deep in the northern Sudan, who rose to importance in Southeast Asia from around the time of World War I. Apart from this movement of ideas, books, and persons between Africa and other parts of the “Muslim world,” the authors in various ways also show the relevance of religiously trained scholars in the lives of believers on the continent. There are studies that look closely at the discourse of sermons and at texts on healing, reflecting both careful attention to language and interpretation and to the actuality of the role of religion in various communities at an intimate and neighborhood level (studies by Umar, Kreese, and Declich).

These volumes reflect a shift over the past three decades of studies on Islamic knowledge-production and practices in Africa. If one were to trace a line back-ward to where these studies find their inspiration and enabling context, one possi-bility is the appearance of regional research bulletins such as those from northern Nigerian universities since the 1960s. During this time there have been concerted efforts to collect documentation to enable the writing of history from local sourc-

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es, an initiative by the Fontes Historiae Africana, and by later journals such as Islam et société au Sud du Sahara (Paris) and Sudanic Africa (Bergen, Norway). Crucial to the capacity to conduct research are the major projects to catalogue various African Islamic libraries by the Al-Furqan Foundation (London), and the Arabic Literature of Africa project edited by John Hunwick and Sean O’Fahey, two of the leading figures in the field, and published by Brill. These instruments for research are still modest given the unrecognized, unorganized, and sheer quantity of materials that exist in so many places on the continent. Yet this start in cataloging and compilation of basic research data is foundational to serious analytical attention being paid to studies of scholarly practices, histories of ideas, histories of the book and reading, and the formation and politics of archives. Marc Bloch noted that however unexciting the labor of creating the instruments for research may appear, these are as necessary as any scientific instrument, for “documents do not suddenly materialize, in one place or another.” And he added: “Granted that instruments do not create science, nevertheless a society which pretends to respect the sciences ought not to neglect their instruments.”10

Nearly every essay in both volumes mentions depositories that hold the texts discussed in the respective essays, and a number of chapters deal directly with the state of libraries and archives. These volumes are therefore about book collecting in various ways. Krätli’s is a detailed documentation and thoughtful reflection on important issues including cataloging, digitization, and collecting by and in librar-ies. There is an opening here to begin to think in more imaginative theoretical and methodological terms about the meanings of archives, their invention, formation, and continual reimagination and remaking. Abdel Kader Haidara writes about his own experience as a library owner and worker in the field making inventories of private libraries in the Timbuktu region of Mali since the 1980s. He alone made inventories of 408 private manuscript collections. He describes a number of Timbuktu’s private collections and how they were founded. Manuscripts were often hidden away, and thus European travelers did not encounter libraries but individual texts, he explains. Colonial authorities took away whole collections such as the library of ‘Umar Tall (d. 1865). Only after independence did locals bring some of their collections to light again, says Haidara. Said Ennahid writes about the major Moroccan manuscript collections. Morocco and the countries to its south had once formed a literary-cultural zone, as is clear from the essays in this collection. There are long-term connections between cities such as Fes, Timbuktu, and Walata, and thus the manuscript libraries of Morocco have mate-rials from these places. Ennahid gives a detailed description of the Moroccan collections and the relevant search tools for each major collection; some prog-ress has been made in the use of advanced computer technologies. Outside the capital, Rabat, libraries barely survive. Albrecht Hofheinz in The Transmission takes a close but preliminary look at the formation of a Timbuktu collection that purports to prove an Andalusian connection in the town dating back to the six-teenth century. In these case studies of libraries the issues appear on the surface to be rather straightforward and the challenges evident. In certain respects much

10. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1953), 70 and 71.

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technical progress has been made in these places compared with Algeria, where Judith Scheele reveals a situation of neglect of the country’s manuscript heritage, a neglect that speaks of a stringent continuity in cultural politics since the colonial period. What to do with collections of Arabic texts and documents is not simply a conservation problem, but raises identity questions at the intersection between French, Arabo-Islamic, and Berber cultural and linguistic influences. She writes about two instances of communities intent on doing something about manuscript collections found in their midst. As she observes, “questions of manuscript conservation are more than merely technical.” This applies not only to Algeria, which has very specific, regional, political, and linguistic inflections. Haidara and Ennahid’s article chronicles relatively uncontroversial advances and challenges, whereas Scheele presents a type of ethnography of the politics of collecting, interweaving the local and the national dimensions in her discussion. Although all these essays about conservation and collecting are valuable contributions, her essay points to the kind of coverage that is still required for the many libraries and collections that have been established and that are striving to get recognition and funding. Local politics and national-level contestations over identities and power and other pressures are all interwoven as the idea of forming a library or archive takes hold and unfolds over time. These are some of the issues that histories of library and archive formation have to take into account. In this striving to make documentary and book collections visible and legible to diverse national and global publics, the international funding scenario is also relevant, as in Haidara’s allusion to the role of US and other foundation funding for his projects. With the crisis in Mali since 2012 and the transport of parts of various collections from Timbuktu to the capital, Bamako, a new set of issues for those concerned with conservation and the use of these libraries is on the agenda.

These volumes contain nothing about script styles or paleography even though they are about the handwritten text. A variety of—some very unusual—Arabic script styles were and are employed in Africa; comparative study of these styles has hardly begun. African Arabic paleography is far more than jejune distinc-tions between “Maghribi” (that is, Morocco/North Africa) influenced forms, “Sudanic” Arabic, and the eastern styles in used in Cairo and generally in the Middle East and East Africa. The printed book and print publishing do come in for discussion in Sadgrove’s essay in The Transmission. He discusses the use that the Ibadi sect made of the new printing presses in Cairo and East Africa. The work of Shaykh Attafayyish (d. 1914), the leading Ibadi scholar from cen-tral Algeria, was composed by hand; when he turned to print he had his books published by the first Arabic printing press in East Africa, on Zanzibar Island, founded in 1879–80. Sadgrove can tell this rather unusual story that connects these distant parts of the continent—and not often thought of as having any con-nection—because Attafayyish’s correspondence with the press survives and so many of the letters deal with the publication process. In this essay we are also introduced to various presses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cairo. The problems that presses presented may have led many scholars who could not come face-to-face with the printer to stick to the manuscript form. Attafayyish certainly had to spend some of his time writing to enquire about the

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state of his books instead of composing more lines of poetry and scholarly prose. As Sadgrove notes, Attafayyish “suffered the eternal problems that authors face with their publishers” (210).

Reflected in these volumes is a steadily growing body of work on books and ideas within the ambit of “Islam in Africa,” as one of the Brill series is titled. This body of work explicates the intellectual depths and complexities of a major religious current in various parts of the continent, with a scripture and an empha-sis on literacy and learning. But the Islamic scholarly trends interpreted in these volumes were not a world unto themselves, as is clear from the various shifting precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. Moreover, in the Horn of Africa and parts of the Nile Valley there were literate Christian elites; in parts of North Africa and southern Morocco there were Jewish communities with their literacy in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew. With the later arrival of Christian missionary edu-cation, an African literate elite emerged in various places for which there are numerous studies in southern Africa, for instance. Colonial modernities and the secular imperatives of the colonial and postcolonial state also wrought changes to the context of learning. It was especially in this context that the new literacies and centers of power impinged on the established networks and circles of learn-ing and religious practice. Each of these communities and processes has it own temporality and politics. Putting these different religiously grounded and secular textual cultures into conversation should be considered. It is possible that work done in the Arabic script by Muslim scholars are filed under “Islam in Africa,” whereas texts in the Latin script, by missionary-educated elites, are considered as part of a more “mainstream” “intellectual history” of Africa. Thus Tarikhs (histo-ries) of various sizes and dealing with a range of places on the continent, of which there are many dating from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, are not taken into account when scholars study local or “homespun” African histori-ography.11 What are these tarikhs if not locally generated historical writing? On the other hand, in his succinct introduction to The Transmission, Reese refers to the way in which “Islamic studies” has neglected Africa as a “marginal region.”

Obviously, these volumes cover a number of separate but interrelated fields of research: the history of thought, the history of the book (scribal and printed), and the history of reading. “Textual culture” is perhaps the best expression to capture where these distinctive research areas intersect. How this overlaps and intersects with orality and “oral cultures” deserves more concentrated work. Jack Goody’s work on literacy attempted to address the “interface between the written and the oral” but with all the archives of written materials that have emerged in recent years it is time to rethink that approach, which has stressed the “restricted” nature of literacy in West Africa—restricted in subject matter and in users.12 This clearly was, and is, not the case although Arabic is considered a “sacred language” and is used in religious texts and practices. There is a need to look at the many uses of Arabic and other languages as both written and oral/aural. For instance, at

11. See, for instance, essays in Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa, ed. Derek Peterson and Giacomo Macola (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), which look only at local intellectuals who wrote in the Latin script.

12. See footnote 4, above, especially Goody, Interface between the Written and the Oral.

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least the written text of the Quran was memorized and recited in public on many occasions; the sacred biography of the Prophet Muhammad was composed in the best classical Arabic prose or poetry and was read out aloud in public to an audi-ence who only understood a local language; it was also translated into the local language. Text and speech intersected at numerous other moments; sitting with or holding a book—especially a big one—in public also makes it a visible object.

Networks are important and have been stressed in these studies and in numer-ous others. New networks will be found and new materials about already known networks will probably be discovered. But there is a need to dwell again on the text, which does not mean close reading that cuts the text from the world, how it moved and was made. Dwelling on the text means reading for the unfolding of thought and ideas. As O’Fahey puts it in The Transmission: “The current cri-tique of ‘Orientalism’ risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The study, mastery, and transmission of texts is the essence of Islamic education wherever” (277). Words, sentences, and books were closely read and analyzed. Philology had, and still has, its practitioners in Africa. Grammars were widely circulated and dictionaries were consulted because words were valued and mattered if one were to be taken seriously as a teacher and thinker. Commentaries were written and counter-texts were composed because writers believed in the power of writ-ten discourse and argument expressed in writing. What the materials from Africa open up for us are the possibilities of situated philological reading, or as Sheldon Pollock has put it in another context, to work with a “theory of textuality as well as the history of textualized meaning.”13

The way in which these books have come to form part of libraries and then constituted a core of an archive is a process that is not yet well understood. One possible way to at least begin is to work back from more recent cases of the making and unmaking of archives and libraries and think with these cases about the possibilities in earlier periods of how collections were formed and at least partially conserved. Krätli’s concluding essay begins to speculate about this pos-sibility. What is certain is that there is a long history of the way in which words on paper were treated with respect and great seriousness in many parts of Africa.

shaMil Jeppie

University of Cape Town

13. Sheldon Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009), 934.