West African manuscripts are abundant and diverse in content and form,[1] such as books, documents, and letters,[2] and are composed in the Arabic script, Ajami script, and indigenous African scripts.[1] West African manuscripts, as dialogical[3] products of West African manuscript culture[2] and components of West African intellectual history,[4][5] may have been produced as early as the 10th century CE.[1] West African Muslim scholars, who were bilingual or multilingual[1] and constituted what is collectively a West African intelligentsia that shaped West African historiography,[3] composed the majority of West African manuscripts.[1] West African countries with manuscripts from the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods include Togo, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Nigeria, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Ghana, Gambia, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and Benin.[1] The Timbuktu manuscripts in Timbuktu, Mali, which are the most well known set of manuscripts in West Africa,[1] are estimated in number to total between 101,820 manuscripts[2] and 348,531 manuscripts.[4]
West African manuscripts contain topics of alchemy, arithmetic, astrology, astronomy, biographies, business records and discussions, chemistry, chronicles, commerce, currency, dialectology, diplomacy between European and African rulers in the pre-colonial era, disease and cure, divination and geomancy, ethics and peace, eulogies, genealogies, geography, government legislations and treaties, healing, history, incantations, Islamic sciences, saints, and rituals, jurisprudence, instructions on codes of conduct, language and grammar, law, lists of kings and imams, literature, logic, medicine, numerology, official correspondence, pharmacology, philosophy, poetry, political economy, politics, private letters, prose, slavery, slave trade, and freedom, sociology, speeches, talismanic resources, theology, therapeutic medical manuals,[1] and the science of calendars.[6] The existence of West African manuscripts refute prevailing past racist notions that, Africa as a continent and Sub-Saharan Africa as its sub-region, were regions of the world that were without literature and that were limited to only ritual and orature.[7][2][3] West African manuscripts also have the potential to revise the history of the West African Sahel and the history of West Africa, at-large.[8] as well as facilitate further decolonization of the history of Africa.[3] However, although West African manuscripts are plentiful, esteemed in academia and the media, and have been subject to numerous institutional initiatives to be preserved and digitized, there has been a limited amount of philological research done on West African manuscripts, due to a collective academic "hypertrophy of theory," "devaluation of the strictly textual in favor of the oral and the visual," "growing indifference to and incapacity in foreign languages, especially historical languages," and "shallow presentism of scholarship and even antipathy to the past," which has resulted in the retention of a "griot paradigm" within Africanist scholarship.[3]
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