IntroductionFootnote 1
In 1999 Gregory Mann observed that recent changes in Mali’s political landscape enabled researchers to study the country’s colonial and post-colonial past.Footnote 2 After gaining political independence from France in 1960, Mali was ruled as a single-party state until 1991, when the military regime was ousted. During this period, it witnessed Tuareg insurgencies soon after independence, and drought in the 1970s and 1980s. The turbulent early 1990s were characterized not only by demands for democratization but also by Tuareg uprisings in the north.Footnote 3 The political stability described by Mann was the result of a peace deal in 1996. Despite tourism thereafter providing some much-needed revenue, the country’s political and economic woes continued into the 2000s.
Twenty years after Mann’s observations political events are again shaping options to (re)write Mali’s history and inform debates about digitizing its archives. Since 2012 political instability has marred the country.Footnote 4 After the collapse of the Qaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, Tuareg fighters returned to Mali and renewed their claims for the establishment of an independent state of Azawad in the north. In early 2012 the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) invaded this vast area and they were joined by al-Qa‘ida fighters who had infiltrated the Sahel since the end of the Algerian civil war at the turn of the twenty-first century. Mali’s army was an inept match for the jihadists and the Tuareg separatists, and the government’s inadequate support of its army spurred one of its captains, Amadou Sanogo, to launch a coup d’état in March 2012. However, military rule was short-lived as the president of the National Assembly became interim President of Mali the following month. As military rule transitioned back to civilian rule, the coalition of Tuareg MNLA and al-Qa‘ida continued to hold sway in northern Mali until a military operation, driven by the French and launched in January 2013, halted the advance of the Tuareg insurgents and the jihadists.Footnote 5 Although that operation prevented the expansion of jihadist rule to the south and ousted most of the fighters, it could not quell their activities completely.
The political situation in Mali remains uncertain in spite of the initiation of a national peace process after the military coup of March 2012. Continuing armed incursions from northern to central Mali and across the border into Burkina Faso and Niger have led to international diplomatic and military efforts, the establishment of the United Nations’ Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and a five-nation counterterrorism military force, the G5 Sahel Joint Force, in July 2017.Footnote 6 The Human Rights Watch Report of 2019 records “scant progress”Footnote 7 of the peace process amid further political and economic deterioration in one of the world’s poorest nation states.
As Malians question their political and economic future, the country’s volatile condition also jeopardizes researchers’ ability to visit the central and northern regions, if not, according to travel alerts, the entire country. Mali’s main economic sector is agriculture, although prior to the jihadist invasion in the north and the ensuing political crisis, tourism had been a major source of income, especially for the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Timbuktu and Djenné, which had in fact come to rely on it. Timbuktu in northern Mali was subjected to the rule of jihadists, but Djenné, located in Masina in southern central Mali was not, although the jihadists have lately become more active in the region.Footnote 8 Since the crisis in 2012 the nation’s economy has collapsed and tourism has ceased completely.
While not the main attraction for tourists, manuscripts made a contribution to cultural tourism to both Timbuktu and Djenné. The jihadist threat was harnessed inside and outside Mali to emphasize the universal value of the manuscripts in Timbuktu and Djenné, thus conjuring Westerners’ complicity in the potential destruction of them if they did not fund their evacuation from Timbuktu. In 2012 and 2013 Abdel Kader Haïdara, a manuscript collector from Timbuktu with a mission to salvage the city’s manuscript collections, made global news when he successfully invoked jihadist destruction of Sufi mausoleums to raise money to transfer private library collections from Timbuktu to Bamako. Evidence suggests that the threat to the manuscript collections, albeit not entirely unfounded, was in fact grossly exaggerated.Footnote 9 However, the spectre of foreign, militant Islam in the form of jihadist destruction had played no role in securing the original funding for the projects in Djenné, which began in 2009, although it might have helped gain approval for the funding of the third project which ran from 2015 to 2017. Because of its history of factualism and localism, Djenné is not an ideal representative of tolerant, cosmopolitan Malian Islam, which serves as a foil for radical Arab Islam.Footnote 10
Based on the image of Timbuktu as one of Western Sudan’s preeminent centres of Islamic learning and trade from the medieval period until the French conquest at the end of the nineteenth century, Djenné is often described as Timbuktu’s lesser known twin. Located on the River Bani on the floodplain of the Niger Inland Delta, Djenné was one of the earliest urbanized areas in Africa and, like Timbuktu, a centre of scholarship and trade for many centuries. With Islamization dating to the early thirteenth century, Djenné rose to become an important trading hub and seat of Islamic learning under the Mali Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the town traded gold from the south with salt from the Sahara. With Djenné’s integration during the second half of the fifteenth century into Mali’s successor state, the Songhay Empire, its reputation as a scholarly and trading hub continued to grow. Djenné’s history at the crossroads of more than one empire explains its diverse and multi-ethnic population, including Fulbe, Bambara, Bozo, Songhai, and Marka, among others.
Although colonial reports attest to a decline during the first half of the twentieth century of Djenné’s role as a trading and scholarly city, it has maintained its regional importance as a seat of learning and attracted secular and religious tourists at least until the crisis of 2012.Footnote 11 Due to their rich and unique heritage, Djenné’s old towns became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988. The old towns are built entirely of mud brick, which requires fairly expensive and laborious annual maintenance after the rainy season. In recent years the challenging upkeep of mud buildings has led DjennénkeFootnote 12 to opt for cement structures and tiling, thereby violating the preservation condition that all buildings be built of mud only. That has in turn threatened the city’s status as a World Heritage site and in 2016 Djenné was placed on the list of sites in danger.Footnote 13 Similarly to the art of manuscript writing, the craft of mud masonry is passed down through the generations. Hence, the manuscripts created in Djenné have been largely preserved by the descendants of the original copyists.
Despite being a major player in trans-Saharan trade and hosting students and scholars from far afield, Djenné’s community has reputedly been parochial and very close-knit albeit, according to historical and contemporary sources, long characterized by factualism.Footnote 14 A contemporary example for Djennénke’s distrust of outsiders is the Mission Culturelle, the government-run institution tasked among other things with ensuring the preservation of the city’s unique architecture. The Mission Culturelle faces challenges resulting from lack of trust between its staff, who are Malian but usually not from Djenné, and the Djennénke.Footnote 15 Anecdotal evidence confirms the Djennénke’s suspicion of anyone who is not from the city, which leads them to make hardly any distinction between other Malians and Westerners. Their suspicion of Westerners specifically stems from the exploration of the archaeological sites in nearby Jenné-Jeno, or ancient Djenné, which declined in the twelfth century and had vanished completely by 1400, when the new Djenné emerged a few kilometres to the northwest.Footnote 16 Some Djennénke maintain that the archaeological sites have been “sold” to Westerners and outsiders, among whom the Djennénke include the government’s Mission Culturelle. As artefacts from Jenné-Jeno have not been put on display in a local museum, it has been difficult to dispel the notion that outsiders have been the only ones to benefit from Djenné’s cultural patrimony.Footnote 17 That notion is reinforced by the fact that when the French conquered the region in the 1880s and 1890s they looted artefacts and manuscripts, such as the library of the Tukulor jihad leader al-hajj Umar Tal in Segu. In the light of those experiences Djennénke reluctance to make cultural heritage available to outsiders is understandable, although their demands for material benefit need to be further situated in contemporary economic, political, and social contexts.Footnote 18 As the following sections will show, similar tensions and demands informed the project to preserve and digitize the city’s manuscript collections, which has raised questions about digital imperialism.
The Creation of Djenné’s Manuscript Library
The discovery of Arabic manuscripts – some written in the Arabic language, others in local languages like Swahili on the East African coast, and Hausa or Fulfulde in West Africa – has invited a more complex reconstruction of the societies in which the manuscripts were created and received. At the same time, debate continues about the indigeneity of Arabic manuscripts – and Islam generally – in sub-Saharan African societies. Categorizations of Islamic practices as foreign and threatening rather than local and docile have proliferated since the colonial era. Obviously Arabic manuscripts make up only part of the West African intellectual and cultural heritage and at times their role has been misinterpreted, if not to say fetishized. As Shamil Jeppie and Soulaymane Bachir Diagne have convincingly demonstrated in their edited collection The Meanings of Timbuktu, the interacting and contesting discourses of both oral and written sources form part of the rich patrimony of the region.Footnote 19 Thus, we should not treat the corpus of written sources as if they were their own entity separate from oral traditions, for oral traditions themselves have interacted with written ones in the Western Sudan since the medieval period.
The fetishization of Arabic manuscripts in sub-Saharan Africa, and West Africa especially, began in the 1990s. They have since been used to demonstrate to the world that Africa does indeed have a written tradition and thus a legitimate place among global civilizations. Henry Louis Gates most prominently articulated how Arabic manuscripts challenge racist ideas about black illiteracy. At the expense of local contextualization he places the universalist nature of the manuscripts in the foreground of his documentaries. Through Gates’ documentaries and the BBC’s “The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu” (2009) the manuscripts of Timbuktu have attracted global attention among researchers as well as from the general public over the last twenty years. Such reaction to the documentaries highlights the manuscripts’ potential for revising our understanding of Sahelian and West African history. At the same time, the documentaries have elevated Timbuktu’s role as a centre of erudition by inflating numbers and romanticizing its history.Footnote 20 The creation of myths about Timbuktu has a long history and saw new iterations during its jihadist occupation. In the words of Bruce Hall, Abdel Kader Haïdara convincingly harnessed “the universalizing discourse of ‘world heritage’”Footnote 21 to secure funding for transferring manuscript collections from Timbuktu to Bamako.
Like Timbuktu, Djenné is a West African city that has yielded a treasure trove of manuscripts. Perhaps not surprisingly, the surveying and preservation of it has been connected to its twin in the north, although with notable differences. Originally, Abdel Kader Haïdara was also a key player in preserving Djenné’s manuscript collections. Haïdara established himself as an expert on Arabic manuscripts from 1984 onwards, when he began to work as a collector, or “seeker of manuscripts,” at the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu.Footnote 22 By the early 2000s he was no longer working for the Ahmed Baba Institute but as director of the Mamma Haïdara Library in Timbuktu and had become well-known as a manuscript expert. When Haïdara surveyed manuscripts in Djenné and its surrounding villages he estimated the number of manuscripts in the area to be around 10,000.Footnote 23 The number, Bruce Hall has argued, was inflated to attract funding. For Timbuktu, Hall estimates that the total of manuscripts, including single-page documents, does not exceed 30,000 in total.Footnote 24 Hence Haïdara’s estimate for Djenné alone was rather generous. The numbers game in fact leads us to question the very definition of a manuscript and to conclude that even single folios – if not to say any scribble in Arabic – must count as manuscripts in order to arrive at Timbuktu’s claimed estimates of hundreds of thousands.Footnote 25
Deploying his successful strategy of universalist heritage discourse, Haïdara raised funds from the European Union, USAID, and the US Embassy to build a library for Imam Korobora (d. 2017), owner of one of the largest manuscript collections in Djenné.Footnote 26 The safekeeping of Djenné’s manuscripts and their digitization was driven by Imam Korobora, Haïdara, and the Anglo-Swedish designer and former Djenné hotelier Sophie Sarin. Like the embellished stories of the rescue mission for the Timbuktu manuscripts, the history of the Djenné Manuscript Library has the potential to be made into a captivating movie, animated by flamboyant characters and plenty of drama.
Located to the east of the Great Mosque, the Djenné Manuscript Library opened its doors in 2007. Every Monday, the city’s vibrant weekly market day, the Library is surrounded by bustling market stalls, colorfully dressed traders and their customers from Masina and further afield. It is a more than fitting location to house private archives containing the history of these peoples’ ancestors. While the manuscripts themselves are evidence of the traditions, ideologies, and daily activities of the Djennénke, their preservation and digitization is the result of international as well as local collaboration. The website of the Library introduces its unique concept and philosophy as “a library of private collections in a public space.”Footnote 27 The Library keeps the collections safe on behalf of the owners, who retain ownership while giving researchers access to the collections.Footnote 28 Its archives thus blend public and private spheres rather than maintain a strict dichotomy between them.
The concept of Djenné’s Manuscript Library is different from the much more publicized one in Timbuktu, where dozens of private libraries housed numerous manuscript collections until most of them were secretly evacuated to Bamako.Footnote 29 Djenné decided against Timbuktu’s diffuse model, which had made access to the collections more challenging and time-consuming. Unlike in Timbuktu, most of Djenné’s manuscripts were produced locally and have remained in the possession of the families of the copyists.Footnote 30 Most of the extant manuscripts in the region are copies of didactic work originating from North Africa and Egypt, with only a small percentage being original West African works.Footnote 31
While it was international funding that prompted competition and friction among Timbuktu’s manuscript owners, Djenné’s particular brand of factionalism predated the Library project but was also reinforced by it. The Djenné Manuscript Library has been a contentious project since its inception, because as far as the Djennénke were concerned the Library was a public depository, while for Imam Korobora it was his private library.Footnote 32 When the population protested against the Imam’s appropriation of the library, he removed almost all his collections and secured funding to build his own library from SAVAMA-DCI, the NGO founded by Haïdara to preserve manuscripts in Mali. The dispute about the nature of the Djenné Manuscript Library eventually involved the Minister of Culture, Cheick Oumar Sissoko. In response, in 2007 Sissoko created a library management committee, a nominal body comprising twelve of the city’s notables. The committee was tasked with representing the interests of all Djennénke.Footnote 33 Thus side-lined, Imam Korobora remained antagonistic to the Djenné Manuscript Library and the digitization projects until his demise in 2017.
One of the supporters of a centralized public depository of the manuscripts was the Anglo-Swedish expatriate Sophie Sarin, who became an unlikely key player in the preservation of the city’s manuscripts.Footnote 34 In 2006 she moved to Djenné to open a hotel and “just happened to stumble across the Djenné Manuscript Library by chance one day.”Footnote 35 At the time, she also started a blog in which she detailed her experiences and introduced readers to the precious manuscripts.Footnote 36 It was then that an avid blog reader alerted Sarin to the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, which offers annual grants for “the preservation of archival material that is in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration world-wide.”Footnote 37 An enthusiast rather than an expert, Sarin nonetheless successfully applied for a pilot project.Footnote 38 She had the support of two academics, Dmitry Bondarev, a linguist and manuscript expert at the University of Hamburg, and Constant Hamès, an anthropologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). In Djenné, Mamadou Samaké of the Mission Culturelle and Babou Touré, a representative of the Djenné Manuscript Library, collaborated with Sarin to survey the city’s collections.Footnote 39 In the form of a blog, the digital turn therefore led to the preservation and digitization of Djenné’s manuscripts collection and triggered a debate about digital imperialism, as the following section will show.
In 2009 Sarin launched the pilot Endangered Archives Programme project to establish the scope and nature of the Arabic manuscripts at the Library as well as in private homes in Djenné.Footnote 40 As the Imam’s collections had constituted the bulk of the manuscripts at the Library, new collections suitable for safekeeping had to be identified. The pilot project’s launch, which was attended by dignitaries and collection owners, was broadcast on Malian television. The manuscript expert Haïdara acted as project consultant and mentor. Timbuktu’s archivists trained their homologues in Djenné, and to actively engage the manuscript owners in the preservation process Haïdara recommended regular workshops to educate people about the value of the manuscripts and how they could be preserved.Footnote 41 After the successful completion of the pilot project, Haïdara offered his support of subsequent major projects. Beginning in 2011, three major projects would follow the pilot project and throughout them, events were held to promote the collections and the importance of their preservation and digitization.Footnote 42
At the time of the pilot project in 2009, access to private archives remained restricted and required careful negotiation from local librarians. Given the Djennénke’s distrust of outsiders, those who interacted with the manuscript owners had to be trusted and respected local figures. Accordingly the archivists Garba Yaro and Yelpha Djeïté, as scions of esteemed families, were entrusted with visiting manuscript owners. They were joined by experienced colleagues from Timbuktu, who also noted the lack of trust, reminiscent of their own early experience in Timbuktu. However, the strategy in Djenné worked, as thirteen families opened their private collections to the team. In the course of the four-month pilot project, manuscripts were surveyed in the homes of the owners, some of whom agreed to deposit them at the Library. The pilot project yielded close to 3,000 documents from thirteen family archives, still only a fraction of the extant collections.Footnote 43
The surveyors found the manuscripts in wooden chests and metal boxes, often in disarray. Most of the manuscripts in wooden chests had been attacked by termites, and water damage caused by leaking mud roofs in the rainy season had caused further deterioration. During the pilot survey, archivists meticulously separated manuscript folios from one another by laying them in white paper.Footnote 44 Some owners watched closely as the archivists sifted carefully through the family treasures; others, afraid of theft, refused to allow anyone else to handle the folios. The survey team was well aware that owners tended to show incomplete and less valuable manuscripts.Footnote 45
In the report of the pilot project Sarin noted that the importance of the manuscripts would become clear only later, when they would be properly studied by researchers. “These future researchers are the ones who will decide on the value of the documents once they have been recovered by our team during the Major Project which we hope will follow.”Footnote 46 The first major project began in autumn 2011 and in March 2012 the Library staff welcomed with great joy the first “proper” researcher, the PhD student Ariela Marcus-Sells from Stanford University.Footnote 47 At the time, they weathered the beginning of the political and economic crisis, when power-cuts during the day forced them to work at night.Footnote 48
Based on the pilot project, the aim of the first major project was to preserve and digitize Djenné’s manuscripts, which were now stored in the Library in acid-free boxes and newly built cupboards with protective netting.Footnote 49 As digitization required new resources, additional staff were hired and digital cameras acquired, along with lighting units and computers. Although the team members agreed that new staff should be local or Malian, Samaké from the Mission Culturelle and Sarin disagreed with members of the library management committee about the hiring criteria. Should professional knowledge of Arabic and French be considered more important, or “family connections?”Footnote 50 Eventually a compromise was found, with Garba Yaro and Yelpha Djeïté continuing as surveyors of collections and liaison with families.
An important task facing the project was the need to make owners appreciate the value of the manuscripts, which had diminished due to the increasing availability of paper and printed material over the course of the twentieth century. Despite the reluctance of some manuscript owners to show the team what they had, the first major project produced almost 150,000 digitized images.Footnote 51 Thanks to the team’s efforts, manuscript owners gained more confidence in the preservation process during this major project and brought their collections to the Library.Footnote 52
The manuscripts selected by owners for preservation and digitization reflect their individual values and considerations. While some manuscripts are in Ajami, vernaculars written in Arabic script, like Fulfulde, Songhai, Bambara, and Bozo, the vast majority are in Arabic.Footnote 53 Many of the manuscripts are not dated so that a main challenge is working out the age of them, which requires archivists to consider criteria like the quality of the paper and its provenance.Footnote 54 The practice in Timbuktu, however, was not to suggest dates unless they could be clearly established from the actual text of the manuscript. As Djenné’s archivists were trained by the staff in Timbuktu who had worked in the Djenné Manuscript Library, there was general reluctance to offer estimates for dates of manuscripts. The absence of dates remains one of the main challenges for historians working with the collections.Footnote 55 While most items in the catalogue are undated, the archivists established that the bulk of the manuscripts originate from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the most ancient dating from 1394.
The Library’s criteria in selecting manuscripts for digitization were age, subject matter, physical appearance, and rarity.Footnote 56 That owners had their own criteria in selecting manuscripts became clear when the Library was flooded with copies of the Qur’an, Hadith (accounts of the deeds and sayings of the Prophet), and siras (biographies of the Prophet). In the interest of diversity of subject matter the Library then decided to allow digitization of only one copy of the Qur’an per family.Footnote 57 It was fortunate, as Sarin observes, that “there were also significantly high numbers of other types of texts being brought.”Footnote 58 The preference for the Qur’an reflects the considerations of the owners for whom, on the one hand, their Qur’an manuscripts are the most valuable and thus the priority for digitization. On the other hand, as digitization makes the document available to researchers around the globe, they are a safe choice that attests to the owner’s Muslim identity. It would be interesting to know which copies of the Qur’an were selected by the owners and which by the archivists. While the project team was acutely aware of the question of representativeness, in the interests of diversity of subject matter and scope they sometimes made choices which went against the original wishes of certain manuscript owners.
The Library’s collections are arranged by family and can be searched by owner’s name or subject matter. The catalogue is arranged by the following subject matters: Qur’an, exegesis of the Qur’an, ‘ilm al-qur’an (studies of the Qur’an), Hadith, jurisprudence, theology, prayers for the Prophet, Sufism, geography, interpretation of dreams, correspondence, archives,Footnote 59 esotericism, astronomy, astrology, siras, invocation, eulogy, intercession, preaching and sermons, philology, literature, rhetoric, and history.Footnote 60 The Endangered Archives Programme provided cataloguing criteria, such as title, date of the original material and the digital copy, extent (i.e. page count) and format of the original material and digital copies (i.e. paper specificities and size), physical characteristics (like water or termite damage), custodial history, system of arrangement, scope and content, language, and script. For most of those categories the catalogues of the three major projects have no information other than the title, a brief description of the content and physical characteristics, as well as the extent and format of the physical copies.Footnote 61
A considerable percentage of the manuscripts fall into the category of esotericism, frequently referred to as “maraboutage,” a derogatory term for numerology and divination. Djenné has long held a reputation as a centre of esotericism, which is widespread in West Africa and important for problem-solving and psychological redress. While constituting only a small percentage of the collection, correspondence is a subject particularly valuable to historians. Depending on the nature of its content, correspondence allows historians to reconstruct social, intellectual and economic histories and everyday experience. It includes, for instance, communication between Sheikh Sidi Muhammad al-Kunti in Timbuktu and the jihad leader Seku Amadu in Hamdullaye as well as slave transactions.Footnote 62 Given the sensitivity of the topic, owners tended to make available correspondence about slavery only reluctantly. The archivists, who worked closely with the manuscript owners, influenced decisions in depositing collections at the Library and allowing digitization. As notable members of the community themselves, the archivists informed the content of the deposited collections by honoring owners’ interests. While the deliberations remain private among the participants, it is clear that the collections at the Library, digitized or not, have been largely shaped by local power structures and social networks. For instance, had historians been involved, it is probable that other manuscripts would have been selected for safekeeping and digitization.
Contested Access to Knowledge
Unlike the first major project, which ended in 2013, the consecutive second and third projects included Djenné’s peri-urban areas to a radius of sixty kilometres.Footnote 63 By the end of the third major project in September 2017, Djenné’s Manuscript Library housed 8,520 manuscripts from 141 families in Djenné and surrounding villages. The third project digitized close to 140,000 images from 2,616 manuscripts, originating from sixty-one families in Djenné. Although the projects aimed to digitize a larger number of manuscripts, the digitized folios still amount to almost all the manuscripts extant in Djenné. Factionalism was a distracting force throughout the major projects from 2011 until 2017, as some families refused to store their manuscript collections at the Library, withdrew their collections or did not participate in the digitization efforts.Footnote 64 The efforts and objectives of various groups and individuals have created the archives at the Djenné Manuscript Library, and embedded as they are in local and international power structures have also informed discussions about free access to the digitized collections.
Tensions over manuscript preservation, about access to knowledge, and questions of agency have a long history in Djenné. Mistrust of Western intentions was initially engendered by the well-known fact that during their conquest of Mali at the end of the nineteenth century the French looted important collections of manuscripts, notably the Umarian Library in Segu.Footnote 65 The Library staff were therefore obliged to convince the Djennénke of the merits of digitization by highlighting the difference between the unauthorized French misappropriation of manuscripts more than a century before and contemporary concerns about preservation and accessibility.
The different agendas of the protagonists meant that the Djenné Manuscript Library remained a contested site. Imam Korobora, who although one of the initiators was soon to be one of the main opponents of the Library project, had formed an association that he did not formally dissolve when he withdrew his support.Footnote 66 As the town did not wish to be represented by the Imam’s association, they formed a new association that coexisted with his. The Imam then declared the coexistence of the two associations illegal, and administrators concurred. Legally therefore, and for the administration – most notably for the prefect and his deputy – the original association formed by the Imam was the official representative of the Djenné Manuscript Library. Among Djenné’s administrators meanwhile, concern mounted over the Library as a source of conflict within the community.Footnote 67
When the Minister of Culture formed the library management committee in 2007 he provided that its mandate be reviewed and renewed after five years, with the approval of all the local authorities in Djenné. After years of impasse, the question of the association seemed to be resolved in late August 2012, when the Djennénke agreed that the town’s interests could indeed be represented by the original association of the Imam, who no longer had any interest vested in it. The association founded by the Imam then became the association of the Library and the Djennénke.Footnote 68 However, that agreement quelled Library-induced dissent only temporarily. After Imam Korobora’s death in April 2017 Yelpha Djeïté, archivist at the Library, scholar, and Qur’an school owner, became the Imam of Djenné. Disputes continued although Djeïté now embodied both the city’s spiritual authority and the spirit of twenty-first century manuscript preservation and digitization.Footnote 69
Factionalism resurfaced at the end of August 2017. Shortly before the third and final Endangered Archives Programme project came to a close, requests from members of the library management committee for direct access to the funds of the Endangered Archives Programme added a final moment of drama. The request itself was immaterial because the grant was not directly administered by any of the local members. Dignitaries and collection owners had further sought to be included in the Library project in order to secure jobs for their kin and dependents, which could lead to failure to employ the most qualified staff available.Footnote 70 A case in point was the Library’s IT and digitization manager, who was supposed to check the digitized material prior to its delivery to the British Library. He could not be contacted in the final days of the project, arguably as a ploy to prevent the delivery. If it was a ploy, he succeeded at least partially, as Sarin had to submit incomplete and inadequately checked material. The elusive digitization manager had close ties to the Village Chief who, together with certain members of the management committee, wanted the Library to be closed on administrative grounds. The Prefect, brought in to mediate, realized that the request to close down the Library was driven by futile efforts to tap into the project’s funds and made the point that the purpose of a library is not to make money. Even though the Endangered Archives Programme projects did not make Djenné’s notables wealthy, they did provide over a number of years a reliable source of income for about eight or ten archivists and staff and enhanced the city’s cultural capital.Footnote 71
The trials and tribulations of the Djenné Manuscript Library were published in an anthology in 2015, on the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Archives Programme.Footnote 72 In addition to that publication Sarin’s blog, subject neither to peer-review nor scholarly scrutiny, provides more than just a glimpse behind the scenes of the Endangered Archives Programme projects and the challenges they faced. It also reveals, for instance, the process of translating Sarin’s experience in Djenné into an academic article, which involved not only providing proper citation of sources but also making linguistic concessions. Sarin gives examples of the imposition of “politically correct” expressions, like “system of family connections” instead of “nepotism” which she saw as a form of censorship. There had to be agreements about spelling too, such as “Qur’an” instead of “Koran,” to ensure uniformity across the volume. Most importantly, the editor rejected her thesis about why the Djennénke were reluctant to allow digitization of their manuscripts. Sarin argued that knowledge is esoteric in local culture and must be earned, a view she predicated on her understanding of how learning is transmitted in Qur’an schools.Footnote 73 Sarin’s view is that Qur’an school students memorize verses of the Qur’an for years without necessarily grasping their meaning, but that view was excised from her article because the editor considered it both a generalization and an unfavourable portrayal of education in the city. Nevertheless, Sarin continues to explain Djennénke’s parochial preservation of knowledge as the antithesis of Western demands for universal access to knowledge and accused the editor of Eurocentrism.Footnote 74
By then a resident of Djenné for almost a decade, Sarin had gained a firm understanding of local concepts of knowledge and access to it. Transmission of knowledge in Muslim societies has been well explored by scholars, such as Louis Brenner, who studied the meaning of knowledge and its transformation over the course of the twentieth century in Mali.Footnote 75 In the pre-colonial era, Qur’an schools in Djenné provided elementary education, whereas at the next level the approach offered by the majlis was more tailored to the students. The transmission of knowledge hinged on the teacher-student relationship, with students seeking to learn with certain scholars based on their specific expertise and reputations. The chain of transmission in Islamic learning is hierarchical, meaning that not all forms of knowledge are equally valid or accessible.Footnote 76 At the same time, scholarships for poor students and circulation of manuscripts among networks of scholars, kin, and friends enabled general access to knowledge. French colonial education blended traditional hermeneutics with secular knowledge and subject matter important to Western societies. Brenner has demonstrated how the episteme of Islamic knowledge moved from hierarchical and esoteric to rationalistic in the course of colonization and after political independence. Most importantly for the present discussion, access to and ownership of knowledge informed socio-political status. Respected members of society might have been poor, but learned. Ownership of rich manuscript collections further increased social esteem.
The predominantly esoteric nature of knowledge and the hierarchical structure in gaining it explain at least to some extent the Djennénke’s reluctance to have their manuscripts digitized, which means forfeiting control over access to it. The question of reception might also have informed owners’ decisions about the nature of dissemination; whether manuscripts were meant to be read privately, or recited publicly.Footnote 77 Today however, the vast majority of manuscript owners are no longer able to preserve their collections adequately. In view of economic deprivation and the preponderance of a rationalistic episteme which competes with the esoteric, a considerable number of owners have decided to deposit collections at the Djenné Manuscript Library for safekeeping. In doing so they have made private collections public and have informed fellow citizens and researchers about their cultural capital, which attests to the integration of private archives into the public sphere. Although characteristics of esoteric knowledge linger, the rationalistic episteme and political economy call for different strategies, such as handing responsibility for physical care of material to the Library while retaining legal ownership.
Doubtless, remuneration was a major incentive for manuscript owners to digitize their collections. Considering that the pilot project provided no form of compensation to manuscript owners and given the financial difficulties that many of them faced, the willingness of owners to participate was remarkable.Footnote 78 By contrast, during the major projects owners were remunerated. During the digitization process, they received 3,000 FCFA per day which equates to approximately five US$. In a country where the vast majority of the population lives on the equivalent of less than two US$ per day,Footnote 79 digitization provided an additional if limited income. Owners of larger collections might receive compensation for hundreds of pages, to sums of several hundred dollars. Publication of digitized images for commercial use, such as in magazines, constitutes an additional source of income. There is no set fee for commercial use of the digitized images, and in the case of an article published in Christie’s Magazine, the owners received 50,000 FCFA per image.Footnote 80 For JPEG copies, which can be purchased from the Library, a fee is collected of 500 FCFA per image, to be shared equally between manuscript owners and the Djenné Manuscript Library.Footnote 81
A concern of the Djennénke, spurred by some members of the community, was the free accessibility of the manuscripts on the internet. The notion of “open access” was challenged by those who argued that the British Library rather than the owners would benefit financially and that owners could no longer control the reception of their collections. To address those concerns, a compromise was reached in 2013 to delay the publication of the digitized collections on the Endangered Archives Programme website until 2018. The compromise guaranteed the continuation of the digitization process.Footnote 82 A certain amount of the reluctance to digitize stems from the presumption that once manuscripts are available online, researchers will no longer visit the library,Footnote 83 although in fact visits to the library by researchers have been few and far between. As for the availability of the collections in situ, the Library is open to the public and access is free, although researchers pay an annual membership fee of 20,000 FCFA. Perceived by the Djennénke as a loss of revenue, for researchers too digitization implies lost, or at least diminished, opportunity to explore the environment and social context which created or at least preserved the manuscripts. Another point worth considering is the impact on research of digital imperialism, as the convenience of consulting manuscripts online, far away from the societies in which they were produced, will lead to shorter research stays and less cultural immersion for international researchers, which is bound to affect the nature and quality of their research.
Permission for digitization remains contentious because it implies loss of controlling access to the manuscripts and their reception. Digitization involves a level of abstraction and alienation. Manuscripts are reduced to images on the internet, removed from the environment in which they were if not produced, then at least preserved for decades or centuries. Despite such concerns, since February 2019 a total of 7,934 digitized files, or “around 400,000 images”Footnote 84 from the three major projects have been available on the website of the Endangered Archives Programme. The actual number of digitized images is considerably greater than the number of files suggests, because each file comprises a number of images, ranging from a few to hundreds in the case of the manuscripts of complete books. The Malian National Archives in Bamako holds copies of the digitized material, as does the Djenné Manuscript Library,Footnote 85 where work on the catalogue was completed in 2018 with support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation of Germany as part of a preservation project by the University of Hamburg.Footnote 86
The political and economic situation in Djenné is unlikely to improve in the near future. However, the availability of digitized manuscripts offers a way to reconstruct its rich history from afar as the three major Endangered Archives Programme projects in Djenné have digitally preserved the vast majority of the city’s collections. Doubtless, digitization contributed to inflating numbers as funding incentivized the submission of large numbers of manuscripts. Yet, Djenné differed from Timbuktu not only in its conceptualization of the Manuscript Library but also in how its digitization projects progressed. When the jihadists invaded Timbuktu in 2012, digitization of the manuscripts was already underway although progress had been slow. The jihadist threat could therefore be invoked when, during a UNESCO manuscript conference in Timbuktu in February 2017, Sarin was approached by three manuscript library owners. They asked her to raise funds for the digitization of collections that had not been transferred to Bamako as part of Haïdara’s rescue mission.Footnote 87 In that vein, Sarin’s involvement in the preservation of Malian manuscripts continues.Footnote 88
Concluding Thoughts
Funded by Western donors, Djenné’s Manuscript Library houses private collections that represent the city’s illustrious past and cultural patrimony, as it grapples with Mali’s uncertain future. The preservation and digitization of manuscript collections is a product of the digital age on various levels. New forms of media, such as the blog, have paved the way for Endangered Archives Programme grants, a pilot project and three major projects one after another from 2009 to 2017. The grants were obtained by an unlikely player in the manuscript business, in the person of hotelier and designer Sophie Sarin. The cosmopolite Sarin further used non-traditional venues like the magazine of the British auction house Christie’s and her own blog to promote the collections.Footnote 89 Still less famous than the Timbuktu manuscripts, thanks to Sarin’s efforts the ones in Djenné have nevertheless made international news and been advertised among academic and public circles. During the process, Sarin has had to rebut sensationalist headlines such as false claims that the digitization of Djenné’s manuscripts was a result of the jihadist occupation in the north.Footnote 90
The digital age with its open access to knowledge has further challenged the esoteric and hierarchical tradition of knowledge in Djenné. Only those who were initiated gradually gained access to knowledge, which implied that such individuals must be part of the local culture or can earn access to it over time. That tradition has faded since the onset of Westernization although it has not died out completely, as manuscript owners have demonstrated, for their unease about digitization stems from that same tradition as well as from concerns about being exploited by the West. It took considerable effort, persuasion, and concession to induce manuscript owners not only to deposit their property at the Library but also to preserve the manuscripts digitally. Rights over their use have been transferred to the Library, while ownership rests with the family. Recent social, political and economic changes have influenced Djennénke’s considerations, as many recognized that their homes could not provide the best environment for keeping the manuscripts safe from environmental and possible political threats. The collapse of the economy since 2012 has further spurred the owners of collections to entrust them to the Library, while remuneration was a major incentive for digitization.
Digitization necessarily affects research findings. While technology and social media in the twenty-first century enable communication with all corners of the world at any moment, chats, tweets, emails, and phone calls cannot replace research experience on the ground. Even in the case of longer research stays, such experience might provide for outsiders only a snapshot of the society in which they have chosen to immerse themselves for a limited time. Yet such immersion is crucial to contextualizing the object of research and sparking their historical imagination. It is also an important opportunity to hone language skills and ideally to gain the respect and trust of members of the community under study. With digitization, trips to archives in situ will become fewer. The sensual experience of working with manuscripts, such as their texture or distinct smell, will be lost. This is not to diminish the importance of digitization, especially in locations like Djenné, where the economic and political situation remains uncertain. Still, as much as the digital turn facilitates research, it entails a decrease in essential experience of the sort that has previously informed historical research and imagination. Hence the importance of addressing concerns about digital imperialism in the global south and the West.
When Sarin embarked on seeking funding to preserve Djenné’s manuscripts, she hoped to find documents that would rewrite West African history. In her blog of 31 August 2017 she concluded more modestly that “we have not found anthing [sic] very extraordinary perhaps, but we have built up an important community library, representing over 130 Djenné families. That is worth something.” As the digitized collections have only recently become available, the real value of the manuscripts in writing Djenné’s history and in rewriting the history of the region remains to be seen.
