How the African Ajami Project Is Transforming Access to West African Literature

How the African Ajami Project Is Transforming Access to West African Literature 

The African Ajami Project of Boston University African Studies Center (ASC) has been instrumental in rekindling awareness of and interest in four major West African languages — Wolof, Mandinka, Hausa, and Fula — written in the Ajami script. Ajami, which refers to non-Arabic languages written in modified Arabic script, holds profound historical and contemporary significance and remains an essential area of scholarly research related to the region. 

Since its inception, the project has steadily gained momentum as affiliated scholars continue to expand the scope and reach of Ajami literature through ongoing research and resource development. Their work supports the linguistic preservation and advancement of these endangered languages while highlighting the rich histories and cultures of several African communities. Over the past year, the project has achieved several important milestones through the development of key language resources for the academic community.  

The project’s latest achievement is the completion of the largest digital collection of Fuuta Jalon scholars’ Arabic and Ajami manuscripts in the world — a result of a multi-year initiative led by Prof. Fallou Ngom and Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor which was funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (project EAP-1430). The initiative digitally preserved over 52,000 pages of manuscripts from what is now the Republic of Guinea and Senegal. Some of these rare texts date back to the 18th century, offering an unprecedented window into the intellectual, cultural, and religious life of Fuuta Jalon scholars across generations. 

Fula communities played a central role in the composition, teaching, and dissemination of Ajami in West Africa. Fula, the language of the Fulɓe people, developed across a vast region stretching from Senegal to Nigeria and Cameroon over the past millennium. The preserved texts address a wide range of secular and religious themes in both prose and poetry. They explore ritual practice and eschatology, education, ethics, medicine, astrology, farming, and social relations, alongside school and family records. Historical texts recount the migration of the Fulani people to the highlands of Fuuta Jalon and document the establishment of regional polities. 

The project focused on preserving the primary sources central to these important legacies, and making them accessible to researchers, educators, students, and the broader public worldwide. 

Members of our field team digitized the materials directly within the communities where they were held. They consulted with local specialists about the history, meaning, and use of each manuscript, which provided critical historical and cultural context, and informed the development of detailed and reliable metadata for the collection. 

In addition to the completed preservation project, our African Studies scholars have carried out several other major recent African Ajami research initiatives. The project exploring the expansion of Ajami literacy in West Africa (2019-2022), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, undertook a comparative study of Ajami manuscripts in four major West African languages, digitized the manuscripts, transcribed and translated them into English and French, prepared scholarly commentaries, and developed multimedia resources. This project marked the first time such a diverse body of African Ajami texts had been translated into two major European languages and made globally accessible.  

Another major initiative, Readers in Ajami (2020-2024), funded by the United States Department of Education, developed specialized Ajami readers in Hausa, Wolof, and Mandinka, along with a companion multimedia website. The project provides students, teachers, scholars, and professionals with the linguistic and cultural tools needed to engage Ajami users in West Africa. Drawing on this work, our scholars recently published a double special issue of Islamic Africa, which examined Ajami literatures in West Africa and situated African Ajami studies within participatory multimedia and digital archiving approaches. 

Through these groundbreaking initiatives, the African Ajami Project has not only increased the visibility of African literature written in Ajami but also enabled current and future generations of African researchers and linguistic scholars to access a wealth of knowledge about the continent’s vibrant history, politics, culture, and traditions.  

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