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Explore the Wolof Ajami Reader: First of Three Ajami Readers Now Online
We are pleased to announce that the Wolof Ajami Reader, the first in a series of three planned Ajami Readers, is now available on the RIA website in the Wolof Resources section.
Our specialized Ajami Readers—covering Wolof, Mandinka, and Hausa, three major African languages with rich Ajami traditions—are designed to equip students, teachers, scholars, and professionals with the skills necessary to engage with the Ajami literary traditions of West Africa. These resources offer an in-depth look into a wide range of fields, including business, health, agriculture, human rights, and politics, making them especially valuable for understanding the increasingly influential Muslim societies of the Sahel region.
The Wolof Ajami Reader is authored by Fallou Ngom, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Jennifer Yanco, and Elhadji Djibril Diagne. It is developed from manuscripts and interviews collected in Senegal and focuses on promoting literacy, oral proficiency, and cultural knowledge. The Reader contains six thematic units with biographical information and images of the authors or discussants of the manuscripts, the texts in Wolof Ajami with Latin-script transcriptions and English translations, images of Ajami user communities, glossaries and notes, and pedagogical exercises.
The Reader Units are complemented by their corresponding Wolof Ajami video interviews on the project website, containing video clips with Latin-script and English subtitles, metadata with information about the videos and contributors, Ajami user-community images with Latin-script and English captions, glossaries and notes, and pedagogical exercises. This multimedia resource gives the users access to interactive tools such as an embedded Wolof Ajami keyboard for practice.
The Reader also serves as a template for creating similar resources in other African languages that utilize Ajami scripts, bridging the gap between local writing traditions and the widely-used Latin script. It provides a model for building sustainable digital educational materials that incorporate the overlooked yet invaluable local knowledge contained in Ajami documents.
These resources aim to bring greater visibility to African literatures written in Ajami, addressing the historical gap in access to this wealth of knowledge about Africa’s history, politics, and cultural traditions.
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Our project members presented at the International Research and Studies Program meeting
Our staff members attended the Project Directors Meeting of the International Research and Studies Program of the United States Department of Education that took place on April 12, 2024, in Washington, DC. Prof. Fallou Ngom and Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor presented on our ongoing project, Project RIA: Readers in Ajami and Companion Multimedia Website.
The International Research and Studies Program supports research, studies, and the development of instructional materials to strengthen instruction in modern foreign languages, area studies, and other international fields. The all-day workshop provided the program grantees with an opportunity to share experiences about ongoing projects and network with other grantees and the staff of the International and Foreign Language Education Office.
Our presentation was also featured in the International Foreign Language and Education June newsletter.
Our work was featured on the British Library Endangered Archives blog site
The British Library Endangered Archives blog posted our article about our new project, Digital Preservation of Fuuta Jalon Scholars’ Arabic and Ajami Materials in Senegal and Guinea. The project is funded by a grant from the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP1430). It seeks to digitally preserve 50,000 pages of endangered Arabic and Ajami manuscripts (texts written with modified Arabic script) produced by Fuuta Jalon scholars who lived between the 18th and early 20th centuries in what is now the Republic of Guinea. The endangered Arabic and Ajami manuscripts to be preserved and digitized include the surviving texts of important scholars and the handwritten copies made by their students, followers and family members who have kept them in their private libraries in the Fuuta Jalon region in Guinea and Senegal where the second largest Fuuta Jalon community in Africa lives. These archives will be the largest digital records of this material in the world.
Our African Ajami scholars publish special issue in Islamic Africa journal
Our new special issue in Islamic Africa examines Ajami literatures and literacies in West Africa and situates African Ajami studies in participatory multimedia and digital archiving approaches. The double special issue of nine articles is titled “Ajami Literacies of Africa: the Wolof, Mandinka, Hausa and Fula Traditions” and is co-edited by Fallou Ngom, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, David Robinson, and Rebecca Shereikis (Islamic Africa, volumes 14.2, 2023, and 15.1, 2024). It centers around the knowledge generated through the African Ajami research project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
African Ajami literatures hold a wealth of knowledge on the history and intellectual traditions of the region but are largely unknown to the larger public. The history of Ajami refutes the claims that Africa lacks written traditions. The downplaying and devaluing of the significance of African Ajami traditions has long characterized Arab-centric and Eurocentric scholars and administrators of the colonial era, and its legacy persists, perpetuating racial stereotypes, and limiting political and educational participation.
The articles of the special issue make three main contributions. First, they establish important historical dimensions of the role of Ajami literacy in mediating the lives of grassroots communities that have not yet been systematically studied. Secondly, they enable unique comparative perspectives on Ajami use in four major West African languages, contributing to the interpretive and contextual analysis of Ajami literacies and their social role. The special issue articles draw on the materials in our African Ajami collections, analyzing various manuscripts and topics and situating them socially and temporally in their communities of origin. And thirdly, the articles explore the role of digital technologies and methods in studying and preserving African Ajami texts.
The introductory article to the special issue by Fallou Ngom, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, and David Robinson discusses the building blocks and historical development of Ajami cultures in West Africa, outlines the collaborative research initiatives that our special issue draws upon, and explores the challenges and opportunities for participatory knowledge-making that accompany the rise of digital technologies in the study of African literatures and literacies.
Special issue contributors include Bala Saho, Ousmane Cisse, Margaret Rowley, Elhadji Diagne, Gana Ndiaye, Mustapha Kurfi, Jennifer Yanco, David Glovsky, Abubakar Jalloh, Karen Barton, Eleni Castro, Neil Patel, and Mark Jamra.
Our other ongoing African Ajami research initiatives include the Readers in Ajami project and Digital Preservation of Fuuta Jalon project.
Read the BU Pardee School of Global Studies news article about the special issue here.
Our work was also featured in Brill blog "Humanities Matter".
Our Ajami research is featured in BU research journal The Brink
BU research journal The Brink published a new feature article on our Ajami research on December 21, 2022. Read more here
BU NEH Ajami Project Sharing New Resources
The Boston University NEH Ajami project is pleased to share the resources it has developed in the course of the three-year research engagement, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project, Ajami Literacy and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa, has digitized a unique selection of manuscripts in Ajami (African language texts written with a modified Arabic script) in four major West African languages (Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Wolof), transcribed and translated them into English and French, prepared commentaries, and created enhancing multimedia resources to be made widely available to the scholarly community and the general public.
The NEH Ajami project is the first systematic comparative approach of several major African languages written in Ajami, examining the different patterns of Ajami development in these four languages and literatures, and the multiple forms and custodians of Ajami literacy. It also marks the first time that such varied African Ajami documents have been translated into two major European languages (French and English) and made accessible to communities and scholars worldwide. The project has also captured the musical traditions that have accompanied the written texts. The project has an equally unique participatory quality—with the help of our field teams and Ajami experts in Africa and the United States, it aims to facilitate interpretive knowledge about the meaning and purpose of Ajami texts, their social functions, and the voices of the people who have written, own, and use them. A selection of interpretive essays by the project members has been prepared for academic publication. The multi-disciplinary team of scholars and Ajami experts in Africa and the United States has digitized, transcribed and translated several thousand pages of texts and prepared selected video and audio files that can be accessed on our website: https://sites.bu.edu/nehajami/.
Please see more here.
Collaborative Workshop: Three Years of the NEH Ajami Project
On July 7-9, 2022, the participants of the NEH-funded Ajami project gathered for a three-day workshop to share experience, best practices and lessons learned, and plans for the future. The three-year project explores the Ajami literatures of four main languages of West Africa, seeking to increase global access to primary sources in Ajami. In the sessions of this collaborative hybrid workshop, the project members reflected on their experience with fieldwork in Africa, manuscript digitization, transcription, and English and French translation processes, interpreting Ajami manuscripts and writing academic articles. Participants also discussed the digital and technological aspects of the project. The goals of the workshop included identifying and sharing best practices in all of the project areas, and developing takeaways for the future. The workshop was attended by BU African studies faculty, research affiliates, staff, and graduate students as well as members of the Geddes Language Center, African Studies Library, and colleagues at partner organizations across North America and West Africa. READ MORE HERE
Fallou Ngom Presenting at ISITA
New Federal Grant Award: Readers in Ajami
The team of Ajami scholars at Boston University, led by Professor Fallou Ngom, has been awarded a three-year grant of $178,900 by the U.S. Department of Education to develop specialized Ajami readers in Hausa, Wolof, and Mandinka (three major African languages with rich written Ajami literatures) with a multimedia companion website. The project will provide students, language teachers, scholars, and American professionals with the necessary linguistic, cultural and literacy skills to engage Ajami users of West Africa. The resources of the project will cover a range of fields, including business and economy, health and medicine, agriculture and the environment, and human rights, politics and diplomacy. The project will produce a methodology that can be replicated for other world languages with dual literacy systems (Ajami and Latin script orthographies). It will provide an optimal model of how to build and sustain specialized textual and digital educational resources that incorporate local voices and knowledge recorded in multiple African Ajami scripts – something many academics and professionals have overlooked for centuries. The project draws on the expertise at BU and overseas in Ajami, African linguistics, pedagogy, social anthropology, and digital technology. Our team, led by Professor Ngom, includes Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Dr. Jennifer Yanco, Dr. Zoliswa Mali, Dr. Mustapha Kurfi, Mr. Ablaye Diakite, Mr. Mouhamadou L. Diallo, and the Geddes Language Center digital specialists Alison Parker, Shawn Provencal, Frank Antonelli, and Dr. Mark Lewis. The new project complements the ongoing work of the BU-based NEH collaborative research project: Ajami Literature and the Expansion of Literacy in West Africa. Introductory team meeting of Project RIA took place on November 20, 2020.