Historical Documents Written in Arabic and Fulfude in Futa Jallon (Guinea)

Abstract

The Arabic and Fulfude manuscripts from Futa Jallon (Guinea) are an illustrative example – apart from their local characteristics – of the literature written in the areas of ancient Islamic Sub‑Saharan Africa. Here, the historian can find extensive chronicles, but also shorter historical narratives written in Arabic or in Fulfulde. They are closely tied to oral traditions and they serve the political and religious aims of the group to which the author belongs. But the historian can also rely on a wide set of documents, from which he draws many interesting conclusions, although these texts were not written to deliver an historical message to the generations to come. They include: letters, theoretical texts, poems dealing with the relations with colonisers, and even purely religious texts. In such a way, these internal sources, which remain underexploited, are a new frontier for African history and an essential complement to the external sources that scholars have so far brought into the foreground.