After I had written the last entry from the British Library Private view
I also posted the pictures on Facebook, and I received this comment ( below in my
translation) from Ousman
Yaro who works at the Djenne Manuscript
Library. He is the grandson of a
celebrated Djenne poet:
“Congratulations and
a big thanks to our coordinator Sophie Sarin on behalf of the people of Djenne in
general, and the personnel of the Djenne Manuscript Library in particular. But
the awful thing is that the Djenne Manuscript Library, unless nothing is done
in the coming month, is threatened with closure! All the projects are now
finished. The last one came to an end only a few days ago. The personnel, with
more than eight years of work experience, will have to find other activities
and the manuscript owners will no longer have confidence in the library’s
ability to look after their collections and will therefore remove them. Such
are the consequences if the Malian state; the funding bodies and the
benefactors withdraw, or don’t continue their involvement!”
It is indeed a very serious situation. I made an appeal in my
speech at the British Library for help.
Below is my speech, and the
last section is the relevant one:
“Ten years ago I had nothing to do with Malian manuscripts.
That I am standing here today about to talk about these projects in Djenne is
one of those twists and turns of fate one could hardly make up.
One day in 2008 two Djenne dignitaries dressed in
embroidered boubous and prayer caps
arrived at my little mud hotel in Djenne. They were from the Djenne
Manuscript Library: an institution I had frankly never heard of- I had been too
busy looking after tourists during what was still a happy time in Mali, which
was an up and coming tourist destination.
The Djenne notables invited me to come and see the library- also a mud
building in the celebrated Djenne architecture, which had earned this ancient
city UNESCO world heritage status. The
library needed funding. Could I help them? In those days there were not many
families who had deposited their manuscript treasures there yet, but enough to
make me fascinated: so it was not only
Timbuktu that had manuscripts? I should have known better of course- Djenne is
actually much older than Timbuktu, and Islam penetrated here in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, during the height of the Malian empire, when the
first version of the famous Djenne mosque was built. Of course there would be
manuscripts here!
In the summer of 2009 the Endangered Archives Programme organized a conference here
at the British Library. I went along to this and met the people in charge who
seemed in favour of our putting a proposal together for our first Pilot Project- including Cathy Collins... are
you here? Cathy sent me off to SOAS to meet Dr. Dmitry Bondarev, and he became the projects’ academic sponsor, a
position he still retains, as well as a becoming a trusted advisor and good
friend.
The four Endangered Archives Programmes in Djenne ran
between 2009 and 2016 during which time the library’s collection grew from a
few hundred manuscripts belonging to a handful of Djenne families to becoming
an important depository for 8520 manuscripts belonging to 141 Djenne families. The
subject matter of the manuscripts is varied, although with a large proportion
of Islamic texts such as Korans, Islamic jurisprudence and Hadiths, or
traditional stories concerning the Prophet Mohammed and his companions. There
is also a very large collection of what is called ‘esoteric’ texts, which
concerns magic- a speciality of the Djenne Marabouts, who are famous all over
West Africa. These manuscripts include talismans and also many herbal remedies
and traditional healing recipes.
The policy of
the library has been to offer open access to scholars who would like to study
the manuscripts in situ, but the deteriorating political situation in northern
and Central Mali has meant that very few scholars have been able to avail
themselves of this opportunity.
That is why
this great collection of nearly half a million images from the Manuscripts of
Djenne , which will now go online, together with the ongoing major project with
three libraries in Timbuktu is truly an expression of what the Endangered
Archives Programme Project is all about- these documents are now virtually out
of bounds and they are indeed endangered, not only by the perennial hazards of
climate and insects, but also by an increasingly precarious security climate. However, this great collection is saved, at
least in digital form, for posterity, and for that we thank Arcadia and the
Endangered Archives Programme!
Finally, I have a request: the Djenne Manuscript Library is now losing
all its funding. The staff, in particular Garba Yaro, its devoted main
archivist, will no longer have a salary. The central Government sees the
library as the responsibility of the local community and of the Mairie, as part
of decentralization. But the Mairie of Djenne is entirely without funding and
has not paid its own staff for many months. The actual mud building of the
library need a yearly recoating of mud.
The good news is that this is not a question of a lot
of money: with £ 6000- £7000 a year, Garba Yaro would keep his job, the library
would get its yearly coating and a
modest few light bulbs would be kept alight.
And most importantly, the Djenne families who have deposited their
manuscripts in the library for safe keeping would not have to remove them
again. Djenne Manuscript Library, painstakingly and lovingly built up during
the last ten years into a major resource would still remain. Please will someone help me to give that wonderful
news to the Djenne team on the 7th of December in Bamako!"
