The British Library pilot project for the Djenne Manuscripts is just about half way through the 4 months period allocated. Things are progressing without too much involvement on my behalf. Well, for one thing, I don't read Arabic... I turn up now and then and check the progress, asking questions such as: anything interesting today? Yet more magic?
That is because Samba, the Timbuktu archivist, tells me that 80% of the Djenné manuscripts deal with Maraboutage- or the subject of Magic. That is a lot more than the Timbuktu manuscripts, which tend to be more purely Islamic, i.e containing poetry devoted to the Prophet, transcripts of the Koran etc. The Djenné manuscripts tell you how to put spells on people.
Here I am with M. Maiga, the Kintigi (neighbourhood chief) of Kanafia, a district of Djenné. He has let us in to his house where he has big trunks full of ancient manuscripts, which we have just begun to look at today. He is very suspicious of us, and wonder why we want to look at these papers. We tell him we just want to look at them and count them at the moment. This is very suspicious to M. Maiga, who thinks we must have an ulterior motive. Why would we just want to look at the papers and count them?
This reminds me of Mungo Park and his problems in telling people that he had arrived just to find out whether the Niger river flowed towards the east or the west. Why on earth would anyone want to risk their life to find out something as useless as that? There must be another reason behind it, non?
The Djenné population did perhaps have some foundation to suspect the French colonial administration of wanting to relieve them of their manuscripts. They therefore built secret rooms and walled in some of their manuscripts to save them from the French, and perhaps even from the Moroccans earlier on. Who knows, perhaps we will be shown some of these secret rooms? At the moment it feels as if we are seeing the tip of an ice berg....