Editorial, April 2015

We are happy to issue our first newsletter for 2015.  We hope to appear quarterly and have more frequent updates between the newsletters. This issue carries articles by researchers at the project as well as news relating to the project and relevant to researchers and those interested in the fields of manuscript studies, book history, and cognate areas. Our concern with “the manuscript” can be as narrow and esoteric as one wishes; or as broad and global as one might want to make it. Although our main focus has always been the manuscript collections in and around Timbuktu, we have also always had a wider interest in all the fields connected to the handwritten book, and the book as such.  In future issues of the newsletter, we shall foreground this dimension of interest much more overtly. Thus, news about paper is not irrelevant to us and it is worth noting in this regard that UNESCO listed a few Japanese paper-making villages on its register of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Similarly, new thinking about archives is important to our work and we carry an article by Samaila Suleiman on the way lawyers use one branch of the National Archives of Nigeria.

In 2014 we had a range of activities and hosted several visitors. We shall continue hosting visitors this year and plan a few workshops too. As usual, we shall announce these on this website and send emails to you if you are on our mailing list. If you are not, then please contact us.

John O. Hunwick (1936 – 2015)

On April 1, 2015, the great scholar of Timbuktu and African history, John O. Hunwick, passed away. We hosted him on two occasions early in the history of our project and during those visits we were convinced that our project was necessary because of his encouragement. We not only benefitted intellectually from him but also from his sense of humour, generosity, and personal commitment to knowledge from and about Africa. Professor Hunwick was educated at SOAS, University of London, and taught for many years at various West African universities; his last position was at Northerwestern University, Evanston, USA, where he is also founded the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA). He is the author and translator of numerous important works in African and Islamic studies, including a translator of the Tarikh al-Sudan of Al-Sa’adi, and founded the Arabic Literature of Africa series of bibliographies published by Brill of Leiden. He shall be sorely missed by us at the project and all his students and readers of his many works. We will run a special section on his work in a future newsletter.

Shamil Jeppie

[Image Source: Dave Hunwick ]