Fulfulde Literature in Arabic Script

Scholars of the West African savanna have long been familiar with the use of the Arabic alphabet to create cajami or “non-Arabic” literatures in Fulfulde and Hausa. Maurice Delafosse took a rather negative position on the value of this material, basing his opinion on two formidable obstacles: the absence of natural correspondence between a Semitic alphabet and non-Semitic phonemes and the difficulty of establishing a unified system of of conventions where such a natural correspondence was lacking. He argued that the ajamiyya manuscripts were few in number, poor in quality, and did not deserve the name of literature. By contrast, several more recent authors have stressed the importance and the continuing composition in ajamiyya: Gilbert Vieillard and Alfa Ibrahima Sow, in their work on the Fulfulde of Futa Jalon, Pierre Lacroix in his work on the Adamawa dialect of the same language, and Mervyn Hiskett in his studies in Hausa. Even where the volume of material is small, they have pointed to the critical pedagogical functions of ajamiyya for the spread of Islam.In this paper I wish to show both the importance and the problems of exploiting Fulfulde literature in a somewhat different milieu, the jihad of al-hajj Umar of the mid-nineteenth century and the state which his son Amadu Sheku ran from Segu. To achieve this I will examine a narrative poem taken from the library and archives of Segu but housed since the 1890s at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris under the title Fonds Archinard. In the process I hope to draw attention to the historical circumstances in which the ajamiyya conventions for Fulfulde were developed and maintained in Futa Jalon and then extended to the Umarian entourage, and to the necessity for textual and contextual criticism of written documents based on an understanding of the close relationship between oral and written media and the continual revision that characterize a received tradition.