Local Preservation, National Demolition, International Publication: the Ta'rikh Mandinka from Bijini ca. 1800(?)-2007

I

The Ta:rikh Mandinka from Bijini has been published in a classical format (as a monograph in Brill's African Sources for African History Series), but the publishing process of this book was rather extraordinary. This note on the publication serves as an instructive (and encouraging) account for all who work on the documentation and publication of African historical sources. Our "Bijini Experience" illustrates how literate and script-loving persons (academics and publishers alike) can tackle a source in which the oral and the written have always been blurred.

II

The Bijini Ta:rikh Mandinka relays the history of Bijini, a small town in present-day Guinea-Bissau. The work is a compilation of three different manuscripts that were previously guarded (and transmitted) separately (see Giesing and Vydrine 2007:32). The first manuscript is in Arabic and narrates the origin of the Mandinka and the Kaabu empire. The second manuscript is in Mandinka, and narrates the origin of the status category of "warriors" (ñàncoyaa). The third part discusses the downfall of the Kaabu "empire" and wars that succeed that event, up to the nineteenth century. It is likely that the first two manuscripts were kept by the Kasama family, and the third by the Baayoo family; some time after the mid-nineteenth century, when the compilation (and "completion") took place.

The second manuscript has been written in Mandinka with an alphabet based on Arabic script. This alphabet has locally functional diacritics which had to be developed by the author in order to make the text readable as Mandinka. Manuscripts of African languages noted down in Arabic are rare. For the Mande world only two of them are known: the Pakao book (Schaffer 2003:7-8, who leans on a personal communication with Vydrine, and Vydrine 1998) and the Bijini Ta:rikh Mandinka.¹ Valentin Vydrine, from St. Petersburg, is one of the few scholars who is able to analyze both the Mande and Arabic languages in order to understand what the authors of these books actually wanted to note. Since there was no standard convention on the orthography of the Mandinka language (in either Arabic or Latin scripts) in nineteenth-century West Africa-linguists find it difficult enough to deal with the present-day languages and their orthography—and since all languages evolve over the course of a century, superior language skills are required to allow for a reading of these books in their original forms.

III

If the Bijini Ta:rikh Mandinka had been stored until it was 'discovered' by a scholar—such as was the case with the Pakao book—a correct transcription and translation would have been a laudable academic accomplishment, but nothing more. The destiny of the Bijini Ta:rikh Mandinka, however, was more adventurous.

In the 1980s the Bijini Ta:rikh Mandinka was owned by al-Hajj Ibrahiima Koobaa Kasama (1934-2000). He continued the work of his forefathers (see table 3 in Giesing and Vydrine 2007:325) and wrote a history of Bijini and the national liberation war (1962-1973) and thereafter (these texts are not part of the text edition). The manuscripts that have now been published as the Bijini Ta:rikh Mandinka survived the regional wars (on which it reports) and the colonization by the Portuguese (on which it also reports).

However, it should be noted that the manuscript owned by al-Hajj Ibrahiima Koobaa Kasama is the result of a process of copying with a goal of transmission. During the process of copying, data may have been lost and/or may have been added. Although we know the list of owners and transcribers of the manuscripts, it is impossible to trace the changes each of them made.

In 1934 Portuguese colonial administrator J. Vellez Caroço, who was interested in local and regional histories, invited the people from Bijini to read to him their manuscripts. Among these people was al-Hajj Ibrahiima Koobaa Kasama's father, who was Bijini's imam at the time. This 1934 performance (our italics) was translated on the...