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DTSTART;TZID=America/Chicago:20260924T120000
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SUMMARY:Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History - Shamil Jeppie
UID:645798@northwestern.edu
TZID:America/Chicago
DESCRIPTION:The first talk in the series titled "Timbuktu Talks\," cosponsored by ISITA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and featuring new books and research on Islam in Africa.  This is an online talk hosted on Zoom.  To attend\, register in advance here: https://bit.ly/3UwRc9Y  Shamil Jeppie will discuss his new book\, Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History (Princeton University Press\, 2026).   Description: Printed books did not reach West Africa until the early twentieth century. And yet\, between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries\, literate and curious readers throughout the region found books to read—books that were written and copied by hand. In Writing Timbuktu\, Shamil Jeppie offers a history of the book as a handwritten\, handmade object in West Africa. Centering his account in the historic city of Timbuktu\, Jeppie explores the culture of the “manuscript-book”—unbound pages\, often held together by carefully crafted leather covers. He describes the most important and most prolific scholars and their works\, the subjects they covered\, and ways these books were circulated\, collected\, and preserved.  The authors of the manuscript-books wrote to demonstrate their knowledge to their peers\, expound theological and legal opinions\, and engage in scholarly disputation. After beginning his account in Timbuktu\, Jeppie traces the literary connections among places as distant as Marrakesh in the north and Sokoto in the south\, and smaller settlements in between. He chronicles the work of Ahmad Baba in late sixteenth-century Timbuktu and his students in early seventeenth-century Marrakesh; the emergence of writers in the eighteenth century in what today is Mauritania; the writings of the scholar-rulers of Sokoto\, northern Nigeria\, in the nineteenth century; and the eventual discovery of the manuscript-book world of West Africa by European travelers and French colonial officials. Finally\, Jeppie finds that the handwritten text persisted even after the advent of the printed book\, and even among writers whose books were in print\, including the famous Malian novelist Amadou Hampâté Bâ.  Dr. Shamil Jeppie is Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town.  He was educated in Cape Town and Princeton University. He has worked on aspects of the social history of Cape Town and Durban\, South Africa\, and 19th-century Sudan.  He is the founder of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project based at the University of Cape Town. Through this project he has fostered an approach to the written materials in the Sahara/Sahel that bring them into dialogue with other traditions of manuscript production and book history. His edited volume The Meanings of Timbuktu (2008) brought to a wide readership both cutting-edge scholarship on histories of writing in Africa and images of these texts.  \n\nMore Info: https://isita.northwestern.edu/events/lecture-series.html\n\nRegister: https://bit.ly/3UwRc9Y
LOCATION:Online
TRANSP:OPAQUE
URL:https://isita.northwestern.edu/events/lecture-series.html
CREATED:20260908T050000Z
STATUS:CONFIRMED
LAST-MODIFIED:20260909T141456Z
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