1 - A Century of Scholarship

Summary

This chapter addresses crucial historiographical, philological, and historical questions concerning the nature of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh, a widely circulated yet misinterpreted primary source for West African history. By reviewing a hundred years of scholarship on the topic and exploring West African manuscript libraries, the chapter demonstrates that the current understanding and uses of the Tārīkh al-fattāsh are radically impaired by scholars’ dependence on a defective colonial confection that passes as a critical edition produced by Houdas and Delafosse in 1913. This flawed edition and translation in fact conflates two different works: the seventeenth-century “Chronicle of the son of al-Mukhtār” and the nineteenth-century Tārīkh al-fattāsh written by the Fulani scholar Nūḥ b. al-Ṭāhir from the entourage of Aḥmad Lobbo, the funding leader of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi.