| The first several hundred manuscripts that make up the Niamey collection were recorded in the AMMS in 1990/91 from the mimeographed catalogue prepared in 1979 by the Institut de Recherche en Sciences Humaines (List des manuscripts en langues arabe et ajami à l’Institut de Recherche en Sciences Humaines, Niamey, Niger, Niamey, 1979). This was the least detailed of all of our input sources and presented a number of problems that are no doubt still evident in the AMMS listing. | This collection is drawn from regions to the north-west of Niamey (the Azaouad) across modern-day northern Nigeria, and, to the north, Ahir/Aïr, and it provides a link between material collected at Timbuctu and that identified as “Kano” in AMMS. All 2551 entries in the mimeo 1979 hand-list have now been entered in AMMS, but a number of these are only partially identified due to the incomplete information in that listing. Happily, with other partial references we were able to more fully identify a number of citations. Currently, the Institut in Niamey possesses an estimated 4,000 manuscripts in its collection. |
| The Niamey collection was begun by the then President of the Niger Assemblée Nationale, Boubou Hama, in the early 1970s as part of his personal collection in documentation of his writing on the region. A survey of what had become the IRSH collection was published in 1980 (Ahmed Mohammed Kani, “A New Source for Material on the Literary Activity of the ‘ulama of the central and western Sudan: the Niamey collection” in Bulletin of Information, Fontes Historiae Africanae, Evanston, 1984/5, 41-48), and in 1996 the collection description was up-dated by M. Ayman Fadel in Sudanic Africa (7, 1996, 165-169). | It includes some photocopies of original material that appear elsewhere, but the List annotations do not indicate provenance of individual entries, and there is a handful of non-Arabic materials (conscientiously given Arabic titles). It does appear to be especially rich in nineteenth-century correspondence, but what part of this consists of original manuscripts is not clear. |
| The Niamey collection is open to researchers at the IRSH, Niamey. |
| Serial entries of items appear as the record number for AMMS; citations to the actual hand-list numbers in the List appear under “collection number” in the individual records. Since the published catalogue was produced in Arabic, we have reproduced the entries (inclusive of some errors) and added full names and nisbas where this information is available from other citations to the same authors in AMMS. These entries have required appreciable editing which is still in progress as this version of AMMS is put on line. |
| The range of subject headings used in AMMS represent an effort to uniformly apply the subject headings developed for the Boutilimit and Nouakchott collections, but in cases like the Niamey entries where there was a minimal level of detail annotated in the original catalogue, the subject headings have been reconstructed from titles where these are available. These subject rubrics are neither comprehensive nor definitive and, in this collection, particularly incomplete. | An effort was made to arrive at classifications that would make sense to a student of the Islamic sciences and to be consistent across English and Arabic entries, but in a few cases there may be slight variance across these fields. Correspondence presents special problems that were solved, where the content was discernable from a title, by grouping letters into three broad, not unambiguous rubrics: politics, economy and society. |
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