| The manuscripts that make up the Segou collection were recorded in the AMMS in 1988/89 from the catalogue prepared in 1985 by Ghali, Mahibou and Brenner, Inventaire de la Bibliotheque ‘Umarienne de Segou (CNRS, 1985). The collection has been variously called the “Ahmadou Library” and “Fonds Archinard” (the latter after the French officer who seized the manuscripts at the time of conquest in 1890). | References to these manuscripts had appeared previously but incompletely in a 1925 catalogue of Arabic manuscripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale, and in a 1976 catalogue based on a selective inventory of the collection done in 1947-52. These efforts both omitted much material of interest to West African historians, which led to the entire collection being re-catalogued, and microfilmed between 1979-82; the inventory cited above was published three years later. |
| The Segou collection is from the library of Ahmadu Seku, son of al-Hajj ‘Umar, who inherited his father’s conquests and ruled a territory increasingly under siege from 1864 until the French conquest in 1890. It contains numerous fragments and single page items and a large, valuable body of correspondence. | Its disparate make-up lends it a certain air of authenticity as a working library, a repository of day-to-day writings not filtered by an owner self-conscious of his scholarly image or literary capital of classical works. |
| The Segou collection is available at the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, Section des Manuscrits Orientaux. Xerox copies and/or microfilm of the collection is available at Yale University Library, Africana Collection, and at the Centre de Recherche et Documentation Historiques Ahmed Baba, Timbuctu, Mali. |
| Serial entries of items appear as the record number for AMMS; citations to the actual BN manuscript identifying numbers appear under “collection number” in the individual records. Since the published catalogue was produced in French transliteration, the AMMS Arabic entries required a re-translation, greatly aided by access to M. al-Ghali and Mahibou’s notes, kindly made available by Professor John Hunwick. | Some editing has been done to bring names and spellings in conformity with other entries of the same authors in the AMMS listings, and where partially-identified authors of classical works were listed, these have been filled out to facilitate their cross-listing with other collections. |
| The range of subject headings used in this finding aid represent an effort to consistently apply the subject headings developed for the Boutilimit and Nouakchott collections, but this was only possible where the level of detail annotated in the original catalogue allowed it. It is neither comprehensive nor definitive. 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 presented 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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