Fontes Historiae Africanae/Sources of African History (FHA) is an international editing and publication project which was initiated in 1962 to organise a series of the sources of the history of sub-Saharan Africa. It is directed under the General Auspices of the Union Academique Internationale (UAI), and two general series co-editors, Silvester Trnovec from the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Mohamed Diagayeté from the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, Timbuktu, Mali. The British Academy established a British Committee in 1973 which published 10 volumes, and a new series in 1995 which to date has published almost 20 volumes. The FHA is committed to making African history as widely available as possible, and to that end is seeking to develop partnerships with African publishers to facilitate co-publication on the continent.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tārīkh Ibn Al-Mukhtār of the Songhay Empire and the Tārīkh Al-Fattāsh of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi
By Mauro Nobili, Zachary Wright and Ali Diakite
The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms presents a new reading of West African history from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Based on close analysis of Arabic manuscripts from Timbuktu and other regions, this volume provides key historical context from the Songhay Empire through the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi, along with translations and Arabic editions of the long-obscured Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār in parallel with the later production known as the Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The central observation that emerges from these texts is that Muslim scholars in premodern West Africa, who saw themselves as constitutive to the powerful kingdoms in the Western Sudan, claimed almost unprecedented authority to shape reality through narration.
Great Sogolon’s House: Mande Epic from the Condé Bards of Fadama (Guinea)
By David Courtney Conrad
The unusually long version of West African Mande epic transcribed and translated for this book is an extravagant demonstration of the extremes to which Mande bardic artistry can be carried. The text presented here is the result of multiple recording sessions with an extraordinarily creative oral artist who augmented key episodes of the Sunjata epic that devolved to him from his own father, as well as previous generations of Maninka and Bamana griots of north-eastern Guinea and southern Mali. In marked contrast to versions of the Sunjata epic recounted by other griots, an essential part of this narrator’s performance-style is to season familiar episodes with cultural details and digress into explanations not usually offered by other bards.
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