Africa — The Africanist

The Africanist — Ajami manuscripts beyond the Nile–Ethiopia axis, Hausa praise poems to Wolof Murid verse.

Africa beyond the Egyptian and Ethiopic desks: the NEH Ajami collection’s Hausa, Mandinka, Fula and Wolof manuscripts in romanized transcription, the public-domain reference shelf in archive.org’s uncorrected OCR — Griffith’s Old Nubian texts, the Swahili of Steere, Taylor, Büttner and Velten, Schön’s and Robinson’s Hausa, Hanoteau’s Tuareg grammar and Kabyle poetry, Koelle’s Vai — and the Old Nubian UD treebank, the medieval Nile kingdoms’ language parsed word by word.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these three answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): fuf 20 · ha 20 · mnk 20 · wo 20 · eng 6 · fra 2 · deu 1 · onw 1 · sw 1.

The desk’s instruments

No desk-specific instruments curated yet — the generic surfaces above apply.

Working the africa desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable africa               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync africa                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis africa          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis africa                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis africa   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.