تاريخ الفتاش (Timbuktu Chronicles 1493-1599)

Twentieth century. Houdas and Delafosse’s Arabic version of Kati’s chronicle was compiled from three handwritten manuscripts that were procured through careful negotiation and with the assistance of a Timbuktu notable, Sidi Muhammad al-Imam ibn al-Suyūti. These three texts were later compared and analyzed in light of Houdas’s and Delafosse’s extensive knowledge of the region and with the assistance of local partners. The text that they produced became a classic of French and African literature, comparable in influence to Wallace Budge’s epic translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead (1899).

In the interim, a great deal of information about the libraries of Timbuktu has surfaced, much of which was unknown to Houdas and Delafosse. In fact, the “real” Ta’rikh al-fattāsh The Chronicle of the Seeker has yet to appear in any language; it lies in stacks upon the vast shelves of the Kati family archives in Timbuktu, where the manuscripts authored by al-hājj Mahmūd Kati and his ancestors await their future digitalization, editing, and translation. The Kati family archives include manuscripts by Kati’s father and other family members, which were written in numerous languages, including Arabic, Spanish, French, and Ajami African languages written using the Arabic script. These manuscripts extend from the era of the Spanish Inquisition into the French colonial period.

The version of the Ta’rikh al-fattāsh presented here is an English translation from both the Arabic and French texts first edited and translated by Houdas and Delafosse, and it includes their extensive and detailed annotations. The modest goal of this book is to introduce an important but neglected document to the English-speaking world, in the belief that Houdas and Delafosse’s edited text is itself historically significant and that the length of the present version will suffice for all but the specialist. My assumption throughout has been that the Ta’rikh al-fattāsh is important for its intrinsic literary merit, as well as its obvious historical value. In other words, Kati’s chronicle is a valuable work of African literature. Provided that the effort is made to read Kati’s work in light of its implied goals, most readers will

find the Ta’rikh al-fattāsh to be an accessible, informative, and fascinating text.

Mahmūd Kati (or Koti) ibn al-hājj al-Mutawakkil Kati was born in Kurmina (Northern Mali) in the year 1468. According to Fondo Kati, the present curator of the Kati family libraries in Timbuktu, Mali, Kati’s father, al-hājj al-Mutawakkil Kati, was a Sephardic Arab Muslim who migrated to Timbuktu in the years following the Spanish Inquisition. Kati’s father married a member of the Wakuri nobility, an indigenous Songhay woman of Soninke descent—the ancient founders of the Ghana Dynasty.

Kati writes that he was born in Kurmina, but he lived most of his adult life in Timbuktu. In the Ta’rikh al-sudan Chronicle of the Sudan, authored by ’Abad al-Rāhman al-Sadi in the same era, Kati is referred to as “the erudite scholar and jurist Qādī Mahmūd Kati ibn al-hājj al-Mutawakkil ’alā ilah, who died in the year 1593.” However, if the Ta’rikh al-sudan is correct, Kati would have been 125 years old at the time of his death. Modern scholars contest the accuracy of this date, which has led to complex debates about the true authorship of the Ta’rikh al-fattāsh.

In the late nineteenth century, the French traveler Felix Dubois, author of the colonialist travelogue Timbuctoo, the Mysterious (1896), documented an oral tradition of Timbuktu that Kati died in 1552, or fourteen years after the death of the Askiya Muhammad. If this tradition is correct, Kati would have been eighty-four years old at the time he died—a figure more plausible than al-Sadi’s. John Hunwick suggests that Kati probably wrote the first six to ten chapters of the Ta’rikh al-fattāsh and that his son, Qādi Mahmūd Kati, is likely the Mahmūd Kati referred to in the Ta’rikh al-sudan. Hunwick proposes that it was actually Kati’s son who wrote the later chapters, with further contributions from Kati’s three grandsons: Ismail, Yusuf, and Muhammad al-Amin. Sometime in the 17th century, Kati’s great-nephew Ibn al-Mukhtār edited the manuscript that eventually passed into the hands of Houdas and Delafosse. Ibn al-Mukhtār, the final editor of the Ta’rikh al-fattāsh before Houdas and Delafosse translated it, was the