Numerous tārīḫs (chronicles) were written in Timbuktu and its surrounding world from the seventeenth to the twentieth century CE. They constitute the Timbuktu tārīḫ tradition. The tārīḫs were embedded in different political projects, which became possible and necessary only under certain historical conditions. Hence, tārīḫs do not all belong to one single genre of historical literature. A chronicle that belongs to the Timbuktu tārīḫ tradition is the twentieth-century Kitāb al-turjumān. It sheds light on history writing in the Sahel during a crucial time, namely European colonial rule and the political realities it gave birth to thereafter. One of modern historians’ most important tasks is precisely to identify, describe, and analyse the different genres within the tārīḫ tradition. We attempt to do that in the case of the Kitāb al-turjumān.

This article advances a new theory about the composition of the chronicle generally referred to as Tārīkh al-fattāsh. The Tārīkh al-fattāsh, allegedly written in the sixteenth-seventeenth century, is one of the most famous chronicles on which scholars have relied for information about West Africa’s pre-colonial history. However, there are still many puzzling issues and unsolved problems associated with this work, as edited by Octave V. Houdas and Maurice Delafosse in the early twentieth century. This analysis uses unexplored manuscripts that were either unknown or unavailable to previous scholars, and advances a new theory on the genesis and authorship of the chronicle: that the edited text in fact conflates two texts, a seventeenth-century chronicle and a nineteenth century one.