West African manuscripts
West African manuscripts are abundant and diverse in content and form, such as books, documents, and letters, and are composed in the Arabic script, Ajami script, and indigenous African scripts. West African manuscripts, as dialogical products of West African manuscript culture and components of West African intellectual history, may have been produced as early as the 10th century CE. West African Muslim scholars, who were bilingual or multilingual and constituted what is collectively a West African intelligentsia that shaped West African historiography, composed the majority of West African manuscripts.