The Timbuktu Grammarian Who Standardized Soninke

Timbuktu: Africa's Forgotten Center of Knowledge — Fexingo History · Jul 3, 2026 · 8m · transcript

This episode tells the story of Muhammad al-Kabari, a 16th-century Timbuktu scholar who compiled the first known grammar of the Soninke language. Against the backdrop of the Songhai Empire's multilingual markets and the Saadian invasion, al-Kabari's work preserved a West African language in Arabic script, revealing a vibrant tradition of indigenous linguistic scholarship in the Sahara. We explore how his grammar, surviving only in fragments, sheds light on the intellectual networks connecting Timbuktu to the broader Islamic world and challenges the notion that African languages were…