Overview
This section presents a selection of visualisations to provide an insight into the extensive corpus of the Islam West Africa Collection.
Distribution of items by country and sub-collection
The graph illustrates the contents of the database, organised by country and sub-collection. Burkina Faso and Benin make up the bulk of the collection. Future updates will include new material from Côte d'Ivoire and Togo.
Number of items by type over years
The graph shows the evolution of the types of content in the database over time. Looking at the prevalence of these items, it is clear that the last 30 years are strongly represented. In the 1970s and 1980s, media coverage in the four countries was rather limited and tended to focus on specific events related to Muslim life. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a marked increase in coverage, with varied coverage of the diverse activities of Islamic associations and narratives of internal divisions within Muslim communities. This trend reflects not only an increase in the quantity of articles about Islam and Muslims, but also the emergence of private newspapers following the end of one-party regimes in the countries concerned in the early 1990s.