This is slightly misleading, Ajami hasn't been particularly ignored. There are a huge number of african manuscripts in a variety of languages including Arabic which haven't been studied, it's been estimated that in Mali alone there are something like 250,000 - 500,000 manuscripts from 1100-1800 AD in private hands. Just in Timbuktu it's estimated their are upwards of 100,000+ manuscripts (Wikipedia has more details if people are interested).<p>The official libraries struggle to even catalogue the material they have. The Ahmed Baba Institute is trying to digitize it's collection but has only manage a tiny fraction of the 18,000 manuscripts they hold.<p>Largely it's a problem of money and staff, obtaining, preserving and cataloguing these manuscripts isn't cheap, let alone studying them all. Even preliminary analysis of the manuscripts available in libraries is a task that will take millions of man-hours.
The BBC had a good intro to this subject called <i>"The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu"</i>. At least I liked it, but I had no idea about any of this stuff before I watched it. It was repeated a few days ago and is available on iPlayer for one more day:<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hkb0z" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hkb0z</a><p>I'm assuming that it was the inspiration for the new series,
<i>The Lost Kingdoms of Africa</i> which just started and focusses more on art history:<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1m4" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1m4</a>