[2] He spent most of his life working for the Moroccan Arma bureaucracy, initially in the administration of Djenné and the massina region of the Inland Niger Delta.
The early sections of the chronicle are devoted to brief histories of earlier Songhay dynasties, of the Mali Empire and of the Tuareg, and to biographies of the scholars and holymen of both Timbuktu and Djenné.
During his stay in Gwandu (now in northwest Nigeria) he consulted a copy of the Tarikh al-Sudan in his investigation of the history of the Songhay empire.
In his book Barth wrote: But I myself was so successful as to have an opportunity of perusing a complete history of the kingdom of Songhay, from the very dawn of historical records down to the year 1640 of our era; although, unfortunately, circumstances prevented my bringing back a complete copy of this manuscript, which forms a respectable quarto volume, and I was only able, during the few days that I had this manuscript in my hands during my stay in Gandó, to make short extracts of those passages from its contents which I thought of the highest interest in an historical and geographical point of view.
These annals, according to the universal statement of the learned people of Negroland, were written by a distinguished person of the name of A'hmed Baba, although in the work itself that individual is only spoken of in the third person; and it would seem that additions had been made to the book by another hand; but on this point I can not speak with certainty, as I had not sufficient time to read over the latter portion of the work with the necessary attention and care.
If he had read the entire book with more attention, he would have seen that the date – year, month and day – of Ahmed Baba's death is mentioned by the author ...".
[5] A third copy of the Tarikh al-Sudan, Manuscript C, was sent to Houdas by the linguist René Basset who was head of the École Supérieure des Lettres in Algiers.
[12] The Berber author of Ta'rikh al-Sudan, Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di, recorded the oral tradition surrounding the origin of the Ghana empire and Mali.