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Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival
Candace Feit for The New York Times
Ismaël Diadié Haïdara with collected family manuscripts. He says Timbuktu has a "second chance" to become a great city again.
By LYDIA POLGREEN Published: August 7, 2007
TIMBUKTU, Mali — Ismaël Diadié Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that has somehow endured through 11 generations — a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.
A copy of the Koran from the 12th century. According to notes in the text, it was bought for a Moroccan king for a sum of gold. “This is our family’s story,” he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. “It was written in 1519.”
The musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten outpost’s future.
A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden for centuries in houses along Timbuktu’s dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu — a city whose name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere — may once again claim a place at the intellectual heart of Africa.
“I am a historian,” Mr. Haïdara said. “I know from my research that great cities seldom get a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to our past.”
This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge of a renaissance.
“We want to build an Alexandria for black Africa,” said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run library in Timbuktu. “This is our chance to regain our place in history.”
The South African government is building a new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their contents available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city’s musty family libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.
The Libyan government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktu’s only swimming pool and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of Timbuktu.
Timbuktu’s new seekers have a variety of motives. South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links to some of the history stored here, while American charities began giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary series in the late 1990s.
This new chapter in the story of Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it.
The geography that has doomed Timbuktu to obscurity in the popular imagination for half a millennium was once the reason for its greatness. It was founded as a trading post by nomads in the 11th century and later became part of the vast Mali Empire, then ultimately came under the control of the Songhai Empire.
For centuries it flourished because it sat between the great superhighways of the era — the Sahara, with its caravan routes carrying salt, cloth, spices and other riches from the north, and the Niger River, which carried gold and slaves from the rest of West Africa.
Traders brought books and manuscripts from across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and books were bought and sold in Timbuktu — in Arabic and local languages like Songhai and Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg people.
Timbuktu was home to the University of Sankore, which at its height had 25,000 scholars. An army of scribes, gifted in calligraphy, earned their living copying the manuscripts brought by travelers. Prominent families added those copies to their own libraries. As a result, Timbuktu became a repository of an extensive and eclectic collection of manuscripts.
“Astronomy, botany, pharmacology, geometry, geography, chemistry, biology,” said Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, the descendant of a family of imams that keeps a vast library in one of the city’s mosques. “There is Islamic law, family law, women’s rights, human rights, laws regarding livestock, children’s rights. All subjects under the sun, they are represented here.”
One 19th-century book on Islamic practices gives advice on menstruation. A medical text suggests using toad meat to treat snake bites, and droppings from panthers mixed with butter to soothe boils. There are thousands of Korans and books on Islamic law, as well as decorated biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, some dating back a millennium, complete with diagrams of his shoes.
Ancient Manuscripts From the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu (Library of Congress)
Mr. Haïdara is a descendant of the Kati family, a prominent Muslim family in Toledo, Spain. One of his ancestors fled religious persecution in the 15th century and settled in what is now Mali, bringing his formidable library with him. The Kati family intermarried into the Songhai imperial family, and the habit Mr. Haïdara’s ancestors had of doodling notes in the margins of their manuscripts has left an abundance of historical information: births and deaths in the imperial family, the weather, drafts of imperial letters, herbal cures, records of slaves, and salt and gold traded.
Moroccan invaders deposed the Songhai empire in 1591, and the new rulers were hostile to the community of scholars, who were seen as malcontents. Facing persecution, many fled, taking many books with them.
West African sea routes overtook the importance of the old inland desert and river trade, and the city began its long decline. When the first European explorers stumbled across the once fabled city, they were stunned at its decrepitude. René Caillié, a French explorer who arrived here in 1828, said it was “a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth.”
Mr. Caillié’s description remains accurate today. For all its vaunted legend, Timbuktu remains a collection of low mud houses along narrow, trash-choked streets backed by sand dunes, difficult to reach and unimpressive on first sight. In 1990, Unesco designated it an endangered site because sand dunes threatened to swallow it.
Many tourists who come here stay for just a day, long enough to buy a T-shirt and get their passports stamped at the local tourism office as proof they have been to the end of the earth. In a recent Internet campaign to choose the new seven wonders of the world, Timbuktu failed to make the cut, much to the chagrin of the city’s tour guides and boosters.
Yet the city has been making a slow comeback for years. Its manuscripts, long hidden, began to emerge in the mid-20th century, as Mali won its independence from France and the city was declared a Unesco world heritage site.
The government created an institute named after Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu’s greatest scholar, to collect, preserve and interpret the manuscripts. Abdel Kader Haïdara, no relation of Ismaël Diadié Haïdara, an Islamic scholar whose family owned an extensive collection of manuscripts, started an organization called Savama-DCI dedicated to preserving the manuscripts. After a visit from Mr. Gates in 1997, he was able to get help from American charities to support private family libraries. With the support of the Ford and Mellon foundations, families began to catalog and preserve their collections.
But time, scorching desert heat, termites and sandstorms have taken a toll on the manuscripts. Most were locked in trunks or kept on dusty shelves for centuries, and their pages are brittle and crumbling, waterlogged and termite-eaten. In the village of Ber, two hours of dusty track east of Timbuktu, Fida Ag Mohammed tends to several trunks of manuscripts that have been in his family, a line of Tuareg imams, for centuries.
“This is a biography of the Prophet Muhammad,” he said, gingerly lifting one manuscript bound in crumbling leather. “It is from the 13th century.”
The neat lines of Arabic script were clearly legible, but the edges of many pages had crumbled away, the words trailing off into nothingness.
Savama is in the process of building a new mud-brick library for Mr. Mohammed’s books, but until it is ready he has no means to preserve his manuscripts. To rescue their contents, if not their physical substance, he was copying the most fragile texts by hand, using an ink he makes himself out of gum.
Now, when the scorching heat of the day eases, a favored sunset activity in Timbuktu is watching the Libyan earthmovers dig the new canal. Like tiny toy trucks in a giant sandbox, they push mountains of sand to coax the Niger to flow here, bringing more water and new life to the dune-surrounded city.
“To see this machine makes me more happy because it means things are changing in Timbuktu,” said Sidi Muhammad, a 40-year-old Koranic scholar, splayed on a dune with a group of friends, gossiping and fingering their prayer beads.
The Malian government has encouraged Islamic learning to flourish here once again, and there are dozens of Koranic schools where children and adults learn to read and recite the Koran. Training programs are teaching men and women how to classify, interpret and translate the documents, as well as preserve them for future study.
Abdel Kader Haïdara, who in many ways started the renaissance by wandering the desert in search of manuscripts, persuading families to allow their treasures to see the light of day, said Timbuktu’s best days lie ahead of it.
“Timbuktu is coming back,” he said. “It will rise again.”
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It would do the government of Niger well to preserve these treasures that are truly valuable instead of their greedy loot.
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An older article (but with some good stuff in it) to compare against the latest news to see what progress has been made in the interim.
Rediscovering a heritage in Timbuktu : Lost texts find new life
By Philip Smucker International Herald Tribune
Published: MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2004
TIMBUKTU, Mali:: There was a time, centuries ago, when the Sahara was arguably one of the best places on earth to buy a book. From West Africa's Atlantic coast across the sandy expanses to the White Nile in the east, camels laden with chests full of books and manuscripts trekked from one oasis to the next. In caravan cities like Timbuktu, tanners, leather workers and scribes worked to replenish the rich stock of political treatises, scientific manuals, law books and sacred texts. . Many of these works were lost during the colonial era, when Africa became known as a continent with no written history. But others survived, their pages frayed but still intact, some hidden beneath mud homes, others stashed in desert caves, a trove of ancient documents dating from as long ago as 1,000 years. . Today, thanks to outside help, Timbuktu is at the edge of a cultural revival. Increasingly known as a repository of Africa's intellectual heritage, it is attracting scholars seeking to rediscover and preserve the lost texts. . Particularly relevant, [] African and Arab scholars say, are accounts of how the African interpretation of Islam helped regulate the affairs of men, resolve disputes and provide a model of tolerance. Buried in the crumbling manuscripts of Timbuktu and neighboring cities, scholars are finding evidence of wars averted, sieges ended and lawlessness put to rest. . The information is all the more valuable for moderate Muslim leaders because of the rise of less tolerant forms of Islam, like Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism or the Salafist movement in Algeria, that are expanding their foothold. . Timbuktu, which sits on the southern edge of the Sahara just north of the Niger River, was the most important of the region's former intellectual capitals. In 1967, Unesco provided money for a manuscript conservation center in Timbuktu, but until recently progress was excruciatingly slow. . Then, in 1997, recalls Abdelkader Haidara, director of Timbuktu's Mamma Haidara Library, Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University unexpectedly arrived. . Gates, the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, had traveled to the city to find out about its ancient documents. . "I opened the doors to the books and manuscripts piled up in a dusty back room by the thousands, and Professor Gates broke down in tears," Haidara said. "He started to sob and said he had grown up all his life believing that Africa had no written heritage of its own. 'Lies, lies, all lies,' he said." . Gates got in touch with the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which agreed to finance a small restoration project for the Arabic-language documents in Haidara's family library, some of them 850 years old. . The foundation and several European Union aid groups have since begun the meticulous process of restoring the ancient texts of Timbuktu. Money has also been provided to build several libraries; some now have shelves, held together with chicken wire. . "Only a select group of scholars is aware of the African model of Islam found in these ancient texts," said Stephanie Diakite, an American scholar who works closely with African scholars and is eager to help, as she put it, "reanimate an old model of thinking." . In one aid project, Diakite and local librarians are finding families with ancient skills in manuscript writing and bookbinding to get them involved in the text preservation process. . "Some families have kept tools in their homes for centuries and haven't known what they were used for," said Diakite, a legal expert who is a certified bookbinder. "We are locating these families and training men and women in the art of conservation, adapting old book-writing and -binding skills to the necessities of the modern age." . In addition, workers are scanning pages of the ancient texts and creating digital images of the works. . Timbuktu arose in the 12th century on the site of an oasis, and by its height in the 15th and 16th centuries had grown to a city of 100,000. As a crossroads on Saharan trading routes, the city prospered and a vibrant intellectual life took shape, with wealthy rulers and religious leaders sponsoring scholars. . Publishing thrived. Books were produced by artisans like skin tanners, leather workers and metallurgists, with calligraphers, illuminators and gilders working a stage above them, and scribes sitting alongside learned intellectuals. . Entire libraries of African texts — mostly written in Arabic, but often transcribed from local African languages — were handed down from father to son over the centuries. In those medieval times, religious and political assemblies met in the courtyards of Timbuktu's many libraries to take up legal matters and to resolve communal disputes. Elders applied ancient texts to the understanding of current affairs. . When armies from what is now Morocco invaded the city at the end of the 16th century, they were greeted with astonishment and gentle rebukes by Timbuktu's elders, who said they could find no reference in the Koran that would permit one Muslim nation to invade and enslave a similar state. Unimpressed, the invading commanders shackled Timbuktu's intellectuals, mounted them on camels and packed them off to Marrakesh, Morocco. . One of Timbuktu's largest remaining libraries, the Fondo Kati, is run by Ismael Diadie Haidara, an eclectic scholar who claims Germanic, Jewish and Black African descent. . "Timbuktu was a melting pot for centuries," said Diadie Haidara, who has written several books, including one on the Jews of Timbuktu, who flourished here centuries ago and built a synagogue that lasted through the 19th century. . Scholars today argue that study of the ancient texts will help the region's people reconnect with a lost identity. "Our work is both urgent and necessary as a means of recovering our collective memory," said Abdelkader Haidara. . Although few Malian youths these days can read Arabic, Haidara and Diakite have begun a program to involve Timbuktu's young people in recitations, particularly poetry readings on themes of openness and tolerance. . Along with the half-million books and manuscripts that Diakite says she has seen in Timbuktu and the city of Gao in recent years, there are, she added, "thousands of wonderful poems," many reflecting a lost culture that now has a chance to be rediscovered.
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The treasures of Timbuktu Wealth of words | The belief that Africa had no written history has been disproven in the fabled centre that once was a seat of Islamic scholarship Dec. 18, 2005. 01:00 AM JOAN BAXTER SPECIAL TO THE Toronto Star
TIMBUKTU, MALI Time has not been kind to this once-great centre of civilization, which in the early 1500s inspired the Spanish explorer Leo Africanus to paint a picture of a learned, cultured and peaceful place where books were the main industry, where one literally walked on "gold."
Lured by this promise of riches, European explorers tried for centuries to find Timbuktu. By the time the first ones finally arrived in the 1800s, they found a desolate desert outpost not all that different from the sand-swept town of today, with no evidence of all the fabled wealth. Hence, the Western myth about a never-never place with little to offer the world — a myth that is about to be exploded.
Today, treasures are being unearthed here that are radically changing the way the world views Timbuktu, Africa and her history. They're called the "Timbuktu manuscripts" and they disprove the myth that Africa had no written history.
While many thousands have been recovered, there are still hundreds of thousands of manuscripts hidden away in wells and mud-walled storerooms in northern Mali. Huge collections have been passed down in families over many centuries, kept out of sight for fear that European explorers, and then French colonists, would abscond with them.
"Before, all the manuscripts were kept in our homes," says Abdelkader Haidara, who has inherited his family's collection of 9,000 written works dating back to the 16th century.
"Then, in 1993, I had an idea to open a private and modern library that would be open to everyone."
Thanks to funding from an American foundation, Haidara has been able to open his Mamma Haidara library and catalogue 3,000 of the manuscripts, some of which date back to the 1100s.
None of this would have been possible had not Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of Harvard University's African and African-American studies department, visited Haidara and realized the importance of preserving these documents.
"When professor Gates came here and saw the storeroom full of these manuscripts written by African scholars centuries ago, he started to cry," says Haidara. "He wept like a child, and when I asked him why, he said he had been taught at school that Africa had only oral culture and that he had been teaching the same thing at Harvard for years and now he knew all that was wrong."
Gates recalls how he felt the day Haidara showed him the manuscripts that "put the lie" to Western claims about Africa's lack of written history and intellectual tradition.
"When I held those books in my hands, tears rolled down my face," he says. "It is unquestionably true that I was moved to tears by the feel of these books, of this history, in my hands. It was one of the greatest moments of my life."
"You know, many people consider Timbuktu to be the end of the world," says Mahamoudou Baba Hasseye, the owner of another private library. "But it was an important centre of Islamic scholarship and culture, and people from all over the world came here to study at the Sankore University in the 15th and 16th centuries. There were 100,000 people in the city and one-quarter of them were students or professors."
Hasseye is the direct descendant of one of the city's great scholars, Mohamed Bagayogo, whose father came to Timbuktu from Yemen in the 1400s. Mohamed Bagayogo went on to become one of the city's greatest professors and his writings on law, governance and justice still adorn the frayed margins of hundreds of ancient manuscripts.
Mahamoudou Hasseye is also the former director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a public archive in Timbuktu that is named after one of Bagayogo's students.
"Ahmed Baba wrote more than 50 books," says its deputy director, Sidi Mohamed Ould Youbba. "He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare and he wrote more than Shakespeare, and the only reason he was not as well known is that Timbuktu was isolated; Europeans couldn't find it."
The Ahmed Baba Institute has a collection of 30,000 manuscripts, all fantastically scripted and some adorned with gold. They deal not just with Islamic law and theology but also astronomy, mathematics, geography, herbal medicine, conflict prevention, democracy and good governance, all written centuries ago.
Books known as the "Searchers' Chronicles" are comprehensive historical accounts of empires in West and North Africa up to the 16th century.
`Timbuktu is not
the end of the Earth;
it's the centre'
Salem Ould Alhadj
Malian historian
One of the authors of the Searchers' Chronicles was a scholar named Mahmud Kati, whose father immigrated to Timbuktu from Spain in the 1400s and whose mother was Songhay royalty, sister of the Askia Mohamed who ruled the flourishing Songhay Empire that controlled Timbuktu at the time.
Ismael Haidara, one of Mahmud Kati's direct descendants, has received Spanish funding to develop the Fondo Kati Library in Timbuktu, in which thousands of his forefathers' invaluable manuscripts are stored.
"The problem is that the manuscripts need to be preserved, and that is very expensive," says Hawa Haidara, who co-manages the family library with her husband. "You can't handle them or words fall literally right off the pages, because the paper is old and so fragile," she says, pointing to a pile of bits of paper on the floor.
"The other problem is that all these manuscripts are written in Arabic scripts, even if the authors were sometimes writing in African languages, so even if we get funds to restore them, the manuscripts must also be digitized, translated and studied to see what all is in them."
In calculating Timbuktu's wealth, Ismael Haidara notes that his ancestors include black Muslims, white European Christians who converted to Islam and also black Jewish merchants who settled in Timbuktu centuries ago.
"Timbuktu may be one of the poorest places on Earth," he says. "But it is important not to forget that every citizen of Timbuktu has in his eyes and in his blood a thousand years of history and a thousand years of different cultures. And that is our wealth."
The multinational European, American and African research teams now working to preserve, restore and study the precious written treasures of Timbuktu say theirs is an urgent mission, since poverty is leading to the sale of some fine items, while climate and insects continue to take their toll on the fragile paper.
This year, South African President Thabo Mbeki launched Operation Timbuktu to build a new Ahmed Baba Institute facility and an exhibit of some of the most valuable works was mounted in South Africa in October.
Meanwhile, several institute staff members have been to London for training courses on preservation and restoration of manuscripts.
To date, only 2,500 of the institute's 30,000 manuscripts have been analyzed and deputy director Youbba says that without more assistance — new computers and more trained staff — the digitization will probably grind to a halt.
Despite continuing projects funded by Norway, the United States and South Africa to help restore the manuscripts, the task ahead is daunting for an impoverished country like Mali, where hunger and poverty take precedence over ancient documents.
Indeed, on a recent trip to Spain to drum up funding for his library, and exhibit manuscripts there, Ismael Haidara also arranged for a shipload of food to be sent to Timbuktu to help ease the famine brought on by last year's drought and locust invasion.
Hawa Haidara says efforts to have scholars "adopt a manuscript" to aid in preservation efforts didn't provide even enough money to cover the cost of electricity in the family library. To do that, they now sell small brochures for about $1 each to visitors.
"So far, it is as if a baby has just been born," says Abdelkader Haidara of the efforts to reclaim the knowledge in these written treasures.
"Now, the baby needs to grow and be protected to reach adulthood.
"These manuscripts have interesting texts on women, about family life, about traditional medicines that could be valuable to the world. But now we need to restore and digitize them, so they can be translated and studied around the world."
If all that is accomplished, Malian historian Salem Ould Alhadj says, the world will see that "Timbuktu is not the end of the Earth; it's the centre."
And with a smile, he recites a Timbuktu proverb:
"Salt comes from the north; gold from the south; money from the country of the white man. But the beautiful word of God, knowledge and wonderful stories come only from Timbuktu."
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TIMBUKTU’S SECRET BOOKS THREATENED BY NEGLECT AND ILLEGAL EXPORT Mali: the fabulous past of Africa
Timbuktu was for centuries a desert crossroads, a major centre for trading and for learning where thousands of manuscripts were written and stored. These are only now re-emerging to supply wonderful details of a forgotten golden age of Islamic history.
By Jean-Michel Djian
THE famously remote city of Timbuktu has been keeping a secret. In the past few years thousands of ancient manuscripts have been discovered there, mostly at the Sankore university-mosque, a major centre of intellectual life from the 12th to the 16th centuries. These documents are enormously important to the story of Africa. Some 15,000 have been located and filed under the aegis of the United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation (Unesco). Perhaps 80,000 more lie untouched in chests, attics and corners of the city. The precious manuscripts were the glory of the Niger river valley from the 13th to the 19th century but are now threatened by decay and illegal traffickers.
Traffickers take the documents, written in Arabic or sometimes Fulani by scholars from the old Malian empire (1) and beyond, to Switzerland, where they are enhanced before being sold to collectors. Ali Ould Sidi, head of the Timbuktu cultural mission, is alarmed: "The manuscripts found in homes need to be identified, protected and restored. Otherwise Timbuktu will be stripped of a written heritage whose importance can hardly be overestimated."
Timbuktu was seen as holy, mysterious and inaccessible and fascinated explorers such as the Scotsman Mungo Park, France’s René Caillé and the German Heinrich Barth. It is a wonderful city of mud and sand in what is now northeastern Mali, on the edge of the Sahara desert, near the left bank of the Niger. It began as a Tuareg encampment in the 11th century and came into its own in the 14th century as a trading post on the route between the old West Sudan (2) and the Maghreb. Salt from Taoudenni in the north, gold from the mines of the Bouré region in the southwest and slaves from Ghana passed through it.
Arab and Persian merchants were joined by travellers (3) and Muslim philosophers acting as missionaries. The Sahel (the savannah area south of the Sahara) split between those peoples who converted to Islam and those who did not. The Mossi people in what is now Burkina Faso resisted conversion: the Songhay empire, which succeeded the Malian empire at the end of the 14th century, converted. The production of manuscripts in Timbuktu was linked with the spread of Islam.
The three largest cities in the region, Timbuktu, Gao and Djenné, became centres of an Islamo- Sudanese civilisation the influences of which can still be felt today. In the 15th century the population of Timbuktu was an astonishing 100,000 (today it is 30,000), including about 25,000 students, members of the Sankore university-mosque. Ulema (Muslim scholars) lectured and scribes recorded their words on bark, camels’ shoulders, sheepskin, papyrus or paper from the East and later from Italy.
Over centuries they built up a priceless body of philosophical, legal and religious writings. There is a vast variety of knowledge within these manuscripts, from the positions of the planets to the tonality of musical instruments and the prices of textiles and kola nuts. Caravans on the route from Agadez (now in Niger) to Tichit (now in Mauritania) via Sokoto (now in northern Nigeria) carried quantities of information between enlightened merchants as well as blocks of salt, sacks of tobacco and other goods. For nearly 300 years trade and knowledge developed mutually.
These manuscripts prove that it never was true that African civilisations relied on oral traditions, as some scholars, including the late Hamadou Hampâte Bâ, suggested (4). But when documents fall into the hands of people who are more interested in making money than understanding the past, it is easy for our appreciation of their intellectual value to be distorted or lost. How can this rich vein of written wisdom be safely and sensibly tapped before time destroys it?
A team of academics and local historians from the United States and Mali (5) are working to solve the problem. All those concerned with this key element in Africa’s historical consciousness gather at the Ahmed Baba centre for research and documentation (Cedrab) in Timbuktu. It was created by the Malian government in 1970, on the initiative of Unesco, and is named after Ahmed Baba (1556-1627), the last chancellor of Sankore University. Baba taught law and wrote on many other subjects. He resisted the Moroccan invasion that crushed the Songhay empire in 1591. Most of his works were destroyed when he was deported to Fez in 1593, but his orthodox teachings resonate today.
Cedrab’s purpose is to classify, protect and restore manuscripts. Paper is delicate: water and fire destroy it; it dries, breaks, tears and crumbles into dust and is vulnerable to termites. Many of the manuscripts are in private hands. The culture minister, Sheikh Omar Sissoko, explains that the centre is trying to preserve as many as possible: "Since we cannot take possession of all these documents, we are supporting the creation of private foundations to help enumerate and preserve family collections. This is the best way of getting citizens to take responsibility for their heritage and protecting it at the same time."
Ismaël Diadé Haidara, a Timbuktu historian and philosopher, holds one such collection. He receives guests at his computer, where he writes books including Les Juifs à Tombouctou (Jews in Timbuktu) (6). Jews had an important role in bringing gold from the Sudan to Christian Europe and through them a Majorcan Jew, Abraham Cresques (1325-87), a father of cartography, heard of Timbuktu.
Jews were well established in the ports of the Maghreb by the Middle Ages - the Cresques family moved from North Africa in the early 12th century - so trade routes linked them to the interior. The celebrated Arab trader Hasan Ibn al-Wazzan, nicknamed Leon the African, wrote of a Jewish presence in Gao in the 15th century. Haidara is a descendant of the Kati dynasty of ulema (7) and goes into detail explaining the history of his family’s library, kept in a restored house near the Jingereber mosque. "This collection began in 1468 when my ancestor, the Islamicised Visigoth Ali B Ziyad al-Kuti, moved to West Africa from Toledo. After that it didn’t stop growing for several generations of Kati. We decided to get the texts out in 1999."
The library is a trove of medieval knowledge, with writings on anything from good governance to the dangers of tobacco. Law, theology, medicine, grammar and mathematics are all covered in works by scholars from Córdoba, Baghdad and Djenné. The tomes are stored on shelves protected from sand and dust. Legal documents pertaining to the Jews and Christians of Timbuktu testify to the intense commercial life of the city. Slaves sold and freed are recorded, together with the prices of salt, spices, gold and feathers, on parchments attached to gold-illuminated letters from sovereigns from both sides of the Sahara.
The documents are covered in annotations and explanations, in the margins or on the colophon (the last page of a book or end of a papyrus scroll, where the scribe signs his name and the date). They tell us too when an earthquake or brawl interrupted the writing. Thanks to a few contemporary translators, analysis of these documents is vividly illustrating a whole era from the perspective of sub- Saharan Africa.
The texts vary widely. Most are written in Arabic but the style of each scribe depended on his linguistic origins - which included Tamashek (the language of the Tuareg), Hausa, Fulani, Sonrai, Jula, Soninke or Wolof. All used the same calligraphic style, the maghribi cursive Arab script, ideal for fitting a lot of information on to a little paper. The documents include such celebrated works as the 15th-century Tarikh al-Sudan (History of the Sudan) by Mahmud Kati and the 17th-century Tarikh al-fetash (The researcher’s history) by Abderahmane as-Saad.
The discovery of these manuscripts has given sub-Saharan Africa the solid historical grounding it lacked; we are only now beginning to appreciate fully its importance. They endorse the claims that the great Senegalese historian Sheikh Anta Diop (8) made for the spiritual depth of pre-colonial African society. They also describe the trans-tribal trading economy that brought wealth to the region. This economy was born of Islam; the ulema, with their skill in communicating with so many students, were its midwives.
The result was a coherent and sophisticated culture whose spiritual dimension evolved according to its own principles and continued to the arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century. Sheikh Dan Fodio (1754-1817), an admirer of his predecessors and especially of Ahmed Baba, noted in his memoirs that until the European conquest, African thought "worshipped an open form of Islam that was quite distinct from the Islam of the Arab world" (9). In the 20th century French scholars such as Pierre Marty and Vincent Monteil substantiated this claim (10).
The cost of saving the Timbuktu manuscripts is estimated at $5.6m - which is 60 times less than the sum that EuroDisney has just demanded from shareholders to save its Paris theme park. Yet the preservation of this gold mine of African history is still at risk.
Translated by Gulliver Cragg
* Jean-Michel Djian is a journalist and author of Le triomphe de l’ordre. La pensée tuée par l’école’ (Flammarion, Paris, 2002)
(1) At its peak in the 14th century, the Malian empire stretched to the coast of Senegal.
(2) In the Middle Ages the Sudan covered the whole area between Sudan and the Niger river.
(3) The great Tangiers traveller Ibn Battuta spent time in Mali in 1352-3. He describes a visit to Timbuktu in The Travels of Ibn Battuta, Cambridge University Press, 1958.
(4) See Hamadou Hampâte Bâ, L’Etrange destin de Wangrin, editions 10/18, Paris, 1973.
(5) John Hunwick, professor of history and religion specialising in Islamic Africa at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Chris Murphy, a researcher at the Library of Congress, were quoted by Lila Azam Zanganeh in the New York Times, 24 April 2004. Also working on the documents are Samuel Sibidé, director of the Musée National du Mali, and Mohammed Galla Dicko, head of the Ahmed Baba Centre in Timbuktu.
(6) Ismael Diadé Haidara, Les Juifs à Tombouctou: Recueil de sources écrites relatives au commerce juif à Tombouctou au XIXe siècle, Editions Donniya, Bamako, 1999.
posted
In my opinion this is one of Africa's greatest legacies and preserving these ancient African manuscripts are of deathly importance. Supposedly, some poor rural families who posses some of the original manuscripts, are even pressured into seeking to sell their books to foreign tourists, merely to make ends meet. Likely losing them forever to the black market..
The Mossi people in what is now Burkina Faso resisted conversion: the Songhay empire, which succeeded the Malian empire at the end of the 14th century, converted. The production of manuscripts in Timbuktu was linked with the spread of Islam. ------------------------------------------------
one correction-the songhay empire developed at the end of the 15th cen. a.d.
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quote:Originally posted by Sundiata: In my opinion this is one of Africa's greatest legacies and preserving these ancient African manuscripts are of deathly importance. Supposedly, some poor rural families who posses some of the original manuscripts, are even pressured into seeking to sell their books to foreign tourists, merely to make ends meet. Likely losing them forever to the black market..
posted
But why is the historical Timbuktu seen as part of "the East"? This is rhetorical question because I suspect that there's still the belief in some quarters that anything having to do with "civilisation"--when found in Africa cannot be indigenous.
Hence the perennial ideological debates about Ancient Egypt, Ancient Kush, Axum, African metallurgy, the African phenotype, African agriculture, African language phyla shared elsewhere.
The stubbornly implicit asumption is that any cultural item deemed to be creatively worthy of note must have had origins external to the peoples of an assumed generic African phenotype.
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posted
Lol! Next thing you know they will say Eurasians introduced bows&arrows, javelins and skinning to Africa as well.
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posted
It's the old Ex Oriente Lux concept birthed in the 18th century(?) and though dead never quite layed to rest as its spirit still flitters about the earth even today.
quote:Originally posted by lamin: But why is the historical Timbuktu seen as part of "the East"? This is rhetorical question because I suspect that there's still the belief in some quarters that anything having to do with "civilisation"--when found in Africa cannot be indigenous.
Hence the perennial ideological debates about Ancient Egypt, Ancient Kush, Axum, African metallurgy, the African phenotype, African agriculture, African language phyla shared elsewhere.
The stubbornly implicit asumption is that any cultural item deemed to be creatively worthy of note must have had origins external to the peoples of an assumed generic African phenotype.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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