Then, starting with invasion and occupation by the Moroccan army in 1591, and culminating with colonization by France in the 1880s and '90s, most of the great libraries were looted or destroyed. The centers of learning collapsed, and the majority of the evidence of Timbuktu's contributions to the world was lost -- everything, that is, except what went underground, often literally. As Ahdoudoye puts it, "My family, they make the manuscripts down in the ground." History went to the victors; hence the story of Africa as a benighted continent, without so much as a rudimentary written record of its past.
MENTION AFRICA, and the typical Westerner pictures a place of violence, hunger, disease and ignorance. For much of the continent, recent history offers scant evidence to the contrary. The influence of Timbuktu and other educational centers in Africa on human civilization has garnered barely a footnote. Yet the story of Timbuktu's reign as a center of learning on a continent that is among the world's most diverse is not just a disclaimer trotted out for disappointed tourists. It is a work in progress, and scholars predict it will actually change history, and, in the process, put to rest the prevailing notion that Africa is one long tale of woe.
This Arabic manuscript dates to the 14th century.
(Xavier Ross - Gamma)
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This interests me, so one morning my Moroccan friend and translator Brahim Karaoui and I strike out for a library that we have been told has the largest collection of texts in Timbuktu, the Ahmed Baba Center, one of five official repositories in the city. Guided by a couple of giggling girls who eventually hand us off to a purposeful man, we find the nondescript complex of concrete buildings that make up the center, which was named for the scholar who headed Timbuktu's Sankore University in the pre-colonial era. Inside, perhaps 20 men are quietly cataloguing a cache that includes an estimated 20,000 manuscripts dating as far back as the 13th century. There is a lot of sorting going on. There is also a palpable sense of mission: No one stops working when the American and the Moroccan walk in the door.
The workers direct us to Bouya Haidara, a supervisor who is poring over book No. 1204 in a room filled with decaying, embossed leather-bound books and loose, yellowed manuscripts. The buildings of Ahmed Baba are not air-conditioned, and the few display cases would have long since been decommissioned in a more modern library, but the manuscripts do not disappoint. Written in a florid, almost baroque style of calligraphy, often with notes in the margin such as might be found in a used textbook, they are embellished with gold-laden ink and artful watercolors and drawings. I have been told that the manuscripts contain poetry, religious missives, travelogues, complex legal treatises, manuals for conflict resolution and, remarkably, astronomical computations that predate Copernicus and Galileo. None of this is evident to the untrained eye -- most of it is in Arabic -- and I do not get much from Haidara. The furrow in his brow hints at the tedium and weight of his work, and he seems a bit guarded about discussing the texts -- an understandable response, considering that outsiders have not always had the best interests of Timbuktu in mind when inquiring about them. As Brahim translates, Haidara gently deflects my questions about the families who hoarded the books, directing me instead to the imam of the Grand Mosque. After nosing around the record room for a while, Brahim and I head off through the warren of alleyways to find him.
On the ground, Timbuktu's air of mystery translates into an inscrutable urban layout, and we frequently have to stop to ask directions. Two elderly Tuaregs with Coke-bottle glasses lead us to a shop run by a woman who is preoccupied with learning how to operate her new cell phone. (Cell phone service arrived in Timbuktu recently, a graphic example of the weird advance of global technology, considering that the city has yet to otherwise acquire even the most basic infrastructure.) Without looking up from her phone, the shopkeeper tells us that the imam of the Grand Mosque is out of town. She then offers to dispatch a boy to retrieve another imam in his stead. Soon Mahamoudou Baba Hasseye, the affable imam at Timbuktu's Sidi Yahia Mosque, arrives, resplendent in a silver caftan, white turban and reflecting sunglasses.
It turns out that Hasseye has both ends of the story covered. Retired from the Malian cultural ministry, he is a leader in the campaign to gather and preserve the manuscripts, and a descendant of a family that for 500 years hoarded a stash of some 800 books by burying them in wooden boxes, including one that sits in a corner of his living room. In passing, he mentions that his relatives have been imams at the Sidi Mosque since the 16th century. Among the intellectual leaders of pre-colonial Timbuktu was one of Hasseye's ancestors, Muhammad Baghayogho Wangari, who amassed a large library on law, literature, manufacturing, science, history, geography, Islam, astrology, traditional medicine and crafts. "People of influence in Timbuktu, he asks others to write, that's why there are so many bibliothèques," Hasseye says of Wangari and his peers. "He paid gold for knowledge."
HASSEYE LEADS US down a serpentine alley to his home, a simple but comfortable two-story mud-brick house typical of Timbuktu. Upstairs, his turquoise-washed living room is filled with books, both old and new, and after turning off a TV blaring a soccer match, he reclines upon a row of cushions and explains his family's legacy between sips of potent local tea. Speaking in French, the official language of Mali since the days when the landlocked West African nation was known as French Sudan, he says that in addition to his role as an imam, or religious teacher, he sees the preservation of the manuscripts as his calling. He believes the manuscripts confer upon his family a baraka, or blessing for life, he says.
The literary heyday, he says, lasted until the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism wrecked much of the continent. Timbuktu was an important center for a succession of empires that encompassed parts of present-day Mali, Mauritania, Ghana and Niger, but, "when colonization arrived, the first thing they do is destroy African cultures," Hasseye says. "Second, they destroy the economy. All the richness, they take it all. The richness deep in the earth, the manuscripts that were buried, they are unable to exploit."
Hasseye estimates there are more than 70,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu's official centers, but it is possible that far more survive -- no one knows for sure. Although the documents are typically written in Arabic, some include passages in Hebrew and in African tribal languages. Most are scattered across holdings in Mali, Morocco and France, and some may still be buried in the sand. Even for the collections that remain in Timbuktu, the first hurdle in gathering and preserving them is to persuade families to give them up, which is not always easy. It was the families' determination to hold on to them, after all, that ensured the manuscripts' survival. Some of the books are also important family histories, known as tarikhs.
The chief proponent of the effort to preserve the manuscripts of Timbuktu is Abdel Kader Haidara (no relation to Bouya), who is visiting the United States seeking support for the work while I am in Mali.
