Back in time: Timbuktu narrates its golden era

Abdel Haidara is the curator of the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, a private holding of some 5,000 ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu, the legendary city of Mali. Over the 13 generations his family has held a trove of manuscripts.

Throughout the ages, dating back to the 16th century when his "first grandfather" started the collection, there has been a long and debilitating war with insects, heat and dust. But the collection has survived, and in conjunction with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, a small sample of texts from the Haidara library is on view at the Library of Congress.

The delicate pages were not bound, but stacked and stored in tooled-leather cases. Documents on display, selected from some 23 books brought to the Library of Congress to be microfilmed, include works on astronomy, mathematics, Islamic law and business ethics.

The script is Arabic, but with a variety of calligraphic styles, and in some cases ample marginalia that testify to their long use in everyday study.

That includes information about local kingdoms, local medicine, local literature including epics and poems, and firsthand accounts of the trade in slaves, salt and gold that made Timbuktu a centre of the Islamic world to rival Cairo and Istanbul.

Some people think history began with the Greeks and ended with the Americans, think of African "civilisation" as a thin ribbon of cities and cultures running along the Mediterranean Sea and down the Nile. Conveniently, it's the same Africa that was most engaged with Europe and the Near East.

But that Africa was also intimately connected with Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. And cities like Timbuktu, where an important overland trade route joined canals leading to the Niger River, weren't backwaters or outposts of North Africa; they were the centres of their own civilisations, which reached even further into the centre of the continent.

The manuscripts are written in Arabic and many deal with Islamic law and religion, but Timbuktu libraries aren't filled merely with copies of Arabic texts that circulated throughout the Islamic world.

Rather, they contain a full, rich and particular history of another Africa, with its own kingdoms, literature and history.

Individuals, governments and outside agencies have begun to focus efforts on preserving an estimated one million or more ancient documents scattered around western Africa.

In Timbuktu there are some 22 private family libraries. Few benefit from modern preservation.

In the environs of Timbuktu, as many as 100 different families hold ancient documents, stories are told of nomadic families who buried boxes of texts and moved on, never to unearth them.

Timbuktu, once a teeming city of merchants and traders and a centre of scholarship, is now a dusty town of some 20,000 people. It was founded in the 11th century, and was central to a succession of peoples and empires – the Tuareg, Mali, Songhai – before Morocco sent soldiers overland to sack it late in the 16th century.

It was known to Europeans, but so remote as to seem legendary. Not until the 19th century did Europeans return with extensive firsthand accounts of it.


© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service