The Timbuktu manuscripts

A city of learning

Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara near the Niger River, was founded as a trading town about nine hundred years ago. For centuries it was a meeting point for goods from West Africa and merchants from the Mediterranean, and it also became a center of religious scholarship. The University of Cape Town's Tombouctou Manuscripts Project describes it as a great center of learning, famous in West Africa and beyond from the 13th to the 20th century. Local scholars and their students recorded their work in handwritten books, both original works and copies.

The manuscripts

The surviving manuscripts number in the hundreds of thousands. They date from about the 12th or 13th century to the early 20th, though most of those exhibited by the Library of Congress date from the 16th to 18th centuries. Most are in Arabic, written in styles of script developed in Timbuktu and the wider region, and some are in African languages. Their subjects include Islamic law, theology, mathematics, devotional poetry, commerce and historical chronicles. Scholars expect them to change how Islamic, West African and world history are written.

Much of this heritage is held by families in private libraries, such as the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library, which dates from the 16th century and is one of the largest in Timbuktu. The Malian government also created a public research center, the Ahmed Baba Institute, named after the 16th-century Timbuktu scholar.

Study and digitization

From the 2000s, outside institutions began working with Malian custodians. In 2004 the University of Cape Town began digitizing legal manuscripts at the Mamma Haidara Library and later added texts from the Ahmed Baba collection. Its research covers legal and social history, the history of the book and reading in West Africa, and African Arabic calligraphy. The Library of Congress also digitized manuscripts from Mamma Haidara and another Timbuktu library and presented them in a 2010 exhibition.

The 2012–13 rescue

After a military coup in March 2012, armed groups seized Timbuktu on 1 April. According to the University of Hamburg's Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, they came to treat the manuscripts as a target once they learned how valued they were. Between June 2012 and January 2013, owners and custodians smuggled the collections to Bamako, more than 700 km away, by car, donkey cart and canoe. They moved about 2,400 metal chests holding some 285,000 items. The rescue was led in large part by Abdel Kader Haïdara, director of the Mamma Haidara Library and head of SAVAMA-DCI, an association of manuscript owners.

Not everything escaped. UN News reported that insurgents burned or stole 4,203 manuscripts held at the Ahmed Baba Institute. The Hamburg center estimates that at least 95% of the manuscripts were saved overall.

Ongoing challenges

The manuscripts largely remain in Bamako, many still in their chests. Bamako's more humid climate and inadequate storage threaten their condition, and UNESCO has warned about illicit trafficking.