They packed the books into metal trunks and rice sacks and moved them out by car, boat and donkey cart. In 2012 and early 2013, while jihadist groups controlled Timbuktu in northern Mali, librarians and families secretly evacuated hundreds of thousands of manuscripts to Bamako. The operation, led by the librarian Abdel Kader Haidara, saved one of Africa’s greatest intellectual treasures.
Timbuktu and its libraries
Timbuktu, near the Niger River on the edge of the Sahara, became a major centre of trade and Islamic learning from the fourteenth century. Scholars, students and traders gathered there. The city’s manuscripts cover religion, law, history, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and poetry. Many were written in Arabic, and some in African languages using Arabic script.
Many manuscripts were kept in private family collections for generations, stored in homes and passed down through families.
The Ahmed Baba Institute, a state research centre named after a sixteenth-century scholar, was established to collect, preserve and study manuscripts.
The 2012 crisis and the evacuation
In 2012, rebel and jihadist groups seized northern Mali, including Timbuktu. They destroyed shrines of local saints, and many feared the manuscripts would be next. Haidara and his colleagues organised the secret transport of manuscripts to Bamako, using couriers and hiding the books from checkpoints. As French and Malian forces retook Timbuktu in January 2013, militants set fire to part of the Ahmed Baba Institute’s new building. Some manuscripts were destroyed, but most had already been moved.
In Bamako, the manuscripts are being stored, conserved and digitised with international support. The story has been told in books such as The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer.
Why the manuscripts matter
The manuscripts challenge the idea that Africa had no written intellectual tradition before colonialism. In its golden age, Timbuktu was home to scholars who taught at mosques such as Sankore and Djinguereber. Students came from across West Africa and North Africa to study with them. Ahmed Baba, a sixteenth-century scholar after whom the institute is named, wrote many works and was exiled to Morocco after a Moroccan invasion in 1591. He later returned to Timbuktu.
Timbuktu was once famous for its books. In 2012, people who loved those books risked their lives to make sure the city would still be.
