Ancient manuscripts, which provide tangible evidence of African scholarship centuries before colonialism, are being rediscovered in this desert town, writes Shamil Jeppie
Timbuktu is not a venue for any of the African Cup of Nations games currently being played in Mali. It does not have a sports stadium, not even a green patch to host a local five-a-side match. Furthermore, there is no road linking the capital, Bamako, to Timbuktu. An exhausting and bumpy two-day drive in a 4×4 will take a visitor there, or the weekly flight. A very slow riverboat is another option. Such precarious transport choices are obviously not suited to the world of international soccer.
On most maps Timbuktu is shown to be on the Niger river but it is, in fact, 13km away. Instead of the verdant landscape of a riverside settlement, Saharan sand dominates the townscape. The desert aspect of the town overwhelms its environment as new sand dunes build up almost within its boundaries. Buildings around the northern edge have steadily begun to sink under piles of white sand.
Timbuktu appears to be just another town in the contemporary Sahel neither a nomadic encampment nor an international trading entrept. An American student told me in Bamako that there was very little to see in Timbuktu. As a tourist she, of course, followed the usual directions in the guidebooks: see this mosque, visit that market a town to visit but a really disappointing destination. With some luck such a guidebook may mention the Cedrab, which stands for the Centre de Documentation et de la Recherch du Ahmadu Baba. This is a modern, unremarkable set of buildings unlike the mosques of the town, the earliest of which dates to around 1325. The attraction of this centre is its library, or rather its archive, for it is really a depository of written materials, without reading or research facilities, and its repository of rare literary materials is compelling. This centre should earn instant celebrity status in the world of books making it the sole reason to visit Timbuktu.
The library’s present collection consists of about 20 000 manuscripts. They are in various stages of disintegration depending on their age and exposure to the elements over time. This collection is, in fact, modest given the amount of materials in private hands and buried in walls in mosques in Mali’s Sixth Region, which could be around 300 000 items.
All these materials, like those in the centre’s archive, date from the beginning of the 1300s to the late 1900s. Many are codices in local leather bindings, others are loose leaves; there are a few heavy multi-volume tomes, while others are pocket size. There are also letters, contracts and other items of a documentary nature.
In the centre, due to a shortage of shelving, they are tightly and seemingly haphazardly piled on top of each other in glass cabinets. What is visible are many uneven, dark brown layers of bindings and fading paper. There is no complete catalogue of this collection although one has been published listing the first 9 000 items. A small glass display cabinet in this cramped space allows one to see a sample of the texts, which are also stacked tight together hardly affording a clear view of a full folio. An embarrassment of riches without the means to adequately store or display them. They are all written in the Arabic script not in Middle Eastern styles, but in the unique calligraphy of North-Western and Sudanic Africa called Hatt Maghribi. In the usual works on Arabic calligraphy these styles are hardly represented, unlike those of Western Asia. This collection is virtually all in this regional style of Arabic script and most of the works are in the Arabic language itself. While Arabic is the dominant language, the collection is multi-lingual. There are a number of fascinating examples of local languages written in Arabic characters. Songay, Tamasheq and Hausa texts are on display but there would be Fulfulde ones as well buried among the piles of works. Here may be the earliest records of these languages as written languages.
Very few of contemporary Timbuktu’s citizens speak Arabic and those who come closest speak what they call Hasaniyya, which sounds like a mixture of a Berber dialect and Arabic. But before the 20th century Arabic would have been spoken and written more widely, although probably not used in everyday affairs. What is certain is that it was the language of scholarship very much the way Latin once was in Europe.
Today Arabic in Timbuktu has the status of a devotional language and very few manage to achieve complete fluency in it through study at the local mederses.
Unfortunately, even most of those associated with the centre and other libraries are not able to read the materials they wish to conserve and are proud to exhibit as their intellectual and cultural patrimony.
The Cedrab material is thus a symbol of a productive past that has only tenuous continuity into the present. The centre’s collection is a record of lively and extensive literary activity. It is tangible evidence of African scholarship, of Africans reading and writing, and at extremely high levels of sophistication as well, and centuries before colonialism. The levels of discourse were often abstract and speculative. These African scholars left traces of their work on grammar and rhetoric, on jurisprudence, and religion and mysticism. Many of the manuscripts reflect scientific pursuits covering mathematics, astronomy, medicine, astrology and geomancy. It is this past of intellectual endeavour and what would now be called “academic excellence” that a number of educated locals want to save from complete effacement. Collecting and preserving as many of the thousands of manuscripts in and around Timbuktu, and as soon as possible, is their way to salvage this past.
A number of projects have been established in the past three decades to preserve this heritage but in the past few years these flagging attempts have been revived. Among historians from outside the region John Hunwick at Northwestern University in the United States and Sean O’Fahey at Bergen University in Norway have been leading the campaign to draw attention to Timbuktu and other African scholarship in Arabic (whether in the language and/or only the script). To date they have published three huge catalogues and are in the process of completing two more.
O’Fahey and Hunwick see the latest discoveries, and there are more all the time, as revolutionising our understanding of African history. They have had to work hard against, on the one hand, a Western Orientalist establishment that has largely ignored African Arabic scholarship and, on the other hand, a tendency in Africanist historical studies making oral tradition virtually the only legitimate mode through which the African past can be claimed.
Cedrab’s collection also represents the rich and complex social history of this part of the Sahel. It represents the legacy of Timbuktu as a recognised seat of research and writing. Apart from the achievements of higher learning in Timbuktu, the manuscripts testify to a range of arts related to the culture of the book that used to thrive in the town. They speak of a vibrant book trade: merchants traded in salt, gold and fabric but there was also a market for books and for the related materials such as paper, ink and leather. About the demand for books, Leo Africanus (al-Hasan bin Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati) the Andalusian-Moroccan who visited Timbuktu in the early 1500s, noted that: “In Timbuktu there are numerous judges, scholars and priests, all well paid by the king. Many manuscript books coming from Barbary are sold. Such sales are more profitable than any other goods.”
The book crafts, copying and scribal services were flourishing and full-time occupations in the town. All these aspects of Timbuktu’s social and intellectual history could be reconstructed through the manuscripts.
Ahmadu Baba, Timbuktu’s most famous scholar and in whose name the centre was founded, was captured in 1593 during the Moroccan conquest and his collection of 1 600 books was seized as well. He complained to his captors saying that his collection was the smallest in the town. There is a record of about 50 works written by him, one of which is a biographical dictionary a supplement to a well-known earlier dictionary in which he notes the achievements of the scholars of the time. The entry on his teacher, Muhammad Baghayogho, a Mande scholar who migrated to Timbuktu from Jenne reads: “Moreover, he was constantly attending to people’s needs, even at cost to himself, becoming distressed at their misfortune, mediating their disputes, and giving counsel. Add to this his love of learning, and his devotion to teaching in which pursuit he spent his days his close association with men of learning, and his own utter humility, his lending of his most rare and precious books in all fields without asking for them back again, no matter what discipline they were in. Thus he lost a large portion of his books … One day I came to him asking him for books on grammar, and he hunted through his library and brought me everything he could find on the subject.”
The colophons (the last page of a book giving details about the printer, and so on) of a few volumes that have been examined reveal immensely valuable information about the history of books. One colophon in a copy of a 28-volume dictionary by an Andalusian scholar completed in 1574 gives the names of the copyists, who provided the blank paper, from whom the copy was made, the amount paid to the copyist, and independent verification of the copy. The colophon reveals that the copyist received the equivalent of 4,238g of gold, the verifier half that amount.
Another source of evidence for the history of the region is the margins of the manuscripts. All Timbuktu paper was imported, usually from Europe, and there were periods when the imports were slow in arriving or expensive when texts were reinscribed in their margins. In an untitled work by one of Timbuktu’s major chroniclers, Mahmud al-Ka’ti, he records on the margins a range of everyday events, such as: “In that year God caused prices to fall, rains were abundant, and wells filled up. As soon as rain began to fall, people began to plant, and God facilitated harvesting of the crop. He sent successive rains to His servants following the year 910 (1504-5) and people continued thus for five years.” An entry for another year records “stars flew around the sky as if fire had been kindled in the whole sky east, west, north and south. It became a mighty flame lighting up the Earth, and people were extremely disturbed about that. It continued until after dawn.” Was this a meteorite shower in 1583? From such notes a whole range of researchers from intellectual historians to climatologists could benefit and illuminate various aspects of West Africa’s past and present.
Mahmud Ka’ti’s collection is a private one gathered by one of his descendants, Ismail Daidie Haidara, a shy man with a degree from the University of Granada in Spain and author of three studies on Timbuktu published in Morocco. He has been visiting his extended family to gather their ancestor’s works, in an attempt to reassemble his library. His Fondo Ka’ti archive now holds 3 000 items. Recently he had a catalogue prepared with the help of a German researcher, but it is still only an unbound computer print-out. Meanwhile, the archive is a regular cramped room at home without special shelving, storage facilitates and proper temperature controls. There are numerous private libraries, such as the reconstructed Mahmud Ka’ti archive, inside the town and the surrounding settlements.
The most impressive in terms of organisation and management is the Mamma Haidara library run by Abd al-Qadir Haidara. He inherited his father’s library of about 5 000 volumes and was fortunate to have Henry Louis Gates, a well-known Harvard English professor who was making a TV series on Africa, stumble upon his collection a few years ago. When Gates saw the perilous state of the manuscripts he raised a grant from the Mellon Foundation for Haidara to build a modest but functional five-room building. Yet it is still not properly outfitted with air-conditioning or a laboratory in which to undertake conservation work, for instance. But it is the best in Timbuktu and the materials, neatly stacked in beautiful, locally made cabinets, can be consulted. He has also worked on cataloguing his material. The London-based Al-Furqan foundation has already published his first three volumes as part of a projected five- to six-volume catalogue.
The private collection of the frail Imam of Timbuktu’s oldest mosque, Djingere Ber, is in a hazardous condition. It is stuffed without apparent order or particular consideration into a few cabinets and boxes in an annex on the roof of his apartment. There is space for about two persons in this unlit room filled with all variety of manuscripts and books, from Quranic commentaries to works on astronomy. His son-in-law dipped into boxes producing volume upon volume, some of which were in relatively good condition, while others were mostly eaten away. A few had intricate gold work on their front pages as well as exquisite calligraphy in various colours. He estimated that there were only about 500 works in this collection. This seems like an underestimate. There are perhaps hundreds of such collections that are in desperate need of rescue. Even if one views these manuscripts in complete ignorance of their content or context they are extraordinarily beautiful to behold. Before they land up in private collections in Europe, America or Kuwait or under an auctioneer’s hammer in Paris or London they need to be saved for Africa and hopefully kept in Timbuktu by its people.
In 1990 Timbuktu was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco and is considered an endangered historical space. This is the case for the town’s built environment. The original Sankore mosque, which started out as a college, is, in places, heavily sunken under sand. The manuscripts, for long hidden but now slowly being rediscovered, are integral to Timbuktu. It is also an African legacy and an expression of humanity’s collective intellectual heritage.
Timbuktu witnessed an African renaissance at the time of Europe’s long before the term was coined in South Africa. President Thabo Mbeki’s visit there last year excited the locals and they expect South Africa to work with them to preserve this heritage and revitalise their town. Our curiosity about the legendary Timbuktu should be extended to assistance and collaboration. But how we do this meaningfully is the critical issue. As a start, expertise in preservation in the National Library of South Africa system should immediately be made available to Timbuktu archival projects. At the same time our emerging writers and historians should be encouraged to look north of the Limpopo to study and engage with the historical traditions of the Niger bend and adjoining regions. We could also collaborate with the locals in finding ways to let its brighter past provide opportunities to improve Timbuktu’s difficult present.
For now the continental soccer tournament will be synonymous with Mali. However, after these over-financed games we should ensure that the rich and productive literary past of Timbuktu gets the funds, public attention and critical scholarly inquiry it deserves. A preamble to our engagement could be the words of Leo Africanus, the early 16th-century visitor to Timbuktu, who wrote in his great Della discrittione dell’Africa: “Africa has indeed been my nurse. I grew up there and spent the most delightful part of my life there. But I have, before everyone, the excuse of my role as historian which demands speaking the truth about matters regardless, and without accommodating the wishes of anyone in particular.”
Shamil Jeppie teaches African and Middle Eastern history at the University of Cape Town. He visited Timbuktu as part of a Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology team