Filmmaker Sharron Hawkes has gone from Butterworth to Timbuktu.
Hawkes returned this week from a two-week trip to Timbuktu in Mali, where she is producing and directing a documentary on the conservation and research of hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts.
Now living in Johannesburg, Hawkes grew up in Butterworth in the Eastern Cape.
Her fascination with the Timbuktu manuscripts, many buried in the sand, damaged by termites or floods, started when she travelled there on holiday a few years ago.
”They are at risk so the idea of digitising and storing them properly now, then studying the digitised copies to see what they hold is important,” said Hawkes.
”They’re from a time in African history when everyone thought there was no academic study going on in Africa and that’s not true, so it’s a good way of showing that.”
Getting the documentary made has been a long hard road for Hawkes. It involved a second trip for research, which initiated the Astronomy Research Project (ARP), then two years of fundraising before she could take a team there this month to film.
Involved with the film is the leader of the ARP, Dr Thebe Medupe, who is one of SA’s first black astronomers, and Malian translators Adama Coulibaly and Imam Oumar Doumbia. Their research is funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology.
The film is funded by the United States-based Ford Foundation.
The US-based Timbuktu Foundation says the city was founded by the Tuareg Imashagan in the 11th century and grew to have three universities and 180 Qu’ranic schools.
In 1591 the Moroccan army sacked the city, burned the libraries and killed or deported many scholars.
The manuscripts detail trading accounts to conflict resolution, Islamic social history, mathematics, physics, medicine, history, geography and astronomy.
Ancient Malians needed their knowledge of astronomy to follow the trade routes and to record the Islamic calendar; they also recorded phenomena like eclipses and meteors.
The film aims to ”bring to life the ancient work of these African astronomers, scribes and academics”, said Hawkes.
Filming took 13 days, eight of them travelling to and from the remote city — flying to Mali and then driving to Timbuktu.
The crew’s vehicle broke down on Mali’s rough roads and
Crossed the Niger river on a pont but Hawkes said it was easier than her earlier trips, as there is now a rough road to Timbuktu rather than a sandy, ever-changing track.
She said Timbuktu is ”an incredibly harsh place”.
”You just don’t fight the sand, it’s just there.”
The city is full of libraries — small family libraries, joint collections, a mosque library and the government archives.
Manuscripts were big business in ancient Timbuktu — scholars wrote them there, bought them from other centres and there was a thriving trade in copying them.
”Copying was cheaper than getting a new book from across the desert… There was lots of negotiation over how many pages you were given and how much you were paid for copying,” explained Hawkes.
SA is spending millions helping Malians to restore and preserve their manuscript heritage. The Timbuktu Manuscripts Project is a South African Presidential Initiative and the first Nepad cultural project. President Thabo Mbeki has called it ”critical” that it succeeds.
For Hawkes it’s like a treasure hunt.
”Thebe and his team are still translating manuscripts so we’re not sure what we’re going to find.” – Sapa