by RUTH MCLEAN
Tens of thousands of manuscripts were smuggled out of Timbuktu under jihadists? noses, containing a wealth of knowledge about science, governance and peace-making. Now the public is getting a look.
In an air-conditioned room on a quiet tree-lined street in Mali’s capital, Bamako, three young men sat at desks with cameras mounted overhead, picked up one page of parchment at a time from tall stacks at their left, clicked the shutter button and then reached for the next page. Click. Flash. Repeat.
One of the men, Amadou Koita, said he had been doing this work for five years. But the job is far from complete. Rooms full of metal trunks crammed with manuscripts await him.
The documents are part of a trove of tens of thousands of old manuscripts — legal documents, copies of the Quran, scientific writings — that for centuries were conserved and passed down by the desert-dwelling families who owned them, or collected in libraries. Then, suddenly, they were in danger.
In 2012, jihadists took over Timbuktu — today a small, sunbaked city in northern Mali, but once the most prominent of numerous centers of Islamic learning in pre-colonial West Africa — and burned many manuscripts, according to librarians and Timbuktu’s mayor at the time. In a dramatic rescue, most of the documents that escaped the flames were smuggled out.
Now, after years of careful preserving, cataloging, and digitizing, more than 40,000 pages from one of Timbuktu’s biggest libraries have been made available for anyone to explore on Google Arts & Culture.
“Africans knew how to write before many outside Africa did,” said Andogoly Guindo, Mali’s minister of culture. “These manuscripts can throw light on part of Africa’s past.”
But bringing them to a wider audience faces significant obstacles. For the most part they are undecipherable to people not educated in the West African Islamic tradition — those unable to read Arabic as well as African languages written in modified Arabic script, known as Ajami. Only a tiny proportion of the documents are being translated because there are not many scholars with the skills to do it.
“There’s been very very little, marginal work on excavating the content of the manuscripts,” said Abdulbasit Kassim, a historian of West and Central Africa who specializes in manuscripts. “What exactly can the manuscripts tell us about African history? What can they tell us beyond the different phases of African history, from spirituality to the field of science, to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, logic, philosophy, esoteric sciences?”
West Africa’s wealth of manuscripts provide evidence of extensive written traditions in the continent stretching back centuries — in contrast to past claims by Western colonialists and scholars who characterized African societies as oral rather than literate ones.
The manuscripts from Timbuktu show that the city’s scholars had found that the earth revolved around the sun — having the insight at around the same time Galileo did — and used mathematics far earlier than scientists in other parts of the world, said Cynthia Schneider, co-director of the Timbuktu Renaissance initiative, which recently organized an exuberant event in Bamako, ending with a dance party, to launch the Google project.
The scholars also produced millions of pages of jurisprudence, and writings on the Prophet Muhammad, and on mysticism.
But for modern purposes, the most useful portion of the Timbuktu manuscripts — which also contain travel diaries, correspondence and sex tips — might be those on how to govern justly, corruption-busting techniques and conflict resolution.
“Each problem has a solution in the manuscripts,” said Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian who helped coordinate the rescue of the documents from Timbuktu. He pulled down his mask, revealing a bounteous mustache, downed his glass of attaya — sweet, strong tea — and put the mask back. “We have to use them.”
Mr. Haidara founded SAVAMA-DCI, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the preservation of the Timbuktu manuscripts, which collaborated with Google on the project. The Bamako offices of the group house some of the manuscripts in specially made boxes to protect their leather bindings and fragile pages of calligraphy and illustrations, often of tiny, colorful flowers.
Segou, a river city in south-central Mali, was another center of learning and scholarship in the region. It housed the library of Omar Tall, a scholar, politician and military leader, born in the 1790s, whose library was seized by French colonial authorities and taken to Paris.
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