![]() ![]() “Ahmed Baba wrote more than 50 books,” says its deputy director, Sidi Mohamed Ould Youbba. Mahamoudou Hasseye is also the former director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a public archive in Timbuktu that is named after one of Bagayogo’s students. Mohamed Bagayogo went on to become one of the city’s greatest professors and his writings on law, governance and justice still adorn the frayed margins of hundreds of ancient manuscripts. Hasseye is the direct descendant of one of the city’s great scholars, Mohamed Bagayogo, whose father came to Timbuktu from Yemen in the 1400s. ![]() There were 100,000 people in the city and one-quarter of them were students or professors.” “But it was an important centre of Islamic scholarship and culture, and people from all over the world came here to study at the Sankore University in the 15th and 16th centuries. “You know, many people consider Timbuktu to be the end of the world,” says Mahamoudou Baba Hasseye, the owner of another private library. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.” “It is unquestionably true that I was moved to tears by the feel of these books, of this history, in my hands. “When I held those books in my hands, tears rolled down my face,” he says. Gates recalls how he felt the day Haidara showed him the manuscripts that “put the lie” to Western claims about Africa’s lack of written history and intellectual tradition. “He wept like a child, and when I asked him why, he said he had been taught at school that Africa had only oral culture and that he had been teaching the same thing at Harvard for years and now he knew all that was wrong.” “When Professor Gates came here and saw the storeroom full of these manuscripts written by African scholars centuries ago, he started to cry,” says Haidara. None of this would have been possible had not Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of Harvard University’s African and African-American studies department, visited Haidara and realized the importance of preserving these documents. “Then, in 1993, I had an idea to open a private and modern library that would be open to everyone.” Thanks to funding from an American foundation, Haidara has been able to open his Mamma Haidara library and catalogue 3,000 of the manuscripts, some of which date back to the 1100s. “Before, all the manuscripts were kept in our homes,” says Abdelkader Haidara, who has inherited his family’s collection of 9,000 written works dating back to the 16th century. Huge collections have been passed down in families over many centuries, kept out of sight for fear that European explorers, and then French colonists, would abscond with them. While many thousands have been recovered, there are still hundreds of thousands of manuscripts hidden away in wells and mud-walled storerooms in northern Mali. They’re called the “Timbuktu manuscripts” and they disprove the myth that Africa had no written history. Today, treasures are being unearthed here that are radically changing the way the world views Timbuktu, Africa and her history. Hence, the Western myth about a never-never place with little to offer the world - a myth that is about to be exploded. By the time the first ones finally arrived in the 1800s, they found a desolate desert outpost not all that different from the sand-swept town of today, with no evidence of all the fabled wealth. ![]() Time has not been kind to this once-great centre of civilization, which in the early 1500s inspired the Spanish explorer Leo Africanus to paint a picture of a learned, cultured and peaceful place where books were the main industry, where one literally walked on “gold.” Lured by this promise of riches, European explorers tried for centuries to find Timbuktu. Abdelkader Haidara inspects ancient manuscripts in his Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktuįirst published 18 December 2005, Toronto Star ![]()
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