In the village of Ber, approximately an hour and a half through the sand dunes from Timbuktu, Fida Ag Mohammed tends to manuscripts that have been in his family, for centuries. (Candace Feit for The New York Times)

Ancient writings bring new interest to Timbuktu

Published: August 6, 2007

TIMBUKTU, Mali: Ismaël Diadé Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that had somehow endured through 11 generations - a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.

"This is our family's story," he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. "It was written in 1519." The musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid Arabic script of the 16th century, is also this once-forgotten outpost's future.

A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden for centuries in the warren of houses along Timbuktu's dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu - a city whose staccato sounds have become a synonym for nowhere - may once again claim a place as the intellectual heart of Africa.

"I am a historian," Haïdara said. "I know from my research that great cities seldom get a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to our past."

This ancient city, so long abandoned as a backwater, a prisoner of the relentless sands of the Sahara is on the verge of a renaissance.

"We want to build an Alexandria for black Africa," said Mohammed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run library in Timbuktu. "This is our chance to regain our place in history."

The South African government is building a new library here, a state-of-the-art facility that will house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their contents available, many for the first time, to researchers.

Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East are pouring millions of dollars into the city's family libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate and interpret the long-forgotten manuscripts.

The Libyan government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktu's only swimming pool and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu's new seekers have a variety of motives. South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links to some of the history stored here, while U.S. charities first began giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., a noted Africa scholar at Harvard, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary series in the late 1990s.

This new chapter in the story of Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it.

The geography that has doomed Timbuktu to obscurity in the popular imagination for half a millennium was once the reason for its greatness. It was founded as a trading post by nomads in the 11th century and later became the capital of the vast Mali Empire, then ultimately came under the control of another of Africa's great precolonial empires, the Songhai.

For centuries it flourished because it sat between the two great superhighways of the era: the Sahara, with its caravan routes carrying salt, cloth, spices and other riches from the north, and the Niger River, which carried gold and slaves from the rest of West Africa.

Traders brought books and manuscripts from across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and books were bought and sold in Timbuktu, in Arabic and local languages like Songhai and Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg people.

Timbuktu was home to the University of Sankoré, which at its height had 25,000 scholars. An army of scribes, gifted in calligraphy, earned their living copying the manuscripts brought by travelers. Prominent families added those copies to their own libraries. As a result, Timbuktu became a repository of an extensive and eclectic collection of manuscripts.

"Astronomy, botany, pharmacology, geometry, geography, chemistry, biology," said Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, a descendant of a family of imams that keeps a vast library in one of the city's mosques. "There is Islamic law, family law, women's rights, human rights, laws regarding livestock, children's rights. All subjects under the sun, they are represented here."

Moroccan invaders deposed the Songhai Empire in 1591, and the new rulers were hostile to the community of scholars, who were seen as malcontents. Facing persecution, many fled, taking many books with them.

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