24:36
This is the story of the rise and fall of a legendary city and its long-hidden legacy of hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts. Set against a backdrop of great empires and visionary leaders, it tells how trade routes from the East became ink roads, bringing writing to the heart of West Africa. And how Timbuktu became its leading light. And how invasions and conquest caused that story to be buried, literally. Africa's storytellers, guardians of its history, have had their oral traditions dismissed as mere song and dance and the assumed lack of a literary heritage interpreted as meaning Africa doesn't
have its own intellectual traditions. But now a different truth is emerging that tells us the reading and writing of books has been as important a part of life in Africa as it has in Europe. And as Timbuktu's manuscripts are brought out of hiding, the conviction grows that what they have to tell us may forever rewrite Africa's history. This box looks like it's been buried. It's covered in dirt and things on the bottom. Why was it put under the ground? Over the years we have protected the manuscript from those who wanted to take them away.
We have over 4,000 manuscripts in our collection. What's incredible is that I'm in a small village in Mali, in Africa, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. It's It's the last place on Earth I'd expect to find manuscripts hundreds of years old. But this is where the search for the lost libraries of Timbuktu really begins. Europeans dreamed of reaching Timbuktu ever since stories began to circulate in medieval times of a desert Eldorado whose streets were paved with gold. My journey was as mundane as any these days. Several flights and an overnight in Mali's capital Bamako before the last leg to Timbuktu.
It wasn't until the 19th century that European explorers set out to survey Africa and to search for the fabled city of Timbuktu. Their journeys across deserts and along rivers took years, led to violent encounters with desert tribesmen, and cost lives. So, Timbuktu became forever synonymous with remoteness and mystery, the farthest place on earth. I grew up in Sierra Leone and I've long known that Timbuktu was in Mali in the Sahara Desert. But it was only passing through here a few years ago I realized there was much more to Timbuktu than meets the eye. That this seemingly unremarkable desert
town was once a splendid city of scholars. And from the 13th century, West Africa's most important seat of learning. In Sierra Leone, I've often heard stories of the Alfas, learned men from the north who traveled south to spread the word of Allah. What I'd never realized before is that many of them would have started out right here in the deserts of Timbuktu. Even Africans are just discovering the story of Timbuktu and its lost libraries. Probably people educated in Arabic and Islam know something about manuscript, but I don't think that the general public are aware about manuscripts.
I became aware of the existence of the manuscript not longer than 2 years ago. It sounded like a joke because my director called me and says, "Alexia, you've been requested to go to Timbuktu. Do you know a place called Timbuktu?" And I said, "No, other than the fact that it's a small impossible place to get to in Mali in West Africa." Until 1960, Mali was a French colony and French has remained the official language. Only after independence did the custodians of Timbuktu's manuscripts feel it was safe to bring their cultural treasures out of hiding.
This is one of around 30 libraries opened in Timbuktu in recent years. Between them, the libraries have over 70,000 manuscripts. Timbuktu's libraries are run by families whose ancestors began collecting books and documents eight centuries ago. The new libraries house whatever remnants of those collections have survived the ravages of time and their contents offer an invaluable source for a new understanding of West African history. At the Mamma Haidara Library, Abdoul Kader Haidara has agreed to show me some of his collection. Manuscript on astronomy, medicine, and theology, including commentaries on the sayings of
the prophet. These particular manuscripts date from around the 16th and 17th centuries. This one's been nibbled by termites. This is a very interesting manuscript about astronomy. These are the astronomy drawings showing the position of all stars. I'm not an expert, but that is what they tell us. It shows you how to calculate position of the stars using these letters and numbers. Next, he showed me a 16th-century manuscript. So, this is a text of the prophet's sayings.
What's more, there are all these notes in the margin. They can be about anything. But this one talks about hygiene. If you eat something unclean, you will always have problems and complications with your health. Okay, so you must always wash your food, which is pretty good advice. And all that was written in the margins by people who came after. In the past, there were very little papers. They were very expensive. So, the margins of books were often used just like today when we use a diary. I saw one example where the writer said, "Today, there was an earthquake in Timbuktu." And here's a 500-year-old recipe for toothpaste.
You take some salt and some sugar and mix that together with some charcoal and brush it on your teeth every day, and your teeth will become white. And what's more, it will get rid of your bad breath. So, how did the libraries first come into being? How were they lost? And how will their discovery alter perceptions of Africa? At the end of the 10th century, when Timbuktu was founded, a large part of West Africa was under the rule of the Ghana Empire. It was West Africa's first superpower, and its leaders were early converts to Islam. The spread of Islam was the compelling factor that changed history here and gave Africa its literary tradition.
Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula, from Egypt and then along the coast of North Africa. But some other Muslims came from the north. The ones who founded Timbuktu and being traders, spread Islam from the Sahara to the south coast. Just as in Europe, where most early manuscripts were religious works written in Latin, in Timbuktu, the bulk of the texts are written in Arabic and concern Islamic theology. The Ahmed Baba Institute, the only public library, holds Mali's national collection. Set up in 1973, it now has over 40,000 manuscripts.
The head librarian told me just how many turn up on a weekly basis. It's an impressive number. Every week we get about 700. 6 to 700 a week? Yes, per week. So, when the manuscripts arrive here, the first thing we have to do is evaluate them to see what conditions they are in. We pick out all the best ones, but the ones that are too damaged, we put to one side. For me, my favorite ones are the ones in the African languages, but written with Arabic characters. They are called Ajami texts. Because I'm Sonrai, when I see a manuscript in Sonrai, it makes me happy.
You have some manuscripts in Pearl, Sonrai, Tamasheq, all with Arabic characters that recount the history of Africa. The manuscripts are being digitized so they can eventually be made available to a worldwide scholarship. But the first priority has to be the conservation and preservation of the manuscripts. In 2001, South Africa's then president, Thabo Mbeki, visited the institute and hailed the manuscripts as among the continent's greatest cultural treasures. He immediately gave funding for their preservation. Alexio Motsi is a South African conservator making regular visits to Timbuktu to work on delicate and often damaged manuscripts and equally importantly to train local people in conservation skills.
To come here to Mali to see what was here was actually a serious motivation for me because it was a dream come true for a conservator. Must have been like finding the gold at the end of the rainbow. It was more than finding gold because being aware of the sort of the historical background that Africa doesn't have documentary heritage, this for me was also another motivation which made me become very passionate. At least 300,000 manuscripts are known to exist in the region, but so far only a tiny percentage have been translated or studied in any detail.
A lot of them have not been read, a thousand at most. So there are lots of manuscripts that we got and that's really exciting. But it also gives us the idea of the challenge that lies ahead, you know, and how much work that must be done on the manuscripts. The conservation, cataloging, translation, and study of all the known manuscripts is a task which could take decades. But thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of manuscripts are still out there. Some hidden behind walls, some in cellars, and some still buried in the sands of the desert. The last 300 years have dealt a succession of blows to Timbuktu.
Morocco invaded at the end of the 16th century. Violent power struggles between rival fundamentalist Islamic sects created anarchy throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries, followed swiftly by the final indignity of French colonization. Like other victors, the French took away manuscripts as the spoils of victory. To protect their heritage, the owners of manuscripts hid their collections. Timbuktu's libraries went underground. Over the last 50 years, the manuscripts have gradually been brought out into the open again, but their owners are still suspicious.
Searching for manuscripts it's a bit like prospecting for gold. Before taking over his family library, Abdel Kader used to track down manuscripts for the Ahmed Baba Institute, seeking them out and persuading reluctant owners to hand over their treasures to the state for safekeeping. I went to do some prospecting in a village called Bambara. The family led me down a corridor that led to a bedroom. And in the middle of the bedroom was a well. They opened the cover of the well and with the help of a torch we could see a pile of manuscripts. When we took them out, we found that about 60% of them were damaged. But the rest was good. And they are now in Ahmed Baba Institute.
But winning people's confidence could be difficult. The first director of the Ahmed Baba Institute went to see an Imam once who had a large collection of manuscripts stored in his bedroom. Every day the director went to chat with him. And every day the Imam promised they would work together and he would give some manuscripts. The director thought that everything was going great until one day when he went to see the Imam only to found that he would build a huge wall in front of his manuscript. And the director said, "What's going on here?
What is this all about?" And the Imam said, "There is going to be no more library and no more discussion." And to this day those manuscripts are still behind that wall. At the height of its golden age in the mid-1500s, Timbuktu's population had grown to 100,000. That's massive by the standards of the day and a good 25,000 of them comprised the city's community of scholars and their students. But if Timbuktu was once a town of 25,000 scholars, there's not much sign of it now. Frankly, Timbuktu today feels like a dusty, if elegant, backwater, a place that's been crumbling for centuries. Nevertheless, it's wonderful to think that behind any of these walls could be yet another cache of undiscovered manuscripts.
Though there's already more than enough to ensure a rethink of the history of this part of Africa in a new and dramatic way. To me, it has actually changed my understanding. I'm much more proud to be an African, and I'm much more proud to be an African conservative. And more proud to be contributing towards the re-correction or rewriting of the African history. The center of Ahmed Baba The Ahmed Baba Institute was born from the international conference organized by UNESCO in 1967. And the topic was the origins of African history. I repeat, the origins of African history. And what's the origins? Is the manuscripts.
So, with the Arabic manuscripts, the intention is to rewrite the history of Africa. Still, future historians should be wary of dismissing existing African sources, including oral ones. The challenge lies in weighing all the sources against each other. African history have been for a long time uh built on oral tradition. Of course, a lot of people think that oral tradition is not credible. But I think that it is an important source for African history. So, the question is how you approach the source, and how you criticize the source to write the history. A crucial source of evidence in any new appraisal of Africa's past are archaeological discoveries being made along the Niger near Timbuktu.
The Niger has always been the lifeblood of this region, just as the Nile was to the Eastern Sahara. Its waters provided fish and allowed agriculture to develop. The river was a long-distance trade route connecting the myriad communities along its banks. The Niger River rises in the hills of what was once the ancient kingdom of Fouta Djallon, 150 mi from the West African coast. And but for a quirk of geology which caused the river to flow inland, the Niger would have been a very short river instead of one of the world's longest. Nearly 3,000 mi long, the river first flows north toward Timbuktu. It then curves eastward before turning southeast
through Nigeria to the Atlantic Ocean. Between Jenna and Timbuktu, the Niger is yielding new revelations to equal the discovery of the manuscripts. From as early as 500 BC, this area was one of the most densely urbanized parts of the world rivaling other early urban civilizations such as Mesopotamia. Doug Park is part of an American team that over recent years has extensively surveyed the region's wealth of archaeological sites. When we met, Doug was about to begin excavating a huge city site 10 mi south of Timbuktu. So, how typical is a site like this in Mali? How many might there be? Well, there is a lot. And there are accounts that say that if someone from Jenna wanted to uh send a message to a village or a city a few hundred kilometers away, he just
had to shout. And then the message would be carried across the flood plains and along the Niger until it reached that village because so many people were living in such proximity. Yeah. So, the picture at that time was just of it was of an urban landscape all across all along the borders of the Niger River. Exactly. So, read this landscape for me. Here, what you look for are these gray areas. Yeah, where it looks kind of earthy. That is this massive pottery carpet. It spreads around an area somewhere between 70 and 100 hectares. Which is enormous.
It's massive. The city rivals the size of the great cities of Mesopotamia like Ur or Uruk. So, how does that compare to modern Timbuktu? Well, to the old Medina of Timbuktu, uh it's maybe um maybe twice the size. And if you put that in comparison to the size of Timbuktu in regards to the rest of the world's cities during the Middle Ages, Timbuktu was somewhere around twice the size of London. Timbuktu was twice the size of London. site is twice the size of Timbuktu. Wow. One fascinating fact to emerge is that these people lived together peacefully for centuries. And that looks very much like a skull. That is a skull. And what we can
tell from him is that, you know, [clears throat] uh it's probably not going to be an Islamic burial because its head is facing south. So, would he have definitely been in a grave? Yeah, um he was definitely he was buried as opposed to held there. well, yeah. It's a good question. Found in the backyard. Well, we don't really find any evidence for warfare in West Africa during the pre-Islamic period. And um we're not really quite sure why that is.
It peaceful society, we don't know. The general practice would have been is to bury the dead underneath the floor of the house. Oh, I see. So, granddad under the house. Yeah, good old granddad under the house. So, I mean, are you going to excavate him or are Or going to leave him? No, he's he's he's far too fragile to excavate. So you're going to leave him to rest in peace. For a while. Okay. Do you want to show [clears throat] me the rest of the site?
Sure, I would. These densely packed interdependent communities each had a specific skill base. Some were farmers, others fishermen. There were potters and metal workers. Their activities cleared forests that once covered this landscape. It's an iron slag. And you see here this is the byproduct of iron smelting. Now if you can imagine the amount of wood to make truck amount of truckle to fire the furnaces to melt the iron ore is an immense amount of wood. So there must have been trees. There must have been a lot of trees.
Especially African hardwood trees and you only have acacia now. And that's it. So Could it be as a result of the smelting? Absolutely. Much of the pottery carpeting this site served the same purpose as our tin cans and plastic bags. Oh, look at this. This is a pestle. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I've got one at home. This one's pretty well made, too. Some things don't change, yeah. No, no. They stay the same for the most part. At least some of the real basic stuff.
Um and so we're getting Oh, here. Look, here's a grindstone here. As you see. These two are probably a pair, actually. Doug has described a city scape whose architecture would have looked much like the villages still dotted around Timbuktu. It's just the density that's changed. It's amazing to learn that right here on this spot there once existed a civilization 2,000 years ago as old as Christianity the size of which rivaled modern Timbuktu over there and in terms of its antiquity Timbuktu and the manuscripts dating back to the 11th century are beginning to look relatively, well, modern.
Archaeology has yet to tell us what happened to that civilization or about Timbuktu's early origins and how the town fitted into the bigger picture of a river lined with city-sized settlements. But, Timbuktu's lively oral traditions tell the tale. Local legend has it Tuareg tribesmen set up base camp here around this well, a few miles inland from the mosquito-infested banks of the Niger River. While the Tuareg went off to graze their livestock in the desert after the rains, they left their belongings to be supervised by a slave woman, Buktu, the lady with the large navel. Hence, Timbuktu's name simply means Buktu's well.
The Tuareg have been the main ethnic group to inhabit the Sahara for centuries. Their knowledge of the desert gave them control of the trade routes that ran from the north and east and led to the Niger. By the late 10th century, the most important and safest routes had focused on the region where the Niger bends eastwards. Timbuktu's creation was no accident, but a commercial necessity. They say that Timbuktu is where camel meets canoe, lying as it does between the great Sahara Desert and the camel trains bringing the riches of the Mediterranean and the river carrying gold from the fields of the south. The
town was uniquely placed to flourish on trade. Camel trains from the north brought dates, European fabrics, glass, jewelry, tobacco, and salt from the Sahara. The boats from the south bring cereals, honey, shea butter, gold, and slaves. What made Timbuktu an important place in the Middle Ages was the gold and slaves. It's said 2/3 of the world's gold came from Mali in the 14th century. Much of it passing through Timbuktu. Today's markets are mostly a local affair, but camel trains do still arrive with the other mainstay of the city's historic wealth.
Salt was the white gold of Timbuktu. From the mines in the north, it was brought down in great slabs by camel train to the town for transshipment on the river. International trade in Timbuktu often needed written contracts that required the services of scribes and notaries, and they needed to work in a common language that bridged frontiers. Arabic spread across Africa in the wake of Islam, just as Christianity spread Latin across the European continent. So, it's for good reason then that historians call Arabic the Latin of Africa. In the wake of Islam, another commodity
began to arrive with the camel trains. Books were soon being traded in Timbuktu's marketplaces as wealthy merchants found a new indulgence for their deep pockets and leisure time. Books greatly enhanced the status of their owners and gave the pious a deeper understanding of Islam. The profit of the book trade soon rivaled the trade in gold, salt, and slaves. By the end of the 13th century, the prominent families of Timbuktu began to boast their own libraries, and the sons of those families aspired not just to trade, but to scholarship. Paper was imported from Europe and China, and a new occupation swelled the ranks of the city's workforce.
Calligraphers started copying Islamic texts from abroad, as well as the town's own scholars. Their labors were impressively rewarded. If I was working back in the 15th century, I'd be earning millions. I'd have many houses, many camels, and lots of gold. You'd get many people ordering manuscripts back then, and they'd pay in gold. They'd pay in camels. They'd even exchange their houses in order to acquire manuscripts. It's a very different story today, and nowadays, I'm among the poorest people in the town, and I'm still the only person in the town practicing this craft.
Towards the end of the 13th century, Ghana was overtaken by the Malian Empire, and Timbuktu became the commercial hub of this new superpower. The fabulously wealthy Muslim ruler of the Malian Empire, Kanka Musa, made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, stopping in Timbuktu in acknowledgement of the city's economic and cultural importance. Kanka Musa was the greatest emperor of West Africa. He was a very religious man, very pure. He went with a huge retinue of men and women on his hajj to Mecca.
He took 16 tons of gold with him and distributed it so generously in Egypt and Mecca that the price of gold collapsed. News of the splendor and spending power that marked Kankou Moussa's progress through Egypt and Syria soon reached the ears of merchants around the Mediterranean. Within 50 years of Moussa's pilgrimage, the Mallorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques had drawn a map for the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne showing a black African monarch on a golden throne and Timbuktu as the capital of Mali. The legend of a desert Eldorado had gripped European minds. Kankou Moussa brought Arabic professors back from Mecca to boost Timbuktu scholarship, though it's said they proved to be no match for the city's own black African scholars.
He also commissioned new buildings to grace Timbuktu including a palace. Any sign of Kankou Moussa's palace which it's said once stood somewhere here have long since disappeared. The palace was designed for the king by the Andalusian architect Es Saheli who Kankou Moussa brought back from his pilgrimage to Mecca. When the palace fell into disuse, the site became an abattoir. But one magnificent remnant of Kankou Moussa's legacy remains. The Djinguereber Mosque was also designed by Es Saheli. It's been added to and repaired over 600 years, but it still represents a startling almost futuristic vision utterly different from my idea of a mosque.
Impressive as it is now, back then Kankou Moussa's mosque would have awed the people of Timbuktu just as Europe's mighty cathedrals left their congregations in no doubt as to where the power lay. The Imam guided me around the mosque's deceptively spacious interior. We are in the second prayer aisle of the mosque, and there are nine of them in all, each about 100 m long. When you look from the outside, you get the impression that the mosque is not very large, but when you come inside, you see that it's actually huge. And when you come into the mosque, too, you get the impression that it's air-conditioned.
The architects made it in such a way to stop the heat from getting inside because the mud brick is a bad conductor of heat. So, the mosque always has the temperature of the early morning. Scholarship as much as trade were to drive Timbuktu's reputation. Timbuktu scholars were avid in their pursuit of knowledge in every field. Knowledge was highly respected in the Islamic world, and those possessing it won prestige and power. With its professors and their prolific writings, Timbuktu was set to become the region's most important center of learning.
Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan world traveler, who voyaged as far as China and ancient Mali, visited Timbuktu in the 14th century. In his chronicles, he noted his impressions of the city, in particular the piety, tolerance, wisdom, and justice of its inhabitants. You had so many books coming from Arabia, and because the people of Timbuktu had digested so much Islam, they were able to give it to real meaning and accessibility for the people. Because of Timbuktu's mastery of Islam, it has always strived towards an Islam with great tolerance. I wonder to what extent this tolerant Islam and its scholars' writings came from being filtered through African eyes. In Africa, in Timbuktu or anywhere else, there was already a culture there.
So, when Islam arrived, it mixed with the culture already in place, and that's what made Islam what it is in Timbuktu today. So, you have the tendency of having one foot in Islam and the other foot in an occult world of African roots. The manuscripts represent as a whole the tools for the transmission of Islam. In fact, they only show the domination of Islam. The daily activity of Timbuktu scholars revolved around its three mosques. The Sankore mosque is said to have been built in the 14th century by a wealthy Tuareg woman.
Together with two other mosques, the Sidi Yahya and the Djinguereber, they comprised what became known as Sankore University. The Sankore's rise was marked by an expanding scholastic community whose intellectual musings rapidly filled the libraries. It also signaled Timbuktu's golden age, ushered in during the last decades of the 15th century by yet another turn in the cycle of West African empires. The Songhai Empire was the most powerful yet. Its creator, Sunni Ali Ber, reigned from his capital Gao over a landmass greater than Western Europe.
Nominally a Muslim, Sunni was also a champion of African traditions. He refused to allow his culture to be subsumed by Islam. If Timbuktu scholars weren't willing to play to his tune, he soon let them know who was boss. The scholars and those in charge of the religious principles had to obey Sunni. Otherwise, he would get rid of them. When he arrived in Timbuktu in January 1468, the scholars got scared and many fled to other towns and cities. But Sunni Ali Ber was also a visionary and an idealist, a leader who today's historians might hail as the continent's first Pan-Africanist.
Sunni was a great visionary, too. He wanted a united Africa and, furthermore, everywhere he conquered, he imposed his own language. For him, unity is the means of communication and a common language. The emperors who succeeded Sunni were more devoutly Muslim, encouraging Timbuktu scholarship and subsidizing its professors. By the mid-1500s, the city's size and population eclipsed that of many European capitals, and the Sankore University was recognized as West Africa's preeminent center of Islamic knowledge. But in Timbuktu, the term university doesn't quite equate to the modern
concept of a university. Certainly, Sankore was a major seat of learning, but it evolved its own particular scholarly structure. Timbuktu once had more than 180 Koranic schools like this one, which taught the basics of Islam. Those who could afford to moved on to the Sankore University and undertook three further levels of study in Arabic grammar and literature, Islamic law and sciences, and commentaries on the Koran. Final exams were both oral and written, and degrees were presented to the successful candidates in the form of a special turban. So, yeah, is the form of the turban, and
this represents the diploma. What is the significance of this turban? This part is like this. Around the face, it's like this. Then there's the element that goes around the head like this. And finally, you can see that all the part of this turban make up the name of God. Once he has the turban, we take the student to the city near here mosque, where all the scholars are sitting down. The student sits in the middle. Suddenly, they rip the turban off his head. And the scholars tell him he doesn't deserve the turban, and then they ask him seven questions about the Islamic law. If he answers the questions correctly, he can wear the turban once
again, and everyone goes to the Sankore for a big party. Then the successful student enters the community of wise men and the Imam. The Sankore's professors and graduates weren't just the religious but also the ruling elite. They were the lawmakers and the judges who governed every aspect of life. And though they lived among the people, they jealously guarded their power and kept the benefits of literacy to themselves. In the case of Timbuktu, teaching was only in the Arabic school and the Quranic school. And it is also because this knowledge was not so linked to the general the economic political and the technical.
And for the scholarly it was important to guide the believers. And there is this view that you have the common folk and the only thing they need to know is how to pray well. But you still have a 51% illiteracy in many parts of the Muslim world. The spread of literacy further into Africa also faced significant geographic barriers. Writing took the path of business and trade. And wherever business stopped the culture of writing stopped, too. In such a way that the Arabs never really moved away from the banks of the river. They simply followed the Niger River as if it was the spinal column of the world.
History tells us that the growth of literacy is one of the first steps to the creation of modern nation-states. But the benefits a wider literacy might have delivered for West Africa must remain pure speculation because in 1591 a cataclysmic event destroyed the stability of the Songhai Empire and shattered Timbuktu's scholastic ideal for good. So the Moroccans came here to fight the Songhai. And they took over Timbuktu. Then they destroyed the university. And deported most of the scholars back to Morocco along with all the manuscript they could find. And that is how the university disappeared. But the Moroccan invasion was just one factor in Timbuktu's decline. By then, the shifting focus of European trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
was already depressing the fortunes of the whole region. West Africa was always going to lose the battle. Why? Because the demand for African gold fell at the beginning of the 15th century. Europe was then buying its gold and precious metals from America. The markets were getting poorer. And all that played a big part in affecting West Africa. The Moroccan invasion never became a full-scale occupation. The long years of the late 18th and 19th centuries saw the whole Niger region embroiled in a period of anarchy.
A series of violent struggles between Sufi brotherhoods, each pushing their own brand of fundamentalist Islam, destroyed all hopes of a return to the stable days of the Songhai Empire. Reaching into this heightened atmosphere were the first tentacles of European colonization. One of the consequences of that colonization was how Africa's cultures and traditions would be viewed and treated. Europeans knew the Niger flowed inland, but thought it might be a branch of the Nile or the Congo or might empty into a yet undiscovered inland sea. In 1785, the Royal African Society sent Mungo Park on the first of two expeditions to chart the Niger's true
course and find Timbuktu. Who better to tell Mungo Park's story than a latter-day explorer sturdily cast in the Park mold? His great-great-grandnephew, Doug Park. My ancestor was Mungo Park and he was the first European supposedly to lay eyes on the Niger River. And he wrote about it and after his first journey he became famous for that account. Took a sailboat down to the port in Dakar and traveled as far by land as possible, got on a boat and then became lost for 3 years.
I see. He was lost in the sense that no one knew what had happened to him. Right, absolutely. His team had died and deserted him and so it ended up just being him and he living off the kindness of strangers living throughout the Niger Delta. He managed to make it back to I think the port in Dakar and sailed back to England. The second time he went to the Niger River he actually made it quite a bit further and he brought a lot more people along with him. Mungo Park did make it as far as Timbuktu was never actually able to get to the city. So somewhere around where we are right now perhaps he had sailed past.
Unfortunately, he was a few hundred miles up the river from Timbuktu. He was ambushed by a number of natives who had been following him for a while and he jumped into the river and drowned. The local trading societies didn't want Europeans to find out where the cities actually were and so those people protecting these middle Niger cities were very aggressive. And so, it wasn't easy for any early traveler in this area. The first British explorer to reach Timbuktu was Alexander Gordon Laing, another Scott. Being half Scottish myself as well as West African, I can't help but wonder sometimes whether the lure of Timbuktu isn't in my blood in more ways than one.
Laing was a British Army major who made the sartorial error of traveling in uniform and was taken as a spy. He was severely wounded by Tuareg tribesmen on his way into Timbuktu in 1826. He was allowed to recuperate for a month, only to be murdered by the Tuareg a week into his return journey. A few years later, Frenchman René Caillié reached Timbuktu and survived the journey home. Caillié disguised himself in local robes and spoke enough Arabic to pass as a Muslim. He was singularly unimpressed with Timbuktu.
The anarchic 19th century closed abruptly as French colonization quashed any future hope of self-rule. One of the briefest periods in Timbuktu's history, colonial rule had a profound effect. What Timbuktu scholars had failed, or perhaps been disinclined to do, the French achieved in decades. Compulsory schooling in French spread literacy across the whole social spectrum. However, the imposition of the French educational system resulted in the loss of the classical Arabic required to read the manuscripts, leaving Timbuktu's written legacy accessible only to a minority to this day.
The existence of the manuscript on its own is an amazing discovery, but the devil as they say is in the detail. What do they tell us about the way people lived here in Timbuktu centuries ago? Already the concerns of ordinary townsfolk are being revealed in a detailed study of records of some of Timbuktu's thousands of surviving fatwas issued over the centuries. I think all of the way of you say is fatwa people say it's a death sentence. A fatwa literally means is it's it's a religious verdict. One of the interesting ones on women who got married while married. You have one incident of woman whose husband
traveled, she said to him, "Well, you're leaving and I need you." And he said, "Well, if I'm not back within a certain amount of days, you can then divorce yourself." Now, there were no witnesses to this incident. So, he comes back later sometime later and he finds her married. he do? Yes, many of these women clearly said that look, I just don't finances are not the only things that I need. I need your company. I need your emotional support. So, if you are not around, I'm not going to, you know, just stay around without a husband. What was the advice of the mufti in those cases where a woman felt herself to be free to remarry and had done so?
No, they came back and they said that well, the second marriage is invalid and she must be returned to the first husband. So, all of them seem to agree to that. So, overall the impression you get of the position of women in that era was what? Is that they were present, [clears throat] they announced their presence, they had their say. They were not simply sitting at home. There's another manuscript that is not a fatwa. But from there you can see that husbands who are always very worried whether they could really satisfy their wives. So there were some anxious men around in those days.
There are probably many anxious men today around, but certainly over all there is yeah, erectile dysfunction was an issue. You could see you know and the traditional healer was a very pious Muslim scholar really saw it as part of his Islamic duty to help his brother was in distress. What was the advice given to the husband? Well, you take the blood from the comb of a chicken, you know, or of a and use it either putting it rubbing it under the feet or even at times on the penis. Was it medicinal or was it psychology do you think? Do you think they just knew that if somebody relaxed things might just get better? If I'm and I'm venturing, I mean I'm assuming yeah, maybe they really believed it's it's it's going to work, you know.
I always feel like maybe Elizabeth would always say that. In the 17th century following Moroccan invasion, Timbuktu scholars began the first rewriting of this part of Africa's history. The Timbuktu tariks became a whole new literary and historical genre. The great tariks are a series of histories of the city and the wider region. Written with the express purpose of supporting the existing elites right to rule within the new Moroccan regime. Their authors drew on written record as well as oral traditions, reinterpreting the past in the light of subsequent events much as a modern historian might do today. And as such they need to be weighed carefully. disadvantage
The disadvantage we have with the tarik is a bias in the writing of history. Because history is always written for the governing powers to the detriment of those that can be fooled. Mahmud Kati, who wrote the history of the Songhais as the emperors, was one of their nephews. So, don't expect him to be negative about the Askia's. When you read the Tarikh al-Fattash, you see an argument supporting the Askia's and condemning the Sonni. Both are from the same family, but from opposing sides. Therefore, you find this political bias. In the Tarikh al-Sudan, you will find this same political bias, and on top of that, an argument for the religion. In the Tarikh an-Nisian,
which is the story of the Moroccan dominance in Timbuktu, you find an argument in support of the powers in place at the time. Ajami was another genre which flowered across the turbulent late 18th and 19th centuries as some writers attempted to reach a wider audience among the ethnic groups along the Niger. The texts used and adapted Arabic script to write in local African languages. Ajami simply means any language which isn't Arabic. The warring Sufi brotherhoods especially used Ajami to popularize their brands of Islam, but Ajami is important in other respects,
too. It tells the people's history, with which the Tarikhs weren't concerned. The Ajami text put on paper an oral tradition that was in danger of extinction. You find all sorts in there. Poetry, songs, as well as text on history. And sometimes history sings. The official truth is the one you find in the king's court. But as soon as we go in the street and we see a mother breastfeeding her child, she sings the songs of her people. And that's where the truth is. It's a whole culture of which we don't make the most of today. But we should because you can't have a comprehensive understanding of African culture without the Ajami text.
Alongside glorious oral traditions, the manuscripts represent an exciting new resource, which the government is doing its best to protect. But Mali is one of Africa's poorest countries with many pressing issues. Just 50 years old, the modern state of Mali is still concerned with its own internal security. This is a monument to a 1996 peace deal with the Tuareg. The tribesmen have been rebelling sporadically against the government ever since the modern state of Mali was created in 1960.
The last president, Alpha Konaré, worked hard to heal divisions. But many Tuareg want greater autonomy, even their own homeland. It's been a rocky road to a tentative peace. And then there are the scorching sands of the Sahara, whose creeping advance threatens to overwhelm the town and has already created a more arid landscape. And with parched ground comes the destructive danger of flash floods that wreck buildings and reduce manuscripts to pulp. On top of all Timbuktu's problems, the flood plains of its lifeblood, the River Niger, have gradually retreated over the centuries. Where once they reached the city
outskirts, now they don't even come within 5 km of the town. The quarter where I live is called Bajinde. And Bajinde means the channel of the hippopotamus. That was when the river used to come there. But now it's gone. During a state visit to Timbuktu, Libya's Colonel Gaddafi made an offer of help. Gaddafi asked the townspeople what they'd like most, a school, a hospital, anything. They said, "Water." And so this is Gaddafi's gift, a canal bringing the waters of the Niger River back to Timbuktu once more.
Apart from offering the possibility of irrigating the desert scrub and bringing agriculture back to Timbuktu, the canal has also given the townsfolk a welcome new diversion. Late afternoon along the banks of the city reservoir and people have come to enjoy the water and each other's company. The reservoir is only a few months old, one of the changes that have come to Timbuktu. There were other changes. Western ideas and influences are easy to spot, especially amongst Timbuktu's youth. More visitors will bring much-needed prosperity, but all the hazards of a tourist industry, too.
Still, the people of Timbuktu clearly don't want to remain a desert outpost and are taking positive steps towards change. These days, Timbuktu is busy renewing its links with the outside world. Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh border, is the latest town to be twinned. Apparently, it was a toss-up between Hay and Glastonbury. No surprise, then, that a town of books, with its own international literary festival, won out.
The process of reinvention is making its mark on the townscape. A state-of-the-art new home for the Ahmed Baba Institute is nearing completion next to Sankore mosque. It's a radical juxtaposition of new and old. Many here hope that by exploiting the legacy of the manuscripts, they can not only regain their status as an international center of culture, but secure an economically viable future. The manuscript which you have seen can become a real industry. They can be like a mine. Like a gold mine. This cultural renaissance will rediscover our manuscripts. They will be broadcast and the whole world will be more knowledgeable and Timbuktu will be
like a lighthouse lighting up all of Africa. If you come back in 10 years time, you might find that people wanting to visit the moon will decide to come to Timbuktu instead. Anything's possible. The last time I was in Timbuktu, my visit was just a fleeting one. But having spent two weeks in the town, I think what surprised me most is the sheer scale, the sophistication, and the antiquity of the civilization that existed here. What I've discovered is that in Timbuktu, history isn't measured in centuries. It's measured in millennia. Timbuktu teaches us that history is a game of chance, that the ambitions of powerful men affect ordinary folk, and events thousands of miles away can
change fortunes, that wealth and cultural aspirations are intricately linked, but most of all why reading matters then and now. Reading represents a meeting with myself and then with others. It's a form of dialogue through time and space. For me, reading is an inexhaustible source of knowledge. Reading is the only way to get access to the universal knowledge. And we cannot be outside of this universal knowledge. The first leg of my journey home is a relatively short one to Mali's capital, at least in terms of miles and minutes.
Here in Bamako, almost a thousand kilometers upstream from Timbuktu, it already feels like a different world. Timbuktu, as it once was, is gone. But the manuscripts survive, and with them a sense of what was once a magnificent achievement. Africa's recent and troubled history can't be rewritten, but her history is beginning to be. And with it, perhaps, a vision of her future.
