In 1325, the fabulously wealthy emperor of Mali, Musa I, travelled to Mecca carrying a tonne of gold as spending money. It has been estimated that in the 14th century two-thirds of the world's gold came from west Africa, a large proportion of it passing through Timbuktu, where it was transferred from the river to trans-Saharan caravans, from canoe to camel.īut Timbuktu was to become most famous as a centre of scholarship. It grew rich by virtue of its location at the northernmost bend of the river Niger, between the gold mines to the south and the salt mines in the Sahara. But from the early 14th to late 16th centuries Timbuktu was famous for its wealth. Old men lead donkeys along sand-choked streets where children play barefoot and goats sift through the rubbish strung out along the roadside, eating everything they can find. Timbuktu today is a sleepy collection of mud-brick houses that sits low in the ever-tightening embrace of the Sahara. I knew that, if people continued like that, one day they would enter our library and smash up everything.'įrench soldiers on patrol in Timbuktu. What they didn't take they were smashing up. There were people of all ages looting the buildings, taking tables, chairs, air-conditioning units, anything they could find. 'I saw something that made me very, very afraid,' he says. The fighting was intense and everyone stayed in their houses.' When he felt it was safe, he took a walk around the town and was shocked by what he saw.

'The first week of the occupation, there was a lot of shooting. They didn't make any kind of preparations. 'People were a bit scared but they didn't feel there was any great danger. 'Before the hour of their arrival, we didn't think the rebels would come to Timbuktu,' he says. Over sweet mint tea in his office at the end of a red-earth road in the south-west of Bamako, Haïdara tells me the story of how he masterminded the smuggling of the manuscripts to safety from under the noses of the jihadists. What Cissé didn't know, however, was that, while several thousand manuscripts had been destroyed or looted, hundreds of thousands more had been smuggled to safety by an unlikely band of bibliophiles.Ībdel Kader Haïdara is a tall, 50-year-old librarian who wears a moustache and a pillbox kufi prayer cap.

After the jihadists fled in the face of advancing French and Malian troops in January last year, the mayor of Timbuktu, Hallé Ousmane Cissé, revealed that the city's precious archive had been torched. The shrines of Sufi saints were hacked to pieces and some priceless medieval manuscripts were burnt or stolen from the state archive. Timbuktu is a Unesco-listed world heritage site and the spiritual capital of sub-Saharan Africa agonisingly, many of the cultural artefacts that gave the city its identity were destroyed or damaged. One of my relatives' sons was the first guy to have his hand cut off.' Dara fled soon after, along with an estimated two-thirds of Timbuktu's citizens. 'My drum player was caught and put in jail. 'One of my cousins was beaten in front of me, given 100 lashes from the jihadis,' she says. 'When entered the city, people said if you were an artist they would cut out your tongue, because they hate music and want to ban it,' Bintu Dara, a singer, tells me in the Malian capital, Bamako. The largely moderate Muslims of Timbuktu were terrified. Suspected thieves had their hands or feet chopped off after summary trials. Music, a vibrant part of Malian culture that has been exported all over the world, was banned. Women were beaten for walking in the company of men. It was a time of devastation in northern Mali: first the rebels pillaged the town, then the jihadis imposed a brutal form of sharia law on the population. So began the 10-month occupation of Timbuktu, first by Tuareg separatist rebels, then by their fellow-travellers Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), a jihadist affiliate of al-Qaida. Before noon, a convoy of rebel pick-ups swept into the undefended town.

Bok! Bok! Bok,' Diagayeté, an archivist, remembers. Shortly afterwards, the first gunshots rang out over the city. The soldier ran off to ditch his uniform and returned a few minutes later in civvies, intent on taking refuge in Diagayeté's house. It was a friend from the army: a heavily armed group of rebels had arrived at the city boundary, he told him he'd done everything he could and must leave the city immediately. At 5am on a Sunday morning, Mohamed Diagayeté was disturbed by an urgent banging on the door of his house in Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara desert.

Ancient manuscript book