When militants threatened Timbuktu's manuscripts in 2012, librarians did not wait for outside rescue; they smuggled hundreds of thousands of pages out by canoe themselves.
A city built on gold and scholarship
The Djinguereber Mosque was commissioned in the fourteenth century by Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, after his celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey during which his lavish gold spending reportedly disrupted currency values in the markets he passed through. The mosque helped anchor Timbuktu's rise as a centre of Islamic scholarship, trade and manuscript production, drawing scholars and students from across West Africa for centuries.
Hundreds of thousands of manuscripts
Private family libraries in Timbuktu accumulated an estimated several hundred thousand manuscripts over centuries, covering astronomy, law, medicine and theology, evidence of a sophisticated written intellectual tradition in West Africa that challenged colonial-era assumptions that the region's history was purely oral.
The 2012 rescue
When Ansar Dine and allied militants took control of Timbuktu in 2012 and began destroying Sufi shrines, librarian Abdel Kader Haidara organised a covert operation moving tens of thousands of manuscripts out of the city by road and river to safety in Bamako, an effort that saved the bulk of the collection. Militants nonetheless destroyed a number of ancient shrines and some manuscripts that could not be evacuated in time, an act for which a member of the group was later convicted at the International Criminal Court, the court's first conviction specifically for the destruction of cultural heritage.