Timbuktu

Timbuktu grew where the desert trade met the Niger, and its learning grew with the trade, because the same families financed both. Teaching was organised around scholars rather than institutions: a student read a text with a master, received a licence to transmit it, and moved on to the next, and the mosques of Sankore, Djinguereber and Sidi Yahya housed such circles rather than functioning as a university in the European sense. Describing Sankore as an ancient university is a modern shorthand that flatters the city while obscuring how it actually worked.

The city's chronicles, written in Arabic in the seventeenth century, record the scholarly lineages, the appointments of judges and imams, and the fortunes of the Songhay empire that ruled it. The best known figure is Ahmad Baba, jurist and author of dozens of works, who was deported to Marrakesh after the Moroccan invasion of 1591 and taught there before being allowed home. One of his opinions, written in reply to questions from the Saharan trade, held that a person's enslavement could not be justified by their origin but only by unbelief, and it is cited to this day in discussions of slavery in Islamic law.

What survives of that world is paper. Tens of thousands of manuscripts on law, theology, grammar, astronomy, medicine, poetry and commerce remained in family hands, passed down and often kept privately, alongside the collection of the state institute named after Ahmad Baba. They are the strongest single refutation of the idea that West Africa before the colonial period had no written intellectual tradition.

The great mosques of Timbuktu are built of mud brick faced with earth plaster, which the rains take off. They are therefore rebuilt as much as they are maintained, in an annual communal replastering led by the masons' guild, with families bringing earth and water, young men climbing on the projecting wooden stakes that serve as permanent scaffolding, and the work finished as a festival. The building is the same age as the last coat and as old as the practice, which is a different idea of preservation from the one heritage law usually assumes.

Around the mosques stood the tombs of scholars and saints, spoken of collectively as the three hundred and thirty three, visited for blessing and for intercession. In 2012 an armed group took the city and destroyed most of them, along with the sacred door of the Sidi Yahya mosque, on the ground that veneration at graves is idolatry. Manuscripts held at the state institute were burned as the occupiers withdrew.

Two things limited the damage. Librarians and manuscript owners, working quietly over months, moved several hundred thousand volumes out of the city in trunks by road and river to Bamako, a rescue organised largely by the custodial families themselves. And in 2016 the International Criminal Court convicted one of the men responsible for directing the destruction, the first conviction anywhere for the intentional destruction of religious and historic buildings as a war crime, with an order for reparations. The mausoleums were rebuilt by local masons and reconsecrated in 2015.