Battle to save written history
Author re-evaluates the murky truth behind those who battled to save Timbuktu’s treasure trove of manuscripts, writes James Belfield.
Africa’s label as the Dark Continent came not only from racially-born ignorance on the part of its northern invaders but a wilful superiority complex.
The shameful hustle to colonise Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries was so often backed up by philosophers such as David Hume who thought ‘‘there never was any civiliz’d nation of any other complexion than white’’ that even in the late 20th century historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper were able to conclude that because there was no such thing as African history, ‘‘there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness’’.
The kings, queens, princes and governments of Europe who were happy to draw straight lines on a map and milk their territories for human, mineral and vegetable resources did so because they didn’t view their conquests as owning their past, and therefore any meaningful society or culture.
But stacked and stored in homes throughout Timbuktu – a city inhabited since the 12th century, a key trading post of Mali, Songhai, Moroccan and French empires, and the home to a ‘‘golden age’’ of scholarship and a thriving book trade during the 15th and 16th centuries – were hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that detailed personal, social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, religious and political stories dating back to around the same time as the Magna Carta was written up in England.
Journalist and author Charlie English’s The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu balances a colourful history of the European discovery of Timbuktu with an investigation into how that treasure trove of manuscripts was saved from destruction when al Qaeda-linked Islamist rebels Ansar Dine overran northern Mali in 2012.
English – the former head of international news at the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper – is adept at drawing comparisons between the guns and clubbable men behind Africa’s colonial conversion and Ansa Dine’s imposition of sharia law and a theocratic regime, while his journalist’s eye constantly re-evaluates the murky truth behind those who battled conflict and bureaucracy to save Timbuktu’s written history.
This latter thread of The Book Smugglers has been well documented as it offers an adventure movie-style story of rescue to set against reports of purposeful destruction of cultural heritage by Islamist groups dating back to the Taliban’s demolition of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001. Where English’s reporting succeeds is by creating a historical context for the preciousness of the manuscripts and a rigorous examination of what actually took place in Timbuktu during the recent Mali Civil War.
English’s Africa reveals a constant tension between the darkness and obfuscation of war and colonisation, and the enlightenment of those willing to delve into history and safeguard the past.