The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu

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 into 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 on the bottom.

Why was it put under the ground?

TRANSLATION: Over the years we have protected the manuscripts

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 about 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 El Dorado 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.

CAMEL ROARS

Their journeys across deserts and along rivers took years,

led to violent encounters with desert tribesmen and cost lives.

So Timbuktu became for ever 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 realised 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 Alphas,

learned men from the north

who travelled south to spread the word of Allah.

What I'd never realised 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 the manuscripts,

but I don't think that the general public are aware about manuscripts.

I became aware of the existence of the manuscripts

not longer than two years ago.

It sounded like a joke, because my director called me

and said, "Alexio, 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, Abdel Kader Haidara has agreed

to show me some of his collection -

manuscripts 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.'

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: This is an interesting manuscript

about astronomy.

These are the astronomy drawings showing the position of all stars.

I am not an expert but that is what they tell us.

They knew more about it then than I do now.

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."

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 and 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.

-TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:

-Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula,

from Egypt and 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.

TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH: Every week we get about 700.

Six or seven hundred a week?

Yes, per week.

When the manuscripts arrive here

the first thing we have to do is evaluate them

to see what condition 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 favourite ones are the ones in the African languages,

but written with Arabic characters.

They are called Ajami texts.

Because I'm Sorai,

when I see a manuscript in Sorai it makes me happy.

You have some manuscripts in Sorai, Tamashek...

all with Arabic characters, that recount the history of Africa.

The manuscripts are being digitised so that they can 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 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.

More than finding gold!

Being aware 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 - 1,000 at most.

So there are lots of manuscripts that we got, and that's really exciting.

But it also gives us an idea of the challenge that lies ahead, you know,

and how much work that, that must be done on the manuscripts.

The conservation, cataloguing, 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 colonisation.

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.

TRANSLATION: 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 Obamba.

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 find that he would build a huge wall in front of his manuscript.

And the director said, "What's going on here, what this is 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 re-think

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 conservator,

and more proud to be contributing towards the re-correction

or re-writing of the African history.

-TRANSLATION:

-The Ahmed Baba Institute was born

from the international conference organised by UNESCO in 1967.

And the topic was the origins of African history.

I repeat, the origins of African history.

What's the origins? It's the manuscripts.

So, with the Arabic manuscripts,

the intention is to re-write 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 has been for a long time

built on oral tradition.

Of course,

a lot of people think that oral tradition is not credible,

but then I think that it is an important source

for African history.

So the question is, how you approach the source

and how you criticise 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 life blood 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 Futa Djallon - 150 miles from the West African coast.

And, but for a quirk of geology which caused the river flow inland,

the Niger would have been a very short river

instead of one of the world's longest.

Nearly 3,000 miles long, the river first flows north towards Timbuktu.

It then curves eastward

before turning southeast, through Nigeria to the Atlantic Ocean.

Between Djenne 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 urbanised parts

of the world,

rivalling other early urban civilisations 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

ten miles south of Timbuktu.

So how typical is a site like this in Mali? How many might there be?

Well, there is a lot.

There are accounts that say that if someone from Djenne

wanted to send a message to a village or a city

a few hundred kilometres away, he just had to shout,

and the message would be carried

across the flood plains and along the Niger

until it reached that village.

Because so many people were living here in close proximity.

So the picture at that time was just of...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 grey, these grey areas.

-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.

-This city rivals the size of the great cities

of Mesopotamia, like Ur or Uruk.

How does that compare to modern Timbuktu?

Well, to the old medina of Timbuktu, er, it's maybe...

maybe twice the size.

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 twice the size of London.

Timbuktu was twice the size of London...

-And this site is twice the size of Timbuktu.

-Wow!

One fascinating fact to emerge

is that these people lived together peacefully for centuries.

Now, that looks very much like a skull.

That IS a skull.

What we can tell from him is that, you know 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...

-You can tell he was buried as opposed to fell there?

Well... Well, it's a good question.

Fell in battle!

Well, we don't really find any evidence for warfare in West Africa

during the, during the pre-Islamic period.

And, we're not really quite sure why that is.

A peaceful society, we don't know.

The general practice would have been to bury the dead

underneath the floor of the house.

-I see, it's Grandad under the house.

-Yeah. Grandad under the house.

So, are you going to excavate him or are you going to leave him?

No, he's far too fragile to excavate.

-So you're gonna leave him to rest in peace.

-Yeah.

-Do you want to show me the rest of the site?

-Sure.

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.

Some iron slag.

And you can see here, this is the by-product of iron smelting.

Now, if you can imagine the amount of wood to make a truckle to fire

the furnaces to melt the iron ore is an immense amount of wood.

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. I've got one at home.

-Some things don't change.

-This one's pretty well made, too.

They stay the same for the most part -

at least some of the real basic stuff.

Erm, and so, we're getting...

Oh, look, here's a, here's a grindstone here.

These two are probably a pair.

Doug has described a cityscape 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 civilisation, 2,000 years ago,

as old as Christianity, erm, the size of which

rivalled 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 civilisation -

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 that 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 Timbutku 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.

-TRANSLATION:

-Camel trains from the north

brought dates, European fabrics,

glass, jewellery, tobacco and salt from the Sahara.

The boats from the south bring cereals, honey,

gold and slaves.

What made Timbuktu an important place in the Middle Ages

was the gold and slaves.

It's said two thirds 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 trans-shipment 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 profits of the book trade

soon rivalled 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 work of the town's own scholars.'

Their labours were impressively rewarded.

TRANSLATION: If I was working back in the 15th century,

I'd be earning millions. I'd have many houses,

many camels and lots 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 practising 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.

-TRANSLATION:

-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 15 tonnes of gold with him, and distributed it so generously

in Egypt and Mecca that the price of gold collapsed.

News of the splendour and spending power

that marked Kanka Musa's progress through Egypt and Syria

soon reached the ears of merchants around the Mediterranean.

Within 50 years of Musa's pilgrimage,

the Majorcan 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 El Dorado had gripped European minds.

Kanka Musa brought Arabic professors back from Mecca

to boost Timbuktu's 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 Kanka Musa's palace,

which it's said once stood somewhere here, have long since disappeared.

The palace was designed for the king by the Andalucian architect,

Es-Saheli, who Kanka Musa brought back from his pilgrimage to Mecca.

When the palace fell into disuse, the site became an abattoir.

But one magnificent remnant of Kanka Musa's legacy remains.

The Djingareyber 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 Kanka Musa'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.

-TRANSLATION:

-We are in the second prayer aisle of the mosque,

and there are nine of them in all, each about 100 metres 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 a temperature of the early morning.

Scholarship, as much as trade, was to drive Timbuktu's reputation.

Timbuktu's 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 centre of learning.

Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan world traveller, 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.

-TRANSLATION:

-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 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 wondered to what extent this tolerant Islam

and its scholars' writings came from being filtered through African eyes.

TRANSLATION: 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 we 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's 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 Yahia and the Djingareyber,

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 signalled 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 Songhay Empire was the most powerful yet.

Its creator, Soni Ali Ber, reigned from its capital, Gao,

over a land mass greater than Western Europe.

Nominally a Muslim, Soni was also a champion of African traditions.

He refused to allow his culture to be subsumed by Islam.

If Timbuktu's scholars weren't willing to play to his tune,

he soon let them know who was boss.

TRANSLATION: The scholars and those in charge of the religious principles

had to obey Soni, 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 Soni Ali Ber was also a visionary and an idealist -

a leader who today's historians

might hail as the continent's first pan-Africanist.

Soni 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 the common language.

The emperors who succeeded Soni were more devoutly Muslim,

encouraging Timbuktu's scholarship and subsidising its professors.

By the mid-1500s the city's size and population

eclipsed that of many European capitals, and the Sankore University

was recognised as West Africa's pre-eminent centre

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 here 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 Sidi Yahir 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 law-makers 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 Koranic school.

And it is also because this knowledge

was not so linked to the general,

the economic, the political and the technical.

For the scholar, 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 west.

The spread of literacy further into Africa

also faced significant geographic barriers.

TRANSLATION: Writing took the part 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 their 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 Songhay Empire

and shattered Timbuktu's scholastic idyll for good.

-TRANSLATION:

-So, the Moroccans came here to fight the Songhay.

And they took over Timbuktu.

Then they destroyed the university and deported most of the scholars

back to Morocco, along with all the manuscripts 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 brotherhood,

each pushing their own brand of

fundamentalist Islam, destroyed all hopes of a return

to the stable days of the Songhay Empire.

Reaching into this heightened atmosphere were the first tentacles

of European colonisation.

One of the consequences of that colonisation

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 mould -

his great-great-grand-nephew 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 after his first journey

and he became famous for that account.

He took a sail boat down to the port in Dakar.

And travelled as far by land as possible, got on a boat

and then became lost for three years.

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 sail back to England.

The second time he went to the Niger River,

he 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 were 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 the 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, for any early traveller in this area.

The first British explorer to reach Timbuktu

was Alexander Gordon Laing, another Scot.

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 travelling in uniform, and was taken as a spy.

He was severely wounded by Tuareg tribesmen

on his way in to 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 Rene Caillie reached Timbuktu

and survived the journey home.

Caillie 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 colonisation quashed any future hope of self-rule.

One of the briefest periods in Timbuktu's history,

colonial rule had a profound effect.

What Timbuktu's 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 manuscripts on its own is an amazing discovery,

but the devil, as they say, is in the detail.

And what do they tell us about the way people lived

here in Timbuktu centuries ago?

Already, the everyday 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 if you say fatwa, people say it's a death sentence.

A fatwa literally means a religious verdict.

One of the interesting ones on women who got married while married.

You have one incident of a woman whose husband travelled.

She said to him, "Well, you're leaving and I need you."

And he said, "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, some time later and he finds her married.

Married to somebody else.

Yes. Many of these women clearly said, "Look, I 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 just stay around without a husband."

What was the advice of the muftis 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, is invalid, and she must

be returned to the first husband. All of them seemed 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, they announced their presence,

they had their say, they were not simply sitting at home.

There's another manuscript, and it's not a fatwa.

But from that you can see that husbands were always very worried

whether they could really satisfy their wives.

So there were some anxious men in those days.

There are probably many anxious men today around, but certainly overall,

yeah, erectile dysfunction was an issue, you could see.

And the traditional healer was a very pious Muslim scholar,

who really saw it as part of his Islamic duty to help his brother

who was in distress.

What was the advice given to the husband then?

Well, you take the blood from the comb of a chicken, or of a cock,

and use it, either putting it, rubbing it under the feet,

or even at times on the penis.

Was it medicine or was it psychology, do you think?

Do you think they just knew that if somebody relaxed,

things might just get better?

If, and I'm venturing, I mean, I'm assuming here, maybe

they really believed it's going to work, you know.

I always feel the healers would always say that, but...!

In the 17th century, following the Moroccan invasion,

Timbuktu's scholars began the first rewriting

of this part of Africa's history.

The Timbuktu Tarikhs became a whole new literary and historical genre.

The great Tarikhs are a series of histories

of the city and the wider region,

written with the express purpose

of supporting the existing elite's right to rule

within the new Moroccan regime.

Their authors drew on written records as well as oral traditions,

re-interpreting 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.

SPEAKS FRENCH

TRANSLATION: The disadvantage we have with the Tarikh

is a bias in the writing of history,

because history is always written for the governing powers

to the detriment of those that came before.

Mahmoud Kati, who wrote the history of the Songhay's Askia emperors,

was one of their nephews -

so don't expect him to be negative about the Askias.

When you read the Tarikh al-Fattash, you see an argument

supporting the Askias 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'll find this same political bias, and on top of that an argument for the religion.

In the Tarikh which is the story of the Moroccan dominance in Timbuktu,

you find an argument for 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 an 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 popularise 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.

TRANSLATION: The Ajami texts put on paper

an oral tradition that was in danger of extinction.

We found all sorts in there - poetry, songs as well as texts on history.

And sometimes history sings.

The official truth is the one you'll find in the king's court,

but as soon as we go on the street,

and we see a mother breast-feeding 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 we can't have a comprehensive understanding

of African culture without the Ajami texts.

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 had been rebelling sporadically against the government,

ever since the modern state of Mali was created in 1960.

The last president, Alpha Konare, 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 5km of the town.

TRANSLATION: The quarter where I live is called Badjinde.

And Badjinde 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 are 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 borders 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 the 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 centre of culture,

but secure an economically viable future.

TRANSLATION: The manuscripts which you have seen

can become a real industry.

They can be like a mine,

like a gold mine.

SPEAKS FRENCH

This cultural renaissance will discover 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 ten 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 civilisation 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 1,000km 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.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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