Libraries · a Light

Timbuktu's manuscripts were smuggled out in footlockers

When armed groups took Timbuktu in 2012, the city's libraries held centuries of manuscripts on law, astronomy, medicine, poetry and mathematics, many still owned by the families who had copied them. Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian, organised an evacuation. Volunteers packed manuscripts into metal footlockers and rice sacks, moved them out of the city a few at a time by car, donkey and boat down the Niger, through checkpoints, and stored them in houses in Bamako. By early 2013 an estimated 350,000 manuscripts had been moved. Some were burned in Timbuktu, but far fewer than first reported. The collections are now being conserved and digitised in the south of the country.

Timbuktu to Bamako · 2012 to 2013