Explore Centuries of Knowledge and Meet the Individuals Preserving It
The 7,028 manuscripts included accounts of the lives of Christians and Jews in the Songhai Empire; the buying and selling of slaves; and the commerce of books, salt, gold, fabrics, spices, and cola nuts. There were books that originated along the Niger annotated by the learned men of Timbuktu and Djenné. Other had come to Mali from across the Middle East, margins filled with the musings of sages of Córdoba, Granada, Fez, Marrakesh, Tripoli, Cairo, and Baghdad. Ismail Diadjié Haidara was especially proud of two illuminated Korans, one copied in Turkey in 1420, the other on sheepskin in Ceuta, Andalusia, in 1198, and kept hidden for centuries in a family check in Kirshamba village, a hundred miles from Timbuktu.
Hammer, J. (2017). The bad-ass librarians of Timbuktu andtheir race to save the world's most precious manuscripts. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
Books to Check Out
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by 
Decolonizing Pedagogy: Ubuntugogy Based on a Timbuktu Manuscript by Hamid Fernana
Location: Hoopla
Publication Date: 2020
The Race for Timbuktu by 
Timbuktu by 
Timbuktu (Available through ILL) by 
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