This Tuesday Special Assignment takes viewers on an extraordinary journey through the West African country of Mali in search of the fabled Timbuktu Manuscripts, said to be one of the most valuable collections of ancient scripts in the world.
Special Assignment’s executive producer Jacques Pauw and cameraman Jan de Klerk travelled to Mali to film the Timbuktu Manuscripts, currently being kept at the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu. They also journeyed beyond Timbuktu deep into the Sahara desert, to find manuscripts that have been buried for centuries under the sand.
The Timbuktu Manuscripts are currently the subject of worldwide attention after Timbuktu was short-listed as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. There is also an ongoing international effort to save and preserve these documents.
South Africa stands at the forefront of this conservation effort after President Thabo Mbeki visited Timbuktu in 2001 and visited the Ahmed Baba Institute. Shocked at the state of decay of the manuscripts, the President launched the South African-Mali Project, aimed at restoring these ancient artifacts. Since then, South Africa has trained several Malian researchers and conservationists at the National Archives in Pretoria. South Africa has also embarked on building an ultra-modern, underground library in Timbuktu where the manuscripts will be stored in future, protected from the dry desert heat.
The Special Assignment team travelled to the Malian capital of Bamako where they met up with SA-Mali Project director Riason Naidoo. From there, they travelled the 1 200 kilometers to Timbuktu by road in temperatures of 50 degrees. In the process, they filmed some of the most extraordinary sights in Mali, among them the people of Dogon, who have lived for centuries in mud structures against the cliffs of the escarpment in central Mali. They also visited Djenne, another World Heritage Site and home to the famous Djenne Mosque, the biggest mud structure in the world.
Between the 12th and 16th centuries Timbuktu was one of the most important cities in the Muslim World and a centre of learning. It boasted three universities and fifty Koranic schools and intellectuals from across the Muslim World and from as far as Spain and Portugal converged on the city.
Between 600 000 and 800 000 academic and religious manuscripts were produced there. A hundred thousand manuscripts have survived the subsequent centuries of Moroccan occupation and French colonialism. Twenty thousand of these are kept at the Ahmed Baba Institute, the rest are in private libraries across Mali and in private collections in countries such as Spain, France and Morocco.
The manuscripts deal with subjects like history, religion, mathematics, law, grammar, medicine, arts, culture and philosophy. They prove that Africa had a tradition of academic excellence long before the arrival of colonialism. As the Imam of the Djengereber Mosque in Timbuktu said: “The gold comes from the south, the salt from the north, the cash from the faraway lands of the white man. But wisdom and spiritual enlightenment can only be derived from the scripts and lore of Timbuktu.”
“From Here to Timbuktu” is produced by Jacques Pauw and was filmed by Jan de Klerk.
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