2005-10-03,+Timbuktu,+far+away,+far+from+forgotten,+City+Press


 * City Press, Johannesburg, 01/10/2005 18:18 - (SA)**

= **Timbuktu, far away but far from forgotten** =

By Mapula Sibanda

THEY set out on a fact-finding mission to Timbuktu with the zeal of centuries-old adventurers. Their journey to the Malian city of Timbuktu, the intellectual capital of the country, was in itself an exploration.

The first leg of the journey was an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to Paris.

Then came a second flight to Bamako, Mali, followed by a testing two-day 4 x 4 journey that included passing through the Sahara desert, after the group missed the only scheduled flight to Timbuktu due to some delay in protocol arrangements.

The group consisted of a historian from UCT, Dr Shamil Jeppie; curator Alexio Motsi; archivist Dr Graham Dominy; the deputy director-general in the department of arts and culture Themba Wakashe, and the head of preservation at the National Library, Douwe Drijfhout. It was December 2003 when the first group of local professionals traced the journey that Mbeki took in November 2001 when he was initially shown the manuscripts during a state visit.

With temperatures of about 35 degrees on their winter December days (temperatures can go up to 50 degrees in summer), the initial visit by local professionals to Timbuktu took the mystical utopian character of a far-away place that many European explorers have coined to explain the word Timbuktu.

In the early centuries when the city was known for its gold and salt produce, many European traders tried but failed to reach Timbuktu. As a result, most ended up defining the city in mystical terms or even documenting it as a far away or unreachable place.

The group of five conservation and preservation professionals set out on a fact-finding mission to inspect the priceless Arabic manuscripts of the people of Mali.

Indeed, for many African scholars, Timbuktu is a form of Canaan depicting the earliest documentation of African knowledge systems.

The rich legacy of manuscripts left by scholars from as early as the 1200s that are stored at various mosques and private and public libraries tell a different story about African knowledge systems.

These refute the widely-peddled perception that the greatest scholars in the world were from Europe.

Indeed, the power of Timbuktu and its neighbouring cities, which also practised the tradition of documenting their lives and discoveries in manuscripts and diaries, is encapsulated in an African poem that goes like this: "//Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom come from Timbuktu.//"

It is said that there may be more than 700 000 manuscripts and diaries in Timbuktu and surrounding areas.

The Ahmed Baba Institute houses about 20 000 of these.

It was at the request of Mbeki - after his visit to Ahmed Baba Institute - to start a co-oporative project between locals and Malians to restore and preserve the manuscripts - that the five professionals undertook this trip.

Motsi, a former book-binder from Zimbabwe who has since settled here and head curator of the project, recalls how seeing the manuscripts when they finally reached the Ahmed Baba Institute was akin to a religious experience.

"I am used to seeing valuable manuscripts like that locked up and sealed in protective glass cages. When I saw thousands of such rare manuscripts that I had to blow dust to see the caligraphy on the pages at Ahmed Baba, I was filled with a sense of wonder."

The National Library, where Motsi once worked before he joined the National Archives as the head curator, had 114 medieval manuscripts from Europe.

To be faced with the original literary heritage of African history humbled Motsi.

"Being there was like being born into a new world, to identify myself with something of this value. I was proud to be African.

"The old manuscripts were bound with the same high quality of standard that I had seen of European medieval rare books," said Motsi, adding that the excitement was more over the content from those manuscripts.

He said seeing those manuscripts strewn all over rooms and office at Ahmed, he was also awed by the work that it would take to conserve just one manuscript.

Restoration is about making something old look new. Conservation is about stopping priceless documents from losing quality.

The Timbuktu manuscripts needed to be conserved. The expertise of the archivists included making suggestions on the type of treatment the covers and pages would need. Some manuscripts were brought to South Africa and five Malian nationals from the Ahmed Baba Institute were trained.

The five have since been in the country - for two months at a time - three times and can now make protective covers for the old manuscripts.

The manuscripts include recordings and interpretations of the Quaran, Prophet Mohamed's teachings and prayers, documents on mathematics, astrology, law, poetry, medicine, sciences, literature, and many other teachings of the time.

Through the manuscripts, Motsi discovered how West Africans interpreted their own Arabic languages as one of the Arabic scripts on the manuscripts has a distinctly African flavour.

The training of the Malian locals is beginning to reap positive results. The five transfer their skills to another group of seven back home to prepare for the task of restoring the thousands of manuscripts.

The Timbuktu project has been adopted as a presidential initiative and Nepad's first cultural project and enjoys the support of the African community of Indian descent whose business community has pledged to raise funds to make the project a success. The second part of the project will include building a centre that will be adequate to house rare archival materials and local businesses have already gone to Mali on a fact-finding mission to assess the requirements for this project.

At a fund-raising dinner earlier this week, R3 million was donated by the business community and handed to Mbeki, who described the initiative as "a project that will add enormously to the renaissance of our continent".

The president said the initiative was launched to ensure the manuscripts would not be lost to illegal traffic so that such a critical part of African history would not be allowed to die.

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From: http://www.news24.com/City_Press/Features/0,,186-1696_1809722,00.html