The Trunks That Left Timbuktu
When armed groups took Timbuktu in April 2012, the city's manuscript libraries were private, family-owned and largely uncatalogued. Over the following months something like 350,000 volumes were packed into metal footlockers and moved some nine hundred kilometres south to Bamako — by taxi, by bus and by pirogue, through checkpoints held by the people they were being hidden from.
The manuscripts were never in a national library, and that is the first thing to understand about how they survived. Timbuktu's written record sat in houses. Several dozen families held collections that had come down to them across centuries, kept in wooden chests and cupboards in ordinary rooms, and while a state institute had been buying and borrowing from them since the 1970s, most of the material was privately owned, unlisted, and known chiefly to the family that owned it. A conquering army looking for a library would have had to be told where to look.
On 1 April 2012 Timbuktu fell to Tuareg separatists and, within days, to the armed Islamist groups who pushed them aside. By the summer the mausoleums of the city's saints were being pulled down with pickaxes on the grounds that veneration of them was idolatry, and it was reasonable to assume that a body of writing full of Sufi devotion, astrology and legal argument would be next. What happened instead was a removal operation organised locally, financed largely from Europe, and executed by taxi drivers and boatmen.
What was actually in the libraries
The romantic version of Timbuktu — a city of scholars in a place Europe imagined as empty — is true enough to be worth stating plainly and misleading in its details. The collections run from roughly the thirteenth century to the twentieth, and they are not all rare or beautiful. They are working papers. Alongside the illuminated Qur'ans there is jurisprudence, grammar, astronomy, arithmetic used for inheritance calculations, medical recipes, poetry, letters, and a great deal of contract law: bills of sale, loan agreements, judgments in disputes between families. Some are in Arabic and some in African languages written in Arabic script — Songhay, Tamasheq, Fulfulde. Ahmed Baba, the sixteenth-century jurist the state institute is named after, was deported to Marrakesh after the Saadian conquest of Songhay in 1591 and complained that the 1,600 volumes seized from him were the smallest library in his family. That is the register: not a treasure hoard, but the paperwork of a literate society, which is far more useful to a historian and far harder to dramatise.
The plan, and the trunks
The man who organised the removal was Abdel Kader Haidara, who runs one of the family collections and who had spent years travelling the region for the state institute persuading other families to lend or sell. He knew, in other words, exactly where the material was, which nobody else did. The first phase was not evacuation at all: manuscripts were quietly moved out of the recognisable libraries into private houses inside the occupied city, packed into metal footlockers bought in the market — enough of them, fast enough, that the price of a footlocker in Timbuktu went up. Only later, as it became clear the occupation would not be brief, did the second phase begin: moving them out of the region entirely. They went south in cars and buses and on the backs of donkey carts, and they went down the Niger by pirogue through Mopti and Ségou, in consignments small enough that a stopped vehicle was a loss rather than a catastrophe. Roughly 2,500 lockers made the journey, and the couriers were mostly young men from the families who owned the contents. The money came from a mix of European foundations — the Dutch Prince Claus Fund among the earliest — a German government contribution, and, later, a crowdfunding appeal.
The security of the operation rested on a fact no army could have designed around: the only complete list of where the manuscripts were lived in the head of one man, and he was the one moving them.
What burned on 28 January 2013
France launched Operation Serval on 11 January 2013 and Timbuktu was retaken on the 28th. As the fighters left they set fire to part of the Ahmed Baba Institute — the modern, South African-funded building that had opened in 2009 after Thabo Mbeki made the Timbuktu manuscripts a set-piece of his African Renaissance argument. The first reports out of the city said the collection had been destroyed, and the wire copy went round the world in a day. It was wrong. Most of the institute's holdings had already been moved to Bamako; the loss was in the region of four thousand manuscripts, which is a real and permanent loss and is not the tens of thousands first reported. The correction travelled a fraction as far as the original claim, and it is still common to meet people who believe the libraries of Timbuktu burned. The buildings, which could not be packed into anything, were not so lucky: fourteen of the city's sixteen listed mausoleums had been pulled down in 2012, along with the sacred door of the Sidi Yahia mosque, and local masons rebuilt them in the same technique by July 2015. In September 2016 the International Criminal Court convicted Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi of directing that destruction and sentenced him to nine years — the first conviction anywhere at the ICC for the destruction of cultural property as a war crime in its own right.
A desert archive in a river city
Then came the problem nobody had time to think about during the emergency. Timbuktu is on the edge of the Sahara: hot, and for most of the year extremely dry, which is why paper survives there for six hundred years. Bamako is nine hundred kilometres south-west on the Niger, with a rainy season that runs from June into September and humidity to match. Manuscripts that had been stable for centuries were now sitting in a climate that grows mould and feeds insects, stacked in rented rooms in a city where the power fails. The response has been the unglamorous half of the story — dehumidifiers, acid-free boxes, cleaning, fumigation, trained staff, and a running electricity bill — and it is the half that needs money every year rather than once. Alongside it, digitisation: tens of thousands of volumes photographed page by page in partnership with the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library in Minnesota, and a further tranche imaged with Google in 2022, which puts the text out of reach of any future fire while doing nothing at all for the object.
Who owns them now
More than a decade on, the trunks are still in Bamako, and the reason is simply that the north is not safe. That has produced an argument with no comfortable answer. The manuscripts belong to families in Timbuktu, not to the Malian state and certainly not to any of the foreign institutions that helped pay for their removal; the collections are part of what makes Timbuktu Timbuktu, and a city that has lost its shrines, its festival and its visitors has now also lost its libraries to the capital. Against that: nobody wants to be the person who sent them back a year early.
What the whole episode demonstrates is narrower and more useful than the rescue-story version. Cultural property survives when the people who own it are the ones deciding, and when the decision can be made in days rather than by committee. No international convention moved a single trunk. A man with a list, a network of relatives and a supply of footlockers moved all of them, and the institutions arrived afterwards to help with the conservation, which is genuinely the part they are good at. The manuscripts are safe, unread by almost anyone, and in the wrong city. All three of those are true at once.