Decaying Manuscripts Reveal Africa's Literate History

As John O. Hunwick gingerly leafs through the magnificent folios of a collection of 600-year-old manuscripts, tiny flakes of ancient parchment crumble away, and a portion of West Africa's literate history settles in the scorching desert sand beneath his feet. He is standing in the courtyard just outside the library of Abdel Qader Haidara, an Islamic scholar whose family's collection of 5,000 beautifully illuminated documents dates back centuries.

The decaying documents provide rich textual evidence of West African history and culture -- and much of the evidence challenges Western beliefs about the region.

Manuscripts like Mr. Haidara's, as abundant as the gold that helped enrich this city in the 13th century, could start "a revolution in the field of African studies," says Mr. Hunwick, a pioneer of the field and a professor of African history at Northwestern University. But without the resources to catalog and preserve the manuscripts, or scholars to translate and study them, West Africa's intellectual legacy risks being swallowed by the shifting sands of the Sahara.

Though this "lost city" has been in decline since the late 1500s, when Moroccan troops invaded and destroyed the Songhai empire, Timbuktu was once West Africa's Mecca -- its commercial, cultural, religious, and intellectual heart. Blue-turbaned Tua-regs and nomadic Arab traders traversed the Sahara with precious cargo on camel caravans. The city's estimated 100,000 residents, made wealthy by that commerce in gold, ivory, kola nuts, salt, and slaves, included some 25,000 students and scholars, who formed small circles of learning in mud-brick mosques. Prominent scholars in those academies certified their students to teach particular books or disciplines, continuing ancient Islamic traditions of learning and scholarship.

"There generally tends to be the view that Africa is a continent of oral tradition or the continent of song and dance -- that this isn't a continent that has an intellectual tradition of its own," says Mr. Hunwick. But while only a small minority of West Africans were literate, Mr. Hunwick and other scholars are studying documents that clearly demonstrate that the culture was not entirely oral. Manuscripts on astronomy, Islamic mysticism, medicine, and theology reveal "an intellectual tradition that few people believed could have existed in West Africa," he says.

"It's a revolutionary concept for many occidental communities that there is a literate history in Africa," says Stephanie Diakite, an American scholar who advises the Malian government on the manuscripts. "When much of Europe was in its Dark Ages, Africa was recording its literate history," she says.

German and French explorers knew about some of the manuscripts as early as 1850, and many of those documents were translated by French scholars. Relatively few extant works have been translated into English, however, and assumptions that West Africa lacked a written history still abound, even among some scholars. That dismissiveness, and what many see as the inherent racism behind it, helped to justify colonial empires, exploitation of natural resources, pilfering of manuscripts, and traffic in human cargo.

"There are in excess of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that have not yet been edited, and any peek at these will help shed light on ... development of the whole region," says Salih Altoma, a professor emeritus and former chairman of the department of Near Eastern languages and cultures at Indiana University at Bloomington, former director of its program in Middle Eastern studies, and former member of its African-studies program. "Things will change dramatically in terms of our understanding of the region."

Treasures of Wisdom

Only 4,000 people now live in Timbuktu, but the city still radiates the magic and mysticism that for centuries attracted some of the Islamic world's best minds. That tradition of scholarship was so ingrained that even today, proverbs evoke an illustrious past: "Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu."

The city's treasures of wisdom, though, are not cataloged in any single library, but stashed away in assorted boxes and animal-skin containers. One collection -- the Ahmad Baba Center, assembled in 1973 with the help of Unesco -- contains about 10,000 manuscripts, but they are in disorder. An estimated 80 to 100 family collections of manuscripts exist in Timbuktu alone, containing manuscripts from as far back as the 12th century. They are written primarily in Arabic, which was the dominant language in the region at the time the writings were created, but which is today spoken by few here who are not scholars or clerics. The documents provide a level of historical detail that is beginning to give scholars a tangible sense of how medieval African life functioned.

Mr. Hunwick, who learned Arabic in Somalia in the 1950s during a stint with the British army, has lived and breathed this continent's history for 40 years. He has translated from Arabic one of the principal histories of West Africa (the Ta'rikh al-Sudan or History of the Blacks) written by the 17th-century Timbuktu scholar al-Sa'di. In 1964, Mr. Hunwick established the Center of Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan, in Nigeria, where he was teaching. It was one of the first contemporary attempts to chronicle the Arabic manuscripts of West Africa.

Nearly 40 years later, a mere 1 or 2 percent of the manuscripts have been translated, and Mr. Hunwick is one of only a handful of Western scholars working to decipher West Africa's Islamic history. "He's one of the few people who has the competence to work with these manuscripts at a profound level," says Bruce Hall, a Canadian Ph.D. student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who is using the manuscripts to conduct research on how local identities changed under colonialism.

Scholars of Africa focus on oral history, and "these documents don't fit well into those sorts of paradigms or the kind of training people have and the advising you get in the larger field of African history," Mr. Hall says.

Moreover, the language is a barrier. "There are relatively few Africanists who can critically read Arabic," Mr. Hunwick explains. Most scholars of Africa concentrate almost exclusively on French or English as colonial languages, and Arabists tend to focus on North Africa and the Middle East.

In an attempt to remedy that, Mr. Hunwick created the Institute of Islamic Thought in Africa at Northwestern two years ago; it is the only center at an American university that is dedicated to the history of Islamic culture in sub-Saharan Africa.

Western scholars are also finding manuscripts written in African vernacular languages like Bornu, Songhai, and Fulani using the Arabic script. That demonstrates, contrary to conventional wisdom, that Africans had the ability to write their own languages long before Europeans came and taught them the Latin alphabet, Mr. Hunwick says.

A 'Humbling Experience'

For those few Western scholars who have made the trek here, the experience can be a personal and professional epiphany. Despite the debilitating heat, lack of infrastructure, and utter isolation from the better-known world, the desert's mystical tradition inspires. "You could spend a lifetime in a very small area and never get to the bottom of these manuscripts. There is no bottom, and that's a profoundly humbling experience," Mr. Hall says.

Indeed, it will take lifetimes to examine West Africa's history. "This is not even a drop in the bucket," says Ms. Diakite, the ministry adviser who has lived in Mali since 1978 and has personally surveyed 300,000 manuscripts.

Until two years ago, Mr. Haidara's family collection was stored in a hodgepodge of trunks and boxes in his home. Now though, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Haidara family collection rests safely in a library built for that purpose, amid an assemblage of mud houses and sand streets. Two-thirds of the 5,000 manuscripts have been cataloged, and the Al-Furqan Foundation of Islamic Heritage, in London, has published a three-volume guide to the collection. Mr. Haidara hopes to acquire additional funds to translate the documents into English and French so they can be studied by more scholars.

One of the strengths of Mr. Haidara's collection is its concentration on the commercial and legal aspects of the trans-Saharan slave trade. "Some of the best scholarship on slavery dismisses the role of Africans' ideas and knowledge" about slave control and slave resistance, says Jeremy Berndt, a Ph.D. student from Northwestern. He and Mr. Hunwick hope that the documents in Mr. Haidara's collection will show how slavery was practiced in Africa and what it meant to the social system here. "The possibility of rewriting history by working with these manuscripts is very great," says Mr. Hunwick.

Finding and getting access to other private collections can be a laborious task, requiring as much diplomacy as detective work and talent. Mr. Berndt is examining Islamic culture and politics in the late 1800s and early 1900s, focusing on how local social and political changes under colonial rule shaped Islamic intellectual developments. He is basing his work on family collections of manuscripts that he discovered in the poor and isolated village of Gimbala, in eastern Mali. It took him months of living there and learning the local African language and asking before elders began revealing their collections for him to examine.

Working in a remote village on documents without indexes can be frustrating, yet unlocking the secrets of the Timbuktu manuscripts is an obsession for the scholars here. There is always the allure of coming across a document that will alter history, since no one is sure what exists. No comprehensive survey has been done.

"I think there are a number of manuscripts dealing with fields we don't even know about, since we don't have full accounts of lots of libraries," says Mr. Hunwick. The scholarship of Islam in Timbuktu wasn't limited to Koranic recitation; it encompassed huge tracts on Sufism or Islamic mysticism as well as treatises on Islamic law, philosophy, logic, and the Arabic language.

The marginalia in the manuscripts are occasionally richer sources of information than the documents themselves. In one 16th-century text Mr. Hunwick surveyed, he noticed a rare description of what was apparently a meteor shower: "In the year 991 [1583 A.D.] in God's month of Ragab the Goodly [August] after half the night passed, stars flew around the sky as if fire had been kindled in the whole sky -- east, west, north and south. It became a mighty flame lighting up the earth and people were extremely disturbed by that. It continued until after dawn."

Rescue Mission

Such historical gold mines will be lost if scholars and the Malian government do not intervene to save them. Ms. Diakite has obtained several hundred thousand dollars in foundation support and foreign aid to help the government document what exists, preserve it, and train researchers.

"The importance of this corpus has been so unrecognized, this is an unresearched body of work essentially," she says. "It's a tremendous resource to have, for Africans to be able to refer to their own history, rather than someone else's, to design their future."

A large part of Ms. Diakite's work is devoted to helping the government of Mali develop a core body of academics, through the University of Mali, to begin developing local scholarship on the manuscripts. "The time has come for these select Western scholars to move into a different role, to mentoring African scholars so Africans themselves can investigate the corpus, research it, and put it in their own service," she says.

Providing young Malian scholars with the critical training isn't easy. And getting them to the United States to study in American universities is even more difficult, since French is their academic language. That means that Malians would need to speak four languages to pursue advanced studies and research in the United States.

Meanwhile, time is running out. There is currently no law in Mali to protect literary patrimony, so nearly all of the manuscripts here can legally be sold or removed from the country. In August, Ms. Diakite convened an international symposium in Bamako, the capital, which began drafting legislation to close that loophole and created an inter-African organization for the preservation and research of the manuscripts.

While the Sahara's stifling heat consumes the humidity and aids in the natural preservation of the documents, fire, insects, and rare flash floods have all inflicted their damage over the centuries. Mishandling and poor storage techniques have also diminished this historical trail of ink, rendering many thousands of manuscripts into precious particles of dust. Digitization projects are under way, both through Northwestern's institute and Ms. Diakite's work with the Malian government, to preserve the content of the manuscripts and make it readily available to scholars. Ms. Diakite is also trying to set up a lab where conservation services will be available to private collectors.

For African-Americans as well, the contents of these library collections are meaningful. Many of the slaves taken to the United States were literate. One of the earliest slave autobiographies was written in Arabic, in 19th-century North Carolina by a West African slave named Omar ibn Sayyid. "It's especially significant for African-American communities that they be able to associate themselves with this advanced level of civilization," says Ms. Diakite. "Much of our educational system in the U.S. reinforces amongst African-Americans that they come from illiterate civilizations."

As Mr. Hunwick wrestles with the sun's mid-afternoon cruelty and the thick, sand-choked air, he acknowledges that his remaining time to work with these manuscripts is evaporating. Two years ago, the 62-year-old scholar suffered a debilitating stroke that left him partially paralyzed.

"My aim is to create the basis for young scholars to be interested in working on this material. I am now getting to the end of my academic career, but I want to open the path for the coming generations, to encourage students to learn Arabic as part of African history," he says. "I can only just light the fire and get things going. If I can do that, it will be my satisfaction."