Timbuktu Manuscripts on show
7 November 2008
"Timbuktu: script and scholarship", an exhibition of around 40 ancient manuscripts from the collection of Mali's Ahmed Baba Institute, is currently on tour in South Africa - marking the first time these priceless, delicate manuscripts have left the windy sands of Mali.
The exhibition is on at the Durban Art Gallery until 16 November, before transferring to Johannesburg's Standard Bank Gallery from 21 November to 1 December. It has already travelled to Cape Town, Grahamstown, Pretoria and Bloemfontein.
Ancient African texts
The Timbuktu Manuscripts - or Mali Manuscripts - some of which date back to the 13th century, are Arabic and African texts that hark back to city's glorious past, when Muslim merchants traded gold from West Africa to Europe and the Middle East in return for salt and other goods.
South Africa has thrown its weight behind efforts to preserve the ancient documents, which are thought to hold the key to some of the secrets of Africa's history and cultural heritage.
Written in a variety of styles of Arabic calligraphy by scholars and copyists who were part of an African Islamic intellectual tradition centred in Timbuktu, the manuscripts have shattered the historical view of Africa as a purely "oral continent", pointing to the fact that Africa has a rich legacy of written history.
While most are in Arabic, some are in indigenous languages such as Songhai and Hausa, written using Arabic script.
The largest collection of manuscripts, numbering about 30 000, is housed in the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies, named after the famous 15th century Timbuktu scholar Ahmed Baba. The rest of the texts are housed in the private libraries of families in and around the city.
Some of the manuscripts are beautifully decorated with gold illumination and kept in finely tooled leather covers.
The exhibition includes manuscripts ranging in subject matter from religion to astronomy and mathematics, as well as history and literary forms. It also includes manuscripts covering legal judgements and commercial transactions that give a sense of the daily life of the citizens of Timbuktu.
South African involvement
The exhibition is part of the South Africa-Mali project initiated by former president Thabo Mbeki in 2002, following a visit to Timbuktu in 2001.
The project, a flagship cultural initiative of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), aims to conserve the collection at the Ahmed Baba Institute by building a state-of-the-art archive to house the manuscripts and training staff in their conservation.
The archive, being built with South African assistance, is nearing completion.
Speaking at the exhibition opening in Cape Town in September, Professor Toure, Mali's higher education minister, said the "vast and functional" building would have the temperature and humidity controls necessary to provide the correct conditions for preserving the manuscripts.
Long-since a symbol in Western popular imagination for remote and exotic destinations, Timbuktu 500 years ago was not only a wealthy trading port, but also a centre for academics and scholars of religion, literature and science.
'Sophisticated reading and writing'
The documents chosen for the exhibition date back to around the 16th century and cover a range of disciplines, including medicine, philosophy, mathematics, astrology and Islamic studies.
Mbeki, also speaking at the opening of the exhibition, said that "various kinds of writing materials and subjects" were covered by the documents on display, "revealing a multifaceted past of sophisticated reading and writing in West Africa, and reflecting a tradition of prodigious intellectual production."
South African academics, led by Shamil Jeppie of the University of Cape Town, are also involved in studying and deciphering the documents as they build a digital archive to complement the manuscript collection.
Dr Eltie Links, chairperson of the board of South Africa's Iziko museums – which helped to organise the exhibition along with Mali's Ministry of Higher Education - called the project the "real implementation" of the vision of someone who could see "far-off".
As a result, the world, its readers and its thinkers were now endowed with a largely unexplored intellectual legacy.
Links thanked the Malian authorities for allowing the precious manuscripts to come to South Africa, in an exhibition that will travel across the country, allowing South Africans to continue what Mbeki called a "trans-African engagement and conversation".
SAinfo reporter and BuaNews
Would you like to use this article in your publication
or on your website?
See: Using SAinfo material
