And Haidara’s manuscripts were precious for what they said more broadly about Africa’s history. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who visited Timbuktu and Haidara in 1996, explains that Hegel, Kant, and other Enlightenment philosophers contended that Africa had no tradition of writing, and therefore no history and no memory.
“And unless you have those, you are not a civilization, which was a pernicious argument that provided justification for the slave trade,” Gates said in a recent interview. “The absence of writing, of books, was seen as a reflection of the subhuman position of the Africans. So the presence of these books had high, high stakes, going back to the 18th century. Kant and Hegel and Hume did not know anything about this.”
Over nine traumatic months, Haidara and his team rescued 350,000 manuscripts from 45 different libraries in and around Timbuktu and hid them in Bamako, more than 400 miles from the AQIM-controlled north. There were many close calls, including one involving Haidara’s nephew, Mohammed Touré, a 25-year-old curator at the library. One night when he was leaving work with a trunk full of manuscripts destined for hiding, Touré came face-to-face with Oumar Ould Hamaha, one of AQIM’s most inflexible zealots.