Copyrighted material of the author

ILCAA Joint Research Project
How to Write African History―New Perspectives and Methods
Research Institute for Languages and Culture of Asia and Africa
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
May 24, 2013

The History of Books, Libraries and Reading in West Africa
Shamil Jeppie
Institute for Humanities in Africa (Huma)
University of Cape Town

Since Mali, and particularly northern Mali where Timbuktu is situated,
has been and remains in the international news let me briefly talk about
the situation there, as best as I have been able to gather information fromthere, before presenting you with a book collector from Timbuktu.
The Oxford English Dictionary “word of the year” for 2012 was“omnishambles;” and it could have been coined with Mali 2012 in mind forthrough last year and into 2013 it has been a period of persistent military
disruptions, deep political confusion in the capital, Bamako, and continued
hardship for the majority of the population. From virtually every
perspective it has been a mess: from the massacre in Aguelhok at the startof 2012 through a coup d’etat, the changes in government, a military
without a vision and soldiers without a sense of service, small bands ofrebels able to take more and more territory, destruction of historicmonuments, moving around of manuscript collections, and then urgently
calling on the ex-colonial power to save the country from further shambles.
Most of my friends and colleagues are usually based in Timbuktu, about
800km or 500 miles away from the capital. Some may not originally comefrom Timbuktu but have found themselves there because of language andresearch skills that allow them to work in the libraries that have emergedin that town. When a group of rebels called Ansar Dine took over the town
in the first half of 2012 there was an exodus from the town by bus andboat and my colleagues left with their families to Bamako and from there
to their original villages or hometowns. But other colleagues stayed on.
There were a few who managed to go in and out and brought out parts of
their manuscript collections and external hard-drives to the relative safety
and security of the capital.
We stayed in touch with those who had relocated to Bamako.
Communication lines with Timbuktu soon broke down. But we were ableto put together stories from people in Bamako who got news
intermittently from within Timbuktu. We managed to bring to Cape
Town one colleague who spent a few weeks with us. In this age of hyperfast information flows the slow and complicated routes to get a hint ofnews gave us a sobering perspective on connectivity when mobile phones
and the Internet are no longer viable means of communication.
The Ansar Dine’s early campaign of tomb destruction clearly highlighted
their specific theo-ideological tendency. We did sense over the past few
years that there was a growing presence of these Wahhabi/Salafi types inthe town. But they kept to themselves. A few of them may have joined theinvading victorious Ansar Dine when they arrived in town. Marching toknock down the tombs of the holymen of Timbuktu was probably what
they had wanted to do for a long time. But when they started they madethemselves immensely unpopular. They had to go on showing that they
were serious about destroying these structures because people must havecontinued with their ways, visiting the saints and visiting the cemeteries,
possibly as ways of resisting the imposition of the new strictures by men
with guns but no religious, spiritual or moral authority among them.
There was no immediate threat to the storerooms of the libraries. Yet theowners locked up, hid their materials and left town with some of theirmost valuable manuscripts. They informed us to stop communicating with
the international media about the libraries and remove articles dealing
with this issue from our website. Our fear initially was not about bookdestruction. We were worried about neglect and mishandling. The Ansar
Dine was trying to establish a little state in Timbuktu so their concerns
were defending the town against counter-attack and capture by thegovernment. Of course, despite a coup d’etat to protect the territorial
integrity of the Malian state, for ten months the Malian army neverengaged militarily with the rebels. So Timbuktu was left alone and therebels went about attempting to establish their dream shariah city-state.
Deciding on the lawful and the prohibited status of manuscripts held in
the libraries was never going to be a priority even though many items
among the collections are anathema to the views of the Ansar Dine; there
are texts of sufi poetry, liturgies, and prose by leading sufi masters fromthe region.
In this context, attacking a tomb with hoes is a much more public andspectacular act than tearing-up or burning a text in a library. We hopedthat they were illiterate and uninterested in books, as they seem to havebeen. But we have been told that materials did disappear and were
probably stolen from the major state archive, the Ahmad Baba Institute.
We are waiting for details about the estimated number of items that weretaken or destroyed. However, no library or archive was attacked andrazed to the ground as the French marched into Timbuktu and the rebels
fled, as was reported by Sky and Reuters and other news sources. There
was a need for a compelling story to broadcast to the world, a bonfire of2manuscripts was to be it. But it did not happen. The locals had takensome precautions. Hiding materials and moving them elsewhere werepossibly ways of preservation from earlier episodes of conflict and troublein Timbuktu. They appreciate a solid building to house their texts – anarchive in the conventional sense - but they appear to have rememberedalternatives, which included the mobility of manuscripts in metal cases; it
has made me think that through the history of the wider region there is along history of the “mobile archive.” The wooden box or metal case as anarchival repository offers security and is movable.
II
I want to turn now to look at how handwritten books and other written
matter moved across the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea andthe Sahel with Timbuktu one among many points of book composition andcollection along the way.
I have been reflecting for some years now on how Timbuktu came to haveso many manuscript collections. There are many myths about the place. Is
the steady appearance of manuscripts over, say, the last two decades
another mirage? Timbuktu is correctly associated with the great 16th
century scholar Ahmad Baba, a prolific author, and with the 17th century
large Tarikhs (Chronicles) of Sa’adi and Ka’ti or Ibn al-Mukhtar. But how
did libraries and such substantial manuscript collections come to beconstituted? There are some external remarks about books and libraries
since the observations of Leo Africanus (Hasan bin Muhammad alWazzan) in his Descrizione dell’Africa (completed by 1520 but only
published in 1550)1 that books were more valuable than gold in Timbuktu;
but there are no known records which directly reflect the making of afamily or local book collection.
I stumbled upon the name of Ahmad Bul’araf in almost every conversation
with researchers at the main state archive in the town, the Ahmad Baba
Institute library, and many of the custodians of the smaller familycollections, which now number around two dozen.
Bul’araf died in September 1955 in Tombouctou when Mali was not yet
independent but part of French West Africa. A major part of the legacy left
to his family was his large library of manuscript-books, letters, andprinted works. Could the passion for collecting of this twentieth-century
figure offer a way to imagine at least elements of earlier traditions ofcollecting in the region? Whatever the case, his story is worth telling for
its own sake.
Aḥmad bin Mbarak bin Barka bin Muḥammad Bul‘arāf al-Taknī2 was bornin 1884 at Guelmīm in the Sūs region in southwestern Morocco. Aroundthe time he was thirty years old he left his birthplace and moved further
southward. He went first to a location in Senegal then to the learned townof Shinqīt in present-day Mauritania.

3When exactly he left Guelmīm, where and for how long he lived in“Senegal” and when or why he moved on from there are all still unclear.3
We know that there was a general economic decline in the Sus region, andin Guelmim in particular, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
which drove its inhabitants out.
Shinqīt was a town recognized for its many distinguished scholars and hemet many learned men there. Here he sat with them and, it would appear,in these scholarly circles he was initiated into the more advanced aspectsof Mālikī fiqh (jurisprudence) and other disciplines. It is still unclear at
whose feet he sat, whose homes he frequented or how much time he spent
in sessions listening to teachers.
Trading opportunities led him further South to Timbuktu. The routes
between the Sūs and Timbuktu via settlements in-between were among
the established trans-Saharan trade routes. Camel caravans would over amatter of weeks or months transport various items of trade, traders andalso scholars over these vast spaces. His migration southward reflects alarger migration in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century by people
from various parts of the Maghrib to the French-controlled territories ofWest Africa.
Timbuktu had been taken by the French in 1893. Bul’araf arrived therearound a decade later, in 1904. This is where he started his bookcollecting and trading about three years later. It appears that he would
never return even to visit his birthplace in the Maghrib. I assume that hetravelled out of the town as a trader but I have nothing to show how far
out of the town or where he went. From what I have read he appears tohave been rather immobile and yet at the same time impressively wellconnected to people thousands of Kilometres away in every direction of thecompass. He maintained contact with merchants, scholars, and bookcollectors or dealers he had met or heard about and made new contacts
through writing letters. Over the years he kept up a regularcorrespondence with growing numbers of businesses and scholarly
contacts in distant places, as I shall show below. His capacity to reachscholars and scribes and then enter into a correspondence with them wasa great and enduring skill. This was an important means of developing
his book collection. This was necessary for his business but I would argue
that it was his passion for books that led him to develop his network ofcontacts.
His life in Timbuktu is a story of the making of a manuscript-bookcollector. He was of course part of a family, a clan, and ethnic networks
such as the ‘ulamā’ (learned) networks.
As a bibliophile he accumulated works from great distances away from
Timbuktu. He bought works and commissioned copies. He had to concern

4himself with prices – of paper, of copying, of the postal service. For
instance, he wrote to booksellers located along the southern and eastern
shores of the Mediterranean: as far apart as Fes and Tangier, in the
distant West, through to Cairo and Beirut, in the East, to acquire works.
His network included writers of works, owners of texts, copyists of books,
intermediaries between authors and copyists, middlemen in the movementof the objects from point of origin to him; from point of production to
consumption and ultimately conservation. When he encountered theprinted book his network embraced booksellers and printers. I cannot say
when he first handled printed texts and whether it struck him as very
different to manuscript books but for the moment I shall keep this
distinction between the handwritten and the printed work. In thisextensive bibliophilic network he was a generator of material and a
medium for their circulation.
When Bul’araf arrived in Timbuktu it was under a relatively new Frenchadministration. Le Tricouleur was raised there at the end of 1893,
making it part of the Soudan Français (later to be declared part ofl’Afrique Occidental Française which was the same administration but
under a different name). There appears to be little impact or
encroachment of the colonial presence on his activity. It may even haveenabled his correspondence and network especially through the operationof the colonial postal service. The postal service in West Africa and acrossNorth Africa connected the cosmopolitan centres of the southern shores ofthe Mediterranean, with many booksellers and printers, and outposts like
Timbuktu. By the time Timbuktu was conquered the French had 14 Post
Offices scattered across the vast space of its Soudan colony. (This grew to
30 by the 1920s, according to one source.) But there were also what the
French journalist Felix Dubois called “second-hand” ones in various places,by which he meant a Petty Officer who ensured the departure and deliveryof letters in every town with a French presence. Dubois observed that once
a fortnight the French mail is meant to arrive and depart. It apparently
travelled at a rate of 35 miles per day.4
The postal service was crucial to the movement of correspondence andobjects such as Bul’araf’s books. Transport of the books could still havebeen with the camel caravans but there is evidence to show him concernedwith postal rates and especially with the length of time it took for items tomove between two points. According to a rather optimistic view, in theory
it took a week within West Africa and two weeks to or from Cairo;
although the mail between the latter and Timbuktu entailed long delays.
Apparently, the post first went to Paris then back into Africa. In any case,consideration of the UPS of the day – the colonial postal services - is
crucial in an exploration of the movement of books that I am considering.
There was always the possibility of attacks by bandits in the vast desert –a concern which is expressed in letters from the period - and the colonial
military presence ensured the relative safety of the movement of mail. As

5

a merchant he had many reasons to be concerned about the safety of theregion because his goods – such as tea, sugar, leather goods, and perhaps
paper - had to come and go.
Another indicator of his acceptance of the reality of political power in his
world was his adoption of the western dating system, alongside the hijri,in many of his letters at least those from the later period that I have seen.
He did interact with the colonial administration and they came torecognize him as a man of substance and potential ally. Among his own
papers there only remains correspondence between him and the secretaryof the Governor in the 1950s when the colonial administration was about
to withdraw from the region.
How much did Aḥmad Bul‘arāf himself write? He is the author of at least
27 works according to Mahmoud M. Dedeb, the leading contemporary
scholar of Timbuktu.5 In John Hunwick’s major compilation of West
African Arabic writing, Arabic Literature of Arabic (volume four), he isidentified as the author of 39 works.6 According to the index to the five
volumes that partly catalogues the manuscript holdings of the Centre dedocumentation et de recherches historiques Ahmad Baba (Cedrab) inTimbuktu around 150 written items are attributed to him.7 However, on
working through the volumes one discovers that this includes a number ofletters, some copies of the same items, apart from what would beconsidered his own works of scholarship. This figure is therefore an
overestimate; although more material may appear in the catalogues now
in preparation. Handlists in preparation from other libraries may also
have copies or original works by him. For instance, the Mamma Haidara
Library catalogue of its 8000 items has a few items under his name.8 The
major absence is a cumulative catalogue that incorporates all the Bul‘arāfmaterial including those that remain at the family home and those taken
by his descendants to Niamey in Niger.
(In the absence of a catalogue for his own library as it was at the time orimmediately after his death we have to therefore rely on other catalogues
and descriptions of this collection. Despite numerous efforts since Unesco’s
intervention, as part of the General History of Africa project, in the1960s,
existing catalogues barely touch the surface of the many layers of writtenmaterials. (For instance, existing catalogues sponsored by the Al-Furqan
Foundation in London on the whole is meant to only include scholarly
manuscripts (makhtutāt) not other documentary materials such as letters,
receipts (wathāiq); where the latter appear in catalogues they are there
not by design but co-incidence). There has been a burst of activity in thepast decade or so in Timbuktu to establish private libraries and there are
now at least two initiatives to organize the various private libraries.9 The
focus of all these efforts at establishing libraries has been on the
manuscript collections i.e. handwritten texts, their cataloguing and basic
conservation.)

6

The manuscript tradition has come to be considered the pride of the town’s
intellectual legacy. Bul‘arāf was the modern pioneer in this. His labours,of course, coincide broadly with the coming of print to the Sahel. (Fasalready had a lithograph press in 1865.) The overwhelming weight ofhandwritten books and other materials in the region easily lead one toforget the more than century of printing in the region, which came with
the French colonial presence. There appears to have been no aversion to
print; no fatwa against its use has been found.
Bul‘arāf’s manuscript copying project was not a reaction against
technological innovation and modernity. We have yet to find a text
questioning the permissibility of printing, or on the other hand, a text
promoting its uses. We have a record of Bul‘arāf’s library holding printed
books; among them was the major work of Arabic grammatical theory,
Kitāb al-Sībawayhi, two volumes, published in Paris in 1885.10
He also arranged for the printing of local works. 11 He went way beyond
the confines of Timbuktu in this pursuit. There is evidence of at least ten
such works printed under the patronage of his library.12 Tunis is the only
place of publication given. The apparent local preference for the
manuscript form, until very recently and even today, deserves further
reflection.13
In what could be considered his major work of scholarship, thebiographical dictionary, a kind of scholarly Who’s who? - ‘Izālat al-rayb
wa shakk wa al-tafrīt - he makes a place for himself. Under, “Aḥmad bin
Bul‘arāf al-Mūsū Alī al-Taknī” he is, at the time of the composition of thedictionary, 1359 Hijri (1940 AD), the compiler of 12 works.14 He was thenaround 76 years old. It seems highly unlikely that the rest of his writingcame after this – whether we number them at 150 or in the 30s. But whendescribing his own scholarly efforts in his own tarjamah (biographicaldictionary) he limits his contribution to scholarship as a compiler. He lists
his 10 compilations of fatwas of local scholars. He gathered the legal
opinions (fatāwa, nawāzil, ajwiba) on numerous matters from a host ofscholars. He also mentions two commentaries by himself, one on
abrogated ḥadīth by Ibn Jawzī, and another on a work by Ibn Ḥajar. He
confidently includes himself among the greats of his era and region, butthen modestly writes of himself as only a compiler. The entry on himself
is of average length (14 lines of printed text), not the shortest but neither
long. A number of entries are merely one line noting, for instance, thatsomeone was a writer of poetry or legal opinions. There are around 30
entries that are extensive and one covering twelve pages.15
The biographical dictionary at one level may be his only “original” work
but how should we read the copies of works he composed, or even those hecommissioned for copying by other copyists? I can foresee a good deal of
his hand and mind intervening in the copying process. There is someevidence for this. In a massive text – more than 800 pages - he himself

7finished copying in August 1937 on the last page he essentially claims that
his completed version is superior to the copy that he had copied! He
writes that he had looked far and wide for the original but when he could
look no further he fell upon a copy and proceeded himself to work with itto produce a second copy. He says that his passion for rare nawāzil(juristic opinions) led him to busy himself with copying it despite his
initial reluctance because the copy he used was so poor – the writing was
filled with errors (fasād). He writes that his copy is “more correct of thetwo copies as I carefully searched and reflected on it.” Yet he goes on hopethat he may still find the original.16
To be engaged in copying was therefore a way of producing a new work; it
was a creative act despite the intention of the copyist. A new “original”
was made in the process of making a copy. “The implications for reversing
the relationship between original and copy. . . are far reaching.”17 Copying
implies both imitation and plenitude, it is the one and the many,
replication and profusion, argues Nick Groom.18 We can therefore
understand the confusion by catalogers trying to classify his materials.
This way of working may not have been unfamiliar in Timbuktu. Copies
fill many catalogues and we may be missing originality by passing overthem because we spot yet another copy! (To dismiss Timbuktu as having
been merely a massive Xerox machine, as one western scholar was
reported in the South Africa media is not to understand all the things aphotocopier can do! These days there are 3D ones.). Moreover, from a art
history perspective, every copy in a collection is a unique manuscript.
Copying was also an act of conserving a work; the spirit, apart from mostor much of its primary content, lives in the copy.
Copying a work of 800 pages also raises a whole stream of questions
relating to the craft of writing and book production: how long did it take tomake this work? How many hours a day did he sit down (not at a desk, I
presume) to write? Did he divide the work up by chapter or number ofpages when timing his rate of composition? Did he set aside a stack of
paper aimed for this copy only?
The Bul‘arāf library has been reduced to a modest family collection hardly
recognized as a library of significance and barely able to keep going. One
estimate is that in 1945 it held 2,076 manuscripts, which had dwindled
down to 680 by 2002. Many of the items were donated by his descendants
to the state-run archive in Timbuktu and to the university library in
Niamey, Niger.19
When his library was still functioning it was a solid structure andreportedly had a manuscript conservation unit, a place for copyists and forchecking copies, and a unit for making covers for the loose leaves ofwriting (sewn bindings have never been used in Timbuktu).20 It isremembered as an inspiration for other archival ventures including as an
example of an indigenous initiative when the Unesco General history of8Africa experts visited Timbuktu in the late 1960s.21 His activities in thefirst half of the twentieth century is possibly the best recorded in theirown terms as to how an archive came to be constituted in the region. It
points to a precedent for the recent archival work in Timbuktu andperhaps to its past.
Many of the writers of the town are well-known but those devoted toreproducing the works of these famous writers have played an importantrole in bringing attention to their authors. Even today one could bereferred to a local copyist when requesting a copy of a ms. We have thenames of a number of the copyists in his network.22 Ahmad Bul’araf
would himself get down to copying a text when he was particularly
concerned with the subject of the manuscript, as is clear by now. This
seems to have been the exception however. He most often employedothers to copy for him. We know of the following men whom hecommissioned to copy works: Abdurahman bin Sidi Uthman, Muḥammad
al-Amīn bin Sidi Muḥammad bin Barik, Muḥammad al-Qununi, andAbdullah bin Aḥmad, Jadn bin al-Murābit. In 1929 Muḥammad al-Amīn
bin Sidi Muḥammad bin Barik copied a large work on Islamic law
numbering 400 folios. Three years later he completed a copy of a work on
grammar. In 1942 Abdurahman bin Sidi ‘Uthman copied a classical workof fiqh for him while in 1950 the same copyist sent him as a gift a copy hehad made of an index to a long didactic poem.
In a letter dated September 1945 to Sayyid Muḥammad, a descendant of
the great Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d.1811), he requests a copy of a work byanother descendant in the family line, Ahmad al-Bakkā’i (d.1865). He
believes that his honourable correspondent has a copy of the work because
it is cited in a text by the latter’s now deceased father. The owner of thework is located somewhere in a desert settlement called Tāku. In thework by Bakkā’i he responds to another scholar’s promulgation of theviews of the Tijaniyya sufi order. Bul’araf was not a Tijani; indeed fromthis correspondence he was interested in literature that refuted theirviews. Bul’araf seems to have been more sympathetic to the Qadiriyyahorder. Bul’araf says that there used to be copies of this work in the area
but they were all consciously destroyed. In his inquiry about this work heasks about the possibility of having it copied and sent to him. He inquires
about the cost of copying. He is prepared to pay for the copying and forthe paper to be used. It turns out that he has 100 folios of the work but hecannot fathom where they fit; they are random folios. A good part of theletter is his citations of the beginnings and endings of the various sections
he owns. Right at the end of the letter he mentions the title: Fath alquddūs fi jawāb ibn Abdullah Muḥammad Akansūs.23 An intermediary is
mentioned, a tailor, who would assist with transferring the completed
copy to him. We do not know whether he was successful in this request
and got to add this work to his collection. This is however an example of
Bul’araf’s work on his copying network: owner of a work in anotherlocation, request for a copy, offer to pay for copying and paper, identifying

9

intermediaries to transfer item or make sure it enters the postal systemthen operating in the region, take possession and add to collection.
His interest in the written word went seamlessly from manuscript to theprinted text. He wrote to Fas, Rabat, Marrakech, Tunis, Oran,
Constantine, Algiers, and Cairo for copies of printed books and magazines.
In an undated letter he writes to a Fes bookseller requesting a list withprices of the books he sells and asking especially for four titles including“the Tarīkh of Ibn Khaldūn.”24 His first letters to booksellers andmerchants date to 1911 when his correspondence shows him working witha merchant and bookseller in St Louis. In 1922 Bul’araf writes to amerchant in Kano, in the then British-ruled territories of Northern
Nigeria seeking some titles. He wrote to Muḥammad al-Sayyid al-Zāhiri
al-Wahrānī thanking him for a magazine (al-Wifāq) and asking aboutsome books. Another Algerian he wrote to, in 1922, was the editor of themagazine al-Shihāb seeking the exchange of books. For 1926 and 1927
there is an exchange with Dār al-Hilāl publishers in Cairo.
Bul’arāf’s network could be reconstructed in fair amount of detail because
the names of the people with whom he corresponded are available to us.
The vast majority of the correspondence is with men involved in some
aspect of the book: writing, copying, selling, and reading it. Among themwere Muhammad Yahya bin Muhammad Salim al-Walātī (a friend,
possibly from his days in Shinqīt), Tahir Tunisī, Zayn bin Abd al-Azīz, Alībin Bashīr, Salīm bin Ibrahim Samadar, Abd al-Qadir, Muh. Al-Amīn, AlMustafa bin Abd Allah al-Ribātī, Ahmad Salīm bin Muḥammad, Shaykh
Muh. Al-Mukhtar bin Ahmad bin Anbal al-Tshiti, Shaykh Bay bin A’mar,Muḥammad Mahmud bin Shaykh, Idrīs bin al-Mahdi, and Muḥammad bin
Umar Dukuri. They are meaningless as such but as work on Bul’araf’s
network continues more detail will be added.
Conclusion
I
Bul’araf’s activity as a collector connected him to men of similar pursuitsin Timbuktu and great distances from it. This may not have been uniquein the broader region or the longer narrative of Islamic intellectual ormaterial history but from our perspective today it was significant workover many decades to resuscitate and conserve a way of doing scholarship.
There was originality and authenticity in it even as it was explicitly
concerned with the supposedly unoriginal task of reproduction or copying.
To make copies or collect them were acts of imitation and transformation,
it entailed replication and proliferation.
Jurisprudence was the field he was keen on, not abstract or classicaltheories about the subject but the living jurisprudence of Timbuktu andthe wider region. Thus he personally copied the huge work of local juristic
opinions cited above and there are other examples of his engagement in10this field. This type of jurisprudence was like a living record his
contemporary society. His biographical dictionary was another kind ofrecord of his time and place. They are inestimable sources for writing thesocial history of the region.
The distances his original manuscripts or copies and new books had tomove were enormous. The objects of his passion literally had to travelfrom point to point, through a network of post offices and/or personal
contacts. The postal service and the movement of men on camelback andthe first generation automobile (and possibly the first aeroplanes) were
the technical machinery that animated this network. These machines of
networking and mobility have been neglected but they were indispensible
tools of communication especially over the distances we are considering.
For Africa, studies of book history and the formation of archives hardly
exist. Yet, there is ample material in a number of places on the continent –especially across the Sahel, from Senegal to Ethiopia, and down the East
African coast - to look at the contexts and long history of writing andreading into which men like Bul’arāf entered or which they animated andrevitalised. The world and network of the writer, collector, copyist – often
the same person – and his handwritten, handmade books have a very long
history in many parts of the continent and continues in various ways eveninto the digital age.
Bul’araf’s biography presents us with an opportunity to work in somedetail on this style of intellectual work, collecting and the formation of anarchive. We can pay some detailed attention to his books as artefact for
we have around 150 items of his collection in one archive and anotheruncatalogued body with his descendants in addition to a trunk ofenvelopes and price lists from publishers in North African cities. Even
though the data is most often fragmentary and partial - chronological
gaps and missing materials - many material aspects of manuscript andprinted book cultures could be studied: costs of paper, size of paper,
handwriting styles used, ink colours, which ones had leather covers,
signatures, copying costs and the politics of the colonial postal service andso on. Walter Benjamin reflected on unpacking his own library and his
enchantment as a collector of books. The serious collector is obsessive andhard for non-collectors to understand, says Benjamin. We cannot reallygrasp the meaning of collecting when the personal owner of a collection is
no longer around because there is so much individual history and memory
in each item of a collection. Yet, adds Benjamin: “ Only in extinction is thecollector comprehended.”25(Conclusion)II
I want to bring in that very powerful philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who used
the terms “Mediterranean Africa” and “European Africa” in his Lectureson the philosophy of world history. While Hegel’s “world history” is really11a concept and another way for him to write about Reason, he does bring in
empirical detail to make his case. The shoreline region of North Africa
until the Sahara does not belong to Africa but is part of Europe, says
Hegel. The further away from the shore the more into “Africa proper” onemoves and away from culture and civilization. The rest of the continent,
the large mass of land from the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope, has no
history; it is an “unhistorical continent, with no movement of developmentof its own.”26 It is not part of World History, does not share in universal
Reason, in other words.
This “inaugural thinker of the contemporary world,” (Jean-Luc Nancy)presented his first series of lectures on a “philosophical history of theworld” in late 1822. In these lectures, repeated and expanded in 1828 andagain just before his death in 1831, he summarized major aspects of his
philosophical system and its unfolding in time and space..27 He classifies
ways of approaching the past, gives further elaboration to his idea of thestate as the “realisation of spirit in history,” and offers a periodization anda schema of the world’s geography in relation to historical development.
For Hegel history arises in the East and moves westward and in thispassage across time and space it passes over Africa. Hegel easily dismisses
Africa because he says that it demonstrates no movement and therefore
experiences no temporal change. It is the “unhistorical continent.”
Almost two decades before Hegel offered his philosophy of world history
and dismissed the regions beyond the southern shores of theMediterranean an English traveller, James Grey Jackson, wrote an
account of his long travels in Morocco and has a concluding chapter on the“city of Timbuctoo,” which he never visited but he had heard about it andseen caravans leaving for it and coming from there.28 Jackson appears tobe quite meticulous in noting items of trade, coming into the port of
Mogador and leaving it; and also leaving for Timbuktu. Paper is among
the items imported into this region but he does not mention it among theitems leaving for Timbuktu. At the end of the century Dubois mentions
paper as commodity imported into the French Soudan.
But Jackson has two rather intriguing lines about libraries. He writes: “Ithas been said there is an extensive library at Timbuctoo, consisting ofmanuscripts in a character differing from Arabic. . . .” But he dismisses
this report only to add, as if to contradict this sentence: that there is a“state library” with Arabic, Hebrew, perhaps Chaldic books and probably
some translations of works originally in Greek and Latin! It is revealingthat he used the term library consciously twice here which is rarely usedamong travellers.
Other travellers discovered a few manuscript books and met key scholars
but did not use the word library. Leo Africanus was, of course, the mostglowing in his report about the status of books in Timbuktu. Ahmad
Baba’s collection of works numbered around1600 when he was captured

12and taken from Timbuktu to Marrakech in 1593. Between the time of
Ahmad Baba and Ahmad Bul’araf can we discern some patterns, points offamiliarity – local and regional – in the formation of book collections andlibraries? Scholars and collectors like Baba and Bul’araf are the heroes in
the region’s long and layered history of handwritten books; a history
which is too often overlooked and neglected. In this quiet, persistent, anddeliberate activity they forged ties across the vast space between the
Mediterranean and the Sahel.

1

See L.P. Harvey, “Leo Africanus and his Descrizione dell’Africa,” unpublished ms.,n.d.
2“Aḥmad Bul‘arāf” is the shortest form of a name that can extend in length and varyin different writings by and on him.
3
See Tahia Abou el-Farah, La présence Marocaine en Afrique de l’Ouest: cas duSénégal, du Mali, et de la Côte d’Ivoire (Rabat, Instiut des Etudes Africaines, 1997),
163 - 169
4
Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo the mysterious, translated by Diana White (New York:
Longmans, Green, and Co. 1896), 70.
5
Dedeb, “Ma‘alumāt”, 4 – 6.
6
John Hunwick. Arabic literature of Africa, vol. 4: The writings of western Sudanic
Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 53 – 57.
7
Librarians of the Centre, Handlist of manuscripts in the Centre de documentation etde recherches historiques Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu (London: Al-Furqan Islamic
heritage foundation, 1998), Vol. 5 & indexes.
8Abdelkader Mamma Haidara, (edited by Dr. Ayman Fuad Sayyid), Catalogue ofmanuscripts in the Mamma Haidara library (London: Al-Furqan Islamic heritage
foundation, 2000), Four volumes.
9
Savama-DCI was founded about five years ago and is led by Abdel Kader Haidara,
the founder of the highly organized and most successful private library in Timbuktu.
See Abdel Kader Haidara, “The state of manuscripts in Mali and efforts to preserve
them,” in Jeppie & Diagne (eds.), The meanings of Timbuktu, 265 – 269.
10
Dālī, Introduction, ‘Izālat al-rayb, 14 (Are these from the standard European
edition of Sibawyhi, Le live de Sibawaihi edited by H. Derenbourg, Paris 1881–9?)
11
According to one source, his library in fact had 6,039 printed items in 1945 andonly 900 by the time Ould Youbba, wrote his “Bibliothèque de Bula‘araf,” 3.
12
Dedeb, “Ma‘alumāt,” 6.
13
The scholar who wrote in praise of Bul‘arāf, Mahmoud Dedeb, has yet to convert toprint. All his works are handwritten and circulated in this form. His most recent workin our possession is a 355-page handwritten work, Kashf al-hā’il. He had it digitallyscanned for us.
14
Bul‘araf, ‘Izalat al-rayb, 81
15
On Muḥammad Yahya Salīm (1936), ‘Izalat, pp131 - 141

13

16

ms 1031 Al-‘amal al-mashkūr fi jam’ nawāzil al-Takrūr.
See Nick Groom, The forger’s shadow: How forgery changed the course ofliterature (London: Picador, 2002), 21 – 25.
18
Groom, Forger’s shadow, citing Terence Cave, 22.
19
Ismael Diadie Haidara and Haoua Taore, “The private libraries of Timbuktu,” inJeppie & Bachir, The meanings of Timbuktu, 271 – 275.
20
Dedeb, “Ma‘alumāt” 12 – 13.
21
Ould Youbba, “Biblithèque de Bula‘araf,” 1.
22
I am calling them copyists although “scribe” may be equally descriptive. The
Arabic word used is nāsikh in the materials and the catalogues.
23
See Hunwick, Arabic Literature of Africa, vol 4, p120, item 6.
24
Ms 8195 Ahmad Baba Institute25
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my library: a talk about book collecting,”
Illuminations: essay sand reflections (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 67.
26
Hegel, Lectures on the philosophy of world history, Appendix, 190.
27
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the philosophy of world history.
Introduction: reason in history, translated from German by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975).
28
James Grey Jackson, An account of the empire of Maroco and the district ofSuse . . . . (London: 1809), 257.
17

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