Review: Roland Allen on the Libraries of Timbuktu

How a polyglot destination for thirsty long-distance trade caravans became a centuries-old sanctuary for books

In the Netherlands, there are families who still hold onto the seventeenth-century friendship books of long-dead ancestors. They pull them out at Christmas, and admire the signatures, mottos, dedications, and drawings that connect them directly to the Dutch Golden Age. In England, a few dozen aristocratic libraries have survived the demands of death duty and plundering yankee collectors, and you may, if you’re admitted, marvel at yards of leather-bound incunabula and early modern tomes collected by titled bibliomaniacs during the flush Victorian years. To find any other place where today’s inhabitants take as much pride in their ancestors’ books, you must go to Timbuktu.

The world learned of these phenomenal literary archives in 2012, when they seemed to be on the point of destruction. Tuareg Islamist rebels, armed to the teeth, rolled into town in 4×4s unopposed and picked the most modern public building as their headquarters. From the brand-new library, spacious, well-appointed, and kept cool by thick walls intended to protect ancient paper from temperature fluctuations, they ran the city chaotically for a year, destroying scores of local monuments and keeping the locals in a state of fear. Their final act, before being driven back into the desert by the French military, was to burn the library’s manuscripts. This cultural vandalism was beamed to the world, yet another example of Islamist contempt for culture.

Fortunately, as the South African scholar Shamil Jeppie relates in his eye-opening account of a unique literary inheritance, it was a myth.