Entry #13

• Hammer, Joshua.  (2014)  "The Brave Sage of Timbuktu: Abdel Kader Haidara."  Nationalgeographic.com.
• Accessible online at http://bit.ly/1hdKVB3

Entry #6 of this History Log was about the Timbuktu's early history with libraries.  At the time, it reminded me of a book that I've been meaning to read, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer.  This is the article Hammer originally wrote about Haidara.  While this articles speaks on events less than a decade old, I believe it still ties into the class.

Just as in the previous entry regarding the Prussian music collection, Haidara oversaw the scattering of 350,000 manuscripts to "safe houses" in order to protect them from AQIM, the terrorist group who at that time had seized northern Mali.  I hope Haidara had better luck re-assembling his collection!  Haidara became a librarian to fill his father's shoes, who had been the head collector at the Ahmed Baba Institute.  Haidara would, after expanding the collection by 20,000 volumes, eventually leave the institute to build his family's archive (his father had also been a great scholar who had amassed his own personal library).  The former Libyan dictator, Qaddafi, attempted to purchase the family collection!  But Haidara turned the offer down, saying "...this isn't for me. This is the heritage of Mali, of a great nation. It's not for sale."

The purpose of Haidara's library to display Mali's rich intellectual history (as seen in Entry #6) and he  and his team rescued manuscripts from around the country, at great risk.  (Hammer tells the story of Haidara's nephew, who almost lost a hand for theft when he was discovered removing materials from a library within occupied territory.)  Again, I see the power the written word has on culture and the way librarians are working to diligently to preserve it because of its historical context.  It is argued in this article that the colonial conception that Africans had no written language was what led to the perception of a "subhuman position."  "So the presence of these books had high, high stakes, going back to the 18th century."

Here is the link to the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library's page through the Tombouctou Manuscript Project's site.