Monday, February 12, 2018

Reading Journal: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu


By Joshua Hammer
Simon & Schuster
2016

This is what I knew off hand about Mali:  That Ali Farka Toure is/was from there.  I started listening to his music- back when it was called “world music” when I used to frequent SOB’s with Christine. I liked the music, but never really researched the people who made the music.

This is what I knew about Timbuktu: a remote location often compared to bum-fuck, as in I never see them anymore, they moved out to Timbuktu…or they moved out to bum-fuck.  Sad western education.
Africa is a continent, not a country, and must be reminded of often, even if it is a common slip of the tongue, and we should know better.  So I did not know much about Timbuktu.

As I wrote in my Holiday card this year, we are destined to repeat our horrible histories, and this book really proves that point. 

500 years before the Nazis destroyed books there was a highly civilized literate society in Timbuktu. The books that were being destroyed were not just paperbacks with risqué materials in them, nor even  printed Gutenberg style books.  The books we are talking about were the hand scribed and meticulously illuminated one of a kind books, and these books were hidden in ditches, holes dug in the desert sand, in caves and people‘s backyards to be hidden from the religious madmen, it’s always religion that creates stupidity isn’t it?.  Imagine digging out  a 13th century illuminated manuscript in your backyard.

page 212
Timbuktu as a paragon of moderation and intellectual ferment that had fallen victim to a once-in-a- millennium conflagration.  Timbuktu had witnessed the killings of scholars by the Emperor Sunni Ali in the 1300s, the rise of the anti-Semitic preacher Muhammed Al Maghili in the 1490s, the edicts of King Askia Mohammed banning and imprisoning Jews during that same decade, and the implementation of Shariah law in Timbuktu by the jihadis in the early and mid-1800s.  …constant state of flux, periods of openness and liberalism followed by waves of intolerance and repression…anti-intellectualism, religious purification, and barbarism had coursed through the city repeatedly over the preceding five centuries.”

Those in power rewrite history to make their point, progress their ideas, make excuses for their bad behavior.  The white men who kidnapped a culture of Africans to become enslaved lied to themselves, and those around them to justify their actions.
 for example:
Western white men declared that “Negroes….to be naturally inferior to the whites, no ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences”   

Hegel (remember that philosopher we were forced to read in 1st year philosophy class?) said “Africa had no indigenous system of writing, no historical memory, and no civilization.  (they are) Unhistorical, Undeveloped."

The untrue absence of books and literature in the African continent proved that Negros were savages, and thus ok to enslave them.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu knew a different fact.  One man in particular, Abdel Kader Haidara, was entrusted with his fathers library of manuscripts, a large portion of them were illuminated scribed texts on astronomy, medicine, and other sciences that were written 1300-1400s.  Haidara and his colleagues knew that if these books were destroyed, the history of his country would be as well.   

I learned a lot about this part of the world, all the fucked up shit that happens with religious fundamentalists, the conflict of ideals within each religion and the amazing history of one African nation, and made me think what else was going on in the vast continent.  This amount of scholarly research, and literacy couldn’t have been isolated only to Mali.  There must have been so many other pockets of civilization that existed and probably wiped out before Europeans could discover it. 
Sad, so sad. 

 

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