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.
No comments:
Post a Comment