The dysfunctional copy: “Mali Magic,” loss and the digital remake of the Timbuktu archive

ABSTRACT

In 2012, the manuscript collections of Timbuktu were feared to be at risk of destruction after rebel groups overtook the city. Rumours of the burning of the library and the destruction of thousands of manuscripts catapulted this archive into a discourse of “heritage in peril.” While the rumours were greatly exaggerated, they propelled the archives into new digitisation initiatives led by international organisations to preserve the archive from future loss. What this recent episode obscures, however, is the long history of loss, destruction and remaking that is constitutive of the nature of this archive. This contribution reflects on the integral makeup of this loss for the archive, underscoring its different modes – from the physical anatomy of the manuscripts themselves to colonial plunder, and independence-era archival reconstitution. At the same time, it highlights the generative aspects of loss in the Timbuktu archive, through an exploration of copying as a long-preferred mode of preservation and knowledge production, as well as the problematics of digitisation as the current chosen mode of preservation.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• loss
• heritage
• libraries
• Timbuktu
• manuscripts
• digitisation

Contextual background

In the immediate aftermath of the fire that destroyed the Jagger Reading Room and much of the African Studies print collections at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in April 2021, an overwhelming sense of loss prevailed in many quarters. Although this was not the only African archive to burn in recent times, it poignantly highlighted issues that resurface after every such incident. The library’s status as “the most important African Studies collection” on the continent was often emphasised, although as Lungisile Ntsebeza argues (2020), the meaning of African Studies at UCT itself is still highly contested and open to debate. This contestation can be traced to the very creation of the discipline of African Studies, and the role of Africans in the study of the continent, as discussed by Mahmood Mamdani (1996, 1998). This timely special issue, provocatively, asks us to consider the effects of treating loss as a fundamental condition of the archive and the consequences of this on its relationships with African Studies.

My case study focuses on the manuscripts of Timbuktu, which have become synonymous with the written tradition in sub-Saharan Africa over the past two decades, shattering colonial discourses on the lack of writing in Africa before the arrival of European colonialism. While acknowledged and recognised in some quarters, this “iconic archive” (Molins Lliteras 2020) is still largely ignored in mainstream academia, education and popular discourses on the African continent’s history and knowledge production practices. Like UCT, – and South Africa more generally – the Timbuktu archive’s role within African Studies is also highly contested. In March 2012, the manuscript collections of Timbuktu were feared to be at risk of destruction after rebel groups overtook the city. Rumours of the burning of the library and the destruction of tens of thousands of manuscripts upon the “liberation” of the city in 2013 made international headlines, catapulting this archive into a discourse of “heritage in peril.” While the rumours were greatly exaggerated – many collections were transported from Timbuktu to Bamako through a rescue operation organised by the custodians of the Timbuktu libraries, while others remained safely hidden in Timbuktu, leaving a few thousand manuscripts unaccounted for – they propelled the archives into new digitisation initiatives led by international organisations to preserve the archive from future loss.

This contribution analyses the most recent of these digital projects, Google Art & Culture’s “Mali Magic” theme, and offers an overview of the different digitisation initiatives of the Timbuktu archive, highlighting the problematics of digitisation as the current chosen mode of preservation against loss in the archive. I argue that the contemporary focus on digitisation and the current episode of loss in the archive obscures the long history of loss, destruction and remaking that is constitutive of the nature of the Timbuktu archive. Loss is integral to the makeup of the archive: on the one hand, through the physical anatomy of the manuscripts themselves and their uses in knowledge transmission and production practices, and, on the other, through the vicissitudes of their place in the historical events of the region. At the same time, I highlight the generative aspects of loss in the Timbuktu archive through an exploration of copying as a long-preferred mode of preservation, knowledge transmission and production.

“Mali Magic:” Google Arts & Culture’s digital project

In March 2022, Google Arts & Culture launched a new theme, “Mali Magic,” as part of its ever-expanding digital collections.¹ The theme is intimately linked to the fear of loss of Malian heritage, and the digitisation project is presented as a solution to safeguard against loss, as hinted by the subheading: “The great legacy of Mali and the people’s quest to preserve it.” The theme is subdivided into four subthemes, “The Four M’s of Mali: Manuscripts, Music, Monuments & Modern Art,” which are “flourishing against all odds,” against a background of unimaginable loss, highlighted repeatedly in the written, video and sonic offerings.

As one has come to expect from Google, this digital project is impeccably and engagingly designed, combining animation, videos, film and sound contributions expertly crafted into a variety of high-quality offerings. A cutting-edge creative company, B-Reel, which has done work for brands such as H&M, Nike and Carolina Herrera, created the striking animation.² To add to the popular allure, several celebrities are involved with the project, including a video with Morgan Freeman “telling the story of the Timbuktu Renaissance.”³ The theme was produced in collaboration with the following organisations, which have left the imprint of their particular discourses and agendas on the overall project: the NGO SAVAMA-DCI, a Malian organisation whose aim is “the preservation and enhancement of the Timbuktu Arabic manuscripts that constitute the Islamic cultural heritage of Mali, Africa’s collective memory and part of the World Heritage,”⁴ and which was responsible for the smuggling operation of the Timbuktu manuscripts to Bamako in 2012; the Timbuktu Renaissance, a platform in alliance with the Brookings Institution and the Government of Mali, which “aims to leverage Mali’s, and in particular Timbuktu’s, rich culture and heritage to promote tolerance and jump-start wealth creation and resilience;”⁵ the NPO Instruments 4Africa, formed to “reinforce traditional music and the arts in West Africa … [and to] promote time-tested cultural activities that support traditional values of tolerance and peaceful conflict resolution;”⁶ UNESCO, which counts Timbuktu and its manuscripts among its World Heritage Sites and has been involved with preservation efforts in Mali for decades;⁷ 4D Heritage, a digital technology company that uses virtual reality models and experiences to re-imagine “the heritage experience, pioneering the use of agile, non-invasive technology to monitor and document fragile ecosystems and endangered sites;”⁸ and finally, the Zamani Project, a research group within UCT, which undertakes “data collection and analysis, heritage communication, and training and capacity building for experts and the public so that they have access to high-quality spatial heritage data, and can learn from, conserve and protect heritage.”⁹ Conspicuous by their absence, however, is the participation of scholars and researchers, particularly on the subtheme of “Manuscripts,” which will be the focus of my analysis. Nevertheless, although I examine this subtheme specifically, many of the arguments can be extended to the other subthemes, as certain threads run throughout the overall project.

The first point to highlight is the chosen name of the project, “Mali Magic.” The linking of magic and Mali evokes ideas of witchcraft, mystery, myth and the supernatural, which have long histories in the study of Africa, particularly concerning the discipline of anthropology on the continent, and have forcefully determined research directions for decades. Moreover, including the Timbuktu manuscripts under such a theme recalls the long association of Timbuktu itself with myth and mystery, which has had a shaping effect on how the manuscripts of the city are cast in public discourse (Molins Lliteras 2020). As I have argued elsewhere, the effects of such an association over time contribute to the iconicity of the Timbuktu archive, while, at the same time, leading to the affirmation of certain narratives, occluding or silencing others.

These effects are exemplified poignantly by the selections offered in the “Manuscripts” section. The narrative they present can be simplified thus: Firstly, Mali is cast as the home to a tolerant and inclusive variety of Islam (as opposed to, by extrapolation, that of the Middle East), with remnants of “African” culture; this syncretic “African Islam” that is presented is suspiciously similar to the concept of Islam noir developed by French Africanists during the colonial period to depoliticise Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, which contributed to the relegation of its study as a strictly anthropological phenomenon thus sidelining the study of its intellectual traditions (Triaud 2014). The development of this concept had both policy effects in colonial West and North Africa, as well as lasting effects in academia: studies of Islam and history in Mali are still sharply divided between anthropologists and historians, those that study oral traditions or written traditions, and there is little overlap in both methods and themes. Moreover, the narrative suggests that the manuscripts of Timbuktu can serve as a kind of unifying object around which peace in Mali can be built, drawing from the lessons on conflict resolution and peace-making that can be found in the manuscripts themselves.¹⁰ The narrative is illustrated by the nature and themes of the online exhibits presented as part of the overall project and curated by SAVAMA-DCI: “Timbuktu, Home to a Humanist and Tolerant Islam,” “The Timbuktu Manuscripts and the Human Right to Education,” “Poems for Peace,” “The Role of Mathematics in the Peace (and Manuscripts) of Timbuktu,” to highlight a few.¹¹ The selection of these themes – along with the descriptions of the selected manuscripts – to the exclusion of others, decontextualises the manuscripts from the intellectual and cultural context in which they were produced. By mystifying the manuscripts and their content and removing them from their intellectual and cultural context as products of a wider tradition of Islamic scholarship across West Africa and the broader Muslim world, the significance of the manuscript libraries of Timbuktu is misunderstood.

The second aspect of the narrative presents the political crisis in northern Mali in 2012/13, subsequent insurgencies and the ongoing instability in the Sahel in a simplistic, decontextualised account of “jihadist” terrorism provoking a massive loss and destruction of the country’s heritage. Within this “Good Muslim vs. Bad Muslim” (Mamdani 2004) discourse, little mention is made of the human, ecological, political and global aspects of the crisis: the massive displacement of people; the escalation of conflict between pastoralist and agriculturalist communities; the increasing environmental degradation and subsequent augmented competition on resources; the recurring coup d’états of the last few years; the global networks of arms, drugs and people smuggling operating in the Sahara and Sahel; not to speak of the ongoing geopolitical and strategic interests of the former colonial powers and global north countries in the region. In this way, the “Magic Mali” project focuses on jihadist terrorism as the main threat to the heritage of Mali; thus, the loss of the archive is relegated to a very particular contemporary phenomenon, obscuring its long history and recurring iterations derived from multiple causes. In the video “The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Renaissance, Ruin, Rescue,” the jihadist threat is emphasised with images of the destruction of the mausoleums in Timbuktu in 2012, while the section “Preservation against all odds: Remarkable stories of rediscovery, rescue and resilience” provides multiple stories of the rescue efforts by Timbuktu librarians – the good Muslims – fighting against irreparable loss. In “The Surprising Things You Can Read in the Timbuktu Manuscripts: From black magic and aphrodisiacs to mathematics and peace-keeping,” the Google Arts & Culture team spin their version of the jihadist threat to the manuscripts: “If the militants’ narrow and literal interpretation of the Koran was fulfilled, they would have no less hesitation in burning documents up to 600-years-old that cover subjects as broad as peace-keeping, astronomy, mathematics, fortune-telling and sex tips, as they had in taking sledgehammers to historic shrines.”¹² Similarly, while misidentifying the jihadists, they also cast the content of the Timbuktu manuscripts as unique, misunderstanding the widespread nature of certain types of writing throughout the Muslim world: “Among its recipes for aphrodisiacs and elixirs to enhance fertility was advice on which Koranic verses could intensify and prolong orgasm. Such writings represent an ease and liberalism that horrify the puritans of ISIS/Da’esh and its ilk, today.”¹³ Thus, as the story is a simple one of jihadists destroying precious heritage, the digital solution on offer is portrayed as the perfect antidote to offset the loss.

The digital project offered by Google is presented not only as curated online exhibitions, videos, sonic recordings, stories, educational materials and lesson plans; a central aspect is “the” digital archive of the Timbuktu manuscripts in the form of a Google “Experiment.” This feature, entitled “A Universe of Verse” allows the user to explore more than “40,000 pages of manuscripts,” or is it “40,000 manuscripts” [?] safeguarded by Dr Abdel Kader Haidara and SAVAMA-DCI.¹⁴ This initial discrepancy between pages – are they speaking of folios here? – and manuscripts, does not bode well for the quality of the archival venture. Nevertheless, as I launch the experiment, I am awed by the mesmerising mandala-like spiral that comes into focus, composed of tiny thumbnail images of the digitised manuscript folios that spin into position. The effect is certainly visually stunning. Four options are presented for the exploration: “1. A Brief Introduction:” Here using a mouse to scroll through the navigation, a short introduction to the manuscripts is presented in paragraph after paragraph at the centre of the mandala-spiral of manuscript image thumbnails, moving towards the centre of the spiral with each paragraph, creating a sense of movement and abundance. The content of the text seems to recede in importance, giving way to the visual richness of the effects of the images in motion. “2. The Books:” Now I can see the number of digitised manuscripts in this archive, 69 of them to be precise, of varying lengths, organised in brown folders in eight rows of eight manuscripts each, with five more in the ninth and bottom row. Clicking on the folder allows it to open, revealing its contents; the manuscript folio, beautifully digitised, without the conventional ruler showing manuscript dimension or tone hues. Clicking on the right and left arrows simulates the flipping of the folios of the manuscript, and thus the act of reading – remember to click right, as Arabic is read from right to left. However, it is nearly impossible to read the manuscript, since the size of the image is too small to distinguish the characters. The hovering zoom symbol invites a closer view, but when clicked exits the mandala mode for a more conventional approach to the image, which can finally, after some effort, be enlarged to reading depth. Here I begin to wonder about the metadata for the manuscripts, as there is only a badly translated title and nothing else. Be patient, I chastise myself. “3. Grid View:” Perhaps functionality features such as a simple search function will be here, I tell myself. However, this is just the manuscript folios presented one by one in an endless grid format. Again, it is certainly visually striking, with the different shades of browns of the individual manuscripts providing a feast of hue and tonality that could translate into secret code perhaps. Zooming in and out brings the folios into sharper view, but nothing else. “4. A Universe of Verses:” It is surely this section that will unlock the potential of the archive, allowing users to browse by title or author, composition date, manuscript theme, manuscript number or collection, or script style and/or search for names or words of interest. No such luck. Again, this just presents the same manuscript folios in a different visual order, this time in a random disorderly fashion, partially superimposed upon each other. By zooming, you are further immersed in the maze, and it starts to become less dense, revealing one final manuscript superimposed on what I deduce is a grey, aerial photo of Timbuktu, which I recognise from somewhere. Once again, I cannot but admire the stunning design of the digital archive; but I need to ask, is it actually an archive?

I can only begin to speculate about the cost of Google’s digital Experiment for the creation of “the” digital archive of the Timbuktu manuscripts. In one of the videos that form part of the “Manuscript” subtheme, Dr Banzoumana Traoré, former head of SAVAMA-DCI’s operations, mentions that Google set up a dedicated digitisation studio on their premises, producing digital copies of ten times the quality of the ones generated by their existing studio – set up by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) in 2013 to the most up-to-date requirements for professional digitisation.¹⁵ Yet, Google’s digital archive is not functional or usable in any way. There is no way of searching for specific items of interest, there is no metadata to accompany the manuscripts, and there are no tools to facilitate reading, not to speak of research. In a case of extreme irony, Google, a company that has developed the most advanced search engine, presents a digital experience that lacks even a simple version of this functionality, contributing to another loss for the Timbuktu archive. One wonders if the designers were more interested in creating an innovative visual experience, which it certainly is, than anything else. But the outcome is the production of an unusable digital archive of unreadable manuscripts. Moreover, this emphasis on a “timeless” visual at the expense of the contextualisation and historicisation of the intellectual production reproduces well-known tropes in African Studies associated with the anthropologising of the continent.

One might want to argue that it is perhaps the nature of Google as a platform made to appeal to a wider public, which provoked the problematics of the digital archive described in detail above. However, I will show through a cursory overview of the different digitisation projects dedicated to the Timbuktu manuscripts in the last two decades, that many of the problems illustrated above are prefigured in previous digitisation schemes. More crucially, the unreadable and unusable Google digital archive once again participates in the co-production of the iconic Timbuktu archive; so precious, so rare, so unique, that its mere existence justifies its value, thus relegating its contents and contexts of production to mere sidepieces of little importance. Once again, this recalls the legacy of colonial African Studies on the continent but with a different emphasis, concentrating on aesthetics and ignoring intellectual production.

Digitisation in the Timbuktu archive

Since the early 2000s, there has been a range of digitisation programmes dedicated to the manuscripts of Timbuktu, presented as the surest and safest way to safeguard the archive from future loss. Digitisation is often touted as the only viable solution to the inevitable decay and loss of the physical archive, while also promising the democratisation of access to the archive. Digitisation has often been promoted by external funders and donors while being resisted by local librarians and manuscript holders.

The American Ford Foundation was one of the first actors to become involved in the preservation and digitisation of Timbuktu manuscripts in the early 2000s. During this period, two other programmes were initiated, the Norwegian SAUMATOM (Salvaging the Manuscripts of Timbuktu), financed by NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) and the Project Mali/15, coordinated by Luxemburg with funding also from UNESCO (Ould Youbba 2008). The state collection, the Ahmad Baba Institute, managed to digitise about 7,000 manuscripts of various lengths, less than one-fifth of its collection. For private collections, concrete numbers were less readily available; however, over the years, many of these digital copies were lost, damaged or rendered obsolete by newer technology. Another major project, the South Africa-Mali Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, built a new library-archive building for the Ahmed Baba Institute, which was inaugurated in Timbuktu in January 2009 (Molins Lliteras 2013). The project also placed great emphasis on providing a secure and complete digital solution for the existing digital copies of the manuscripts. However, the proposals for a dedicated offsite duplicate server were rejected and the digital copies of the manuscripts continued to be held in only one location, with its concomitant risks.

The rescue operation organised by the custodians of the Timbuktu libraries and assisted by several international organisations during the crisis of 2012/13, saw the transportation of about 300,000 manuscripts – a figure still disputed – to Bamako (Russo and Bondarev 2015). This was an inflection point in the digitisation schemes as many of the digital copies of the manuscripts were lost, damaged or stolen during the evacuation of the manuscripts, and many of the libraries, in particular the family collections, began their digitisation efforts anew and from scratch, duplicating the work undertaken in the previous years. The International Project “Safeguarding the manuscripts of Timbuktu,” coordinated by the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at the University of Hamburg, with funding from the German Federal Foreign Office and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, established archival facilities in Bamako where the Timbuktu manuscripts could be stored, preserved, catalogued and digitised (Russo and Bondarev 2015). The digitisation efforts were led by the HMML at Saint John’s University (Minnesota, USA) with funding from the Dutch Prince Claus Fund, the Arcadia Fund of London and private donors. This digitisation project has been the most successful so far, digitising thousands of manuscripts, while also undertaking serious cataloguing efforts to accompany the digital items. The British Library, through its Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), has also been involved in several digitisation schemes, first in the town of Djenné from 2009 to 2017 (EAP269, EAP488, EAP690, EAP879) and then in Timbuktu, in collaboration with the HMML, for three major libraries that remained in the town after the 2012/13 crisis (EAP1094). However, this last project, in contrast with the ones from Djenné – and despite an award of £54,929 – has not made any images available, since “the metadata EAP received does not match the images and we are currently unable to make the material available,” although the HMML has some of the images from this project available on their website.¹⁶

Problematics of digitisation in the Timbuktu archive

The problematics of the digitisation programmes in the Timbuktu archive are numerous, including technical issues; inadaptability to the local characteristics of the manuscripts; questions of intellectual property and cultural heritage; and private property and world heritage. The first major set of issues is technical, relating to the enormous change over time in technologies and digitisation standards and protocols. As digitisation technology developed and, depending on the different funders or libraries, standards and protocols changed drastically, producing extremely uneven results, lacking in standardisation and sometimes compatibility. In addition, the high cost of the digitisation equipment, the lack of local expertise and the staff-intensive nature of digitisation work, often meant that it was the first activity to stop when funding was curtailed.

The second set of issues involves the physical and local characteristics of the manuscripts of Timbuktu. Most of the manuscripts are in loose-leaf format, often kept inside a leather case, but also simply wrapped with a cord, therefore, the risk of losing or misplacing the leaves during digitisation procedures is of serious concern (Russo and Bondarev 2015). Many of Timbuktu’s manuscripts are undated, thus, ideally, digitisation should include back-lit images which help identify the composition of the paper or the existence of watermarks, which could facilitate approximate dating. Such digitisation techniques, however, are not standard practice, and new technologies would need to be developed.

Another important issue is that of intellectual property and its ramifications. Copyright of digitised manuscripts is theoretically retained by the manuscript owners, whether in the private libraries or the state collection. However, the standard practice of digitisation programmes such as those sponsored by the HMML or the British Library of retaining copies of the digitised material often makes manuscript owners reluctant to accept digitisation schemes. Moreover, they have great concerns about free (or restricted) online access, as owners feel they will lose control of their collections if they are freely available online, not to speak of the loss of incentive to travel to the archives in Mali if the material is readily available online. Finally, one can question who benefits from digitised material when it is freely available online. It would most likely be researchers or individuals in the global north, or developed countries, with fast digital infrastructure, who could easily browse or download the large files of digitised manuscripts. Researchers or individuals in Africa or the global south, however, where internet access is limited, sporadic and expensive, would not benefit from this “free access,” as they would have great difficulties in browsing, downloading, saving and storing the digitised materials. In addition, a compounded problem arises with the academic outputs produced from these digitised sources, such as books and articles, which are rarely available in the sources’ countries of origin or the global south more generally. This replicates another of the problematics of African Studies, the continent as a “source of raw data” for the extraction or use by the global north for their intellectual production and theorising.

Other issues that constrain digitisation programmes encompass broader questions of cultural heritage. On the one hand, the manuscripts of Timbuktu are both cultural heritage objects and family heirlooms, while, on the other, they are historical documents of great significance. In this context, how does digitisation affect the status of the object? This question becomes more poignant when dealing with manuscripts of a religiously significant nature, such as the Quran or amulets, which some consider to have particular powers in their physical manifestations. Digitisation in this case could be considered as stripping the object of its very reason for existence. Similarly, there are concerns about the sensitive content of some materials contained in the manuscripts, such as issues of inheritance or family relations and reputation, with consequences for people who are still alive today.

Finally, the last set of issues is the tension between the Timbuktu manuscripts as both “private property” and “world heritage.” Local family librarians emphasise their property rights over the manuscripts as objects that confer upon them both intellectual status as well as potential sources of revenue. At the same time, however, by claiming world heritage status for the manuscripts – and seeking donor funding on those terms – they must negotiate questions such as access to the manuscripts in both digital and physical form. For almost two decades, the Timbuktu libraries had a policy of only allowing physical access to the manuscripts in situ under special conditions – state research permits for the IHERI-AB and individual negotiations for the private libraries. Since the 2012/13 political crisis and the evacuation of many manuscripts to Bamako, donor agencies have imposed an open-access policy in exchange for funding. Thus, currently one can access a great number of manuscripts from private collections through third-party sites (HMML and British Library), while the state collection restricts access to its digitised manuscripts. In this way, the great disparity that exists between the private libraries and the state archive exemplifies the fraught and contradictory nature of claims on the Timbuktu archive as simultaneously private property, Malian heritage and world heritage.

The HMML (and to a lesser degree the British Library’s EAP project), might be considered in some ways a highly successful digitisation scheme, as it currently has over 20,000 Malian manuscripts available for browsing (however, not downloading) through its virtual reading room and has thus facilitated access to digitised manuscripts and information (metadata to a greater or lesser degree) for manuscript scholars.¹⁷ Nevertheless, this project illustrates some of the problematics described previously and reproduces some of the founding tropes of African Studies. Firstly, issues of intellectual property and copyright are fraught; the digital items and metadata are stored in perpetuity on and off-site in Minnesota (Stewart 2018), relegating the importance of the digital copies kept in their country of origin. This recalls the extraction and continued ownership of African objects in European museums, currently subject to sustained debates about repatriation. The reluctance of IHERI-AB, the state manuscript collection, to collaborate with the HMML should be understood in this context, as a refusal to cede ownership of Malian national heritage to foreign nations. Moreover, the narrative of the colonial saviour resonates strongly in the history of the HMML’s (and British Library’s) so-called “preservation” efforts, which began in the 1960s with a focus on the monastic manuscript heritage of Europe, later expanding to other Eastern Christian Churches perceived to be under “threat” in Africa, the Middle East and India, and finally extending to Islamic manuscripts in the 2000s (Stewart 2017). This narrative upholds that the salvation of the manuscripts depends on technological (in this case digital) expertise located outside the continent, thus denigrating other local modes of preservation and knowledge transmission such as copying.

Loss and copying in the Timbuktu archive

The recent focus on digitisation outlined above obscures the long history of loss, destruction and remaking that is constitutive of the nature of the Timbuktu archive. This loss is evidenced through different modes and at different times and yet is integral to the makeup of the archive. On the one hand, is the physical anatomy of the manuscripts themselves and their uses in knowledge transmission and production practices – their physical support; their format; and their intrinsic mobility. On the other, the vicissitudes of their place in the historical events of the region – conquests; revolutions; colonial plunder and innovations; and independence-era archival reconstitution.

The first aspect of this loss concerns the physical makeup of the manuscripts themselves and their roles in knowledge production and transmission circuits. The Timbuktu manuscripts are, for the most part, written on European-made paper which was imported to the region through the famed trans-Saharan caravan trade (Bloom 2008; Walz 2011). The paper was produced especially for the West African market, and due to the long distances the paper had to travel, it was an expensive commodity and was thus used with care and reused multiple times (Biddle 2017). The nature of the imported paper, combined with the climatic conditions of the Saharan and Sahel regions, exacerbated the degradation and damage to the manuscripts which became easily broken, brittle and decomposed with ease. Thus, this aspect of the physical loss of the manuscripts is an integral part of the archive, constitutive of its nature. West African manuscripts – unlike most manuscripts from the wider Islamic world – are characterised by their loose-leaf format, in other words, their folios are generally unbound and kept together with a leather manuscript cover, often inserted in a satchel or pouch (Viola 2009). The manuscript covers themselves also contain traces of the making and remaking of the manuscripts and their contents: mastara markings (used to create blind ruled lines on paper for guiding the scribe’s writing) and the burnishing or polishing of the paper’s surface; repair work done to torn pages and evidence of former construction; and indications of reuse of materials (Minicka 2008). These characteristics of the manuscripts suggest a manuscript culture acutely aware of loss and destruction as part of its natural condition.

Moreover, the format of West African manuscripts is intimately linked to their usage, which in turn is premised on their mobility, portability and exchange. The unbound, loose-leaf manuscripts were integral to the dissemination of knowledge; sections of the manuscripts could be dispersed for teaching or ritual recitation purposes, exchanged by scholars or distributed among students for copying. Thereafter, the manuscripts were put together once again; however, perhaps a few folios would go missing in the process, or others inserted in their place. In this way, disparate folios could be reconstituted in one “whole” manuscript again, but with folios written by different hands and/or at different times. Additionally, West African manuscripts were part of a scholarly culture renowned for the centrality of its scholars – as opposed to fixed institutions – in the knowledge production and transmission chain. Manuscripts thus travelled with their owners, who were often mobile, moving from town to town, and were thus easily dispersed, lost or damaged (Lydon 2004). Even in Timbuktu, where certain scholarly lineages were established for longer periods, the manuscripts were not necessarily stored in one fixed location such as a library or mosque, but rather moved from one scholar’s house to another, to the houses of their students or the copying centres. In this way, the inherent mobility of the manuscripts in West African manuscript culture is again constitutive of the loss in the archive.

The second main aspect of loss in the Timbuktu archive concerns the vicissitudes endured by the manuscripts on account of the historical events in the region; loss and the making and remaking of the archive on a large scale, so to speak. A comprehensive overview of such events in the longue durée is beyond the scope of this paper, however, I will briefly highlight a few crucial moments by way of illustration.¹⁸ One of the iconic episodes of loss in the archive occurred during the famous conquest of the Songhay state by the Moroccan army in 1591 to control the caravan trade, which precipitated the gradual decline of Timbuktu’s status as a centre of learning. Aḥmad Bābā (d. 1627), the celebrated scholar of the city who led the opposition to the conquest, was taken prisoner and deported to Marrakesh in chains, along with his family and manuscript library. The loss of this collection for the Timbuktu archive is keenly felt until the present, as most of Aḥmad Bābā’s original manuscripts are now found in Moroccan libraries (Zouber 1977). Another period of heightened loss and remaking of the archive was during the nineteenth-century revolutions in the region, a period of state-building and Islamic renewal led by scholars. As Mauro Nobili (2020) has demonstrated, a central tool for the legitimation of the political project of the polity known as the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (c. 1820–1862) and its founding leader Aḥmad Lobbo, was the destruction, manipulation and creation of historical manuscripts.

A defining moment of loss and reconstitution of the archive occurred during the colonial period, which included colonial plunder as well as the creation of new collections. The French conquest of the Toucouleur theocracy (c.1850–1898), saw the confiscation of the defeated leader’s treasure, incorporating his library, formerly of his father, Umar Tal (c. 1794–1864), the famed scholar and founder of the polity. Four trunks of manuscripts and printed documents were shipped to Paris, bound and later deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). This important collection of manuscripts remains at the BnF (Ghali, Mahibou, and Brenner 1985) and is currently the subject of intense appeals for repatriation. According to some manuscript experts (Haidara 2008), because of colonial plunder, many manuscripts were hidden or buried by their owners during this period – another loss – assigning some to oblivion, while others resurfaced much later. Nevertheless, the colonial period also witnessed the creation and remaking of new manuscript collections through the prospecting efforts of colonial administrators and agents, such as the small collection of the agronomist George de Gironcourt (1878–1960) during his mission in French Sudan in 1911–1912 and now also housed at the BnF (Nobili 2013). Parallel to these European-initiated examples, in this period, the case of Aḥmad Bul’araf (1864–1955), a bibliophile, collector and merchant-scholar, also demonstrates the remaking of the archive and the centrality of copying in the Timbuktu archive. Reportedly, his library had a manuscript conservation unit, a place for copyists and for checking copies and a unit for making covers for loose leaves (Jeppie 2011). According to Shamil Jeppie (2015), Bul’araf can be regarded as a transitional figure: a “modern” pioneer, both revitalising and conserving the manuscript book arts of Timbuktu, as well as a mediator in the network of the manuscript book as an object, to be produced, collected and conserved.

After Malian independence in 1960, with the new impetus of nationalist historiography and Africanist impulses and discourse, the government of Mali – under the auspices of UNESCO – created the Ahmed Baba Centre for Documentation and Research in Timbuktu (CEDRAB)¹⁹ in 1973 (Hunwick 1992), to collect and conserve the region’s manuscript legacy. The Centre began a very successful campaign to acquire manuscripts, concentrating firstly on Timbuktu and then extending to the rural areas and eventually neighbouring countries (Ould Youbba 2008), thus effectively creating a new archive. After the mid-1990s and the democratisation of Mali after decades of authoritarian rule, there was an explosion of private manuscript collections/libraries in the town, from five such libraries in 2004 to 21 in 2008, to 408 in 2011 in Timbuktu and surrounds (Haidara 2011). These manuscript libraries are the private property – as opposed to state or even pious endowments – of a particular family or even of a particular member of a family and trace their origins to a well-known scholar of the past, even though the libraries exemplify extensive making and remaking of the collections (Molins Lliteras 2013). Many of these libraries were the ones transported to Bamako after the 2012 insurgency, exemplifying another loss to Timbuktu itself and the further reconstitution, remake and re-formation of the Timbuktu archive.

As a counterpoint to the destructive aspects of loss outlined above, the widespread practice (and art) of copying (Dedéou and Jeppie 2017; Diakite and Naylor 2023; Hunwick 2002a, 2002b; Molins Lliteras 2017; Nobili 2013) – by students, by scholars or by scribes – as a long-preferred mode of preservation and knowledge transmission and production represents the generative aspect of loss in the Timbuktu archive. “Copying” is usually associated with a lack of originality in Western discourses that value “the original” as a site of creativity, uniqueness and inventiveness. A recurrent indictment against the Timbuktu manuscripts is the prevalence of copies in the archive, and thus it has often been denigrated as a “derivative” archive, containing “mere” copies of original works composed elsewhere or multiple copies of the same manuscripts. These discourses around the archive determined the way it was studied in academic circles – often ignored by so-called serious scholars of the Islamic sciences, Islamic manuscripts and history and relegated to Africanists, who sometimes lacked the language expertise required to approach the manuscripts. For a long time, this lack (another loss) of serious study on the manuscripts relegated the archive’s status as a mere symbol of written culture in Africa, but little else. However, this conception of copying dismisses the practice’s generative, multi-layered, knowledge-producing aspects, which constitute an art of their own. As described previously, copying was used actively and productively as a preservatory tactic, where lost, damaged or misplaced manuscripts or parts thereof could be replaced, replenished or remade. A striking, early example of this are several colophons found in a manuscript copied in Timbuktu in the 1570s, a 28-volume copy of al-Muḥkam fī ‘l-lugha, a dictionary compiled by the eleventh-century Andalusian scholar Ibn Sīda. In one of these colophons, the copyist states that the commissioner of the copy initially hired another copyist and paid him for the copy of that volume, but that the other copyist claimed that the “original” copy of the volume “was burnt in a fire that set his hut ablaze by night” and thus the owner of the manuscript had to hire him to complete the copy of that particular volume (Hunwick 2002b). The colophons in this manuscript are especially illuminating for the history of the copying profession in West Africa, as they give some detail on the contractual aspect of the work, including the fees paid for both copying and vocalisation of the text and provide full names for the copyists, the vocalisers and their employer and record a later transfer of ownership. More recent manuscripts, such as those catalogued by the HMML, show that Timbuktu had many famous families of scribes, such as the descendants of Muḥammad Godo (c. 1600s), included in the genealogies of dozens of copyists across the Timbuktu collections (Diakite and Naylor 2023).

But more than a preservatory tactic, copying was a dynamic, knowledge-producing practice and an essential facet of West African manuscript culture. The Quran was the foundational text that was first copied and recopied to teach basic reading and writing skills to children. This often took place on wooden tablets (lawh) that could be erased and reused as the child progressed to other sections of the Quran. Thereafter, manuscripts were copied by students as part of their educational journey; one had to master “the greats” to advance to the next level of the curriculum, and copying and recopying their works demonstrated a mastery of the cornerstones of each subject. Such manuscripts often contain reading notes, showing where students completed a lesson, with what teacher and at what pace (Molins Lliteras 2017). Moreover, as Dimitry Bondarev (2017) has demonstrated, in some regions, there is a correlation between manuscript layout and specific types of annotations, layout and phases of education, which indicate that some of the annotated manuscripts originate from teacher-student interaction, and some from personal use by advanced scholars.

Once a student had graduated to the level of a scholar, one could begin to copy works by adding one’s commentary; or a commentary on one of the “great” commentaries; or definitions and explications of concepts in local languages; or applications of these concepts and ideas into local contexts. A contemporary Islamic scholar and teacher from Timbuktu, Mahmoud Mohamed Dedéou, known as Cheikh Hamou, has written an extensive “guide” to the markings, acronyms and abbreviations used by copyists (and writers) of the manuscripts of the region. This points to a writing culture that developed a set of shared practices and symbols; moreover, these signs revealed skill and authority (Dedéou and Jeppie 2017). Scholars of Islam in Africa have argued that this tradition of transmission does not equal mere repetition of past learning, but also includes an element of transition whereby the achievements of scholars’ past are interpreted anew by the next generations (Bang 2012). These knowledge practices are part of the manuscript culture of copying; paratext and marginalia abound in West African manuscripts, adding to the archival-artefactual density of these analogue copies and thus exemplifying textual transmission and knowledge production both across space and time.

Conclusions

Loss needs to be understood as constitutive of the Timbuktu archive, but also generative, through the practice of copying as a preservatory and knowledge-producing mode. Integrating loss into the nature of the archive goes against the classic European understanding of archive codified in the nineteenth century, and which persists in many quarters. According to this notion, archival items are embalmed material, usually documents, produced at a particular point in time and offering archival testimony of that time. They are then preserved until the present in their original form – or as close as possible (Hamilton 2017). Loss in the archive thus throws into relief the assumed stability and permanence of archival records of all kinds. Moreover, the art of copying is a tradition of reproduction that is ultimately about transformation and change, demonstrating that records ultimately change through the act of reproducing them. Thus, loss and copying in the Timbuktu archive underscore the making and shaping over time of manuscripts, sources and archives, shattering the illusions of permanence, immutability and originality – in form and content – of archives.

Digital copying, on the other hand, which is but another tradition and method of reproduction, hides behind a fantasy of fidelity to the original and has come to be seen as the “perfect” reproduction. Beyond preservation, at its most basic, digitisation is a distinct form of copying – and one that is increasingly construed as superior to, say, earlier modes of copying. Moreover, during the past decades, as manuscripts are increasingly being viewed as “cultural heritage,” they are conserved along guidelines provided by heritage agencies – specifically digitisation – rather than the transmission mechanisms of West African Islamic scholarship – such as copying. Anne Bang (2012) raises the question of what is “lost in transmission” when the mode changes from the preservation of knowledge – in our case copying as reproduction – to the preservation of heritage – or digitisation as reproduction. We see that even in the most technologically advanced modes of preservation that reimagine modes of engagement (and visualisation) of the manuscripts, much seems to nonetheless be lost, including the very priority of collecting, organising and utilising textual repositories. Ironically, the immersive, near virtual-reality simulating aspects of Google Art & Culture’s Experiment, decontextualises the archive and pales in terms of usability of the manuscripts compared to the hand-written copies and their corresponding palimpsest of annotations and marginalia. The “Mali Magic” project, both enacts the myth of the Timbuktu archive and the possibilities of the digital archive while betraying it at the same time. The archival usability, and the archival-artefactual density of the analogue copies relative to the unusable (indeed archivally dysfunctional) digital and immersive counterpart provide an avenue for conceptual problematisation between the perceived binaries of copying and digitisation.

Acknowledgments

I thank Lebogang Mokwena for the inspired title for this piece, and the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative’s (UCT) Research Development Workshop (23–25 March 2022), the special issue’s editors and the anonymous peer reviewers for their collective comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susana Molins Lliteras

Susana Molins Lliteras is an Associate Researcher at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the UCT. She was a researcher at the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project (www.tombouctoumanuscripts.uct.ac.za), focusing on West African book and manuscript history. She publishes on the archives of Timbuktu and the social history of a West African Sufi movement in South Africa.

Notes

1. https://artsandculture.google.com/project/mali-heritage, accessed 12 March 2022.

2. https://www.b-reel.com, accessed 1 April 2022.

3. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/nAWhN_Nrx-TooQ, accessed 12 March 2022.

4. https://www.savamadci.net/, accessed 4 April 2022.

5. https://www.timbukturenaissance.org/about, accessed 4 April 2022.

6. https://i4africa.org/, accessed 4 April 2022.

7. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/119/, accessed 4 April 2022.

8. https://www.4dheritage.com/, accessed 4 April 2022.

9. https://zamaniproject.org/, accessed 4 April 2022.

10. https://savamadci.org/ceremonie-de-lancement-de-la-phase-ii-du-projet-inspiration-des-manuscrits-anciens-pour-la-paix-et-la-reconciliation-imarp-initie-par-long-savama-dci-27-decembre-2022-au-memorial-modibo-keita/, accessed 1 October 2023.

11. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/1wWx1KZfsCrXiw, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/rwWxT6ZAMTu6YA, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/PQUx-9QRfGctvQ,

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/wwVx4N9bpjVxTA, all accessed 12 March 2022.

12. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-surprising-things-you-can-read-in-the-timbuktu-manuscripts/ugVxxsF6_Ea8Lg?hl=en, accessed 1 October 2023.

13. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-surprising-things-you-can-read-in-the-timbuktu-manuscripts/ugVxxsF6_Ea8Lg?hl=en, accessed 1 October 2023.

14. https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/the-timbuktu-manuscripts/BQE6pL2U3Qsu2A, accessed 2 October 2023.

15. https://hmml.org/collections/islamic/, accessed 1 October 2023.

16. https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1094, accessed 2 October 2023.

17. “As of July 2022, HMML’s Mali projects have resulted in 3.6 million unique image files, representing 249,000 manuscripts. Of these 18,483 manuscripts are catalogued and viewable online at vhmml.org/readingRoom” (https://hmml.org/about/global-operations/mali/, accessed 2 October 2023).

18. For a detailed account, albeit with a different emphasis, see Molins Lliteras (2020).

19. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the CEDRAB was renamed the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research (IHERI-AB) to refocus its aims on education, training and research on the manuscripts.