Researchers
Timbuktu
Timbuktu is the city of salt, gold and books on the edge of the Sahara in Mali: the port of the desert caravans that carried salt from the north and gold from the south. It peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Mansa Musa made his Hajj from it and built the Djinguereber mosque; it became West Africa''s university — seven hundred thousand manuscripts in family collections and the Sankore, Djinguereber and Sidi Yahya mosques. The Moroccans took it in 1591 and carried its scholars off to Marrakesh, but its books stayed in the desert until its people saved them from smuggling and war. Timbuktu today bears witness that the Islamic written word reached the depths of Africa. Timbuktu stayed a meaning: learning can dwell at earth's ends so long as families keep their books, and the Sahara that looks like the road's end was really a bridge binding north and south. Its manuscripts today, in family chests and world libraries, witness that Africa wrote its history in its scholars' own hands, not only in strangers' pens.