How were Timbuktu's manuscripts smuggled to safety?

The manuscripts of Timbuktu were not kept in a grand national library. For centuries they sat in private households in the city, in northern Mali, handed down in families. They cover art, medicine, philosophy and science, as well as copies of the Quran. Some are written in African languages such as Songhay and Soninke, in the Arabic script known as Ajami.

They exist because Timbuktu cared about books. To its people books were symbols of wealth, power and blessings, and acquiring them was a primary concern for scholars. A trade in books with the wider Islamic world and the strong support of the emperor Askia Mohammed led to thousands of manuscripts being written. The chronicler Mahmud Kati even recorded a meteor shower in August 1583, likely the Perseids.

Then the city's fortunes dimmed. After a Moroccan invasion in 1591 scholars had to flee, or face imprisonment or murder. Under French colonial rule Arabic education declined, and appreciation for the manuscripts fell so far that many were sold off. Most have still not been studied or catalogued, and nobody knows how many there are.

In 2012 and 2013 Islamist rebels held the city, and 4,203 manuscripts were burned or stolen. But the great majority were saved. Abdel Kader Haidara, from a family of curators, and Stephanie Diakité organized an evacuation to Bamako in the south. Local families hid the collections in their homes first. Some 350,000 manuscripts were moved to safety.