August 16, 2005

A disaster , similar to the one in Niger, appears to be threatening the region of Timbuktu, the legendary city whose name is a byword for remoteness.

It may seem slightly frivolous to talk about culture in the context of potential starvation, but Timbuktu, on the World Heritage List, is an extraordinary place. A centre of trade and learning, in the Middle Ages it accrued fantastic wealth from the gold and salt trades; the Emperor Mansa Musa's wealth was so staggering that when he visited Egypt the gold he handed out as tips was enough to destabilise the Egyptian economy for several years. Perhaps the main glory of the place, however, is its many libraries, full of remarkable ancient manuscripts. Some of these are in danger from decay and theft. Alas, it seems the priority will now have to be saving people.

posted by Plegmund 19 years ago
  • peanut !
  • Wow, I never knew.... This is both amazing and saddening.
  • Nice post, if depressing.
  • While the majority of Malians still rely on farming as a means of food and livelihood, agriculture is becoming more difficult to sustain. In the last 30 years there have been two major droughts adding to the continual spread of the desert and the loss of more farmable land. Over the past 50 years the desert has overrun an area roughly the size of France and Austria combined. Also, a Time photoessay about Salt.
  • Super posting, Pleg. The ancient manuscripts are fascinating, it'd be great to see a translation. Also, it's embarrassing but I really know next to nothing about the area's history....
  • One of my colleagues just returned from 2 years in Mali and Timbuktu. We had a long conversation about the condition of the manuscripts, in fact, and how the larger architectural structures there are "topped-up" with mud plaster every year or so. A fascinating place. What honked off my friend, though, is that the people living there could use some conservation help with their manuscripts and also some assistance with food, but instead the big U.S help organization (sorry, the name escapes me) sent thousands of box fans! Fans! These people know how to live in the heat and it's not free to run all those fans that they graciously (though somewhat confoundedly) accepted. I just think that's really bizarre...
  • Yes, the regular refreshment of the buildings is curious: I'm surprised they haven't imported cement. I was interested to read that the bristly appearance of the larger buildings, with poles sticking out at regular geometric intervals, is not a defensive measure, but a way of providing easy climbing for those who add more mud periodically. It seems this was an invention introduced by an Islamic architect brought back by Mansa Musa from his trip to Mecca (on which he is supposed to have taken 60,000 people, though this can hardly be true since his party would have outnumbered the population of most of the towns they visited, including Mecca. Good old Isidore of Seville has tons of stuff about the Mali Empire and Timbuktu.
  • Plegmund- my friend was telling me that there is one building she encountered (a mosque, perhaps?) that was pretty tall and the locals had just gone ahead and capped off the top several meters with cement because they were tired of climbing all the way to the top. Said it looked very odd...
  • Thanks Plegmund, I was educated.
  • Sounds like Niger's president belongs to the same party (the Make-Shit-Up-If-The-Truth-Isn't-Convenient Party) as the U.S. president. As to the FPP: This is horrible. And I can't help but think we're going to see more of this kind of thing as global climate change continues.