The men who would save Mali's manuscripts

Timbuktu entered a long decline within a century of Africanus’ visit, when it fell to the armies of the Moroccan sultan in 1591. In later centuries sea trade on the Atlantic eclipsed the trans-Saharan caravans.

'Found only in Timbuktu'

By the time Mr. Sadeck, the copyist, got a taste for calligraphy as a boy, the tradition was all but extinct.

It was his uncle who taught him to make ink from charcoal, powdered stones, and gum Arabic, and to arrange lines of elegant Arabic script in neat blocks on paper and animal hide parchment.

When he grew up he worked for six years in commerce as an assistant to a small-time merchant, whose death in 2000 pitched him into unemployment.

“I was in the street,” Sadeck says. “I didn’t know what to do.”

It was then that his uncle suggested he start work as a copyist. Commissioned by the city’s libraries to reproduce their works, he has also built a business selling copies to mainly Western tourists – gaining a unique erudition in the process.

“If a text is interesting, you try to memorize it,” says Sadeck, who has also memorized the Quran. “And as you read, you learn.”

One popular item is a West Africa proverb: “Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the lands of the fair-skinned people, but the word of God and holy things, and beautiful tales are found only in Timbuktu.”

Quranic verses are also in demand. On the wall of his workshop he has taped several hides bearing the Surat Ya-Seen, one of the Quran’s 114 chapters.

In 2004, Sadeck began offering lessons in calligraphy to students in Timbuktu, passing on his knowledge as his uncle had passed it to him. He has no children of his own.

“That’s why I try to teach children,” he says. “So it can continue.”

Transporting and hiding manuscripts

Last April a military coup unseated president Amadou Toumani Touré, prompting Tuareg and Islamist gunmen already ravaging Mali’s desert north to swoop down in concert on northern cities including Timbuktu. Overnight, tourism – and with it Sadeck’s livelihood – were cut off.

“When the coup d'état came, within a week I had packed my bags,” he says. Among his belongings were around 50 manuscripts.

Meanwhile, Haidara, the librarian, rounded up thousands of manuscripts from libraries and arranged for them to be hidden in private homes. He left Timbuktu last summer for Bamako, where he runs Sauvegarde et Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Défense de la Culture Islamique, or Safekeeping and Promotion of Manuscripts for the Defense of Islamic Culture, an NGO that seeks to care for manuscripts.

Sadeck’s brother has installed him in a workshop above his house on the edge of Bamako. So far there has been little work. For now, there are only stacks of manuscripts on the table, copies displayed on the wall, and outside the window the interminable lines of the power cables.

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