superstitious Terrorists in West Africa repeat destruction of ancient books in Timbuktu that was committed in 1600's previously , dammit <



Timbuktu's story of protecting its own intellectual legacy didn't end in the 16th century. It happened again within living memory. In 2012, extremist militant groups occupied Timbuktu during a period of conflict in northern Mali and began deliberately destroying manuscripts, shrines, and historical sites they considered idolatrous, drawing global attention and concern for drawing global attention and concern for the fate of the city's remaining archives. <




In response, local librarians, archavists, and ordinary residents undertook a genuinely remarkable, largely improvised rescue effort, smuggling tens of thousands of manuscripts out of the city undercover of darkness, hidden in trunks, ricesacks, and canoes, transported by road and by river to safer locations in Mali's capital, Bamakco, often at real personal risk to those involved. This modern rescue effort echoes almost exactly the same instinct that built Timbuktu's archives in the first place seven centuries earlier. A community treating written knowledge as something worth extraordinary nersonal risk totreating written knowledge as something worth extraordinary personal risk to protect. It's a genuinely rare thing in history. A story about the value of preserving the past that continues to unfold in the present with the fate of these manuscripts remaining an active ongoing concern for historians and