The Bad-Ass Librarians Of Timbuktu And Their Race To Save The World’s Most Precious Manuscripts Quotes
"Abdel Kader Haidara was a small boy when he first learned about the hidden treasures of Timbuktu."
"There were thousands of manuscripts at the house in Timbuktu, locked away in tin chests in a storage room behind a heavy oak door."
"One of his father’s most prized works was the original travel diary of Major Alexander Gordon Laing."
"The canal was the most vibrant corner of the city, a gathering point for children, market women, and traders."
"Mamma Haidara had come of age when Mali, then known as French West Sudan... had still not fallen under total French control."
"Abdel Kader, his mother, many of his siblings, and representatives of several brothers and sisters who couldn’t attend jammed the vestibule of the family house in Timbuktu’s Sankoré neighborhood to listen to a reading of the will."
"Haidara spoke Songhoy, the language of Mali’s Sorhai tribe, the dominant sedentary ethnic group along the northern bend of the Niger River, and in school he studied French, the language of Mali’s former colonial masters."
"The king, Al Hajj Askia Mohammed Touré, gave lands and financial support to scholars and invited architects to Timbuktu to build mosques and palaces."
"The University of Sankoré, a loose affiliation of mosques and private homes, developed into the most prestigious of 180 scholastic institutions in the city."
"In 1964, four years after Mali won its independence from France, a delegation from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris convened in Timbuktu."
"The jihadis made the city’s bibliophiles more careful, but didn’t dissuade them from trading and collecting manuscripts."
"Haidara’s obsession was growing. He was spending an average of three weeks a month on the road, mostly traveling by pinasse and dugout canoe along the Niger."
"In 1993, Haidara considered moving on. He had worked at the Ahmed Baba Institute for nine years, surviving road accidents and canoe capsizings, losing his way in the Sahara."
"The library he had dreamed of creating for five years was going nowhere."
It was one of the most moving days of my life," Gates recalled. "I was so emotional, holding these books in my hands.
"Now, a decade after the Tuaregs gave up their guns, the fruits of peace were apparent."
"Tall and ebullient, with a Falstaffian goatee and tufts of curly hair framing a balding pate, Haidara met me at his home in the Bella Farandja neighborhood."
"To preserve the region’s literary treasures Haidara had organized twenty Timbuktu families into an association."
"Haidara had, almost singlehandedly, transformed Timbuktu from a depressed backwater into a Mecca for researchers, diplomats, and tourists."
"The Important Stars Among the Multitude of the Heavens, written by a Timbuktu astronomer in 1733."
"I am afraid it is destroyed completely," Al Wangari muttered, tossing aside a book of Hadith.
"Nobody in the family had thought about collecting them or preserving them."
"It was a lending library, like modern ones, with margin notes declaring that ‘Mr. X has borrowed this book.’"
"The sun was just rising when Ber’s library curator, a gaunt man in his fifties with wispy side burns named Fida Ag Mohammed."
"Dust is the enemy of these manuscripts," he murmured, shaking his head.