Timbuktu: Salt for Gold, Sankore Scholars and a Secret Footlocker Rescue

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A 2006 British survey found 34 percent of young people thought Timbuktu was fictional, yet the Malian city sits where the Sahara meets the Niger River, about 15 kilometers from its main channel. One chronicle, the Tarikh al-Sudan, says Tuareg nomads named their storage camp after Tinbuktu, the enslaved woman who guarded it. Twice a year azalai caravans of thousands of camels marched three weeks to the Taoudenni salt mines, 664 kilometers north, and hauled back 30 kilogram slabs that could trade pound for pound with southern gold. After Mansa Musa's lavish pilgrimage to Mecca, the city drew scholars and reached an estimated 25,000 students among about 50,000 people.

Learning centered on Djinguereber, Sankore and Sidi Yahya but lived in private homes, where families such as the Aqit hosted students and kept libraries. A Moroccan army defeated the Songhai in 1591, and in 1593 scholars were executed or exiled as Atlantic trade drained the caravans. In 2012 Ansar Dine occupied the city and took pickaxes to Sufi mausoleums. Before French and Malian troops arrived in early 2013, fighters burned more than 4,000 manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute, but over 90 percent of an estimated 700,000 survived because librarian Abdel Kader Haidara organized a secret rescue.

• Explorer Heinrich Barth traced the name to a Songhai word for a hole or hollow.
• Farmers grow African floating rice that rises up to three meters with the Niger's flood and harvest it from canoes.
• The harmattan wind blows constant dust and sand off the desert into the streets.
• Haidara's network packed up to 300 manuscripts into each of nearly 2,500 metal footlockers.
• About 350,000 manuscripts were smuggled out by donkey cart, river boat and night drives to Bamako and rural villages.