The Librarian Who Smuggled 350,000 Manuscripts

In 2012, armed groups linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took control of Timbuktu in Mali. Timbuktu had been, from the 13th to the 16th century, one of the great centres of learning in the world — a city of scholars whose libraries held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on astronomy, medicine, law, poetry and mathematics. Some dated back to the 1200s.

The extremists had already destroyed shrines and were understood to consider the manuscripts heretical. The city held roughly 377,000 of them.

Abdel Kader Haidara was a librarian from a family of manuscript collectors, and he had spent years running a project to preserve these documents. When the takeover came, he started buying metal footlockers.

The operation that followed was, by any measure, extraordinary. Manuscripts were packed into trunks and moved out of the city by whatever means existed: down the Niger river by boat, in cars and trucks, in ordinary luggage, over a period of months, past checkpoints where discovery would have been fatal. Haidara coordinated a network of families and couriers — mostly private citizens, not soldiers.

Somewhere between 250,000 and 350,000 manuscripts were smuggled to Bamako, the capital.

When the extremists fled Timbuktu in early 2013, they burned the library of the Ahmed Baba Institute. A fraction of the collection was lost. The great majority was already gone, sitting in trunks in a city eight hours away.

The preservation of a civilisation's written memory is usually credited to institutions. This one was carried out by a man with a spreadsheet, a budget, and a strong opinion about metal trunks.