This is the second installment in a series on presentations from the Print, Publishing and Cultural Production in (South) Africa Seminar held at the University of Pretoria on Monday, 13 May 2013.
Until very recently, to the average person the name Timbuktu simply signified a very remote and possibly fictional place. I remember my delight, as a child, at actually finding it in an atlas: Timbuktu really existed! In 1988 the ancient desert city was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the distinctive cultural treasures of its ancients mosques and mausoleums. In 2012, however, Timbuktu made news headlines for an unfortunate reason: violent conflict in Mali threatened the antiquities housed by the city. Among Timbuktu's antiquities is a rare, historic collection of manuscripts with intriguing implications.
The Intersection of Manuscript and Print in Timbuktu
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| West African manuscripts are loose-bound. Image: time.com |
The Timbuktu Manuscript Project at the University of Cape Town has been instrumental in present-day cataloguing, archiving and study of the Timbuktu manuscripts since 2003. This presentation introduced the ground-breaking role of the project, not only in the study of these manuscripts but in raising awareness of pre-colonial book culture in Africa.
After two decades of dedicated work on the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu, Shamil Jeppie relates his findings with all the contagious zeal of an Indiana Jones in tweed. He marvels at the fact that, in the face of such compelling evidence, official histories of Africa still stubbornly insist that the book arrived in Africa with European colonists just a few hundred years ago. Since the Timbuktu Manuscript Project studies manuscripts from across Africa, there is ample evidence of rich book traditions, both in West and East Africa. Interestingly, manuscripts in West Africa were loose-bound in leather covers (see image), while those further East were bound much in the manner of today's books. The reason for the East-West divide is not apparent.
It is true that South African interest in Timbuktu has drawn criticism, most recently in an article by Hans Pienaar in Business Day (March 5, 2013), who quotes an unnamed American author as saying that Timbuktu was no literary Mecca but simply "a giant Xerox machine in the desert." In the study of manuscripts, where meticulous copying by hand far predated the printing press, Professor Jeppie retaliates that the phenomenal human "Xerox machine" is in fact worthy of celebration.
In particular, the presentation investigated the contribution of the Timbuktu collector Ahmed Belarif, who not only obtained and curated manuscripts, but also copied them. In many cases it appears that his copying work evolved into something of an editorial function: his copies of jurisprudential texts became considerably heftier than the originals. With 20/20 historical hindsight it is also ironic to note that in an essay of his own, entitled On the Importance of History, Belarif accuses his contemporaries in Timbuktu of disregarding the value of their heritage. A further striking point is that with the introduction of movable type for Arabic script, Belarif has no qualms about the innovation, unlike rather luddite copyists elsewhere who considered print something of a perversion of their craft.
The presentation closed with images from the Timbuktu Manuscript Project collection, and I was so riveted that I would not have been surprised to find a film of manuscript dust on my shoulders at the end of it. It turns out that, although Timbuktu is a real place (all too brutally real, considering recent events), it is nonetheless the stuff of legend.
My burning question: Although I am fiercely in favour of acknowledging pre-colonial cultural production in Africa, one cannot ignore the fact that these manuscripts are in Arabic script, with the vast majority of them in the Arabic language. Although it arrived well before the European colonists, the Arabic script and language were patently not homegrown. The question, then, is to what extent these manuscripts should be viewed as representative of cultural production in Africa. Let the record show that I am absolutely backing the home team here... but inquiring minds want to know.
