In person, the librarian was an imposing man with a handshake of astonishing softness, a … Fax: +34 928 380 683 --Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Fall of Baghdad "I didn't talk to them, they never called me, they never noticed me.". When Haidara got the word that the militants—feeling stronger and more confident—had removed checkpoints across northern Mali, he gave the orders to his operatives to begin moving the manuscripts from Timbuktu's safe houses to Bamako. (Haidara has a second wife, not an unusual practice in Mali, also named Khadija, who is a high-ranking Malian diplomat based in Paris.). Abdel Kader Haidara smiled as he welcomed the news that he would be awarded the German Africa Prize, earlier this year. Conservators repair manuscript pages using paper fabricated to match the originals. This rescue operation was the work of librarian Abdel Kader Haidara from Timbuktu. We'll leave it. Between September and January, couriers made hundreds of trips back and forth between the two cities in rented 4x4s, usually carrying two or three cantines of manuscripts on each journey. I said, 'Leave me alone, just leave me to it.'". The director kept pursuing him. Night after night, a team under the direction of the library's founder, Abdel Kader Haidara, quietly packed the ancient works of astronomy, poetry, history, and jurisprudence into metal chests, then spirited them out of the library in mule carts and 4x4s to safe houses scattered around the city. In 1984 Abdel Kader Haidara began working at the Ahmad Baba Center in Timbuktu. So Abdel Kader … Im Generalinterview berichtet der wissenschaftliche Projektleiter Dr. Abdel Kader Haïdara, wie er die Rettungsaktion der Manuskripte organisiert und selbst erlebt hat. A breakthrough appeared imminent in 1996, when he received a call from the Libyan government, promising him "assistance." Find the perfect Abdel Kader Haidara stock photos and editorial news pictures from Getty Images. Join Facebook to connect with Abdel Kader Haidara and others you may know. Gates was also impressed by Haidara, "this colorful man, not extravagant or flamboyant, but deeply learned. C/ Alfonso XIII, 5. Mali’s cultural hero Abdel Kader Haidara: how a librarian saved the treasures of Timbuktu Tuesday, August 13th, 2019 Abdel Kader Haidara explaining some of Timbuktu’s treasures. "I risked losing my hand, my foot," Touré said. What do you want to do with them?' "I said, 'I think that right now, just stay silent. Now it’s being found everywhere on earth, including the oceans. Gates helped secure a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, which allowed Haidara to keep searching for family books and to construct a library to house them. We will pay you in any currency you want. UNESCO began drawing attention to the works in the 1960s, funding a national library, the Ahmed Baba Institute, and scouring the region for lost works, but it wasn't until Haidara became involved in their conservation effort that the city's literary renaissance began in earnest. The real breakthrough came shortly afterward, when Professor Gates stopped in Timbuktu while making a television documentary series about Africa. Email: [email protected], © 2020 Casa África - Todos los derechos reservados, Información económica y cultural de los países africanos. En 2012 jugó un papel fundamental en la preservación de los manuscritos de Tombuctú durante la ocupación yihadista. The Mamma Haidara center restores, catalogues, repairs, and digitizes manuscripts to provide the most complete history that can be assembled. So we just had to keep working, doing what we could do. Overnight, Timbuktu was plunged into a nightmare. These books—scattered in 45 libraries across the city, most of which Haidara had helped get built—epitomized the reasoned discourse and traditions of intellectual inquiry that the militants, with their rigid views of Islam, their intolerance, and their hatred of modernity and rationality, wanted to destroy. The book was a kind of medieval Encyclopaedia Britannica, Haidara said, chronicling the lives of Islamic scholars, broken into short biographical sections with delicate flourishes, such as green, red, and gold embossed letters marking the beginning of each new section. He encouraged Abdel Kader to master the techniques of manuscript librarianship. Don't speak about them.' His vehicles broke down twice; his driver got lost en route. The trips seldom went smoothly: On his first journey south, Mohammed Touré was stopped half a dozen times at Malian government checkpoints. La mayoría de ellos fueron redescubiertos en la década de 1960 después de haber sido ocultados por las familias que los poseían durante la colonización francesa. His uncle swung into action. I first met Abdel Kader Haidara in happier times. Written primarily in Arabic, the majority of the works are privately held, often by descendants of the original scholars. Select from premium Abdel Kader Haidara of the highest quality. His father ran an Islamic school in the oldest quarter of Timbuktu. Do you agree with Haidara that ancient manuscripts need to be preserved for the sake of an entire culture? Seine Sorge gilt nun der Restaurierung und Konservierung der mittelalterlichen Handschriften. But the face-offs with the jihadists kept coming. View the profiles of people named Abdel Kader Haidara. Stephanie Diakité and Dr. Abdel Kader Haidara began a campaign to raise money for the preservation of the books including a crowd-funding campaign called "Timbuktu Libraries in Exile". Now these historical documents need to be preserved and made permanently accessible for research. The enterprising librarian Abdel Kader Haidara emerges as the central hero in a band of conspirators who sought to prevent an auto-da-fé by smuggling the manuscripts out of … Everything collapsed overnight. "Since the 16th century our ancestors had been acquiring manuscripts," Haidara told me. "It was one of the most moving days of my life. "I could never have imagined such a thing happening just a few months before. ), The continuing state of limbo was taking a toll on Haidara: "I'm all the time surrounded by worry, by responsibility, sometimes I even forget my family," he admitted. Having fled Timbuktu to live in self-imposed exile in Bamako, Haidara manned the phones, calling imams, neighborhood leaders, and other librarians, who came forward with documents and affidavits attesting to Touré's role as curator. Whereas many institutions have provided funding, equipment and/or training, the leading role in all the proceedings is played by the local people. The manuscripts were bound in goatskin and handwritten in delicate calligraphy, with flourishes of gold and pen-and-ink drawings of mosques and desert landscapes. Only 18 finished it. Les manuscrits de Tombouctou ont été évacués à Bamako entre avril 2012 et janvier 2013. It's not for sale.'". "It's obvious that it's an important work," he told me. When I was home, manuscripts surrounded me. Bandits captured a boat full of books on the Niger River and held it for ransom. Haidara had transported dozens of chests to this newly acquired safe house during the rainy season that had ended the previous month, and he was checking to see how well the manuscripts were holding up. The city's production of manuscripts reached its apogee in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Timbuktu was a commercial hub on the Niger and a center of academic studies with more than 150 universities. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. The Islamic State ransacked and demolished mosques, shrines, churches, libraries, and historical monuments across the Middle East and North Africa. Unauthorized use is prohibited. SpaceX launches first astronauts on a reused rocket, Children born to Chernobyl survivors don’t carry more genetic mutations, Yes, vaccines block most transmission of COVID-19, Here’s how locals are preserving Italy’s famed wildflower bloom from overtourism, See fireflies magically light up this national park, Birds, bison, and bears—here’s how to see wildlife from your car. At that time, Dr. Mahmoud Zouber was director of the center. New research on Indian jumping ants shows they can undergo dramatic reversible changes previously unknown in insects. Abdel Kader Haidara with ancient family-owned manuscripts, Timbuktu, Mali, 2007. Desde hace 30 años, lidera la Biblioteca Mamma Haidara -Tombuctú. 35003. If you are feeling despair about the fate of the world, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a must-read, and a welcome shot in the arm." "You didn't have any choice but to continue. "Abdel Kader feels as close to the manuscripts as he does to his children," says Stephanie Diakité, an American attorney who became entranced by the works 20 years ago during a visit to Mali and decided to make their preservation her life's calling. Haidara, an Islamic scholar, sorts through ancient manuscripts. I'd thought they were a legend at best, from the time I was a boy, reading Ripley's Believe It or Not. How did Brazil’s lauded vaccine program fail at COVID-19? In 2012, a terrorist faction known as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) seized control of Timbuktu, the ancient capital of Mali, in western Saharan Africa. Abdel Kader Haidara and the Badass Librarians of Timbuktu. There were many close calls, including one involving Haidara's nephew, Mohammed Touré, a 25-year-old curator at the library. "Little by little, I sensitized people to the conservation work the library was doing," he says. Scribblings by many different hands filled the margins, presumably added by scholars at Sankoré who consulted this work for their own research through the ages. "The manuscripts show that Islam is a religion of tolerance," Haidara told me that day, arguing that his collection would go a long way toward breaking negative perceptions in the West. "They had already started chopping off hands in public places.". "We were completely traumatized by the jihadists. Sign up for more inspiring photos, stories, and special offers from National Geographic. Shortly after my visit to Mali, French forces tracked down and killed Oumar Ould Hamaha, the AQIM fanatic who had arrested Touré on that night in Timbuktu two years earlier. It got a little easier over time. - Abdel Kader Haidara, a librarian, has been identified as the one who saved rare Arabic materials from destruction in Mali - This was after Islamic fighters invaded Timbuktu and destroyed several properties in the city - His act has left to the preservation of the items and a … Adds Diakité: "He feels as much responsibility for them as he does for his own family.". Behind locked doors, Haidara, Touré, and a few other volunteers packed the manuscripts into the trunks. I first met Abdel Kader Haidara eight years ago, when I flew to Timbuktu to write about the country's rediscovery of its literary heritage. "They couldn't believe it," he says. "They had built up a library in Bamba, and my father added to it. In Mali, the Haidara family is known for its intellectuals and judges. "He said, 'You're stealing them,'" Touré recalled one recent afternoon in the Malian capital of Bamako. By 2006, when I visited Haidara—an imposing and ebullient figure who was clad that day in a beige skullcap and draped in a peacock-blue traditional gown known as a bubu—scholars and historians from across Europe and the Middle East were flocking to the Mamma Haidara to study a collection that offered perhaps the most revealing glimpses of what Timbuktu had been at the height of its glory. Offshore wind is poised to take off in the U.S.—but it won’t be easy, 80 years ago, a player made baseball history … an organ player, that is. He bought himself time, but his fate was unclear. Haidara began knocking on the doors of families in Timbuktu, trying to persuade them to bring their manuscripts out of hiding. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who visited Timbuktu and Haidara in 1996, explains that Hegel, Kant, and other Enlightenment philosophers contended that Africa had no tradition of writing, and therefore no history and no memory. Abdel Kader Haidara was a son of a scholar and he grew up in an intellectual environment in Timbuktu. Can ‘community choice’ help them get it? They had this smell, the manuscripts, and they said, 'You're smelling of manuscripts, Abdel Kader.' Photograph: Charlie English. Abdel Kader Haïdara is a tall, 50-year-old librarian who wears a moustache and a pillbox kufi prayer cap. Tel. A través de actividades divulgativas, educativas, económicas y culturales, fomentamos el conocimiento mutuo y fortalecemos las relaciones hispanoafricanas. Over nine traumatic months, Haidara and his team rescued 350,000 manuscripts from 45 different libraries in and around Timbuktu and hid them in Bamako, more than 400 miles from the AQIM-controlled north. "People would say, 'The manuscripts are for us, and they don't leave our presence. The same year Savama-DCI, a foundation that Haidara established to encourage others with access to family collections to follow in his footsteps, received a $600,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to construct two new libraries in Timbuktu: the Al-Wangari and the Allimam Ben Essayouti. "Abdel Kader arrived, had to pay a lot of money, and we were finally liberated, with the manuscripts," he says. Abdel Kader Haïdara is a tall, 50-year-old librarian who wears a moustache and a pillbox kufi prayer cap. After months of prodding, Haidara dropped his plans for a business career and began intensive training, learning everything from conservation techniques to how to assess the monetary value of individual works. Haidara and I met up at his Mamma Haidara Library, a handsome limestone villa in the heart of the old town, with the best samples from his collection displayed in vacuum-sealed glass cases in air-conditioned and well-lit rooms. "They said, 'The proof is there; you were robbing this library.' The only casualties: 4,200 manuscripts that were burned to ashes in a bonfire set by militants at the Ahmed Baba Institute just minutes before the militants fled the city ahead of the French invasion. Here is another, librarian Abdel Kader Haidara, who rescued Timbuktu’s cultural treasures after the jihadist occupation of […] These ants can shrink and regrow their brains. by Naomi House On May 22nd, 2015 SSN Insider named T160K crowdfunding campaign, the Cataloging of the Timbuktu Manuscripts and Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, to their Development Pick List! 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