The Book Smugglers Of Timbuktu

Two tales of a city: The historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend. To Westerners, the name "Timbuktu" long conjured a tantalising paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for "discovery" tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city. But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval centre of learning, it was home to tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When al-Qaeda-linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents, a remarkable thing happened: a team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the manuscripts into hiding. Relying on extensive research and firsthand reporting, Charlie English expertly twines these two suspenseful strands into a fascinating account of one of the planet's extraordinary places, and the myths from which it has become inseparable

Two tales of a city: The historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologised places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.

Part of the ALL-NEW Ladybird Expert series. Learn about Timbuktu, in this clear and authoritative introduction to the place considered to be one of the most important trading cities of the medieval world. Written by curator and cultural historian Gus Casely-Hayford, this book delves into the rise of the largest empire in West Africa and what made Timbuktu the most significant Saharan desert-port of the age. You'll encounter the Mali Empire in its golden age, teeming with riches, scholars and trades. Its history steeped in magicians, epic wars, story-tellers and missing ships. You'll learn what made Timbuktu so notorious and irresistible to Europe, and why centuries later it still enchants the Western World with its beauty, wealth, mystery, intellectual excellence and legacy. Inside you'll discover . . . - The significance of The River Niger - The great advantages of the introduction of camels - The birth of Mali - The connections between Islam and the Mali Empire - How the libraries give vivid access to the medieval African perspective - And much more . . . Written by the leading lights and most outstanding communicators in their fields, the Ladybird Expert books provide clear, accessible and authoritative introductions to subjects drawn from science, history and culture. For an adult readership, the Ladybird Expert series is produced in the same iconic small hardback format pioneered by the original Ladybirds. Each beautifully illustrated book features the first new illustrations produced in the original Ladybird style for nearly forty years.

Africa is the birthplace of humanity and civilization. And yet people generally don’t want to accept the scientific impression of Africa as the birthplace of human civilization. The skeptics include Africans themselves, a direct result of the colonial educational systems still in place across Africa, and even those Africans who acquire Western education, particularly in the humanities, have been trapped in the symptomatology of epistemic peonage. These colonial educational systems have overstayed their welcome and should be dismantled. This is where African agency comes in. Agential autonomy deserves an authoritative voice in shaping the curricular direction of Africa. Agential autonomy implicitly sanctions an Afrocentric approach to curriculum development, pedagogy, historiography, literary theory, indigenous language development, and knowledge construction. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics?information and communications technology (STEM-ICT) and research and development (R&D) both exercise foundational leverage in the scientific and cultural discourse of the kind of African Renaissance Cheikh Anta Diop envisaged. “Mr. Francis Kwarteng has written a book that looks at some of the major distortions of African history and Africa’s major contributions to human civilization. In this context, Mr. Kwarteng joins a long list of thinkers who roundly reject the foundational Eurocentric epistemology of Africa in favor of an Afrocentric paradigm of Africa’s material, spiritual, scientific, and epistemic assertion. Mr. Kwarteng places S.T.E.M. and a revision of the humanities at the center of the African Renaissance and critiques Eurocentric fantasies about Africa and its Diaspora following the critical examples of Cheikh Anta Diop, Ama Mazama, Molefi Kete Asante, Abdul Karim Bangura, Theophile Obenga, Maulana Karenga, Mubabingo Bilolo, Kwame Nkrumah, Ivan Van Sertima, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several others. Readers of this book will be challenged to look at Africa through a critical lens.” Ama Mazama, editor/author of Africa in the 21st Century: Toward a New Future “There are countless books about the evolution of European intellectual thought but scarcely any that captures the pioneering contributions of Africans since the beginning of recorded knowledge in Kmet, a.k.a. Ancient Egypt. Well, that long drought has ended with the publication of Kwarteng's An Intellectual Biography of Africa: A Philosophical Anatomy of Advancing Africa the Diopian Way. Prepare to be educated.” Milton Allimadi, author of Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in the Media

In this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from the Global South demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied The notion that societies mediate issues through certain kinds of engagement is at the heart of imaginings of democracy and often centers on the ideal of the public sphere. But this imagined foundation of how we live collectively appears to have suffered a dramatic collapse across the world, with many democracies apparently unable to solve problems through talk – or even to agree on who speaks, in what ways and where. In the 10 essays in this timely, original and sophisticated collection, writers from southern Africa combine theoretical analysis with the examination of historical cases and contemporary developments to demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied. They propose new concepts and methodologies to analyse how public engagements work in society. Babel Unbound examines charged examples from the Global South, such as the centuries old Timbuktu archive, Nelson Mandela as a powerful absent presence in 1960s public life, and the challenges to the terms of contemporary debate around the student activism of #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall. These show how issues of public discussion span both archive and media, verbal debates in formal spaces and visual performances that circulate in unpredictable ways.

Recent political conflicts signal an increased proliferation of image testimonies shared widely via social media. Although witnessing with and through images is not a phenomenon of the internet era, contemporary digital image practices and politics have significantly intensified the affective economies of image testimonies. This volume traces the contours of these conditions and develops a conception of image testimony along four areas of focus. The first and second section of this volume reflects the discussion of image testimonies as an interplay of evidential qualities and their potential to express affective relationalities and emotional involvement. The third section focuses on the question of how social media technologies shape and subsequently are shaped by image testimonies. To further complicate the ethical position of the witness, the final section looks at image testimony at the intersection of creation and destruction, taking into account the perspectives of different actors and their opposed moral positions. With an emphasis on the affectivity of these images, Image Testimonies provides new and so far overlooked insights in the field. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Sociology and Social Policy, Media and Communications, Visual Arts and Culture and Middle East Studies.

The mid-nineteenth century brought a revolution in popular and scholarly understandings of old and second-hand books. Manuals introduced new ideas and practices to increasing numbers of collectors, exhibitions offered opportunities previously unheard of, and scholars worked together to transform how the history of printing was understood. These dramatic changes would have profound consequences for bibliographical study and collecting, accompanied as they were by a proliferation in means of access. Many ideas arising during this time would even continue to exert their influence in the digitised arena of today. This book traces this revolution to its roots in commercial and personal ties between key players in England, France and beyond, illuminating how exhibitions, libraries, booksellers, scholars and popular writers all contributed to the modern world of book studies. For students and researchers, it offers an invaluable means of orientation in a field now once again undergoing deep and wide-ranging transformations.

LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'A sweeping, absorbing history, deeply researched, of that extraordinary and enduring phenomenon: the library' Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children's drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. In this, the first major history of its kind, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the contested and dramatic history of the library, from the famous collections of the ancient world to the embattled public resources we cherish today. Along the way, they introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of fashions and tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanours committed in pursuit of rare and valuable manuscripts.