The dysfunctional copy: “Mali Magic,” loss and the digital remake of the Timbuktu archive

ABSTRACT

In 2012, the manuscript collections of Timbuktu were feared to be at risk of destruction after rebel groups overtook the city. Rumours of the burning of the library and the destruction of thousands of manuscripts catapulted this archive into a discourse of “heritage in peril.” While the rumours were greatly exaggerated, they propelled the archives into new digitisation initiatives led by international organisations to preserve the archive from future loss. What this recent episode obscures, however, is the long history of loss, destruction and remaking that is constitutive of the nature of this archive. This contribution reflects on the integral makeup of this loss for the archive, underscoring its different modes – from the physical anatomy of the manuscripts themselves to colonial plunder, and independence-era archival reconstitution. At the same time, it highlights the generative aspects of loss in the Timbuktu archive, through an exploration of copying as a long-preferred mode of preservation and knowledge production, as well as the problematics of digitisation as the current chosen mode of preservation.

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• loss
• heritage
• libraries
• Timbuktu
• manuscripts
• digitisation

Acknowledgments

I thank Lebogang Mokwena for the inspired title for this piece, and the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative’s (UCT) Research Development Workshop (23–25 March 2022), the special issue’s editors and the anonymous peer reviewers for their collective comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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13. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-surprising-things-you-can-read-in-the-timbuktu-manuscripts/ugVxxsF6_Ea8Lg?hl=en, accessed 1 October 2023.

14. https://artsandculture.google.com/experiment/the-timbuktu-manuscripts/BQE6pL2U3Qsu2A, accessed 2 October 2023.

15. https://hmml.org/collections/islamic/, accessed 1 October 2023.

16. https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP1094, accessed 2 October 2023.

17. “As of July 2022, HMML’s Mali projects have resulted in 3.6 million unique image files, representing 249,000 manuscripts. Of these 18,483 manuscripts are catalogued and viewable online at vhmml.org/readingRoom” (https://hmml.org/about/global-operations/mali/, accessed 2 October 2023).

18. For a detailed account, albeit with a different emphasis, see Molins Lliteras (2020).

19. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the CEDRAB was renamed the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research (IHERI-AB) to refocus its aims on education, training and research on the manuscripts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susana Molins Lliteras

Susana Molins Lliteras is an Associate Researcher at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the UCT. She was a researcher at the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project (www.tombouctoumanuscripts.uct.ac.za), focusing on West African book and manuscript history. She publishes on the archives of Timbuktu and the social history of a West African Sufi movement in South Africa.