Charlie English’s new book, The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, tells the story of the librarians who saved hundreds of thousands of priceless manuscripts from Al Qaeda in 2013.

In April 2012, armoured al-Qaida trucks arrived in the town of Timbuktu in northern Mali, an ancient centre of learning. The jihadists began destroying sacred sites in the city, and before long efforts began to smuggle the city’s store of important medieval manuscripts to safety in Bamako, Mali’s capital.

English chatted to Radio New Zealand about the book. Listen to the conversation below.

 

About the book:

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.

Click on the link above for more about the book!

Listen to the podcast:

Categories International Non-fiction

Tags Charlie English Jonathan Ball Publishers Podcast Radio New Zealand The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu