The Bagre and the Mali djinn

Timbuktu was never a myth: it was a real city of gold, salt and above all BOOKS, where by the 1500s scholars at Sankore copied and traded hundreds of thousands of manuscripts on astronomy, medicine and law. When jihadists occupied the city in 2012 and burned what they could reach, librarians and families had already smuggled some 350,000 manuscripts out to Bamako in trunks, on donkey carts and by river, one of the great rescues in the history of the written word. The city and its libraries are real; “fabled Timbuktu” sells it short.