![]() ![]() Visiting scholars had brought Korans, the Hadith (the pronouncements of Mohammed compiled by his companions), inquiries into Sufism, and works of the Maliki school of jurisprudence. When they moved to their winter grounds, they left their heavy luggage in the care of a woman they named Bouctou, “the one with the big belly button,” and referred to the settlement as Tin-Bouctou, the well of Bouctou.īy the 14th century, Timbuktu had become a thriving metropolis and trading center and had begun to emerge as a place of learning and culture. The town was founded in the 11th century by a clan from the Tuareg tribe who established a summer redoubt on a congenial spot they found on a tributary of the Niger River. But The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu provides irrefutable evidence that culture and learning in Africa were far more advanced than in Europe by the 16th century when Timbuktu flourished as a center of learning. Without thinking about it, I had accepted the conventional wisdom endorsed by luminaries such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that Africa had no indigenous system of writing, no historical memory, and no civilization. ![]()
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