Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures
    Unavailable
    The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures
    Unavailable
    The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures

    Written by Charlie English

    Narrated by Jonathan Keeble

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘An exemplary work of investigative journalism that is also a wonderfully colourful book of history and travel’ Observer, Books of the Year

    ‘A piece of postmodern historiography of quite extraordinary sophistication and ingenuity… [written with] exceptional delicacy and restraint’ TLS

    The fabled city of Timbuktu has captured the Western imagination for centuries. The search for this ‘African El Dorado’ cost the lives of many explorers but Timbuktu is rich beyond its legends. Home to many thousands of ancient manuscripts on poetry, history, religion, law, pharmacology and astronomy, the city has been a centre of learning since medieval times.

    When jihadists invaded Mali in 2012 threatening destruction to Timbuktu’s libraries, a remarkable thing happened. A team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the precious manuscripts into hiding. Based on new research and first-hand reporting, Charlie English expertly tells this story set in one of the world’s most fascinating places, and the myths from which it has become inseparable.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateMay 4, 2017
    ISBN9780008181918
    Unavailable
    The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures

    Related to The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu

    Related audiobooks

    African History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Landscape Was His Mistress

      Feb 9, 2022

      IN 1802, John Constable wrote seven observations and resolutions about art. In them, among other things, he pledged to follow Nature, to make ‘unaffected’ pictures, and to avoid ‘common place people’. He also declared that ‘there is no easy way of be

      5 min read

    • Article

      The King Of Westminster

      May 24, 2023

      The King Of Westminster
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Past Is A Foreign Country

      Jan 26, 2022

      Penelope Corfield (Yale University Press £25) PENELOPE CORFIELD has set herself an ambitious task: how to distil the complex, overarching narratives of the British-Irish 18th century—from shifting dynasties, multiple national identities and parliam

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Battle of London 1939-45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire

      Nov 17, 2021

      Bodley Head £30 Jerry White has a unique relation to London and Londoners. More than a historian, he is the city’s witness, champion and town-crier, tolling his bell through the streets, oyez, oyez, oyez, proclaiming the latest chapter in the life of

      3 min read

    • Article

      Fairies, Folklore And Forteana

      Jun 15, 2023

      As noted in the last FT, I have recently been collecting accounts of the immortals among us. Folk who refuse to die and who keep turning up through the generations like a bad penny. These undying individuals come in various forms, but in Britain at l

      2 min read

    • Article

      History

      Apr 3, 2024

      Viking, 464pp, £20 In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book

      11 min read

    • Article

      Crazy For Cider

      Aug 25, 2021

      JAMES CROWDEN is a poet, shepherd and total cider nut. In this, at least his third book on the subject, there is no other drink but that it suffers from his passion for cider, apple brandy and cider’s delicate, sweet sister, perry—and almost no momen

      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Nov 26, 2020

      It is always my favourite time of the month when BBC History Magazine arrives on the doorstep, and I was pleased to see some ancient history making an appearance in the November issue. I enjoyed Andrew Bayliss’s account of Leonidas and the battle of

      4 min read

    • Article

      'Black Tudors' Reveals a Surprising and Overlooked Chapter of History

      Nov 16, 2017

      Hidden in British archives and parish records are the identities of dozens of black people who lived in England during Tudor times.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Seeking the ‘Lost Legion’

      Jun 8, 2021

      Seeking the ‘Lost Legion’
      3 min read

    • Article

      CHARLES II's CURSED REIGN

      Apr 20, 2023

      CHARLES II's CURSED REIGN
      11 min read

    • Article

      Anniversaries

      Oct 1, 2020

      Anniversaries
      5 min read

    • Article

      Exploring The Congo River

      Sep 16, 2019

      In 1853, while David Livingstone tarried at Linyanti on the Chobe River, a messenger arrived saying there was a white man downriver who wanted to greet him. Livingstone was stunned, but wishing no competition from other European explorers, he refused

      3 min read

    • Article

      Culture Chronicle

      Jul 4, 2021

      Culture Chronicle
      7 min read

    • Article

      Behind The Fake News

      Dec 27, 2019

      Behind The Fake News
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Mar Vellous Miscellany

      Feb 11, 2023

      In these columns I have inevitably tended to focus on the longer, high-profile volumes which make up the backbone of the Society’s publication list, so it is a pleasure to be able to turn in this issue to a too-often neglected genre: the miscellany v

      2 min read

    • Article

      Enthralled by Egypt

      Jan 18, 2024

      Interesting as your feature on Napoleon's “many faces” was (Christmas), it surprisingly omits his fascination with ancient Egypt. In 1798, a large party of French savants, including scientists such as Joseph Fourier, accompanied Napoleon's military e

      4 min read

    • Article

      Hidden Assets

      Oct 26, 2023

      Disguising the Taj Mahal with bamboo scaffolding to protect it from enemy attack in 1942 (Did You Know?, November) was just one example of the countless ways that factories, runways, power plants and other important structures were camouflaged during

      3 min read

    • Article

      Chips, With Everything

      Oct 28, 2021

      Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson, £35) Christopher Pincher is Minister of State for Housing DIARIES ARE CAPTIVATING, they tell us so much about so much. They magic up the mood behind the headlines of the t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Tiger Feat

      Jan 26, 2024

      Tiger Feat
      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Dec 28, 2022

      I was intrigued by the short story in the November issue's Anniversaries section regarding the peaceful transfer of power from Henry III to his son Edward I –the first such occasion in English history. I wanted to know more about why this particular

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu

    4/5

    27 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      The city of Timbuktu with its ancient history has long captivated people. Just the very name conjures up images of an oasis in the desert, a city full of exotic people and a place where the mysteries of the East meet the gateway to the dark continent of Africa. It is a place that drew travellers in the Eighteenth century seeking the legendary place where even the slaves wore gold, but the desire to reach there was not always met with success, history shows us that the roads there were littered with failed expeditions as they succumbed to the hostile landscape, disease and attack.

      There is another side to Timbuktu, it has always been a world centre in the Islamic world for learning from as far back as the 13th Century. As they became a centre where knowledge was pooled. This has left a lasting legacy of thousands and thousands of documents, books and manuscripts in public and personal libraries throughout the city on subjects as diverse as astronomy, religion, law and history as well as cultural subjects like poetry. These vast libraries came under threat from destruction in 2012 as al-Qaeda–linked jihadists poured across Mali wreaking havoc and destruction as they went. After destroying several mausoleums the librarians and archivists of the city were forced to consider the fate of their precious papers. So began the race to either hide the manuscripts or in the case of large collections, to move them to another city where they would be safe.

      At times this reads like a thriller, as he tells the stories of how the manuscripts were moved from Timbuktu to a place of safety in Bamako using secure networks of couriers. Much of it was carried out in secret as the least amount of people that knew about it, the safer the operation. Charlie English recounts the stories he’d been told, before travelling to the city to see for himself the lockers and their precious cargoes. Whilst I think that it was important to set the context, for me it felt like there was too much emphasis on the past events. I didn’t like the switching around of the old and the new, I would have preferred the current day and historical events to be in separate sections. With its history, contemporary world issues and focus on ancient books, it is a difficult book to pigeonhole. It is a fascinating and very readable account of a small but significant part of world history.
    • 4/5
      In 2013, the forces of AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb) take Timbuktu and immediately begin to impose their Salafist vision of Islam - one that is at odds with the spiritual, Sufi version that has been the norm in West Africa. The scholars of Timbuktu immediately worry for their vast and unique collection of Islamic and historic manuscripts from Medieval times, one of the few primary sources of West African history. Those worries increase as the jihardists start to smash the mausoleums of Sufi saintsAnd so begins a remarkable story as brave officials, families and holders of private collections of manuscripts start the dangerous (both to the smugglers and the manuscripts) and time consuming business of hiding some manuscripts and moving others to the relative safety of Bamako, many hundreds of miles awayInterspersed with this Charlie English presents a very knowledgeable but readable history of the exploration of West Africa, with a particular focus on the histiography of the region (ie the history of its history). This is fascinating enough on its own, particularly the chapters on the undoubtedly brave, but equally undoubtedly somewhat foolish, early British explorers, many of whom came to a premature endSo a very entertaining and informative read, which ends on a slightly sour note, as the author starts to doubt his own story and his own conclusions and has the intellectual honesty to present those doubts. Doubts that are very much in line with the vague, swirling, illusory history of Timbuktu itself