Interview with historian Shamil Jeppie,
author of Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History

TSJ

TSJ: Could you tell us why you wrote Writing Timbuktu: The Book in West African History and what you hope this intervention would achieve?

Shamil Jeppie (S.J.):  I live and work on the southern tip of Africa and have been fascinated by the histories of other regions of the continent since before I started university in the early 1980s. At the time, in South Africa, only the history of Europeans was taught, and most of Africa was a large absence to us. Thus, throughout my higher education, then as an educator and scholar I have tried to learn, teach and research, where possible, any part of the continent that intrigued me. To take a long jump forward, when I got the opportunity to work with colleagues in Mali, and in Timbuktu in particular, in the early part of this century I jumped at the opportunity. After years of working with colleagues and friends there, of immersing myself in the existing research and in the primary sources I decided to write a book that introduced my own research, my approach to the materials.

I see in the larger archive of the region—from Marrakesh to Kano, and from the Senegal River to Niamey, let’s say, via Shinqit and Timbuktu—a world where the manuscript book was a thing of value and significance. It was a material object for which paper and leather covers were items of commerce and craft. The book, long before it arrived there as a printed object, was present at least in some homes, and I want to point to a complex and rich world of the book as a product of deep and extensive whole networks of learning, teaching, writing and debate. I could not, of course, always find the archival documentation for detailed treatment of every writer in each period but that was how I framed the work.

TSJ: The history of the Sahara has been overpopulated by colonial literature since the 19th century. What conceptions do you wish Writing Timbuktu will undo in the minds of your readers?

S.J.:  The colonial discourses on the Sahara are analyzed and untangled in the recent book, Desert Imaginations (2025) by Brahim el-Guabli, which will be a reference point for literary scholarship on desert and the Sahara in particular. Timbuktu was very much an object in that discourse, reaching that impossible place was a fantasy of many European travelers which I cover in chapter one where I have a survey of the discovery of the book in the desert. I could have gone into a far more wide-ranging discussion but wanted to show how the intellectual life of the desert was viewed. There is the figure of the journalist Felix du Bois who authored the best-seller Tombouctou la mystérieus (1897), after he was sent to cover the conquest of Timbuktu but came too late to see the action. Then he went on to write that book that is a kind of intellectual and institutional history of the region based on information gathered from informants and his own fertile imagination.

I want to show that there is a long history of writing in the desert. The manuscript book as an object and what it takes to make it requires our attention. There are all the material elements –paper, the ink and styluses, the leather covers or pouches to carry them–that involved capital and exchange. This is beside the intellectual effort and the content that reflected a considerable amount of training of the writers over many years. So, there was a schooling system without school buildings and in the open under whatever shade could be found. Nomadism did not mean that learning was absent. This is not to romanticize anything or to make claims about rates of literacy. There were levels of literacy and, of course, only a small cohort became the kinds of scholars I write about; but there are many more that I do not mention at all. The arch of the narrative goes broadly from Ahmad Baba (d.1627) to Ahmad Bularraf (d.1955). I end with a discussion of the persistence of manuscript culture in the age of print.

3 TSJ: Writing Timbuktu is a history of both place and people as they connected with, traded, transferred, and disseminated books. Could you tell us more about the significance of this history of knowledge and what its recovery from your own perspective does to the history of the Sahara?

S.J.:  My book is not the first to take on this subject. Although I think it might be unique to take on a relatively long sweep of history, one that stretches from Timbuktu before the Sa‘adian invasion in 1591 to the 20th century writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ and that makes connections using the manuscript book as a unifying thread. Since the late 1960s and especially after the efforts to build archives and collect manuscripts kept by families, there have been scholars who have looked at specific aspects of the traditions of learning; and I acknowledge them in my work. The major archive-library was opened in Timbuktu in the early 1970s, and this enabled more systematic research. Works were safely stored in one place and catalogues published as guides to them; one could follow up a citation in a work. Similar efforts were undertaken in Mauritania, in Nigeria and elsewhere. We should not underestimate the value of institutions like the library-archive as a public resource that can facilitate education and research.

I use the idea of the manuscript book as an organizing principle but collecting and the collection are very present in the work. There is still a large quantity of materials to study, to edit, and to use to make connections between various places, big and small. We are dealing with a vast space of course but there is interesting work on Tuwat, the oases in Algeria, Shinqit is an iconic location in Mauritania, in Niger there is Agadez with collections, and one can find manuscript books in so many small hamlets. Recall the surprising encounters that the traveler Heinrich Barth had with bookmen on his travels that I discuss in chapter one. So we can look at the manuscript book as a material object–and paper was the most fundamental component–that was moved across this space. Look at what were objects of trade and place paper among them.

TSJ: You dedicate an important section of the book to Boularaf and his extraordinary work, trading in books and also preserving them. Can you summarize his story for the readers and tell us how his legacy survives today?

S.J.:  In my early trips to Timbuktu I visited families with collections and had long conversations with some of the scholars who were deeply involved in copying texts, identifying unsigned works, apart from their impressive knowledge of Arabic grammar and law and so on. The name of Ahmad Bularraf (Boularaf, is a popular spelling) always came up; his name and his son’s name, who became a well-known scholar of Arabic grammar, and other members of the family. I was intrigued by this man. He was also known to researchers from the University of Mohamed V in Rabat who had done a project on the Moroccan diaspora in West Africa. They had done fieldwork and conducted interviews in Mali and Bularraf featured in that work. I gathered from the references that Ahmad Bularraf was a keen correspondent with other traders.

When I tracked down a set of letters kept at the National Library in Rabat I found that all the letters were between him and booksellers far and wide. I also learned from the first archivist of the Centre de Documentation et de Recherche Ahmed Baba (Cedrab), Dr Mahmoud Zouber, that the basis for the library was Ahmad Bularraf’s collection. Then I followed his traces to Niamey, where there are a handful of manuscripts by him in the university library and he also had family there. So, his story is fascinating, from Guelmime to Timbuktu, to a number of other places in-between and beyond. I have been collecting materials on him and by him and he should really be the subject of a full study which I should prepare if I can fill in a few gaps. In the meanwhile, I think I give a sense of his life as a collector in chapter seven. We can tell similar stories of other men who moved across vast spaces in the Sahara. The Kunta which were a family, clan, led a Sufi order, were political operators and ran an extensive commercial network immediately comes to mind and there are works that cover their activities but there is still much more to do.

TSJ: The history of the book is the history of its making as well as the histories of all the different intermediaries who had a stake in its existence. Could you reflect a little bit on these stakeholders and how they made the Sahara and the Sahel into havens for knowledge transfer?

S.J.:  Yes the intermediaries are important in the mobility of the book. It is fascinating how people were connected in far-flung parts of that vast space. There were networks of information about the movement of people and things long before colonial postal service and the telegraph were established. We can say more about these, as I do in the case of Bularraf who used the colonial postal service extensively. Much more can be done of the telegraph and the postal service in the colonies. They were also used to monitor, spy and censor information. Bularraf was himself an intermediary, but he was also a writer and commentator. He came from the Tikna clans who were famous traders in Wad Nūn and he arrived in Timbuktu as a trader and used his family and Tikna network for his business, and books became an integral, and perhaps the most important, part of his trading activity. He still has descendants in Timbuktu and they established a library of his materials that did not go to the Cedrab which I began to visit but since the insurgency in the North in 2012 it was not possible to go back to work on those materials.

TSJ: An important aspect of the Sahara is its Amazigh dimension. Have you encountered anything about this aspect in your sources?

S.J.:  On the inscriptions I mention early in the book there is evidence of Tifinagh script. In the larger region I am sure there are many inscriptions alongside Arabic and on their own. In Timbuktu itself I did not find the script in any texts. But Tamasheq is, of course, spoken in the region, it is among the languages in this multilingual space alongside Hassaniyyah Arabic, Songhay, Fulfulde, Fusha Arabic, Bamana, French and so on. But texts are with few exceptions in Fusha and that is the standard by which writers judged other writers. A high-level of Fusha is still cultivated. In neighboring Niger a similar situation prevails. However, in the North around Agadez there was an active use of the Tifinagh script into the present. I was told by an anthropologist who had spent years doing fieldwork there that Tifinagh is used but largely by women and only in private communications. Is it a secret women’s script? This would be an issue to explore. It would be worth investigating if this phenomenon hasn’t yet been studied. The current flourishing of the script and publishing in it and teaching of the language and script seems to be largely happening in Morocco; much less is happening in Mali or neighboring countries like Algeria and Niger. I look forward to learning from initiatives such as your journal– I find the section Temehu on the journal website a great resource—to deepen my knowledge and understanding of the cultural politics and historical processes, and the archives in Tamazigh.

TSJ: Now that Writing Timbuktu is out in the world, what are some of the lingering questions that you think should be broached in future research about books and the Saharan space.

S.J.: I am so curious about so many aspects of that vast space but I have to be careful and narrow down my interests or make connections between these interests. Furthermore, I am thousands of kilometers away and it is easier for me to go to England and France than to Mali, Senegal or Niger– one must crisscross the continent or leave and re-enter to get there! I do get to Morocco frequently and so I have been slowly collecting materials there and feel that I must go back to Guelmime and those areas. There was quite a bit of excitement when I first went there and the leadership of the Tikna were most welcoming. Some were amused by my interest in a man (Bularraf) who concerned himself with collecting and copying books more than commerce which they prided themselves on. Others had read some of my already published essays and were thinking of a whole conference on him!

It would be interesting to look in detail at what Marrakesh was like when Ahmad Baba was there. The city was a magnet for all sorts of people, and I’m wondering what it was like for a man like Baba—an exile, outsider—to live, teach and write there for a dozen years. He had students from Fez and elsewhere and he was a recognized scholar. I am intrigued by the place in, say, between 1578 (Battle of the Three Kings) and 1620s. I’m sure there are lots of works by Moroccan scholars on Marrakesh that I should start with. But there are also lots of primary sources such as the Baba’s own writings that should be tapped.

Finally, since you asked, it would be necessary to keep an eye out for Tifinagh texts and other traces of Amazigh culture and history.

We also must make sure this knowledge circulates across the continent. I want my students to be intrigued and curious about the scripts, texts, histories and cultures of other regions of the continent. Just as I want students in those parts to have an interest in southern Africa.