BY THE WAY, the author is the Joshua Hammer whose journalism on events in Africa appears in The Nation, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, not the Josh Hammer associated with the Claremont Institute and the Edmund Burke Foundation. As a case of noted authors working at the same time and sharing an unusual name, this coincidence is up there with P. Wyndham Lewis (avant-garde writer and painter) and D. B. Wyndham Lewis (popular biographer).
For quite a while, western scholars assumed that there was not much of a documentary tradition in Africa before European colonization, but they were mistaken, for Mali had extensively developed such a tradition in the 15th and 16th centuries. Collecting, preserving, and cataloguing as many of these manuscripts as he could was the work of Abdel Kader Haidara, the bad-ass librarian whose activities we follow for much of the book.
The collection is in jeopardy after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which enables al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists, in cooperation with Tuareg separatists, to sweep into Mali from the North. The manuscripts are the fruit of an Islamic culture, yes, but one the jihadists regard as heretical, so Haidara has to find a way to get the immense collection away safely before it is captured and destroyed.
He succeeds--as the books subtitle lets us know, so that's hardly a spoiler. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is a brisk read, an inspiring story, and an illuminating look at both the history and the current circumstances of Mali.
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