When I saw the photo it took my breath away. That’s how powerful it was, even though the image simply showed fragile faded pages covered in weather-beaten leather held together with an equally worn strap.
I had already read the card on the museum wall noting that this was from “Manuscripts of Timbouctou (Timbuktu),” but I didn’t expect it to be so impactful. The photograph’s strength was in its ancient history and its thousand years of being hand-turned and scholar-studied – and its survival to now. Mali photographer Seydou Camara had naturally captured this one and several others in a series of photos.
The photos were part of a “Creative Africa” exhibit in the Perelman Building at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Camara’s works and those of two other African photographers – Akinbode Akinbiyi and Ananias Léki Dago – held forth in a room by themselves in an exhibit titled “Three Photographers/Six Cities,” which will be on view until Sept. 25. Other parts of Creative Africa includes to-die-for fashions, architecture, textiles and antique sculptures.
A major part of the exhibit are works from the 1500s to the 1900s from the Penn Museum’s African collection, consisting of such item as ivories, textiles, wooden vessels and bronzes from the Benin people.
Camara and his fellow photographers were at a press preview for the exhibit recently. He said that he began shooting the manuscripts in 2009 to help preserve their history. There was already a project afoot in Mali to conserve and translate the manuscripts, begun six years earlier.
Called the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, its aim was the same as Camara – to save the thousands of manuscripts spread out in collections in Mali. There are estimated to be more than 100,000 in private libraries and a government archive in the city.
The manuscripts are texts handwritten by scholars and their students in Arabic and African languages in Arabic script on such subjects as commerce, law, astronomy, religion, science and politics. They were created between the 13th and 20th centuries, many during a time when Timbuktu was the center of culture in West Africa and the Sahara.
The manuscripts show, as the Library of Congress noted in an exhibit of 32 manuscripts, that Africa has a long and “irrefutable” literary history.
When we usually think of Timbuktu we don’t necessarily envision a city of scholars. It’s seen as an exotic distant place, but the city is more than that. It was first settled in the 12th century, and by the 15th century it had become an intellectual center. It reached its golden age of political and intellectual thought in the 16th century.
Manuscripts and books were always an integral part of the fabric of the city. During the 16th century its scholars wrote religious and secular books. Trade books were prevalent. Manuscripts from North Africa and Egypt made their way there, and scholars from other areas stopped in to copy books to add to their own collections.
The city was designated a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1990.
Camara said he wanted to make sure the manuscripts were not plundered or destroyed. That happened in the 16th century during the Moroccan invasion that ended Tibuktu’s golden age, destroying an extensive library owned by scholar Ahmed Baba. More recently, in 2013, rebels and Islamic extremists set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute, one of the city’s major libraries. About 2,000 were lost and more than 25,000 had been moved elsewhere.
He went to Timbuktu nine times to photograph the manuscripts.
I was struck by Camara’s photos because they reminded me of the historical documents that come up at auction – not as old but important themselves in telling the stories of families and their history, along with the intertwined histories of peoples in this country.
After I saw them, I very much wanted to speak to him, only to learn that he speaks as much English as I speak French, which is his native tongue.
Speaking through an interpreter, Norman Keyes, director of communications at the museum, though, he said that he started shooting the manuscripts because he was afraid that rebel groups in the area would seize control and destroy them. “He wants to document them as a means of helping to preserve them and their memory,” Keyes said.
A photographer for 10 years, Camara was supposed to follow the traditional career path of his family and become a lawyer. But he realized that he preferred art to law, although he finished college with a B.A. degree in law but never used it.
Born in 1983, he fell in love with art as a child living in a suburb of Bamako, Mali, where he’d watch a man pass his house every morning “on his way to work with his paintings.”
“He asked his grandfather, can I quit school so I can go do that. No you can’t do that (his grandfather said). You go study law.”
Camara liked to draw in school. When he got to high school, drawing was not offered. He went on to the University of Bamako and earned a BA degree in private law.
“He discovered people making photographs and he began to explore it, think about it,” Keyes said. “He came to it on his own, not through school.”
Camara studied at the CFP-Bamako, a photography school in Bamako, where he now lives.
The city of Bamako has become an important center for photography in Africa, according to an exhibition held in 2012 in which Camara’s Bibiana series was represented. Last year, his manuscripts series were part of an exhibit titled “Telling Time.”
