JOST A MON

Welcome to the twenty-fourth instalment of the Giant’s Shoulders, the monthly carnival of science and history-of-science blogging from around the planet. In this issue, there’s a bit of a preponderance of historical vignettes, which I trust you’ll find interesting.

Shall we start with a timeline of scientific discoveries, analyses and inventions? How about this – from years that end in 24 in every century? I’m missing several years, so if you’d like to fill those in, please be my guest.

I can’t think of any particular grouping in this carnival. You know, by subject and all that. It’s pretty motley. Chronological order is somewhat unsatisfying, like arranging books on your shelf in alphabetical order of title. Let us, therefore, be whimsical.

From New at LacusCurtius & Livius, we have Bill Thayer’s introduction and a link to a classic paper about how people developed effective ways to compute the heights of mountains. It’s a wide-ranging work, starting from the Ancient Greeks and working its way through Kepler and The paper is from 1929, so expect nothing on GPS in it!

Continuing with mensuration, Ethan Siegel at ScienceBlogs has a neat little piece about how to determine distances to the stars. In How Far to the Stars, he explains the principle of parallax, notes that Copernicus thought he could use it to tell distances, and then goes on to Christiaan Huygens’s idea of using luminosity to compute how far Sirius is from us.

So we are able to measure distances with excellent accuracy. But what of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Surely it’s impossible to measure simultaneously (to arbitrary precision) both the position and the momentum of an object? This is certainly true on the scale of the truly small, but why is it not so evident on the scale of our senses? Why does quantum mechanics explain to remarkable accuracy the weird behaviour of the minute but loses that weirdness at the macroscopic? On homunculus, Philip Ball presents Big Quantum, where he talks about this explanatory lacuna in the transition between the very small and the large. It’s all due to decoherence!

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How about some pseudoscience? Alchemy has had a bad rap, and yet it provided the foundations for chemistry. Via Thony C., we have Lawrence Principe and the Rehabilitation of Alchemy – another lecture in Utrecht posted at Heterodoxology.

For another example of the genre, we have Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor with an interesting little piece about one type of alternative medicine – uroscopy. This is the use of urine’s colour, consistency, taste and smell as a diagnostic tool. By the 19th century, professional medics had discounted this as quackery, but common people continued to frequent piss-doctors. In Cameron the Piss-Prophet, we learn how one such worthy was hoist by his own petard.

From one aspect of quackery, we move on to another. In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft (or Tofts) was a sensation in England for having allegedly given birth to rabbits.

She had supporters and deriders in equal measure; scientists argued both in her favour (e.g. a medical doctor, John Maubray) and against (Sir Richard Manningham, a male midwife). William Hogarth’s Cunicularii at the Wellcome Library Item of the Month (besides analysing some lovely etchings by the great artist) raises a subtle question.

Leaving quackery, we ponder another form of obfuscation. Via Thony C. we have an article titled “Follies of the present day”: Scriptural Geology from 1817 to 1857 by J.M. Lynch at A Simple Prop. Who were scriptural geologists? These were scientists who tried somehow to unify vast geological time with their faith in the Bible’s six days of creation. Note that these people did not believe (pace Ussher) that the Universe was formed in 4004 BC.

Why did these Christian scientists not pay closer attention to James Hutton? In 1785, he had published an article Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability in which he began the study of deep geological time. Via Thony C., we have John F. Ptak’s Raising Greatness: James Hutton’s Deep View of Time, 1795 posted at Ptak Science Books talking about Hutton’s remarkable intuition, as he saw the entirety of Earth’s history explained in the sloping red sandstone at Siccar Point.

While on the subject of deep time, a fossil of the Archaeopteryx was first discovered in 1861. Since then palaeontologists have argued whether this transitional creature (between dinosaurs and true birds) was capable of flight. Ed Yong presents First Birds Were Poor Fliers at the Discover Magazine Blog. There were some reasons to believe that the beast could fly but also good reasons why not.

Fossils and da Vinci - who would have thunk it? Via Thony C., we have Brian Switek's Leonardo da Vinci - Palaeontology Pioneer at the Smithsonian Magazine's blog.

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Dorset Ancestors have a biography of Francis Glisson, a native of that English county, who went on to great success as a doctor in 17th century London. When he heard of a new debilitating disease among children of Dorset, he studied it carefully and concluded that this bone-deformative condition (which we know as ‘rickets’) was caused by malnutrition.

A sesquicentennial after Glisson plied his investigative mind, another Englishman began to consider the various causes of deafness in people. As a diagnostic tool, John Harrison Curtis invented the Cephaloscope, which is described in Jaipreet Virdi’s post The Cephaloscope on From the Hands of Quacks.

John Harrison Curtis also insisted that aurists – students of auditory illnesses – should also be attached to medical hospitals. Jaipreet Virdi’s related post The London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb tells this story.

From illnesses of the body, we segue to a illness of the mind. The dreaded African disease, sleeping sickness, when in an advanced stage, often resulted in violent mania. Was this true insanity on the part of the natives, or just a manifestation of a fear of isolation in a camp? From Sleeping Sickness and Lunacy at the Colonial Psychiatry Hub, we learn that much documentation of the effects of sleeping sickness on the local population is available from the British staffers of the Colonial Office (Uganda).

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Just for variety, here’s something to watch rather than to read. Via Thony C., we have Lens on Leeuwenhoek: Videos about his life, times, and accomplishments posted at Lens on Leeuwenhoek.

This video is an overview of the life, times, and accomplishments of Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the Dutch scientist who used hand-made single-lens microscopes to become the first human to see protozoa, bacteria, sperm, and red blood cells, among many other things.

And although that video’s only 7 minutes long, it promises more riches to come. Can there be any more to van Leeuwenhoek, then? Indeed there can, and Thony C. presents Lego-nhoek? posted at Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal.

van Leeuwenhoek, of course, was a contemporary, competitor and Royal Society colleague of that polymath Robert Hooke. I found several blogs on this brilliant Englishman, and planned to chuck them in here, but closer scrutiny revealed that at least one of those pieces was a copy of a Wikipedia article. I hope this is not a similar copy: Leland Velazquez discusses the Physics of Bungee Jumping. Hooke’s work on elasticity leading to his eponymous law is the underpinning of this extreme sport.

If Robert Hooke is around, Christopher Wren can’t be far behind. Another brilliantly multifaceted man, Wren involved himself in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, art, and – we learn from Christopher Wren and the Bees by Gene Kritsky at Wonders & Marvels – beekeeping. Why is this scientifically relevant? He also developed the transparent beehive that was suitable for the scientific observation of bee behaviour.

The bees were able to move between the various layers of the hive, and glass panels set into the structure allowed an observer to see the honey cascading down inside it. Although Wren’s construction had not been an immediate success (due to a failure to realise that bees worked downwards), it offered the prospect of an ever-increasing stock of bees and honey within the same hive. [from here]

Speaking of polymaths, there was Florence Fenwick Miller in the 19th century. She was a suffragette, a journalist, an educator, and a qualified medical doctor. From Peacay at the absolutely ravishing BibliOdyssey, we have An Atlas of Anatomy.

From Peacay at BibliOdyssey again, we have Fungis Danicis, a lovely set of illustrations of fungi studied by a Danish lawyer-turned-botanist named Theodor Holmskjold in the 18th century. This worthy actually identified over fifty new species during two years of observation in the countryside near Aarhus.

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Now for some controversy! When scientists without training in history try to develop works in the history of science, clearly feathers are ruffled.  Via Thony C., we have Renaissance Art or Neuroanatomy? Part 1 and part 2, posted by Darin at PACHSmörgåsbord. It appears that there have been a series of papers over the past 20 years by various scientists trying to find hidden anatomically precise messages in Michelangelo’s art.

R. Donald Fields wrote up a guest blog at Scientific American recently that discusses the oeuvre; as it turns out, none of the scientists involved is a trained historian. As the rebuttal at PACHSmörgåsbord makes clear, this is dangerous practice:

Why does this matter? Because such articles attract the attention of editors and contributors at places like Scientific American. These contributors then post a redaction of the article on the website, where the post becomes one of the most popular. Such redactions misrepresent the history of science, suggest that anybody can write the history of science, and deny that historians of science have a discrete expertise. That’s why it matters.

But just to show that not all scientific speculation on art is ill-founded, check out this interesting bit of detective work by a bunch of astronomers at Texas State University. Via Thony C., we have a post by Roger Sinnott on Sky And Telescope titled Walt Whitman’s Meteor-Procession, we learn about the great poet’s imagery (“the strange huge meteor-procession" that went "shooting over our heads" with "its balls of unearthly light”) and an interesting astronomical phenomenon.

I’m not sure if this next piece fits within the purview of our Carnival (as it may be more aligned to sociology) but I think it relates to a seminal work of behavioural psychology, so perhaps I can present it? Christopher Greene’s Clarks’ Black-White Doll Experiment Replicated at Advances in the History of Psychology blog discusses an even more controversial subject than that in the preceding paragraph, and highlights its most recent replication under the aegis of CNN (full report here in PDF).

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On to more jolly subjects. Remember Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation? It is 50 years since the invention of the (optical) laser. Via Thony C., we have Happy Birthday! posted by Matt Springer at Built on Facts.

Another anniversary is that of Vannevar Bush’s visionary piece sixty-five years ago in the Atlantic Review about associative links in information, which one can easily see as an early precursor to hypertext and all that. Via gg, we have Simon Harper’s review ‘As We May Think’ at 65 from his blog Thinking Out Loud.

In the 19th century, by a gradual process of socialisation, the scientific and professional communities in the USA began to differentiate themselves. Will Thomas posts Paul Lucier on ‘Professionals’ and ‘Scientists’ in 19th century America at the Ether Wave Propaganda blog.

We end on a luminous, numinous note. What links a certain 1980s teen film, a song by John Parr, the Chinese sea-goddess Mazu, and – wait for it – ionised air? In St Elmo’s Fire, Captain Skellet of A Schooner of Science explains the whys and the hows of the gorgeous blue glow that appears on the tips of masts on sailing ships.

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[And there you have it. Thanks for stopping by. I hope this encourages  you to write up your own pieces on science and its history and philosophy. Do consider submitting your blog article to the next edition of the giant's shoulders at The Dispersal of Darwin. You can use the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.]

It is the imperial influence of Europe that has transformed much of Africa into the continent we know today. Long after the wondrous designs of the Egyptian Pyramids and the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and the mud-brick mosques of Mali, new architectural paradigms began to inform the African metropolitan landscape. This is most evident in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea.

Although Eritrea has long been part of Ethiopia, independent only since the 1990s, Asmara – a World Heritage site – has little in common with the constructions of its erstwhile overlord. In fact, it has much more in common with the architecture of Italy, the country that colonised and occupied it from the end of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War.

In the early years of their rule, the Italians introduced a bewildering mixture of styles in Asmara. The city’s town square offers the perfect example of this melange. The building of the Communal Bank of Eritrea is in the neoclassical idiom; the post office building has an austere, stripped classicism with lovely colours; there is a Baroque edifice in one of the corners of the square, with its swooping stairs and strange cupola; a 1950s-style building has strong lines and punched out windows; a neoclassical building that acknowledges a sort of arabesque arcade; and there is a symmetrical palace building that completes the ensemble.

Asmara’s mix of architectural styles defines it as the epitome of the 20th century in Afro-Italian history. But, of course, the Italian taste for the eclectic didn’t last. By the 1930s, Benito Mussolini had decided to inflict a harsh futuristic aesthetic on his colony. Like Hitler, he wanted to express his power via architecture. He decreed that the new Asmara would be done up in his favourite style, namely Modernism.

One of Africa’s most remarkable buildings has to be the Modernist petrol station built in the shape of an aeroplane. Designed by one of Mussolini’s favourite architects, Giuseppe Pettazzi, the 1938 Fiat gas station is a splendid example of a branch of Modernism called Futurism. It used to be said of this beautiful fossilised pterodactyl of an edifice that its design reflected the desire of homesick colonials to return to Europe.

There’s a story about this building. Pettazzi, when he had to submit these plans to the local authority, faced a huge problem. They couldn’t believe that a concrete structure with a sixteen metre cantilever looking like this could stand up by itself. So they forced him to put lots of little columns underneath in order to support it. When the structure was built, Pettazzi was reported to have held a gun to the builder’s head, and ordered the poor man to take away all the columns. And lo and behold, it's standing up.

At the height of the occupation, 70,000 Italian civilians were drafted into Asmara, to build Mussolini’s model city. To keep them entertained, in 1937, the authorities built the Odeon cinema, one of five picture palaces in Asmara. Its elegant foyer appears to have been ripped out of the set of a classical movie, with subtle backlighting and sumptuous fittings. Upstairs, in its function room, the architects gave it a playfulness with its deliciously sloping ceiling.

It’s easy to fall for a place like Asmara. This is what happened to the Eritrean architect Naigzy Gebremedhin, author of Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City. One of his favourite buildings in the Selam Hotel, built in 1937. Its style is Rationalist, a branch of Modernism that favours the simple, the brutal and the ruthlessly functional. The Fascists, says Naigzy, adopted this style and made it their own, and the Italian architects of the time adopted both the Fascist stance and continued to work in this particular idiom.

The Casa dei Italiani in Asmara was originally the Fascist youth club, Casa dei Ballila; at the front gate, the fasces are still visible – reeds tied together, the traditional Fascist insignia, and at the capitals of the columns used to be axes, which have since been removed. It used to be a Fascist club for boys, so to speak, and now it’s the club for Italian expatriates and the Italian-speaking Eritrean community.

Of course, Mussolini’s buildings weren’t really designed for the natives at all. The Italians imposed strict social segregation, leaving most Eritreans sidelined and marginalised. Nevertheless, many Asmarinos (as they are called) retain a certain affection for Mussolini’s cultural legacy. While they would never excuse any of the terrible colonial past, Eritreans do appreciate that the Italians spared no expense in designing and constructing the city. Despite the daily reminders of their colonial subjugation, it is evident that many Asmarinos love their capital. And why not? Even an outwardly unprepossessing apartment block can hide a wonderful surprise.

Take a look at this seamlessly meshing appearance from below of the spiral staircase that serves six to seven apartments in this block.

This is by no means a unique experience in Asmara, a city that retains a wonderful charm. If nothing else, the Romans were able to donate a certain romance to the place.

Naigzy reveals that the Fiat building was only one of several that were inspired by forms of transport. Here is one that looks like a train, led by a locomotive going down the river.

And when that one was finished, directly across it was built another building – which looks like a boat.

By 1941, Mussolini had turned Asmara into the most modern city in Africa. But in just six years, Il Duce’s dreams of grandeur were shattered by Allied troops, who jackbooted him out of Eritrea. As the tanks rolled into town, the soldiers must have been amazed to discover a little Italy, complete with legions of locals walking the passaggiata down the via Mussolini.

For the Italians, of course, the evening stroll had been a way to wind down the day with elegance and flair. The Eritreans continue to enjoy some of that élan in Asmara, which remains to this day one of the most charming cities in Africa.

(A loose transcript of David Adjaye’s Building Africa: The Architecture of a Continent. BBC Four.)

This is the story of the rise and fall of a legendary city with a long-hidden legacy of hundreds and thousands of ancient manuscripts. Set against the backdrop of mighty kingdoms and visionary leaders, it talks of how old trade routes from the East became Ink Roads, bringing writing to the heart of West Africa, and how Timbuktu became its leading light, and how invasions and conquests caused that story to be buried in the desert sands of the Sahara. African storytellers have had their long oral traditions dismissed as mere song and dance; the ensuing lack of a written literature was interpreted as a lack of a literary tradition. But now a different interpretation is emerging: one that tells us that reading and writing has been as important a tradition in Africa as it has been in the other great civilisations of the world. As Timbuktu's manuscripts are brought out of hiding, the conviction grows that what they have to tell us will forever rewrite Africa's history.

By the 17th century, tales of an African Eldorado whose streets were paved with gold and whose culture was more glittering than any in Europe were beginning to percolate into the white man's consciousness in the North. As European colonialism grew apace, it became a matter of honour for the likes of England and France to send explorers across the Sahara, or from the sea, to find this fabled city named Timbuktu. The expeditions took years, involved violent strife with desert tribes and large losses of lives, so Timbuktu became synonymous with remoteness and the unknowable. But eventually Western Africa fell to the Europeans, and Mali, once the richest empire in the world, became nothing more than a backwater province of the French. It regained its independence only in the 1960s, and several years were to pass before the owners of its rich literary history felt safe enough to bring their manuscripts out of hiding.

Even today, few people realise that Mali was once Africa's most important seat of learning. From the 13th century onwards, Timbuktu became an academic centre and a paradise for scholars. Today, the memory of those glory days has diminished to a recollection of alphas, wise men from the North who spread knowledge of the word of Allah. In fact, these men were from Timbuktu, students and teachers of faith and science. Among Africans, perhaps only those studying Arabic and the Qur'an know of Mali's great past and its libraries; for the general public, Timbuktu remains a remote undistinguished town on the Niger river.

Families have passed on their manuscripts from generation to generation. Over 70,000 are now available in the thirty or so libraries that have opened in Timbuktu in recent years. Books and documents began to be collected eight centuries ago. The libraries now store whatever remnants have survived the ravages of time. Their contents offer a new and unrivalled source of understanding West African history.

At the Mamma Haidara centre, there are manuscripts on astronomy, medicine and theology, including commentaries on the Hadith. Several date from the 16th and the 17th centuries, and have been nibbled by termites. One astronomical treatise shows how to compute the positions of the stars, providing tables and algorithms. A theological document contains annotations and analyses of the Prophet's sayings, and deal with a variety of aspects of the lives of the faithful. One comment is about hygiene and the necessity for a moderate diet.

Paper was expensive in those days, and so margins of books were constantly reused. On the same page as the description of a moderate life, there appears a comment: today there was an earthquake in Timbuktu... In another book, there appears a five-hundred year old recipe for toothpaste. Take some salt and some sugar, and mix it up with some charcoal, and brush the paste on your teeth, and your teeth will become white. And what's more, it will get rid of your bad breath.

How did these libraries first come into being? How were they lost? How will their rediscovery alter perceptions of Africa?

At the end of the 10th century, when Timbuktu was founded, a large part of West Africa was ruled by the Ghana empire. This was West Africa's first superpower, and its rulers were early converts to Islam. The spread of Islam was the compelling reason for the change in West African mores, and provided the impetus for its first literary tradition.

The first Muslims to arrive in West Africa were traders from the north, who then spread their faith across the Sahara all the way to the south coast. Just as in Europe, where most of the early manuscripts are religious texts written in Latin, the earliest texts in West Africa are religious as well, but written in Arabic, and discuss Islamic theology.

The Ahmed Baba institute, Timbuktu's only public library, stores Mali's national collection of manuscripts. Setup in 1973, it now has over 40 thousand documents. Even today, every week, they get around 700 new manuscripts, surely a surprising number. Whenever a new piece arrives, the librarian and his staff need to evaluate it. They select the ones that are in the best condition; the poor ones are set aside. There are many in African languages but written in the Arabic script. These are called Ajami texts. There are documents in Tamazight, Sorai, and other local languages that recount the history of the region. All of them are being digitised so that they can be made available to a worldwide scholarship. The first priority, however, is the conservation and the preservation of these manuscripts.

Over 300,000 manuscripts are known to exist in the region, but so far a very small percentage has been translated or studied in any great detail. The conservation, transcription, preservation, study and analysis of the known documents is a task of decades. But thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of manuscripts are still hidden in cellars and basements or perhaps buried in the sands of the desert.

The last three hundred years have dealt a succession of blows to Timbuktu. Morocco invaded at the end of the 16th century. Power struggles between rival sects of fundamental Islamists created anarchy throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, followed swiftly by the indignity of French occupation. Like other colonisers, the French took away manuscripts as spoils of their victory. To protect their treasures, the custodians of the manuscripts began to hide them, and they went underground, resurfacing only over the last fifty years. But the custodians are still suspicious.

Before he began to work for his family library, Abdul Qader Haidara was a prospector for manuscripts employed by the national library, and it was his task to track down hidden caches and persuade their owners to hand them over to the state for safekeeping. Convincing them was a difficult matter. When the previous head of the national library approached an Imam of a local village who maintained his own trove, the latter was willing to treat with the director, promising him that they would work together. Several weeks passed, with the director making frequent trips and parleying with the Imam, convinced that his words were persuasive, only to find one day that a wall had been constructed around the manuscripts. The Imam announced that there would be no more discussion, and to this day, those manuscripts have not been yielded to the national library.

At the height of its golden age in the mid-1500s, Timbuktu's population had grown to about a hundred thousand souls. A quarter of them were teachers, students and scholars. Today, the city is a crumbling and dusty backwater, and there is little sign of the academic dominance of the past.

The challenge for historians is to meld the written and the oral descriptions of Africa's past. It is as much a mistake to base the retelling of Africa's history only the manuscripts as it is to depend entirely on the epics handed down over the generations.  Furthermore, a crucial source of information comes from archaeological digs along the Niger river, a source that also needs to be incorporated into new understanding. The Niger river is one of Africa's greatest, providing a source of livelihood and trade for sundry communities that waxed and waned along its banks. Between Djenne and Timbuktu alone, archaeological digs have confirmed that thriving and densely populated urbanised settlements began here as early as 500 BC. It was said that if someone in Djenne wanted to convey a message to someone in a distant village or city, all he had to do was shout, and his message could be carried over the flood-plains and the river to its destination because the entire region was so densely populated.

A pottery cover ten miles south of Timbuktu reveals a city that is twice the size of the medieval Timbuktu, which itself was twice the size of the London of the time. This was far from the only settlement here: these were not small, discrete townships, and their peoples lived peacefully for centuries. Very little evidence of warfare exists in West Africa before the advent of Islam, so economic cooperation appears to have been the order of the day. Some settlements were of farmers, others of fishermen, still others of potters and metalworkers. Once the landscape was covered in forest, which was cut down by the activities of the populace. The metalworkers alone would have required enormous quantities of wood to stoke their furnaces, and possibly contributed to the desertification of the land. Pottery was the ancient analogue of our tins and plastic bags; shards are found in huge quantities: pestles, pots, grindstones, utensils. The cityscape would have resembled the earthen villages that dot the countryside around Timbuktu today, only the density of occupation having changed over the millennia.

Archaeology doesn't tell us what happened to that urban civilisation, or how Timbuktu was born. That information we can glean from the oral tradition. Tuareg tribesmen are said to have established a camp by a well a few miles away from the mosquito-infested banks of the Niger. When the Tuareg headed off to graze their herds in the desert after the rains, they left their belongings to be looked after by a slave woman named Buktu, the lady with the large navel. Timbuktu, then, simply means, Buktu's well.

The Tuareg are the dominant tribes of the desert, an intimate knowledge of which has given them unrivalled control over the trade routes from the north and the east leading to the Niger. By the 10th century, commercial considerations had led to the establishment of a city where the Niger turns eastwards. This is where the trade routes from across the Sahara could safely converge. Timbuktu is where the camel meets the canoe, lying as it does between the desert and the river, where camel trains bringing in the riches of the Mediterranean could be offloaded onto boats and shipped to the kingdoms up and down the Niger, and gold arriving from the south could be used to pay for the luxuries of the north. Dates, European fabrics, glass, jewellery, tobacco, and salt from the Sahara poured into Mali on the camel trains. Boats from the south brought cereals, honey, gold, slaves. It is said that in the 14th century, two-thirds of the world's gold came from Mali, much of it passing through Timbuktu. Today's market here, however, is a small affair, although that other great mainstay of trans-Saharan trade, salt, still arrives by camel, brought by the Tuareg.

International trade in Timbuktu required written contracts, which generated a thriving business for scribes and notaries, who would need to produce documents in a lingua franca. Since the advent of Islam, Arabic became that common language of trade and discourse. In the wake of this religion, books also began to arrive in Timbuktu, and began to be traded like any other commodity, as wealthy merchants found a new indulgence. Books enhanced the status of their owners, and gave the pious a deeper understanding of their faith. The profit of this trade rivalled that from gold and slaves, and by the 13th century, prominent families in the city began to boast of their own private libraries. The sons of those families aspired not only to trade but also to scholarship. Paper was imported from Europe and China. Calligraphy became a viable and respected trade, creating new manuscripts based on indigenous work and copying documents coming from abroad. Their labours were impressively rewarded.

Sidiki Nazim, a calligrapher practising in Timbuktu today, says that in the Middle Ages, his work would have earned him great wealth: he would have owned houses and camels and gold. Today it is a completely different story. He is among the poorest in town, and the only one still practising this ancient craft.

Towards the end of the 13th century, Ghana was overtaken by a new Malian empire, which became the new power in the region with Timbuktu as its economic centre. When the emperor of Mali, Kanka Musa, made his grand pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he stopped at Timbuktu, acknowledging its supremacy as mercantile and cultural powerhouse of Western Africa. The Emperor was a pious man, and on that Hajj, he distributed fifteen tons of gold so generously in Egypt and Mecca that the price of gold was depressed there for a long time thereafter. News of his wealth and splendour as he wound his way around the Levant soon reached the ears of European merchantmen. Within fifty years of the pilgrimage, the Mallorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques had drawn up a map for the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, showing a black Emperor sitting on the golden throne of West Africa, with Timbuktu as its capital. The legend of a desert Eldorado began its grip on the European mind.

Kanka Musa brought back Arabic scholars to heighten the academy in Timbuktu, but it was said that they proved to be no match for the excellence of the city's black African scholars. He also commissioned new buildings to grace Timbuktu, including a grand palace designed by the Andalusian architect Es-Saheli, whom he had brought with him from his travels. When the palace fell into disuse, the site began to be used as an abattoir.

There is little sign of that great edifice today, although one remnant can be found: the Djingareybar Mosque [picture by Dave Lantner], also designed by Es-Saheli, patched up and restored several times over the past 600 years, it represents an almost futuristic notion of a mosque, quite distinct from the usual perception of Islam's houses of worship. Impressive as it is now, in its day it would awed Musa's people just as much as the great cathedrals of Europe, that left no doubts in the minds of their visitors exactly where the power lay. From outside, the mosque doesn't look very large. The interior, though, is huge. There are nine prayer aisles, each about a hundred metres long. It is comfortably cool within as well, almost air-conditioned. Mud brick being a bad conductor of heat, the halls are always at the temperature of the early morning.

In Islam, learning has been much prized, and the academicians of Timbuktu won praise and power in equal measure. When Ibn-Battuta, the greatest traveller of the Middle Ages, visited the city, he was spell-bound by its culture and learning, pointing out the piety, justice and tolerance of its inhabitants. Because of the depth of that learning, the African scholars of Timbuktu were able to distil the essence of their religion and convey it precisely to the people, leading to a tolerant form of Islam practised in West Africa. How much of this tolerance was occasioned by the filtering of Arabian ideas by African minds? Perhaps the Islam that took root in this part of the world was really a blend of the older occult faiths and the monotheism brought in from the East?

The scholarly work in Timbuktu was concentrated in its three mosques: the Sankore mosque (photo by Rajarajaraja), commissioned, it is said, by a wealthy Tuareg woman in the 14th century, the Djigareybar mosque, and the Sidi Yahia mosque. These three mosques comprised the Sankore University, whose rise was signalled by the active research community and prolific writings that filled up the libraries. Timbuktu's Golden Age began in the final decades of the 15th century, fuelled by yet another turn in the cycle of West African imperial history. The Songhay empire, greatest of them all, reigned from Gao, over an area bigger than Western Europe. Under Sonni Ali Ber, an Emperor who championed African traditions, the kingdom was only nominally Muslim, and he refused to allow the dilution of local cultures by Islam. He arrived in Timbuktu in 1468 and showed the scholars there who was boss: they were to obey his diktats on pain of dismissal or death. He would not permit their religious principles and teachings to subsume his culture, he announced. The scholars fled to other towns and cities. But Sonni was a visionary as well, with a view of unity in Africa, so he always imposed his language wherever he conquered.

Sonni's successors were more devoutly Muslim, and they encouraged and funded Timbuktu's scholars. By then, Sankore University was recognised as a pre-eminent centre of learning and discourse. Of course, their interpretation of 'university' is quite different from ours. 180 Qur'anic schools taught children the basics of their faith. The well-off among them would go on to Sankore for three further levels of learning: Arabic grammar and literature, commentaries on the Qur'an, science and Islamic law. Examinations were both oral and written, and degrees were presented to the successful students in the form of a special turban. An interpretation could be made of the design of this turban: the dangling long cloth on the right of the u-shaped face with the circular wind over the head, when written right-to-left, would spell out the name of God, Allah.

A student wearing this turban would be led into the middle of a circle of scholars in the Sidi Yahia mosque, who would rip off his turban, claiming that he was unworthy of it. Then they would pose seven questions in Islamic law to him. If he answered correctly, he would be allowed to wear the turban, and they would all go to Sankore to party. The student then enters the community of wise men and the imam.

The scholars of Sankore were not just teachers. They were also the ruling elite, judges and legislators, who governed every aspect of the people's lives. Although they lived among the people, they were jealous of their power and kept literacy to themselves. As far as they were concerned, the common people only needed to know how to pray correctly, and that was the extent of their encouragement of reading. The spread of literacy in West Africa was also curtailed by significant barriers: the culture of writing followed the trade routes, and since these were mainly along the Niger, literacy was restricted to these regions as well.

In 1591, the Moroccan invasion destroyed the Songhay Empire, the Sankore University, and put a massive dent in any development of a modern nation state in West Africa. The fulcrum of knowledge and learning crumbled under the onslaught of the Maghrebis. Meanwhile, the European shift of trading from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic destroyed the economic basis for West Africa. Gold began to be imported in large quantities from the Americas, resulting in further impoverishment of the Niger belt. The markets became poorer, and while the Moroccans didn't stay on as occupiers, the region imploded in sectarian violence as one brand of fundamentalist Islam fought another through the 18th and 19th centuries. There was simply no time or energy left for learning.

A great consequence of the subsequent colonial occupation of Africa is how Africans (and the world) began to look and interpret its tradition and culture. Furthermore, the imposition of the French educational system on Mali destroyed the old Arabic scholarship, leading to a loss of continuity in learning and knowledge. This means that Timbuktu's manuscripts today are accessible to a very few people, a precarious position for any historiography to be in.

Even the small number of documents deciphered today reveal wonderful glimpses of Mali's past. A book of fatwas, or religious verdicts, describes the quotidian concerns of the laity. A woman whose husband went away on a mission agreed with him that if he didn't return in a certain number of days, she could divorce him and take up with another man. There were no witnesses to this agreement, however, so when the man returned much later, he found that his wife was married to another; the mufti declared that the second marriage was invalid and that she should return to the first man. The woman's voice rings down through the centuries: it is not just your money that I need, but also your companionship and support and love, and if you aren't here, why should I not find these in another man? Clearly there were concerns facing women, but equally, men had pressing anxieties as well. They wanted to be sure they were satisfying their wives, and when erectile dysfunction posed a problem, they were urged by the healer (who saw it as his holy Islamic duty to help out his brother) to apply the blood from the comb of a rooster to their feet or penis, to cure the condition.

After the Moroccan invasion, the scholars of Timbuktu began a new genre of historical writing called the Tarikhs, a rewriting of African history. These were a series of tracts meant to legitimise the elite's right to rule within the suzerainty of the Maghrebis. Their authors drew on oral tradition and written records to reinterpet the past within the light of subsequent events. As such, they need to be weighed carefully. Mohammed Kati who wrote the history of the Songhay Empire was a nephew of the clan, so it is naive to expect him to say anything negative about his Askia ancestors. In the Tarikh-al-Fattash, there are arguments supporting the Askia and condemning the Sonni. Both are from the same family but politically in opposition, and the bias colours the history. Likewise, the Tarikh-al-Sudan proposes in favour of the ruling powers and also in favour of the then dominant strand of religion; and so on, with other Tarikhs dealing with the Moroccan invasion.

Ajami, a genre aimed to reach a larger audience along the Niger, used Arabic writing for local African tongues. Ajami simply means any language other than Arabic, and the warring Sufis used it in propaganda favouring their own version of fundamentalist Islam in the region. On the other hand, it described the lives of commoners in a way that the Tarikhs didn't concern themselves with. The Ajami texts encompassed poetry and history and songs, preserving a dying oral culture. Without the Ajami manuscripts, there can be no unbiased retelling of African history.

Mali is a poor country, and fifty years after its independence, it is still more concerned with internal security than with the promotion of learning and historiography enabled by the rediscovery of the manuscripts of Timbuktu. A long-running Tuareg rebellion ended as late as 1996, but even today, they still clamour for greater autonomy or a state of their own. It's been a rocky road to a tentative peace. Meanwhile, the Sahara extends deeper into the country, parching the countryside and increasing the danger of flash-floods that destroy buildings and reduce the manuscripts to pulp. On top of all these problems, the flood-plains of the lifeblood of Timbuktu, the Niger, are receding year after year. Where once they touched the outskirts of the city, now they are more than five kilometres away.

Timbuktu no longer wants to remain in isolation. Especially among the youth, Western ideas abound, and the locals look forward to the prosperity brought in by tourism. The city is also looking outward more and more, twinning itself with other towns around the world. Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh borders is the latest to be twinned. Apparently, it had been a close competition between Hay and Glastonbury. No surprise, then, that the British city of books with its own literary festival and cultural tradition won out. 

Further Reading

1. Lydia Polgreen, Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival, New York Times, Aug 7, 2007.
2. Matthias Schulz and Anwen Roberts, The Rush to Save Timbuktu's Crumbling Manuscripts, Der Spiegel, Jan 8, 2008.
3. The Timbuktu Educational Foundation.
4. P. C. McKissack, F. McKissack, The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa, Macmillan, 1995.
5. The Road to Timbuktu, PBS Television Series.
6. Gerald Rizzo, The Inland Niger Delta: A Cartographic Beacon, Afriterra Foundation.
7. John O. Hunwick, STUDIES IN TA√RˆKH AL-FATT◊SH, III: KAfiTI ORIGINS (PDF!)
8. Fallou Ngom, Ajami in Senegambia: The Research and Educational Potentials, Western Washington University.
9. Aminatta Forna, The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu, The Times, Feb 7, 2009.

Notable People and Places

1. Abdul Qader Haidara of the Mamma Haidara: Centre Juma Almajid pour la Conservation et la Restauration des Manuscrits a Tombouctou.
2. Bouya Haidara, Head Librarian, Bibliotheque Ahmed Baba Aboul Abbas (1860-1931).
3. Salem Ould Elhadj, Historian.
4. Alexio Motsi, South African conservator
5. Shahid Mathee (manuscript researcher)
6. Samuel Sidibe (Director, Mali National Museum).

7. Douglas Park (Archaeologist, Yale University), digs 10 miles south of Timbuktu.

In M.D. Vassanji's superb account of East African life through the eyes of local Indians, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, it becomes fairly clear that attachments to the motherland are considerably attenuated with each successive generation. The earliest immigrants hearken back to India as a beloved land of beauty and trust; their children, growing up in Africa, lose some of that varnished viewpoint; by the time of the grandchildren, India has become alien, unknown. While they look down upon the native Africans, they look up to the British. [In this, of course, they are no different from more recent Indian emigres to the West.] When India gains independence, nobody is more appalled than the East African Indian. As African nations fight for freedom, it is the rare Indian who is willing to join in on their side.

Alongside the alienation from the motherland and their fellow Africans a rampant prejudice begins: Indian Indians and Africans are untrustworthy, uncivilised, unsophisticated.

The trajectory followed by a particular caste of Gujarati Hindus, the Lohanas of Kutch, exemplifies this trend. While Indian traders have plied the seas surrounding the subcontinent for millennia (see Maddy's article, for example), the Gujarati emigration to East Africa appears to have begun only in the 19th century. Between 1880 and 1920, the number of Indians in East Africa grew nine-fold to 54,000, and included not only Gujaratis (Patels, Lohanas, Shahs and Ismailis), but also Sikhs and Goans, many of whom went there to set up trading communities, riding off the establishment of the British dominion over the area. The earliest migrants were predominantly men. Following the setting up of a successful business venture, a man might bring in his relatives - brothers or sons. Social nexuses that might have been frowned upon in India, such as those between people of different castes, were gradually built up in Zanzibar and Kenya, possibly made easier by the common language (Gujarati) and the distance from the motherland and the necessity for some sort of social cohesion whilst a small minority in an alien land.

The Hindu men would travel to India to find wives. Owing to the somewhat uncertain social and economic situation in East Africa, the women rarely accompanied the men on the journey back. Instead, they would remain in their villages, looking after the elders and raising the children. The husbands would make several trips a year to look in on the family and impregnate the women and establish mercantile connections with the community at large. And, in truth, in the first phase of Gujarati emigration to Africa, their largest trading partner was India, with millions of sterling worth of goods flowing back and forth across the Arabian Sea.

Sometimes, the wives would live a few years in East Africa before heading back to India: childbirth, especially, more often than not would occur in their mother's house. Matters of ritual purity prevented the women from staying on in Africa, although in view of the contributions their husbands were making to the local economies, many a potentate offered to help.

The sultan of Zanzibar, Seyyid Bargash, must have been aware of this as he encouraged Hindus to bring their wives to Zanzibar. He sent his private vessel to welcome the first Hindu woman in Zanzibar and gave her a reward of Shs 250/-. In addition, he promised to turn Zanzibar’s Old Fort into a residence for the wives of merchants and offered to equip it with water pipes fitted with silver taps to ensure that Hindu women need never appear in public.

The social and business networks of the earliest emigres was familial and international. Trust and honour drove the creation of these networks, made all the easier because not all men in a clan would go to Africa. The ones that remained to look after the ancestral businesses would maintain links with their peripatetic relatives, offering not only secure banking but also collateral in the form of real estate. These networks were periodically renewed and strengthened whenever the travellers returned home, either for marriage or to look in on the family. But once the wives began to live in the diaspora, their reasons for returning became slimmer. It was with considerable reluctance, then, that the men would make the trips home: perhaps when a relative died, or when it was time for their own ashes to be scattered in the Ganges.

A consequence of such networks was that, even if the East African Indian couldn't travel to India, he would still strive to maintain relations with the homeland. His house would aim to reproduce the joint-family structure; he would continue to speak Gujarati; he would cherish Indian traditions; he remained staunchly vegetarian. Charities and foundations were established back home. India, in other words, remained in their hearts.

Between 1920 and 1960, the second phase of this evolution played out. Initially at least there were twice as many Lohana men as women in Africa, and so the pressure to return to India to find wives remained great. As time went on, however, it became easier to marry within East Africa itself, and the loosening of purity rituals meant that marriages could take place outside the community as well. Meanwhile, the Indian textile industry began to suffer in competition with Japan and (to a lesser extent) Europe, which produced goods of superior quality and variety. Also, the general impoverishment of India during (and immediately after) colonial rule led to diminished exports there by the companies of the emigres. East African Indian companies began to close down their Indian branches, and establish trading offices in other parts of the world. It was clear to the emigres that there was much more money to be made in business with America, Europe and the Far East. (There is some evidence, however, that after the second World War, a further wave of Indians from Gujarat setup shop in East Africa, and replicated the familial networks of yore. This meant that, in absolute terms, trade between East Africa and India didn't decline by much. The contribution from long-standing East African Indian companies, though, dwindled.)

Whereas the primary education of Lohana children was at 'Indian' schools in East Africa, much of their subsequent study was done at English-medium establishments, or indeed in the UK. The new generation, therefore, found itself oriented more towards Africa and Europe than India. It became imperative that they find their spouses from among the locally raised Hindus, who knew how to handle native servants, who were familiar with the Africanised Gujarati cuisine, who could speak the local tongues.

The Gujarati community in East Africa by now thought of itself as distinct from its mirror in Gujarat. Their world-views were completely different. Unwritten contracts that once made identical sense to both parties became difficult to interpret, and misunderstandings abounded. Coupled with the weakening of India's economic power and the collapse of the family networks, business dealings began to be fraught with risk. The African Indian thought that the Indian Indian was uncivilised (not having had the educational opportunities provided by close exposure to the British) and rough and cut-throat at business dealings, while he himself was westernised, familiar with English contract law, sophisticated. Because they no longer saw themselves as part of the same community, relationships needed to be built anew, as though with strangers; it was important to establish 'good name'. India, sadly, by then had lost its reputation.

It is often thought that the adhesive that holds migrants together abroad is their attachment to the motherland, which is not easily lost. The migrants require the motherland to maintain their identities and culture. Yet, this is not always the case. For the Gujaratis of Africa, as we have seen, barely eighty years after they first left the shores of Kutch, the sundering was virtually complete.

[This piece is based extensively on and paraphrases much of G. Oonk's paper: Trust and Images in Indian Business Networks, East Africa 1900-2000 (PDF!)]