Joshua Hammer · 2016 · overland

Joshua Hammer's account of Abdel Kader Haidara, who spent twenty years collecting manuscripts across the Sahara and along the Niger for the libraries of Timbuktu - and then, when al-Qaeda took the city in 2012, moved three hundred and fifty thousand of them six hundred miles south by Land Cruiser and canoe.

1. 1
   Timbuktu

   The Sankore quarter, and a house where boarders from across the Sahel studied jurisprudence and astronomy - Abdel Kader Haidara growing up among his father's manuscripts without much interest in them.

2. 2
   Ber

   The desert north-east, and the collecting years: riding out to villages to persuade families to part with volumes that had been in trunks for four centuries, and mostly being told no the first several times.

3. 3
   Niafunke

   Upriver by canoe along the Niger, doing the same thing village by village - two decades of it, and the Mamma Haidara library assembled out of what he brought back.

4. 4
   Gao

   2012, and the armed groups coming west out of the Sahara - Ansar Dine and MUJAO taking the northern towns while the Malian army disintegrates ahead of them.

5. 5
   Timbuktu

   Occupation: sharia courts, amputations, the Sufi shrines pulled down with pickaxes - and Haidara working out that the manuscripts have to leave, and that there are three hundred and fifty thousand of them.

6. 6
   Mopti

   South by road and river with the trunks, past checkpoints manned by men who have not been told what to look for - teenage couriers driving Land Cruisers, and boatmen taking crates down the Niger.

7. 7
   Segou

   Further south, still six hundred miles to go, and the operation now running on grant money raised by satellite phone from a city under occupation.

8. 8
   Bamako

   The capital, and the manuscripts safe in rented houses - and then the news that the jihadists, retreating ahead of the French, burned four thousand volumes still at the Ahmed Baba Institute.