I recently heard a news story that moved me deeply.
Anyone who has read my short stories “Persephone’s Library” and “What Rough Beast” knows how profoundly the idea of preserving books in a time of ignorance, violence, censorship and the destruction of knowledge resonates with me. The preservation of knowledge, which often comes at great personal risk, is to me an act of immense heroism.
In Mali, amid all the other horrors and tragedies being perpetrated, Islamist insurgents set fire to a library that is a World Heritage site, and the repository of ancient texts, some dating as far back as the 13th century. These texts represent the history of the people of Northern Africa, and their loss would have been devastating not just to the history and culture of the region, but also a deep blow to all of us in the world who value history, knowledge, learning.
They set fire to the state of the art new building that had been built to preserve these documents–but fortunately, they didn’t know enough to check on the old building–which still housed the bulk of the collection. This allowed Abba Alhadi, a 72 year old man who has been caretaker and custodian of these rare manuscripts for the past 40 years, to smuggle the majority of the collection out over several weeks by placing them in empty rice and millet bags. He walks with a cane and is himself illiterate, but every night, he would load those rice and millet sacks full of books onto a cart which he would push across town to be loaded onto a truck that bore 28,000 of the 30,000 volume collection to safety. Says Alhadi:
“I have spent my life protecting these manuscripts. This has been my life’s work. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I could no longer protect them here. It hurt me deeply to see them go, but I took strength knowing that they were being sent to a safe place.”
And, in a parallel to the events in “What Rough Beast” that gives me chills, other books had been preserved in a special, secret, fire proof underground room in the new facility that had remained secured and undiscovered while the insurgents pillaged, destroyed and burned all the manuscripts above. A final consolation is that at least some of the books that were destroyed had been digitzed as part of a preservation project.
When I read the article from the Associated Press, I couldn’t help but start tearing up with deep gratitude to the heroes of this story–the people who risked much to save the history of many peoples and cultures that would otherwise have been destroyed by extremism and ignorance. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Fine post as usual. I just shared it on Facebook and Google+. It’s wonderful that so much was saved. It’s so important to the future of the world to preserve knowledge.
Thanks, Lorinda, for sharing this post! I so agree. It is upsetting to hear of that kind of intention–even if it was foiled in the end. I find that kind of uncompromising mindset horrifying and rather frightening.
Thanks for this. I had read the “everything was lost” article earlier so I am very glad to hear that the opposite is true! What a wonderful man Abba Alhadi is. I have always felt so sad at the loss of the library at Alexandria – all that ancient cultural knowledge lost. Preserving knowledge is so worthwhile.
Kind of an amazing story. Yes, by some accounts, it sounds like possibly as little as 5% was lost. Sad, but so much better than what they originally believed. It’s a powerful story.
Yes–Hypatia and the story of Alexandria is such a potent (I’d say in some ways archetypal) story. This amazing place of learning and accumulated knowledge–gone. It’s a deep loss. The other one that always gets me was the destruction of the Maya repository of texts by the Catholic priest who assumed they were all blasphemous writings. Tragic–and infuriating. We know so little about that culture, which makes the loss so much deeper. I can only imagine the kind of horror and despair the caretaker of that collection must have felt.