In a small workshop at the edge of town, Boubacar Sadeck sits surrounded by papers, parchments, and hides. On his business card is written in French, “Artisanal copyist of XVI century manuscripts.”
Boubacar Sadeck reproduces medieval manuscripts in the Bamako workshop he’s borrowing while crisis grips his home in Mali’s north […]
In 2004, Sadeck began offering lessons in calligraphy to students in Timbuktu, passing on his knowledge as his uncle had passed it to him. He has no children of his own: “That’s why I try to teach children,” he says. “So it can continue.”
“In Timbuktu, I’m the only copyist of my generation still working,” he says.
But he is no longer in Timbuktu. He fled for the capital Bamako last April as violence engulfed Mali’s north. Islamist militants now control Timbuktu with a rule by gun that threatens both the country’s future and the artifacts from its rich past.
“When the coup d’état came, within a week I had packed my bags,” he says. Among his belongings were around 50 manuscripts. Haidara rounded up thousands of manuscripts from libraries and arranged for them to be hidden in private homes. He left Timbuktu last summer for Bamako, where he runs Sauvegarde et Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Défense de la Culture Islamique.