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Being Human
The Tombo
uct
ou
Manuscripts Project
Associate Professor Shamil Jeppie, who leads the
Tombo
uct
ou Manuscripts Project, has made regular trips
to the UNESCO world-heritage site of Timbuktu to work
with an archive of handwritten texts in Arabic and African
languages in the Arabic script, produced between the 13th
and the 20th centuries.
Lamu Endangered
Archives
During 2012 Associate Professor Jeppie took his interests
in Islamic culture eastward to Lamu in Kenya, one of the
original Swahili settlements in East Africa.
Research Projects
A United Nations expert mission estimates that around
4 000 ancient manuscripts were destroyed by Islamic
fundamentalists during their occupation of Timbuktu
in early 2013. This is approximately one-tenth of
the manuscripts that were stored in the city. Most
documents were saved by the devotion of the library’s
Malian custodians, who spirited them out of the
occupied city in rice sacks, on donkey carts, and by
motorcycle, boat and 4-wheel drive.
Funded by the British Library Endangered Archives
Programme, Associate Professor Jeppie, together
with Norwegian colleague Anne Bang and Ethiopian
student Hasan Kawo, ran a project to catalogue the
manuscripts of a small library at the Riyadha madrasa
in Lamu. The 19th century Riyadha Mosque is one
of the oldest and most influential Islamic teaching
institutions in the Swahili world. During this visit,
digitisation of the entire manuscript collection of
unique copies on Islamic education in East Africa
for the past 120 years was completed, generating a
total of 35 000 digital images of the full collection.