THE MEANINGS OF TIMBUKTU, 3rd edition

376pp., illus., maps, paperback, Cape Town, (2008) 2023

A collection of essays which were, with one exception, originally read as papers at a conference of the Tombouctou Manuscript Project of the University of Cape Town in August 2005.

Contributions include:

"Re/discovering Timbuktu" by Shamil Jeppie

"Toward an intellectual history of West Africa: the meaning of Timbuktu" by Souleymane Bachir Diagne

"Arabic calligraphy in West Africa" by Sheila Blair

"Intellectual innovation and reinvention of the Sahel: the seventeenth-century Timbuktu chronicles" by Paulo F de Moraes Farias

"Muslim women scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Morocco to Nigeria" by Beverly Mack

"A man of letters in Timbuktu: al-Shaykh Sdi Muhammad al-Kunti" by Abdel Wedoud Ould Cheikh

"The state of manuscripts in Mali and efforts to preserve them" by Abdel Kader Haidara

"The Arabic Literature of Africa Project" by John Hunwick

"Textual sources on an Islamic African past: Arabic material in Zanzibar's National Archive" by Anne Bang.

Dr Shamil Jeppie is a senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. A member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Popular Memory at UCT, he serves on the steering committee of the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of French and Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. Formerly Vice-Dean of the College of Humanities Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal, he is also a former special advisor to the President of Senegal. He is currently Chair of the Scientific Committee of CODESRIA and a member of the UNESCO African Scientific Committee on Higher Education.