‘I want to create a private library for them,' and he said, ‘fine.'" For three years, Haidara searched for financing with no success. Then, in 1997, Henry Louis Gates Jr. stopped in Timbuktu ...

It is a practiced soliloquy but a logical point of view for a man whose family controls Timbuktu's largest private library, with some 22,000 manuscripts dating back to the 11th century and volumes ...