We were on a very specific mission- to meet up with Abdelkader Haidera, the Director of the Mamma Haidera Manuscript Library in Timbuktu. We are putting together a proposal for a grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme to save, catalogue and digitize the ancient manuscripts of Djenne, and Abdelkader Haidera is the eminence grise of Malian scholarship in this field. He has promised to help us, so all is going according to plan so far. More about this later…