Word: mali
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...Suleiman Djarra appeared during a heavy rainstorm. The 2 year-old suddenly stopped eating and then developed severe diarrhea, which continued for days, draining him of energy. On the third day, Suleiman's mother Aiseta Traoré carried his listless body to the road outside their village in southern Mali and hitchhiked to the nearest hospital about 9 miles (14 km) away. There, she says, a doctor gave her a pack of vitamins and advised her to take the boy home to recover. Hours after Traoré and Suleiman reached their village, though, the boy died...
...younger Malians, even in Ber, deep in Mali's remote north, are very different from their parents' generation. Few can read the manuscripts' old Arabic script, and some are beginning to ignore long-held taboos against selling them. When I visit Essayouti, Timbuktu's imam, at home, he shows me four ? 15th century leather-bound manuscripts that locals had sold him the day before for about $200. Many locals, he says, simply need the money, or don't know who will next look after the books. "We are trying to explain to each new generation why these are important...
...like Jack Bauer [from television's 24]." Crowds of Europeans converge every January to attend the musical Festival of the Desert in nearby Essakane. And young locals - armed with French and English - ply their trade as guides for adventure tour groups. (See pictures of the Festival au Desert in Mali...
...still arrive on camel, bearing giant bricks of salt which they transport across the Sahara for weeks - just as traders did centuries ago when the area's manuscripts were originally written. In Mahmoud's mind, too, local attitudes remain unchanged. Locals remain fiercely distrustful of outsiders, he says, including Mali's government in Bamako, with which locals have been at odds for years. Many people still jealously guard family heirlooms as a tangible form of security. "We won't sell our manuscripts, even if you offer us billions. They will be left to the children who will look after them...
...Timbuktu's children decide to sell the manuscripts, there will be nothing to stop them. Unlike antiquities laws which protect old carvings, for example, Mali has no law barring people from taking manuscripts out of the country. As international interest in the works grows, so too could their value on the world market, according to some experts. In 1979, Zouber, the President's counselor, bought 25 Timbuktu manuscripts from the daughter of a former French diplomat who had been stationed in Mali and had taken them with him when he left; Zouber tracked her down in Cannes and paid about...