When you think of Timbuktu, what comes to mind?

A faraway place?

Maybe the definition of a faraway place.

From here to Timbuktu, that's how the saying goes.

A place so far away, it might as well be mythical.

Except Timbuktu is a real place and only as far away as you are from it.

Sure, it's far if you're in, say, Kalamazoo.

But if you're in Western Africa, well, then it's just right over there, in the country of Mali.

And as for its slightly mythic feel,

well, there may be something to that,

because Timbuktu has a rich history,

rich in a literal sense as a place that once housed great wealth,

but also rich as a scholarly hub,

which was at its peak from the 1300s to the end of the 1500s.

And how do we know the story of this ancient, magnificent city?

Through its famed collection of manuscripts,

which, like the city, have become the stuff of legend. I'm Dilanthuris, and this is Alice Obscira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're going to Timbuktu to explore the intellectual legacy of one of the world's most misunderstood cities.

More after this. This sort of connotation of Timbuktu as this far away, imaginary, almost mythical, impossible to reach, location has been going on

for quite a while. That is Dr. Susanna Malines-Literis.

I'm a associate researcher at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the

University of Cape Town in South Africa.

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