From Timbuktu To Washington, D.C.
Smithsonian exhibit highlights Mali’s intellectual roots, cultural traditions
By Phaedra Brotherton
WASHINGTON
An important center of learning where Islamic and West African scholars met and attracted thousands of students around West Africa to come and study, Timbuktu has recently become a major area of academic study. And Washington’s Smithsonian Institution hopes to introduce and educate people about Timbuktu’s rich history and culture during the institution’s 37th annual Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., which will be held on the National Mall later this month. The Folklife Festival, produced by the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and co-sponsored by the National Park Service, has become a national and international model of a research-based presentation of contemporary living cultural traditions.
According to the Center, it has brought more than 16,000 musicians, artists, performers, craftspeople, workers, cooks, storytellers and others to the National Mall to demonstrate the skills, knowledge and aesthetics that embody the creative vitality of community-based traditions. In addition to Mali, this year’s festival will explore the living traditional cultures of Scotland and Appalachia.
“Mali is best known for the city of Timbuktu, founded in 1100 as the heart of the trans-Saharan gold and salt trade,” says John W. Franklin, program manager of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and co-curator of the Mali program, along with Dr. Mary Jo Arnoldi of the National Museum of National History and Samuel Sidibe, director of the National Museum of Mali. “(Timbuktu’s)
famous mosques and universities were destinations for aspiring scholars to study religion, literature, mathematics, law, physics and history.”
Franklin, son of historian Dr. John Hope Franklin, says the Mali exhibit has been in the works since 1998. He says the U.S. ambassador to Mali, David Rawson, and Malian tour operator, Djibril Taboure were looking for a way to increase Mali’s profile in the United States on “a number of levels.”
