by Jason Collins
“There is more profit made from [book] commerce than from all other merchandise,” in Timbuktu, as observed by Leo Africanus in 1526. This was not simply poetic exaggeration from the famous traveler. For centuries, the Malian city stood at the very heart of an expansive intellectual network across the Sahara where scholars traded in written knowledge. These manuscripts imported into Mali’s libraries can expand what speculative fiction imagines and how we build those worlds.
What Type of Text Is in the Timbuktu Manuscripts?
The manuscripts themselves cover an extraordinary range of subjects, including astronomical charts, medical treatises, legal commentaries, theological debates, and collections of poetry and proverbs. When viewed as a collective, they reveal a city where science, faith, and art were inseparable.
We also know that at its height, Timbuktu’s scholars filled private libraries with manuscripts bound in goatskins and debated theology beneath the mud-brick walls of the Sankore Mosque complex, which functioned as an Islamic learning center. Over 27,000 of these handwritten works, some dating back to the 13th century, have survived the passage of time. Scholars safeguarded the manuscripts for centuries from theft and loss during colonial expansion. Recently, these manuscripts survived thanks to the efforts of families who risked their lives to hide them from extremist attacks.
What the Manuscripts Offer: A Different Intellectual Heritage
Today, writers in the science fiction and fantasy genre should thank all those who worked to preserve the great works of Timbuktu, as many of these West African manuscripts could be the blueprints for new imaginative tales.
These manuscripts reveal that African civilizations were theorizing law, cosmology, and ethics concurrently with European traditions. They also depict worlds where spirituality and science coexisted rather than collided and where libraries served as political and moral centers of society.
Drawing from Timbuktu’s archives is to engage with an alternative intellectual lineage that redefines what “ancient knowledge” might look like in speculative fiction. The desert city was built on scholarship, where the true currency was knowledge and where literacy was a civic duty and a spiritual pursuit. With Timbuktu’s manuscripts, a talented speculative writer can build societies that think, argue, and evolve on their own terms, not according to what’s already well established in the genre.
Non-Eurocentric Inspirations for Worldbuilding
By leaning on Timbuktu’s knowledge, a writer could create an expansive society that bucks the norm, where might is not reliant on a sword, and a book of star maps is as prized as the business end of a blade. Where scholars wield influence through their mastery of astronomy and jurisprudence. Writers could go so far as to replace knights and castles with mathematicians and libraries who strive for a just cause, shifting the emotional center of a story from conquest to inquiry.
The manuscripts themselves suggest near-endless narrative possibilities that reach beyond how a world could look. They feature astronomical treatises that map lunar cycles, medical texts with herbal remedies, and legal and ethical writings. This could guide a writer to imagine a world in which priests measure destiny through planetary alignments, healers blend faith and science with a touch of magic, or a civilization develops a justice system that is as complex as their speculative world. The opportunities are endless.
Contemporary Echoes in Afrofuturism and Fantasy
With Timbuktu manuscripts, writers have the tools they need to craft unique stories. But this is not to say that no one has ventured into the realm of Timbuktu lore for their inspiration. In fact, there are a few famous works that draw from this diverse tapestry of knowledge.
For example, The Black Pages, a novella by Nnedi Okorafor, is one of the best examples of an author using Timbuktu manuscripts and ethos in their modern stories. This gripping novella centers on a protagonist who is on an important mission to save an ancient library in Timbuktu, which is under attack by jihadists. This parallels the true events in which extremists threatened Mali, leading librarian Abdel Kader Haidara in 2013 to smuggle out thousands of manuscripts by donkey, cart, and canoe, under the cover of darkness.
Another excellent example of creatives drawing on the lore of Timbuktu is Marvel’s Black Panther: Long Live the King. This comic adaptation, and its broader Afrofuturist worldbuilding, hints that Mali and Timbuktu are part of Wakanda’s heritage. A great alt-history for worldbuilding in comics.
An older example is the 1960s novels The Best Ye Breed and Blackman’s Burden, written by Mack Reynolds. These science fiction novels were set in North Africa and reference Timbuktu.
There are many other speculative worlds with African flair that imply lost scholarship and legendary libraries, even if they don’t name Timbuktu directly.
How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation
It’s also important to know that when studying Timbuktu’s manuscripts, seeking inspiration from the knowledge gleaned teaches a subtler lesson about worldbuilding. It teaches coherence because every manuscript, even when theological, is grounded in a worldview in which the sacred and the rational intertwine.
Through this strategy, writers can design belief systems that make sense within their invented universes—and avoid the kind of flat cultural borrowing in which non-Western ideas are often used for visual flavor. That’s why, when writers draw on Timbuktu manuscripts, they must remember that these systems of knowledge are living ecologies. They feature histories of logic, lineage, and debate built into them, so a writer’s imaginary world must bear this in mind for the story to remain believable.
To avoid misrepresentation, it is important for a writer to be carefully curious and well learned by reading translations, listening to scholars, crediting influences, and acknowledging when they are an outsider. Science fiction and fantasy writers should go in with the mindset of treating Timbuktu’s manuscripts with reverence and intellectual partnership to guide the spirit of creation itself.
Timbuktu’s manuscripts endure as uncontested proof that civilizations are measured not only by what they build but by what they choose to remember. If we have learnt anything by looking into Timbuktu’s grand history, it’s that to create is to preserve, and to preserve is to imagine anew.
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Jason Collins is a Las Vegas–based freelance writer whose work explores how big ideas ripple through individual lives. His writing often moves between human experience and cultural imagination, tracing the ways people adapt, create, and dream within changing worlds. Whether covering real-world stories or cultural phenomena, Jason approaches each piece with a storyteller’s curiosity and a journalist’s precision.