Timbuktu University

Perhaps the most overblown myth is that of the great University of Timbuktu. Sometimes called the University of Sankore, after a quarter surrounding a mosque in that
fabled desert-edge city, this university has been an enduring staple of one school of
African historiography. Du Bois wrote that under Askiya Muhammad, emperor of
Songhay (1493 1528), the university swarmed with thousands of black students1 J. C.
de Graft-Johnson, a Ghanaian scholar, called it one of the worlds greatest seats of
learning.2 S. M. Cissoko, a Senegalese historian writing more recently in UNESCOs
General History of Africa, says the black elite of the middle Niger River region reached
the heights of Islamic learning at Timbuktu.3
Actually, no formal university ever existed at Timbuktu. Instead, there was an unorganized community of Muslim scholars who taught theology, jurisprudence, grammar,
logic, rhetoric, and other Islamic subjects. The earliest of these scholars included blacks
sent by Malian emperor Mansa Musa (1312 37) to the University of Fez, Morocco,
for training. However, it was not until the sixteenth century that Timbuktu flourished
as a center of learning and that local instruction most resembled a university; and by
that time most of its leading scholars were of Berber or Arab extraction. The Sankore
mosque in particular was a foyer of Sanhaja Berber, not black, academic life.4
Stanley B. Alpern, African historiography: New myths for old, in: Academic Questions 5/4 (1992),
51-62, here p. 59.

2
3

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1915; London: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 32; and W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: Viking Press, 1947; New
York: International Publishers, 1965), 211.
J. C. de Graft-Johnson, African Glory (New York: Praeger, 1954), 107.
S. M. Cissoko, The Songhay from the 12th to the 16th Century, in vol. 4 of General History of
Africa, ed. D. T. Niane (Berkeley, Calif.: Heineman, 1984), 208 9.
Nehemia Levtzion, The Western Maghrib and Sudan, in vol. 3 of Cambridge History of Africa,
ed. Roland Oliver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 392 93, 416 18, 421 22.