A Soninke woman paints the wall of her house in Djajibine, Mauritania.
Margaret Courtney-Clarke/Corbis

1.       Many old west African families have private library collections that go back hundreds of years. The Mauritanian cities of Chinguetti and Oudane have a total of 3,450 hand written medieval books. There may be another 6,000 books still surviving in the other city of Walata. Some dated back to the 8th century AD. There are 11,000 books in private collections in Niger. Finally, in Timbuktu, Mali, there are about 700,000 surviving books.