Haidara's story was incredible, but the proof was there before me: the 400-year-old Arabic manuscripts were handed down from generation to generation, buried in trunks and boxes in the homes of several of Timbuktu's most prominent families. Even major scholars of the era had not yet seen this collection.

There seemed to be thousands of the dusty manuscripts, a few bound in leather; most were piles of loose papers meticulously tied together, some with gorgeous gold etchings and illustrations that would themselves bring thousands of dollars in the world's great auction houses. One was about 13th-century law; another, astronomy. Beside it was a 300-year-old history of Islam. If translated, they might completely rewrite the history of black Africa. Standing in Haidara's "library," a dusty storage room crowded with old metal trunks piled one on another, I imagined how that shepherd felt holding the Dead Sea Scrolls, perhaps sensing the majesty of his discovery, yet helpless to unlock its secrets. Here, at the "Gateway to the Desert," at the edge of the Sahara's grand sandy superhighway for camels, where two distinct universes have been meeting for a millennium, I held in my own hands perhaps the only remains of the black African world's intellectual achievement.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Originally published in The New Yorker magazine. Used with permission.