The Black Pages (Black Stars, #2)

by Nnedi Okorafor

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean. —Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Their feathery pages were flimsy, thin, and near the ends of their current lives. Their next lives were as dust.

The man had died like this because of his mouth, not because of the manuscripts for which Timbouctou had become famous.

piling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow full of the texts dating back to the thirteenth century, records of sub-Saharan Africa’s rich medieval history.

Sounds like the saving of art from the Nazis

spirits and djinn always linger when there is something to linger for.”

Education and the future were important, but family was the true elixir of life.

His father and his father’s friends, men who had (according to his father) been entrusted with guarding the manuscripts over the last forty years, had been moving the manuscripts gradually, after hearing rumors that al-Qaeda was coming. “Yet only a few of them can read them,” Issaka whispered. He sighed tiredly. Over twenty-four hours of travel to surprise his parents with an early arrival and he was the one surprised. His father had never spoken about being some guardian of ancient books.

There's something beautiful (and maybe sad) about not being able to read, but still knowing the value of these books.

Ten scowling old men. His father, Uncle Yusuf, Uncle Taofik, Uncle Mohammed, Uncle Moussa, Uncle Traore, Uncle Gaston, Uncle Haidara, Uncle Mamadou, and Dr. Abdel. His mother had once told him that only half of them were actually blood relatives, but none of that really mattered; uncles were uncles.

They seem to want to destroy all things that are about knowledge, history, and free thought.”

They want to erase the history of our people. They want to erase our ancestors. Wipe them all away and replace them with the memory of the Arab. It is a false jihad against the genius of the black African. It is not Islam at all.”