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AFTER nine years of studying the ancient scrolls of Timbuktu, Transkei-born film-maker Sharron Hawkes has finally fulfilled her dream of documenting some of the secrets they hold.

In 2006, the Daily Dispatch reported on how Hawkes, upon returning from a holiday in Mali in Timbuktu, was inspired to create a documentary on the ancient manuscripts of Mali that had been buried in the sand. Some of these manuscripts, which Hawkes said held secrets to astronomy, had been damaged by termites and floods.

Her plan was to translate these ancient documents, uncover the secrets they held and to document her efforts along the way.

After two years of fund raising, Hawkes and her crew set off for Timbuktu. She also managed to secure funding from a number of different organisations, including the Department of Science and Technology and grants from the Ford Foundation which, she said, paid for them to travel to and from Timbuktu for the filming.

“We took various trips to Timbuktu and back. It’s very expensive to keep an entire film crew and equipment there. It also takes four days to get there.” The journey involved flights to Timbuktu, and hours of travel with guides through the desert.

Now nine years later, the 60-minute documentary, which carries a price tag of R3 million, has finally been completed.

“We didn’t know what we would find in the manuscripts when we started,” Hawkes said this week. “But we were quite pleased with what we discovered. What we were trying to prove was that astronomy was being done in the 1400s.”

Hawkes – together with her crew, Malian translators and such literary greats as Dr Thebe Medupe, who was the first black South African astronomer – managed to translate the scrolls and uncover the astronomy aspects in the manuscripts. Within them was a glimpse of the life of the ancient Islamic people, too.

“We found other interesting things like the fact that Islamic people used this to find out what time to pray. They would watch the shadow because they didn’t have watches. They used a very tricky trigonometry … They were really quite clever.”

Hawkes, who had described Timbuktu then as “an incredibly harsh place”, said things were even worse during the rest of her stay in the desert. “It was 50°C … In that kind of heat it feels like your brain is actually melting. For the people that live there it’s okay, but we were obviously not used to it.”

But now it is all over, Hawkes obviously thinks it was worth it. The documentary was launched in October at a Johannesburg theatre. “It was amazing. We were really only expecting about 80 people but ended up having about 300 people there.”

Hawkes said that the next phase was to put together a work programme so school children could learn the secrets of the manuscripts.

“This way the research can keep going,” Hawkes said. - By ZISANDA NKONKOBE