Best news of the week.

This, which we learned about here.

"Researchers in Timbuktu are fighting to preserve tens of thousands of ancient texts which they say prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the European Renaissance.

Private and public libraries in the fabled Saharan town in Mali have already collected 150,000 brittle manuscripts, some of them from the 13th century, and local historians believe many more lie buried under the sand."

We have long noted that Africa does not get much attention in this country -- our government, so vocally indignant about human rights in the Middle East, has maintained a quite curious silence about the daily Apocalypse faced by the various peoples of Africa. It is interesting to note that 450000 people have died in the genocide in Darfur since 2003, while the conflict that has rocked the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1994 is, if we are to believe Wikipedia and The Economist, " the bloodiest in history since World War II. " Interesting, but judging by the level of U.S. involvement, not particularly relevant. Twenty million Africans have died of AIDS. Ponder that number for a moment -- although when death tolls escalate into the millions it becomes hard to keep numbers in the head -- one's attention wanders. It is apparently much easier to deal with human suffering when it remains countable. Yet consider twenty million individuals, each with his or her own voice and, if you believe in such things, unique, irreplaceable soul. What did they live for? What did they think? What did they know? What conversations we might have had with the endless dead, if only we'd wanted to meet them, thought they were worthy of our friendship, our compassion--

Against tragedy of this scale the discovery of this lost literature may be tiny, microscopic. Yet we submit that anything that can be done to illuminate Africa's history, known to most Westerners only as a mess of colonial abuses underscored by vast swathes of unimaginable suffering, anything that can be done to get the world to look in Africa's direction, bears significance. Numbers do not seem to work. Art, literature, culture -- in these we can read humanity, as clearly as we can read pain in a pair of eyes.