Africa's archives were burned. I built a laptop altar for the one that's left.
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built In January 2013, as militants fled Timbuktu, they set fire to 4,202 manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute. Some were centuries old, on mathematics and science. The loss was real, but it could have been far worse. For months before, librarians and families had been moving the collections…
In January 2013, militants burned 4,202 manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu, some of which dated back centuries and dealt with mathematics and science. Prior to this, librarians and families had been moving the collection out in various ways to protect it. Meanwhile, in the reporter's part of the world, British colonial officials had destroyed documents through burning or sinking them at sea, and some were secretly sent to Britain for safekeeping.
The loss of this written memory has had a lasting impact - it is not just historical accounts but personal stories and memories that are lost when grandparents and family members are forgotten. To combat this, the reporter built Oríkì, a small offline AI archive for family memories that runs on a laptop. Users input their family history in ordinary language, and the Gemma model processes it to create a family tree.
The system looks for gaps and asks questions to help remember the missing details. All of this is done locally, without sharing sensitive information, and can be run on any laptop with Python and the necessary dependencies.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.