Timbuktu has recently become an ‘iconic’ symbol of the pre-colonial written tradition in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, scholars have often only focused their research on the content of the manuscripts and the scholarly traditions they represent. In this article I examine the ‘life’ of the Fondo Ka'ti archive, one of the many private libraries that have surfaced in the town in recent years, and that has positioned itself apart from other libraries due to its unique historical construction. I argue that archival biography is the most relevant approach when analysing this topic and offer an assessment of the sources for such a biography. Therefore, I treat the Fondo Ka'ti archive itself as an historical artefact, looking both at its conditions of production as well as at how its own being has in turn affected the context it finds itself in. Such a perspective enables fresh insights into the entangled processes that produce history, it can point to the hybridities embedded in both archives and identities and set up alternative sources for histories.