Buktu is known as one of the first and most successful entrepreneurs of the time.

In the 11th century, an old woman from the Berber ethnic group named Buktu lived near a merchant crossroads in the western part of the Sahara Desert. Merchants from Morocco and the Middle East passed through. As a result, she found a brilliant idea to dig a well to accommodate the traffic and make money. Salt caravaners created a marketplace around the well, where salt was the currency, and in time, a city grew and thrived around it.

Timbuktu (the well of Buktu) grew into an intellectual hub of literacy, building the first library and becoming the top place in the world for higher education: growing the first university to teach physics, math, writing and poetry. People traveled from all over the world for conferences, sharing experiences, poems and books. Books were purchased, or if too valuable, the scribes of Timbuktu copied them. These were archived from all over the world, creating one of the world’s first libraries.