I'd be really interested to hear more about the literature of ancient Kush or Timbuktu -- what language it was written in, what kind of scholarly tradition it had. My education covered (at least superficially) Europe, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, India, and East Asia, but Africa south of the Sahara is a big blank spot...

So I went and looked it up on Wikipedia, and it turns out that Kush had an alphabetic script. Many inscriptions remain but little of the language (Meroitic) has been decoded. Although they would have had access to paper as a result of contact with Egypt and the Hellenistic world, there's no indication that any books written in Meroitic have survived.