The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  Two hundred miles downriver, the largest city in the region was also experiencing the jihadis’ onerous rule. In Gao, a city of mud-brick huts and the gaudy mansions of Arab drug traffickers, sprawling along the southern bank of the Niger River, the Islamists went on a rampage their first night in town. They turned their machine guns on a dozen bars and nightclubs that had constituted the city’s only entertainment. Le Relais, Le Hero, Le Camping Bango, Le Petit Dogon, L’Auberge Askia, and other popular establishments were riddled with hundreds of rounds and reduced to smoldering ruins. The Al Qaeda spinoff group that ruled the city, comprised mostly of black Mauritanian and Malian Islamists, under the leadership of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, converted City Hall into the palace of justice, and implemented Shariah punishments. “When someone is arrested, the person is brought to the commissariat [Islamic Police] and interrogated [and held until trial],” said a witness. As many as ten suspects at a time were crammed, sometimes for two weeks, into a filthy, eight-foot-by-eight-foot concrete room with graffiti scrawled on the bare walls. “Trials are heard every Monday and Thursday, and the detained are transferred to the justice palace to be judged,” the witness went on. “There are five judges, some of whom are foreigners, but no lawyers in this process, so the right to defense is not respected. The population can attend the trials which take place in a big room.”

  As in Timbuktu, the Islamic police also meted out punishments on the spot, beating and whipping dozens of people, some of them elderly, for drinking and smoking cigarettes. A bricklayer accused of drinking alcohol was handcuffed, held overnight at the police station, and given forty lashes with a switch made of camel skin and camel hair. “He hit me forty times, counting in Arabic and moving from the legs up my body,” the victim recounted. “It was terribly painful, I had many welts.” A man in his late sixties defied the Islamic police when they demanded he put out his cigarette, telling them: “I like smoking. I will smoke today, I will smoke tomorrow . . . in fact, I will smoke every day until the day I die. Is this the work of God, beating people for smoking?” They savagely beat him and threw him in jail overnight. A sickly septuagenarian smoker, beaten by a teenaged member of the Islamic Police, a witness said, “urinated on himself after about five strokes—the punishment for smoking is ten—it was too much for him.”

  Boys and adolescents became the jihadis’ eyes and ears in the north, employed to lurk in alleys and spy on their neighbors. The militants also recruited boys for the Islamic Police, training them to shoot weapons in a makeshift firing range behind Timbuktu’s main military camp, in a field that had belonged to the gendarmerie, the military police. “I saw them running, sometimes with their guns, sometimes not, and firing in the air. . . . There were about twenty-five to thirty people all mixed, about twelve or so were children. The trainer was a Senegalese, who’s an officer in the Islamic Police,” recounted one observer of the weapons course. A Timbuktu resident told Human Rights Watch that he saw boys as young as eleven riding about the city in vehicles driven by Ansar Dine militants, and joining the Islamic Police on foot patrols.

  On Thursdays and Sundays, Ibrahim Khalil Touré and his colleagues on the Crisis Committee made their way through the alleys of Timbuktu. Touré gazed with contempt on the jeep-loads of turban-wearing Islamic Police that bounced through the streets. Billboards with Koranic quotations had replaced advertisements for consumer goods, and black banners flew from every municipal building. They walked through the doors of Timbuktu’s City Hall—its windows broken in the spasm of looting—and took seats in a lightless, airless room with sporadic electricity. Across the conference table sat Abou Zeid and his cohorts. Abou Zeid, as usual, clutched his Kalashnikov. The contrast between the bulky semiautomatic and the diminutive, limping Al Qaeda leader had inspired a cutting remark among the denizens of Timbuktu: “How does he have the strength to fire it?” They shook hands across the table. Abou Zeid and his jihadis spoke Arabic; the men of the Crisis Committee spoke French, and a Timbuktu imam served as the interpreter. The two sides discussed medical treatment, electricity, food distribution, and education. All social services had degraded under the occupation, because of the exodus of government engineers and other experts, and the shortage of capable replacements.

  The conversations were cordial. “We had no choice but to keep talking to them, because we had to safeguard lives,” Ibrahim Khalil Touré told me. When the jihadis decreed that boys and girls must learn separately, the committee members dutifully put together a plan to divide up the schools. When Malian government officials in the south refused out of fear to cross into jihadi territory to administer national examinations, the committee arranged for hundreds of buses to bring students down to Mopti, the nearest town of any size in government-controlled territory. But beneath the measured dialogue, the members of the Crisis Committee seethed. “We are a city that has had Islam for one thousand years,” Ibrahim Khalil Touré told me months later. “We had the greatest teachers and universities. And now these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way.”

  After years of spartan conditions in desert camps and caves, the new rulers of the north settled into their lives of urban comfort. Five times a day, at prayer time, Abou Zeid and his entourage made their way to one of Timbuktu’s three Wahhabi mosques, including the butterscotch fortress perched on a dune at the edge of the Sahara, a stone’s throw away from Abdel Kader Haidara’s house. “They would pray with their rifles in the mosque, with their shoes on the prayer carpets,” Ibrahim Khalil Touré remembered with disdain—the mark of “primitives,” he said, who had spent much of their lives praying in the desert sands. At sunset, Abou Zeid retreated to the terrace of the Hotel Bouctou, the same spot where U.S. Special Forces troops had sipped beers between training sessions with Malian recruits, to relax with his fellow commander, Iyad Ag Ghali. At night the Algerian either slept in his suite on the ground floor of the Hotel Bouctou or camped in the dunes.

  Then, abruptly, after one week, Abou Zeid checked out of the hotel. The jihadi commander settled the bill with crisp hundred-euro notes that a minion peeled from bundles of cash stored in the back of a Land Cruiser. Ransom and drug money, owner Boubacar Touré thought. Abou Zeid moved with a handful of cohorts into the Moorish-style villa that Qaddafi had had built in 2006, isolated in the dunes and surrounded by a grove of palm and pine trees. Abou Zeid, according to Touré and other witnesses, was often seen in the company of a boy about ten years old, who was believed to be his son; nobody had any idea where he kept his wives.

  Timbuktu residents observed clandestine deliveries of food during the night, and heard reports that the two French geologists kidnapped in Hombori and the three European travelers taken in Timbuktu were imprisoned inside the villa. There were other sightings of the hostages at an Arab militant’s home on the northern edge of Timbuktu—a cleaning woman spied the stricken faces of white men peering from the barred upstairs windows. One man swore he had seen the prisoners being led from a car, blindfolded, and marched into the Hôtel La Maison.

  In Gao, a somnolent town of wide streets of reddish sand lined with mud-brick compounds, and sturdier concrete villas behind metal gates, Mokhtar Belmokhtar occupied a peach-stucco ranch house behind high walls in the prosperous Château quarter. He was joined by a ten-year-old son, named Osama, in honor of his spiritual mentor, Osama bin Laden, and one of his Arab wives, who often visited from Algeria. Down the street, fifty Hausa-speaking jihadis from the northeastern Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram—including suicide bombers, assassins, and, it is believed, the movement’s fanatical leader, Abubakar Shekau, who would two years later organize the kidnapping of 276 girls from a secondary school in Chibok—occupied the former headquarters of a welfare agency, and trained in a former government military camp outside the city. Belmokhtar moved around Gao in a four-vehicle convoy, and, when he appeared in public, a retinue of armed men surro
unded him. He had his hair cut by a favorite barber, bought lamb in the downtown market, and on one occasion visited the government hospital to be treated as an outpatient for malaria. “Please take care of the Prince,” his entourage told the nervous staff physicians, who did their best to remain calm in the presence of the jihadi commander.

  Like Abou Zeid, the Prince preferred to leave the city in the evenings. In a canopied pinasse, escorted by three boats filled with armed men, Belmokhtar and an Al Qaeda lieutenant he had fought beside in Afghanistan often motored from Gao’s harbor to the Pink Dune, an eighty-foot-high mountain of sand on the far bank of the Niger. From the knife-edge summit of the giant dune, its surface intricately scalloped by the constant wind, Belmokhtar could gaze upon a landscape that had not changed much since Al Hajj Askia Mohammed Touré, the greatest ruler of the Songhai Empire, surveyed the scene from the same vantage point five centuries earlier. The river curved and divided into channels as it flowed past dozens of cookie-cutter islets. In the other direction lay the Sahara, a flat ocher sea speckled with yellow grass. At sunset the bodyguards slaughtered a sheep and grilled it atop the dune, which turned from orange to pink in the fading light. Belmokhtar camped beneath the stars.

  12

  At his home in the Bella Farandja neighborhood, Abdel Kader Haidara paced the courtyard for long periods of reflection, pondering how to respond to the rebels’ seizure of Timbuktu. Largely thanks to Haidara’s initiatives, the city now had forty-five libraries, ranging from small private archives to ten-thousand-volume collections with exhibition spaces and conservation and digitization facilities that rivaled those in Europe and the United States. Most prominent were Haidara’s Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in the Sankoré neighborhood and the Ahmed Baba Institute, housed since 2009 in an $8 million complex built by the South African government. The forty-five libraries served as repositories for a total of 377,000 manuscripts, ranging from four-hundred-page, leather-encased volumes to single folios, including some of the greatest works of medieval literature in the world.

  The immediate threat to the manuscripts from the looting in Timbuktu had passed, but Haidara was gradually realizing that they faced a greater danger. He knew that many of the works epitomized the reasoned discourse and intellectual inquiry that the militants, with their rigid views of Islam, their intolerance, and their hatred of modernity and rationality, wanted to destroy. It was inevitable, he was coming to believe, that the manuscripts would become a target.

  To be sure, jihadi spokesmen had appeared on radio and on television twice soon after their capture of Timbuktu, to reassure people that “we won’t harm the manuscripts.” But Haidara and most of his friends and colleagues dismissed the promise as a public relations ploy. “They went on television and assured us, ‘we know the value of the manuscripts, and we vow to protect them.’ And that’s the moment that people got afraid. We knew that they were lying,” said Sane Chirfi Alpha, Timbuktu’s director of tourism and a close friend of Haidara.

  Timbuktu’s population, Chirfi explained, was savvy enough to understand that the mere act of acknowledging the manuscripts’ existence implied that the jihadis had them in their sights—and would turn against them when the time was right. “We could read between the lines,” Chirfi went on. “They told us that we had deviated from Islam, that we were practicing a religion full of innovations, not based on the original texts.” Deborah Stolk, the director of the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands, a major funder of manuscript conservation in Timbuktu, initially downplayed the peril, though it became clear to her later that the texts were endangered. “These manuscripts show a community in which science and religion coexisted and influenced each other,” she said. “That community is not in line with the one envisioned by Al Qaeda.”

  Emily Brady had anticipated trouble in Timbuktu from the moment the coup d’état occurred in March. An American attorney, scholar, illustrator, translator (of an 1839 French grimoire, or book of the occult, entitled Treasure of the Old Man of the Pyramids), and poverty-eradication specialist in her fifties from Seattle, Washington, Brady (who requested that her real name not be used in this book) had first visited Mali in the 1990s. During that visit, she met Abdel Kader Haidara, and instantly became captivated by the manuscripts.

  The texts, she told The New Republic in 2013, “do something for me nothing else ever has.” While keeping her base, an ocean-side house just south of Seattle, Brady began spending more time in Mali: she apprenticed with master bookbinders in Bamako; studied Bambara, the language spoken by Mali’s dominant ethnic group; married a young Malian, and purchased a house near the Niger River in Bamako, where she spent a good portion of every year. “I’m a book artist and book and paper conservator with one side of my brain and an attorney and governance specialist with the other,” she described herself in an online Reddit chat about the manuscripts.

  During her first encounters with Haidara in Timbuktu in the 1990s, Brady had been struck by the multifaceted and liberal society revealed by the works, by evidence of an artistic and scientific culture that had flourished alongside devout Islamic traditions in Timbuktu. She relished the manuscripts about musicology—“wonderful books about playing the lute,” she said—and the epic poetry that often communicated powerful and illicit emotions through the clever use of imagery. “A poet would describe a relationship with tea when he was actually talking about a woman’s sexuality,” observed Brady. Both subjects, she knew, were anathema to the Al Qaeda zealots. From her home in the Malian capital, in consultation with Haidara, she had preemptively sent out letters to every contact in her database in late March 2012, a total of two thousand individuals and organizations, alerting them to the danger posed by the advancing jihadi army. She received no responses.

  When the rebels seized control of Timbuktu, she recalled two years later, “Abdel Kader called me and he said, ‘If we don’t do something, the manuscripts are going to be affected. They’re caught in a combat zone. They could become something of value to the jihadis politically.’ We pleaded with donors [for money], and still nobody would help.”

  A few days after the occupation began, Haidara met with his colleagues at the office of Savama-DCI, the Timbuktu library association that he had formed fifteen years earlier.

  “What do we have to do?” Haidara asked them.

  “What do you think we have to do?” a colleague replied.

  “I think we need to take out the manuscripts from the big buildings and disperse them around the city to family houses. We don’t want them finding the collections of manuscripts and stealing them or destroying them.”

  “But we have no money, and we have no secure way to move them.”

  “Don’t worry. I will find a solution for that,” Haidara said.

  Months earlier, the Ford Foundation office in Lagos, Nigeria, had given Haidara a $12,000 grant to study English at Oxford University in the fall and winter of 2012–2013. The money had been wired to a savings account in Bamako. He emailed the foundation and asked for an authorization to reallocate the funds to protect the manuscripts from the hands of Timbuktu’s occupiers. The money was released in three days.

  Haidara recruited his nephew Mohammed Touré, his sister’s son, who had worked with Haidara at the library since he was twelve. Touré idolized his uncle and envisioned spending his life in manuscript preservation; Abdel Kader had tapped him as the family’s next scholar, just as his own father, Mamma Haidara, had tapped him when he was in his teens. “I ran the library, I welcomed the delegations, the researchers, the journalists, anyone who came by,” Touré told me when we met months later in the courtyard of Villa Soudan, a French-run guesthouse on the east bank of the Niger in a neighborhood of embassies and walled-off villas in the Malian capital. He was twenty-five years old, a wiry man with a high-pitched voice, a fidgety, distracted manner, and a pair of cell phones that went off at regular intervals, one for work and one for personal affairs, prompting impassioned bursts of conversation in Arabic; French;
Tamasheq, the language of the Tuaregs; and Songhoy, Touré’s first language, spoken by the dominant ethnic group along the northern bend of the Niger.

  Touré and his uncle reached out to people they trusted—archivists, secretaries, Timbuktu tour guides, and half a dozen of Haidara’s nephews and cousins. In a coordinated effort, the volunteers went from shop to shop in Timbuktu’s commercial district, buying, as discreetly as possible, metal trunks at a rate of between fifty and eighty a day. They reasoned that if everybody in the group limited his purchases to just two or three chests daily, the activity wouldn’t attract suspicion. “It looks like ordinary baggage. And commercial activities were going on as usual during the jihadis’ time,” Touré explained. When the metal lockers were sold out, they bought lesser-quality ones of wood. When they had purchased every trunk in Timbuktu, they swept through markets in the riverside town of Mopti, a large commercial center in unoccupied territory about 240 miles to the south. When they had bought up every one in Mopti, they purchased oil barrels in Timbuktu and shipped them down by boat to Mopti workshops. In that bustling riverfront city, metalworkers broke apart the barrels and refashioned them into chests—there was nobody in Timbuktu who could do the work—and sent them back downriver to Timbuktu. In one month, they accumulated 2,500 trunks and moved them into storage rooms inside the city’s libraries to prepare for the evacuation.