The Storied City

by Charlie English

  When Taura went away on business, he left Park in the care of a Muslim teacher named Fankooma, who owned a large number of manuscripts. Park had been shown similar documents at other places during his travels, but now he had time to discuss them in detail:

  Interrogating the schoolmaster on the subject, I discovered that the Negroes are in possession (among others) of an Arabic version of the Pentateuch of Moses [the first five books of the Old Testament], which they call Tauret la Moosa [the Torah of Moses]. This is so highly esteemed that it is often sold for the value of one prime slave.

  The Sudanese also had copies of the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah, which were held in very high esteem, and Park discovered that many people in Kamalia knew the Old Testament stories, including those of Adam and Eve; the death of Abel; Noah’s flood; the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the story of Joseph and his brethren; and the histories of Moses, David, and Solomon. He was surprised to find a number of people who could relate these stories to him in Manding, and they were shocked to discover that he knew them too.

  Fankooma used his manuscripts to teach the seventeen boys and two girls in his school. The boys were educated in the mornings and evenings and performed domestic duties for their master during the day, which was when he taught the girls. The pupils learned to read the Kuran and say a number of prayers, and when they were ready, a feast was prepared and the student sat an exam, or “[took] out his degree,” as Park put it. The explorer attended three of these ceremonies, listening with pleasure to the “distinct and intelligent answers” each of the students gave. When the examiners were satisfied, the last page of the Kuran was put into the student’s hand, and he or she was asked to read it aloud. Finally, all the scholars rose, shook each student by the hand and bestowed on each the title of “Bushreen,” or scholar.

  The boys’ parents paid the schoolmaster with a slave or the equivalent price on their children’s graduation. (Park did not say whether the same was true for the girls.) This was always done, Park noted, if the parents could afford it; otherwise the boy would remain the domestic slave of the schoolmaster until he could collect sufficient goods to ransom himself. Although they were given an Islamic education, Park noted that most of Fankooma’s pupils were not Muslims, and their parents’ aim in putting them into school was solely their child’s improvement. Kamalia was far from unusual in having a school. He had noticed that “encouragement . . . was thus given to learning (such as it is) in many parts of Africa.”

  After making these observations on a working eighteenth-century African education system, Park left Kamalia in April 1797. He traveled with Taura’s caravan of thirty-five slaves, some of whom had been kept in irons for years and could scarcely walk, but were now bound for a miserable life in the Americas or a terrible death on the middle passage. It took two months to cover the “tedious and toilsome” miles. As they approached Pisania, Park met an English-speaking woman who had known him before he set out but who now mistook him for a Muslim. When he told her who he was, she looked at him “with great astonishment, and seemed unwilling to give credit to the testimony of her senses.” The Gambia traders had been told long before that Park had been murdered in Ludamar, and had never expected to see him again.

  • • •

  PARK REACHED FALMOUTH just before Christmas 1797, after an absence from England of two years and seven months. Britain was thrilled with his discoveries, none more so than the members of the African Association, who had something to celebrate at last. Beaufoy had died in 1795, so the traveler worked up an account of his expedition with the association’s new secretary, Bryan Edwards. Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, which included new maps drawn by the noted cartographer James Rennell, was published in 1799. It was a gripping real-life adventure story, in which Park gave European readers their first proper account of the Sudan and its people, and it quickly became a bestseller. Timbuktu and the Niger were the talk of Europe.

  The African Association had grown hugely in the decade since its founding. On May 25, 1799, its members met at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall, where Banks congratulated the assembly on Park’s book, “which has been so well received by the public.” While Lucas and Houghton had not been well chosen, Park had shown “Strength to make exertions, Constitution to endure fatigue, and Temper to bear insults with Patience, Courage to undertake hazardous enterprises where practicable, and judgement to set limits to his exertions when his difficulties were likely to become insurmountable.”

  Europe’s attitude to Africa had changed in the decade since the Saturday’s Club had created the association. Britain and France were in the middle of a long series of wars, and Napoleon had seized Egypt to try to threaten the Suez Canal and British trade in India. One corner of the African continent, at least, had a strategic value, and Banks, who always worked to promote the nation’s interests, now talked frankly of exploiting Park’s new information for profit, and by military means. Park had opened “a Gate into the interior of Africa,” Banks said, through which “every Nation” could enter and extend its commerce. “A Detachment of 500 chosen Troops would soon make that Road easy, and would build Embarkations upon the [Niger]—if 200 of these were to embark with Field pieces they would be able to overcome the whole Forces which Africa could bring against them.” With European technology, the “ignorant Savages” of the interior could be taught how better to pan for their gold, and the value of the annual return, which he estimated to be currently worth a million pounds sterling, would likely be increased a hundredfold.

  The meeting drew up a memorandum to the Committee of the Privy Council for Trade and Plantations, setting out an unabashed colonialist agenda. They advised that “the first step of Government must be to secure to the British throne, either by Conquest or by Treaty, the whole of the Coast of Africa from Arguin to Sierra Leone; or at least to procure the cession of the River Senegal.”

  Park married that year and moved back to Scotland to work as a doctor, but the work didn’t suit him and he was soon longing to return to Africa. He told the novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott that he was troubled by a nervous disorder that meant he would awake suddenly in the night and believe he was still a prisoner in Ali’s tent in Ludamar. When Scott expressed surprise that he should still want to return to the continent, Park answered that “he would rather brave Africa and all its horrors than wear out his life in long and toilsome rides over the hills of Scotland, for which the remuneration was hardly enough to keep soul and body together.”

  By the winter of 1803–1804, increasingly alarmed by French claims on West Africa, the War and Colonial Office was seriously discussing sending a military force to capture Timbuktu. In the end it was agreed that the African Association’s most successful traveler should be sent back with a small detachment of soldiers. This second Park expedition sailed from England on January 30, 1805, charged with following the course of the Niger “to the utmost possible distance to which it can be traced.”

  If the key to the success of his first journey was its unthreatening nature—bolstered by the kindness of Park’s hosts, dollops of good luck, and immense personal fortitude—the second expedition was designed to fight. Park went with a captain’s commission, a £5,000 salary, £5,000 for expenses, and a party of forty-five, including a company of soldiers, sailors, and carpenters, his brother-in-law Alexander Anderson, and a friend from Selkirk, George Scott. The soldiers were recruited from Goree, an island off the coast of Senegal that had recently been captured from the French, so they were partially acclimatized to West Africa, but disease still killed them quickly in the interior. By the time they reached Bamako, thirty-one of the Europeans had died. But the stakes were higher than ever for Park, and he pressed on. He reached Sansanding in October, where he built a forty-foot sailing boat he christened His Majesty’s Schooner Joliba, the Manding name for the Niger. He hired a guide, Amadi Fatoumi, and bought three slave boatmen to help work it, but by the time they were read
y to leave Sansanding there were only five Europeans left, and Anderson and Scott were both dead.

  The survivors must have known by now that they were unlikely to escape the interior alive, and at least one of the soldiers was deranged. Even so, Park would not be swayed from his course. He informed London in his last dispatch that he had “the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt,” adding that if he did lose his life, at least he would die on the river. HMS Joliba set sail in November 1805, and Park was never heard from again.

  It took the British government six years to work out what had happened. In 1811, one of Park’s former guides tracked down Fatoumi, who had written his own account in Arabic of the expedition’s last days. The Joliba had sailed downriver for 1,500 miles, with Park, still haunted by his experience of “Moors,” electing not to land until they reached the coast. Whenever they encountered a threat they shot their way through it, and as reports of the Christians’ aggression spread, so did resistance to their progress. Fatoumi’s bald account of the Joliba’s passing of Timbuktu only hints at the last days of the disease-raddled crew as they teetered on the brink of madness:

  [We] came to [Kabara]; on my passing there, three canoes came again to oppose our passage, we repulsed them by force as before; came to [Timbuktu]; on passing there we were again assailed by three other canoes, which we repulsed; passed [Gourma], after passing seven canoes [came] after us, which we likewise repulsed; we lost one white man, of sickness; there were then in [the Joliba] only four white men, myself, and three slaves we had bought, making eight hands; each of us had 15 musquets apiece, well loaded, and always ready for action. . . . [Sixty] canoes came after us, which we repulsed after killing many of the natives, which we had done in all our former engagements.

  In this last action one of the few surviving soldiers, Lieutenant John Martyn, was in such a savage bloodlust and had needlessly shot so many that Fatoumi took hold of his hands and tried to restrain him. “We have killed enough,” he told Martyn. “Let us cease firing!” The soldier turned his anger on the guide, but Park intervened to save him.

  By a phenomenal effort of will, the bloodied boat reached Yelwa, in modern Nigeria, early in 1806, where Fatoumi left them. They were just five hundred miles from the Oil Rivers delta, where the Niger empties into the Gulf of Guinea, but they would not get much farther. Just above the steep rapids of Bussa, they were attacked from the shore. The boat ran aground, and Park and the three remaining Europeans jumped into the river, where they all drowned.

  • • •

  BY 1820 THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT had increasingly taken on the African Association’s role of exploring the continent. The association’s membership had dwindled along with its influence, from seventy-five in 1810 to forty-six by 1819. It had filled in many of the gaps on the maps of Africa and created a new model for exploration that would be built on by the geographical societies that were about to spring up all over the world. The association’s findings had been won at some cost, however, as every one of its “travellers,” apart from Simon Lucas, had died abroad. The young German Friedrich Hornemann reached Fezzan disguised as a Muslim in 1799 and sent back the intelligence that “Tombuctoo certainly is the most remarkable and principal town in the interior of Africa,” before disappearing. Twenty years later a report reached Britain that he had died in 1801 in what is now Nigeria. Henry Nicholls was dispatched from the Gulf of Guinea in 1804 to find the termination of the Niger, without realizing that the object of his search was the very spot from where he had set out. He died in 1805, probably of malaria. In 1809 the association dispatched Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who wandered the Middle East for nine years, learning Arabic and rediscovering the city of Petra, which had been lost for a thousand years, and the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, which had been buried by sand. As he finally readied himself to set out for the Sudan late in 1817, he contracted dysentery and died.

  Banks was an old man by this time. He was fat and gouty and spent his waking hours in a wheelchair, though he continued to preside over the Royal Society until his death, which came on June 19, 1820. It would be another six years before a European explorer finally attained Timbuktu.

  5.

  AL-QAEDA TO THE RESCUE

  APRIL 2012

  Sunrise on Monday brought a new cavalcade of vehicles from the east. They filed along the sandy street that ran past Ismael’s house, Toyota trucks painted the dun colors of the desert, each with a heavy machine gun mounted on the back along with a handful of swaying men. Unlike the vehicles Ismael had seen the day before, these picked their way along the road with deliberation. As they passed he could see that instead of flying the multicolored banner of the MNLA they carried black flags inscribed with white Arabic lettering. The new arrivals drove to the military camp and pulled down the MNLA’s multicolored standard and burned it before replacing it with their own oblong of dark material. “There is no God but Allah,” the flags read.

  By ten a.m. Jansky’s phone was buzzing. A group of new arrivals had stopped in front of the mosque near the Flamme de la Paix monument at the northwestern edge of town, he was told, so he climbed into his car to go see who they were. Following the ring road he passed a group of rebel leaders driving in the other direction. His phone rang again. Another group had arrived at the hospital. He turned south.

  The list of jihadists who arrived in Timbuktu that day would make a strong poker hand of “Most Wanted” playing cards. They included two senior al-Qaeda commanders: Yahya Abou al-Hammam, the “emir of the Sahara,” and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the leader of AQIM’s Masked Brigade. Both were in their thirties, veterans of the Algerian civil war who had been sentenced to death in absentia, and by 2015 they would each have a $5 million bounty on their heads. Al-Hammam was said to have been involved in the murder of a seventy-eight-year-old French hostage in Niger, while Belmokhtar—a veteran of Afghanistan who went by an assortment of colorful nicknames including “One-Eye” and “Uncatchable”—was wanted for a string of killings and kidnappings.

  But these men would play minor roles in the city’s future, compared with two others who arrived in Timbuktu that day: Abdelhamid Abou Zeid and Iyad Ag Ghaly. Abou Zeid was also a veteran of the Algerian war, older than the others, most identifiable by his short stature: he was around five feet tall. The “Little Emir” was a rising star in AQIM thanks to the money he had made from kidnapping, which had earned the organization millions of euros. He was said to keep this money buried at a secret desert location, and was seen paying his fighters in brand-new euro notes. He could be ruthless—in 2009 his jihadist brigade had murdered a British man, Edwin Dyer, who had been captured near Timbuktu—and wherever Abou Zeid went, his Western hostages were held close by. Despite his wealth he led an ascetic life, and like a good jihadist he carried his Kalashnikov at all times. He spoke in a murmur that was said to be inspired by the soft tones of Bin Laden. He drank Coca-Cola and enjoyed milk mixed with rice and dates.

  Ag Ghaly, meanwhile, was from the same Tuareg clan as Mohamed Ag Najim. Like Ag Najim, he had joined Gaddafi’s military as a young man but returned to Mali in the 1980s to carve out a career as a revolutionary. He had a black beard and a babyish face, and though at one time he enjoyed whiskey and music, he had since become radicalized. In one U.S. diplomat’s assessment, he cast a shadow over the north of the country and turned up “like the proverbial bad penny” to take his cut whenever a ransom was paid. His ability to play both sides was legendary: the Malian government once sent him as an envoy to Saudi Arabia, but he was expelled for making contact with extremist organizations. When his bid to lead the MNLA was rejected, he created a new jihadist group named Ansar Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”), which acted as a domestic branch of al-Qaeda. That day, he was in Timbuktu to hijack the MNLA’s victory.

  At eight a.m., Alkadi went to see a colleague, and together they decided to go into town on Alkadi’s little motorbike to find o
ut what was happening. In the Petit Marché they saw two Toyotas pull up next to a small mosque. Each vehicle was packed with gunmen wearing turbans that tumbled down to their waists, and in the lead truck was a man with distinctive bright teeth and a hennaed beard whom Alkadi recognized as Oumar Ould Hamaha. Known to most as Barbe Rouge, or “Redbeard,” Hamaha was a Timbuktien and a jihadist commander.

  “Come, gather round the car,” Hamaha told the crowds in the market in good French, as his fighters jumped down from the 4x4s and began to usher people toward him. “We have not come to kill you,” he said. “We have come in the name of Islam.”

  When a crowd had assembled, Hamaha began to explain their mission.

  They were not looking for independence from Mali, he said, nor did they want to do people harm. Timbuktu had once been a great Islamic city, and they simply wanted it to become one again. The problems that people had—of poverty, unemployment, unhappiness—existed because they had been led astray from the laws of God. Now that God had allowed them to capture the town, it was His will that they ensure Timbuktu lived by the strict laws of Islam.