A petition begun by a group of fifty-one leading scholars and library directors now started to gain traction on the Internet. Calling for the manuscripts to be protected lest an important part of world memory be “annihilated,” the petition attracted the names of more than 1,500 academics from universities in seventy-four countries, including Yale, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. The head of the West African research institute IFAN, meanwhile, warned that the precious documents might be illegally sold or destroyed by the occupiers. “These manuscripts have survived through the ages thanks to a secular order,” said the scholar Hamady Bocoum. “With the arrival of the Islamists, that secular order is broken, that culture is in danger.”
Ismael was worrying about the end of the secular order too. Al-Qaeda had a long-standing threat against teachers of French in Mali, and the education system was one of the early targets for Ansar Dine’s Islamification program. The jihadists ordered that boys and girls be separated, but there weren’t enough teachers left to take the extra classes, so schools remained closed. A ban on teaching philosophy was also announced, which Ismael found personally threatening, since as far as he was aware he was the only one in the city who taught it. He had a large library of printed books devoted to the subject, including works by Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Spinoza, and Montaigne, and he knew the red-bearded jihadist Hamaha was aware of its existence since he and his elder brother, a family friend, used to come round to read them.
Ismael’s greater concern, though, was for his manuscripts. He had been busy in his Fondo Kati library, and by Wednesday the documents had already been hidden in places he refused to divulge even two and a half years later. “Like that, even if the men came into the building, they were not going to find anything,” was all he would say.
He wasn’t the only one hiding manuscripts. The al-Wangari library, which was said to be based on the original collection of the sixteenth-century Timbuktu scholar Muhammad Baghayogho, was in the care of its guardian Mohamed Cissé while its proprietor was abroad. At eleven a.m. on Thursday, Cissé was disturbed by an anonymous phone tip-off. “Be careful,” the voice said, “bad people are in front of your gate.”
The call put Cissé in a funk. What could he do? He had to go see who these “bad people” were and find out what they wanted. When he reached the library building, which stands at an intersection in the warren of streets behind the Sidi Yahya mosque, he saw two jihadist pickups parked out front. As far as he could tell, the armed men didn’t intend to go inside, but even so he was worried. That night he called the patron, Mukhtar bin Yahya al-Wangari, to tell him what had happened, and they agreed the manuscripts should be moved. Two days later, Cissé and Mukhtar’s elderly brother came to the library in the dark with a few sacks and some lockers to begin the process.
“I looked at the atmosphere [around the library], checking whether it was really calm and that there were no people with guns loitering on the corner,” Cissé recalled. The street was empty, so they slipped inside and locked the door behind them, then began to take the manuscripts down from their shelves and place them in the sacks and lockers. They were too flustered to prioritize the more important documents; they just grabbed what they could. It took thirty minutes to an hour to fill each locker. “Every time we took a manuscript, we had to do it softly, to be careful that we didn’t damage them, because the folios are very old. That was why it took a lot of time.” When a box was full, it was closed with two padlocks. They put some manuscripts in sacks as well, but these were hard to carry.
They listened carefully before leaving, and when the street outside was quiet, they took a deep breath and unlocked the door. One man carried the lockers in a handcart, or push-push, while the other brought the cumbersome bags. Mukhtar’s brother lived a short distance away, across the main road from the Sidi Yahya mosque, and they took the manuscripts to his house and placed them in a dark room, covering them with other household objects so that even if someone came in and looked around, they wouldn’t be seen.
Hiding manuscripts was not an option at the most visible library, the new Ahmad Baba building in Sankore, which contained around 15,000 of the institute’s total collection of 38,803 documents. The head of the institute had been working his last days in the job before handing it over to a new director, and he had fled the city that week. Abdoulaye Cissé, a tall man with an angular face, was now the organization’s senior official in Timbuktu. On Thursday, he too received an anonymous tip-off. “There are bandits who want to come to destroy your library,” he was told. There was only one thing he could do, he decided: ask the city’s new occupiers for help.
He set off for the military camp, where the jihadists were now based, and asked a bearded sentry in combat fatigues if he could speak with Iyad Ag Ghaly. But the Ansar Dine leader wasn’t there, and instead Cissé was passed to another commander, a Chadian called Adama who would become known for wearing a suicide vest wherever he went. Cissé explained that he had received a threat that the Ahmad Baba building was going to be looted, and told him it must be protected at all costs. Adama promised to see what he could do.
Two days later, a group of jihadists arrived in Sankore and started to deploy around the building. Cissé went to talk to them, telling them he worked for the institute and was a Timbuktien—“I am from the town and I will not leave the town,” he said—and that he had to come in regularly to check that everything was safe, that was his job. They agreed to let him look around whenever he wanted, and he continued to visit the premises every few days to see that no more damage had been done.
At the old Ahmad Baba building on the Rue de Chemnitz, the caretaker Abba Traoré and his grandson Hassini had been trying to fend off groups of looters who asked them to open the storerooms, telling them they didn’t have any keys. When they explained this problem to the jihadists, they were given a note in Arabic that said the building was under their protection and must be left alone. “If looters came, I would show them the paper, and they would go,” recalled Hassini. “That was how we did it.”
• • •
THROUGHOUT APRIL, as the days grew hotter, people drained out of northern Mali. Refugees packed their bags with a few essentials, locked their homes, and went to join whatever transportation they could find. Some set out for neighboring countries—Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire—where they ended up in refugee camps; others went to southern Mali, stopping in Segu, Mopti, or Bamako. Almost half a million people would leave the north that year. Some went to stay with relatives, sharing small apartments with families who had been struggling to get by even before the crisis, living on handouts from the World Food Programme and charities that had been in the country for decades. Adults lost their jobs, children lost their schooling, and at every stage of their flight the refugees were robbed, by the rebels in the land they were fleeing and by the militaires in the territory they were running to.
They fled mostly because they were scared. “Everyone you saw, you could read the fear on their face,” Diagayeté recalled. He remembered his family being so afraid they could barely eat. “Everyone was frightened. People didn’t know what was going to happen that day, or what would happen the following day.” Rumors of rebel atrocities ran around the town. “People said if you are an artist they would cut out your tongue, because they hate music and want to ban it,” said Bintu Guerba, a singer. The jihadists didn’t cut out tongues, but they did ban music and punish people for playing it, so she fled to Bamako.
Even those who wanted to stay found they had no means to live. With the town ransacked and the state workers gone, much of the city’s infrastructure had shut down. The jihadists had saved the electricity plant, but it was low on fuel and there were frequent power shortages and blackouts. Few shops were open, and every bank had been smashed up, so there was no way of getting money. Diagayeté’s main reason for being in Timbuktu was his job at the institute, but now the institute was closed. “I said to myself
, when the little cash I have in my pockets is finished, what will happen next?” he remembered. “I can cope, but how about my little children? If my money runs out, how would I be able to get away, or even eat?” When he found a place on a truck heading south on the third day of the occupation, he didn’t hesitate. He dropped some computers and hard drives with scans of manuscripts at the house of a colleague—it was just a small part of the collection, but he did what he could—then he left.
Alkadi and his wife, Fatouma, discussed leaving every day. Their house was in the Arab and Tuareg neighborhood of Abaraju, where many of the rebels and their sympathizers lived, and now they felt intimidated. They would see AQIM leaders in the street daily, and all their neighbors who had dark skin like them had gone or were preparing to go: whatever the jihadists said about all races being equal before God, Alkadi and Fatouma didn’t believe it. Alkadi lived next to a shop that sold mobile phone credits, and one day a group of looters banged on his door, believing that he ran the shop. He told Fatouma to lock herself in after that.
He still went out daily, riding around town on his little motorbike, observing. Sometimes he stopped by the bus station in the middle of the Grand Marché, trying to gauge how easy it would be to leave, but it was always so busy with people that he couldn’t even get in. His colleagues were all fleeing: each day he would discover that another one had left. Once a group of them asked him to go with them in a car they had rented, but he said no, there was still too much chaos. It was better to stay until things had settled down and then see what to do. He still believed the Malian army might come back and retake the town.
Alkadi and his colleagues kept in touch with Abba, the caretaker at the old Ahmad Baba building on the Rue de Chemnitz, where most of the manuscripts—around 24,000—were still held. Although gunmen had been sniffing around, the manuscripts were safe. It was the MNLA who had posed the gravest danger, and now that they had been chased out, the threat wasn’t so great. “We didn’t worry about the jihadists at the start, because the manuscripts spoke of Islam,” he remembered. “They spoke of good things. Since these people were Muslims, they would never harm them.”
Anyway, even if they had wanted to, they couldn’t move the manuscripts. There were far too many.
• • •
OF THE MANY ACCOUNTS of flight from Timbuktu, none was more colorful than that of Ismael Diadié Haidara. It was, he said later, like a Malian Schindler’s List.
With his manuscripts hidden, he decided to leave quietly on the first Saturday after the occupation, April 7, and hired a pickup to take him to the river, where the Fondo Kati had a boat. The vehicle arrived at dawn that day, and he gathered his children and his belongings. Opening the front door of his house, he found a crowd of more than fifty friends and neighbors standing in the street with their bags.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We are coming with you,” they said.
The quiet exit he had envisaged would be impossible with so many. Ansar Dine or the MNLA would be bound to hear the commotion and come to investigate, and anyway the truck he had hired wasn’t nearly big enough to carry them. But they were desperate. He had to try. He told them to climb on—there were two women in their eighties, as well as children and even babies—and when the truck was completely overloaded he told the others the driver would come back. Ismael then climbed in with his two children—the only members of his family who were with him in Timbuktu—as well as a computer and four of his most precious manuscripts, which he carried in a bag. The driver warned him that if the men at the first checkpoint saw the bag, it would be stolen, but he could hide it in the space under his seat, so that was where it was put.
As the truck started to move, the people left behind began to cry. Ismael told the driver to stop and went over to reassure them. “You are going to leave Timbuktu,” he said. “Not a single person will stay here.” Then he climbed back into the overburdened vehicle, which set off toward the river.
They were stopped at an MNLA checkpoint by the turnoff to the airport, where two rebel fighters covered them with guns while others climbed into the truck to search it, asking if they had weapons or were hiding soldiers. “No,” Ismael told them, “there are no soldiers here. We are all civilians.” After examining the bags thoroughly, the MNLA waved them on, and the truck continued toward the ferry at Koriume. There they were stopped again, and again everyone was asked to get out while the MNLA fighters searched the vehicle.
“Who is in charge here?” asked the commander.
Ismael came forward.
“If you want to leave,” the commander said, “I will first have to explain who we are and why we have become the MNLA.” He then launched into a political speech that lasted more than ten minutes, telling the refugees that they fought for everyone, not just the Tuareg but all the people of the north, whom they intended to free from the domination of the Malian government. He explained the origin and purpose of the movement, even down to the design of the MNLA flag, and when he had finished, he asked if everyone understood. The passengers nodded.
He took Ismael by the shoulder: “What do you say?”
“You ask me my opinion, so I will tell you what I think,” Ismael said. “I think you have done a very bad thing. If you came here to liberate the population, instead of burning houses and shooting and making people afraid, you should explain this to the people in Timbuktu, then I am almost sure that a big part of them will follow you. You have to take the people into account. We have an opinion too. We can agree with you, or disagree.”
The commander called over another man, whose desert turban was wrapped around his face so that only his eyes were visible. He asked Ismael to repeat what he had said, and a discussion began that ran on for almost thirty minutes. By the time they had finished, the driver of the pickup had returned to Timbuktu to collect the second group from the library and bring them to Koriume.
It was now after two p.m., and the political arguments were still being exchanged when the masked rebel said that if they wanted to leave, they must go immediately, since he and his men were about to be relieved and they couldn’t guarantee the next group would let them out.
Ismael thanked him.
“One more thing,” said the masked man. “At nightfall, wherever you are, stop there. They will shoot anything that moves.”
The refugees went to the port, where they climbed aboard the Fondo Kati’s pinasse. They had traveled only a short distance upriver by nightfall, but Ismael, heeding the rebel’s advice, told the boat’s captain to stop at the next village. They were welcomed with food and mattresses in the villagers’ houses, and at five the following morning they continued toward Mopti. It took almost a week, but eventually all of Ismael’s passengers reached government territory.
In Bamako, the librarian moved into an empty house that belonged to his brother. “I was with all my family then,” he said. He was also with his four most precious manuscripts, which he had evacuated from Timbuktu.
• • •
AS ISMAEL WAS SETTING OFF UPRIVER, Haidara left his house to look around the city. It was a week into the occupation, and the first time he had ventured out since his arrival the previous Sunday. He walked south toward the administrative quarter, passing the mairie and the governorate in the Place de l’Indépendance. The paper that was scattered about the streets alarmed him: it was precisely this sort of danger that had brought him back to Timbuktu. “Truly that made me feel bad,” he said. “They had started with the government buildings and moved on to all the other administrative buildings. They were all ransacked.” There was still some looting, and he understood that if it carried on, they would eventually come to the libraries, which were often housed in grand buildings and were obvious targets.
He returned to the house in a state of anxiety, determined to “do something.” It was impossible to hold meetings at the time, so he spent the next days sp
eaking on the phone to his colleagues and friends among the major library-owning families. “They asked me, ‘What do you want to say? We see the paper in the streets, the damage, yes, but what do you suggest?’”
They should pack the manuscripts in chests and lockers, he said, and bring them into the family homes.
“They said, ‘Okay, we agree, but we do not have the money to buy lockers. We can’t do it.’”
Haidara didn’t have any cash either, but he did have a $12,000 grant from the Ford Foundation that was meant to pay for him to learn English at Oxford University. He hadn’t used it—nor, friends said, did he intend to—and now he sent a message to the foundation saying he wanted authorization to spend the money on the manuscripts. “They said, ‘Sure, it’s done, it’s authorized,’” Haidara recalled.
His next difficulty was to get his hands on the money. The banks had been looted, but transportation was still working, so he wrote a check and sent it with a colleague 250 miles south to Mopti, which was still in government hands. It was too much money to take out all at once, so he did a deal with a trader there who agreed to hold it and pay out small amounts as needed. Now he had a pot of money—five or six million West African francs—with which he could purchase lockers. He bought them almost daily in the market after that, until the city had run out and more had to be ordered in. Eventually the supply in Mopti would run out too, and Haidara would have to have them made, buying empty oil drums in Timbuktu and sending them south to be worked into lockers and shipped north again.
Haidara was not alone in asking people to move their manuscripts into their houses; and many manuscript-owning families, including Ismael and the al-Wangaris, didn’t need to be told. Sane Chirfi Alpha said that in those early days of occupation there was a “discreet meeting,” which was aimed largely at the manuscripts belonging to the Ahmad Baba institute. “We met with the members of the High Islamic Council,” he said. “They felt they had to do something to move the manuscripts.” In the end it seemed too risky to try to move the state archive, but others were advised to try to move their manuscripts discreetly: “They passed the message among themselves that each one should smuggle his manuscripts and hide them where he could.”
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