The operation progressed rapidly—in Haidara’s case a little too rapidly. In the second week of occupation, a television crew from Al Jazeera visited Timbuktu. Mohamed Vall, the channel’s North Africa correspondent, had been given permission by Ansar Dine to report on life in the occupied town, and he asked about the manuscript collections. The jihadists told him they were perfectly safe, and he should see for himself.
On Saturday, April 14, Vall went to see Haidara’s nephew Mohamed Touré, who looked after the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library, and told him he wanted to do a tour of the building to see the famous manuscripts. Touré started to sweat: he knew the place was almost empty and he might be accused of stealing. The library wasn’t worth seeing, he told Vall—really, there was nothing of interest there, it wouldn’t make good TV, and anyway he wasn’t free to show him around. Vall went back to tell the jihadists what had happened.
Shortly afterward, gunmen showed up at Touré’s house with the television crew in tow. “They forced me to go to the library,” said Touré. “I went, I opened it up, they filmed it all, they saw the places, the offices, everywhere.” But there was nothing there: the camera zoomed in on empty shelves and cupboards. The only manuscripts they could find were several boxes Touré had hidden in a bathroom.
Where are the rest? Vall asked, as his escort of three jihadists waited by the library door. “I don’t know,” lied Touré. “You’ll have to talk to the boss. I’m not in the loop.”
Vall filed a somewhat confused report.
Abdoulaye Cissé meanwhile continued to visit the new building at Sankore to check that nothing more was being looted. In the second week, he found a new jihadist in charge whom he didn’t recognize. The senior leaders had taken up residence in the building, Cissé was told, and he couldn’t come in. A few days later, Cissé heard that the “senior leaders” included Abdelhamid Abou Zeid, who had moved in with several French hostages. The Ahmad Baba institute had become a jihadist barracks.
Cissé would not be allowed inside again.
PART TWO
DESTRUCTION
And do you think that unto such as you,
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew,
God gave the Secret, and denied it me?—
Well, well, what matters it! believe that too.
—OMAR KHAYYÁM, Rubáiyát
8.
THE ARMCHAIR EXPLORER
1830–1849
Even by the standards of nineteenth-century portrait photography, William Desborough Cooley looks cantankerous. Caught in middle age, he stares into the future with a downturned mouth and skeptical, bag-laden eyes. Posterity was not going to be kind to Cooley. Nor, especially, were the explorers of his day: few “armchair geographers,” as he was derided, were more hated than this one. Cooley did, however, possess a remarkable ability. While they tramped through the disease-ridden wetlands and forests of tropical Africa armed with maps and compasses, he was making equally groundbreaking discoveries by leafing through documents in the British Library. It was Cooley who pushed the search for Timbuktu and the Sudan beyond mere cartography, initiating European inquiry into early West African history.
He was born in Ireland, probably in 1795, the year Park first set out to find the Niger. The son of a barrister and grandson of a notable architect, Cooley was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and as a young man moved to England, where he joined the London literary scene, becoming staff writer on The Athenæum magazine and a contributor to The Edinburgh Review. In 1830 he began an account of Europe’s global exploration, The History of Maritime and Inland Discovery, which established his reputation as a geographer, and became one of the first fellows of a new exploration club that met in the rooms of the Horticultural Society in Regent Street. This organization, which soon absorbed the declining African Association, would be called the Royal Geographical Society.
Cooley’s combative spirit was soon engaged in the business of setting straight the grandiose claims of some of his contemporaries. In 1832 he secured an early triumph against a rival of England by exposing the apparently fraudulent travels of the explorer Jean-Baptiste Douville, who claimed to have reached deep into the interior of Angola and for this achievement had been awarded a gold medal by the Société de Géographie. Cooley began his review of Douville’s three-volume Voyage au Congo et dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique équinoxiale with trademark sarcasm: “Africa, distinguished in all ages as a land of prodigies and wonders, has never given birth to anything more extraordinary than the volumes now before us,” he wrote, before establishing that the journey would have been impossible within the time Douville had claimed. The results were catastrophic for the Frenchman: his reputation was shattered and his ashamed fiancée committed suicide. Douville challenged to a duel anyone who repeated Cooley’s remarks, but he eventually fled France for Brazil, where he was murdered on the banks of the Amazon in 1837.
This unhappy episode appears to have given Cooley a taste for the takedown. It certainly boosted his reputation: in 1832 he was elected to the RGS council, and three years later he became vice president, but his rise through the English establishment came to an abrupt halt when he picked a fight with the RGS secretary, Captain Alexander Maconochie, accusing him of financial misconduct. The incident, which may have been sparked by a matter as trivial as the mislaying of Cooley’s subscription fee, escalated to offers of a duel, and Cooley was forced to step down from his official post. From then on, he devoted himself to searching for what the leading eminence of Victorian exploration, David Livingstone, called “theoretical discoveries,” which, however, brought method and rigor to European ideas about Africa, chiefly the Western Sudan.
In 1834, Cooley interviewed an Arab merchant and his black slave in London about East African geography. He correlated their information with Portuguese and other sources and produced a groundbreaking work on the interior of the continent, in which he proposed the existence of an undiscovered inland sea in East Africa called Lake Nyassi, now known as Lake Tanganyika. This led him into a thorough exploration of another group of sources, which until then had been poorly used: the early Arab geographies. With these he believed he could correct the errors of his forebears, notably the brilliant eighteenth-century French mapmaker Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville and the African Association’s own cartographer, James Rennell:
The Arab geography of Africa lies, at present, a large but confused heap of materials, into which modern writers occasionally dip their hands, each selecting what appears to serve his purpose, and adapting it to his views by an interpretation as narrow and partial as his mode of inquiry. Modern geographers—D’Anville and Rennell not excepted—have allowed fancied resemblances of sound to lead them far away from fact and the straight path of investigation. . . . The disorder introduced into the early geography of Central Africa by this false method of proceeding has deprived it of all its value.
Cooley determined to “examine the Arab authors of greatest value” and develop the information found in them. In this task he would be helped by a friend, the Spanish Orientalist Pascual de Gayangos, who was charting the history of Islam in his country by returning to the manuscripts of the Arab chroniclers and comparing them with existing European accounts. Cooley used the same technique: cross-referencing the Arab sources with those of Europeans, such as the Portuguese historian João de Barros and the Spaniard Luis del Mármol Carvajal, as well as the more recent writings of Park and Caillié. In this way he could estimate the reliability of each source and establish the origin of the information. He would start from scratch, abandoning all previous hypotheses about the locations of the empires of Ghana and Mali. By this vigorous process, which he called “rectification of sources,” the more fantastical reports and secondhand accounts were eliminated.
Cooley’s use of Arab texts was indicative of his approach, which was broad-minded for his time. European geography in his view was parochial; his writing would emph
asize the fact that black Africans had their own past, and was largely free of the racism that would come after him. He did not, for example, fail to note, when describing “barbarous” executions at the court of Mwata Yamvo in eastern Angola, that the penal codes in European countries were similarly draconian.
Two Arab geographers were especially useful to Cooley: the Andalusian Abu Ubayd al-Bakri, whose most important work, Book of the Routes and Realms, was written in 1068, and Ibn Khaldun, a scholar born in Tunis in 1332. These two authors had written extensively about the West African civilizations, Cooley realized. Al-Bakri was particularly useful on the empire of ancient Ghana, which, unlike the modern state of that name, lay three hundred miles due west of Timbuktu and was still in the ascendant when he was alive. Ibn Khaldun, meanwhile, was a key source for the Mali empire, which stretched from Gao to the Senegalese coast and subsumed Ghana in the thirteenth century.
The name Ghana, al-Bakri noted, meant various things. It was a title given to the rulers of the kingdom, but there was also a “city of Ghana” which
consists of two towns situated on a plain. One of these towns, which is inhabited by Muslims, is large and possesses twelve mosques, in one of which they assemble for the Friday prayer. There are salaried imams and muezzins, as well as jurists and scholars. In the environs are wells with sweet water, from which they drink and with which they grow vegetables.
Six miles away from the city of Ghana was the “king’s town,” al-Ghaba. It had a court of justice, a mosque, and domed buildings, and around it were woods that contained prisons, as well as groves and thickets where the “sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult” lived. The king was pagan, adorning himself with necklaces and bracelets and a high cap decorated with gold, but he surrounded himself with Muslim interpreters and ministers. Around his pavilion stood ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials, while behind him were the same number of pages, holding shields and swords decorated with gold, and on his right were the sons of vassal kings, dressed in splendid garments, their hair plaited with gold. At the door of the pavilion were guard dogs of excellent pedigree that wore collars of gold and silver, studded with a number of balls of the same precious metals.
The Ghanaian king, it was said, could put two hundred thousand men into the field, more than forty thousand of whom were archers. He financed this military might by taxing the raw materials that were mined in the kingdom, al-Bakri noted:
On every donkey-load of salt when it is brought into the country their king levies one golden dinar, and two dinars when it is sent out. From a load of copper the king’s due is five mithqals, and from a load of other goods 10 mithqals. [A mithqal, the Sudanese equivalent of the dinar or ducat, was around 4.25 grams of gold.] The best gold found in this land comes from the town of Ghiyaru, which is 18 days travelling distant from the king’s town over a country inhabited by tribes of the Sudan whose dwellings are continuous. . . . The nuggets found in all the mines of his country are reserved for the king, only this gold dust being left for the people. But for this, the people would accumulate gold until it lost its value. The nuggets may weigh from an ounce to a pound.
According to al-Bakri, the king owned a single golden nugget that was as big as a boulder.
Three hundred years later, in 1374, Ibn Khaldun, who had traveled widely in northern Africa and Spain, finding employment in the courts of Fez, Granada, Tlemcen, and Cairo, embarked on an epic, seven-volume history of the world. The last of his volumes, often known as History of the Berbers, contained valuable information on the Western Sudan, and on the rulers of the empire of Mali. By his era, he noted, the Ghanaian empire had been annexed by the kingdom of Mali, which stretched as far as Gao, two hundred miles east of Timbuktu, and had become “extremely powerful.” It was a Muslim empire: the earliest kings of Mali embraced Islam in the thirteenth century, and many of them had made the journey to Mecca. Ibn Khaldun lingered particularly over the 1324 pilgrimage of Mansa Musa, “an upright man and a great king.” Tales of Musa’s justice were still being told in North Africa fifty years later. Musa brought several Muslim scholars with him on his return from Mecca, including the Andalusian poet and man of letters Abu Ishaq al-Sahili. One of these companions told Ibn Khaldun:
We used to keep the sultan company during this progress, I and [al-Sahili], to the exclusion of his viziers and chief men, and [would] converse to his enjoyment. At each halt he would regale us with rare foods and confectionery. His equipment and furnishings were carried by 12,000 private slave women wearing gowns of brocade and Yemeni silk.
Al-Sahili returned with the king to his capital, where he wished to have a house built with plaster, which was unfamiliar in his land, and the Andalusian rose to the task, erecting a square building with a dome. “He had a good knowledge of handicrafts and lavished all his skill on it,” Ibn Khaldun was told. “He plastered it over and covered it with coloured patterns so that it turned out to be the most elegant of buildings. It caused the sultan great astonishment because of the ignorance of the art of building in their land and he rewarded Abu Ishaq [al-Sahili] for it with 12,000 mithqals [about 50 kilograms] of gold dust apart from the preference, favour and splendid gifts which he enjoyed.” Al-Sahili was also said to have built a palace for Musa in Timbuktu, and the first incarnation of the Jingere Ber mosque.
Musa’s reign lasted for twenty-five years, according to Ibn Khaldun, and the Malian empire collapsed soon after, during the reign of his grandson, Mari Jata. Ibn Khaldun’s source, a Moroccan qadi, or Islamic judge, who had worked at Gao, described Jata as “a most wicked ruler over them because of the tortures, tyrannies, and improprieties to which he subjected them.” He squandered the empire’s wealth by his “loose living” and even had to sell the boulder of gold that had been the prized possession of the Malian treasury. By the time of his death in 1373/1374, the monarchy was in crisis, and his successor, a far better ruler, was not able to keep power.
• • •
IN 1841, COOLEY PUBLISHED his groundbreaking work The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained. It was the first reliable account of the historical geography of sub-Saharan Africa and represented the dawn of a new discipline, that of West African history. His identifications of place names from the medieval Arab geographers and historians have, for the greater part, gone unchallenged by later authorities, and The Negroland formed a basis for all succeeding investigation. Typically he relished the errors he had discovered in the work of others: Rennell had confused Kano, in modern Nigeria, with Ghana, and Cooley demonstrated that the two names were distinct in origin. He also understood that “Ghana” represented a kingdom as well as the monarch himself, and that the capital where the ruler resided had not always been the same city, but may have been a “wandering name” applied to different places at different times.
Cooley remained a controversial figure, however—a “stormy petrel,” as one critic put it—and his contributions were little recognized during his lifetime. After his death in 1883, the official history of the Hakluyt Society, an organization he had founded to publish explorers’ accounts of their voyages, described him as “a somewhat erratic genius.” Other obituaries openly questioned his mental health on the grounds of his extraordinarily fixed views. Even though he had correctly deduced the existence of Mounts Kilimanjaro and Kenya, he maintained that they couldn’t possibly be capped with snow long after European explorers had seen that they were, and he held that the two great African lakes of Malawi and Tanganyika were joined in a single giant stretch of water, contrary to the observations of Livingstone. He died in poverty in a house behind the railheads of King’s Cross and Euston, in London, but his work on the Western Sudan would remain one of the few of the era to “measure up to the requirements of modern scholarship,” as the historian John Ralph Willis would write.
Cooley was also the favorite reading of the one explorer with whom he appears to have struck up a relationship of mutual respect, a ma
n who was not without misanthropic leanings of his own, and even shared Cooley’s tendency toward bullheaded pedantry. “Previously to my journey into the region of the Niger,” the explorer wrote, “scarcely any data were known with regard to the history of this wide and important tract, except a few isolated facts, elicited with great intelligence and research by Mr. Cooley.”
This was the man who would go on to uncover the secrets of the largest kingdom in West African history, an empire whose heyday coincided with that of Timbuktu, and about which Europe was entirely ignorant. The kingdom was called Songhay, and the explorer’s name was Heinrich Barth.
9.
A HEADLESS HORSEMAN
APRIL–MAY 2012
Haidara returned to Bamako at the start of May to find the capital in chaos. Faced with harsh economic sanctions imposed by neighboring West African states, the officer who had led the coup in the capital, Captain Amadou “Bolly” Sanogo, had stood aside, and the government now consisted of an uneasy alliance between his supporters and an interim civilian president. In the space of a month the country had lost its elected leader and half its territory, the foreign aid on which it depended had been shut off, diplomats had been withdrawn and embassies closed or left with a skeleton staff. As Amnesty International put it, Mali was at the center of a “major international disaster.”
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