Four days later, Diadié received a note summoning the Crisis Committee to appear before the jihadists. They went to the police station, and from there were driven to the former Land Registry office, where Abou Zeid was now staying, and shown into a spacious living area that had been fitted out with carpets and mattresses for the guests. Here they found the entire jihadist high command: baby-faced Ag Ghaly, diminutive Abou Zeid, the handsome, urbane spokesman Sanda Ould Bouamama, and a host of other officers of various nationalities, each of whom had a Kalashnikov close by. Over tea, the occupiers of the city explained that they had made inquiries, and they were happy to accept that the Crisis Committee did indeed represent the people of Timbuktu. They repeated the mantra that they had come simply to ensure that the holy city lived by the principles laid down by God. They would soon hold a congress in Gao that would found the Islamic Republic of Azawad, they said, and from that moment it must be understood that there was no state in northern Mali—no prefect, no governor appointed by Bamako, no mayor or Malian constitution—there was only the law of sharia. The committee should understand their aims and help guide the city to the right path, and it would be of no use for them to sulk or fight, because God had given them the means to make people do as they wished. Yet they preferred persuasion to force, which was why the elders had been invited today.
“From that time on we would work together,” Diadié recalled. “If we felt things were not suitable, we should tell them, and vice versa. Collaboration had more or less begun.”
There were some topics, though, that the committee and the jihadists would not be able to discuss. One of these was the issue of the manuscripts: “It was too dangerous,” Mayor Cissé recalled. “That was a problem that was hidden.”
Another was the fate of the city’s World Heritage monuments. For the jihadists, that would be nonnegotiable.
• • •
AMADOU HAMPTÉ B once described the Muslim empire of Ahmad Lobbo as having been erected on an “ancient substratum of local religions.” This, according to Hampâté Bâ, established a social framework in which different peoples could live side by side while jealously preserving their various ethnicities and characteristics. At the start of the twenty-first century, this mixture of beliefs still existed along the Niger. Mali was a country filled with mosques, where people’s lives were governed in the main by the principles of the Maliki school of Sunni Islam, but it was also a country where marabouts made ju-ju and gris-gris amulets for truck drivers and boat captains to ward off evil, and where journalists commissioned spells to help their interviewees open up. Some of these practices were evidence of the “ancient substratum” at work; others were manifestations of the Sufi mysticism that had long played a role in African Islam.
Sufis, broadly speaking, believe the living can find enlightenment through their inner dedication to God. The holiest Sufi leaders develop special intimacy with the divine, and are sometimes venerated as saints. The mausoleums around Timbuktu contained the bodies of hundreds of these saints, and people would pray to the more powerful and well-known of them to intercede in their lives. Sixteen of these mausoleums were inscribed in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage monuments in 1988, along with the Jingere Ber, Sankore, and Sidi Yahya mosques, and the saints buried within—historic figures such as Ahmad Baba’s great-uncle Shaykh Sidi Mahmud, the great sixteenth-century qadi of Timbuktu, and Shaykh Alfa Moy, who was killed by Moroccan troops in 1594—formed a spiritual rampart that miraculously protected the city. Air Mali explained how this worked in practice: “If you take the medina of Timbuktu, there are mausoleums at the four corners of the town, and each saint occupies a corner. That means nothing bad can enter there, so the town is safe. And even if you throw a bomb or a missile, remember that it will not fall in the interior of the town. It will rather fall outside.” According to Sane Chirfi Alpha, the spiritual defense had saved the town from a shower of mortar shells that fell on it during the 1992 Tuareg rebellion, but didn’t explode. “There was no scientific explanation for it,” he said.
The jihadists considered many of these beliefs, including the veneration of the Timbuktu Saints, to be dangerous “innovations” on the practices of the Salaf, the first and purest of Muslims. In order to return the city and its religion to the pure state, these innovations would have to be eradicated.
When it came, the conflict did not erupt over a saint, however, but over a jinn.
In the second half of April, a ghostly figure was said to have appeared in the town, dressed all in white, with a length of cotton bound round his face in the Tuareg style, and riding a white horse. This was al-Farouk, the talismanic symbol of the city who for centuries had protected it from malicious spirits and bad behavior. Al-Farouk was said to crisscross the town after dark enforcing a three-strike curfew system: the first two times he caught young people out misbehaving he would send them home with a warning, but the third time he would make them disappear forever. Once, centuries before, he had foolishly attempted to dress down some holy visitors from Jenne who stayed late in the mosque, and the imam of Sankore was so angry he imprisoned al-Farouk for seven hundred years in the waters of the Bani River. The jinn had since returned, and had been restored to his rightful place at the heart of Timbuktu, with his own monument on a traffic island in the Place de l’Indépendance.
Mamadou Kassé, a young Malian whose father was said to be a muezzin in Bamako, thought al-Farouk was a false idol. When he arrived in Timbuktu in April 2012 to join the jihad and was told about the jinn, he decided the best thing for him to do was to destroy the monument. “I climbed up and I smashed it in front of everyone who told me that it is the jinn who protects the town,” he said. He was unable to destroy the whole thing—the plinth was large and made of thick concrete—but he managed to knock off the horseman’s head and feet and those of his steed. “Look, your genie is nothing!” he told the crowd who gathered to watch. “It is God who protects us!”
Instead of being convinced, the people were angered by his act of vandalism and demonstrated their fury by marching on the military camp. The jihadists dispersed the protesters by shooting over their heads.
The al-Farouk monument was neither old nor especially valuable, but it was a symbol of something the occupiers wanted to eradicate, and Kassé’s vandalism was significant as an opening salvo in the battle with Timbuktu’s spirits that lay ahead.
Two weeks after the jinn’s monument was targeted, the jihadists attacked something far more precious: the mausoleum of Shaykh Sidi Mahmud. This saint, who died in 1548, had been a great Timbuktu scholar, recognized for his dignity. His tomb, made out of stones and raw earth, had been built on a low hill on the site of the vestibule of his house, to the north of the town. His followers had been buried around him, so that he now lay in the center of a substantial cemetery, and people regularly went to pray there.
On Friday, May 4, a group of jihadists who saw the worshippers told them that what they were doing was forbidden and that they should “seek help from God directly” rather than from the dead. They then began to attack the tomb, tearing off the door of the mausoleum and ripping out its windows, burning the white curtain separating the sepulcher from the place of prayer and smashing several stelae. An anonymous assistant mayor told a reporter the following day that the jihadists had promised to destroy other mausoleums, as well as some manuscripts. “Timbuktu is in shock,” he said.
Cultural experts around Mali reacted with a mix of anger and sadness. “I suffer and everyone suffers in the same way with me,” said Professor Baba Akib Haidara, a Timbuktien manuscripts expert. “They are going backward, backward, it is unacceptable. They attack our values, our spirits, that which is deepest in the soul of Timbuktu. UNESCO must mobilize international opinion. This is not Islam, and there will be a great catastrophe if nothing is done.” For the filmmaker and former culture minister Cheikh Oumar Sissoko, the tomb was “part of the cultural and spiritual heritage of Timbuktu, an
d of humanity in general,” and the intolerance the attack demonstrated was a “tragedy.” The Malian government, meanwhile, condemned “with its last breath” a “contemptible act which tramples on the basic precepts of Islam, a religion of tolerance and respect.”
On May 14, the city’s cultural community—artists, intellectuals, and manuscript workers—launched a call for help from the UN secretary-general. “Total anarchy and lawlessness now reign here in Timbuktu,” the declaration stated, adding that there was “serious risk of destruction of all its riches.” If world heritage meant anything, the international community must act now, since “Timbuktu is about to lose its soul. Timbuktu is threatened with outrageous vandalism. Timbuktu has at its throat a sharp assassin’s knife.”
The jihadists were unmoved. They were doing God’s work. “The height of a tomb must not exceed the level of the ankle,” Redbeard Hamaha explained. “If a tomb is higher than that, you must knock it down.”
• • •
FOR THE TRIUMVIRATE of librarians in Bamako, the desecration of Sidi Mahmud’s tomb was a worrying new development. How far would these people go? What would it mean for the manuscripts? As anyone who had spent time with the documents knew, their contents were not restricted to subjects the jihadists would find acceptable. In particular, the idea of intercession—in which Muslims could ask a saint to make special requests to Allah on their behalf—was widely discussed in the manuscripts, but was anathema to the Salafists. As refugees from the city reported, the town’s occupiers deemed some of the books in the Ahmad Baba institute to be “not consistent with Islam.”
Reports also reached the librarians that the jihadists had begun to challenge Timbuktu’s principal religious festival, Mawlid, the Prophet’s birthday. Sunni Muslims all over the Islamic world had been celebrating Mawlid since the twelfth century, but the Salafists disapproved of it: in their view, it was an innovation that elevated the Prophet to the level of near divinity. This was a major concern for the librarians, since Mawlid celebrations in Timbuktu were based around the Ishriniyyat, or “The Twenties,” an allegorical poem of twenty rhyming verses praising the Prophet’s life. Written by Abd al-Rahman al-Fazazi in the thirteenth century in Córdoba, this devotional text had been introduced to Timbuktu from Morocco in the fifteenth century and copied extensively. In the buildup to the festival, the entire poem was read four times: first over a forty-day period, and then over a week, then over three days. Finally, it was read in the course of the single night before the holy day itself. Since this work was found among many manuscript collections, Haidara feared it would draw the attention of the occupiers of the town to certain documents they would not like.
“There were a lot of meetings in Timbuktu between the occupiers and the notables and marabouts about the organization of the Mawlid festival,” Haidara remembered. “The occupiers said, ‘No, no, no, Mawlid is something we forbid. And the manuscripts that speak of it really are not good manuscripts.’ We heard that. That made us start to think. We said that that is perhaps a threat.”
He also began to hear reports that the rebels had caught people with manuscripts in their luggage and destroyed them. “They found some manuscripts and they burned them,” he recalled. “It was not a big deal, they were little manuscripts, but they burned them.” These stories played on Haidara’s imagination. If they had destroyed a few sheaves of manuscripts, what would they do to a library full of them?
“We said that is not good,” said Haidara. “We knew that was how things begin, little by little.”
According to Maiga, these pieces of information crystallized into a decision in the last week of May.
“One day,” recalled Haidara, “I said to Maiga, I think we must find a solution to bring the manuscripts to Bamako. Now, I said, it is time.”
10.
THE POPE OF TIMBUKTU
1850–1854
A rare bank of fog drifted across western Libya on the morning of March 31, 1850, signaling the likelihood of rain. It had been a wet spring, and as Heinrich Barth and his Prussian colleague Adolf Overweg waited for their expedition leader at the rendezvous south of Tripoli, they were surprised by the greenery of the desert, which looked like a prairie; it was filled with cornfields, pasture, flocks of sheep, and a rich array of blue wildflowers. As the sky began to unburden itself, James Richardson’s party arrived, and Barth looked on skeptically as his servants set about pitching a tent the size of a field hospital. It rained so heavily for the next twenty-four hours that their plans to depart were postponed, but if Barth was frustrated, he didn’t confide it to his journal. He was finally on the brink of the journey that would define him, a five-year odyssey that would solve the conundrum of Africa’s missing golden heart.
Few men were so suited to a task as Barth was to exploration. A lithograph depicting him as a young man reveals a skeptical, mustachioed figure with a ramrod-straight back. The ramrod was instilled by his parents, Johann and Charlotte Barth of Hamburg, Lutherans who raised their offspring according to strict principles of morality, duty, and industry. Heinrich was the third of four children, born in 1821, and was sent at the age of eleven to the elite Johanneum academy, where he had few friends and displayed what one contemporary described as an “aristocratic aloofness.” He was a driven pupil, however, who filled his spare time reading classical history and geography in the original Greek and Latin. In his teens, believing himself to be physically weak, he adopted a routine of exercises and cold baths, even in winter, to toughen himself up.
Two weeks after leaving the Johanneum in 1839 he enrolled at Berlin University, one of the most vibrant educational institutions of the time, where fellow students included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Søren Kierkegaard. Barth was taught by two titans of nineteenth-century science: Carl Ritter, the father of modern geography, and Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist whose epic five-year exploration of Latin America had hoovered up sixty thousand species of plants and thirty-five crates of insects, birds, rocks, and other specimens. This fine education alone would set Barth apart from the adventurers who had gone before. He carried Cooley’s Negroland with him, and his journals reveal a detailed knowledge of the Arab geographers, as well as the findings of his predecessors Park, Caillié, and the Scottish naval officer Hugh Clapperton, who visited Central Africa in the 1820s. To the old hands at the Royal Geographic Society he must have seemed overeducated, but he could also point to hard experience in the field. A year after graduating from university he had embarked on a solo three-year expedition from Tangiers through Barbary and the Middle East. Between Tripoli and Egypt he was attacked in the night by Bedouin bandits, shot in both legs and knocked unconscious. By the time he returned home, he was, according to his brother-in-law and future biographer, Gustav von Schubert, “silent and withdrawn,” a hard man to get to know:
It took a long time before I was able to thaw the ice around his heart and experience the depths of his character. In his first letter to me, he wrote, “If you make my sister unhappy, I will shoot you dead,” which was clear enough.
Beneath this carapace lay a man who needed to be needed: his only goal, he once wrote, was “to be useful to humanity, to encourage them toward common enlightenment, to feed their spirits and give them strength.” Sadly for Barth, his account of his North African journey left humanity underwhelmed. The Athenæum’s anonymous reviewer wrote of Wanderings Along the Punic and Cyrenaic Shores of the Mediterranean that “a more perplexing specimen . . . of some of the worst faults of German prose has rarely fallen in our way,” and plans for a second volume were scrapped. More hurtful even than the professional slights he received at this time was the rejection of a marriage proposal. “The experience was a great blow to Barth’s self-esteem,” Schubert wrote, without recording the woman’s name. “His bitter fear of romantic relationships lasted for a long time after that, and even in later years he could not bring himself to enter in marriage.”
N
o matter. Barth would deploy his passion in foreign parts, where he always seemed more comfortable.
In 1849, he found his opportunity, on James Richardson’s British expedition to the African interior. The evangelical Richardson had joined the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society on its establishment in 1839 and developed a special interest in the part of the trade that crossed the Sahara. In 1845, his investigations led him as far as the oasis of Ghat, in Fezzan, and on his return he floated the idea of an expedition to Lake Chad to the foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, with the aim of supplanting the slave trade with trade in British manufactured goods. Palmerston agreed. Since Richardson was no expert at geographical observations, he turned to his Prussian contacts for a scientist, and on Ritter’s recommendation recruited Barth and Overweg. They would travel at Britain’s expense on what Richardson called a “Journey of Discovery and Philanthropy to Central Africa via the Great Desert of the Sahara.”
Unusually, and perhaps ominously, the three men drew up a contract before their departure to establish their roles. Richardson, as leader, would determine the choice of route and the method of advance, but he was also obliged to help them in their scientific work. If they reached Lake Chad alive, he would retire, leaving the Germans whatever instruments they needed to carry out their observations.
Tensions between Barth and his leader were evident from the start. “Mr. Richardson was waiting in Paris for dispatches when Mr. Overweg and I reached Tunis,” was how Barth would choose, years later, to open his five-volume account of the journey; it would be a further six weeks before the dithering Richardson reached Tripoli. Barth used the time to take Overweg on a substantial tour of the coastal regions, a digression the Briton took as a sign of “European impetuosity.” After Richardson’s arrival, the delays only escalated as he waited for prodigious quantities of equipment to be shipped in from Malta. The biggest holdup was the boat. Although the first 1,500 miles of the expedition’s route led them across the desert, they would carry a heavy rowing wherry in which they hoped one day to survey Lake Chad. They also needed a sailor to work it: Richardson had recruited a nephew to this task, but he was so difficult he would be sent home when they were halfway across the desert.
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