By the time they reached the Niger ferry crossing opposite Koriume, they had been traveling for thirty-six hours. It was dusk, and they were not allowed to enter Timbuktu after dark, so they prepared to bed down in the open, on the south bank of the great silvery river. They weren’t alone: Bouya, a nervy character with a high-pitched laugh, recognized a friend and, despite what Maiga had said, couldn’t stop himself from revealing the secret that had been weighing him down. They were on a mission, he told the friend, and perhaps they would even try to get into one of the Ahmad Baba buildings. The friend was astonished. It would be suicidal to attempt such a thing. Before anyone could stop him, he was making a phone call to discuss it with his brother, who agreed that they must not try to get inside the institute under any circumstances: “If you enter the building, the Islamists are going to kill you,” he warned them.
It wasn’t the advice that worried Alkadi and Sadidi so much as the fact that word of the mission was now out.
The agents pressed on. In the morning they crossed the river and passed through the final checkpoints, at Koriume and at the Total gas station at the entrance to town. Sadidi and Alkadi then went to rest at Alkadi’s house in Abaraju, where his brother was still living, and the next day they went to see a colleague, Aboubacrine Maiga, who lived with his family close to the Sidi Yahya mosque, to tell him they had been sent to bring some manuscripts out of Timbuktu.
It was agreed that Bouya, as the senior man, should now go to see the old caretaker Abba and his grandson Hassini and tell them about the task. Soon after leaving, Bouya called to say he had spoken with them and there was no problem, so Alkadi and Sadidi walked through the sandy alleys to the Rue de Chemnitz. Abba led them to the small yard planted with trees at the back of the building and opened the door to the depository, a white-walled room where the manuscripts, each carefully placed in its own acid-free box, were stored in wooden cabinets. The agents had come prepared with a number of empty ten-kilo rice sacks, and they took the manuscripts out of the boxes and carefully packed them into the bags.
They were all nervous, especially Bouya: “The first day we were enormously afraid because it was our first time,” he recalled. “We were really scared, but what can we do? It was not without risk!” Sadidi had an extra problem: he was allergic to dust, which was everywhere, and he kept breaking out in uncontrollable coughing fits.
They hurried to fill the sacks, then one of them went out into the road to call a porter with a push-push to carry the manuscripts to Aboubacrine Maiga’s house opposite the Sidi Yahya mosque. There they made a list of what they had taken. By Alkadi’s estimate they had around eight hundred documents. They managed to find one steel locker, but that was soon filled—some of the leather-bound volumes were huge, with five hundred or even six hundred pages—so they put the rest in two large rucksacks, then divided up the luggage among themselves. Bouya and Sadidi had a backpack each, while Alkadi took the locker plus two huge manuscripts he could not fit inside.
The plan had been for each agent to travel south separately, but now Alkadi and Sadidi preferred not to let Bouya go alone. “When they saw that Bouya began to give information about the mission, they said if they left him alone, he might give away too much and the mission would fail,” recalled Maiga. Sadidi volunteered to leave first. He would phone when he had made it successfully through the checkpoints; then Alkadi and Bouya could leave together.
Alkadi passed an anxious day waiting for Sadidi’s call. When it finally came, Sadidi said he was in Sevare and that there had been no problem. The only people who wanted to look in his backpack were the Malian gendarmes, but he’d told them he was carrying manuscripts that belonged to the state and they had let him pass. Now Alkadi and Bouya set out. Unlike the MNLA, the jihadists weren’t interested in the baggage, and the two passed through the checkpoints without problems. It was only after Sevare, in government territory, that the passengers were ordered to open all their bags.
“The police were searching the bus everywhere,” recalled Alkadi. “They got everything down and looked through all the material.” He watched as a soldier worked his way toward his luggage, coming at last to the locker full of manuscripts. Before he could open it Alkadi stepped forward with a letter Maiga had written explaining that he was traveling on state business.
“I’m not here to look at your mission,” said the soldier. “I’m here to check the luggage.”
Alkadi had no choice but to show him the locker’s contents. The soldier’s eyes widened. “Ah,” he exclaimed, “it’s manuscripts!”
There was an awkward moment, but Alkadi remained calm, and since he wasn’t carrying anything illegal, the soldier simply closed the steel box. It was okay, he said, they could get back on the bus.
They reached Bamako in the early evening, and Alkadi called Maiga to let him know. The following day he brought the manuscripts to the office above the fish-and-chicken shop and told the director what had happened.
When Haidara heard about the rumors circulating in Timbuktu, he wasn’t happy. “I said, ‘Okay, we are going to change the strategy,’” he recalled. “I told them again how it would work.”
• • •
BARELY A WEEK after he had returned from Timbuktu, Alkadi was once again heading north, this time on his own. Sadidi had been ruled out of this second evacuation attempt because of his allergy, while Bouya was a security risk. Maiga had reminded Alkadi not to speak of his mission to anyone else, especially not his family. All the researcher could tell his wife in Segu was that he had to go away again for a few days.
In Mopti he found a 4x4 bound for Timbuktu, which he shared with an assistant mayor and several others. They reached the south bank of the river just before nightfall, but the ferry had stopped for the evening, so they hailed a fishing pirogue, which carried them to the other side, then talked the driver of a Land Rover into taking them the last nine miles to Timbuktu. At the checkpoint by the Total gas station, a young mujahid with a gun, a waistcoat, and a turban in the Afghan style approached the vehicle. Alkadi thought he was a Pakistani.
The assistant mayor was fidgety—what if they found out who he was?—but the young jihadist didn’t even ask for their IDs. His only concern was the elderly woman who was sitting with the men in the back seats.
Alkadi, an educated and devout Muslim, was caught by surprise. She was an old woman, he said. Her son was accompanying her. There was no ban on men and women traveling together in Islam.
“You are lying!” yelled the young fighter. “You deliberately put the woman between you! You have to get out. Get out!”
The passengers hurried to do as the gunman said, and the driver quickly arranged for the woman to swap with a man in the front seat. She was still sitting next to a man—the driver—but the jihadist was satisfied that Salafist protocols had been restored, and the Land Rover was waved on its way.
It was dark by the time Alkadi reached his house in Abaraju. He phoned Aboubacrine to tell him he was back, then went to rest, and the following day they went together to the old building, where they met Abba and Hassini again. They called Maiga from there: the director wanted to explain the new mission personally to the caretaker. That afternoon, they set to the task, which soon became a routine.
Alkadi would leave his house at midday for the duha prayer at a mosque in the market. Then, as the temperature climbed and people went home to eat and rest, he made his way to the Rue de Chemnitz, bringing a dozen or so rice sacks with him. Hassini would let him into the depository. There they worked together, Alkadi taking the boxes off the shelves and passing them one by one to Hassini, who placed them on the table and opened them while Alkadi noted each manuscript’s catalogue number. On the first mission they had noted the titles too, but since Hassini couldn’t read Arabic, they now just took the numbers. They removed the manuscripts from the boxes to save space in the lockers, and Hassini held open each sack while Alkadi carefully filled
it. Apart from a few scientific documents he recognized, Alkadi didn’t know exactly what the manuscripts were; he just grabbed what he could.
They worked until four p.m., breaking off as the city began to reawaken, and then Alkadi stayed with Hassini and Abba in their house in the library compound till dusk. When night had fallen, one of them went into the street to hail a push-push, which was brought around to the back entrance and loaded with the sacks. When they were ready to move, Abba would walk up to the main road to check if the coast was clear. On his signal, the men would set off, Hassini walking in front of the porter with the cart, Alkadi behind, as they escorted the documents the half mile to Aboubacrine’s house. They were careful to choose a different push-push every night so that no one became too suspicious, and they took the back lanes as much as possible to avoid jihadist patrols.
On the second day they added an evening shift. It was harder working at night—there were frequent power outages, and Abba had to hold a flashlight—so they couldn’t stick at it too long, but the manuscript were soon piling up in the house opposite the Sidi Yahya mosque.
Aboubacrine then contacted Maiga, who gave them the number of a trader Haidara knew who would bring the manuscripts south. The trader dropped off ten lockers, telling them to fill them and take them to a particular building in the nearby neighborhood of Bellafarandi. Alkadi and Aboubacrine then transferred the documents to the lockers. When each one was full, they fastened it with a padlock at either end and Alkadi pocketed the keys. They wheeled these, one by one, to the trader’s house, no more than two or three a day and at different times, to avoid being noticed. From there the lockers were shipped south on the vehicles that still plied the desert, working the trade route from Timbuktu to Bamako. Even in wartime, the transporters continued to work, since the jihadists wanted the city’s commerce and needed the food imports. According to Maiga, the occupiers trusted the merchant: “He had the confidence of the Islamists, and took the opportunity to get things out without people bothering him,” he said.
The manuscripts made their way south under piles of Timbuktu produce, as well as Coca-Cola and Fanta and other imported goods shipped from Algeria and Mauritania. “Sometimes the trucks took two lockers, sometimes four,” said Haidara. “Sometimes there were two cars and in each car there were five lockers, or three cars with three lockers. That’s how we carried on.” Sometimes one of Haidara’s people would accompany the shipments, but at other times they were on their own, “under God’s protection,” as Alkadi put it.
When the manuscripts reached the Poste de Nyamana, the giant customs checkpoint at the edge of Bamako, the driver or courier would call to tell the librarians they had arrived, and Maiga or Haidara would go to meet them and, if necessary, ease their passage through the bureaucracy. “I took my car to meet them there at the entry to Bamako,” recalled Haidara. “There was often a blockage there and I paid a lot of money. That was a big problem.” The lockers were then taken to the Ahmad Baba office in Kalaban Coura. Sometimes Maiga drove them personally, but if there was a large number coming in, he would hire one of the green-painted Sotrama minibus-taxis that carry commuters all over Bamako.
As the operation progressed, the strain began to get to Alkadi. He became paranoid about the children who played around his house. What if they told someone about his movements? He started to leave before dawn, before the kids were out, waiting in the trader’s house in Bellafarandi until two p.m. before starting the job. He also worried that Aboubacrine lived too close to the market: the road by his house was always busy with traffic and people and patrols. It was impossible to hide the lockers when they moved them to the trader’s house, and people stared. If he was asked, Alkadi told them they just contained market goods, but he worried that the cover story was wearing thin. What if someone asked him to open a locker? “Perhaps they knew we were up to something,” he thought. “Perhaps they would check inside Aboubacrine’s house, then there would be a big problem.”
He told Maiga he believed people were becoming suspicious. The director thought he had a point. “People saw too much back-and-forth, they wondered what was happening,” he recalled. So when they had placed ten full lockers in the trader’s house, Maiga told him he had done enough. Alkadi traveled back in mid-August, reaching Bamako on the 23rd, fifteen days after setting out.
On the first trip the three agents had moved almost a thousand manuscripts. After working hard for a week, with the help of Hassini, Abba, and Aboubacrine, Alkadi had now shifted around eight thousand more. Roughly two-thirds of the collection that had been stored in the old building still remained.
A short time after Alkadi had settled back in Bamako, Maiga called him in again. “Now you have to go and bring them all,” he said.
• • •
HAIDARA CAME TO THE OFFICE to see Maiga and Alkadi before the third evacuation. He wanted to speak to Alkadi, to reassure him that he was doing the right thing. “He told me that I shouldn’t be afraid and said it was a job that would be good for us in the long run, but it had to be done as if it was no big deal,” Alkadi remembered. “He encouraged me and calmed me.”
Alkadi’s paranoia was such that he didn’t even tell Aboubacrine about this final trip. He worked only at night, with Abba and Hassini, and faster than ever. The ten-kilogram sacks were too small, he decided, so he brought around twenty hundred-kilo sacks. They loaded these in bulk, sewing them closed when they were full. There was no attempt even to count the manuscripts now; such was the rush, it was all they could do to try to stop the loose pages from getting mixed up. They worked long into the night, until they were exhausted, then brought the sacks by push-push and donkey cart straight to the house in Bellafarandi. There they closed the door, unloaded the manuscripts, and returned with the empty sacks to the depository. In the mornings, Alkadi worked alone at packing the documents into lockers. When one of the steel chests was full, he moved it to another room in the house: the trader would take it from there and place it on the transports. At midday Alkadi went home to rest, heading back to the institute at nightfall to start a new shift.
After ten grueling days, the archive at the institute was empty, and Alkadi felt a world of trouble lifting from his shoulders. Leaving the building for the last time, he bumped into Sadidi, the colleague who had accompanied him on the first trip. His friend was surprised to see him back, unannounced, in Timbuktu. “What are you up to? I thought you were in Bamako!”
Even now, speaking to a friend and fellow agent, Alkadi didn’t drop his guard. He had been sent to Gourma Rharous, he told Sadidi, the next major town downriver, and had gone into the institute to give his regards to Abba. “I’m just passing through,” he said.
Alkadi left Timbuktu in mid-September, having moved the entire collection of around 24,000 documents from the old building.
• • •
THE OPERATION had been conducted in great secrecy, but Maiga felt he now had to tell some of his colleagues what had been done. One of these people was the most senior employee left in Timbuktu, Abdoulaye Cissé. When he had taken up his new job, Maiga had entrusted the manuscripts to Cissé, telling him to make sure nothing moved. Two days after the evacuation was complete, Maiga called to say the entire collection from the Rue du Chemnitz had been transferred to Bamako. “We had evacuated all the manuscripts in the old building from under his nose,” Maiga recalled, “and he wasn’t even aware of it!”
Maiga also had to inform the civil servants in the Ministry of Higher Education, which had responsibility for the Ahmad Baba institute. He had been in the job only five months, after all, and now he and Haidara had covertly moved the bulk of the state collection six hundred miles southwest to his new office in Kalaban Coura.
He decided to host a surprise reception, what Haidara described as a “little cocktail,” and invited a select group from the ministry, including the technical adviser with special responsibility for the Ahmad Baba institute, Drissa Dia
kité, and a handful of his own staff. He left out the minister, as he didn’t want it to be too high-profile an event; they still needed to keep their operations secret.
The men from the ministry were shown into a room filled with the sorts of steel lockers that were used for shipping items all around Mali. “It was clear that they had no idea we had begun something,” recalled Haidara. When Maiga opened the boxes, the men recoiled. “They said, ‘Ah! What is that?’” recalled Maiga. “They were very surprised, very surprised.”
Since the jihadist assault on the tombs of the Timbuktu saints, the ministers had been dreading that something similar would happen to the city’s written heritage. “We were preoccupied with an attack on the manuscripts,” Diakité said, so when the lockers were opened and he saw what they had done, he thought it was “marvelous,” something “salutary.” Questions tumbled out. How had they managed to get them through all the checkpoints? How had they even formed the idea of smuggling them south? Diakité did not question the decision to keep the operation hidden. “It was necessary that this was secret, so they did not inform the authorities,” he said. At the same time, he found the thought of the manuscripts in transit in lockers “frightening,” and knew a lot of work remained to be done. “We had to find the means to stop them from being all concentrated in the same locale, because that was also dangerous for the manuscripts.” The humid climate of Bamako was also a threat. “We had to improve the conditions in which they were being held. There were a lot of question marks.”
The Storied City Page 18
