The Storied City

by Charlie English

  The most dangerous moments the smugglers described were when couriers and their lockers were held for ransom.

  The main route from Timbuktu to Bamako ran along the right, or southern, bank of the river, through the population centers of central Mali: Douentza, Sevare, Mopti, and Segu. There was another route, though, along the river’s left bank. Instead of heading south from Timbuktu to Koriume and the ferry, 4x4s could take the track west through the sparsely populated desert to Niafounke and Lere before crossing the river to Segu. It was a long and wild drive of many hundreds of miles, through deep sand and around lakes that filled and emptied with the rhythm of the Niger’s inundations. If it was safe, however, the couriers could avoid the checkpoints and save a great deal of hassle and money. Haidara was told by many people that there were no problems with the Lere route, so they decided to try it.

  It happened that the vehicle chosen for this first run was an ancient 4x4, a “carcass,” as Haidara described it, which kept breaking down: “You know, at the time, all the cars that you rented were carcasses. The cars that arrived from Sevare, for example, were exhausted, and they didn’t even have the right paperwork. You were always obliged to take another car.” They had scarcely traveled a hundred miles when Haidara’s phone rang with alarming news: the couriers had been stopped at gunpoint by a group of men and were now being held hostage. Haidara had no idea who the gunmen were or how dangerous they might be—they could have been jihadists or the MNLA, but it was more likely they were one of the many groups of bandits who roamed the desert. “They took the car and threatened the people who were in it,” said Haidara. “They said that they would not let the vehicle go and that we had to pay something.”

  For him, one dead courier would ruin the whole enterprise: “If something bad happened to these men, then all our work would be like nothing. It would be a big problem.” So he tried to negotiate with the kidnappers to have the men and the lockers released. But conducting such a delicate conversation over the intermittent mobile phone network was impossible: “I was not able to reach an understanding with them. They wanted to take the couriers away. I didn’t know what they would do to them. I didn’t know what was going to happen! They got very afraid. We also got very afraid.”

  He knew Niafounke well, though, and called a friend, who in turn called a respected imam who lived in the village where the men were being held. The imam went to talk to the kidnappers on Haidara’s behalf. “He spoke to them, negotiated a sum of money, and they were given their car back and allowed to pass,” Haidara said. It helped that the car was such a wreck the kidnappers didn’t want it.

  They had been held hostage for twenty-four hours, and it took the couriers eight days to reach Bamako. “Eight days because the car was not good and they spent a day as hostages!”

  It was the only time they tried the route via Lere. “We did not do that again,” Haidara said.

  • • •

  NEAR THE END OF 2012, Savama informed the German embassy in Bamako that between 80,000 and 120,000 manuscripts had been successfully evacuated from Timbuktu. At this time, though, the Malian crisis was entering a far more dangerous phase. In the second week of December, Iyad Ag Ghaly called a congress of tribal elders and jihadist groups at Essakane, a two-hour drive west of Timbuktu. This place of rolling white dunes was hugely symbolic for Ansar Dine and its allies: it was here that the Festival in the Desert had been held each year since 2003, with Western musicians such as Robert Plant and Damon Albarn playing alongside Malian stars such as Salif Keita and Ali Farka Touré. The Irish superstar Bono had sung there with the Tuareg band Tinariwen only that January.

  There would be no Festival in the Desert in 2013. Concerts were banned in the Islamic Republic of Azawad, and in place of musicians the dunes on those days were populated with jihadist fighters. At the summit’s end, eyewitnesses reported seeing more than three hundred pickups race toward Timbuktu, with mujahideen clinging on in back, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” It was not yet clear what it all meant, but a rumor went around Timbuktu that a strategic decision had been made.

  The cogs of international diplomacy were meanwhile grinding toward intervention. On December 20 the UN Security Council authorized the deployment of an African-led force in Mali, and three days later, the jihadists embarked on a new attack on the Timbuktu mausoleums in an act of defiance against the international community. Fighters drove through the streets and markets telling people that these places of idolatry had to be demolished. Then, as one eyewitness recalled, “using picks and shovels, the Islamic Police carried out the destruction of five mausoleums.” Once again, they pledged that not a single one would be left standing.

  If that were not traumatizing enough, negotiations in Timbuktu over Mawlid were also reaching a crisis point. In 2013 the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday would fall on Thursday, January 24. The city had been largely resigned to canceling the event when Abou Zeid dropped in on Grand Imam Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti. The imam took the opportunity to ask the al-Qaeda emir about the festival. “He told Abou Zeid he wanted to speak about the celebration of Mawlid,” recalled Sane Chirfi Alpha, who was given details of this meeting. Abou Zeid responded that he would defer on such matters to his Islamic legal experts, the ulama. “They will decide,” he said. “When you are ready, you bring your ulama and we will bring ours and they can discuss it. If you can convince them, there won’t be a problem.”

  As Mawlid approached, the two sides gathered and debated the matter all morning. “We met here at my house,” the grand imam recalled. “They told us to bring arguments and supporting documents if we had them which would authorize Mawlid.” The meeting lasted from nine a.m. to two p.m., as the Timbuktu ulama put forward their case, based on the Islamic texts, for the festival they had been celebrating for centuries. “We do not contradict anything you have advanced in your thesis,” said the jihadists’ experts, according to Alpha, “but there is one thing that happens during Mawlid we do not like: there is too much deviation, too much perversion. We cannot accept that.”

  “Those who perform the perversion and the deviation do not wait for Mawlid,” replied the representatives of the town. “That is their life before, during, and after Mawlid. It is not Mawlid that causes this, and that is not a reason to stop us from celebrating it.”

  When the discussion was finished, the Timbuktiens were told that they would soon receive the resolution, on the basis of the work they had done together.

  By the start of the new year, it was becoming clear what the Essakane meeting had been about. On January 1, Ag Ghaly sent two extravagant demands to the Malian government: it must recognize the autonomy of Azawad and proclaim the “Islamic character of the state of Mali” in the constitution. The government refused. The next day, around fifteen hundred jihadists began massing at Bambara Maounde, the truck-stop village halfway between Timbuktu and Douentza. On Tuesday, January 8, gunfire was exchanged across the front line, and that night hundreds of jihadist vehicles advanced toward Konna, forty miles inside government territory. At eight-thirty the following morning they attacked the town from three sides, and by late afternoon it had fallen. “We are in Konna for jihad,” a rebel spokesman told Agence France-Presse on Thursday afternoon. “We have almost complete control of the town. After this we will continue to advance south.”

  Mopti was less than an hour’s drive away. If the jihadists took that, there would be little to stop them from going all the way to Bamako.

  The next morning, Friday, January 11, French president François Hollande announced that his country was going to war. “I have decided that France will respond, at the sides of our African partners, to the request of the Malian authorities,” he said, standing in front of his nation’s tricolor flag in the Élysée Palace. Operation Serval, the French offensive to retake the north of Mali, was about to begin.

  • • •

  HAIDARA HAD BEEN WARNED by heritage experts that the end
of the occupation would be the most dangerous period for the manuscripts: “Before starting all this, people told me that the day they leave they are going to burn everything. They are going to sabotage it all. Everything that is important. That was part of the advice they gave me. But I did not know how it would happen.” The prospect of renewed fighting also alarmed Shamil Jeppie, director of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town. “Wherever you see military intervention, things are bound to get destroyed,” he said. “My initial fear was of neglect. The fear now is outright war and military engagement.” The director-general of UNESCO sent out a plea to all military units in the country not to further damage the Timbuktu monuments: “I ask all armed forces to make every effort to protect the cultural heritage of the country,” Irina Bokova said. “Mali’s cultural heritage is a jewel whose protection is important for the whole of humanity. This is our common heritage, nothing can justify damaging it. It carries the identity and values of a people.”

  Against the backdrop of the pending conflict, Haidara and Diakité renewed their energetic fund-raising. On January 4, they went to the heavily fortified German embassy compound on the south bank of the river in Bamako. The ambassador was away on long-term sick leave, but a newly arrived chargé d’affaires, Thomas Strieder, agreed to meet them. Strieder remembered that Haidara seemed anxious. “He was searching for a few allies in the international community to help him to finance these [evacuation] actions,” he said. “He needed money.”

  The librarian told Strieder that Savama had been authorized by the various families in Timbuktu to care for the manuscripts, which had been hidden among the people of Timbuktu in their homes. Now, however, the risk had become too great for them to remain in the city, since the rebel forces had been actively searching for the manuscripts and destroying them:

  He told me that there was an immediate danger, that they had been destroyed, burned, and it had been done . . . during these weeks again and again. I remember that some of the books were found then by the rebel forces and destroyed. Burned, or . . . I think burned, yes.

  Strieder was told the manuscripts had to be brought out by any means. He was convinced the threat was genuine—“I had no reason to doubt it,” he recalled—but he wanted more detail about how the evacuation would work. Was it even possible still to travel by road from Timbuktu to Bamako? Yes, said Haidara, but there were a lot of checkpoints to cross. How would the manuscripts be moved? By pickup trucks, in the night, hidden under fruit and vegetables that were grown in Timbuktu and shipped to the rest of Mali, Strieder was told.

  There was no question that Germany would try to support the evacuation, the diplomat said, but he would need detailed costings as well as some sort of written agreement. He promised to talk to the German foreign ministry, and he and Diakité arranged subsequent meetings, including one at the bar in Bamako’s Radisson Hotel, to formalize the details.

  On January 7, Strieder wrote to Berlin, setting out the case for aid. He had been in touch with the people who were carrying out a rescue of the manuscript libraries of Timbuktu, he told them. The manuscripts were in acute danger, and the Islamists had already destroyed the offices of the libraries, including PCs and furniture. Now, given the likelihood of military intervention, the documents needed to be moved out “as fast as possible and as completely as possible”: it was a question of saving these stocks “from the fire.” Everything should be kept highly confidential, since if the occupiers got wind of what was going on, it would be impossible to proceed further; Haidara and Diakité had turned to the embassy because they “especially trust the Germans.” They were looking for 500,000 euros over the next two years to relocate all the manuscripts and keep them safely in Bamako, but a quick donation of 10,000 euros right now would ensure the rescue of around twenty full lockers.

  The money from Berlin came “astonishingly quickly,” compared with the foreign ministry’s normal procedures, Strieder said, since “they realized the urgency of the project at the top level.” A contract was signed for the transport of four thousand manuscripts “under adverse conditions” in exchange for 10,000 euros, and just eight days after their first meeting with Strieder, Diakité and Haidara returned to the embassy to pick up the money. The large bundle of euro notes was handed over covertly in a plastic bag bearing the name of a Bamako bakery. The manuscript smugglers were not allowed a receipt.

  • • •

  WHEN THE VERDICT ON MAWLID came at last, it was in the form of a note: “Abou Zeid wrote a letter,” recalled Sane Chirfi Alpha, “to say, truly, the arguments that you advance on Mawlid are just, but while we are here, we will not do it.”

  “It showed us clearly that in reality they did not want Mawlid,” recalled the grand imam. The Timbuktiens decided not to force the issue, and the city’s imams asked the inhabitants not to celebrate the festival. At no point in the discussion were the manuscripts referred to, the grand imam said: “We did not speak of the manuscripts.”

  If the recollections of the grand imam and Alpha were correct, the jihadists did not appear hell-bent on destroying all copies of the Ishriniyyat and the collections that contained it. Abou Zeid had organized a legal discussion, then waited until the last moment before calling off the festival. Yet this was not the impression Stolk was given. Savama told her that Ansar Dine had warned the town on January 13 that Mawlid was haram—forbidden—and its celebration would have “repercussions.” This was evidence that the manuscripts’ situation “had indeed been that dangerous,” and that the evacuation was justified.

  The fighting in central Mali at this time meant the land route to Bamako had become too dangerous for most truckers to operate. Since there were still large numbers of manuscripts in Timbuktu, Haidara now decided to move them into the villages surrounding the city. “At that time, they took everything out,” said Haidara. “They brought everything there was into the little villages near the river at Kabara, Iloa, Hondoubongo, Toya.” Diakité would give an account of this move two months later, at a fund-raising lecture at the University of Oregon. It was a time, she said, when Malians from all walks of life helped bring the manuscripts to safety, spontaneously and at great personal risk:

  Housewives offered meals and shelter to our couriers along the route. Merchants transported couriers and footlockers of books without charge, when they saw our people pushing them in pushcarts or carrying them on their backs to get them to the safety of the river. . . . Whole villages created diversions at checkpoints, so our couriers could get them through with the books. In all cases, in the north but also in the south, the community came forward in the name of safeguarding the manuscripts. . . . They called [them] our heritage, our manuscripts.

  By mid-January, tens of thousands of manuscripts were in the villages waiting to be shipped south, and with the desert crossing closed, there was only one way to move them: on the river. This carried significant new risks, however, and became a major source of disagreement between the librarian and his partner. “Abdel Kader [Haidara] and I argued about using the water,” Diakité told her audience at the University of Oregon. “He was for it—he’s the courageous one in our terrible twosome—and I was strongly against. A wet manuscript is just a pile of old rags. Most of the manuscripts are made of rag paper, with ink floating on top. None of the inks on these manuscripts has any kind of fixative. They are completely volatile.” In the end they had no option, since the roads would only get more dangerous as French and Malian forces advanced. “The water became inevitable,” Diakité recalled. “I stopped sleeping altogether at that point. Abdel Kader told me that he did too.”

  Transporting manuscripts by boat was not only risky, but also expensive. On Tuesday, January 15, Diakité set out once again to try to raise more funds, pitching up that day at the Dutch embassy in the Hippodrome quarter of eastern Bamako for a meeting with the embassy’s head of development aid, To Tjoelker. Diakité had been given Tjoelker’s name, as well as that of
a charitable organization based in the Netherlands, the DOEN Foundation, by a contact in the Dutch development finance department. Tjoelker would at least listen, the contact had said. If anyone could make things happen, she could.

  Diakité told Tjoelker the problem. “They said we would like you to help us because there are still 180,000 manuscripts left in Timbuktu and we can’t get them out without extra money,” the diplomat recalled. The jihadists’ reaction to Mawlid presented a genuine threat, Tjoelker was informed, particularly since the French forces were now pushing the jihadists back. “After the battle of Konna, the AQIM fighters who were occupying Timbuktu became very angry and said, ‘Okay, we will show you. We will do a big auto-da-fé on the day of Mawlid, the day of the birthday of Muhammad.’”

  Auto-da-fé—meaning “act of faith” in Portuguese—was the term that had been used to describe the burning of heretics and heretical literature by the Inquisition in medieval Europe. But its modern resonance came from its use to describe Nazi book-burnings. Supervised by the SA and the SS, student societies in Nazi Germany destroyed blacklisted literature in pyres, including books written by Jewish authors, while reciting execration formulas. Josef Goebbels described these rituals as powerful and symbolic actions that would represent the dawning of the new age and the end of the old. Tjoelker was persuaded that this was what the jihadists now intended to do. “Mawlid is haram in the jihadists’ minds, as are the manuscripts,” Tjoelker recalled. “That’s why they said on the 24th [of January] we will do a big auto-da-fé of all the manuscripts.”

  The “consortium” of Savama and D Intl spelled out the immediate nature of the Mawlid threat in a follow-up letter to the embassy, signed by Haidara. There were 454 lockers that needed to be evacuated immediately and in secret, the Dutch diplomats were told, since the jihadists had said they would destroy them. Failure to move them would mean that Timbuktu’s cultural heritage, “which carries the hopes and pride of an entire people,” would be “definitively lost.” There was not much time, since the festival was only a week away.