The Storied City

by Charlie English

  Tjoelker had no budget for saving culture, but Diakité had come knocking at an opportune moment: the Dutch foreign minister, Lilianne Ploumen, had just sent a note to the embassy asking what the government could do to help Mali, and Tjoelker was convinced this was it. She told Diakité that she would try to make a case to the foreign ministry for funding the evacuation, and wrote that day to her superior in The Hague. The response that came back overnight was unhelpful. “It was, you know, ‘It’s a bit complicated,’” Tjoelker said. She was so angry she called her ambassador, Maarten Brouwer, who told her to go straight to Ploumen.

  “I said, ‘Okay, send [the request] directly to the minister and call the secretary to the minister,’” Brouwer recalled, “‘tell her this is something that should be on her desk or in her bag because we really need a quick response.’” Tjoelker did as Brouwer suggested, bypassing the usual ministry hierarchy. The next morning, January 17, Ploumen gave her blessing to the operation. “She said, ‘Okay, let’s do it,’” Tjoelker said.

  The project had to remain highly confidential: “I said to [Ploumen], ‘You can’t tell anyone about it, it has to be kept really secret, because if it becomes public AQIM will react and hinder Savama’s saving action. . . . It is top secret and you can only get the publicity after four or five months but not now, you have to keep quiet.’” Ploumen took Tjoelker’s entreaty for silence so seriously she relayed it to her ambassador. “Let’s not talk about it until it’s done,” she told Brouwer. The embassy even marked down the money in its own accounts as being for school exercise books in order to hide the real purpose of the donation.

  The Dutch foreign ministry allocated 323,475 euros to Savama. Combined with the DOEN Foundation’s 75,000 and the Prince Claus Fund’s 100,000, the total donated by the Dutch public now stood at close to half a million euros. Tjoelker’s reluctant manager at the Africa desk e-mailed to say he had been ordered to help, and that afternoon she began to make arrangements. She went to the finance department and told them, “Okay, I have a top-secret mission. How do we do it?” and worked late into the night to get the paperwork done. If she could produce a contract quickly, Savama had told her, it could be used to borrow money to finance the operation. “In two days we had fixed the contract, all the paperwork, and we could sign the contract with Abdel Kader so that in one week he would get the money,” Tjoelker recalled. “He was working to a deadline, because there were so many manuscripts to move.”

  That Saturday, January 19, Tjoelker took the contract to the librarian for him to sign. She met him in the Bamako lockup where the manuscripts were being received and dispatched to the safe houses. He looked unwashed, she remembered, and “so tired,” and to cheer him up she told him the work he was doing was “important for all humanity.” The contract stipulated that he would evacuate 454 lockers, containing roughly 136,200 manuscripts, which made the cost of transporting each locker a whopping 660 euros, though this included storage in Bamako for a year, the making of an inventory, at 212 euros per locker, and a 10 percent “management fee” for Savama and for D Intl. The 454 lockers were part of 709 that the Dutch were told had to be evacuated in all.

  “That weekend a large numbers of boats—around twenty—were already starting to leave Timbuktu,” Tjoelker said. They could have loaded all the manuscripts at once on one of the larger Niger River pinasses, but instead they put only twenty or so lockers on each vessel, to reduce the risk of a catastrophic loss. The boats then set out on the 250-mile journey upriver, across the inland delta and Lake Debo, to Mopti, where they turned south up the Bani River for a further seventy miles to Jenne. There they were transferred to bush taxis that took the manuscripts the last 350 miles to Bamako by road. “In Jenne there were more than fifty pickups—even one hundred—that would take the manuscript boxes,” said Tjoelker. These were typically Toyotas, and they carried two or three of the heavy boxes in the back each time, covered with other goods—hay, potatoes, grain—to hide them.

  “There were a lot of pickups,” said Tjoelker. “That’s why it was so expensive.”

  • • •

  IT WAS DURING THIS RIVERINE PHASE of the operation that, according to Haidara and Diakité, the incident with the helicopter occurred.

  The Niger boatmen were terrified of French aircraft at this time. Captains such as Hassim Traoré of the Number One Transportation Company remembered seeing the helicopters flying over the river at night and even being approached by them. Their lights appeared “like a star, but flashing on and off,” Traoré recalled. “We got very, very afraid. Many panicked, because people were saying that if the French didn’t know who we were, they might bomb us, so we were really scared.” According to Tjoelker, Diakité and Haidara went to see the commander of Operation Serval to ask that boats that were carrying manuscripts not be targeted; if this is true, the message does not seem to have reached the pilots. Colonel Frédéric Gout, commander of the French helicopter regiment deployed in Operation Serval, was unaware of any special dispensation for the Niger boats, although, he said, they needn’t have worried: without positive identification of weapons on board, his men were not allowed to engage. Of course, the people traveling in the fragile vessels didn’t know that.

  One night, according to Haidara, ten manuscript-carrying boats were traveling together “in a big convoy” and had reached the middle of Lake Debo when a helicopter came to investigate, fixing a spotlight on them. “The people who were in the boats were frightened they would be turned into mincemeat,” Haidara said. The whirring machine hovered over them for thirty seconds, scanning the vessels for weapons, before the pilot banked away. A terrified courier called Haidara at one in the morning to tell him they had almost been killed. “There is a helicopter that passed and was going to bomb us,” the courier told him. Haidara ordered that from now on they must stop at five p.m. wherever they were, and no longer travel at night.

  “I knew that in the helicopters there were detectors, and if they did not detect something serious they could not do harm,” Haidara recalled. “But if they detected weapons or something like that, they could attack. They found that there were no weapons, so they left. But if they had been carrying weapons, they would have hit them, that is sure.”

  Diakité related a version of this story to her audience in Oregon. In her account, the pilot of the French helicopter “demanded that the couriers open their boxes or be sunk on suspicion of harboring weapons,” but the pilot had a change of heart when he “saw the ship was carrying nothing but old piles of paper”:

  Boats full of manuscripts and couriers were in danger of being sunk by French combat helicopters, [which] pulled away and saluted our couriers when they risked their lives to stay on the water, open a footlocker and show the pilots we had manuscripts, not guns.

  Diakité told The New Republic of a further incident on the river around this time, which occurred after the jihadists declared that the “city’s elders had to turn over all the manuscripts so they could be burned before the [Mawlid] holiday began.” The threat put the smugglers in a panic, and they began calling all the couriers and ordering them to get the lockers on the river as quickly as possible. They had soon loaded a fleet of forty-seven boats, which then began to make their way south. As they approached the southern edge of Lake Debo, according to The New Republic, disaster struck:

  Twenty of the boats entered a narrow strait of water. Suddenly, groups of men, their heads covered with turbans, materialized on both sides of the river, waving automatic weapons and ordering the boats to stop. The couriers had no choice but to pull their pirogues up to the shore, where the gunmen said they would burn their cargo unless they could deliver an astronomical sum of money. The teenage couriers pooled their cash, watches, and jewelry, but it wasn’t enough.

  The young men were eventually allowed to call Haidara, who launched negotiations. “He basically gave them an IOU,” Diakité told The New Republic. “It was like Abdel Kader was using a cre
dit card.” The manuscripts and couriers were released. A few days later, Haidara sent the money.

  Tjoelker was given brief updates on these types of incidents via text message. “They would text and say, ‘They are at the Debo,’ ‘We have encountered a problem,’ ‘Problem solved,’ ‘We go on to Jenne,’” she said. “It was very short: ‘Boats are at this place,’ ‘Problem of this night solved,’ ‘Still going on.’” She also remembered hearing a story about people stopping the couriers, and said they had to give them money to go on: “It was a sort of holdup near Lake Debo. . . . There were a lot of boats.”

  Once or twice during the operation Ambassador Brouwer asked how things were going, and he recalled being told of difficulties on the route: “We got some stories about [lockers] full of manuscripts that were transported by pirogues and that it was done during the night and they had a lot of problems on the way because there was the police, there were rebels, and so on,” he said. He had heard that boats had been kidnapped or that people had threatened to set manuscripts on fire. “It was the people on the ground that solved those issues.”

  As the lockers reached Bamako, Haidara took Tjoelker to see them. “He really made me part of the reception of all those boxes. He showed me their way of accounting—which parts have been financed by the Ford Foundation, what has been financed by Prince Claus, by DOEN. Every box had a number and the name of the funder on it so they knew who had paid for what.” She met some of the young couriers who accompanied the lockers. “Especially in Timbuktu I think they did really marvelous things to distract the AQIM guys, to get the manuscripts out of the city.”

  Ambassador Brouwer accompanied Tjoelker on one of these visits. He counted roughly five to six hundred containers in the room, easily enough for Savama to have fulfilled its contract with the Dutch government, and was told there were more elsewhere.

  “I looked at To [Tjoelker] and I said, ‘This is a lot. Are these all full?’ They said, ‘Yes, they are all full.’”

  To be doubly sure, he even singled out one chest-deep in a stack at the back of the stockroom and said, “Okay, show me that one.”

  “It was foolish,” he remembered, “but we actually did it.”

  When the locker was opened, he saw it was piled to the brim with manuscripts.

  14.

  KING LEOPOLD’S PAPERWEIGHT

  1865–1905

  Though Barth and Cherbonneau had discovered clear evidence that the people across the desert had produced literate civilizations, they were swimming against the tide of late-nineteenth-century thought. They would soon be drowned out.

  At the end of his seventeen-page report of recommendations for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, Mr. Kurtz, the ivory-trading antagonist at the center of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, reveals his underlying animus, scrawling in a crazed, unsteady hand: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Kurtz’s logic for killing the people of Africa and stealing their resources is that whites, who are so highly developed,

  must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity. . . . By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.

  Heart of Darkness was based on what Conrad had seen as acting skipper of the steamboat Roi des Belges in 1890 in the Congo Free State, the territory with which Leopold II of Belgium had fulfilled his long-held fantasy of ruling a colony. In Leopold’s Congo, a private army known as the Force Publique would make the people strip the natural wealth of their own land, principally rubber and ivory, for the enrichment of Brussels. If quotas were not met, men would be killed, women raped, children mutilated, and villages torched. The number who died in the territory as a result of Leopold’s reign has been estimated at ten million, or roughly half the population.

  Joseph Banks would doubtless have been horrified to learn of the scale of the Belgian king’s brutalizing of central Africa, but it was in many ways an inevitable extension of the process the African Association had begun, an extreme example of a pattern that was being repeated in discovered lands everywhere from the Americas to Australasia to the Arctic. The era of exploration was over; now came the exploitation. First, however, the great powers had to acquire the African territories, and in the late nineteenth century that was just what they did. In 1870 roughly 10 percent of the continent was under the control of a colonizing power. By 1914 only 10 percent was not.

  The driving force of the new imperialism was partly financial. In the 1870s the growth of many Western nations stalled; their economies would remain sluggish for more than two decades. New markets and raw materials were needed, and Africa had both. This imperative coincided with a peak of European racism, fueled by the greatest technology gap between the industrialized world and Africa that history had ever seen, and promoted by a willing intelligentsia who built on hierarchies of ethnicity developed during the Enlightenment. For the few who had actually been to parts of the continent or studied it, attempting to resist this intellectual shift was impossible. Superficially Barth had been rejected by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin for being an “adventurer” rather than a scholar; but how much of the academy’s decision lay in its rejection of his account of the Western Sudan? The German establishment’s view of Africa was still dominated by the thinking of Georg Hegel, who had announced early in the century that it “is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Obvious evidence of civilizations there, such as those at Carthage or in Egypt, were dismissed as not properly African—they did not “belong to the African Spirit.” The result was that “what we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature . . . on the threshold of the World’s History.”

  Hegel was neither the first nor the last European intellectual to write off the continent and its people. In the 1850s, the French ethnologist Joseph-Arthur Gobineau wrote the seminal work of the so-called science of racism, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of the Races, which included a complete racial hierarchy with white people of European origin at the top and dark-skinned people at the bottom. Explorers such as Park may have “given to some negro a certificate of superior intelligence,” wrote Gobineau, but it was improper to draw scientific conclusions from anecdotal encounters with a few intelligent individuals. The very physiognomy of the black races was evidence of inferiority: their pelvises had “a character of animalism” which seemed “to portend their destiny,” while their foreheads were “narrow and receding,” a sign that they were “inferior in reasoning capacity.”

  Racist theory began to reach into almost every aspect of European thinking about Africa, including exploration. In 1874, the British explorer Samuel Baker stated:

  In that savage country [of Central Africa] . . . we find no vestiges of the past—no ancient architecture, neither sculpture, nor even a chiselled stone to prove that the Negro savage of this day is inferior to a remote ancestor. . . . We must therefore conclude that the races of man which now inhabit [this region] are unchanged from the prehistoric tribes who were the original inhabitants.

  This mind-set would last deep into the twentieth century. In 1923, the leading British historian A. P. Newton would write that “Africa has practically no history before the coming of Europeans . . . since history only begins when men take to writing,” ignoring totally the growing body of evidence to the contrary. Five years later, Reginald Coupland, the Beit Professor of Colonial History at Oxford University, would endorse Newton, asserting that until the nineteenth century, the main body of the Africans “had stayed, for untold centuries, sunk in barbarism. . . . They remained stagnant, neither going forward nor going back. Nowhere in the world, save perhaps in some miasmic swamps of South America or in some derelict Pacific Islands, was human life so stagnant. The heart of Africa was scarcely beating.”

  Robbed
of its past and its culture, Africa was a blank slate, an emptiness on which Christianity and civilization could be imposed. With the intellectual groundwork complete, the “Scramble for Africa,” as a columnist for the London Times dubbed it, could begin. Leopold was one of the instigators of this land grab. Only the second monarch of a country that had been founded in 1830, he appears now as a sort of colonialist pervert. He had been shopping for an overseas territory for decades. In 1861, four years before his accession to the throne, he had given Belgium’s anti-imperialist finance minister a fragment of marble from the Acropolis inscribed with the words “Il faut à la Belgique une colonie”—Belgium must have a colony. He had a penchant for Borneo and New Guinea. He tried to lease Formosa. He invested in the Suez Canal Company and examined Brazilian railways. Finally he enlisted Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer of whom Richard Francis Burton once said, “He shoots negroes as if they were monkeys,” to secretly scope out the Congo basin, a giant patch of land more than thirty times the size of his own country. Stanley built roads and collected treaties, while Leopold tried to persuade the great powers to back the proposal that his International African Association take over the territory. In November 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened a diplomatic conference in Berlin, in part to resolve the Leopold question, in part to set out the ground rules for annexations that were already under way.

  The delegates talked for three months, without a single African at the table. When they parted on February 26, 1885, Leopold’s International African Association had been recognized as the government of the new Congo Free State, creating the legal framework for his ransacking of the territory, and the broad lines of the partition of Africa had been established. To fully own their territories, the conference stipulated, the European powers would have to show “effective occupation”; in other words, they should have forces on the ground.