The Storied City

by Charlie English

  Qadi Umar was with a domestic servant when he was told about the massacre, the Fattash relates. The servant began to cry, so a Moroccan soldier slashed at him with his sword, killing him instantly. At this point, the qadi began to laugh. When he was asked why, he replied: “I had thought until now that I was more worthy than this servant, but I see now he had more merit than I, since he has preceded me to paradise.” The remaining scholars were placed under guard in the fort, while Pasha Mahmud’s soldiers went through their houses, taking everything of value. “His followers plundered whatever they could lay their hands on,” al-Sadi recorded in the Tarikh al-sudan, “and brought dishonour upon the scholars, stripping their womenfolk and committing acts of indecency.” Included in the loot was Ahmad Baba’s substantial library.

  After being held in the fort for five months, the scholars judged to be dangerous—mostly members of the Aqit family—were ordered to be taken across the desert to Marrakesh with their families. Seventy prisoners in all were packed off in chains. The journey was hard on the unworldly scholars: at one point, encumbered by his manacles, Ahmad Baba fell from his camel and broke his leg. They reached Marrakesh on May 21, 1594, and were put in prison. The elderly Qadi Umar would die there.

  The surviving captives were released into a form of house arrest two years later, and Ahmad Baba was granted an interview with the sultan. He found the great ruler shielded from the gaze of ordinary mortals by a curtain, and refused to speak with him until this was drawn aside: by speaking from behind a veil, Baba argued, Mansur was imitating God. When the sultan obliged, Baba asked the question that must have been burning inside him for years: “What need had you to loot my belongings and sack my library and, above all, to have me brought here in chains?” Mansur responded that it was part of his attempt to unite the Muslim world and that, since he, Baba, was one of the most distinguished men of Islam in his country, the submission of the rest of the Songhay kingdom would surely follow his own.

  The decade Baba spent in the Moroccan capital was the most productive period of his career. He became famous as a scholar and an advocate, with a reputation that spread throughout the Maghreb. He taught grammar, rhetoric, theology, and Maliki law, and wrote extensively: thirty of his fifty-six known works were written in this period. But he was homesick, as a poem he wrote in Morocco relates:

  O traveller to Gao, turn off to my city, murmur my name there and greet all my dear ones,

  With scented salaams from an exile who longs for his homeland and neighbours, companions and friends.

  In 1607, when the sultan had died, Baba was allowed to leave Marrakesh. He reached Timbuktu the following year and was the only one of the deported scholars to see his home city again. He lived there for another nineteen years, teaching and writing, and died on April 22, 1627.

  Timbuktu scholarship survived him: the chronicles, after all, were written after his death. But the destruction wrought by Pasha Mahmud had ruined the city, in the words of the Fattash:

  Timbuktu became a body without a soul. Its life was turned upside down, its conditions of existence changed, as did its customs. The lowest elements of the population became the most elevated, and the most elevated became the lowest. The worst scoundrel lorded over the most noble. People traded religious objects for the goods of this world, and faith was swapped for error. The rules of justice were suppressed, tradition became mere dead letter. New doctrines carried the day, and, with the exception of Muhammad Baghayogho, there was no one left in the town who observed the law or who walked in fear of God.

  Almost two hundred years before the African Association sent its first explorers south, Timbuktu had begun its long decline.

  17.

  AN INDIANA JONES MOMENT IN REAL LIFE!

  JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2013

  Large drops of desert rain threatened to turn the alluvial earth to greasy red mud on the morning of January 27, 2013, when a group of French officers met at the disused airfield at Goundam, fifty miles southwest of Timbuktu. The airfield’s only building was a broken-down hut with no door, and shutters that hung off their hinges, but it would have to do. This was the base from which they would plan their final advance. General Bernard Barrera, commander of Operation Serval, and Colonel Frédéric Gout, commander of the helicopter regiment, were welcomed to the hut by Colonel Paul Gèze, the leader of the armored French GTIA1 battle group that had struggled for the past four days up the desert track along the left bank of the river from Bamako. Gèze, a muscular marine, greeted his superior with a big smile and two options. “Beer,” he said, “or whiskey?”

  Operation Serval had been running to a tight time frame. When Gout had received orders from officials in Paris to capture Timbuktu less than a month after the start of the intervention, he had told them they were “crazy.” Since then the schedule had only accelerated: he and his men were now set to attack the city the following morning, just seventeen days after the first French shots had been fired. Defeated at Konna, the jihadists had continued to withdraw, but French intelligence reports suggested they would now make a stand. “At our last briefing they told us that we would meet some jihadists,” said Gout, a tall man with even white teeth, “so for us it was certain.”

  To the French the jihadists were jusqu’au-boutistes: they would fight till the last man and were probably pumped with narcotics. “When they fought us they didn’t seem to suffer,” remembered Gout. “In our first days in the north, they never, ever abandoned their positions. Even when they were up against tanks and helicopters with just Kalashnikovs, they stayed there.” Gout was told machine guns had been mounted on the roofs of Timbuktu’s houses to set up an anti-aircraft barrage, which convinced him that “we would absolutely lose” some aircraft and crew. “They were organized, they were able to use their armaments, there was no morale problem, and they were utterly convinced of their mission,” he said.

  At five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, General Barrera gave the order to advance. He would travel with Gèze’s armored column of French and Malian soldiers, which was to seize Timbuktu airport. Gout’s helicopters were meanwhile told to reconnoiter the roads and destroy anything that might oppose the battle group. The armored column moved much more slowly than was hoped, since it was soon dark and there was the constant threat of IED attack: it was eleven p.m. before they reached the outskirts of the airport.

  The helicopters took no time to cover the ground, and as dusk fell, Gout saw the city for the first time. It looked frail, he recalled, almost swallowed by the sand seas that surrounded it. There was no way more than ten aircraft would go unnoticed here, and his men were tense, ready to be fired upon. The first reports from his pilots were “very detailed and crazy,” with one telling him he could see a couple of motorbikes, and perhaps five or six people, which he judged to be “a real threat.” The colonel told him to hold his fire.

  After some time it became clear that there were no jihadists in the town. Gout sent word to the airborne brigade of French Foreign Legionnaires, GTIA4, who were awaiting his signal. As midnight approached, and as Gèze’s men cut their way through the wire fence that surrounded the runway south of Timbuktu, transport planes dropped two hundred of the world’s most famous desert troops into the sand to the north. It was the largest parachute drop the French military had undertaken in more than thirty years.

  At dawn Gout shuttled the commander of the Foreign Legion unit to Timbuktu airport for a briefing on the final assault. Even though they now believed Timbuktu to be empty of enemy fighters, this was not going to be straightforward: General Barrera knew that the legionnaires might start shooting if they saw armed Malian soldiers. He decided to separate the town into zones, and said the Malian contingent would enter their city first.

  Like everyone in Timbuktu, Air Mali knew exactly what was happening. Since the electricity plant had been destroyed, at nighttime the city was almost perfectly dark, and he had spent the previous evening watching the lights
moving out in the desert as the French maneuvered. He had seen the paratroops land to the north, and the column arrive at the back of the airport where the wire fence was. At any moment, he thought he would be able to see French armored vehicles driving up the road. He kept waiting, but still nobody came.

  Shortly before dawn, people gave up their vigil and went to the mosques to pray. It was only when they came out, and the sun was spreading a pale light, that they could discern distant figures walking toward the city. As the figures came closer, the people could see that they were Malian soldiers. These were the first government troops Timbuktu had seen for ten long months.

  The city’s youths climbed on their motorbikes and took to the Kabara road to welcome the soldiers and escort them in. At ten a.m. the French arrived and were mobbed. The women of the town had been secretly making flags for days, and that morning as the troops entered, hundreds of cheering people lined the roads, shouting, “Mali! Mali! Mali!” and “Thank you, François Hollande!” and waving the tricolors of both countries.

  In that moment, everything was forgotten, Air Mali said. “Everything was over in a single day. The fact of being free . . . for us it was enough. The people were very happy.”

  “A free Timbuktu represents for us something indescribable,” said Diadié. “No one could know the cost of ten months of privation, ten months of intolerance, ten months of humiliation.”

  The senior Malian army officer, Colonel Kéba Sangaré, was brought with his soldiers to the mairie, and from there they went to pay a courtesy visit to the Crisis Committee in Diadié’s house. “They came into our house, they came to our chamber, Colonel Kéba and his staff,” recalled Diadié. “We received them, we gave them our trust, we offered them refreshments. When we gathered the people and told them what was happening, they brought tons of rice and beef, which they offered to wish them welcome.” Then the Malian army organized itself to secure the city.

  Gout intended to retire to Sevare that afternoon: Timbuktu was only the second of the three major cities in the north that had to be liberated, and he needed to plan the next phase of the operation, but Barrera stopped him and suggested that they enter the city together. The general had to see that it was secure, yet he had another motive too. He had become intrigued by the myth of Timbuktu and had been reading Caillié. He wanted to see for himself the house where the French explorer had stayed.

  They drove into town from the airport in a small convoy. “The population was so generous,” Gout recalled. “They were applauding. There was a lot of happiness, we could see it.” People came up to thank them, particularly women and children. They drove as far as they could, but soon the alleys became too narrow for the vehicles, and the officers climbed out and continued on foot. It was dusk, and light from the houses was almost imperceptible. As they approached the building where Caillié had stayed for two short weeks in 1828, an old man came out to greet them. “Ah, you are our liberator!” he said to the general, before offering him a tour. He opened the wooden door, studded with polished metal in the traditional style, and showed the soldiers inside.

  The general was very proud.

  • • •

  FOR THE WATCHING WORLD, the liberation of Timbuktu was a significant milestone in the Malian conflict, but it was quickly overtaken by news of another event.

  Early that morning, Mayor Cissé, who was in Bamako, began briefing journalists about the burning of the manuscripts at the Ahmad Baba institute. Before nine a.m., the mayor told the BBC’s Thomas Fessy he had “very credible accounts of Islamist militants burning ancient manuscripts in the last few days,” according to Fessy. Minutes later, the Arabic TV journalist Jenan Moussa tweeted that she had been told the same thing. By mid-morning the news had been picked up by agencies and was being sent out as snaps on newswires and repeated on social media accounts.

  More interviews with the mayor followed. “It’s truly alarming that this has happened,” he told the Associated Press. “They torched all the important ancient manuscripts, the ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.” To The Guardian, he said: “It’s true, they have burned the manuscripts. . . . They also burned down several buildings. There was one guy who was celebrating in the street and they killed him.” The documents, according to the mayor, “were a part not only of Mali’s heritage but the world’s heritage. By destroying them they threaten the world. We have to kill all of the rebels in the north.” Mayor Cissé’s words seemed to be confirmed when Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford, who was with the advancing French troops, visited the Ahmad Baba building and showed pictures of burnt boxes.

  The secrecy surrounding Haidara’s operation had been so effective almost no one in the international media knew any different, and Cissé’s pronouncement that “all the important ancient manuscripts” had been torched led to catastrophic estimates of the amount destroyed. “Everyone was talking about it, even the radio,” recalled Maiga. “But they put forward imaginary numbers. Some said 200,000 manuscripts burned, something like that.”

  At midday, just a few hours after Cissé’s first announcement, Haidara fired off an e-mail in shaky English to his friend at the Ford Foundation. Things had become “more worrisome,” he began. The jihadists had begun to burn the manuscripts. He was afraid that the city’s heritage could be damaged in fighting. “It is time,” he concluded, “it is necessary that the means are provided for conveying estates to the south of the country.” Whether this e-mail was motivated by genuine fear or by opportunism—it was a moment, after all, when the jihadist threat was surely neutralized—the Ford Foundation moved quickly, spurred on no doubt by catastrophist reports in the media. A Savama funding application was rushed through the foundation’s head office in New York that day with the help of the executive who would go on to lead the organization, Darren Walker. A grant of $326,000 was agreed on, which would pay for the movement of a further 922 lockers. The running total Savama had raised for the evacuation of its manuscripts was now approaching a million dollars.

  In Timbuktu, meanwhile, Abdoulaye Cissé was still thinking about the heap of ashes he had seen on Thursday morning. The jihadists had left for good on Friday, but he had not been back inside since he had realized the building might be mined. Still, he knew something didn’t quite add up. There had been around 15,000 manuscripts in the building, but there hadn’t been nearly enough ash outside the conference room to account for them all. “That was not the whole 15,000 that they burned,” he said. He thought the jihadists must have stolen the rest. “I thought they had taken some. That was the first idea I had.”

  When the French soldiers reached Sankore, they asked to speak to the responsable for the Ahmad Baba institute, and Cissé was called. They questioned him at length about the jihadists—Who were they? Who was the chief? What nationalities were they?—then inspected the building. As elsewhere in the city, they found ammunition and grenades in the jihadists’ sleeping quarters. The French soldiers “took a lot of munitions [away], and they took a lot of documents so that they could understand the rebels,” recalled Cissé.

  As the soldiers worked their way through the building looking for booby traps, they tagged the rooms they had cleared with red spray paint. Reaching the basement, they moved through the exhibition space and began working their way down the long corridor where the storerooms were. There were seven of these rooms in all. Six stood empty, their doors open, while the seventh was locked. A glass inspection window allowed people to look inside, but with the lights not working, all anyone could see was darkness. Opening the door, they found a plain room full of shelving units, each of which was filled with conservation boxes, row after row. Here, the great bulk of the building’s manuscripts, around 10,000, lay untouched.

  When the state employees tallied the collection later, they found 4,203 were missing. The lost documents were new acquisitions, they said, which had been left out in the restoration room on
the upper level of the Sankore building and were an obvious target for opportunist thieves. As to why the other 10,000 had been left, Cissé said he thought the thieves must have assumed the locked storeroom was as empty as the other six, and hadn’t bothered to force the door. It was clear evidence of the spiritual power of the city.

  “It is truly the mystery of Timbuktu,” he said.

  • • •

  THAT EVENING, Haidara took To Tjoelker to see more lockers coming into Bamako. Once again she was shocked by his appearance. “He was completely dirty and exhausted,” she said. “I don’t think he had time to wash anymore.” He was also extremely tired, but “very proud of getting them out.” She believed that at heart he was a shy man who had been reluctantly forced to assume a leadership role. “I think he is quite a silent guy normally . . . not a very big leader,” she recalled. “But because of the circumstances he had to transform himself into the head of the association of families.”

  Haidara took Tjoelker to his second wife’s house, a large and luxurious building with a garden on the south bank of the river, where she was shown into a room that was filled with lockers from floor to ceiling; inside each locker were collections of manuscripts. The documents themselves—the priceless artifacts at the core of the evacuation—worked their magic on the Dutch diplomat. “The contents were so beautiful. They were amazing. The manuscripts were all types of quality, you know? Some were painted, others just simple—a love letter . . . so beautiful.”

  Strieder, the German chargé d’affaires, was similarly impressed by what he was shown of the shipments that arrived in Bamako. It was “a really good action,” he felt. “I saw many of the books—I had the opportunity to look into them at Bamako—and it was incredible, the feeling that you have some manuscripts that are thirteenth or even twelfth century, and many, many different ones . . . all done in the early centuries. It was a great feeling that we had made a contribution.”