The Storied City

by Charlie English

  The evacuation was not yet complete, however. On January 30, two days after the liberation, Haidara informed his contact at the Ford Foundation, Joseph Gitari, that twenty boats were now leaving the Timbuktu region with three hundred boxes of manuscripts. They would do four days of sailing to reach Jenne, he wrote, before signing off with his usual: “Regards!” Gitari forwarded these e-mails to Darren Walker, adding a note of his own: “The operation continues. An Indiana Jones moment in real life!”

  That Friday, February 1, ten more boats arrived in Jenne with a further 150 boxes; 157 more were landed the following day.

  On Thursday, February 7, at 8:13 a.m., Haidara e-mailed Gitari with news of the final shipment. “I just want to inform you that the last canoes just arrived in Jenne. This trip terminates the transport of 922 boxes to Jenne by river. Images of first arrivals [of] boxes of manuscripts in Bamako will reach you soon. Regards!”

  Haidara’s Herculean task of saving the manuscripts of Timbuktu seemed finally to be complete.

  18.

  MANUSCRIPT FEVER

  1967–2003

  After the discovery and translation of the Timbuktu chronicles, the story of the mythologized city began to settle in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though it was still easy to find academics writing of Malian expeditions to America, or of the twenty-five thousand students who attended Timbuktu University during the Sudanese Middle Ages, a small but growing band of professional Africanists chipped away at the myths in the hope of producing an objective truth. The history was remarkable enough, after all, not to require further elaboration. What was left—the “vulgate,” orthodox account of Timbuktu and the Songhay—was based on the chronicles and the Songhay king lists they related, from the Zuwa dynasty to the askiyas via Sunni Ali Kulun and his successors. These details, historians could broadly agree, were facts.

  Toward the end of 1967, UNESCO organized a meeting of experts on the manuscripts of West Africa in Timbuktu, in the newly independent state of Mali. Among the guests was the man who would be known as the doyen of Timbuktu manuscripts experts, John Hunwick. The meeting recommended—and in Hunwick’s view it was “little more than a pious hope”—that a research institute be established at Timbuktu to collect and preserve the Islamic heritage of the region. A name was even suggested for it: the Ahmad Baba center. Within ten years, rather to Hunwick’s surprise, such an institution had been founded. Mali now had its own internationally recognized program devoted to researching the region’s past through its documents.

  By 1992, when Hunwick returned to hunt for copies of the Tarikh al-sudan for a new English translation he was preparing, the institute had made further advances: it now boasted a manuscript restoration department and a section where the works could be transferred to microfiche. It also had a growing number of documents—more than 6,300—as well as a small library of printed works. Hunwick found it “difficult to do justice to the richness of the collection,” he wrote. Most of the items were of local authorship and fell into two broad categories: items of “literary” character, including religious treatises, chronicles, and poems; and items of “documentary” character—letters, legal documents, manuscripts relating to the renting of houses, inheritance schedules, land ownership, and so on.

  Among the literary works, Hunwick listed two copies each of the Tarikh al-sudan and the Tarikh al-fattash. There were also histories of Azawad and the Barabish people, and of the ancient trading town of Tadmakkat. There were biographical dictionaries, as well as a history of the wars between the Tuareg and the French; and a copy of the anonymous Diwan al-muluk chronicle Dubois had found. The prominent religious treatises included works by the family of Kunta scholars who had done so much to help Laing and Barth, including Sidi al-Mukhtar, Sidi Muhammad, and Sidi Ahmad al-Bakkai. There were works by Ahmad Baba himself and by other members of the illustrious Aqit family. Then there was a whole host of manuscripts in Hunwick’s second category, items of “documentary” character.

  At this time, the staff of the Ahmad Baba center included the young Abdel Kader Haidara, who Hunwick noted had “good connections with many families in the city.” The most important element in the embryonic center’s development, however, was its director, Mahmoud Zouber. Zouber was a rare thing, even in the late twentieth century: a Malian scholar who was acknowledged by the world of international academia. He was fluent in Fulfulde, Songhay, Tamasheq, Arabic, and French, and had a deep knowledge of the history and culture of the Middle Niger region, and his research into the life of Ahmad Baba had earned him a doctorate from the Sorbonne.

  Under Zouber’s leadership, the reputation of the Ahmad Baba center grew through the 1990s, along with its collection. Haidara, meanwhile, made his first attempts to promote the private libraries. Toward the end of the decade, Timbuktu’s fortunes received a major boost with the visit of a very special guest: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The eminent head of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Gates had come to Mali to make a film for a PBS series titled Wonders of the African World. Unlike the white men who had explored Timbuktu in the past, Gates approached the subject from the very different standpoint of a descendant of slaves. His visit was inevitably politically charged: in the film, first broadcast in 1999, he would declare that “as a black American, I know what it’s like to have your history stolen from you.”

  Gates was given a tour of the Sankore mosque by the English-speaking guide Sidi Ali Ould, and taken to see Haidara and his books. In these days before the Mamma Haidara Memorial Library was built, the collection was kept in a storage room crowded with old metal trunks, and the volumes were covered with a fine layer of dust and sand. Gates was transfixed: here were thousands of manuscripts, a few bound in leather, others merely piles of loose folios carefully tied together, some with gold etchings and illustrations that he estimated would be worth thousands of dollars in the world’s leading auction houses. If they were translated, he believed, they might completely rewrite the history of black Africa.

  He described this moment in a diary that was published online:

  Standing in Haidara’s “library,” . . . I imagined how that shepherd felt holding the Dead Sea Scrolls, perhaps sensing the majesty of his discovery, yet helpless to unlock its secrets. Here, at the “Gateway to the Desert,” at the edge of the Sahara’s grand sandy superhighway for camels, where two distinct universes have been meeting for a millennium, I held in my own hands perhaps the only remains of the black African world’s intellectual achievement.

  Later, speaking to camera in the courtyard of the Sankore mosque with tears in his eyes, Gates imagined himself “surrounded by black men with long gowns and turbans, which they received as their sign of their degree when they graduated, and each of them carrying books, this whole place surrounded by books”:

  Precisely when Europeans said that black Africans lacked the intellectual ability to read or write, this place, founded just about the time of the University of Paris or the University of Bologna . . . and fully 311 years before my own beloved Harvard . . . was brimming with 25,000 students and scholars gathered from all over black Africa and North Africa who had come here because this was Africa’s great center of learning.

  It was, Gates said, “enough to make you cry.”

  Though Gates’s account of Timbuktu repeated several of the mistakes made by colonial historians, it would radically change the dynamics of the manuscript trade. Here was a black man, a black American, an eminent professor with a chair at Harvard, shedding tears at his personal discovery of written proof of Africa’s intellectual past, the evidence of the travesty of centuries of European racism. Why had he not known about it—why hadn’t the world? On his return to the United States, Gates began to drum up financial support for Haidara, which came in the form of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. After years of trying to scrape funding together for his private libraries project, money for the Timbuktien
was at last beginning to flow. The impoverished city was soon at the heart of a manuscript boom: increasing amounts of funding—donated by UNESCO, the Ford Foundation, Norway, Luxembourg, the United States—spurred people to bring forward more documents from the villages around Timbuktu, while other Malian towns, such as Jenne and Segu, started their own manuscript projects. Manuscript owners welcomed the money, but the boom had a darker side: libraries came to be judged not only on the quality of their books but also on their quantity; the numbers claimed spiraled higher and higher, and collections were inflated through indiscriminate buying. Public and private libraries found themselves pitted against one another in the scramble for funding. A Savama grant application written in the 2000s spelled it out: the Ahmad Baba center had managed to collect twenty thousand or so manuscripts, but this was “extremely small compared to the hundreds of thousands (possibly even millions) in private hands.”

  Gates was not the only man with political ambitions for the manuscripts. In November 2001, South African president Thabo Mbeki came to Timbuktu in company with his Malian counterpart, President Alpha Oumar Konaré, a historian by training. Mbeki was shown the cramped exhibition space in the Ahmad Baba building on the Rue de Chemnitz, which had just two small glass display cabinets, before being led into a conservation studio full of rusty, outmoded equipment. As he was told the history of the contents of the manuscripts, the South African president recognized an opportunity.

  It was only eleven years since Nelson Mandela had made his “walk to freedom,” just seven years since he had been elected president and the evil of apartheid declared to be at an end. Mbeki, as Mandela’s successor, was pushing hard to free the continent from the racist thinking of the past. The evidence in the Ahmad Baba center could be used to reorient the continent’s intellectual life away from its bias favoring the old colonial capitals of London and Paris, he realized, and could help forge a homegrown identity for the continent.

  On his return to South Africa, Mbeki initiated a giant project tasked with exploiting the manuscripts. Over the next decade, millions of dollars of South African money would be poured into construction, conservation, and research programs in Mali and South Africa to develop what Shamil Jeppie, the head of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, called “a vastly underestimated literary heritage that is potentially a symbol of a much wider continental heritage of creativity and a written tradition in particular.” In 2009, the new $8.36 million South African–designed building for the Ahmad Baba center was opened next to the Sankore mosque, with facilities to restore, catalogue, and digitize the manuscripts.

  As money poured in, and their numbers reached fantastic heights, it was surely only a matter of time before the documents offered up discoveries of historical significance. On this front, though, progress was slow. In 1999, Hunwick seemed to be on the brink of a major revelation when he was shown a trove of documents in the Fondo Kati library that appeared to contain original source material for the Tarikh al-fattash, written in the margins of other texts. It was these documents that, a Chicago Tribune reporter was told in 2001, represented the African equivalent of an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which would profoundly alter long-accepted views of African history. Hunwick had a stroke in 2000, however, and research on the documents stopped. In fact, when the apple cart of Sudanese history was upset once again, it was not because of new finds in the manuscripts at all. In the 2000s, the most significant revelations about the Songhay period came from an entirely different source: the medieval Arabic inscriptions written on tombstones in the region.

  The man who decoded this epigraphic evidence was a Brazilian medical doctor turned historical sleuth named Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias. He had lived and worked for many years in West Africa and had developed an interest in these centuries-old writings. What did they mean? Which cultures had produced them? He spent thirty years finding out. His magnum opus, Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali, appeared in 2003, four years after Hunwick published his landmark new English translation of the Tarikh al-sudan. The results would challenge the very foundations of the vulgate, accepted history of Timbuktu and the Songhay empire that had begun with Barth’s discovery of the Tarikh al-sudan in 1853.

  Since the epigraphs, which had been rediscovered early in the twentieth century, were contemporaneous, they were the oldest and most reliable sources of writing in the region, predating the chronicles by hundreds of years. Yet they had been more or less ignored because they didn’t agree with the history in the tarikhs. Academics had reacted to them with “bursts of enthusiasm” followed by “paralyzing uncertainty,” Farias wrote, as they had no idea how to relate them to the established documentary sources: dates didn’t match up, nor did names of dynasties or individual rulers. Only someone with the knowledge and dedication of Farias could make sense of them and work out how they and the chronicles fit together.

  What the Brazilian began to realize was that although they were an invaluable source, large parts of the chronicles were not historically accurate at all: in fact, their authors had confected a narrative of Songhay history for the political task of reunifying the people who lived on the Niger bend after the invasion. The Moroccan conquest had turned the askiyas into puppet kings and reduced the privilege that literate urbanites had enjoyed under their rule, while the new power brokers in the Songhay region still struggled for legitimacy. The chronicles were therefore designed as a form of “catastrophe management,” Farias argued, a new form of literature aimed at reconciling the elites and enabling them to move forward together. They had been constructed in a way that made the story of the Songhay appear as “a single and taut narrative,” but this was synthetic: periods of influence of foreign powers such as Mali were shortened and the rule of the Songhay kings extended both forward and backward in time. This nationalist Songhay version of events squeezed entire dynasties out of the king lists, such as a dynasty bearing the title malik, some of whom preceded the Zuwa, and at least six female rulers who took the title malika and constituted a royal series in their own right.

  To help fill the inconvenient gaps in Songhay history, the authors of the tarikhs had borrowed from other cultures’ preexisting myths. The story of Ali Kulun, for instance, was lifted from Tuareg traditions, and he was probably no more real than Zuwa Alayaman, the mythical king who slew the fish-god.

  There were two reasons why earlier historians hadn’t noticed these errors, Farias wrote. One was the accident of fate that meant Barth happened upon the Tarikh al-sudan and not the epigraphic evidence. After historians had been presented with the chronicles and all their colorful detail, they were reluctant to take on board evidence that contradicted them. The second reason, according to Farias, was an offshoot of the racist culture of the late nineteenth century. The French Orientalists had held up Ahmad Baba as the paragon of the Timbuktu scholar because of his beautiful Arabic prose, while the authors of the tarikhs, writing later and in inferior Arabic, were credited only with being able to faithfully transmit the findings of their more brilliant forebears.

  To Farias, these discoveries did not make the Timbuktu chronicles irrelevant. Far from it. They were much more sophisticated than anyone had allowed. In embellishing history in this way, they had composed the most innovative writing ever to have emerged from the city. “We must rely less on the chronicles’ reconstructions of the early past,” he concluded, “while learning to respect the chroniclers’ skills as text craftsmen and ideological agents.”

  Even at the start of the twenty-first century, then, when many of the building blocks of world history might be said to be settled, West Africa’s past was the subject of serious revision. Farias had shown that, once again, what had long been believed about Timbuktu was wrong.

  19.

  THE MYTH FACTORY

  2013–2015

  In the days after Mayor Cissé’s dramatic announcement, news of the evacuation was slow to filter out. No one
seemed to want to reveal the truth, that almost all the manuscripts were safe, too soon. At the University of Cape Town, the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project team took calls from journalists looking for an expert analysis of what had happened. The academics urged caution. As soon as they had seen the TV pictures from the Ahmad Baba building, they knew that not all the documents had been burned: there simply wasn’t enough damage, not enough ashes. When they called their colleagues in Mali they were surprised that none of them would explain exactly what had happened. “They wouldn’t tell us about it,” remembered Susana Molins Lliteras, then a doctoral student with the project. “They told us it was for security reasons, that it was too unsafe.” By that time, it seemed to her, such caution was unnecessary.

  For those who knew Haidara well, however, selected information was starting to drip out. Jean-Michel Djian, a French writer who specialized in West African culture, told The New Yorker on the day of liberation that the majority of the Timbuktu manuscripts—“about fifty thousand”—were safe and that Haidara had transported more than 15,000 to the capital two months previously to protect them. Later that week, the veteran Africa correspondent Tristan McConnell wrote articles for GlobalPost and Harper’s in which Haidara revealed details of the evacuation. Working with “a handful of volunteers,” the librarian had set about hiding Timbuktu’s manuscripts, he wrote. With “15 colleagues,” he had worked every night for a month to pack them into lockers, starting with the Mamma Haidara collection and then moving on to others. “Well over 1,000” boxes of manuscripts had been buried beneath mud floors, hidden in cupboards and rooms in private houses, or sent upriver. Haidara had refused offers of further help, he told McConnell, because he didn’t want anyone else to know where the manuscripts were hidden.