As the world’s media came to realize that what was thought destroyed had really been saved, a new round of coverage began, and the number of manuscripts evacuated began to mount. By February 25, according to Der Spiegel, the 15,000 Djian reported had become “more than 200,000 documents, or about 80 percent of [the manuscripts in Timbuktu],” citing the German foreign ministry as a source. A German briefing document later put the number at 285,000, while in April, in The New Republic, Haidara was cited as claiming that “roughly 95 percent of the city’s 300,000 manuscripts made it safely to Bamako.” By 2015 this 95 percent would be 377,491 manuscripts, shipped in almost 2,500 lockers. This was not counting the 24,000 or so evacuated from the old Ahmad Baba building, which would put the total over 400,000.
On March 13, 2013, six weeks after the liberation, Diakité launched a new fund-raising drive, T160K: Timbuktu Libraries in Exile, with a talk at the University of Oregon. (“T160K” refers to “the first 160,000” manuscripts that had been evacuated from Timbuktu, she said.) In her lecture, Diakité recollected how the people of Timbuktu and the villages surrounding it, afraid for their lives and futures, not receiving any kind of income because their businesses or jobs had disappeared with the crisis, had come forward to help save the heritage. She was moved to tears by the power of the story. “I’m going to start crying any second here again,” she said. “Here I go.”
She spoke for fifty minutes—“a pretty short amount of time for an adventure of this magnitude,” as she put it—but enough for her to reveal intriguing new findings about the manuscripts. During the evacuation, the workers had made a rough inventory, she said, and discovered for the first time that religious texts were far outnumbered in the collections by secular works, which included poetry, novellas, essays, cookbooks, works of medieval science, medicine, music, and “much, much more.” What she still found most exciting, however, was a theme she had mined a decade earlier under the aegis of the Special Conflict Resolution Research Group in Mali: the manuscripts contained texts that had once been used by a corps of Islamic diplomats called the “ambassadors of peace,” she said, and in her opinion these texts should now be deployed to spearhead the Malian reconciliation process. They could even contain the template to resolve conflicts all over the continent.
The way the manuscripts alone brought people together during the evacuation leads us to believe that they, and this material, could drive the process of enduring peace in Mali, and this may be the destiny of the manuscripts, at least in this iteration of their existence.
Before the manuscripts could fulfill this destiny, though, more funds were needed. Far from being secure, the manuscripts in Bamako were threatened by the city’s humid climate, and this new crisis required even larger amounts of cash than the evacuation. T160K’s target—promoted in old and new media alike—was $7 million. Two months later, on May 15, Haidara published an “Action Plan for the Rescue, Preservation and Valorization of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Evacuated in Bamako,” which detailed the costs of conserving, digitizing, cataloguing, and researching the Savama documents. The price tag for this three-year program was set far higher, at a little over $22 million: an enormous sum in a country where the average annual income was just $1,500.
Several donors answered the new shout-outs. The German foreign ministry and the Gerda Henkel Foundation contributed around $1 million a year, while a University of Hamburg team led the effort to preserve the manuscripts and examine their contents. Dehumidifiers were bought, and a large building in southern Bamako was restored to serve as Savama’s base. There, the slow process of making new acid-free boxes for the manuscripts and photographing them began in earnest, with Haidara recruiting a growing army of employees. Savama was now well on its way to eclipsing the state-run archive as the principal authority for Malian manuscripts.
Offers of help for the famous little city meanwhile began to flood in from all over the world. UNESCO pledged to rebuild all the demolished mausoleums; it would complete the job in the summer of 2015. An American-led initiative, the Timbuktu Renaissance Action Group, was founded with the intention of reviving Mali through its cultural heritage. Timbuktu Renaissance’s project included a deal with Google to let the company film the city for a Street View version, in which, for a fee, distant users would be able to take a virtual tour and watch footage of locals telling stories about the city. “It’s going to be a tourist tool for us,” said the Malian culture minister, N’Diaye Ramatoulaye Diallo. “They wanted to make it in a way that you can visit Timbuktu completely, you can see the manuscripts, you can visit the mosques, the monuments, everything that is in Timbuktu.” There were even plans afoot to construct the city’s first real university, at an estimated cost of $80 million, with courses in everything from literature to farming to renewable energy.
In autumn 2014, Haidara traveled to Europe to receive the prestigious German Africa Prize, in recognition of his efforts to save the manuscripts and avert an “unimaginable loss” to world heritage, and for his tireless commitment to the development and preservation of African history. Presenting the award, the German foreign minister said, “It could have had quite a different outcome, but today we are pleased that 95 percent of the manuscripts were saved.”
• • •
NOT EVERYONE CAUGHT the new outbreak of Timbuktu fever. In autumn 2015, a multinational group of Africanists gathered at the leafy campus of the University of Birmingham for a symposium in honor of the institution’s honorary senior research fellow, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias. Academics from all over the world gathered in white-walled conference rooms to deliver presentations on subjects as diverse as Catholic missionary education in the kingdom of Kongo and the role of the West African griot. Among the delegates were leading experts on the Islamic heritage of West Africa, including Farias, Shamil Jeppie, Charles Stewart and Mauro Nobili of the University of Illinois, and Bruce Hall.
Hall, a tall, soft-spoken assistant professor from Duke University, had known Diakité, Haidara, and Hunwick since 1999, when, as a young Ph.D. student, he had spent several years in Timbuktu working with the manuscripts. He was one of the few Westerners who could read and understand the texts that filled West Africa’s Islamic libraries. Since 2013 he had become the most outspoken critic of Savama. Watching a video of Diakité’s lecture at Oregon and reading her shout-out for funding, he had felt a growing sense of frustration. He had experienced firsthand the commercialization of the private collections and the restrictions on access for researchers that often ensued. The sums Savama was trying to raise, the secrecy, and the mystic terms in which the manuscripts were being described had been red flags to Hall, who sent out a highly skeptical response to Diakité on the Mansa-1 mailing list, which went out to African studies departments around the world.
According to Hall, Diakité had mischaracterized the nature of the documents. Contrary to her claims that they were polyglot, encyclopedic, and secular in nature, 98 percent were written in literary Arabic and, apart from the many single-page letters and contracts, the vast majority were Islamic religious texts. This was not to underestimate them: “They provide a wonderfully important resource for scholars, both Malian and non-Malian, but they are best understood as the product of a wider tradition of Islamic scholarship across West Africa and the broader Muslim World,” Hall wrote. They did not need to be made into objects of veneration.
Hall continued to mine this theme in Birmingham. He was now using the F-word—“fraud”—openly. Since the founding of the Ahmad Baba center, millions of dollars had been given to people in the manuscript business, and the number of manuscripts had been inflated to attract further funding. But any group that tried to work with the documents in Timbuktu had become frustrated, he said: “The money [for Timbuktu] depends on a certain fraud, a misrepresentation of materials and amount of materials.” For Hall, 300,000 was a best guess of the “total number of Arabic manuscripts that are extant in Northern Mali altogether.” Even Haidara
himself in 2011 had put the number in the whole Timbuktu region at 101,820, Hall said. Unless they were being imported on a huge scale, the number in the city itself must therefore be far lower. The state-owned Ahmad Baba institute was by far the most significant collection: if all the single-page letters, contracts, poems, and other material were counted, it might reach 30,000 items. Haidara’s was the largest private collection. Most others were small, Hall said, with the majority numbering only in the several hundreds.
At the heart of the issue of numbers lay a problem of definition. In 2000, London’s Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation had catalogued the Mamma Haidara collection and found just four thousand documents, but this did not include the large numbers of single-page bills of sale, legal judgments, and so on, each of which was now commonly defined in Timbuktu as a manuscript in itself. In my first meeting with Haidara in 2013, he had plumped for an even broader definition by scribbling on a Post-it note and declaring that, in his father’s view, even this would have been called a manuscript. For Hall, such a definition was meaningless.
Hall did not doubt that the evacuations of the old Ahmad Baba building, the Fondo Kati, or the Mamma Haidara library had taken place. “Well-placed officials in the Malian government insisted early on that the manuscripts from [the old Ahmad Baba building] were mostly safe, and that they had been hidden or smuggled out of Timbuktu during the Salafist occupation,” he wrote in a footnote to his paper. But contacts in Timbuktu had told him that many other manuscript collections had remained in the town during the occupation, and that some had been moved to Bamako only after liberation, in order to support the claims that such vast numbers had been evacuated. The story had then been grossly inflated for the international media, and the result was a huge injection of Western money into Savama.
“The narrative of rescued manuscripts is at best misleading,” he noted, “and, at worst, completely dishonest and fraudulent.”
None of the experts in the room disagreed with the substantive points of his deeply critical assessment. How, asked Tom McCaskie, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, had it come about that Timbuktu’s manuscripts had been inflated into something they were not? “Are we talking about an entire structure built on . . . I was going to say ‘lies,’ but I now say ‘nothing’?”
If Hall was right, the hero of Timbuktu had greatly exaggerated the scale of the rescue operation, and Savama had received money to evacuate manuscripts that had either never moved or didn’t even exist.
Reexamining the narrative of the private library evacuation with Hall’s skeptical eye turned up many unanswered questions. Putting the significant issue of the numbers aside for the moment, why had Haidara provided no eyewitnesses to corroborate the more dramatic parts of the operation, though he had repeatedly been asked for them? At first he had said that it was a matter of security; later, that people had been angry with him for giving their names to reporters. Why did some of his associates initially agree to talk, then become mysteriously unavailable? Even the most willing interviewees from the state library would clam up when asked about the evacuation of the privately owned manuscripts: “Ah, no, no, no!” one Ahmad Baba employee said, laughing. “I cannot talk about the private libraries!”
When other accounts were finally obtained, they often disagreed with Haidara’s or Diakité’s version of events, and the terrible twosome even disagreed with each other. Why, for instance, would Diakité have told Deborah Stolk that the Lere route was used just as much as the Douentza route—and that “supervisory and security personnel” were “camped out all along it”—when Haidara said it had been tried only once, and that had resulted in a hijacking? Why would Haidara initially deny the great kidnapping of twenty Niger boats, since he supposedly ransomed it “like he was using his credit card”? Why had other Niger captains who plied the river at that time not heard about this major incident, which would have had a direct bearing on their trade? Why would Diakité say that French helicopters saluted the couriers while they held up manuscripts, when Haidara said, “That’s false. That’s just commentary”?
While certain details appeared unreliable, the academics raised more fundamental questions with the Savama story. How great, really, was the jihadist threat, when all the private collections were hidden? Thomas Strieder, the German chargé d’affaires, came away from his meeting with Savama believing that documents were being destroyed “again and again,” but Haidara himself recalled only vaguely hearing of two early instances of destroyed manuscripts, which he said were “little, little things.” To Tjoelker, meanwhile, was led to believe the jihadists had promised a ceremonial book-burning, an auto-da-fé, on the day of Mawlid, and Haidara made this part of his grant request to the Dutch embassy. They needed money urgently, he wrote in his application letter, since they had to evacuate “before . . . 24 January next, the date at which the jihadists threaten to take action and to proceed to destroy this cultural heritage.” The correspondent of The New Republic was even told that librarians had been instructed to gather their manuscripts together for just such an occasion. Yet none of the Timbuktiens I interviewed recalled any such threat. Asked specifically if the jihadists had spoken of burning the manuscripts at Mawlid, the head of Timbuktu’s cultural mission, El-Boukhari Ben Essayouti, responded: “No, I have not heard that.” The grand imam, the man who led negotiations over Mawlid with the jihadists, and a most unimpeachable source, denied it outright: “They did not threaten to burn the manuscripts of Timbuktu,” he told me.
While the destruction of the mausoleums was evidence of the clash between the Salafists’ beliefs and those of most Timbuktiens, the jihadists’ attitude toward the manuscripts was different. Certain documents would no doubt have been viewed as haram, forbidden, but given that it could take an expert hours to decipher a single page, how likely was it that these often illiterate fighters would find time to weed out the works they disapproved of, or else burn the manuscripts wholesale, including many copies of their holiest texts? On several occasions, the jihadists had promised to protect them, and if Diadié and Sane Chirfi Alpha were correct, the Islamic Police had not even objected to their being shipped south for conservation.
And what of that widely reported act of destruction on the day of liberation itself? If Mayor Cissé really believed they had “torched all the important ancient manuscripts,” as he told the world’s media, why did it take so long to correct this mistake? Later, the Ahmad Baba institute estimated that 4,203 documents had been lost, but few seemed to believe even this many had been burned. They had probably been stolen, most said, and the fire was set to cover the theft. This seemed plausible, and could perhaps explain how 10,000 manuscripts had been left in the basement. Still, it was odd that no one seemed to care what the missing manuscripts actually were, or know which families had given them to the institute.
(Later, when I asked Haidara if he had exaggerated the threat, he responded: “If you believe that there was no threat, that’s your opinion and it does not concern us. The threat existed before Mawlid, during, and after this event. To understand this . . . it is sufficient to look to the case of the manuscript burnings that the world media broadcast.”)
The academics’ skepticism extended even to the biggest question of all: the manuscripts’ vaunted contents. Many of these experts thought the documents’ historical value was as overrevved as the numbers: great claims were made for the private collections, but access was so tightly controlled that few of these claims could be verified. Most damning in this regard was a new study by a South African academic of the documents Hunwick had become so excited about in the Fondo Kati, which were said to have contained the original notes for the Tarikh al-fattash. According to the study, at least some of this material had been forged.
With almost everything about the private evacuation now in doubt, I turned to the Dutch diplomats, at least three of whom—To Tjoelker, the ambassador Maarten Brouwer,
and his press attaché, Mirjam Tassing—had witnessed lockers of manuscripts arriving in Bamako in early 2013. They were astonished by the accusations. Tjoelker, who had done so much to find money for Savama, produced photographs of stacks of lockers in Bamako, some of which were open and filled with manuscripts. “There were hundreds of boxes of metal lockers of the kind you would transport when you are going on a long journey. It was really very, very impressive,” she recalled. “They kept coming in and we made a very rapid count—I can’t remember how—and there were something like 150,000 manuscripts there.” Every locker was numbered, so they could tell who paid for it and which family the manuscripts came from, so they had “a registration of all those big lockers.”
Brouwer was similarly incredulous. “Whatever people are saying, I can tell you the story is for real,” he said. He was alarmed enough by Hall’s accusations, however, to make inquiries of his own. He met with Haidara and was shown the contents of his Bamako safe houses, where many of the manuscripts were still being stored. The result was conclusive, he wrote in an e-mail:
We observed a large quantity of manuscripts that were already inventoried and/or registered, in total 110,000. This number would equal an estimated 800–1000 containers. We have seen ourselves roughly 1300 full containers with manuscripts not yet unpacked, making a total of 2100–2300 containers. Of course these are rough calculations, but we feel comfortable to say that the total of 2400 mentioned by Haidara is most certainly correct. We visited all seven locations within a timespan of three hours and no containers have been moved in the meantime. . . . At all locations we opened some containers and boxes, and manuscripts were inside. We lifted containers to check if they were full or not and all were fully loaded.
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