The Storied City

by Charlie English

  I imagine Timbuktu’s story as a series of myths and corrections laid down one on top of the other. In the future, perhaps, some psycho-geographer will drill down through all these tight-packed layers that reach into the Sudanese past. At the bottom they will find the story of Zuwa Alayaman slaying the fish-god at Kukiya. They will watch Ali Kulun riding past on his way to liberate the Songhay, his horse strengthened with special food. They will look on as the powerful slave woman Tinbuktu, with her sticking-out navel, sets up her desert camp, and see Malian armadas preparing to depart for the Americas, and craftsmen sheathing Musa’s palace with gold. And at the top, closest to the present, they will watch combat helicopters circle a great convoy of Niger pinasses that forges its way upstream, carrying its cargo of invaluable books. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of books.

  Burned manuscripts in the Ahmad Baba institute’s Sankore building, January 2013.

  Joseph Banks, a founder of the African Association, as painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, soon after his return from James Cook’s first circumnavigation in 1771.

  An “extraordinary man”: Connecticut-born John Ledyard, the African Association’s first explorer, who died in Cairo in 1789.

  Mungo Park, a Scottish doctor, reached the Niger on July 21, 1796. The account of his travels created a new archetype for the adventurer in Africa.

  Alexander Gordon Laing, who became the first modern European to reach Timbuktu, wrote of the “abundant” records in the town. He was murdered soon after leaving it.

  René Caillié, who returned alive from Timbuktu, was awarded the Société de Géographie’s 10,000 franc prize, which provoked a furious response in Britain.

  Caillié’s expedition to Timbuktu was low-cost and low-key: he learned Arabic and traveled in the guise of a Muslim.

  Colonial troops raising the French flag over Timbuktu in 1894, as envisaged by the artist Frédéric Lix.

  Heinrich Barth, perhaps the greatest explorer of West Africa, found a copy of the Tarikh al-sudan in June 1853 in Gando.

  A map of Timbuktu, drawn by Heinrich Barth, identifies six districts surrounding the market. The great mosque, Jingere Ber, is in the bottom left corner.

  Barth arriving at Timbuktu on September 7, 1853. Seeing a mass of people coming to welcome him, he galloped forward, gun in hand, to receive their salaams.

  A manuscript on astrology, from the Mamma Haidara collection, which depicts the signs of the zodiac and the points of the compass.

  An illustrated manuscript with a famous collection of Muslim prayers, the Dalail al-khayrat, in the Ahmad Baba institute.

  Abdel Kader Haidara with some of his more precious manuscripts, on display in Savama’s new Bamako office.

  Haidara showing steel lockers filled with manuscripts to Dutch diplomats in Bamako in early 2013.

  Ismael Diadié Haidara, the proprietor of the Fondo Kati library, who took four of his most precious manuscripts to Bamako after the first week of occupation.

  Mukhtar bin Yahya al-Wangari outside his family library in central Timbuktu. The al-Wangari collection was one of many that remained in the city throughout the occupation.

  Abou Zeid, the “Little Emir,” was the al-Qaeda governor of Timbuktu in 2012. He was killed by French forces in northern Mali in February 2013.

  The Sankore mosque, in the north of the city. The area around the mosque was home to many of Timbuktu’s Islamic scholars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  Pro-MNLA demonstrators marching against jihadist rule in October 2012, after a crackdown on Timbuktu’s women by the Islamic Police.

  A locker filled with manuscripts that were shown to Dutch diplomats in a storage room in Bamako in early 2013.

  NOTES

  My account of Timbuktu in 2012–2013 is drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews conducted in Mali, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and South Africa between 2013 and 2016. Supporting material, including correspondence, reports, and grant applications, was provided by foreign ministries and donor organizations, often willingly, and occasionally under Freedom of Information legislation. The narrative of exploration, meanwhile, is drawn from the rich range of works written by explorers and their sponsors. The African Association was diligent in documenting its purpose and activities, issuing Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa periodically to members. These were made publicly available in a two-volume edition in 1810, and in 1964 were collected by Robin Hallett, along with other papers from the association, and published as Records of the African Association 1788–1831, with an insightful introductory history of the organization. Papers relating to other West African explorers, Alexander Gordon Laing in particular, were definitively compiled by the amateur historian E. W. Bovill in his series Missions to the Niger. In addition to these works, I returned again and again to a handful of more recent sources. Chief among them were translations of the Timbuktu scholars, including John Hunwick’s Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, which provides the most authoritative translation of the Tarikh al-sudan, and Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse’s earlier translations into French of the Tarikh al-sudan (Houdas) and the Tarikh al-fattash (Houdas and Delafosse). Pekka Masonen’s The Negroland Revisited provides one of the few detailed narrative accounts of Europe’s relationship with the region, while Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias’s Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali is a salutory warning that the history of Timbuktu is in a state of perpetual flux.

  A NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND NAMES

  As readers of early drafts of this book pointed out, there are few greater obstacles to cross-cultural understanding than a profusion of unfamiliar names or foreign words with unrecognized diacritical marks. So although I have opted to follow the style used by the journal Sudanic Africa for Arabic transliteration, I have removed some of these marks, including in quoted passages, in an attempt to simplify the experience of the general reader.

  Names of people and places have provided a particular challenge, since they have often been romanized differently in different languages. This has created some inconsistencies: I have used the English spelling “Timbuktu,” for instance, as opposed to the Francophone “Tombouctou,” but have spelled the name of modern Malians who share their name with that of the Prophet as “Mohamed,” the way they would spell it, and not as the standard English “Muhammad,” which is the spelling used for historical figures. The relatively small pool of surnames in Mali, meanwhile, has made a mockery of the Western style of using the last name on second mention. (In this story, there are at least five Haidaras, four Maigas, and five Tourés.) Malians get around this by using a variety of names or name combinations. The country’s current leader, President Keita, for example, is known universally as Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, or IBK, and his predecessor Amadou Toumani Touré as ATT. Nicknames—such as “Jansky,” “Air Mali,” and even “John Travolta”—are also widely adopted, and are sometimes printed on people’s business cards.

  My guiding principle has been to try to make everything as straightforward as possible for the reader, without intending any disrespect.

  PROLOGUE: A MAN OF ENTERPRISE AND GENIUS

  For E. W. Bovill, Alexander Gordon Laing was “the most neglected of the African explorers,” partly because he did not survive to tell his tale, and partly because his journal was not recovered. My account of his expedition to Timbuktu is drawn largely from his papers, which I found in the British National Archives (“Major Laing’s Mission to Timbuctoo: Papers Relating to His Death”) and in Missions to the Niger, volume 1, edited by Bovill. Details of Laing’s early life have been drawn from Robert Chambers, A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, volume 3, and from Christopher Fyfe’s entry on him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. An entertaining modern retelling of his story can be found in Frank T. Kryza’s The Race for Timbuktu.
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br />   Bruce Chatwin’s reflections on “Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, Tumbuktu or Tembuch?” were published as “Gone to Timbuctoo” in Vogue in 1970 and later included in his Anatomy of Restlessness.

  PART ONE. OCCUPATION

  The excerpt from The Thousand and One Nights is drawn from Edward William Lane’s 1841 translation.

  1. A SEEKER OF MANUSCRIPTS

  The accounts of Abdel Kader Haidara’s childhood and early life, and his actions on March 30, 2012, are derived largely from many interviews with him. He included a brief portrait of his father’s career and the history of the Mamma Haidara library in his essay “An Overview of the Major Manuscript Libraries in Timbuktu.” His childhood friend Sane Chirfi Alpha picked out the visit to Timbuktu by Amadou Hampâté Bâ as the moment Haidara identified his purpose in life. Anyone seeking a detailed exploration of the country’s culture and West African Islam could do no better than read Hampâté Bâ’s A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar.

  The group of which Haidara is executive president is the Organisation Non Gouvernementale pour la Sauvegarde et la Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Défense de la Culture Islamique (SAVAMA-DCI), referred to generally as Savama. The manuscript research institute founded in Timbuktu was called the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba, or CEDRAB, but was later renamed the Institut des Hautes Études et de Recherche Islamique Ahmad Baba, or IHERIAB. For simplicity, I have used neither of these official names but have referred to it as the Ahmad Baba center or institute. Minutes of the founding meeting were published in “Report of the UNESCO Meeting of Experts on the Utilisation of Written Sources for the History of Africa Held at Timbuktu” in 1968, and its early history was recounted by John Hunwick in “CEDRAB: The Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba at Timbuktu,” and in Louis Brenner and David Robinson, “Project for the Conservation of Malian Arabic Manuscripts.” Hunwick noted the presence on the center’s staff of “a young sharif,” Haidara, who had inherited a considerable library from his father and carried out “prospection campaigns” in the city to establish lists of manuscripts that were available for purchase. Details of Haidara’s work as a manuscript prospector, including the figure of 16,000 manuscripts collected in twelve years, come from interviews with him and from the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town (tombouctoumanuscripts.org).

  Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1963 comments on African history are in cited in M. E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa, among other sources. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s visit to Timbuktu was documented in the PBS film Wonders of the African World. The PBS microsite www.pbs.org/wonders has further information about Gates’s journeys, including extracts from his diaries. Thabo Mbeki’s pronouncement that the manuscripts opened up possibilities for thinking in new ways about the world was delivered on August 7, 2008, at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town. I found the full text on the website of the Presidency of South Africa, at http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=3336. John Hunwick, Sean O’Fahey, and David Robinson were quoted in Ron Grossman’s article “African Manuscripts Rewriting History: Northwestern Professor Uncovers 16th Century Writings by a Black African That Contradict Many Western Preconceptions.”

  The 2011 claim of more than 100,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu’s collections is from Haidara’s “An Overview of the Major Manuscript Libraries in Timbuktu.” He writes that “the most recent surveys suggest the existence of about one million manuscripts preserved in several private and public libraries [in Timbuktu and surrounding areas]. The most important of them in Timbuktu hold a total of no less than 101,820 manuscripts.” Haidara later told me that this represented only the number that had been tallied by that time.

  An authoritative take on the causes of the 2012 Malian conflict can be found in the International Crisis Group report Mali, Avoiding Escalation. Judith Scheele describes the scale of the desert’s black economy in Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara, in detail worth recounting: “Flour, pasta and petrol come down from Algeria on small jeeps, on antique trucks, or even on the backs of camels and donkeys. Livestock and cigarettes come up from Mali. . . . Veils, perfumes, jewellery, incense and furniture arrive from southern Morocco and Mauritania, places at the forefront of feminine fashion with harbours wide open to Chinese imports; these commodities are often traded by women. . . . Narcotics arrive from Mauritania, via the Western Sahara, or from the Gulf of Guinea, and travel themselves around the southern tip of Algeria through Niger and Chad to Egypt, and thence to Israel and Europe. Arms come up from long-standing crisis zones, such as Chad, or are unloaded in the large ports of the Gulf of Guinea and are sold throughout the area.”

  2. A WIDE EXTENDED BLANK

  Details of the establishment of the African Association and its early exploits are drawn from Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, and from Robin Hallett, Records of the African Association 1788–1831, which gives a clear picture of what was known in Europe about the continent and why Joseph Banks and his associates wanted to explore it. A colorful modern retelling of the association’s activities can be found in Anthony Sattin’s The Gates of Africa.

  Banks has been the subject of several biographies, among them Harold B. Carter’s Sir Joseph Banks 1743–1820 and Joseph Banks: A Life by Patrick O’Brian, a writer best known for his Aubrey–Maturin seafaring novels. Some 20,000 pieces of Banks’s correspondence are said to survive; many of these have been collected by Neil Chambers in The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection 1768–1820.

  The scientist’s own observations on visiting the African continent in 1771 can be read in The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks. Jonathan Swift’s thoughts on African maps are part of his 1733 poem “On Poetry: A Rhapsody.” Horace Walpole’s remarks about James Bruce’s exploits in Ethiopia can be found in Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann: His Britannic Majesty’s Resident at the Court of Florence, from 1760 to 1785, volume 2. The English merchant’s comments on the significance of the African trade are drawn from John Peter Demarin’s anonymously published A Treatise upon the Trade from Great-Britain to Africa, Humbly Recommended to the Attention of Government, by an African Merchant.

  The various theories of the origins of Timbuktu’s name have been explored by Riccardo Pelizzo in his article “Timbuktu: A Lesson in Underdevelopment” and by Sékéné Mody Cissoko in Toumbouctou et l’empire Songhay. Sources on the geography of the Niger bend include John Hunwick’s Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire and Sanche de Gramont’s The Strong Brown God. The climate history of the Sahara is explored in Susan Keech McIntosh and Roderick McIntosh, “West African Prehistory,” which presents evidence that between 8000 and 5500 BCE the Sahara was a mosaic of shallow lakes and marshes, roamed by elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, and crocodile. Evidence for this Saharan “green period” was found by Heinrich Barth in June 1850, in the form of prehistoric rock carvings of hunters and oxen in the arid central desert.

  My summary of classical geographers’ knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa is drawn from Hallett’s Records and from C. K. Meek, “The Niger and the Classics: The History of a Name.” Further information about the trans-Saharan gold trade can be found in Ward Barrett, “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” and Ian Blanchard’s Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, volume 3. The marvel that is Abraham Cresques’s 1375 map, the Catalan Atlas, which contains the first representation of Timbuktu in Europe, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and can be viewed online at gallica.bnf.fr.

  Quotations from Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa are from John Hunwick’s translation, found in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire. The “architect of Béticos” who built the Jingere Ber mosque is often said to have been the Andalusian man of letters Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, one of several educated Muslims who returned from Mecca with Mansa Musa (for more on al-Sahili, see here). There was no “king of Timbuktu
,” as such, and Leo was probably referring to Askiya al-hajj Muhammad, who reigned at Gao.

  Richard Jobson’s exploits were recorded in The Golden Trade; Or, A Discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians, first published in 1623. The growth of Timbuktu’s allure in the European imagination is drawn in part from Pekka Masonen, The Negroland Revisited, as well as Eugenia Herbert’s “Timbuktu: A Case Study of the Role of Legend in History.” The metaphor of Timbuktu as the magnet that drew Europeans to West Africa was coined by A. S. Kanya-Forstner in The Conquest of the Western Sudan. The wonderfully pithy put-down of African exploration—“There was nothing to discover, we were here all the time”—has been attributed to a former president of Malawi, Hastings Banda.

  The naive explorer’s kit—little more than a pistol and an umbrella—is drawn from Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, although Park also carried “a small assortment of beads, amber and tobacco . . . a few changes of linen, and other necessary apparel . . . [a] pocket sextant, a magnetic compass, and a thermometer; together with two fowling pieces, two pairs of pistols, and some other small articles.” Later explorers would set out with more extensive resources, though few returned with them.