The Storied City

by Charlie English

  For data on European death rates in West Africa, see Philip D. Curtin’s Disease and Empire and “The End of the ‘White Man’s Grave’? Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa.” In the lecture “Rivers of Death in Africa,” Michael Gelfand stated that “there is no other illness I know that humbles a clinician as greatly as [malaria],” and estimated that 80 percent of the Europeans in Mungo Park’s second expedition died from it.

  John Ledyard’s life story was compiled by Jared Sparks in 1828, in Memoirs of the Life and Travels of John Ledyard from His Journals and Correspondence. Ledyard’s canoe journey down the Connecticut River inspired the creation of the Ledyard Canoe Club at Dartmouth College in 1920; it still runs paddling trips in New England. Ledyard’s last mission is documented in Proceedings and in Hallett, Records. Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on meeting John Ledyard can be found in the third U.S. president’s Autobiography.

  3. HELL IS NOT FAR AWAY

  The dunetop negotiation of Friday, March 30, 2012, was related to me by Kader Kalil and Boubacar “Jansky” Mahamane, who was also present, and by Mayor Halle Ousmane Cissé, Diadié Hamadoun Maiga, and Governor Mamadou Mangara, who were told what had happened. According to Kalil, the idea for a meeting was floated by leaders of the Arab militia; without exception among my interviewees in Timbuktu it was seen as a trick to ensure that the southerners, and the military, left without a fight. Jansky believed the strange circumstances of the meeting were a deliberate tactic to mystify the delegates: it was “a joke, a great production,” he said. It seems that the junta had already ordered a withdrawal anyway; according to a soldier in the reinforcement column from Niafounke, as soon as the troops reached Timbuktu they were told to retreat toward Sevare. Governor Mangara said of the decision to abandon the city: “After the coup d’état there was no immediate force that could defend it in a way that was suitable, despite the desire that was there.” Gaston Damango declined to be interviewed.

  In addition to the interviewees mentioned in the text, I have used a few published sources for the events of April 1, including Houday Ag Mohamed’s Tombouctou 2012: La ville sainte dans les ténèbres du jihadisme. The resident who recalled grenades falling from a pickup like mangoes from a tree was speaking to researchers from Human Rights Watch, who included it in the organization’s 2012 report Mali: War Crimes by Northern Rebels. The MNLA’s statements from the period can be read in large part in the archives of the Toumast Press website. There are two aspects of the day’s events worth noting here: First, several theories exist about why the ammunition store in the army camp exploded; without being able to find an eyewitness, I have gone with the theories of Jansky and Ag Mohamed, who agree that someone was trying to shoot the lock off. Second, there were differing accounts of how the young man was killed; some say he was hit by a shell fragment. Fatouma Harber’s account, however, seems reliable, as she was with him minutes before he died.

  Jenny Blincoe and the community of the NaturePlus program at London’s Natural History Museum helped identify the Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus roseus, in the garden of the Hôtel Bouctou, from photographs.

  4. THE FOURTH TRAVELLER

  More detailed accounts of the extraordinary lives and travels of Simon Lucas and Daniel Houghton can be found in Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa and in Robin Hallett, Records of the African Association 1788–1831. The account of Mungo Park’s first journey, drawn from interviews by the African Association’s Bryan Edwards and published in Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, is still an easy and unpretentious read. Christopher Fyfe’s entry on Park in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that some readers of his Travels were disconcerted that he failed to condemn slavery explicitly, and indeed he lived for some time with two slavers, Dr. John Laidley and Karfa Taura. Nevertheless, as Pekka Masonen has pointed out, on this first journey he seems to have encountered African people without many of the prejudices of earlier or later generations. The Duchess of Devonshire’s rewriting of the hospitable Bambara girls’ song can be found in Lindley Murray’s Introduction to the English Reader; or, A Selection of Pieces, in Prose and Poetry . . . with Rules and Observations for Assisting Children to Read with Propriety (first published 1816). Two likenesses of Park are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The first, painted around the time of his first voyage, shows a bold, blue-eyed young adventurer; the second, painted around 1805 by the satirist Thomas Rowlandson, shows an aging, balding individual who appears to have a broken nose. Joseph Banks’s remarks at the Star and Garter in 1799 are recorded in Proceedings. The account of Park’s second journey and death is from “Isaaco’s Journal of a Voyage After Mr. Mungo Park, to Ascertain His Life or Death” and Park, The Life and Travels of Mungo Park.

  Park’s voyages played a key part in building the Timbuktu myth, according to E. W. Bovill, and in driving other explorers toward it. Banks in particular was quite carried away by Park’s account of “gold in abundance in all the torrents that flow into the Joliba.”

  5. AL-QAEDA TO THE RESCUE

  Reliable information about jihadist groups in the Sahara is hard to come by, but I found interviews and the following sources useful: Wolfram Lacher, “Organized Crime and Conflict in the Sahel-Sahara Region”; Andrew Lebovich, “The Local Face of Jihadism in Northern Mali”; Stephen Harmon, Terror and Insurgency in the Sahara-Sahel Region; and Mohammed Mahmoud Abu al-Ma’ali’s report “Al-Qaeda and Its Allies in the Sahel and the Sahara.” The biographies of several of the most wanted jihadists can be found in the American Foreign Policy Council’s World Almanac of Islamism. The U.S. diplomat’s cable describing Iyad Ag Ghaly as a “bad penny” can be found on the WikiLeaks website. For a hostage’s firsthand view of living with jihadist brigades in the desert, see A Season in Hell by Robert Fowler, a Canadian diplomat who was kidnapped in 2008.

  Sanda Ould Bouamama’s complaints about the conditions in the looted city were published by the Al-Akhbar news agency: “You know that we came here late, and found the city partly destroyed. . . . Many of the institutions were plundered, and its headquarters were smashed, and its cars stolen.” Iyad Ag Ghaly’s declaration of sharia was published in Arabic by the Nouakchott News Agency; I have used an English translation by Aaron Y. Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute. The Bamako paper La nouvelle république reported Kalil’s interview with Ag Ghaly on April 4 and summarized it as blaming “all the misfortune of the people [on] their lack of faith in God and [on the fact they had] abandoned the practice of sharia, which has been transformed under the guidance of white Westerners. . . . Because of that there is misery, debauchery, and other scourges [on] our society.” Kalil and Mayor Cissé both spoke to the Associated Press for a piece titled “Islamists Impose Sharia in Mali’s Timbuktu.” Kalil said that under sharia, women would be forced to wear the Salafist veil, thieves would be punished by having their hands cut off, and adulterers would be stoned to death. “Things are going to heat up here,” said Mayor Cissé. “Our women are not going to wear the veil just like that.”

  6. IT SHALL BE MINE

  The 1823 British expedition to Africa that inspired a response from the Société de Géographie included Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton, and Walter Oudney. In The Bornu Mission, volume 2 of Missions to the Niger, E. W. Bovill observed that “it remains difficult to recall in all the checkered history of geographic discovery . . . a more odious man than Dixon Denham.” Clapperton, by contrast, was a successful and respected explorer whom Alexander Gordon Laing would regard as his closest rival in the race for Timbuktu.

  Details of the Société de Géographie’s snowballing Timbuktu prize are found in the relevant issues of the society’s Bulletin.

  For the principal sources for Alexander Gordon Laing’s journey, see the notes to the prologue. It is worth clarifying here the identities of the Kunta Arab shaykhs, who sometimes confused Laing. The “Cheif Mar
aboot Mouckta” to whom Babani was supposed to deliver the explorer was probably the scholar Shaykh Sidi al-Mukhtar, who had died in 1811, leaving more than eight children. His son Shaykh Sidi Muhammad, who received the injured Laing in 1826, died of a fever later that year. Next in line was al-Mukhtar al-Saghir, who enabled Laing to continue to Timbuktu and eventually wrote to the pasha about the explorer’s death. Al-Mukhtar al-Saghir died in 1846 or 1847 and was succeeded by his younger brother Ahmad al-Bakkai, who lived until 1865. This family represented something of a mini-renaissance in the scholarly activities of the region. More details of their lives and works can be found in Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Meanings of Timbuktu.

  Baron Rousseau’s letter announcing the death of Laing, first published in L’étoile on May 2, 1827, and datelined Sukkara-Ley-Tripoli, begins: “Major Laing, whose tragic end has been announced, perished as a result of his courageous perseverance after having nevertheless been able to visit the famous town of Timbuktu.” It can be found in E. W. Bovill’s Missions to the Niger, volume 1. The baron’s mention of a “detailed history of the town,” probably a reference to the Tarikh al-sudan, is in a letter published in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, volume 7, while excerpts from letters on the history of “Sidi Ali Baba of Arawan,” dated March 3 and June 12, 1828, can be found in volume 9. Baron Rousseau described Timbuktu as having become for Europeans what the enchanted pleasure city of Irem-Zatilemad was to the ancient Arabs, or the fountain of youth to Eastern mythology. It was Rousseau who appears to have first used the adjective “mysterious” to describe the city.

  Réné Caillié’s account of his successful visit to Timbuktu—and his critique that “the city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth”—is told in English in Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo. The 1830 edition is prefaced by a survey of the awful toll of African explorers: “In vain, however, have Houghton, Browne, Hornemann, and Park—in vain have their successors, our countrymen, Tuckey, Peddie, Campbell, Gray, Ritchie, Bowdich, Oudney, Clapperton, Denham and Laing—in vain have other European travellers, Burkhardt, Beaufort, Mollien, Belzoni, started from different points of the coast of Africa, animated with the hope of removing the veil which enveloped the mysterious city:—all have either perished or been baffled in the attempt.”

  The critical reception of the French edition of Caillié’s book was published in The Quarterly Review in 1830. In “Timbuktu: A Case Study of the Role of Legend in History,” Eugenia Herbert summarizes the British response to Caillié: “There is no need to repeat the arrogant incredulity with which the news was received in Britain, the bitter charges made against [Edme-François] Jomard, his champion and the president of the Société de Géographie, or the insinuations in some quarters that the entire story was a fabrication drawn from the papers of the murdered Laing. The sad truth was that Laing had been cast in a heroic mold befitting the conqueror of Timbuktu and Caillié was uneducated, a provincial, a man obsessed, acting entirely on his own. Not until [Heinrich] Barth verified the essentials twenty years later was Caillié grudgingly given his due in England.”

  According to estimates at measuringworth.com, Caillié’s 10,000 franc prize would be worth roughly $60,000 today, while the Peddie expedition’s 1816 budget of £750,000 is the equivalent of around $72 million currently.

  The mystery of what had become of Laing’s papers rumbled on for another century. In 1910, a further account of Laing’s death was given to the French explorer Albert Bonnel de Mézières. He found an eighty-two-year-old Barabish Arab who had been brought up by his uncle Ahmadu Labeida. The old man told Bonnel de Mézières that Labeida had often told him how and where he had killed Laing. In this account, Labeida and three other men on horseback caught up with Laing while he was resting in the shade of a tree and asked him to renounce his faith and become a Muslim. Laing refused, and Labeida ordered the other men to kill him. They hesitated, so Labeida had to stab him himself while the other three held Laing’s arms. They also killed the Arab boy who accompanied Laing, and cut off the explorer’s head before burning all his papers in case they contained magic.

  Bonnel de Mézières found two buried skeletons at the spot he had been shown. Medical officers in Timbuktu examined the remains and confirmed that they had belonged to a European adult and an Arab youth. They were buried in the local Christian cemetery.

  Joshua Hammer’s recent book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts contains a claim that Laing’s journals are in the Mamma Haidara collection. “One of his father’s most prized works was the original travel diary of Major Alexander Gordon Laing. . . . A few years after Laing’s murder, a scribe had written a primer of Arabic grammar over the explorer’s papers—an early example of recycling.” This would be remarkable if true: Dmitry Bondarev of the University of Hamburg, who is working closely with Haidara, told me it was a “shaky claim.”

  7. ISMAEL’S LIST

  Ismael Diadié Haidara’s comment “We do not know really what is happening” was made to Valérie Marin La Meslée and published in “Tombouctou, patrimoine mondial aux mains des islamistes?” Warnings about the manuscripts’ future are culled from various news sources: UNESCO chief Irina Bokova sent out her warning on April 2, 2012; the petition to preserve the manuscripts circulated by the West African Research Association can be found at http://www.bu.edu/wara/timbuktu/; Shamil Jeppie was quoted as saying, “I have no faith in the rebels,” in Pascal Fletcher, “Timbuktu Librarians Protect Manuscripts from Rebels”; Hamady Bocoum’s words about the secular order were published in Serge Daniel, “Timbuktu’s History at Risk As Rebellion Moves In.”

  Evidence of a long-standing threat against secular education in Mali can be found in Amnesty International’s report Mali: Five Months of Crisis: Armed Rebellion and Military Coup. A resident of Timbuktu told Amnesty’s researchers that AQIM had sent several warnings to teachers forbidding them to instruct pupils in French, starting in 2008. Other educators told me in interviews that girls and boys had to be separated, and that early on, certain subjects were removed from the curriculum.

  The figure of approximately half a million refugees or internally displaced from northern Mali in 2012 is taken from the International Organization for Migration report The Mali Migration Crisis at a Glance. According to the IOM, by March 2013, a total of 175,412 people had been forced to flee to other countries, and 260,665 were internally displaced. The pre-crisis population of the north as a whole was estimated at 1.3 million.

  The account of Ismael Diadié Haidara’s departure from Timbuktu is his own. It corresponds with what he told Susana Molins Lliteras of Cape Town University, who has worked closely on the Fondo Kati collection and who verified his smuggling of four manuscripts south. According to her article “The Making of the Fondo Ka‘ti Archive: A Family Collection in Timbuktu,” these included a Kuran dating from 1482 and three manuscripts with marginal notes written, Ismael said, by famous ancestors.

  There is some discrepancy in the timing of the hiding of other libraries. Mohamed Touré of the Mamma Haidara library said he had begun to take manuscripts off the shelves on the night of Saturday, March 30, 2012, after discussing the matter on the phone with Abdel Kader Haidara, who was in Bamako that morning. Haidara denied this, and said no manuscripts were moved until at least a week later. Haidara also disputed Mohamed Cissé’s timing on the move of the al-Wangari library, saying it was moved on the eve of the occupation rather than afterward. Since it was Cissé who evacuated the al-Wangari manuscripts, I have gone with his version of events.

  The jihadist Adama was colorfully profiled by La dépêche in “Révélations sur les hommes qui sèment la terreur au nord Mali”: “Known by the name Commissioner Adama, for having protected the people of the town at a certain time against the looters of the MNLA . . . Of Chadian nationality, he was always noticeable in the town for his particul
ar style of dress: cartridge belt, explosive vest, and Kalashnikov on his shoulder.”

  The Ford Foundation confirmed it had indeed awarded a grant to Haidara to learn English at Oxford.

  The footage shot by the Al Jazeera crew on Saturday, April 14, showing the Mamma Haidara library empty, was available online. The Manuscrits de Tombouctou Facebook account, run by Haidara’s assistant, Banzoumana Traoré, referred to Al Jazeera’s visit in a posting on April 18, and said the manuscripts had been moved by this time: “At the level of private libraries . . . particularly Mamma Haidara and Imam Ben Essayouti, which contain a large amount of manuscripts . . . the manuscripts were transferred to other premises away from the usual depositories.”

  Several days after he was barred from the building, Abdoulaye Cissé was told that Abou Zeid was staying inside “with his people.” The AQIM emir had his hostages there too, Cissé was told, including for a time a Swiss national, Beatrice Stockly. According to the tourist guide Bastos, Stockly was also briefly held in the bank opposite his house. She was released, after a ransom was reportedly paid, on Tuesday, April 24. She returned to Timbuktu and was abducted again by AQIM in January 2016.

  PART TWO. DESTRUCTION

  The quotation from Omar Khayyám, a favorite of the late Christopher Hitchens, is with Richard Le Gallienne’s paraphrasing.

  8. THE ARMCHAIR EXPLORER

  I owe William Desborough Cooley’s presence in the narrative to Pekka Masonen, who gives him “the real honour of establishing [the] modern historiography of Sudanic Africa” and describes his book The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained as “epoch-making.” Aside from Masonen, and Cooley’s own work, I have drawn from R. C. Bridges, “W. D. Cooley, the RGS and African Geography in the Nineteenth Century,” and Bridges’s entry on Cooley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Cooley’s review of Jean-Baptiste Douville’s three-volume Voyage au Congo et dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique équinoxiale was published in The Foreign Quarterly Review in 1832. The Arab sources Cooley used, including al-Bakri and Ibn Khaldun, are in N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. John Ralph Willis was writing in the introduction to the 1966 edition of Cooley’s Negroland of the Arabs.