The Storied City

by Charlie English

  9. A HEADLESS HORSEMAN

  The description of life for the librarians in Bamako in May 2012 is drawn from interviews with all three. Their accounts largely correlated. According to UNESCO’s press office, the high-level meeting in Bamako from May 18 to 20 was attended by UNESCO’s assistant director-general for Africa, Lalla Aicha Ben Barka, and the director of its World Heritage Centre, Kishore Rao, who met senior government officials, among them the interim prime minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, and the culture minister, Diallo Fadima Touré. The account of what happened at the meeting is Abdel Kader Haidara’s.

  Acts of brutality by the rebels in the occupied north were documented by Human Rights Watch in its April 2012 report Mali: War Crimes by Northern Rebels. These acts included the alleged gang rape of a twelve-year-old girl in Timbuktu by three Arab militiamen, though I have not independently verified this.

  My description of the creeping radicalization of Timbuktu is based chiefly on interviews, in particular with Mohamed “Hamou” Dédéou, a respected Timbuktu scholar who works with manuscripts, who told me the visits of Salafist preachers began in the 1990s. Many Timbuktiens like to emphasize the foreignness of the jihadists, though there were many influential Malians and Timbuktiens among them, including Oumar Ould Hamaha, Mohamed Ag Mossa, Ag Alfousseyni Houka (“Houka Houka”), and Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, known also by the jihadist name Abou Turab. Al-Mahdi, who is described in some reports as Houka Houka’s son-in-law, was indicted in 2015 by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of attacking religious and historical buildings in Timbuktu. He was sent to The Hague, where on August 22, 2016, he pleaded guilty to all charges against him and sought the forgiveness of the people of Timbuktu. “I would like them to look at me as a son who has lost his way,” he said. He was subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison. Transcripts of evidence given at the trial can be found on the ICC’s website, at www.icc-cpi.int (see especially https://www.icc-cpi.int/Transcripts/CR2016_05767.PDF). A film portrait of al-Mahdi’s time as a leader of Timbuktu’s Islamic Police, made by the journalist Othman Agh Mohamed Othman of Sahara Media, Mali sous le régime des islamistes, was broadcast as a special report on France 2 on January 31, 2013. It can be found online.

  There was some confusion among interviewees as to who led the Islamic Police during the occupation. It seems clear that al-Mahdi and Mossa were in charge of the Hizba, or morality brigade, at different moments. According to both Kader Kalil and transcripts of the ICC trial of al-Mahdi, the now dead Chadian Adama was initially head of the Islamic Police. The Malian reporter Baba Ahmed, in “Mali: Le fantômes de Tomboctou,” meanwhile, describes a man named Khoubey as commissioner, with Hassan Dicko as “superintendent”; and according to Diadié Hamadoun Maiga of the Crisis Committee, at the end of the occupation Hassan was the commissioner. It appears the Hizba was separate or a subdivision of the Islamic Police, and that four or five different jihadists occupied these leadership roles at different times.

  For the description of al-Farouk’s role in Timbuktu, I am indebted to Miranda Dodd, a former Peace Corps volunteer who lived in the city for many years and married a Tuareg chief, poet, and historian. Her Explore Timbuktu website was a useful source for local traditions, while Bruce Hall told me that the legend exists in other parts of the world, and is an Islamic idea given a Timbuktu gloss. Explaining the mausoleums’ “spiritual rampart,” Sane Chirfi Alpha related that an army colonel told him that in 1992 rebels had fired enough grenades and rockets to blow up the city, but no damage was done: “The colonel never understood how . . . they were all thrown and not a single one exploded,” Alpha said. “He said he could not scientifically explain it.”

  The aptly named Mohamed Kassé was interviewed on video by Cheikh Diouara, who gave me the footage, which can also be found on the Al Jazeera website. The April 21, 2012, march on the military camp was reported in Aljimite Ag Mouchallatte, “Tombouctou: Manifestation anti Ansar Adine/AQMI ce weekend.” The account of the Friday, May 4, attack on the tomb of Sidi Mahmud is drawn from contemporary news reports, including “Mali Islamist Militants ‘Destroy’ Timbuktu Saint’s Tomb” and “Mali: Un mausolée profané par Aqmi à Tombouctou,” and from UNESCO’s Decisions Adopted by the World Heritage Committee at Its 36th Session. Baba Akib Haidara and Cheikh Oumar Sissoko were interviewed for “Mali: L’indignation des artistes et intellectuels après les profanations de Tombouctou.” The city’s May 14 cry for help was published on tombouctoumanuscripts.org and elsewhere. Hamaha’s explanation of the Salafists’ belief in low-level tombs was recorded by Diouara. Abdel Kader Haidara revealed his fears about Mawlid to me in interviews, while the festival itself was explained to me by Ismael Diadié Haidara and by Fatouma Harber.

  10. THE POPE OF TIMBUKTU

  Students of Heinrich Barth are lucky to have a recent account of his life and expedition to Central Africa in Steve Kemper’s A Labyrinth of Kingdoms, from which the translations of Gustav von Schubert, Barth’s brother-in-law, are drawn. Other details of Barth’s life come from A. H. M. Kirk-Greene’s introduction to Barth’s Travels in Nigeria and from Heinrich Barth: Ein Forscher in Afrika, edited by Heinrich Schiffers. The greatest source on Barth is, of course, the explorer’s own monumental Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. The Longman edition (1857–1858) contains evocative color illustrations by Johann Martin Bernatz, which are based on Barth’s sketches. It can be viewed online on the British Library website, at www.bl.uk.

  The italics in Barth’s “to be useful to humanity” are mine.

  The review of Barth’s Wanderings Along the Punic and Cyrenaic Shores of the Mediterranean (Wanderungen durch das punische und kyrenäische Küstenland; the book was published in German only) appeared in The Athenæum in 1850.

  James Richardson’s eight volumes of journals were published posthumously as Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850–51. Richardson was deeply interested in the people who made up his expedition, and to a modern reader his account is more gossipy and somewhat more engaging than Barth’s. G. W. Crowe’s opinion of Richardson is cited in Kemper, A Labyrinth of Kingdoms.

  John Nicholson’s translations of two poems written by al-Bakkai to the sultan of Masina in defense of Barth were included as an appendix in the explorer’s Travels.

  The opinion that Barth’s portrait of the economic life of the historic city would not be bettered is from Elias Saad’s Social History of Timbuktu. Details of the funeral in which Barth’s grieving relatives buried all the still-living explorer’s possessions are found in Kemper, A Labyrinth of Kingdoms.

  Eduard Vogel did not return alive to Europe. He was murdered in 1856 in Wara, the capital of Waday, by the sultan of that kingdom.

  11. SECRET AGENTS

  The connection between the cultural destruction and UNESCO was well understood by Timbuktiens. “Every time UNESCO spoke about the manuscripts, we told them, ‘No, no, really, do not speak about them, because if you do, this is how [the jihadists] will react,’” said Sane Chirfi Alpha. The United Nations body was nevertheless in a difficult position, as director-general Irina Bokova explained to me in 2016: “I know there is this thinking that we don’t have to tease them, we have to appease them . . . [but] we have to speak out.”

  There are numerous contemporary news reports of the battle of Gao, including “Nord du Mali: Gao est aux mains des islamistes.” The best sources for the account of the destruction in Timbuktu, meanwhile, are the videos shot by journalists who had been told in advance what was going to happen. The smashing of the Sidi Yahya door can be seen in Othman Agh Mohamed Othman’s film Mali sous le régime des islamistes (Sahara Media). Sanda Ould Bouamama’s question “UNESCO is what?” was reported by Serge Daniel in “Mausolées détruits au Mali: Bamako dénonce une furie destructrice.” Hamaha was cited by Julius Cavendish in “Destroying Timbuktu: The Jihadist Who Inspires the Demolition of the Shrines.” Transcripts from the ICC trial of Ahmad
al-Faqi al-Mahdi (especially “23 August 2016 | Trial Chamber VIII | Transcript,” https://www.icc-cpi.int/Transcripts/CR2016_05767.PDF; and “24 August 2016 | Trial Chamber VIII | Transcript,” https://www.icc-cpi.int/Transcripts/CR2016_05772.PDF) were also useful in reconstructing those days.

  Reaction to the destruction has been culled from contemporary news reports, including “Mali Separatists Ready to Act over Destruction of Tombs” and “Destruction des mausolées de Tombouctou: Un ‘crime de guerre’ selon la CPI.” Pages from the memo penned by Abdelmalek Droukdel were authenticated by the French counterterrorism expert Mathieu Guidère. Portions appeared in Rukmini Callimachi, “In Timbuktu, al Qaida Left Behind a Manifesto,” and Jean-Louis Le Touzet, “La feuille de route d’Aqmi au Mali,” while the full eighty-page document was published in Nicolas Champeaux, “Le projet du chef d’Aqmi pour le Mali.” Details of the fractious relationship between Droukdel and Belmokhtar are analyzed by Guidère in “The Timbuktu Letters: New Insights about AQIM.”

  According to Haidara, Maiga and Ismael accompanied him to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, where they met with the ministry’s secretary-general, the adviser in charge of the Ahmad Baba institute, and the national director of higher education.

  Haidara did not want to give the name of the friend who paid for his ticket to Geneva, or of other contacts he met there.

  The account of the Ahmad Baba rescue operation was related to me principally by Alkadi Maiga, Bouya Haidara, Hassini Traoré, Mohamed Diagayeté, and Abdel Kader Haidara. Their individual accounts agreed in most significant aspects. The “little cocktail” at which the men from the ministry were shown the evacuated manuscripts was confirmed by the civil servant responsible for the Ahmad Baba institute, Drissa Diakité. The minister in charge of the institute at this time, who berated Maiga for moving the manuscripts without permission, was Harouna Kanté.

  The quotations from Juma al-Majid were remembered by Abdel Kader Haidara, although the Juma al-Majid Center confirmed its contribution to the evacuation.

  PART THREE. LIBERATION

  12. LIVES OF THE SCHOLARS

  Heinrich Barth’s letter of December 15, 1853, announcing the discovery of the Tarikh al-sudan was published in 1855 as “Schreiben des Dr. Barth an Prof. Rödiger” in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. Christian Ralfs’s “Beiträge zur Geschichte und Geographie des Sudan, Eingesandt von Dr. Barth” appeared later in the same publication.

  Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi described the first settlers of Timbuktu as both Tuareg and Massufa. According to John Hunwick in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, the chronicler conflated distinct Berber groups: the Massufa were part of the great tribal federation known as the Sanhaja, who dominated the Timbuktu region and spoke Znaga, while the Tuareg speak Tamasheq, a different Berber dialect. For Hunwick, a plausible derivation of the name Timbuktu is from the Znaga root b-k-t, “to be distant or hidden,” combined with the feminine possessive particle tin. The city, he points out, is situated in a slight hollow.

  Al-Sadi also describes the rule of Askiya al-hajj Muhammad and his descendants as lasting “one hundred and one years,” from April 2, 1493, to April 12, 1591—a period that is of course only ninety-seven years. In fact, askiyas descended from Muhammad are listed in the Tarikh al-sudan to at least 1656, but after the Moroccan invasion they split into those who fought a guerrilla war from a much-reduced territory, and those who became puppets of the Moroccan administration. “One hundred and one years” nevertheless corresponds loosely to the period the askiyas ruled independently at Gao.

  Ahmad Baba’s best-known work, the Kifayat al-muhtaj, is an abbreviated and revised version of his Nayl al-ibtihaj, which was intended as a complement to the Dibaj al-mudhahhab (a biographical dictionary of the scholars of the Maliki school) by Burhan al-din ibn Farhun, a sage from Medina, who died in 1397. Auguste Cherbonneau’s translation was made from two reasonably accurate manuscripts that were sent to him by students, according to his “Essai sur la littérature arabe du Soudan d’après le Tekmilet-ed-dibadje d’Ahmed Baba, le tombouctien.”

  In his Social History of Timbuktu, Elias Saad estimated that by 1325, when it was incorporated into the Mali empire, Timbuktu had around ten thousand inhabitants. The city’s presence on the Catalan Atlas in 1375 is often cited as evidence of its status as a commercial center in the mid–fourteenth century. It continued to grow: Saad is also the source of estimates that at its sixteenth-century peak it housed as many as 150 to 180 Kuranic schools, where basic reading and recitation of the Kuran were taught, and had a maximum enrollment of four to five thousand students. Nehemia Levtzion, Pekka Masonen, and others have suggested that two to three hundred individuals were able to attain the status of fully qualified scholars in the sixteenth century. Not everyone agrees with the portrait of the city as an intellectual hub, however: Charles Stewart argues that Timbuktu’s historical significance has been exaggerated at the expense of other Sudanese centers of scholarship, which lay in what is now Mauritania, in part because of the prolific Ahmad Baba. “There may have never been much of a center of learning in Timbuktu,” Stewart wrote to me, “since early authors there have left almost no trace of teaching the Arabic language.” This contrasts with “the lands to the west where Arabic grammar was a blockbuster of a topic—clear indication of an aspiring and expanding, literate Arabic culture. . . . This does not negate the importance of 20th century book collecting in and around Timbuktu or the current libraries there, but there certainly is dubious evidence that any of the recent fame has much of an historical foundation.”

  My portrait of Barth’s later life is drawn from Steve Kemper, Pekka Masonen, and R. Mansell Prothero. W. D. Cooley’s review of Barth’s work appeared in “Barth’s Discoveries in Africa.” Barth’s contribution to the world’s knowledge of Africa was not fully recognized until a century after his death, with Heinrich Schiffers’s Heinrich Barth: Ein Forscher in Afrika, which detailed the advances Barth had made in the fields of history, geography, botany, medicine, linguistics, archaeology, and ethnology.

  13. THE TERRIBLE TWOSOME

  The portrait of life in the house in ACI 2000 was provided by sources close to the operation who preferred to remain anonymous. Abdel Kader Haidara confirmed that he worked in Stephanie Diakité’s house, and parts of the account of their early setup are drawn from interviews with him. Details of the communications between Savama and the Prince Claus Fund were provided by Deborah Stolk. She also confirmed that much of their correspondence was written by Diakité.

  Hamed Mossa’s crackdown on the women was related by numerous interviewees in Timbuktu, who remained outraged by it years later. A valuable source was Tina Traoré, a fishmonger who was persecuted by Mossa and his men; she was one of the instigators of the women’s march on October 6, 2012, and was among the women who were brought before the jihadist leadership. Reports of the march appeared in Admana Diarra, Tiémoko Diallo, and Agathe Machecourt, “Manifestation de femmes contre la charia à Tombouctou,” and Baba Ahmed, “Mali: À Tombouctou, près de 200 femmes marchent contre les islamistes,” which estimated that up to two hundred women were involved. Asa Ag Ghaly described her persecution by Mossa, including her time inside the women’s “prison,” which I visited in October 2014 when it had returned to its former use as an ATM kiosk.

  Deborah Stolk received the “window of opportunity” e-mail between October 10 and 17, 2012, she said. The approximate forty-dollar (25,000 West African francs) cost of traveling between Bamako and Timbuktu at this time was mentioned by the inveterate traveler Alkadi Maiga. The New Republic’s piece on the evacuation, “The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu: How a Team of Sneaky Librarians Duped Al Qaeda,” by Yochi Dreazen, was published online with one of the verification photographs that had been sent to Stolk.

  The story of the problems with the Savama office in Timbuktu and the subsequent trouble between Mohamed Touré and the jihadists was related b
y all four of the protagonists (Alpha, Diadié, Touré, Haidara). The timing of events was difficult to pin down: Alpha dated the threat to requisition the office to August, but this seems to be at odds with Touré’s statement to the commissioner that he was moving the manuscripts before the rainy season, which in Timbuktu lasts from July to September.

  Touré’s account of his “worst trip” was supported by Haidara, although Touré’s employer said he was not traveling alone: “There were four people traveling with the lockers,” according to Haidara.

  The kidnapping incident near Niafounke was recounted by Haidara. I was unable to verify it with others.

  Diadié and others recalled the gathering at Essakane. The figure of three hundred pickups was reported by Xan Rice in “Day a One-Eyed Jihadist Came to Timbuktu.” The eyewitness to the destruction of five more mausoleums using “picks and shovels” was Othman Agh Mohamed Othman of Sahara Media, who spoke to France 24 for “Dans Tombouctou coupée du monde, le règne de la débrouille.” Iyad Ag Ghaly’s demands to the Malian government and the subsequent assault on the south are drawn from media reports, including Laurent Touchard, “Mali: Retour sur la bataille décisive de Konna,” and Moussa Sidibe, “Comment les populations ont vécu la bataille de Konna et l’occupation des régions du nord,” as well as “Bataille de Konna” on wikipedia.fr.

  Shamil Jeppie’s fears about the military intervention were shared with Vivienne Walt, “For the Treasures of Timbuktu, a Moment of Grave Peril.” The date of January 4 for Haidara and Diakité’s visit with Thomas Strieder comes from the German embassy in Bamako; Strieder, the former chargé d’affaires, told me about it. Diakité’s lecture at the University of Oregon, “The Evacuation of the Tumbuktu Manuscripts and Their Life in Exile: The Work of T160K,” was posted on March 13, 2013, to the university’s media channel and is available at http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/archives/5647. The accounts of Diakité’s and Haidara’s meetings with the Dutch, and of their donations, are based on interviews with To Tjoelker and the Dutch ambassador, Maarten Brouwer, and on internal Dutch foreign ministry documents. I am grateful to Klaas Tjoelker for sending me photographs he and To took of manuscripts in Bamako in late January 2013. Details of autos-da-fé and Nazi book burning were taken from J. M. Ritchie, “The Nazi Book-Burning.”