14. KING LEOPOLD’S PAPERWEIGHT
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness first appeared as a three-part serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, and was included in his 1902 book Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories. The estimate of ten million deaths under Leopold’s regime is drawn from Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, which cites a Belgian government commission of 1919 and other sources. Georg F. W. Hegel is quoted from John Sibree’s translation in The Philosophy of History (1900).
There is dispute over the exact causes of the Scramble for Africa, but the drivers most frequently cited are those I have mentioned, including the Western economic slump, the technology gap, racism, and the competitive atmosphere generated by the activities of Leopold, France, and other players; for further discussion, see M. E. Chamberlain in The Scramble for Africa. In “European Partition and Conquest of Africa: An Overview,” G. N. Uzoigwe states that although the Berlin conference did not dole out specific parts of Africa to particular countries, it did establish the legal framework for doing so. “The argument that the conference, contrary to popular opinion, did not partition Africa is correct only in the most technical sense. . . . To all intents and purposes, the appropriation of territory did take place at the conference and the question of future appropriation is clearly implied in its decisions. By 1885, in fact, the broad lines of the final partition of Africa had already been drawn.”
The racist remarks of Samuel Baker were made at a banquet in his honor in Brighton in 1874, and were reported by The Times, while those of A. P. Newton are cited in A. Adu Boahen, Africa Under Colonial Domination 1880–1935.
The reasons for Barth’s rejection by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin are explored in Steve Kemper, A Labyrinth of Kingdoms; A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, introduction to Barth’s Travels in Nigeria; and Heinrich Schiffers, Heinrich Barth: Ein Forscher in Afrika. My account of the French conquest of Africa is drawn chiefly from Robert Aldrich, Greater France, and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan. The lack of European university chairs in African history was pointed out by Pekka Masonen in The Negroland Revisited. Details of what happened to Louis Archinard’s looted manuscripts are from Noureddine Ghali and Mohamed Mahibou’s Inventaire de la Bibliothèque ‘Umarienne de Segou. It also tallies the contents of the library, which included, among other highlights, a 189-page Tarikh al-sudan; a 363-page copy of the Nayl of Ahmad Baba; a noted treatise on slavery by the same author; fragments of a Tarikh al-fattash; and several letters from Ahmad al-Bakkai. A biography of Archinard by Richard Roberts is in Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Dictionary of African Biography, volume 6. Joseph Joffre’s account of his recapture of the region is in My March to Timbuctoo.
The best source for Félix Dubois’s journey is his own Timbuctoo the Mysterious. Further details of his life, and that of his famous chef father, are found in Yves-Jean Saint-Martin’s Félix Dubois 1862–1945: Grand reporter et explorateur de Panama à Tamanrasset. The gift of Dubois’s copy of the Tarikh al-sudan to the Bibliothèque Nationale is recorded in Octave Houdas’s introduction to his 1900 French translation, which also includes details of the various manuscripts from which he and Edmond Benoist worked. For his 1999 translation in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, John Hunwick found further copies of the manuscript in the Ahmad Baba collection and in the National Library of Algeria, Algiers. Details of al-Sadi’s life and the Tarikh al-sudan are from Houdas and Benoist and from Hunwick, and excerpts from the Tarikh are from Hunwick. A short biography of Houdas by Alain Messaoudi and Jean Schmitz can be found in the Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française.
Flora Shaw’s A Tropical Dependency remains a fascinating period piece. Details of her extraordinary life are in Dorothy O. Helly’s “Flora Shaw and the Times: Becoming a Journalist, Advocating Empire.” My skeptical take on the likelihood of a Malian armada’s making it to Mexico follows that of Masonen in The Negroland Revisited, but there are many modern proponents of the theory, including Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus, and Gaoussou Diawara, Abubakari II, explorateur mandingue.
15. AUTO-DA-FÉ
I am grateful to Cheikh Diouara for sharing his memories of being on the receiving end of French airstrikes during Operation Serval. Details of what remained of the Gaddafi mansion after it was hit were recorded by Drew Hinshaw, in “In Gadhafi’s Timbuktu Villa, an al Qaeda Retreat.” Diadié remembers that the last meeting between the Crisis Committee and the jihadists took place the day before the young man was killed by the jihadists, which media reports record as January 23. It was David Blair, who interviewed the dead man’s sister for “Timbuktu: The Women Singled Out for Persecution,” who reported that Mustapha was shot for shouting “Vive la France!” on a street corner.
Like Abdoulaye Cissé, Air Mali, who lived near the Ahmad Baba building in Sankore, recalled the moment when he realized manuscripts had been destroyed. “We got up in the morning, and we found the manuscripts right away. They had taken them out into the courtyard and gathered them together. Everything they could, they had burned.”
16. CHRONICLE OF THE RESEARCHER
Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse gave a detailed account of their difficulties with the Tarikh al-fattash in the introduction to their own work of synthesis, Tarikh el-fettach ou chronique du chercheur, in 1913. Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee, in “Towards a New Study of the So-Called Tarikh al-fattash,” have authoritatively argued that what Houdas and Delafosse thought to be a single chronicle is in fact two separate texts, one produced in the seventeenth century by a scholar known as Ibn al-Mukhtar, and the other a nineteenth-century forgery produced by a counselor of Ahmad Lobbo, the sultan of Masina, which was falsely attributed to Mahmud Kati. In 2011, Christopher Wise and Hala Abu Taleb published an English translation, Ta’rīkh al fattāsh: The Timbuktu Chronicles 1493–1599, but failed to take into account the problems with the text. The quoted sections here are my translations from Houdas and Delafosse’s French version, and should be treated with caution. The Tarikh’s “full title in English” is given by Paul E. Lovejoy, “Islamic Scholarship and Understanding History in West Africa Before 1800.”
Timbuktu’s sixteenth-century standing as a “city of scholars” is from Elias Saad’s Social History of Timbuktu, as is the estimate that the population was no higher than 50,000: “The data at our disposal indicate that the population of the city ranged between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century when Timbuktu experienced its ‘golden age’ of prosperity and Islamic learning.” The expression “acute bibliophilism” is from Brent Singleton’s “African Bibliophiles: Books and Libraries in Medieval Timbuktu.” Mahmud Kati’s rare dictionary, according to the Tarikh al-fattash, was al-Qamus al-muhit. The price of the Sharh al-ahkam is from Saad, and the dictionary that came in twenty-eight volumes was the Muhkam fi’l-Lugha, also mentioned by Saad. Details of the cost of copying a manuscript are from Singleton.
Sources for the Moroccan invasion of Songhay and the reign of Ahmad al-Mansur include Stephen Cory’s “The Man Who Would Be Caliph,” as well as the tarikhs. Most of the account of the Day of Desolation is from the Tarikh al-sudan, which has the greater detail; relevant passages in the Tarikh al-fattash agree with the main points. For additional details of Ahmad Baba’s life, see Mahmoud Zouber’s Ahmad Baba de Tombouctou.
The extract from Ahmad Baba’s poem of longing for Timbuktu was recorded by the Moroccan scholar Muhammad al-Saghir al-Ifrani, who was born in 1669/1670. It is written in the entrance to the old Ahmad Baba building, and can also be found in John Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire.
17. AN INDIANA JONES MOMENT IN REAL LIFE!
The account of the French advance on Timbuktu was related to me by Colonel Frédéric Gout. It was he who recollected Colonel Gèze’s offer of drinks to the officers at Goundam airstrip, General Barrera’s interest in Caillié, and their visit to the house where the explorer had stayed in 1828.
Innocent Chukwuma of the Ford Foundation kindly provided details of the organization’s correspondence with Abdel Kader Haidara in the last days of the occupation, including Dr. Gitari’s immortal line “An Indiana Jones moment in real life!” Asked why manuscripts still needed to be moved to Bamako after the city had been liberated, Haidara argued that it was better to complete the evacuation than to leave them in the villages.
18. MANUSCRIPT FEVER
John Hunwick’s description of the founding of the Ahmad Baba center was published in the article “CEDRAB: The Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba at Timbuktu.” Concise profiles of other major libraries in Timbuktu can be found on the website of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, at tombouctoumanuscripts.org.
The part that Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s documentary played in inflating the reputation of the manuscripts was emphasized by Jean-Louis Triaud in “Tombouctou ou le retour du mythe.” Triaud, without wishing to diminish the interest and the value of these documents, stated that Gates’s visit had led to their celebration as much more than simply the rich patrimony of knowledge that they really were. “There is something of a heroic and mythical saga in their mediatized rediscovery,” he wrote. For more details of Gates’s visit, see the notes to chapter 1.
More details of Thabo Mbeki’s visit to Timbuktu are recounted in Shamil Jeppie’s “Re/discovering Timbuktu.”
19. THE MYTH FACTORY
Jean-Michel Djian was quoted by Lila Azam Zanganeh in “Has the Great Library of Timbuktu Been Lost?” According to Zanganeh, Mayor Cissé had been told by his “communications attaché,” who had just escaped the city, that the Ahmad Baba center had burned and more than half of its manuscripts had been consumed in the fire. “Yet,” reported Zanganeh, “he also seemed to hint that not all of the city’s manuscripts had been destroyed.” Tristan McConnell’s pieces were “Meet the Unlikely Group That Saved Timbuktu’s Manuscripts” and “How Timbuktu Saved Its Books.” Der Spiegel’s online story, in English, was headlined “Most Timbuktu Manuscripts Saved from Attacks.” The figure of 377,491 private manuscripts rescued was given to me by Haidara in December 2015.
On May 28, 2013, an e-mail from T160K signed by Stephanie Diakité was sent to the Mansa-1 mailing list, stating that “the estimated $7 million cost is an ambitious goal, but raising this money is imperative.” Not all recipients of the shout-out were happy about it. One eminent anthropologist responded: “Thanks for the scam but I don’t buy this. . . . It’s a shame that you use academic networks to sell your bogus project.” The figure of $1 million a year paid by the German foreign ministry and the Gerda Henkel Foundation was mentioned to me in interview by a source closely involved with the project. Some of this money goes to other libraries in Mali.
More details about Timbuktu Renaissance are at www.timbukturenaissance.org. The proposal for Google to film the city, and the plans for Timbuktu University, were shared with me by N’Diaye Ramatoulaye Diallo, the Malian culture minister. Details of Abdel Kader Haidara’s German Africa Prize of 2014 can be found at the Deutsche Afrika Stiftung website.
The conference at the University of Birmingham, “Symposium in Honour of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias,” was held on November 12 and 13, 2015. At the time of this writing, Bruce Hall’s “Rethinking the Place of Timbuktu in the Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa” was due to be published in a collection of papers from the conference.
In April 2016, Stephanie Diakité’s name surfaced in a bizarre $4.25 million legal case unrelated to the evacuation. In a motion filed in the Illinois Supreme Court, she was accused of being a “fraudster” who orchestrated a “series of illegal payoffs to government officials in Mali” in return for false documents (Frank Main, “Inmate Says Bribes Led to Contempt Case, Ordered Freed on Bond,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 26, 2016). The documents Diakité obtained had secured the conviction of a Malian man, Bengaly Sylla, who was sentenced to six years in prison, the court was told. Diakité, it was alleged, was also not an attorney as she had at times claimed. A lawyer for the company that was said to have hired her in the Sylla case stated that there was no proof that illegal payoffs had been made. The case is ongoing at the time of this writing.
The official figure of 4,203 lost Ahmad Baba manuscripts was given to me by Alkadi Maiga. It was impossible to determine what exactly they were. Abdoulaye Cissé said they were documents that had been acquired but not yet processed, and therefore not much was known about them.
The study of the Fondo Kati documents was made by Susana Molins Lliteras of Cape Town University for her Ph.D. thesis, “Africa Starts in the Pyrenees: The Fondo Kati, Between al-Andalus and Timbuktu.” The thesis had not been made publicly available at the time of this writing, but an abstract, published online, notes that the dissertation “raises questions around the authenticity of the marginalia, in terms of their dates of production and authorship.”
On the subject of the movement of libraries after liberation, the Timbuktu manuscript proprietor Abdoul Wahid Haidara told me: “There were two or three libraries that were moved just after the occupation, when Savama had already announced that they had taken all the manuscripts from Timbuktu, and they had to find other libraries to follow them.” He named these collections as Bibliothèque Ahmad Baba Aboul Abbass, Bibliothèque Moulaye, and Bibliothèque Zawiyat al-Kunti, and gave timings of specific conversations about these post-liberation moves that he had had with the libraries’ owners.
LAST WORDS
In September 2016, I put a number of the allegations that arose in the course of researching this book to Abdel Kader Haidara, Stephanie Diakité, and selected protagonists via e-mail. In particular, I asked them to address the question of whether the threat to the manuscripts had been exaggerated, along with their numbers and the story of their rescue.
Abdel Kader Haidara replied that he had not heard the allegations from anyone but me. “We have neither seen nor read anything about it. Would you be the only one to hold this information? What are your sources?” He and his colleagues had worked hard in this area for twenty-seven years and knew the approximate number of manuscripts from their time as professional prospectors. He had also worked hard to build trusting relationships with his partners, who all came to Mali to monitor the actions carried out in Bamako during the emergency and the evacuation. It would be foolish for him to have been “lying to the whole world,” he stated.
“We remain convinced that nothing led us to undertake what we have accomplished but the love of our heritage and the conscience that drives us to protect this heritage,” he wrote. “We did not invent a story. Today, our manuscripts are saved and we will continue to work for their conservation with all the financial, human, and technological resources that the moment gives us.”
Stephanie Diakité declined to comment, about either this or the case in Illinois Supreme Court.
Dmitry Bondarev, who is leading research into the manuscripts for the University of Hamburg’s Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures, told me he believed some international specialists had recently started changing their tone to be less condemning and more realistic: “There might soon be the time when the others will feel as uncomfortable about their assertive verdicts on what happened in 2012 (whichever side of the ‘truth’ t
hey take) as I feel now whenever I have to make allusions to ‘the rescue operation.’” There was “so much irrational going on in the rational minds of my colleagues,” he wrote, that he found his blood pressure rising. In his view, the current estimate of around 377,000 privately owned manuscripts was “realistic, inasmuch as one takes into account the different approaches to what constitutes a manuscript.” As for his dealings with Savama, which had once been difficult, he said, “We are now in much better relationship—these things take huge time and need patience, especially in West Africa and especially if one wants to be more practical rather than destructively critical.”
Bruce Hall, meanwhile, maintained that aspects of the Savama story were a “huge fraud.”
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abu al-Ma’ali, Mohammed Mahmoud. “Al-Qaeda and Its Allies in the Sahel and the Sahara.” Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, April 30, 2012.
Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
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