The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  PATRICK SYMMES

  Bonfire of the Humanities

  FROM Outside

  PEOPLE DRESS LIKE kings and queens in the capital of Mali, even in the dirt streets on the far side of the river. The women walk down mud lanes wearing immaculate gowns with puffed shoulders, gold detailing, and beadwork. The dudes are natty, too, in safari suits, crisp office-boy outfits, or the grand boubou, the national robing that makes any man walk like a giant. Only the heroic boys everywhere—young teens carrying loads, pushing groceries, directing trucks—go around in recycled jeans and T-shirts. In squalor the people must be regal.

  We’d been circling the outskirts of Bamako for an hour, driving in a taxi from street to street, block to block, the confusion more effective than any blindfold. Out here, far from the government compounds and hotel towers of downtown, was the striving Africa, endless rows of two-story cement houses, barbershops, and mobile-phone kiosks. Finally a boy on a motorcycle was sent to fetch us, and we followed him back through the sprawling neighborhood and into a courtyard, where the gate was quickly locked behind us.

  Here a man in a red fez escorted me through the cool, dark house to an iron door painted red and freshly reinforced with cement and a strong padlock. It took a while for my eyes to adjust. Boxes. Boxes and boxes. There were 2,400 footlockers in this room.

  The air reeked of decaying paper, the acid tang of the back stacks at a forgotten university. The trunks were brightly painted in the Malian style: black, green, and silver, with waving lines and diagonals and dots. They shone even in the deep shade of this cavernous room. Some were as small as suitcases, others large enough to hold a body. They climbed to the ceiling on three sides, with only a narrow passage down the middle.

  The man who opened the door to this trove was Abdel Kader Haidara, 44, a round-bellied scholar from the Sahara, with a cloudy left eye and a simple white robe.

  “Here,” said Haidara, gesturing for me to advance.

  Before me was a vast cache of knowledge pulled literally from the fires of war. These were the famed manuscripts of Timbuktu, the legendary caravan town that had thrived here between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Relics of a sophisticated African trading culture that stretched from Mauritania to Zanzibar, they had emerged in the past decade as one of the great archaeological discoveries of our time, a hidden-in-plain-sight secret. Inside wrappings of rag paper or gazelle leather, scribed onto camel- and goatskin parchments, written on Italian Renaissance paper and even stones, the Timbuktu books were a mountain of literature in a supposedly illiterate part of Africa, the secret history of a continent before Europeans arrived.

  And then, in January 2013, they were burned. Jihadi rebels occupying Timbuktu entered the town’s great library and set the manuscripts ablaze. The world condemned it as the most despicable act of vandalism since the Taliban dynamited the monumental Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.

  So how could this room exist?

  I was having an Indiana Jones moment. I opened a trunk and gently swept my fingers over the tooled-leather bindings and the soft edges of rag paper. I picked out a book and opened it, the pages crackling, the calligraphy stunning after some 500 years of sitting in dark rooms. I found myself stroking the books, inhaling their smell.

  I opened cases at random, discovering treasures that I would never be allowed to touch in a museum. The pages were caverned out by millimeter-wide bookworms, some more tunnel than text. I opened another metal trunk and a cloud of dust emerged, the books inside more confetti than pages.

  I won’t look good in 500 years, either.

  The bonfire was the last act in a war that has simmered for decades in the Sahara desert, pitting the nomads who have traditionally controlled northern Mali against its weak national government. It’s no wonder you don’t know where Mali is: one of the world’s 25 poorest countries, this landlocked nation has 7 neighbors and no luck, more than 30 languages, including the French of its colonizers, and its feet in wet West Africa and its head in the arid Arab north; it lies where the Sahara yields to the Sahel, the grassy promise of the tropics. The northerners are mostly Tuareg, the blue-clad tribesmen who’ve roamed across borders for centuries, recognizing no governments unless paid to do so. (They’ve rebelled against Mali three times just since the 1990s.) Their version of Islam has long been relaxed and idiosyncratic, allowing relative freedom to women and embracing music, especially the electric guitar. In the 1990s, before things took a harder turn, Tuareg leader Iyad Ag Ghali wrote a song for the biggest rock band in the Sahara.

  Timbuktu was known for tolerance as well, and for its love of sensual pleasures like music and tobacco. Founded around A.D. 1100 where the Sahara meets the Niger River, it became a trade hub fed by caravans that crossed the desert with salt and books, connected by camel to Córdoba and Constantinople. By the fifteenth century, Timbuktu was home to 100,000 people, with as many as 25,000 scholars crowding its dirt lanes. One urban quarter served as a medieval Xerox machine, lined with scriptoriums where calligraphers churned out handmade copies. Only the rise of European sailing ships pushed it into obscurity.

  In modern times, Timbuktu attracted musicians and Western seekers, a mixture of Afropop gods, young rockers, and ecstatic backpackers who gathered every January for the Festival in the Desert in the dunes west of town. That groovy vibe peaked in 2007, when Bono and Jimmy Buffet crashed the party, but the consensus of desert life was breaking down. Ag Ghali stopped smoking and dancing and embraced the arch-conservative Islam of Ansardine, a homegrown jihadi group, and AQIM, the North African affiliate of al-Qaeda, run by a one-eyed Algerian named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who’d perfected the art of kidnapping for profit. In 2009, a Briton was grabbed—and later executed—after another music festival, and soon there were nine Western hostages in northern Mali. European governments paid $65 million in ransoms, which only emboldened the Tuareg and drew in more cash-hungry fighters. Malian musicians were threatened with death for participating in the Festival in the Desert, and the 2012 event—held right outside Timbuktu, for safety—was the last.

  Then the jihad arrived. Belmokhtar united about 2,000 Tuareg fighters with a smaller, hardened force of jihadis—a quicksand mixture of smugglers and holy warriors bolstered by perhaps 1,000 heavily armed mercenaries returning from Libya. That April, the Malian army abruptly collapsed and the rebels captured Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal, the desert’s main population centers. In Timbuktu, the Tuareg promised tolerance and respect. But when the troops of Ansardine arrived, flying the black flags of al-Qaeda, the rebels set up Taliban-style rule across northern Mali, a place they called Azawad and governed with harsh sharia laws.

  In previous wars—a Moroccan invasion at the end of the sixteenth century and a jihadi uprising in the fifteenth—manuscripts had been destroyed or looted, too. But centuries later, mountains of old paper were still there, in small family collections, preserved by the desert climate and Islam’s reverence for the written word. “We don’t care about books,” one Tuareg rebel had assured a local collector, but that didn’t last. While overwhelmingly Islamic, the books embraced secular science, Sufi magic, and intellectual argument—the wrong kind of Islam, at least for al-Qaeda.

  The occupation lasted 10 months. Then, on January 26, 2013, as a French military expedition approached the city, the retreating rebels paused to commit one final crime. Entering Timbuktu’s modern new library, the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, they carried more than 4,000 manuscripts into a courtyard, where they built a bonfire of words. One match and about 30 minutes of stirring was all it took.

  The mayor of Timbuktu told the Guardian that the fire had destroyed not one but two libraries, “a devastating blow.” But smoke gets in your eyes. Although pictures emerged of torched manuscripts lying in piles, Malian officials soon backtracked. Only some books had been lost. Over the next few months, news reports emerged of a remarkable effort by ordinary Malians to smuggle out these treasures, by truck and trunk, donkey and ca
noe. The jihadis never knew how badly they themselves had been burned: before they lit their blaze of ignorance, the vast majority of the city’s manuscripts were already gone.

  I learned some details about all this by speaking with Stephanie Diakité, a Seattle attorney and expert in West African law. She’d been so taken with the books when she first saw them 20 years ago that she’d trained as a conservator. Months after the war, Diakité was still preoccupied with their security and would not reveal their whereabouts or how Abdel Kader Haidara, with her assistance, had orchestrated much of the daring escape. Even in their current hiding places—that secret location I’d later visit in Bamako, as well as homes along the roads to Timbuktu—the books were at risk, she said, vulnerable to rain, theft, or another war.

  Haidara revealed even less, concerned that the Timbuktu citizens who actually moved the books would be punished if the jihadis returned. The government’s official catalog listed 9,000 manuscripts, but rumors were circulating that the town had held 20 or even 30 times that. Less than 1 percent had been cataloged, let alone copied, and almost no scholars could reach the books or even read the necessary languages. Surprises were waiting inside those crumbling pages.

  The problem with paper is that it goes out of date. My Lonely Planet West Africa was only two years old but radically, dangerously obsolete. It was August, seven months after the liberation of Timbuktu, and after glimpsing the surviving books in Bamako, Italian photographer Marco Di Lauro and I were determined to reach the old city, to meet the heroic, but unnamed, smugglers who’d gotten the books out. We wasted 10 full days in Bamako trying to catch one of the rare UN flights that carried African peacekeeping troops into Timbuktu. There is a northern road through the Sahara and a southern route through the Sahel, but fresh reports of shootings and kidnappings convinced us to avoid both. Instead we’d travel down the Niger, a 2,600-mile watercourse that flows west to east through five countries, curving like a question mark toward the Sahara. The river was the way many of the books had escaped and would be our route back.

  After a day of driving, we spent the night in Djenné, a magical, mud-walled city surrounded by the rushing waters of the Bani River. Djenné is a sister city to Timbuktu, equally venerable, with a mind-blowing mud mosque and its own small library of worm-eaten medieval manuscripts in gold leaf.

  An hour up the road was Mopti, the main port on the Niger. We slipped down the stone quay at 4:15 a.m., picking our way over exhausted stevedores sleeping on cardboard. Hundreds of these men and boys crowd Mopti’s teeming waterfront by day, shouting and dusty, but here was Africa motionless, silent, and cool. After shimmying over smaller pirogues to reach our boat, the captain cast off, and we drifted into the current of Africa’s third largest river.

  LP’s cigarette-paper pages described a peacetime world of swift tourist boats here, with cabins and meals, gliding backpackers past riverside mosques. What we got was a smelly cargo vessel on a rescue mission. Called a pinnace, it had the proportions of a river canoe but was larger: 130 feet long and 12 feet wide, made from planked boards held together with hope. A waterline cargo deck supported two thundering diesels made in France, a score of crated motorcycles, and 6,300 sacks of yellow split peas donated by the World Food Program. The food was destined for the war-displaced nomads and starving villagers we would pass during the next 300 miles of riverbank. The motorcycles were a side business.

  Swinging up an exterior ladder brought you to the lido deck, a passenger area sheltered by a very low roof of corrugated tin. There was room only to sit or lie down; bed was the tin deck and dinner was riz sauce, a fiery brown stew made with goat (once) or fish heads (the rest of the time). There were 14 others onboard, all crew or their families. Seven months after the war, people were still paying to get out of Timbuktu, not in.

  August was the low point for the river, but the first rains had arrived upstream, and our capitaine was attempting his debut passage of the season. Sitting at a wood steering wheel at the front of the top deck, he assured me that we would make the trip between Mopti and Timbuktu in two days and one night. “La nonstop,” he said. It turned out neither of us spoke French.

  The boat marched down the brown river at the pace of a slow bicyclist, hour after hour of featureless mud banks and a couple of barren villages where police officers looked over our credentials. Twice on the first day we paused to pass down the heavy bags of yellow peas or the motorcycles, which were placed in canoes and paddled ashore by strong men.

  But that afternoon, we came through widening channels to a village on an island and, despite all plans and pleas, la stop. Our captain and crew were members of the Bozo tribe, known since ancient times as the masters of the river. This was their largest village, Barkinelba, on the reedy edge of Lake Débo, a seasonal body of water that forms in the Niger.

  In a gibberish of Bozo to Bambara to French to English, we heard that it was too windy to cross the lake. A quick walk across the island proved the point: whitecaps tore up the surface, and the Bozo fishing pirogues were all sheltered in back creeks, tied fore and aft. We were spending the night right here.

  Barkinelba was nice, in the way of insanely poor places at sunset. A few thousand people lived in reed huts with dirt floors, but they were clean, well dressed, and working hard. By day the men fished with monofilament nets while the women pounded millet. At night I sat on the roof of our boat as people with flashlights wandered the dark lanes. The average lifespan in Mali is 55; children in villages like this die all the time for lack of clean water. Yet there was something romantic, even immortal, in the sight of women embroidering by the light of a battery-powered television set, filling the darkness with gossip and laughter.

  The skies had been smudged with Saharan sands all day, but this blew out at night, leaving an enormous Milky Way overhead. When Scottish explorer Mungo Park first came down this river in 1795, he was astonished by what people requested: they wanted paper. In the 1840s, the explorer Heinrich Barth gave away reams of the stuff and described traders wandering the desert with nothing but books to sell. Illiterate Africa was a myth. Words—books—had always been necessary.

  If going there is a dream, and getting there a nightmare, arriving in Timbuktu is one of the world’s great disappointments. Hungry and nearly insane with boredom, we endured days three and four of the two-day trip, staring limply at the banks of the Niger until the north shore gradually turned into the high khaki dunes of the Sahara. The south shore, the Sahel, offered a smattering of restorative grass, and this was Timbuktu’s real advantage. On the desert crossings that connected the Mediterranean world to Africa, it was the first or last stop, the place, they said, where the camel met the canoe.

  Our big canoe ran aground just 400 yards off the quay at Kabara, Timbuktu’s port. We crossed through a sandy no man’s land in a dented Mercedes taxi with desert-soft tires. In ancient times, attacks on travelers were so common here that this patch of sand had its own sinister name, They Don’t Hear, reflecting the cries of victims.

  We passed through rings of increasingly tense security, first Malian soldiers cradling AK-47s, then technicals (weaponized pickup trucks), then African Union soldiers lurking behind sandbagged positions. There had been five suicide bombings linked to al- Qaeda affiliates in northern Mali since the occupation ended; now UN and African diplomats were overseeing the deployment of Minusma, a West African peacekeeping force that was supposed to replace French troops and create stability.

  But the streets of Timbuktu seemed empty, the population of 54,000 gutted by war. Only a trickle of men attended prayers at the fourteenth-century mosque, built by the great emperor Musa, the ruler who gilded Timbuktu’s reputation forever by marching all the way to Mecca with so much West African gold that he crashed the Egyptian economy. Europeans absorbed this story like blood absorbs alcohol and spent centuries searching the Sahara for Tombouctou, a wondrous city of golden castles. When Frenchman René-Auguste Caillié finally reported in 1828 that it was actually a small and do
wntrodden oasis of mud houses, he was initially met with suspicion.

  Alas, he was right. The Atlantis of the desert was a dumpy little place, 600 years past its prime, with sand in the streets and plastic bags in the trees. Almost every hotel and restaurant had closed, and when we found a room it was just in time, for a sandstorm blew in, followed by a chilly downpour that flattened the wattle roofs of poor herders in the backstreets, turning the avatar of mystery into a shivering hovel of mud.

  In the morning, we went straight to the Ahmed Baba Institute. After seven months, you could still see not merely the sooty starburst left on the floor by the bonfire of books, but the actual shreds and cinders of manuscripts themselves, which were swirling around in a sheltered area by the men’s room. I took a step to investigate and heard the crunching of ancient knowledge under my feet. Had I just crushed the only existing copy of an Ottoman geography or the final verses of a Moorish poet? It smelled like the fire happened yesterday.

  The institute was founded in 1973 but only gained real traction in 1984, when Haidara joined, bridging the gap between state researchers and some 65 families with private collections. Like most, he retained physical control of his books, and his own 45,000 items make up by far the largest collection in Timbuktu. These were not just piles of old scraps. Often they were high-quality works with spectacular Arabic calligraphy, illuminated with bright red and blue inks and graced with gold-leaf arabesques that wrapped in infinite loops, reflecting the never-ending nature of God. In 2000, Mali greatly expanded the institute, and this new building opened in 2009 with a staff of 50 Malians trained to protect and digitize the books.