Timbuktu still looks as old as it is, even with the SUVs and electronic shops that sell flat-screen TVs and DVD players. Markets around the region are a loud mixture of music, people haggling over prices, and women walking around with piles of cloth balanced on their heads. At Badjinde market, the loose-fitting pink, yellow, lime, blue, orange and other bright cotton wraps worn by the women are as loud as it gets. I ditch David when he runs into friends from Accra, and head to Bibliotheque Al-Imam Essayouti, where some of the ancient manuscripts are kept. The Bibliotheque is across the street from Djinguereber mosque; built in 1327 at the behest of Emperor Musa Mansa on his way back from Mecca. The mosque is closed for renovations, and the grey loudspeakers that call the town’s men to prayer on Fridays are silent. Green treetops peek out from behind the mosque. The horizon has shrubs that look as light brown as the desert. It’s also the colour of the sky. ‘I’m in Timbuktu,’ I say out loud, pinching myself.
I should be looking for a media pass to get out of paying for my festival ticket. Instead, I walk around town over and over again hoping to meet Habib Koité. My walks, like my presence, are infused with wonder and magic, even when I follow a man walking behind his donkey to see how many times he will make a growling sound from his throat before a glob of spit juts out of his mouth. I accept every invitation for tea and grilled meat, and become Abdul’s shadow at night. Abdul takes me out for dinner at a rooftop restaurant at Badjinde market. The night is jet black, making the stars look like they’re shining brighter than they do in other places. We dine on riz avec sauce tomate – rice with tomato sauce.
Our full house at Abdul’s breaks up on Thursday morning to go to the festival. Abdul’s going on a friend’s bakkie. The trip is a bargain at 3000 francs, but I’m not in the mood to slum it. I go to Hotel Colombe to use their flushing toilets and to look for solo travellers to share a car rental with. I order coffee and strike up a conversation with a woman sitting by herself. She’s an Israeli learning music in Bamako, music festivals are her holy grail. Her guide negotiates an African rate of 7000 francs with the driver of their SUV. Our trip stops at the market where I buy a second-hand wind breaker and a blanket and stop by the ATM for extra cash.
Essakane is a small village about two hours out of Timbuktu. It has a smattering of houses in different stages of crumbling, with missing door frames and walls that look like they were abandoned midway through the process of building them. An eerie silence keeps the village in a comatose state. The trip is uneventful other than for the cars getting stuck in the sand. At the festival site, I stand on dunes to catch my breath; taking in hills of soft white sand that burn from the scorching sun. I make my way to the media camp, where the publicist’s only regret when I ask for a media pass is that they don’t have a mattress for me, only a thin sleeping mat. I share the tent with two journalists from America and Argentina. The site has sections for sleeping – divided into camps for the press, artists, a conference area and accommodation for everyone else – bars and restaurants, bathrooms with showers and toilets, the market and the main stage area.
Before becoming a world event that brings more than thirty thousand people to town, the Festival of the Desert was the traditional meeting of the Tuareg tribes of the Sahara. Even with roots and families in villages like Essakane and towns like Timbuktu and Gao, Tuaregs are nomadic at heart and still follow a way of life inherited from ancestors who roamed the desert with their camels and livestock. Get-togethers like this one are the fabric of their social life.
The festival remains true to its heritage. Men and boys are dressed in bazin boubous, their faces wrapped as always in indigo cotton turbans called tagelmust. Women drape themselves with flowing robes; their heads gleaming with gold accessories. Walking past the stage, I see Harouna Samake tuning his kamale ngoni; Salif Keita’s making a surprise appearance. I huff my way to the entertainment area to look for a good time. A short, very black man in a khaki suit and straw hat jumps at me, planting a kiss on each cheek.
‘Mon cherie, join us, please,’ he says, his right hand clasping my left.
His name is Djibril. He and his friends Cherrif, Omar and Adama have boxes of Marlboros and bottles of whiskey on their table; of course I’ll join them. We barely understand each other – I don’t understand French, still, and Djibril’s English is worse than my French. I pretend to follow their conversation; laughing when they do and contributing by talking about how amazing the festival is. Our table falls silent, their eyes and bodies turning to face the same direction. My jaw drops when I see who they’re looking at. He strolls between plastic tables, smiling at everyone who greets him. Habib Koité hugs everyone and sits opposite me. I walk over to him and fall at his feet the way people here do when they meet at icon.
‘That’s not necessary,’ he says, laughing.
‘Habibo, this is our great friend from South Africa, Lerato,’ Cherrif says.
‘Lerato, this is our friend Habib.’
Habib envelopes me with a long embrace and follows me back to my chair. He never leaves my side. He translates the conversation for me or starts one between us, encouraging me to use the growing French vocabulary that still struggles to roll off my tongue. He holds my hands and shares secret jokes with me. More people join our table, some for a few minutes to greet Habib. I’m with my favourite artist and he is hanging onto every word of my seriously broken French; he thinks it’s amazing that I’m travelling Africa.
‘I hope you’re hungry,’ he says after a while, pointing at an old man bending over a sheep. One sweeping slash and the sheep stops bleating. It bleeds out into a hole the old man digs for this purpose. He hangs the carcass on a tree to skin and gut it before putting it on a spit fire. When it’s ready, he slices it, and we eat with takoula. Habib and I leave the gang to watch Salif Keita. He holds my hands to help me move up and down the dunes and offers me water whenever I stop to catch my breath. The area around the stage is already full. There are rows of people sitting on the ground at the front circled by the standing crowd. Habib is tall enough to see from the back; I’m happy as long as I’m with him. He uses his star power to cut through the crowd to take me to the front. My life is a fantasy – I’m with Habib Koité at a Salif Keita performance, and the band wink and smile when they spot me in the crowd. We go back to the gang after the performance, where the party moves inside. Whiskey and beer make way for tequila shots, and the music goes from barely audible to full blast. The deejay makes my night when he plays ‘Bobraba’. It always inspires the most skankyass dance moves; I lay them on Habib, laughing, downing shots, dancing, becoming friends.
The festival by day is an open-air market with food, jewellery and fringe performances. A woman sits on the ground beating a drum, occasionally dipping her hand into a calabash with water, which she splashes on the drum’s hide. Other instruments in the performance are the clapping hands of three women in black chiffon wraps and cornrows styled with gold disks. A Tuareg boy in matching tan tunic and loose pants stands centre stage, his short arms spread away from his body. He jerks his shoulders and neck in rhythm to his left leg, which he holds in the air at a forty-five-degree angle. He breaks his gaze with a grin at the end of his performance. Four coned, black leather hats lined with cowrie shells peek out from the top of a dune. I follow them, and discover that they belong to musicians who chant around the site and play a musical instrument made with calabashes. One hat has round mirrors, another is decked with blue, yellow, purple, pink and lime cowrie shells. There’s a camel parade and a traditional sword fight dance, with men moving slowly and gracefully in their grand boubous; my first time in the Sahara Desert remains one of the most enchanting times of my life.
Timbuktu empties out on Monday afternoon with the last of the tourist-packed SUVs leaving. The town falls back into silence that’s only broken by the five daily calls to prayer and, sometimes, Mory Kante’s ‘Sabou’ playing softly from one of the houses next to Djinguereber mosque. I stay until the end of January based on a rumour
that Nelson Mandela is coming.
‘If it’s true, it will be the biggest event in the history of Timbuktu,’ Abdul says.
Life absorbs me into its fabric. I start my days around 5am to feel the breeze before the sun comes out to remind my body that I’m in the desert, where days are incredibly hot and nights extremely cold. Filling a blue ten-litre bucket with water from the tap marks the official start of my day with a shower, when I walk through the doorless opening in the wall that divides the yard into his and hers sections. Hers belongs to Abdul’s sister Aisha and her two children. I always carry lots of water to the toilet because I still can’t use the hole-in-the-ground toilet. My piss still trails down my thighs. My poop always misses the hole; when I get the runs, it splashes around the toilet, so every trip to the toilets is followed by cleaning it and showering again. Abdul still refuses to tell me how much I owe him for sleeping at his house, where I now occupy his bedroom.
‘We are family,’ he insists whenever I nag him about my bill.
Abdul doesn’t want me to buy food, preferring that we make an equal contribution of between 2000 and 5000 francs depending on what he can afford. We eat a set diet of plain rice and watery brown stew with two cubes of meat or small chunks of liver. On days when he barely has money, and there’s lots of them, we eat plain rice with spinach that’s chopped so fine it looks like it’s been ground. Our family of six includes his friends, Abu and Mustafa. Mustafa is an English teacher and Abu, who always swims in his clothes, is a hustler like Abdul. He comes during the day for lunch and is back at night to sleep.
Our street corner is marked with a tyre stuck in the sand. Our landmark is a nomad’s camp with a knee-high bamboo house fenced with dry shrubs. The land beyond the camp has an unfinished building, a dumping ground covered by black plastic bags, and a soccer field with poles that don’t have a crossbar. Life is centred around social connections, my people are still Cheriff, Alou and Djibril. I meet another Abu, who commands attention from his wheelchair most nights at Amanar bar, on the edge of the desert. My night time circle includes Florence, the Italian archaeologist on a field trip, and a German man who has been trekking from Mauritania to Timbuktu in his Land Cruiser since 2005.
Life is predictable, with the occasional dust storm and, as Abdul’s house becomes my home, my body starts settling into my life as a wanderer. I now shower in the morning and in the evening instead of every time I use the toilet. As if there has been a call to action, the community turn into my French tutors. Abu doesn’t let a moment pass without teaching me basic French words, pointing at objects and translating my actions. The man who always gives me a bite of the grilled meat he sells doesn’t consider it a visit without tea. Water, tea, mint, sugar, eat, sheep, fire: Eau, thé, menthe, sucre, manger, mouton, feu. My greetings are becoming more conversational. When people ask me how I’m doing, I respond as they would, telling them ca va bien, demi or empe; if my cup of wellness is full, half or empty. Life feels old, even with ATMs that work all the time, a fast internet connection and a DVD rental shop with Desperate Housewives, CSI and 24 box sets.
A young boy follows me home one morning on my way back from buying tadjala and packets of Nescafé and powdered milk for breakfast.
‘I’m Mohammed,’ he says, wiping his hand on his clothes before shaking mine.
He sits cross-legged on the floor and switches on the TV. This starts a pattern of coming over at will; sometimes to talk, but often just to hang out. Mohammed is eight years old and lives three houses away with his mom and sisters. He’s always on the street chasing a plastic ball with a group of his friends. He seems to be everywhere I go. I run into him at the Flame of Peace monument, where he explains that the three thousand guns stuck at its base are from the Tuareg rebellion. He shows up at one of the office containers at the site that’s becoming the Ahmed Baba Institute of Islamic Studies and Research. If I’m there while the sun is out, chances are Mohammed is close by. He comes over one morning for breakfast – which now includes him – to invite me for afternoon tea at his house. His bemused mother lets me into the yard, while he storms in twenty minutes later. He got engrossed in playing soccer. He apologises for being scruffy and puts on his tagelmust to look decent.
‘Please come in, you are welcome,’ he says, leading me to a shed.
He makes a fire and gives me a camel leather pouch with two handles; telling me to press in and out so that air blows onto the fire. ‘That’s very good.’
We drink our tea in three stages – a strong first cup with lots of mint that’s as bitter as death, a milder second cup that’s as bittersweet as life, and finally the lightest, sweetest cup.
‘It’s as sweet as love,’ he winks.
By this stage, his sister has called two of her friends over, and their baby brother has crawled off their mother’s back to join us. Walking me to the gate with his friends, he asks me to bend down and lean into him. ‘Bisou?’ he says with a grin. I plant a kiss on his cheeks and lips. ‘A demain matin, mon amour,’ he says, confirming our morning appointment.
More than anything, I love Timbuktu because it’s only here that I can spend mornings reading Malcolm X and afternoons at Bibliotheque Al-Imam Essayouti looking at the ancient manuscripts that are considered the most important after the Dead Sea Scrolls. The only ones on display are in a glass table in the middle of the room. One of the them is a thick, perfectly preserved Quran handwritten in Arabic script with gold ink. Some manuscripts only have intricate designs, others have writing with decorations around their frayed pages. Manuscripts that are not on display are in a wood cabinet with mesh doors.
It’s not just the students who wrote. Political and religious leaders wrote laws and decrees and responses to counter decrees. Ethicists wrote about extending women’s rights to free them from being reduced to belonging in the kitchen. Cases were made for and against tobacco. Even tea was turned into poetry. Friends and families wrote letters and recorded genealogy and family history; all articulately and beautifully written. There are manuscripts with titles like The Key to the Wings of Desire on the Knowledge of Arithmatic, about mathematics and calculating inheritance. The Joyous Companion of Those Whom I Met of the Maghribi Men of Letters is about the author’s encounters with writers from North Africa. The Rights of the Prophet describes in detail the life of Prophet Mohammed and his genealogy going back twenty-one generations. It was sold for twenty-four grams of gold.
Families also passed them down from generation to generation. Their collections are held in private libraries at their homes. I visit a family library for an intimate encounter with history. The small room is typically Malian, and especially Timbuktian in its simplicity. The only furniture is a table covered in a maroon tablecloth. The decorations on the walls are paper print outs praising the virtues of knowledge. ‘Writing is spiritual geometry,’ one of them reads. The manuscripts are arranged into neat piles on the table. They look their age, with faded brown pages that have holes and burns around the fringes. There’s a clay pot with twigs and sticks – these were used as pens, but they are not the original tools that wrote the family’s scrolls – and a cured sheep skin with some writing. It is full of holes but I can still see some of the words on it. Sheep skin was used before paper became widely available. I hold a manuscript; brittle, it’s the most fragile and precious thing I will ever touch. With so much of our history erased and rewritten to depict us as savages, the manuscripts of Timbuktu are an eternal reminder that Africa is the cradle of civilisation.
The Saturday of Nelson Mandela’s arrival dawns, and Timbuktu becomes a ghost town. All the shops are closed. The road to the market and the soccer field are empty. Greetings end at ‘good morning’, and the slow gait that defines walking here is replaced with hurried steps to Sankore mosque. Crowds have already formed a circle around the field opposite. Camels and mules are dressed in bells and colourful leather pouches. Boubous shine with newness, and women are wearing so much gold jewellery the desert sparkles with it. Kids stand
in the front row waving South African and Malian flags. Nelson Mandela is not in town. The recently ousted president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, is here to inaugurate his presidential pet project with his replacement and Jacob Zuma’s placeholder, President Kgalema Motlanthe, and political VIPs who include Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. Their host, President Amadou Toumani Touré, is proudly West African in a grand boubou. They walk around the building for some time before standing in front of the plaque that bears one of the most prolific scholars of his time, whose legacy transcends time. Born into a family of lawyers and judges and raised on a diet of reading and reciting the Quran by his father and uncle, Ahmed Baba had already established himself as an intellectual in his thirties, writing fifty-six books and a collection of sixteen thousand manuscripts for his private library.
The party moves to a field where the VIPs sit in a tent to watch Thandiswa Mazwai singing ‘Nizalwa Ngobani’ into a scratchy microphone. Her stage is a rug on the ground. When the show ends, and the town goes back to normal, Abdul drives me to the edge of town where I gatecrash the VIP lunch. The only person manning the entrance lets me in without a fuss. Lunch is chicken and lamb served with couscous and takoula. A cooked camel carcass is on a table in the middle of the camp. The presidents sit in their tent sipping mint tea, watching a group of musicians sitting in a semi-circle on a dune with their camels behind them. A melody rises and the only kid in the crowd stands up and starts dancing, his index finger wagging to the beat. It’s the kid from the Festival of the Desert; my young friend Mohammed.
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