To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  We dawdled in the dust, letting our accomplishments settle in with satisfaction. “Thanks,” I said to Zak, who had recovered his confidence.

  In a narrow street, above the doorway of a building, hung a faded sign, tinged with mud that had been whipped high in the rains and dried by the wind:Bibliothèque Manuscrits — Al-Wangari. Feeling euphoric, I pointed to it and smiled at Zak. Just then, a blue robe appeared on the path, seemingly brought by the breeze. It came closer to reveal a tailored fit on the lanky frame of a scholar.

  Ahmed al-Hadj grinned in greeting and unlocked the door to the library. He was pleased that I should enter it. The first two rooms were empty and I immediately remembered a photograph of a similar setting with stacks of crumpling sheets and broken books browned with dust and weather, poorly stored and in ruin. Then the man opened another locked door and we entered a larger, mud-walled room with furniture. A ceiling fan started when the electric switch went up. Immediately, I breathed air that had the aroma of old paper.

  The keeper of the library, magisterial in his movement, went behind his makeshift desk and motioned for me to sit on a wooden chair with a woven brace. Zak, not used to the setting, shyly bridged the language gulf.

  “My father was Imam at the mosque. His father before him. Our family values the old writings.” The seated man leaned his chest forward on the desk, his palms open in the air, not far from either side of his face as though to narrow my eyes on his own. Then he gestured toward a bookcase along the wall. “These manuscripts, these books, I save for them, for my family. And for Africa.” He was a man of letters saving historic writings for those who could not read.

  In 1853 Heinrich Barth, the German explorer, wrote of his “happy arrival in this illfamed place.” Tough, stubborn, and said to have been “more clever than intelligent,” he returned safely to Europe.

  I wanted to touch the pages, feel an ancient book, open history.

  “There are many manuscripts in Timbuktu. It is important that they be kept,” he said, not smiling. “But first they must be found.” Most endangered were the unregistered, unknown sheets of paper stashed in closets or loosely stacked writings without bindings, without containers, a sheaf held only with a wrap of tired leather.

  A wooden case full of books relied on the wall for support and stood beside two unmatched sets of shelving. Glass doors housed rather than protected the bindings and papers. The wall beside me had a larger case of shelves that sagged under the weight of a hundred volumes. Each shelf displayed pastel bookbindings. A bundle of papers was neatly stacked in an opened drawer. This trove of literary riches was merely a fragment of the challenge. I felt both encouraged and helpless; at once a believer that something was being done to rescue the manuscripts while also feeling that these efforts were woefully insufficient.

  “It is difficult to protect these,” Ahmed al-Hadj said through Zak. His left arm’s wave covered a tiny portion of the “Timbuktu manuscripts” I’d heard about. “My family wrote on astrology,” he explained, carefully lifting an old book from the collection and passing it to me. “Now, I wish to save everything.” I took heart from his reassurance, yet struggled to comprehend his perspective. “But it is not possible,” he said of the dilemma.

  This man in blue stared as though gauging trust in my eyes. He rose slowly, and walked to a mud alcove behind his desk to share a secret. He concentrated on me, his long arms carrying a burntwood box. He set it on the ground at my feet, where he knelt, the smoothed earth not dirtying his robe. He pried loose the top, shifted it off, and the carbon smudged his pink palms. The chest held eight damaged books and he removed one of the more intact volumes, its leather cover charred and flaking, and passed it to me.

  “The Koran,” Ahmed al-Hadj whispered. I cradled it in my arms as Zak interpreted with reverence: “It is from the twelfth century.”

  It would be hard to find the soul of Timbuktu, but the search, I thought, might begin in this room.

  He showed me another book and, through Zak, described how the paper withered from dampness during the rainy season. “These books — many, many — were not properly stored.” When I asked how he found this particular book, he said, “There was a home hurt in the rains. This was in it.”

  The jumbled maze of streets in Timbuktu’s Old City, circa 2008.

  A pamphlet, dry and curled, rested on his desk. He pointed to it but did not lift it, telling Zak, “I cannot let him touch this one. The binding had bugs.” When I asked where they went, he replied that they were shaken out. He went to a small pile of individual colophons, single sheets of history, and said of them, “Need more room for storage.” It was not a complaint. A recent acquisition, papers without binding, was piled in studied disarray with no place to file them properly yet or to protect them from changes in temperature or humidity. They left a mark on the mind as would a stand of old-growth forest, a cove of pristine water, or the glimpse of an endangered species. I felt that this might be why I had come to Timbuktu; to assist, to make things better, to help save these precious manuscripts. I felt embarrassingly “Western”: the only way to help immediately in this place seemed to be with cash. And I gave. He accepted. It was not his wish; it was his need.

  There are 700,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu. Their discovery has been called “the greatest archeological find since the Dead Sea scrolls.” Included in the cache are Moorish books with bug-riddled bindings, Islamic pamphlets covered with sand, ninth-century treatises baked by time, and scholarly pages a phase away from dust.

  These literary remnants are mostly from Timbuktu’s glorious fifteenth century, tucked untidily between Africa’s Muslim encounter and the rancour of European exploration. They are the evidences of a proud, if not widely known, heritage.

  Ignorance impeded their preservation over the centuries, and continued lack of awareness facilitated their slow disappearance — the loss of history’s book one page at a time. Were they housed together, collected in temperature-controlled rooms, and catalogued from Arabic to Tuareg to Zahara, these manuscripts would be esteemed one of the world’s bibliographic miracles. They are considered less a treasure only because of their scattered and deteriorating condition.

  Such was the commerce of writing in Timbuktu that the city’s trade routes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became known as the Ink Road, a tribute to more than the manuscripts that made their way along them. Respected marabouts (religious teachers) and scholars were regarded as “ambassadors of peace” for their acumen in negotiations and Koran-based dispute resolution, not only in Timbuktu but in Gao, on the River Niger, and in Djenné. With their scholarship and mediation skills, they were respected as the ideal adjudicators. Sought when arbitration was required, they travelled the routes, figuratively and literally, of parchment and peace.

  When Askia the Great ruled Mali in 1468, after his Songhai defeated the Tuareg, his rule was built upon Timbuktu’s strengths in trade. The city then became the epicentre of learning and Islamic education. Arab scholars wrote and collected books and created large libraries in its universities and synagogues. The vast collections of writings were maintained, protected, and revered. They sustained a learned society and a community of understanding. Thus the phrase “Timbuktu trades in gold, salt, and ink.”

  In Timbuktu’s golden age, sophisticated travellers would arrive with books known to be rare. During this period, manuscriptcollecting was popular in Timbuktu, and caravans were forcibly detained while their written works were copied by hand by students at the universities. Texts from distant universities were often borrowed, studied, and copied. Timbuktu’s libraries grew. At the same time, the city’s private libraries flourished with copies of written contracts, religious books, legal texts, and letters. The marginalia of the day recorded everything from wedding plans to the previous night’s shooting stars, providing a fascinating insight into the culture’s everyday concerns.

  Seeing those manuscripts today causes dismay. Often they lie in the homes of those who cannot re
ad, and who perhaps do not know of the treasures they possess. Or the documents are crammed into the forgotten corners of mud buildings. Individual manuscript pages have been sold to travellers for food, thus disappearing from their family, from Timbuktu, from the public domain.

  The protected manuscript collections that do exist, dating from as early as the second century, have prevented a cornerstone of Africa’s history from sifting through careless hands. That 700,000 manuscripts have survived largely untended is astonishing. International travellers make their plans for Mali, browse a few websites, arrive, sightsee, and depart, oblivious to this literary conundrum: a wealth of historic manuscripts almost accidentally still available. But time is not a friend of these writings; the annual rains bring damaging humidity, the books in dry storage harbour insects, words erode.

  In the race against time to save these irreplaceable treasures, Mali has attracted serious attention, irregular assistance, and modest funds from Norway, South Africa (where a major business consortium plans a new library to house hundreds of thousands of the manuscripts), the United States, and Spain. There is no small amount of controversy in the salvage work, with competing claims of authority and confusing mandates.

  The Ahmed Baba Centre, named for the fifteenth-century scholar, stores nineteen thousand manuscripts that range from philosophy, mathematics, and Islamic law to geography and the sciences. This is the written history of Africans in Africa. It is of them, by them. Not the French, the British, or the Portuguese.

  Restoration teams face a fascinating dilemma in deciding how to protect the brittle pages. Their work barely makes a dent in one of the desert’s greatest challenges. “Rare book boxes” have been designed to house those manuscripts beyond reclamation. Repair and restoration work is risky, too. Sometimes turning a page makes more dust than sense. The key to preserving the knowledge, if not the documents, is to transfer the words to another technology. Microfilming has been problematic, because the ubiquitous sand tends to erase key data components. And the supply of electricity is sporadic.

  Extraordinary efforts are underway to preserve Timbuktu’s centuries-old manuscripts from further deterioration. Funding and expertise are provided by Norway, Germany, the United States, and South Africa, yet the demanding task outstretches the available resources.

  The U.S.-based Timbuktu Educational Foundation* was created in 2000 for “the sole purpose of preserving, restoring, and disseminating the important intellectual contributions of the early African scholars from the famous Timbuktu University of Mali, West Africa.” Those noble objectives for Timbuktu’s disintegrating heritage are farsighted yet time-pressured. The foundation proposes to “translate and publish the manuscripts of Timbuktu” and “restore the historical buildings which house the University of Timbuktu,” which they intend to “reopen with its classical methods of teaching.” It also wants to open a branch of the University of Timbuktu in a major city in the United States with “the ancient, classical architecture of Timbuktu’s great universities.” There, it will recreate the famed Timbuktu “Circle of Knowledge,” the sharing of complex decision-making through the intergenerational training of scholars who mentor professors who, in turn, study with Imams. The scholars deliberate contentious matters together and, in this flow of information, learn and decide. When their deliberations are complete they make a decision, perhaps issue a fatwa. Given these aims, it is understandable that the Malian government, mindful of the co-operation it needs from other well-intentioned groups, made the foundation “the legal custodians and caretakers of the manuscripts.”

  Musa Balde, of Oakland, California, is president of the Timbuktu Educational Foundation. He warns that “this entire African intellectual legacy is on the verge of being lost.” While many of the volumes and decaying materials have been identified through the main universities of Timbuktu, Jingere Ber, Sankoré, and Sidi Yahia, much more work must be done. Balde has launched the foundation’s Preserve-a-Manuscript program, setting a fundraising goal of one hundred U.S. dollars for each artifact that remains from the time when “Timbuktu flourished as the greatest academic and commercial centre in Africa.”

  *The Timbuktu Educational Foundation appears to have ceased programs sometime around 2010. See afterword for this story.

  Meanwhile, in this antiquarian gold mine, the sheets curl and crack where the ink has set. Documents of a dozen warped pages are filled with hundreds of broken words. Africa is known as a land with a rich oral tradition, infused with song and dance; this trove of manuscripts establishes it as a continent with rich traditions in literature as well.

  We emerged from the dilapidated Old City onto a wider street, which made the area feel new, that is, less than a hundred years old.

  “Zak, had you ever been to Barth’s home before?”

  “No.”

  “To Caillié’s?”

  “No.”

  “To Laing’s?”

  “Yes, but only stand outside.”

  We stopped at a home that sold woven baskets. On its porch a pot of fish parts was at a boil. Farther along, a chair held dirty bottles filled with gas oil, each bottle holding just the amount needed to top up one of the motorcycles that were so common on this roadway. Zak stopped to buy a single cigarette, and we asked the boy selling it whether there was another bibliothèque nearby. Zak lit his smoke, puffed, and listened to the explanation as the boy pointed to a nearby building.

  We left the dust-packed road and entered a courtyard thirty metres along. Inside, we found half a dozen one-storey buildings that looked to be residences. A colonnade appeared, and there was a raised walkway made of mortar. A sign hung around the corner: Salle des manuscrits. That was it. We woke the man we took to be the custodian. He said the man we wanted was bathing.

  Apparently not. Djibril Doucouré sauntered toward us with such fresh enthusiasm that I felt as if I were the first to visit his library. The man was Chef de Division Restauration & Conservation des manuscrits a l’Institut Ahmed Baba de Tombouctou. He knew of Western interest in the manuscripts, corresponded with university students in Canada and the United States and, as he showed us to his rooms, was evidently proud of the manuscripts and books he had assembled as part of the preservation effort. Hundreds of protected volumes lined the walls. These books were intimates of his. Doucouré removed a bedsheet covering the glass display case in the middle of the room. In the case, a dozen books lay opened and labeled. “Islamique en 601/1204” was indicative of their ages. The Koran rested in two treasured copies respectively indicating both Muslim and Christian dates, 639 and 1241.

  “These titles, they are about pharmacie,” Doucouré explained, gingerly holding two aged books. “The spines, they crack because of heat.” The temperature had created dry wrinkles, and both books were torn.

  “May I?” I asked, extending my hands. Doucouré placed a book many hundreds of years old across my wrists.

  “This one, it is on optics.” He pointed to an illustration of a conical sphere with lines running through it and measurements indicating magnification. Arab calligraphy is among the most beautiful to be found, and it radiated here as well, though this book’s lines ended with aborted words, as page edges were worn away by heat and humidity.

  When Doucouré showed us a side room, we discussed the limited project funds he had. The library was large and cool and had sturdy shelves. The books were well racked, and I saw titles dealing with history and chemistry and mathematics. I thought if more Westerners visited, more would leave money. More Timbuktu manuscripts would be saved.

  My Timbuktu day was ending. There was an office here that stamped international passports with an imperial-looking blotch. But it needed to be searched out, and soon.

  I turned to Zak. “Shouldn’t we hurry?”

  “Why?” he replied.

  “It will close at five.”

  “At five?”

  “At five o’clock.”

  “Rick,” he stated. “Is Timbuktu. Nothing closes at five.”


  We picked up a couple of bottles of mineral water, a Diago for me, and Roc Vert for Zak. At a visitors’ room in a courtyard behind a sign for Mission Culturelle, there were a few brochures in French and, more curiously for a non-country, the presumption of a passport stamp: Tombouctou. It marked more than my travel document, it marked an accomplishment. Each year fewer than five thousand travellers (Europeans, Arabs, North Americans) — an average of thirteen a day — make their way to Timbuktu. To have been one of them was satisfying. It pleased me nearly as much not to have seen even one of the other twelve visitors that day.

  The day turned to night. Zak and I separated, him returning to the hotel. In the dust that shouldered the Route de Kabara, a yellowed building boasted of access to the Internet, a commercial courtesy of MaliNet. I’d read warnings that in Mali such signs, like those proclaiming VISA cards, were often meant as intentions, not facts. Inside was a table with computers, three of which apparently were functioning, others anticipating such a day.

  The one I chose booted slowly. After all, this was the end of the world; I had to manage my expectations. French keyboards were understandably de rigueur. The uniqueness of this one lay in its individual keys. Each character on the keyboard was handwritten on paper, using different pens and pencils, implying that such “fixes” had been made over time. These pieces of paper were secured to the keys with Scotch tape, the heat making “secured” a tentative concept here. Two tags were on the floor. After three reboots, I was ready and sent my mother and father a brief e-mail: “Have arrived healthy and safe. Dad, I’m in Timbuktu and going to get my hair cut.”

  I left the Internet room. Outside, it was dark; a dim light bulb hung from a cable beside a merchant’s doorway ten metres away. In beleaguered French I negotiated access to the shop’s telephone. It was kept under lock and key in a wooden box. The merchant twisted the key and pulled hard on a sand-encrusted bolt. The phone was old, but in Timbuktu, what isn’t? To ensure that I’d not misjudged the agreed cost, I placed seffe on the table and the shopkeeper gave me change, though he set it to the side in a gesture I understood to mean “In case it is more.” I telephoned Janice with all the emotion of far-off love and, after three rings, reached the answering machine, on which I left a historically placed romantic message.