To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  Fumbling in my pack, I stuffed the remaining tobacco into my pipe and lit it. This produced an unfamiliar dusty smoke that burned dry and went out quickly. I repacked the pipe and lit it again, only then realizing that my last stash had come from the tobacco exchange with the elderly peep smoker in Djiguibombo the day I entered Le Pays Dogon.

  Cheers broke into the darkness. A man squatted in the shadow near a mud wall, the volume low on his radio as I walked by. I asked the game’s final score, and he announced happily that it was Mali 3, Burkina Faso 1. A good night for West Africa.

  EPILOGUE

  A Gentle Harshness

  I LEFT AFRICA PERSONALLY CHANGED BY THE gentle harshness I found and a disquieting splendour that found me. Mali was the journey I needed, if not the one I envisioned. And I learned that there’s a little of Timbuktu in every traveller: the over-anticipated experience, the clash of dreams with reality.

  For some, the greatest gift of travel is anticipation. For others, its benefit is the journey, personal or physical. Many travellers relish the occasions bound in, not for, a destination. There are those who comprehend travel best in the aftermath, in the memories of difficulties met, and in reflection over photographs and home food. There is no recipe. Not all travels are a quest, not every student learns.

  True travellers (that’s an unfair term, but hear me out) find any landscape of interest, passingly so, perhaps, but still of interest. One may develop preferences and value some spaces more than others, yet every place, journey, and view holds potential. And there is never a more real landscape than the one where you stand. All else is memory, imagination, or a cobbled-together expectation of what might be.

  Travel reflects the care one takes in building oneself, in identifying the spirit of living as one sees it. A journey is not complete unto itself; the physical start and end are only arbitrary statements of time, useful for spatial definition. As a traveller, one passes through and around stationary places; the traveller is the stream, not the rock. Travel is about caring for those who welcome you, who grant you passage, who take care of you, who share their work and play, their homes and meals. It is not about waving painted fingernails at the locals as you drive by.

  At its core, travel holds immense hope for a better world. It has been said that “Tourism is the right hand of peace.” I hold that to be true. Two hundred and eighteen countries call this tiny planet home. Each of us is but a step or two away from a person in every one of those nations; they may be family, perhaps a friend, or a fellow traveller. Tourism, more than any other industry, can break down barriers to understanding, can bring people together to celebrate differences.

  In my journey, I was fortunate enough to avoid the misfortunes of Adams. I did not find in myself even a modest measure of Park’s persistence, not an iota of Caillié’s preparation, the conceits of Laing, or the rigours of Barth. It was good that I explored Mali at the dawn of the twenty-first century; I did not have to compete with those paragons of travel. Their impression of Timbuktu, however, echoed across the canyon of the two hundred years between us: “Is that all there is?” Timbuktu was not what any of us thought it would be. Few destinations are as fascinating as the journeys they inspire.

  AFTERWORD

  Now is the Needed Time

  IT HAS BEEN NEARLY A DECADE SINCE I SLEPT on the rooftops of mud homes in the Dogon villages, got lost in the streets of Timbuktu, and wiled away time with Zak. I will always remember that when I was antsy about a delay or other issues arising from foreign travel and sought a solution or his advice, he’d simply say, Inshallah (“If God is willing”).

  My travels to Timbuktu would be forbidden today if the jihadists had their say. A traveler would find him or herself in harm’s way for all manner of reasons, constantly deterred by both the military as well as their own common sense. As I was leaving Mali in 2004, the Islamic extremist groups were already convening in the north, the Tuareg were restless, and the Arab Spring was in gestation. Events then unfolded as they always seemed to unfold in Africa, as portrayed by the Western media — at their own peculiar pace of unrest, brutality, and disappointment.

  Traditionally, Africa annually garners immense hope from observers in the Western world. The Band Aid theme song, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” is a perennial reminder of hardship and conveys the power of Western guilt (“we have more”) with thumping sympathy masked as empathy. Yet we can’t escape the song’s sentiment: “Thank God it’s them instead of you …” It’s often hard for me to reconcile the Timbuktu I visited to the atrocities that have occurred since I left, especially when current events have had such a significant impact on the people I met on my trip. Beginning the month after my journey, Zak and I remained in touch via e-mail infrequently, whenever he could make it into Mopti. As time went on and with the expansion of Internet access, e-mail became more convenient for him, and now we can even speak on the phone.

  When I first returned from my travels in West Africa, Mohammed e-mailed me regularly, offering meaningful promises: “I will get back to you very soon with further details and reimbursement.” Then, “I am having my people check our records for your refund.” Eventually, “I am very sorry it has taken me so long. I will be in Europe in one week and from there I will send you money.” One day the messages stopped. No reply came to the e-mails I continued to send. Eventually I heard from Zak in response to my asking about Mohammed: “Nothing. No one says. Gone.” It seems Mohammed’s business went bad and out.

  Nema e-mailed me once to say that she was taking a computer course and would I please send sixty dollars.

  Zak was never paid by Mohammed for his work as my guide. I covered the amount because it was my shout, as they say, and asked him to share it with Nema.

  Alistair and I traded notes after returning home. He kindly sent along some of his writings, a version of which appeared in a later edition of the valuable book Sahara Overland, edited by Chris Scott. His sharing of this draft ensured that I did right by him when reviewing my own sketchy notes of that evening’s conversation on the hotel balcony in Mopti.

  And a few months after this book was first published I arrived home one evening to find a large bouquet of flowers on the front porch and a card that said, “Thank you. Love, Anke.” I’ve been unable to make contact with my three Malian and two French train companions, though I hope this story finds its way into their hands so they know how they furthered the awareness and understanding of a fellow traveler.

  Ali Farka Touré died in March 2006, after a long battle with cancer.

  In late 2007, I received an e-mail from Zak: “Rick, I am married. Name is Marie.” I was thrilled for him and Marie, and asked about his plans. “Will live in village. Dogon.” When I asked about his guiding business, he responded, “Is difficult. Is slow.”

  And when I asked about Mamadou, Zak replied, “No work. Now not.”

  Around the same time, I asked Zak for his comfort with my writing about him and our travels together. He replied, “Good you write. Make more people for guide.” And after the book was out and I’d sent him gift books as a thank you, he wrote: “Six Timbuktu books. Arrive Mopti. Will share.” And so it went. Of the copies I’d sent him, he gave one to Nema, he said; and because her English was limited, “I told story. She laugh.” And that made me happy.

  In the spring of 2009, Zak sent me a smiling e-mail, one of those messages you glean great happiness from because of how the words jump: “Son Kaleb. New. Born to Maria. And me. Am happy.”

  His family was now rooted in the Dogon village he’d called home forever. But all the while, events outside his world were curtailing his work as a guide as well as the increasingly essential income for his growing family.

  Occasionally I put readers of the first edition of this book in touch with Zak, but none of them actually ventured to Mali: difficulties started to arise, hesitations set in, trips were postponed and finally cancelled. Kidnappings occurred in nearby countries, and Mali was rumoured to be a place fo
r hiding those captives, a country from where lucrative ransoms were negotiated. Tension escalated in June of 2009 when Malian armed force’s Colonel Lamana Ould Dou was assassinated at his Timbuktu home, in uniform, his purported AQIM assailants fleeing into the desert in 4 X 4s.

  In November of 2011, two Frenchmen were kidnapped not far from Timbuktu, nearer Mopti. Two days later, four tourists — one each from The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and South Africa, were having lunch in a café on the Timbuktu square, a place I’d walked by casually and confidently feeling safe. They were approached by gun-toting men who forced them into waiting vehicles. When the German baulked and refused to go with his captors, a gunman turned, aimed, and shot him dead.

  When his work as a guide for trekkers dried up, it became Zak’s ambition to create a garden business for his village and to provide a job for himself and for fellow villagers.

  Timbuktu’s tourism numbers hit a sharp decline — to near zero — in an industry that once accounted for fifty percent of the local economy. Zak’s guiding business, even in the Dogon, dried up.

  Occasionally I sent him money. Not a lot, and I never tied this to Christmas or to an anniversary of our travels, or to anything that indicated it would be annual or even repeated; it was just a little bit to help a friend.

  When the Harmattan winds died down one year, an e-mail from Zak sprouted with an idea: “I build business. Village. Garden to sell.” I wondered if I could help somehow. “What do you need for your new business?” I asked. His garden was growing, he replied, and he had the land to expand, but he needed a larger cistern to hold water for irrigation. The well needed to be deeper, too. Both projects would mean he could give jobs to people in his village.

  Months later he sent two photographs. They showed his large garden, and Zak’s message: “Rick, one day you visit. We sit in garden. You. Me. We eat garden. Is onion.”

  “Onion?!” I wrote back. “Zak, I hate onions.”

  “Is onion garden Rick. You like.”

  I vow to one day sit in Zak’s garden and eat onions with him.

  In 2011, as Libya fell from dictatorship into disarray, many soldiers who had fought alongside Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s troops — armed, well-trained, and eager for action — fled south and west through Niger and Algeria. They found a refuge in Mali and changed that country, perhaps forever.

  The Tuareg have long wanted a country of their own. Today that would require separating Mali in two, with the new nation becoming Azawad.

  The Tuaregs — nomadic desert dwellers who form about a tenth of Mali’s population — have long called this part of the Sahara their home. As recently as two decades ago, they took up the battle for an autonomous territory, one they envisioned as a self-governed homeland. Azawad, they call their proposed new country. Since Mali gained independence from France in 1960, the Tuareg had mounted four armed and aggressive calls for autonomy. Mali, a democratic country, stayed firm that it should remain whole. Each Tuareg attempt at separation ended with a ceasefire, resulting in peaceful, if disgruntled, coexistence. Until the next time.

  Tuaregs know death. Before teaching me how to ride a camel at an oasis near Timbuktu, my Tuareg companion wrapped a blue turban, a cheche, around my head and neck. It was to keep out the wind-whipped sand, he said: “Is necessary. Or you will die.”

  When the Tuareg survivors of the Libyan rebellion returned to Mali, their National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) aligned with AQIM, the opportunistic front of a jihadist movement targeting occupation and control of the huge sub-Saharan region known as the Sahal. The Salafi militants were bent on destroying the status quo in Mali, a country known for its tradition of religious tolerance. Their aim was the establishment of a theocratic state and “terrorist sanctuary.” The consortia moved southward with the common purpose of pushing away the ill-prepared Malian army, taking control first of the desert and then of the Sahel’s trading city of Gao, in the eastern part of the country. And their incursion soon made parts of Mali — certainly Timbuktu — “one of the most dangerous places in the world.”

  To bring that about, several strands of history played out in sequence — all were separate, yet related. The Malian army felt that the government, led by former general Amadou Toumani Touré (affectionately known as “ATT”), provided them with poor equipment and inadequate resources to fight this civil war. That discontent led to a military coup on February 6, 2012, which deposed ATT and replaced him with a mid-level captain, Amadou Sanogo (a graduate of U.S. military training programs for Mali), who was then declared president. (Later, this junta would itself be forced to relinquish power in another transition.) While the cabal fought their own government, the distraction provided the alliance of Tuareg and Taliban-like militants with open ground.

  The Tuareg–AQIM partnership methodically seized control of three of Mali’s regions — Gao, Tombouctou, and Kidal — and surrounded Tombouctou’s capital city, Timbuktu. The old town’s shrines and mosques came under threat, as did its 700,000 manuscripts from the 14th and 15th centuries. The rediscovery of these Arabic and Hebrew language documents has been called “the most important archeological discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Most of the manuscripts are brittle and curled by humidity and time, many of their bindings weakened by bugs. I had cradled some of these ancient books in my hands while visiting Timbuktu.

  One day the insurgents entered and took control of Douentza, the town where I’d played soccer with the free-spirited village children on a patch of dirt road, and I was struck by their immediate loss of innocence. Wherever they went, the AQIM imposed what the New York Times called “hard-edged Islamic rule.” Women were to clothe themselves from head to ankle and to cover their faces with veils. Non-compliance was punished with flogging. Public amputations for minor misdemeanors were but one demonstration of the militants’ fanaticism. They would carve off an accused person’s hand, at the wrist, in public.

  Timbuktu was for many centuries a centre of Islamic teaching and learning, a place where curiosity led to the study and acknowledgement of differing world views and cultures.

  Irony steps in at the oddest times: it was here that the insurgents’ alliance split as the Islamic militants turned on the ethnic Tuaregs, forcing them to flee or be killed, and making Timbuktu a flashpoint during what The Economist magazine termed “bloody repercussions.” The Ansar Dine’s black flag now hung unchallenged in Timbuktu.

  The first amateur photographs coming out of the invaded Timbuktu in 2012 showed spades held high and pickaxes being swung against the mud walls of shrines and mausoleums constructed hundreds of years ago. It was not enough that these monuments had been built and maintained by devout Muslims, or that they had survived the ravages of many centuries. As chunks of earthen plaster fell away and littered the ground, frenzied hands pulled at exposed structural frames. The frames crumbled.

  Timbuktu was once called The Town of 333 Saints, and there are dozens of shrines and mausoleums and mosques, all of them targeted for destruction by the jihadists after they took control of the remote and famous city. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)

  Of the shrines, considered idolatrous by the jihadist vandals, Ansar Dine spokesman Sanda Quid Boumama told Agence France-Presse that they would be destroyed: “All of them, without exception.” The International Criminal Court barked in reply, “This is a war crime.”

  The world responded with words. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) expressed concern about “the looting and smuggling of artifacts,” to which Boumama replied, with a terrorist’s shrug, “All of this is haraam [sinful]. We are all Muslims. UNESCO is what?”

  In the spring of 2012, Zak’s e-mails took an ominous turn. For the first time, he asked for assistance: “Can help village? No food. No work. No garden.”

  Then, weeks later, another message: “Am to Burkino. Look for work. Maybe flee.”

  When he returned from Burkino Faso, the country just south of where he and I had trekke
d in the Dogon area of Mali, he wrote that there were already too many people there looking for work. He and Marie might instead go to Mopti.

  Within days I read on a BBC website that Mopti was where the rebels were heading next in their surge westward in Mali. And it was then that I asked Zak what I wrote in this book’s preface: “Are you safe?” He replied, “Am safe. Village has fear.” It occurred to me that another fear held by Zak’s fellow villagers would be that someone as strong and diligent as Zak might leave them. And that’s what he did.

  Zak and his family fled their Dogon village and headed west and south to the town of Koutiala, somewhat north of Mali’s border with Burkino Faso. His next email read: “In Koutiala, time is little quiet, I think that is better to stay here because all west Africa is in danger so going in new adventure inner Burkina or Côte-D’Ivoire will not change about the security.”

  Then: “The village is 05 km from the town but every morning I go there to look for job! My family and myself are OK today.” As they adjusted, Zak wrote: “Now we have the habit of life from here! At the beginning (02 months) ago it was hard with the mosquito and the wedder.” (Here I have to repeat one of his misspellings, revenge perhaps for the times we spent together in the Dogon when he announced: “Rick, you have unfixable French!”)

  I do not wish to trade on his colloquialisms, charming as they are, nor on his candour — but always he is pure, lovable Zak, the fellow who was my teacher, and always patiently so. It brings a wry and sad smile to my face when he writes, “Please my friend if you can help me; I need to buy cereals for eating food and build a toilette. Because the toilette we are using is in somebody house and they getting boring with us now.”

  And, when he’s been assisted, “Thank you very much for the help; this will arrange my situation.” In the midst of war, amid uncertainty, living in trying times and danger, Zak’s life with Marie and Kalib moved along.