Haidara assured Al Hanafi that the Ahmed Baba Institute would register all manuscripts, so that nobody would lose track of his contributions. He emphasized that he was willing to compensate the owners generously. The chief said that he had no manuscripts himself, but offered to do what he could to help. “Stay here, don’t go into town,” Al Hanafi said. “I’ll go to the mosque, and I will speak to all of the owners there.”
Villagers trickled in, bearing books. Some were in good condition, while others fell apart in Haidara’s hands. Silently and carefully he turned the pages, assessing their value with expert eye, noting their age, their place of origin, the decorations in the margins, the amount of gold leaf. He purchased 250 manuscripts, loaded them into a pinasse, and sailed back upriver to Timbuktu.
Over the coming months, Haidara returned two more times to Gourma Rharous and bought 250 more works. He was becoming increasingly confident about his persuasive powers and his ability to assess a manuscript’s value. Then, on the fourth voyage, without explanation, the sellers stopped coming.
“Nobody’s talking to me. People are avoiding me. What’s going on?” he asked the chief.
“I’ve got no idea,” Al Hanafi replied.
Another week went by. When he greeted people on the street, they turned away. At last, an acquaintance approached him in the market. One of Gourma Rharous’s officials, a man whose responsibilities included safeguarding the town’s cultural patrimony, was looking for Haidara, he said. “He’s very angry.”
Haidara sought out the man, and introduced himself. The official refused to shake his hand. “You’ve created a lot of problems for us. Everybody thinks you’re trafficking in manuscripts for profit. Nobody is happy with what you are doing.”
Haidara tried to explain the nature of his mission, but it was no use. The official, a highly influential figure, had begun actively dissuading everyone in the town from cooperating. “Pay attention, you have to keep hold of your manuscripts, ignore this fellow,” the official advised. “We don’t have any idea who he is. We don’t know where he’s going.” Haidara stayed a few more days. Unlike the previous three visits, when he had collected a total of five hundred volumes, he left empty-handed and discouraged. It had taken a single skeptic to undermine Haidara’s efforts to win over the population.
The skeptics were everywhere. He journeyed down the river to his ancestral home of Bamba, and east along the Niger as far as Gao, the ancient capital of the Songhai Empire, located two hundred miles east of Timbuktu. There he sought out the Islamic judge, or qadi, one of the city’s foremost intellectuals. He greeted Haidara cordially, invited him to sit down, and they talked about the manuscripts and the patrimony of Mali. Haidara gently broached the subject of the Ahmed Baba Institute and said he had come to encourage the qadi to contribute his manuscripts to the collection. Abruptly, the qadi’s attitude changed.
“Who led you here?” the qadi demanded.
“I read a lot, and I learned that your family comes from a long line of scholars and intellectuals, and has a collection of ancient manuscripts.”
“No, no, no,” the qadi said. Haidara knew that he was lying—he had heard from a reliable source that the qadi stored his treasures in a secret chamber in his house—but there was nothing he could do. The qadi called Haidara a “bandit” to his face, and threw him out of his house.
He journeyed by camel for five days to the onetime salt-trading entrepôt of Araouan, deep in the Sahara, 150 miles north along a historic caravan route. Five hundred years ago Araouan, the birthplace of Ahmed Baba, had been a center of Islamic scholarship as well as salt commerce, and he had heard through his Saharan sources that many illustrious works were hidden there—including those collected by the Scottish explorer Laing and stolen by Arab nomads after his murder. Haidara was not used to traveling by camel. He held on tightly to the saddle as the beast mounted sixty-foot-high dunes covered with grass, then, knees buckling, plunged sharply down the other side. He rode jarringly through valleys filled with a sea of spiny bushes that thinned out as they journeyed further north. Then the great waves of sand gradually disappeared, replaced by soft undulations furrowing a barren desert plateau. Nearby were the ruins of the legendary city of Taghaza, which had inspired medieval travelers to fantastic flights of imagination. “The ramparts of the city were of salt as also all its walls, pillars, and roofs,” the medieval Persian cartographer Al Qazwini wrote of Taghaza, basing his account on the fanciful testimony of an eyewitness who had recently visited the oasis. “The doors, too, were made of slabs of salt covered with leather so that the edges might not crack . . . all the land around the town is a salt pan . . . if an animal dies there it is thrown into the desert and turns to salt.” Araouan, a crumbling village where it hadn’t rained in forty years, hadn’t turned to salt, but it had fallen on hard times. The population of two hundred subsisted on a diet of fried locusts, and regarded outsiders with hostility. “He’s dangerous. What does he want with these manuscripts?” people said about him. “Maybe he wants to destroy them. Maybe he wants to bring us a new religion.”
Promising leads turned into crushing disappointments. In Majakoy, on the Niger River, villagers led to him to a man who, they said, had a valuable collection. Haidara found him guarding a locked trunk. He refused to open it.
“It’s for the town’s orphans, it’s not for me. I can’t even touch it.”
“Can I at least see it?” Haidara pleaded.
“That’s not possible.”
The dialogue went on for four days, until the man threw open the chest. Haidara eagerly peered inside—then recoiled in dismay. Termites scuttled in every direction. They had been devouring the last shreds of the manuscripts. Ninety percent had been reduced to dust. The owner looked at the seven volumes that were left—and wept. He hadn’t opened the trunk, he admitted, in twenty years.
But Haidara was patient. Over the course of his journeys he constantly refined his approach to manuscript hunting, and achieved better and better results. “My predecessors made a number of errors that I tried to correct,” Haidara recalled years later. “I avoided everything that didn’t work for them, and I introduced my own strategies.” He never traveled by motor vehicle, believing that it would cause the manuscript owners in poor villages to think that he had vast wealth, and prompt them to inflate their asking price. Instead, when he journeyed away from the river, he rented camels or donkeys. Traveling with pack animals instead of in a motorized vehicle extended his journeys by days, sometimes weeks, but Haidara was convinced that it earned him villagers’ trust. Often, when Haidara talked with the head of a family about “buying” the manuscripts, he was immediately shown the door. “Get out. Get out!” the owner would say. He soon realized that the word had a distasteful connotation for many manuscript owners, equating a treasure passed down through generations with cold cash. From that point, he used only the word “exchange.” He acquired manuscripts in return for building the village a school, and, more often, in a trade for livestock. “I gave out a lot of cows,” he said.
Many times he arranged to trade the manuscripts for printed books, a highly sought after commodity in remote villages. Haidara reached out to booksellers across the Maghreb—Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and Libya—and received shipments in the mail of Arabic literature, history, and poetry, then returned to the villages bearing the books. The process could take six months, but it was almost always worth the trouble. “Take whatever you want,” the owners exclaimed joyfully, running their hands over the bound and printed volumes. Over time, as well, word spread up and down the Niger and through the desert about the conservation work being done by the Ahmed Baba Institute, and some manuscript owners traveled to Timbuktu and saw the care with which their precious heirlooms were being treated. Faith in Haidara grew.
Haidara was developing an acute sense of each book’s worth, and was becoming a skilled negotiator. If the manuscript was complete, which was not that common, it would elevate its value. If Timbuktu’s sc
ribes had made many copies of a single work it would diminish the price. He valued manuscripts written by Timbuktu’s most illustrious calligraphers—a handful of artistic geniuses identified by the colophons at the end of each volume—far more highly than the work of lesser scribes. Subject matter was another key criterion. Haidara highly esteemed works on conflict resolution, contemporary politics, geography—particularly those with detailed and colorful maps—and government corruption, because few such studies existed, and he also placed a high value on medical manuscripts, because the knowledge they imparted was often applicable today.
Haidara took into account damage from termites, dust, or bacteria, but weighed the extent of the destruction against the rarity and beauty of the work, and often bought it anyway, figuring that he would restore it when he brought it back to Timbuktu. And he was prepared to pay huge prices if something captured his imagination. In Sikasso, a town southeast of Bamako near the border with Burkina Faso, he once came across a large trunk containing several hundred manuscripts—poetry written by the great ulemas, or Islamic scholars, from the Peul tribe of Massina in the eighteenth century; manuscripts that described the arrival of French troops in the country in the mid-nineteenth century and debated the implications of the foreigners’ presence; manuscripts about jurisprudence written in a variety of Malian languages, including Peul, Bambara, and Soninké, and transliterated into Arabic; and works that delved deeply into herbal medicines and other esoteric remedies. Haidara acquired the trunkful of manuscripts in exchange for constructing a new mosque for the village as well as a primary school, paying “many thousands of dollars” for the collection. It was the most expensive transaction he made in fifteen years of manuscript prospecting.
People also sensed that Haidara was playing fair. After nearly being run out of Gourma Rharous, the first town he had visited, Haidara returned there a year later. On his first afternoon back in town, a Tuareg nomad in his forties, a gaunt man in a ragged turban with half a dozen children playing around him in the sand, called out to him in greeting as he passed by his tent.
“Come inside,” he cried.
Haidara entered the traditional dwelling, stitched together from goatskins, and sat on the ground in the semidarkness. He noticed a metal chest at the rear of the tent, the type normally used to hold manuscripts.
“You come from where?” said the Tuareg.
“I’m from Timbuktu,” replied Haidara in Tamasheq, the language of the Tuaregs. In addition to his native Songhoy, he was conversant in Peul and Tamasheq, the two other main languages of Mali’s north, as well as French, and thus had no problem negotiating with manuscript owners across the region.
Haidara made small talk, and, seeing that the Tuareg was too poor even to offer his visitor a cup of tea, he offered to purchase some food and drink for him and his family. Haidara ran out to the market, and returned with half a slaughtered lamb and a kilogram bag of tea. The Tuareg grilled the lamb outside the tent and, as they sat eating in the sand with the man’s family, Haidara gently broached the subject of manuscripts.
“I don’t have any of those,” the Tuareg said. “I only have printed books.”
“Can I take a look?” asked Haidara.
“Why not?”
Haidara opened the trunk and pored through the volumes. Buried among the printed material was one work that caught his eye: a Koran from the seventeenth century. He looked through it carefully, noting the delicate Maghrebi letters, the fragile gilt that caught the late afternoon light filtering through the tent flap. It was, Haidara realized, a masterpiece.
“How much do you want for this?” asked Haidara.
“Whatever you want to give me,” the owner said, shrugging.
“You have to name your price.”
“Give me five thousand CFA,” or about ten dollars, the nomad said. It was a pitifully low sum. Haidara could not accept it. They bargained—but this time the buyer was bidding up the price.
“No, no. This treasure has a huge value,” he replied.
“Ten thousand CFA.”
“No,” said Haidara.
“Twenty thousand.”
Haidara gave him one hundred thousand CFA. The man received the money, wide-eyed. “If I’ve got more books like that will you pay for them?” he asked.
“Of course.”
At five o’clock the morning after that, in total darkness, Haidara heard a knock on his door.
“Who’s that?” Haidara said.
The Tuareg entered his room, carrying a large camel-skin sack. Wordlessly he dumped a pile of manuscripts on the ground. In the murkiness before dawn, Haidara could barely see what was lying there. But at six o’clock, golden light filtered through his window, illuminating magnificent treasure. When Haidara stepped outside the hut later that morning he stared in astonishment. Tuaregs from across the region had formed a long line in front of his door, bearing camel and sheepskin sacks stuffed with manuscripts. Many had been hidden in caves or holes in the sand for decades. Haidara handed out the equivalent of thousands of dollars—Kuwait and Saudi Arabia had subsidized the effort—and left with more than a thousand manuscripts. He had paid the sellers everything that they had demanded, and even more. He had taken everything they had.
Haidara headed back upriver to Timbuktu, his boat riding low in the water, weighed down with footlockers and piles of camel-skin sacks.
In Timbuktu, Mahmoud Zouber looked on with astonishment. “You found all that?” he said.
In his first year of work at the Ahmed Baba Institute, Haidara managed to acquire as many manuscripts as the previous team of eight prospectors had collected in a decade.
Haidara’s obsession was growing. He was spending an average of three weeks a month on the road, mostly traveling by pinasse and dugout canoe along the Niger, then returning to Timbuktu to catalogue his works and rest before heading out on the road again. Serendipitous discoveries kept him craving more. Once, in a village near Timbuktu, Haidara acquired a fifty-page fragment of a biography of Islamic saints that he found pleasing, then, on a hunch, traveled up and down the Niger looking for the rest. After two years of assiduous searching he located a similar fragment in a storage room in a village near Gao, 250 miles from the site of the first acquisition. In Timbuktu, he assembled the two parts—and discovered that he now held a complete work by the great Ahmed Baba written during the savant’s captivity. On the last-page colophon Baba had written his name; the date, “991,” according to the Islamic calendar, equivalent to 1593: and the place of its creation, “Marrakesh.” The biography, in two pieces, had made its way back across the desert centuries later to Mali.
Haidara had become consumed by the urge to discover the provenances of the manuscripts, tracing the often circuitous journeys that they made over the centuries. “When I was at the Ahmed Baba Institute, I had an office filled with manuscripts,” he would recall decades later. “When I was home, manuscripts surrounded me. My friends told me ‘you have gone crazy. You can’t talk about anything else.’ I said, ‘leave me alone.’ The manuscripts had a certain smell, and they said ‘you are smelling of manuscripts, Abdel Kader.’ ”
In 1992, Zouber confronted Haidara at the headquarters of the Ahmed Baba Institute. The director, who had taken a paternal interest in his young prospector, was concerned about his personal life. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Why haven’t you gotten married yet? What are you waiting for?”
“Look,” Haidara said, not wanting to feel pressured. “I don’t even have a house to call my own.” Haidara was content sharing with his siblings the spacious home in Sankoré that had been bequeathed to them by their parents. And though he hadn’t yet found a mate, he felt no need to hurry. He had an active social life, plenty of friends in Timbuktu, and remained close to many of his siblings, including a couple of far-flung elder brothers who had become traders in Cameroon and Senegal. Zouber, however, insisted that Haidara settle down.
“Okay,” said Zouber, “I owe you a lot of
money for the last mission you undertook for us. I’m going to write you a check, and I want you to buy some property with it.” With his earnings, Haidara heeded Zouber’s wish and purchased a plot of land owned by an uncle in Bella Farandja, a newer neighborhood on the eastern edge of Timbuktu, facing the desert. Later, he built on the property a traditional house of limestone blocks, a large vestibule, and an inner courtyard, much like the one in which he had grown up. Months afterward, Haidara met a young woman, a university student in Bamako and the daughter of a traditional Sorhai chief from Timbuktu’s Djingareyber quarter. They initiated a courtship and continued to see each other whenever she returned to Timbuktu.
One day Haidara set forth from Timbuktu toward Mali’s border with the Sahel nation of Burkina Faso, five hundred miles to the southeast. He had heard that a family in a remote village had accumulated the finest collection of manuscripts in the region. He traveled by truck toward Gao, skirting a vast lake the color of café au lait, where longhorn cattle grazed along the barren brown shore and the skeletal remains of drowned acacia trees protruded from the shallows. The lake, near the town of Gossi, was also known for the large herds of desert elephants, among the last in the Sahel, that cluster around its banks during Mali’s dry season. Just beyond the lake rose the strange quartz-and-sandstone outcropping called Fatimah’s Hand, named after the daughter of the Prophet and his wife Khadijah, three fingerlike pillars almost the color of human flesh, tilting slightly backward and extending two thousand feet from the desert floor toward the sky.
In Gossi, the site of the region’s biggest cattle market, he hitched another ride on a truck to a smaller village. There he joined a fifty-camel caravan, bringing bars of salt from the Taoudenni mines in the northern Sahara to Burkina Faso. Haidara mounted a camel at two o’clock the first afternoon, but after half a mile, he begged to get off.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Page 4