The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  “What’s the problem?” the camel driver asked.

  “I’m in pain. I need to walk.”

  They trudged through the sand for eleven hours, and at one o’clock in the morning they found a suitable place to camp. His companion prepared a meal, but when Haidara saw what he was eating—gristly, rotten-looking antelope—he felt sick, and preferred to go hungry. At six a.m. they resumed their journey, heading east for another twelve hours and camping in the sand. They left early again the following morning, and crossed a shallow lake near the Burkina Faso–Mali frontier. “We’re going to go our separate ways here, and you have to continue on your own,” the camel driver said upon reaching the other side. With his small sack on his back, Haidara began walking. “It’s very close,” the man shouted after him. “Just follow the lake. Don’t leave it behind.”

  Haidara trudged along the lake beneath a broiling sun, with temperatures approaching one hundred degrees, sipping from the half-liter flask of water that he had brought with him, managing to cool himself off by splashing himself from time to time in the tepid, muddy waters of the lake. He was carrying thousands of dollars of cash in his satchel, but, as always, he was dressed humbly, and was confident that he would strike nobody as being a promising target for robbery. Eight hours after starting out, nearing sundown, parched and exhausted, he arrived at the village. The manuscript owner was gone. He recuperated from his exhausting walk, and waited two days until the man returned. Haidara introduced himself and announced that had come to see his manuscripts.

  “Who told you about that?” the man demanded.

  “Everybody knows about it. Your father was a friend of my father.”

  “What do you want? You want to copy them? You want me to lend them to you?”

  “No, no, I want to exchange them with you.”

  “I can’t even talk about this with you. This is our history, there is no price.”

  “Well I want to see them anyway.”

  The man brought out sacks filled with manuscripts. Most were in terrible condition—bloated from water damage or gouged by termites—and were beyond repair. Some had torn pages and mold growing on them, but Haidara was confident that he could restore them. Others were in mint condition, and included some of the finest works that he had ever seen. There were theological treatises from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leafed in gold, and adorned with the handwritten commentaries of generations of scholars. The greatest treasure was a Koran from the eleventh century, written in Egypt one hundred years before Timbuktu came into being.

  Haidara knew that he had to have them—at any cost.

  “I’m not selling them,” the man insisted. “The manuscripts don’t leave our presence.”

  “I want to take them to Timbuktu,” Haidara explained. “An institute there will conserve them, display them, and restore them to good condition. They will be there for the whole world to share and see—including you and your children.”

  “This is not just for me,” the man replied. “It is for for my older brother, who lives in a village not far from me.” A search party went out looking for the brother. He showed up the following night. Haidara could sense that he was open to negotiation.

  “I’m ready to give you goats, sheep, cows, whatever you want.”

  Haidara and the older brother crossed the marsh in a pirogue and then walked another two days to a market town across the Burkina Faso border. In this remote and sparsely populated corner of the Sahel, the frontier was not clearly marked or policed, and people moved back and forth freely. The man brought out a shopping list: fifty goats, two mules, a huge quantity of rice, millet, and fabrics. Haidara spent $10,000—an unheard of sum. Mules brought the goods back to the village. Haidara loaded the sacks of manuscripts onto the backs of three camels, and then, after handshakes all around, headed back to Timbuktu.

  By now he had spent almost all of his money. His guide brought him to a village, where he waited five days before renting a four-wheel-drive that carried him to Gao, and from Gao he hitched a ride on a truck back to Timbuktu. It had been a four-week journey to retrieve these manuscripts, the longest, most difficult voyage that Haidara had ever made. When he finally arrived, after all the grueling days of trekking through the bush there and back, he was gaunt, broke, thirsty, and physically spent. But he never regretted making the trip.

  Nor did Haidara have second thoughts about the life that he had chosen. “I was well paid for this work. They let me do whatever I wanted, and I did it well,” he recalled three decades later. “I had my freedom. And I had a great responsibility. I had to convince people not to lie. I had to convince them to hand over their manuscripts. They gave me this responsibility with confidence, and I had to fulfill it. And when I started reading these manuscripts, I discovered amazing things, and I couldn’t leave them alone. I couldn’t stop reading.” He steeped himself in the lives of kings and savants, in the wondrous encounters of Timbuktu’s intellectuals with the city’s first Western visitors, in the divisions within Sufism over fikh, or Islamic law, and in the ethical arguments of Ahmed Baba and other polemicists.

  He was particularly interested in manuscripts that contradicted Western stereotypes of Islam as a religion of intolerance—pointing with pride to Ahmed Baba’s denunciations of slavery, and to the strident correspondence between the jihadi sultan of Massina and Sheikh Ahmed Al Bakkay Al Kounti, a mid-nineteenth-century Islamic scholar in Timbuktu known for his moderation and acceptance of Jews and Christians. As time passed he became something of a savant himself, revered by many peers in Timbuktu for his knowledge of the region’s history and religion, sought after by parents to offer their children guidance.

  Soon after returning to Timbuktu with his prized acquisitions from the Burkina Faso border, he went back on the road. The pace was unrelenting. He traveled for hundreds of miles along the Niger, paddling canoes and riding in motorized longboats, heading upstream and downstream, stopping at nearly every village and town en route—Diré, Tonka, Goundam, Niafounké, Gourma Rharous, Bourem Inali, Gao. He made repeated trips in camel caravans north to the barren desert along the Algerian border, and sometimes crossed the frontier into Algeria and Morocco. Haidara was single, and could be gone for long periods, but he found the journeys exhausting—and sometimes dangerous. He fell off a camel. He suffered from exposure, burned beneath the desert sun, and seared himself in the desert wind.

  Near Gao, an eighteen-wheeler he was riding in overturned while trying to surmount a huge sand dune. Dozens of passengers, including women and children, were sandwiched between large burlap sacks of grain and other goods carried with them in the back, and several were badly injured. Haidara leapt free of the huge vehicle moments before it toppled over, and came out of it with only a few scratches. Three times his pirogue overturned in rough waters in the Niger, sending satchels and other belongings to the bottom of the river. By an astonishing stroke of fortune, each accident occurred while he was on the way to a village from Timbuktu on a buying expedition. Each time, he was able to salvage the money he had brought with him, carefully wrapped, inside his gown. And he never lost a single manuscript.

  4

  In 1993, Haidara considered moving on. He had worked at the Ahmed Baba Institute for nine years, surviving road accidents and canoe capsizings, losing his way in the Sahara. He had acquired 16,500 manuscripts, creating one of the largest public collections of Arabic handwritten books in the world. Haidara had become engaged to the university student in Bamako and was ready to settle down and start a family; they would be married in 1995. And he had become focused on the future of the Mamma Haidara collection, languishing in tin crates in storage rooms in Timbuktu and his ancestral village, Bamba. One day he approached the director, Zouber, by now one of his closest confidants. Haidara would name his eldest son after him.

  “You know I have a problem,” he said. “I’ve been working for the Ahmed Baba Institute, collecting and preserving the manuscripts of Timbuktu, for quite a while now, but
I’ve never done this for the manuscripts of my own family.”

  “Why not?” Zouber asked.

  “Because I don’t want to bring them here.”

  “You have to bring them here.”

  “But I can’t,” said Haidara, explaining that he had made a vow when he was seventeen never to part with any of the works from the collection.

  “What do you want then?”

  “I want to create a private manuscript library.”

  “It’s a fine idea,” the director said. “You have to do it.”

  Haidara, pleased by Zouber’s support, kept his office at the center while embarking on a search for funding. He pored through newspapers and magazines, tracked down the addresses of foundations and research centers, and sent out a hundred letters to addresses in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as Western Europe and the United States. Most institutions didn’t respond. A few expressed interest, but those demanded a full catalogue of Haidara’s manuscripts. Haidara couldn’t do it. Nobody had ever attempted to itemize the thousands of works in the Mamma Haidara collection; even he had no idea what it contained. If he sent them a sample of just a few hundred, he reasoned, they would dismiss the archive as small and insignificant, and refuse to fund him. He reached out to the minister of culture in Bamako, who informed him that private libraries didn’t exist in Mali.

  That same year, Haidara hosted in Timbuktu a Malian student who was writing his doctoral dissertation in Libya on Saharan manuscripts. Haidara gave him a tour of the Ahmed Baba Institute, allowed him a peek at his own collection, and permitted him to take photographs. News of Haidara’s collection eventually reached the Libyan government, which contacted him in early 1996.

  “We’re going to help you,” an official close to Muammar Al Qaddafi said. Five Libyan historians and archivists arrived from Tripoli in a government plane and came directly to Haidara’s house from the Timbuktu airport. The men looked through the manuscripts, then conferred.

  “We have a proposition for you,” they said.

  “I’m listening,” Haidara replied.

  “We want to buy everything we see here.” They opened a briefcase, and showed Haidara stacks of bills in various currencies. “You name the price.”

  Haidara had little affection for Muammar Al Qaddafi or his politics. The Libyan dictator had often expressed his devotion to Saharan culture and Timbuktu—he would call it “my favorite city” and spend millions of dollars buying real estate and refilling the canal where Haidara had swum as a child—but Haidara regarded him as a power-hungry megalomaniac who had sowed mischief across the region. It was widely known that the Libyan leader was playing a double game—supporting the Malian government with generous outlays of money for development projects while keeping the Tuareg insurgency in the north alive by harboring rebel leaders, training young Tuaregs as mercenaries, and funneling cash to the movement. Qaddafi had numerous hidden agendas, and he seemed to believe that everybody had a price.

  “I understood their politics, and they weren’t mine,” Haidara would tell me years later. “I’m not rich, but it wasn’t money that I was looking for.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” he told the Libyans. “You never said that you were coming here to attempt to purchase the manuscripts.”

  “What do you mean? We will pay you in any currency you want.”

  “It’s not for sale.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this isn’t for me. This is the heritage of Mali. It belongs to a great nation.”

  “But we can make you comfortable for the rest of your life.”

  “No,” he said.

  At about the same time that Haidara was fending off the interest of Qaddafi and his representatives, Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, the American literary scholar, filmmaker, professor, and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, was contemplating a visit to Mali. Born in Keyser, West Virginia, Gates had earned a summa cum laude degree in history at Harvard in 1972, and became the first African-American to win an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, which funded his PhD research at Cambridge University. After being wooed by several Ivy League universities, he accepted a tenured position in Harvard’s English department in 1991. From that prestigious perch, Gates became the country’s most prominent critic of the Eurocentric literary canon and, in books such as The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, promoted the recognition of African and African-American literature and history.

  In 1960, Ripley’s—Believe It or Not!, the popular syndicated comic strip that appeared in many American newspapers and features oddities and bizarre events—a meteor strike on a ship in the Pacific, a two-foot-long bug in Borneo, thieves who stole “an entire beach” in Jamaica by removing the sand—highlighted a curiosity from Africa that enthralled the ten-year-old Gates. The single-panel drawing, appearing in Gates’s local newspaper, showed men in gowns and turbans holding books and strolling through a great university library in Timbuktu in the sixteenth century. For the young Gates, raised with traditional conceptions of Africa as a continent of savages in the bush, the comic strip was a revelation. “It blew my mind, and the image stuck with me ever since,” Gates said.

  The newspaper comic contradicted the long-accepted “truth” about Africans presented by some of the greatest historians and philosophers of the Western world. In a 1754 essay called “Of National Characters,” David Hume had declared, “I am apt to suspect the Negroes . . . to be naturally inferior to the whites. . . . No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences.” Immanuel Kant, in his work on aesthetics, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, published in 1764, contended, “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling . . . not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in the 1837 Philosophy of History, argued that Africa had no indigenous system of writing, no historical memory, and no civilization. “It is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit,” he declared. “What we properly understand by Africa is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit.” The arguments of these Enlightenment philosophers had frequently been cited as a justification for the slave trade. The supposed absence of books in Africa, the argument went, provided confirmation of the subhuman position of blacks in the Great Chain of Being—a Platonic concept that had developed in the Middle Ages and persisted in the Age of Enlightenment, linking all life in a strict hierarchy of obedience with God at the top, followed by angels, nobles, men, wild animals, domesticated animals, vegetables, and inanimate matter.

  Thirty-seven years after being inspired by the Ripley’s—Believe It or Not! cartoon, Gates received funding for a six-part documentary series about African history for the BBC and PBS. He decided to devote an hour-long segment to “The Road to Timbuktu,” which would examine the rise and achievements of the Malian and Songhai Empires. “I wanted to see the Great Mosque in Djenné, and go to Timbuktu, and investigate myself the truth of the university’s presence and its so-called library,” Gates recalled. Gates and his film crew arrived in Bamako in the spring of 1997, and traveled for a week by pinasse down the Niger. Arriving at the port near Timbuktu, they planned to film at the Ahmed Baba Institute, and the Sankoré and Djingareyber Mosques, where informal universities had flourished during Timbuktu’s Golden Age.

  But when they reached their hotel, their translator-guide, an acquaintance of Haidara, approached them with a different proposal. “If you want to see a real library,” he said, “these books are held mostly in private hands, and there is a man I know who might be willing to show you his collection.” Gates, intrigued, changed his itinerary, and he and his film crew followed his guide through the back alleys to Haidara’s house.

  Haidara meanwhile, was growing despondent. The library he had dreamed of creating for five ye
ars was going nowhere. More than one hundred foundations had turned down his proposal, and he had run out of ideas.

  “A big delegation of Americans is here in Timbuktu,” Gates’s guide informed Haidara on the morning of the Harvard professor’s arrival. “They want to visit you. They want to see your manuscripts, so be ready.”

  Haidara sensed that the visit could be an opportunity for him. “Fine,” he replied. “I’ll prepare something for them.” Haidara laid down a carpet, and gathered the best manuscripts in his Timbuktu collection. Gates and the film crew arrived later that day. As the crew filmed, Gates leafed through a treatise on astronomy, a ledger book that recorded slave transactions, and other works.

  “These are books written by black people?” Gates asks Haidara in a scene captured on camera. Haidara, a bushy-haired and youthful thirty-three-year-old, nods. “When I was growing up,” Gates replies, shaking his head in amazement, “the schoolbooks said that Africans couldn’t read and write, and didn’t have any books.” For hours, Haidara gave Gates a tutorial on Timbuktu’s literary heritage, describing the rise of the University of Sankoré and its illustrious roster of biographers, jurists, and historians; enumerating the twelve important families that had accumulated most of Timbuktu’s manuscripts during its Golden Age; chronicling the invasion by Morocco that drove most of these volumes underground; and explaining the role played by descendants of Timbuktu’s collectors, who had protected the works for four hundred years. “It was one of the most moving days of my life,” Gates recalled. “I was so emotional, holding these books in my hands.”

  Not a word was spoken about Haidara’s stymied plans to build a library, but Gates left his encounter convinced he had to do something to preserve the manuscripts. Unprotected in neglected storage rooms, many were turning to dust or being devoured by termites, and some had already been lost. “It was a bone-dry climate in Timbuktu, so he was lucky,” Gates said. “If they’d been stored in the humidity of Nigeria, they would have turned to mush long ago.”