The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  When he returned to the United States, Gates informed the project director at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York City of the “amazing discovery” he had made in Timbuktu. “All of these books still exist, this guy has them, and they’re not even in a library,” he said. Three months later, on the strength of Gates’s recommendation, the Mellon Foundation awarded Haidara a grant of nearly $100,000 for the creation of a new manuscript center in Timbuktu. The money came with strings attached: Mellon required the collector to create a digital archive before moving ahead with the physical construction. “I know you want to build a library, but the cataloguing and digitization have to come first,” Gates emphasized. Haidara expressed his gratitude. Then he hired an architect and construction crew and built the library anyway.

  “What?” Gates said, when Haidara informed him several months later that the library was complete. “I told you that you needed to catalogue first.”

  “We can’t do that without first having a building,” Haidara replied. He argued that the manuscripts had been exposed to the elements and imperiled in their dusty storage rooms, and that his first priority was to protect them.

  Exasperated, and fearing a scandal, Gates reported the misuse of the grant money to the Mellon Foundation. They grumbled about it, but the attitude, says Gates, was “what’s done is done.”

  A few months later, Haidara again called Gates at Harvard.

  “What is it?” asked Gates, still annoyed by Haidara’s high-handedness.

  “I need another grant to build another library,” Haidara said.

  “What?” Gates exclaimed once more. “It’s amazing that you got a grant to begin with.”

  “I know,” Haidara said, “but there was a slight miscalculation.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We built it in the floodplain. We have to rebuild it.” As Haidara explained it, after many years of little or no rainfall in Timbuktu, he and his construction team had taken for granted that the building site was secure. But that year a once-in-a-generation series of rainstorms had struck the region. Rainwater had deluged the rooms, cracked the cement, and caused the roof to collapse.

  “Everything is filled with water,” he told Gates. Luckily, Haidara hadn’t yet started moving his manuscripts into the new library, and they had all been spared.

  Gates, mortified, went back to the Mellon Foundation. “You remember that library in Timbuktu that was built without your authorization with your money?” he asked the program officer.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Well . . . we’ve got to build it again.”

  The program director just laughed. The whole situation was so “absurd,” said Gates, and Haidara’s demand for more money so audacious, that it evoked more amusement than outrage. The Mellon Foundation decided to come through with the extra funding, and the Ford Foundation contributed money as well. A new building soon rose on the site, this one built with reinforced concrete and with its foundation raised several feet off the ground. On January 13, 2000, in a ceremony attended by many luminaries, including the ministers of culture of Mali and Morocco, and the first lady of Mali—Henry Louis Gates had conflicting engagements and couldn’t make the trip, and the Mellon Foundation sent a representative months later—the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library officially opened its doors to the world.

  5

  In March 2006, after reading a newspaper article about Timbuktu’s reemerging manuscripts, I obtained an assignment from Smithsonian magazine to travel to Mali to write about the literary salvaging operation in the Sahara. I flew up from Bamako on a new private airline, Mali Air Express, to meet Abdel Kader Haidara for the first time.

  Timbuktu’s campaign of literary rescue had dovetailed with a musical flowering in the Sahara. A phenomenon called the Festival in the Desert, three days of camel races and performances by some of Mali’s most popular musicians, including the great bluesman Ali Farka Touré, who grew up in the Niger River town of Niafounké near Timbuktu, and a band of Tuareg ex-rebels known as Tinariwen, or “People of the Desert,” had started in January 2001 and was now drawing thousands of aficionados from across the globe each January to a dune-filled oasis called Essakane, forty miles down a desert track due west of Timbuktu. Both awakenings—one sober and scholarly, the other exuberant and sometimes garishly commercial—had turned Timbuktu into a cultural hub, as it had been during the sixteenth-century Golden Age. Thanks as well to the rise of the Internet and the growing ease of international travel, the isolated town of Haidara’s youth was opening to the world.

  The changes in Timbuktu since my last visit, in 1995, were extraordinary. Back then, two fellow correspondents and I had chartered a small plane from Bamako and toured the town for two rushed hours while the pilot waited at the airport, his meter running. In a piece I wrote for The New Republic about Timbuktu, called “Still Here,” I described the “suffocating remoteness” of a place hurting from the effects of a Tuareg rebellion that had sputtered on despite the signing of a peace deal in 1992. The Saharan nomads had resisted the French colonial army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with swords and spears, then the Malian government with AK-47s, attacking army camps and provoking fierce retaliation against civilians. “Sweeping out of the Sahara on camels and four-wheel-drive Toyotas, the Tuaregs stopped road traffic dead, cut off supplies, and wiped out the tourist trade,” I wrote back then. “Tensions between Tuaregs and blacks grew, and black vigilantes, supplied with weapons by the Malian military, burned down Tuareg encampments in retaliation for rebel raids.” Tens of thousands of people fled across Mali’s western border into Mauritania, and Timbuktu, always tenuously connected to the rest of the world, slid deeper into isolation.

  In 1995, the town had no newspapers, one radio station, and two phone lines. At the Hotel Bouctou, one of Timbuktu’s two tourist establishments, I sipped tea with owner Boubacar Touré in a sand-filled lobby decorated with decade-old Mali tourist posters. “The next Air Mali flight from Bamako was three days away, and Touré hoped it would bring some business,” I wrote back then. “ ‘We had no Westerners this week, and none the week before, but maybe we’ll get lucky,’ he said. Of his twenty-nine rooms, only four were occupied, all by Malian traders.”

  But the year after my brief visit to Timbuktu, the last rebels of the Tuareg uprising that had devastated the north for half a decade agreed to lay down their weapons, and the nomadic warriors surrendered thousands of Kalashnikov rifles to the government. The weapons were buried in the concrete pedestal of a “Monument of Peace” that sits on a rise on Timbuktu’s outskirts—an assemblage of interlocking archways surrounded by colorful murals of Malian government soldiers and Tuareg rebels shaking hands and burning their weapons.

  Now, a decade after the Tuaregs gave up their guns, the fruits of peace were apparent: a fleet of four-wheel-drive taxis waited to ferry tourists down a new asphalt road between the airport and the town. Five hotels had just opened to cater to the fast-growing number of visitors. Ikatel, a private cellular phone network, had set up shop. Three Internet cafés had opened. Hammering and bricklaying were going on all over town. A delegation of imams from Morocco, three researchers from Paris, a team of preservationists from the University of Oslo, and a pair of radio reporters from Germany were on hand to look at the manuscripts.

  Tall and ebullient, with a Falstaffian goatee and tufts of curly hair framing a balding pate, Haidara met me at his home in the Bella Farandja neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city, a short stroll from the Sankoré Mosque. Rambunctious children spilled through the two-story limestone house and into the tiled courtyard, dominated by potted plants and colorful flower arrangements put together by Haidara’s wife. The brood included Haidara’s daughters, ages eleven, nine, and five, and his sons, ages seven and two. Haidara’s home felt warm, cozy, and bursting with life. From the rooftop, the family could look over the sand dunes and azure skies of the Sahara.

  To preserve the region�
�s literary treasures Haidara had organized twenty Timbuktu families with manuscript collections into an association, known by the unwieldy acronym Savama-DCI, the Association for Manuscript Preservation and Valorization for the Defense of Islamic Culture. “I said, ‘You have to open your own libraries, and undertake the work of restoring the manuscripts.’ And everybody was in favor of the idea,” he recalled. The group had lobbied for, and begun receiving, financial assistance from around the world. The Ford Foundation had given $600,000 as seed money to help develop three libraries, including Haidara’s own. Haidara used some of the funds to merge the forty-thousand-volume collection from Bamba, with the five thousand volumes in Timbuktu, and his Mamma Haidara Library was now drawing two hundred visitors a day. Financial support was pouring into Timbuktu as well from the Al-Furqán Islamic Heritage Foundation in Great Britain, run by a Saudi ex-oil minister, the Juma Al-Majid Center for Culture and Heritage in Dubai, Lyon’s Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Gerda Henkel Foundation in Germany, the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development in the Netherlands, the princess of Luxembourg, and other benefactors. Donors allocated millions of dollars for building supplies, conservation materials, cataloguing, and computers, scanners, and other equipment.

  Even Qaddafi had become involved. Deprived of the opportunity to appropriate Haidara’s collection, he began constructing his own library and center for conservation in Timbuktu. Qaddafi would spend five years buying land, dispatching engineers, and erecting a building, only to see it come to nothing with the outbreak of the Libyan revolution of 2011 and his downfall. The Libyan leader announced the creation of the “Qaddafi Prize for Human Rights,” and awarded it to Haidara and a handful of his librarian colleagues for their work rescuing Timbuktu’s literary patrimony.

  Haidara had, almost singlehandedly, transformed Timbuktu from a depressed backwater into a Mecca for researchers, diplomats, and tourists from around the world. “Really, we are doing good work, we have received a lot of money from the international community,” Haidara told me. “There is a great opening here in Timbuktu, a reawakening of the cultural life of the city.”

  And the manuscripts were beginning to find their way into the wider world. Haidara had recently flown to Washington, D.C., to help oversee a Library of Congress exhibit of samples from the Mamma Haidara collection and had arranged a tour of the works through Jackson, Mississippi; New York; Chicago; Hartford, Connecticut; and Buffalo. American museum-goers for the first time could grasp the breadth of the intellectual inquiry led by the savants of Timbuktu. The Important Stars Among the Multitude of the Heavens, written by a Timbuktu astronomer in 1733—during a second period of scholastic flowering that followed Timbuktu’s sixteenth-century Golden Age—explored the movement of the stars and their relationship to the seasons. Curing Diseases and Defects Both Apparent and Hidden was a seamless blend of the religious and the scientific, describing animals, plants, and minerals that could be used as medications, as well as Islamic prayers and Koranic verses that were believed to be helpful in treating the sick. The Book Describing the Blessed Merits of Crafts and Agriculture discussed the social benefits of the working life. Letter to the Warring Tribes quoted from the Koran and the Hadith to urge two feuding factions to live in peace and tolerance.

  A new crop of librarians was emerging in Timbuktu, almost all of them the descendants of the great scholars and manuscript collectors from centuries ago. Sidi Yayia Al Wangari, who had taught Arabic literature in Fez, and served as a UNESCO consultant in Dakar, Senegal, was one of Haidara’s most successful protégés. In the mid-sixteenth century, his ancestor, Mohammed abu Bakr Al Wangari, became a teacher at the Sankoré Mosque, and amassed handwritten books on subjects ranging from history to poetry to astronomy. “He had enormous patience in teaching throughout the day, and was able to get his matter across to even the dull-witted, never feeling bored or tired,” wrote one of his favorite students, Ahmed Baba As Sudani, the exiled sage known as the “The Unique Pearl of His Time.” After the scholar’s death in 1594, the books dispersed to an ever-widening circle of family members. “Nobody in the family had thought about collecting them or preserving them,” Al Wangari told me, as I knelt beside an old wooden chest in his dank storage room, leafing through yellowing pages and gazing at elegant Arabic calligraphy and intricate geometric designs. Turquoise and red dyes were still visible inside grooved diamonds and polygons that decorated the cover of a sixteenth-century Koran, but the costs of centuries of neglect were apparent. As I admired the book, the brittle leather broke apart in my hands. Centuries-old pages fluttered from the broken binding and crumbled into fragments. I pored through more volumes in the footlocker, some bloated by moisture; others covered by white or yellow mold. I opened a manuscript on astrology, with annotations carefully handwritten in minute letters in the margins: the ink on most pages had blurred into illegibility. “This one is rotten,” Al Wangari muttered, tossing aside a book of Hadith. “I am afraid it is destroyed completely.”

  With Haidara’s endorsement, he had secured a $200,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to construct the Al Wangari Library and protect the collection before it was too late. Laborers were mortaring concrete-block walls and laying bricks to dry in the sun outside the half-finished structure.

  Another emerging Timbuktu collector, Ismail Diadjié Haidara (no relation to Abdel Kader), was the direct descendant of a famed Moorish scholar who had fled Toledo in Spain with his entire library in 1469, married the elder sister of King Askia Mohammed, and established the first library in Gao. “It was a lending library, like modern ones, with margin notes declaring that ‘Mr. X has borrowed this book,’ ” Ismail Diadjié Haidara recalled. Haidara initiated a search to track down the volumes, and raised funds from Spain to create Timbuktu’s Bibliothèque Fondo Kati. The 7,028 manuscripts included accounts of the lives of Christians and Jews in the Songhai Empire; the buying and selling of slaves; and the commerce of books, salt, gold, fabrics, spices, and cola nuts. There were books that originated along the Niger annotated by the learned men of Timbuktu and Djenné. Others had come to Mali from across the Middle East, margins filled with the musings of sages of Córdoba, Granada, Fez, Marrakesh, Tripoli, Cairo, and Baghdad. Ismail Diadjié Haidara was especially proud of two illuminated Korans, one copied in Turkey in 1420, the other on sheepskin in Ceuta, Andalusia, in 1198, and kept hidden for centuries in a family chest in Kirshamba village, a hundred miles from Timbuktu.

  I visited the Ahmed Baba Institute, located in the complex where Abdel Kader Haidara had been employed for years. It was still receiving funding from wealthy Middle Eastern governments, as well as from Norway and South Africa, and remained the most prestigious, best endowed, most modern, and largest library in Timbuktu. Engraved on the lintel above the Moorish-style arched entrance was the lamentation of the eponymous savant who had been taken in chains to Marrakesh: “O friend, when you go to Gao make a detour by Timbuktu and murmur my name to my friends,” it read, “and bring them a greeting perfumed with an exile that yearns after the soil where its friends, family, and neighbors reside.” In an atelier fourteen workers were making storage boxes and carefully wrapping crumbling manuscript pages in Kitakata, a thin, strong Japanese paper made from the woven fibers of the kozo plant, considered ideal for repairing the tears or reinforcing the backs of fragile manuscript pages, which typically contained writing only on one side. “This will protect them for at least a hundred years,” Mohamed Gallah Dicko, the Ahmed Baba Institute’s director, who had replaced Mahmoud Zouber after his retirement, told me. (Zouber would later go on to become Mali’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia.)

  Dicko’s technicians had “dedusted” 6,538 manuscripts, wrapping each page of the unbound volumes in acid-free paper and placing them in boxes; there were another 19,000 to go. South Africa’s National Archives had flown dozens of employees to workshops in Cape Town and Pretoria, part of a program initiated by President Thabo Mbeki after a state visit to Mali in November 2001. Taken on a tour of Timbukt
u by his Malian counterpart, President Alpha Konaré, Mbeki had been so moved by the Ahmed Baba Institute’s manuscript collection that he had pledged to assist the Malians in their preservation efforts, and the National Archives had begun training Malian conservators in 2003. In a sunlit room across the courtyard, a dozen archivists huddled over Epson and Canon scanners, creating digital images of the works. “We’re expanding our search to the northwest and the northeast,” Dicko told me. “There are hundreds of thousands of manuscripts still out there.”

  Haidara’s organization was also exporting its cultural renaissance far beyond the city. In 2004, the group had opened a library opposite Djenné’s Great Mud Mosque—a towering multipinnacled structure, built originally in the fourteenth century and reconstructed many times since, that is one of Mali’s most recognizable landmarks. Savama-DCI renovated a library in Gao, launched another in the southern Niger River town of Ségou, and even ventured into a handful of remote Saharan settlements where Islamic scholars had begun tracking down lost and buried manuscripts in the desert and building their own crude libraries.

  Abdel Kader Haidara arranged for me to visit one of these communities: the Tuareg village of Ber, forty miles east of Timbuktu. The sun was just rising when Ber’s library curator, a gaunt man in his fifties with wispy side burns named Fida Ag Mohammed; my driver, Baba; and I departed Timbuktu, and a chill wind whipped through the open windows of our battered Land Cruiser. Baba steered the vehicle over a rolling sand track into the heart of the Sahara, fishtailing past dunes and thorn trees. Ber, a shadeless collection of mud-brick huts and tents scattered across a saddle between two low desert ridges, once had fifteen thousand manuscripts dating as far back as the fifteenth century. But during the 1990 Tuareg rebellion, government troops and mercenaries from Arab tribes attacked, looted, and burned many Tuareg villages in the area, and Ber’s inhabitants, as a precautionary move, dispersed all but a few hundred manuscripts to family members living in settlements deeper in the Sahara, or buried them in the sand. It was a modern-day version of a story that has played out in Mali for centuries, a story of war, hiding places, and loss.