The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

by Joshua Hammer

  Kidal was the trouble spot where the international community’s ambitions had collided with Mali’s realities, a nest of both secular Tuareg militants, still aspiring to create the independent state of Azawad, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb fighters, seeking to blend into the civilian population and keep the jihad alive. A contingent of U.N. peacekeepers had arrived the previous summer, but they were reluctant to take on either group.

  “Nobody is in control here,” I was told by a Guinean lieutenant, as we toured the city in a U.N. armored vehicle escorted by two pickup trucks filled with Togolese police. The security team saw me off the next morning with evident relief. In May 2014, three months after my visit, Tuareg rebels stormed government buildings, killed dozens of soldiers, and took thirty hostages in a “declaration of war.” Kidal’s violence radiated outward across the Sahara, keeping the region in a state of perpetual instability.

  In February 2014, days after returning from my unnerving trip to Kidal, I rode north from Bamako on a rutted road, part asphalt and part dirt, for five wearying hours to observe one hopeful sign of Mali’s revival: the Festival on the Niger—the four-day concert set on a barge moored in the shallows in the southern town of Ségou, which had never been under the control of the militants. The older, more famous Festival in the Desert in Timbuktu had been canceled for the second year in a row in January 2014 because of rocket attacks, ambushes, suicide bombings, and kidnappings in the north. But the impresario Manny Ansar had been invited here, to a stage alongside the Niger River, with his troupe of mostly Tuareg musical exiles, to celebrate the festival’s postwar theme of “cultural diversity and national unity.”

  Ansar and I walked along the riverbank at dusk while waiting for the concert to begin. It was from this very stretch of the river, in December 1893, that the doomed French commander, Etienne Bonnier, had embarked with an army of French officers and Senegalese infantrymen on a gunboat bound for Timbuktu. French forces later ambushed and killed the orchestrator of the massacre, Ngouna, Ansar’s great-great-grandfather, ending Tuareg resistance around Timbuktu. We stood contemplatively at the edge of neatly furrowed fields, observing a fisherman standing upright in his wooden pirogue, poling across the Niger’s glassy surface in the fading light. The river had nourished Mali’s precolonial empires and sustained life here for millennia. But it had also served as an avenue for war and conquest, and much of the violence that had torn apart Mali had unfolded along its now peaceful banks.

  By the time we returned to the festival space, the scene had come alive. U.N. peacekeepers, Malian generals in camouflage uniforms and red berets, Western tourists, and locals filled every seat and jammed the aisles. I took a seat in the VIP section near the stage, while the impresario worked the aisles, embracing ambassadors and Malian music aficionado friends from the United States and Europe, shifting effortlessly from French to English to Tamasheq and back again. Then the lights came up, and Khaira Arby, known as the “Nightingale of the North,” strolled onto the stage.

  In a sequin-studded green gown and a tiara of gold coins, rows of silver bracelets jangling on her arms, the diva swept back and forth, gesticulating grandly, voice booming. In the summer of 2012 AQIM militants had trashed Arby’s guitars and her recording studio and threatened to cut out her tongue if they captured her, forcing her to flee in terror to Bamako from Timbuktu. Now she extended her arms toward the audience, overcome with emotion. “I’m singing for the Tuaregs who never picked up arms against their country,” proclaimed Arby, to the crowd’s roar of approval. It was a gesture of reconciliation, and a plea for unity, in a nation that had been torn apart by war and occupation.

  At ten p.m., Ahmed Ag Kaedi, the Tuareg guitarist from Kidal, whose guitars had been burned by Iyad Ag Ghali’s henchmen, took the stage. His strident guitar playing and hypnotic wail seemed a cry of defiance. Swathed in boubous and Tuareg veils, Kaedi and his Tuareg band, Amanar, sang in Tamasheq about the beauty of the desert, about infinite skies and soaring dunes, about the joy of comradeship, and the sadness of loss and exile, their haunting call-and-response vocals and insistent guitar phrasing rising to an emotional crescendo of loneliness, melancholy, and yearning. Around one a.m., a hundred jubilant spectators climbed onto the stage, gathering around Kaedi as his driving guitar solo cut through the night. Ansar, swathed in a blue boubou, with a rakish white scarf tossed around his neck, danced and embraced the musicians, swept away by the euphoria of the moment. Assembling his exiles on this stage in Ségou, he had scored a symbolic triumph over Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—thugs and killers who had been determined to stamp out all spontaneity, art, and joy in their self-declared caliphate.

  Yet the scene was bittersweet. I thought back to my visit to the Festival in the Desert in 2008, at the height of its popularity, when eight thousand people came to Essakane, one quarter of them Westerners. Tourists in safari jackets had filled the sandy streets of Timbuktu, brimming with anticipation, reveling in the sense of adventure. At the oasis, white canvas tents and traditional nomadic dwellings stitched together from the hides of goats covered the wind-rippled white dunes. It was a grand, unforgettable scene. After a day in the heat and a communal meal with a quintet of young Australians on a months-long trek through Africa, I fell asleep in a tent before midnight. But two hours later, awakening to an infectious guitar phrase, I scaled a fifty-foot-high dune overlooking the floodlit stage. I lay back on the cool sand, stared at a sky filled with stars, and let the hypnotic vocals and guitar licks of Ibrahim Ag Habib, Tinariwen’s lead singer, wash over me.

  Now, six years later, I wondered whether the Festival in the Desert would ever take its place again in the dunes of Essakane. Mokhtar Belmokhtar had set up a new base in chaotic Libya, where jihadis were gaining the upper hand in many parts of the country. On June 13, 2015, two American F-15 fighter jets would drop several five-hundred-pound bombs on a gathering of jihadis in the Libyan coastal city of Ajdabiya, reportedly killing Belmokhtar and six others. But a jihadi spokesperson insisted that the bomb had missed the man whom the French military had labeled “The Uncatchable One,” and who had mistakenly been reported killed several times over the years; to this date no DNA evidence has been presented to confirm his death. Iyad Ag Ghali, meanwhile, was wheeling and dealing from deep in the Sahara, offering to negotiate for the release of the remaining Western hostages in return for immunity from prosecution for war crimes. He was said to be hiding in the oasis of Tinzouatine, which occupies the no-man’s-land between Algeria and Mali. The Department of State had named Ghali a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”—but French and Algerian Special Forces had displayed little zeal in going after him. Despite his plunge into jihadism, despite the suffering he had inflicted on his countrymen, Ghali’s influence among the Tuareg remained considerable, and it was widely believed that no final agreement between the armed nomads and the government could be achieved without his approval. “Iyad is not finished as a political player,” Ansar, Ghali’s former close friend, assured me.

  Without constant surveillance and military pressure on Al Qaeda and its partners, General Bernard Barrera told me, the threat to the region, to Europe and beyond, would not dissipate. “I don’t think the jihadis have the capacity to regroup,” Barrera said when I met him in his office at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in Paris, a vast complex founded by Louis XV in 1751 to train five hundred “gentlemen” for a career in arms, and famed as the military school where Napoleon Bonaparte had prepared for a naval career. “They can conduct little operations, with rockets, killing local people, carrying out acts of terror,” Barrera went on. “We have to keep surveying them, because the terrorism could come to France. It’s not just a problem for Mali. It is a problem for the West.”

  By 2015, however, the international community’s attention was beginning to drift. In late September 2015, sixteen months after I interviewed Barrera, prosecutors brought before the International Criminal Court at The Hague a former member of Ansar Dine’s “morality squad” in T
imbuktu. The ex-jihadi, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, a teacher’s college graduate turned zealot in Iyad Ag Ghali’s radical Islamic movement, stands accused of directing the destruction of ten Sufi shrines and a Sufi mosque in 2012. Prosecutors contend that he wielded great power as the head of the Islamic Police, and human rights groups and many Timbuktu residents welcomed the news of his arrest. At the same time, the draw-down of French troops, the continued weakness of the Malian army, and the inability of African peacekeepers to fill in the gaps allowed the terrorists to regroup. Attacks escalated throughout the year, culminating in the siege of the Radisson Blue Hotel in Bamako on November 20, 2015. Nineteen people died.

  Haidara and I met again in February 2014, during the same trip in which I visited Kidal and the Festival on the Niger. He had recently returned from his second visit to Timbuktu since the French intervention, and he had come away encouraged. The first of the city’s forty-five libraries had reopened, and some of their proprietors were returning home. Haidara was thinking about moving with his family back to Timbuktu as well, but the security remained precarious, with jihadis still encamped in the dunes beyond the city limits, and the Haidaras were enjoying the advantages that living in a relatively cosmopolitan city can offer. He and his first wife had located a physical therapist at a private hospital in Bamako and their five-year-old son had begun to improve both physically and mentally. “When we were in Timbuktu, there were absolutely no specialists to treat him,” Haidara told me. The boy could now sit up, speak a few words, and play with a friend. “It is a bit of a soulagement—a relief—to see this, but it is not easy,” he told me.

  Displaced and impoverished by the conflict, a huge extended family was leaning on Haidara for financial support. He was buying them shoes, clothing, grain, and sheep and goats for religious festivals, and paying the school fees of a dozen nephews and nieces. “When I was young, I earned a lot of money, because I worked extremely hard, but it’s all gone now. I’ve given it all out. I have so many dependents,” he told me as we sat beside the Niger River in the garden of my guesthouse, the Villa Soudan, at dusk, sipping Cokes and watching the sky turn to amber and purple over the King Fahd suspension bridge, a gift from the government of Saudi Arabia twenty years ago. Lights flickered on in the handful of high-rises beside the river—a twenty-story bank building inspired by the Great Mud Mosque of Djenné, an unfinished hotel once owned by Qaddafi. The river meandered past weed-choked islands and paddies and plots of vegetables on both banks. Men, women, and children poked at the soil with hoes beneath the sodden sky. Bamako was one of the region’s fastest growing cities, with a population that had doubled to over a million in the past decade, but even along the river, the heart of the capital, it retained the feeling of an extended African village. “I send money to Timbuktu every month, I send money to Bamba every month. It is too much,” Haidara went on. The forty-five other library owners of Timbuktu were depending on him as well. “My ambition now is to rehabilitate all these libraries in Timbuktu, so that I can bring all the manuscripts back to each family that entrusted them to me,” he said. “That will give me a little bit of peace.”

  Before the short winter rains swept over the city, the Ford Foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, and the Swiss Cooperation Office in Mali had given Haidara thousands of dollars to relocate the manuscripts around Bamako, this time to ten new spaces high above ground: sturdily built, watertight constructions equipped with dehumidifiers to save them from rot. Now that project was finally done. The following day I took a taxi to a neighborhood a few miles from my hotel, passing half-built concrete buildings of slapdash construction, tangled phone and electrical wires, and billboards for Air Mali, the Orange mobile telephone network, and HIV-AIDS prevention, and got out in front of a four-story commercial building on the dusty main street. Haidara waved to me from the top-floor balcony. I climbed the stairs and found him in front of a large storage room—one of the new, climate-proofed facilities he’d found for the manuscripts to keep them from disintegrating further during their purgatory in Bamako. A young assistant dragged out a metal footlocker, setting it down silently beside Haidara and me.

  Kneeling on a carpet he had laid down in the hallway, Haidara opened the box, gently took out the first volume from the pile, and opened it. Five hundred years old, encased in a dark brown goatskin cover, the massive manuscript was in fine condition. I pictured a robed scribe dipping his quill pen into a leather pouch filled with illuminated ink, huddled over linen paper in a murky atelier of a university in sixteenth-century Timbuktu. The manuscript that Haidara balanced in his lap was a well-known volume called Waffayat Al Ayan Libnu Halakan—a kind of medieval Encyclopaedia Britannica, originally written in the mid-thirteenth century by a Kurdish scholar named Ibn Khallikan, chronicling the lives of the ulema, the great Islamic scholars, of the tenth through twelfth centuries. The capsule biographies were arranged alphabetically, written in blocks of squiggling Arabic script in black ink, broken periodically by illuminated single lines of red, blue, and gold. “Each time the scribe commenced a new section, he changed the color of the ink,” he said. “A single copyist wrote the main text, because the writing is the same throughout, so it might have taken him six or even seven months to complete it.”

  But the volume that Haidara held in his hands was, in fact, a collaborative effort. Scores of scholars over the centuries had added commentaries to the original work written by Ibn Khallikan, who had studied in Damascus and lived most of his life in Cairo, filling the margins of every page with notes written in tiny Arabic characters. Haidara ran his fingers gently over these scribblings, commenting on the different textures of the ink and the variations in the handwriting. In many places the original paper had deteriorated, and new bits had been glued carefully into place, giving the manuscript a worn patchwork appearance, like a beloved article of clothing that had been mended over and over again. “Notice how many times it was restored, degraded, and restored,” he said. “The great intellectuals give a work like this a lot of importance. Each notation is dated, and marked by name of the author.” Exegesis followed exegesis, in the manner of Talmudic commentaries, scholars noting one another’s arguments, debating fine points of law and ethics, their dialogue continuing down through the centuries. “This commentator took a phrase from the work, and he gave his opinion about a point of jurisprudence,” he said, pointing to a cluster of Arabic characters squeezed into the margin. “There are several copies of this book around,” including one that had been transcribed by Timbuktu’s most illustrious scholar, Ahmed Baba, for his own library. “The big difference here is the notations.”

  The encyclopedia functioned as a kind of pre-Internet chat room, with the conversations attenuated over hundreds of years. Such encyclopedias proliferated during Timbuktu’s Golden Age, reflecting a desire to give coherence and order to Islamic scholarship from Timbuktu to Egypt and beyond, to confer recognition, even immortality upon learned men who had sought to enlarge the scope of human understanding. They were a Who’s Who of the medieval Islamic world, and they represented an extraordinary achievement at a time when that world was a far bigger, far less interconnected place, and collating the biographies of scattered scholars required exhaustive time and effort. The vigor and durability of Timbuktu’s intellectual life seemed tangible here, in both the original text and the ancient commentaries of savants through the ages. Haidara flipped through the manuscript’s pages reverently before placing it gently back on top of the pile in the footlocker. He had rescued it once from the hands of jihadis in Timbuktu, and again from a waterlogged basement in Bamako. He closed the chest, locked it, and beckoned to his assistant to place it back in the storage room. The manuscript had one last journey ahead of it—back to Timbuktu—though when exactly that would take place, not even Haidara could tell.

  Acknowledgments

  The Bad-Ass Librarians would never have gotten off the ground without the wholehearted backing of my editors at Smithsonian Magazine. In the winter of 2006, I trave
led to Timbuktu to write about efforts to recover and rehabilitate the manuscripts, and over the next eight years made two more trips to Mali on assignment for Smithsonian—a two-week journey in January 2008, to research a lengthy piece about artifact smuggling, and an August 2013 trip to chronicle Abdel Kader Haidara’s rescue effort. The trips whetted my fascination for this strange and beautiful country, and laid the groundwork for the book. I’m deeply indebted to Smithsonian’s Carey Winfrey, Michael Caruso, Terry Monmaney, and, above all, my assigning editor and close friend Kathleen Burke, for indulging my wanderlust for a decade and for encouraging this project. Molly Roberts, Jeff Campagna, Nona Yates, Bruce Hathaway, Jesse Rhodes, Brian Wolly, and the entire editorial staff of Smithsonian also deserve great thanks for their support.

  Robert Silvers sent me to Mali for The New York Review of Books in January 2013, days after the French launched Operation Serval to drive out the militants, a critical trip that brought home the country’s trauma with great immediacy. Esther Kaplan of the Nation Institute provided funding for that January 2013 journey. Over the following year, the Review also sent me to Kidal and Timbuktu, continuing to provide me with a prestigious forum for my Mali reporting and helping me to develop my expertise about the country. I owe thanks as well to the Review’s Hugh Eakin, an encouraging voice throughout the project. I’m grateful, too, to Jon Sawyer and Tom Hundley of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, DC, which financed my travel through northern Mali in January and February 2014 and published much of my reporting and photography on their web site.