Koi Kunboro, a rich sultan who converted to Islam, created the first great mosque here in 1240 by converting his palace into a place of worship, but an early-nineteenth-century ruler deemed the structure too sumptuous, and built an entirely new mosque in its place in the 1830s. His name figures almost nowhere in textbooks, or in the annals of architecture, but a local master builder, Ismaïla Traoré, who was head of Djenné’s guild of masons, designed the present mosque early in the French colonial period, at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The secret of this city’s greatness, like the capitals of all of Mali’s fabled ancient kingdoms, lay, in large part, in its location. Djenné sat astride a huge inland delta, nestled between the converging flows of the Niger and Bani Rivers. Its floodplains assured a steady supply of fish and abundant crops. Moreover, much like the cliffs of the Dogon to the northeast, the rivers and surrounding marshland shielded the population from easy attack by the invaders who had swept these plains through the centuries. For Djenné’s settlers, as for those of Timbuktu, location was everything. The great fortunes that were amassed by individuals in each city were derived from their roles as brokers and middlemen in an ancient caravan trade of gold and slaves marched up from the coastal forests to the south, and salt and metalwares borne southward by camels from the Maghreb and Arabia.
What had drawn me back to Djenné was the work of Susan and Roderick McIntosh, two Rice University archaeologists who had begun excavating a site adjacent to modern Djenné that had distinguished itself with the title of sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest city. Extensive excavations at the site had shown that the long-lost original settlement, known as Djenné-Jeno, was inhabited 250 years before Christ and mysteriously abandoned nearly a century before Columbus set out on his first voyage.
Roderick McIntosh had telephoned me in Abidjan with something close to panic in his voice to alert me to the ongoing plundering of long-buried artifacts from the ancient city. “What is happening is a looting of history on a scale not seen in Africa since Napoleon’s armies looted Egypt,” he said. He then gave me the names of several Malian archaeologists with whom he had worked for years, to act as my guides at the site.
One of the Malian scientists, Boubacar Diaby, met us in the unremarkable “modern” town of Djenné, a scorching, dusty place without electricity or running water, where tailors work their machines by pedal in the shade of mango trees, goats troop freely through the streets, bleating as they go, and the vehicular traffic is mostly two-wheeled, whether bicycle or scooter.
As we approached the site, what I could see of Djenné-Jeno above ground was little more than a low, mile-long mound that rose tear-shaped from the delta. But when we crossed the water and began to tread the mound itself, the history began to come alive, almost literally, in the crunching of a million shards of clay underfoot. These were fragments of a civilization that had created black Africa’s first known city, a great walled agglomeration where perhaps twenty thousand people lived in the year 1000—bits and pieces from a broken figurine here, pieces of earthen burial jars there, iron fishing hooks, fragments of spears, pieces of bone from both humans and their domesticated animals.
Here and there, one could see eroded mud bricks, the traces of a massive wall twelve feet high and ten feet thick that had once surrounded the entire site. The McIntoshes and their team had dug twenty feet deep into the clay-bearing soil to meticulously document the story of Djenné-Jeno, proving that its inhabitants’ ironworking technology, skill with pottery and finesse in crafting gold ornaments, which surpassed even the best of Bamako’s contemporary jewelry makers, all predated contact with Arabic-speaking people of North Africa by four hundred years.
Djenné-Jeno’s elite lived in spacious, rectangular mud-brick houses, whose design has been carried forward largely intact to the present day, as have sophisticated burial rites and ancestor-worshipping practices, at least among a handful of this region’s smaller ethnic groups. Here was the past evoked so proudly by President Konaré—who had worked this site himself with the McIntoshes years before. In a world where the achievements of Africans get scant recognition, Djenné-Jeno’s archaeological treasures resonate with the message that the people of this continent are capable of great things, and indeed always have been.
This city of gold traders, fishermen and farmers of the heavily silted Niger River delta was no mere spin-off from the cultures of the Maghreb, as many European historians once claimed, in a stroke depriving sub-Saharan Africans of credit for any genius of their own. Nor does it seem to have had any links with Egyptian civilization, as some Afrocentric academics have tried to claim, as part of a broader and longstanding effort to tie ancient Egypt together with other parts of the continent to the south. The truth is far more prosaic, and yet for Malians and for other West Africans who knew and understood it, potentially far more inspiring. A great culture had sprung up here locally, thriving for sixteen centuries before succumbing to a series of successor cultures that were driven by a powerful religious import, Islam.
Listening to the terrible crunching sound of the colored shards of clay underfoot as we surveyed the site, though, I realized there was also an awful irony at work here. Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries, had sacrificed precious budgetary funds for more than fifteen years to help make this excavation possible. With so few means at its disposal for conservation, though, it was powerless to stop the pillagers and the steady erosion, which were working in unholy tandem to ravage the mound, along with dozens of satellite sites in the surrounding delta.
“There is no sign of fire, and there is no hint of war to explain why Djenné-Jeno suddenly died out,” my guide, Diaby, told me. “It appears as if a devastating epidemic swept through the area and wiped everyone out. Today, you could say that the pillagers are the city’s second great epidemic.”
Vultures lurked on the few scrubby acacia trees that dotted the surrounding floodplain, creatures either already sated or, as seemed more likely, too lazy to bother to scavenge in the stifling afternoon heat. Here and there, peasants plied the river in their long pirogues. In the distance, a huge herd of cattle advanced slowly, pulling away at the sparse cover of fresh shoots of grass.
With each step, my tour with Diaby was turning into a seminar on the organized crime of archaeological theft, and at bottom, it all seemed remarkably similar to the diamond racket that was ravaging economies in Zaire, Angola, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, next door. In the badlands of the Malian Sahel, the rhythms of life have always been determined by the angle of the sun in the sky, and digging for artifacts, or what every villager in these parts called in French les antiquités, was no different.
With temperatures rising to 110 degrees or higher by early afternoon, Diaby told me, the sound of digging echoes across the floodplains only during the early pre-dawn hours, when many people are still asleep. “The only thing that saves us here is that the thieves rarely dig more than two feet deep,” he said. “The pillagers know lots of sites that we haven’t discovered yet. In order to properly excavate them, though, you have to go down at least six meters [twenty feet].
“Many years of drought have made the people of this region extremely poor, and it is their pauperization that poses the greatest danger to these objects,” Diaby said, invoking a combination that was basic to almost every African crisis: the misery of the locals and the greed of powerful outsiders. “As soon as Djenné’s discovery was announced, the galleries and museums in Europe were paying agents to try to find them Djenné artifacts,” he said ruefully. “That’s what set off the digging, and it won’t stop until the market is glutted with delta objects, and the interest shifts elsewhere.”
Diaby was far more perceptive about the cultural complexities and consequences than his initial broadside against foreign dealers suggested. “The collectors will tell you that they are preserving the items, and helping spread knowledge and appreciation of our culture. But the very manner of procurement is fueling a market that feeds a whole und
erworld of looters who destroy the sites and pay pennies to the diggers.
“They tell us that we don’t have any place to keep these artifacts in Mali. But if they have a real desire for promotion and preservation, let them come here and help us create a museum and educate our people. Instead, they collect the objects fraudulently, and their museums and galleries become laundering sites for the cultural products of our region. Honestly speaking, a few collectors may be profiting, but it is doing nothing but harm for Africa, and for Mali.”
Poverty alone, Diaby knew, could not explain the ongoing rape at Djenné-Jeno. Indeed, with his mention of education, he had put his finger on another key to the problem, indeed to many of Africa’s problems. Old, cracked pottery and ancient items of worship like figurines had no meaning and little intrinsic value to the poor farmers and herdsmen of this area. Most of them had no concept of the interest or value such items could hold for white people in faraway Paris or New York, either. To them it was all a little strange, but since digging for dusty bric-a-brac provided a means to survive, they were happy to dig. The only formal schooling that most of the men in these parts had received was in the bare little Islamic classrooms where, as boys, imams had taught them Koranic prayer.
Islam began to spread through this part of Mali in the eleventh century, and with it came a harsh rejection of ancestor worship, the use of masks and a rich tradition of other figurative art. Like Christianity, which arrived in West Africa much later, the new religious import meant a huge infusion of learning and, by implication, something we usually agree to call progress. But acceptance of the new faith came at a steep cost: cultural self-renunciation.
President Konaré’s government had taken pains to plaster walls in towns and villages throughout the region with anti-pillaging posters. But to a thoroughly Islamicized population, moreover one that had recently lived through severe droughts and famine, and on top of that was illiterate, the effort was noble but ultimately meaningless. “To you it may seem paradoxical, but the people here don’t feel the same connection to this history that the elites of Bamako, or maybe even an intellectual in Abidjan, does,” said Diaby. “They have been taught to scorn their own art, and to revile their own culture. Saving Djenné-Jeno will require a lot of education. Museums must be built right here, so that tourists can come, and jobs can be created, and people can see for themselves how highly their own culture is valued.”
CHAPTER NINE
Tough Love
The rains in Liberia had stopped as if on cue late one morning near the end of January 1996, and the sun was so strong that it required only a smidgen of patience to watch the puddles burn off. Madeleine Albright, Washington’s representative to the United Nations, was due to touch down in a couple of hours, and even the weather had decided that it had better cooperate, clearing the skies for her Boeing 737. Liberians had long been accustomed to thinking of America as their all-powerful but, to them, inexplicably disinterested patron, and the disappearance of the clouds came like celestial reconfirmation.
Albright would be the highest-ranking American official to visit Liberia since George Shultz’s visit eleven years earlier, and for anyone who still remembered, the precedent alone might have been grounds for concern. Like Shultz before her, Albright had chosen a sensitive time to visit. Against all odds, the country’s main warlords had come together to form a transitional Council of State. Almost miraculously, fighting had ceased five months before, and there was serious talk of elections for the first time in recent memory. All of this would require money, however, and Liberia being America’s West African stepchild, the international community was waiting to see what form Washington’s commitment would take.
The Clinton administration had labored to keep Liberia’s problems off the radar screen, and given the depressing grab bag of mediocre politicians and outright thugs who kept the country’s pot boiling, it is certainly not hard to understand why Liberia was thought of as a headache when it was thought of at all. There were cheaper, faster and more secure ways for the world’s most powerful country to transmit its intelligence and diplomatic messages, and just as surely as endless acres of oozing trees had become outmoded by the discovery of cheaper synthetic ways to make rubber, Liberia’s antenna farms were now technological relics of the pre–global positioning satellite and pre-Internet past.
The ceasefire that greeted Albright in Monrovia interrupted what had easily been, on a per capita basis, one of Africa’s most horrible civil wars. No fewer than 150,000 of the 2.6 million Liberians had died during seven years of mayhem. A comparable toll for the United States would be the loss of nearly 21 million citizens. Most of Liberia’s survivors had been turned into internal refugees by the recurrent waves of fighting. In the capital there were no jobs, no electricity and no running water. After countless attempts to find a political solution to the conflict, Liberia’s fighting had degenerated into a massive and chaotic asset grab, with each militia stripping from the land whatever of value it could get. And yet this time, somehow, West African diplomats had pulled out of their hats an agreement involving the leading warlords, which they believed just might hold.
But the country’s neighbors, and Liberians themselves, knew that if the outside world did not inject emergency funds into the country, the fragile peace would not last. More than anything else, money was needed to help the corrupt yet indispensable 8,000-man West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, deploy throughout the heavily forested interior. Running a close second was funding for disarmament and job training for the thousands of boy soldiers who had the run of the countryside, and were now streaming into Monrovia. Without it there was certain to be another explosion, only the timing of which was in doubt.
Washington and its European partners were preoccupied with the crisis in Bosnia, though, and scarcely seemed concerned with what diplomats thought of as a messy, two-bit African tragedy. The United Nations was spending $25 million every week on peacekeeping in Bosnia in 1996, $4 million more than it spent in Liberia in the entire year. “It took the Americans one week to raise $1.8 billion for Bosnia,” Victor Gbeho told me on the eve of the Albright visit. He was a senior Ghanaian diplomat in Liberia on behalf of the West African Economic Community, which had first fielded ECOMOG in August 1990. “If I were paranoid, I would say the Westerners’ delays that we are always facing here are due to one simple fact: This is Africa.”
For her curious little whistle-stop tour of Africa, Albright had chosen as destinations Liberia, Rwanda and Angola—all countries that figured squarely atop any list of places where the West in general, and the United States in particular, had failed the continent most spectacularly in the 1990s. Washington’s client and ally Jonas Savimbi had kept the Angolan civil war going for sixteen years, using $250 million of American taxpayers’ money and American-supplied weapons ferried via Liberia and Mobutu’s Zaire, right next door, to thoroughly gut the country and leave a half million dead.
America’s ostensible aim had been to force a Marxist government to hold democratic elections, which Savimbi was expected to win. When Savimbi was defeated at the polls in 1992, however, he began fighting yet again. The Clinton administration, feeling no sense of obligation to Savimbi or to a country that had hitherto been primarily the Republicans’ obsession, simply turned its back on Angola, agreeing not to speak about the unspeakable in ways that only the truly powerful of the world can. Like the retouched May Day photos of old from the Soviet Union, where airbrushes magically lifted disgraced leaders from the reviewing-stand lineup, making them officially forgotten, the sacrifice of Angola on the altar of the Cold War would simply disappear from the news. Clinton decided to spend as little as possible on UN peacekeeping operations there, and the war America had helped create sputtered on for a full decade more, until Savimbi himself was killed in an ambush by the Angolan army in 2002.
By comparison to Liberia, the first stop on Albright’s tour, Rwanda and Angola were both fresh tragedies. Liberia was a place where Washington’s
record of betrayal and disregard was already a depressing 174-year-old tale of recidivism, and yet no amount of bitter history could shake the Liberians’ sweet and entirely genuine image of themselves as America’s wards. The sentiment was a holdover from the very establishment of the country in 1822.
History had a way of serving up reminders to Liberians that their love of all things American was never meant to be requited. There had been the scandalously cheap price Firestone had paid for its plantations. There had been the singling out of the country by the League of Nations for sanctions over the slavelike work conditions, although European powers were using forced labor to grow cotton, rubber and cocoa all over the continent. Of much more recent note for most Liberians, though, was America’s abandonment of the country in the early stages of its civil war, in June 1990.
Boy soldiers loyal to Charles Taylor were advancing on the city from one direction. What was worse, Taylor’s insurrection, although it was not yet six months old, had already splintered, producing an even more fearsome force, a rival band of fighters from the National Patriotic Front led by an erratic, self-proclaimed field marshal named Prince Yormie Johnson, who were rushing toward the capital from another direction.
President Doe’s peculiar means of fiddling while Rome burned had been to smoke marijuana and play checkers all day while barricaded in the executive mansion with several hundred loyalists from his Krahn ethnic group. When Johnson’s irregulars reached the city, though, he roused himself from his stupor to order a merciless bout of ethnic cleansing against the Mano and Gio peoples, who he deemed were the rebels’ main supporters. Doe, of course, was to be assassinated by Johnson’s fighters in September 1990.
Liberia’s horrors actually prefigured the atrocities that were to come in Rwanda, and America’s instincts were identical in both cases. While churches full of huddling people were becoming scenes of unimaginable slaughter, 2,500 United States Marines who were part of a task force along with six navy vessels steaming off the capital’s shore swooped into Monrovia to selectively evacuate the city’s American residents, along with other Westerners and Lebanese traders. Liberians were left to their own devices, just as Rwandans would be four years later.
Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa Page 22