The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  I rack my brain for an idea. I outline a pattern, based on my initials, and draw it on a sheet of paper:

  I ask Lamina what his brand is. He takes my pen and draws it on my notepad:

  It reminds me of a camel saddle. I look at it, then at Lamina, and we smile at each other. It feels strangely intimate – as if, through these ciphers, we have signed a pact that can never be broken.

  When they leave, I stand on the hotel steps, waving goodbye. Lamina isn’t a natural motor passenger. His foot stumbles on the mud-guard of the 4x4 and he levers himself up, snagging his robe on the door, yanking it free with a wince of frustration. He presses his hands on the vinyl before lowering himself onto the seat, and looks down awkwardly at the folds across his lap. He is out of his element, like a capitaine fish flapping about in a pirogue. I hope that next time we meet, it will be in the desert he loves so much, and he will be riding a camel.

  This evening, I stand on the roof of the hotel, looking out towards the desert. The sun is flaming red, dragging the sky like the tattered remains of a burning curtain. I gaze into the embers, trying to pick out the distant silhouette of an encampment, straining to see as deep into the wasteland as my eyes will allow. I stand there, watching the last pink shimmer on the crest of the desert, dwindling and shrinking and turning to black.

  A month later, back in London, I turn on the television. The news pans to the familiar colours of the Malian desert: morning’s apricot, noontime’s cinnamon, afternoon’s umber. Except that now, those col-ours are stained by the rusty metal tones of pick-up trucks and rocket launchers, machine guns shaking in the air and the cottony black of jihadist flags. The Tuareg separatist movement, the Mouvement National pour la Libération de l’Azawad, is charging through the Sahara, in league with shadowy, fundamentalist allies. It will be a long while before I can think about returning.

  Lights out on the Sahara for now …

  Part Nine

  The Middle of Nowhere

  (Revisited)

  Welcome to the world’s largest prison. A prison that has no boundaries, a prison that has no walls, no cells, no bars. A prison with a fear, where prison break is non-existent. This is the mujahideen’s prison, the Sahara.

  Belkacem Zaoudi, interrogator for Al-Qaeda in the Maghrib

  24

  Timbuktu the Broken

  ‘NOTHING SO CRUEL HAD EVER HAPPENED TO THE PEOPLE OF TIMBUKTU. Never before had they known anything more bitter … It is beyond our powers to tell the tale of all the violent and excessive acts that were committed within their walls.’

  Ahmed Baba should know – he saw it for himself. It was the year 1591, and Sultan Al-Mansur of Morocco had sent a force of 5000 men, armed with blunderbusses, English cannons and 30,000 pounds of gunpowder, to conquer the lands of salt and gold. His commander, the Spanish-born Pasha Jawdar, sent a message to the Malian king, commanding him to surrender because his master, Sultan Al-Mansur, was ‘a descendant of the Prophet, and to him legitimately belonged sovereignty’.

  Then 421 years later, another Arabic-speaking army invaded Timbuktu from the north. This one also claimed religious authority (they called themselves Ansar ad-Dine, or ‘Defenders of the Faith’), but instead of a Castilian eunuch they were led by a Tuareg ex-playboy called Iyad Ag Ghali.fn1 Like the Moroccan army of 1591, they were armed with some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the region, but in outlook they were more like the eleventh-century Almoravids – burning down shops selling alcohol and destroying musical instruments. Comparing distant moments in history is like trying to talk to a Tuareg elder in a tamelgoust: you never know if you’ve made a true connection. Yet for the intellectuals of Timbuktu, recent events had certainly unwound a layer or two from their ancestors’ ordeal.

  ‘Everybody has suffered in these events.’ The historian Salim Ould Elhadje sat, shaking his head, under the fretted windows of his limestone house near the market. ‘You cannot find one person in Timbuktu who has not lost. But the people of Timbuktu are accustomed to tragedy. Nothing could be worse than the invasion of 1591.’

  That it took place in the same century as Leo Africanus’s visit is all the more disheartening. Leo paints a picture of a vibrant, welcoming city, not so much the back of beyond as utopia. He marvels at the ‘stately temple’, the king’s ‘magnificent and well-furnished court’, the abundance of ‘corn, cattle, milk and butter’, the ‘great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men’, the wealth of the inhabitants, ‘insomuch, that the king that now is, married both his daughters unto two rich merchants’. No wonder everyone is so ‘gentle and cheerful’. Reading Leo’s account today is heartbreaking.

  Nevertheless, was Leo himself at fault? Did his Description of Africa help to bring down the curtain? It was published in Venice in 1550, so there was plenty of time for it to reach the ears of Sultan Al-Mansur. He would have had his own sources, but it is doubtful any were as detailed. As far as the scholar Christopher Wise is concerned, it was Leo’s book that provided the inspiration, not only for the 1591 invasion, but also for the later incursions of the Europeans: ‘His scouting trips to the ancient land of Songhay signalled the inauguration of both the Arab Muslim and European Christian conquest of West African civilisation.’

  Is this fair? It flips Leo’s journey back to front, like a gestalt painting, transforming a treasury of learning into an instruction manual for imperial conquest. But can such motives be laid at the door of a teenager travelling as his uncle’s attendant? What is clear is that history has a cruel way of folding back on itself. Not so much circular as weblike, it weaves mischievous threads through time, gluing disparate moments like the 1591 invasion and the 2012 crisis. As I would discover on my return to the city, past and present have a habit of colliding in strange and unpredictable ways.

  Winding through the heart of Timbuktu, Sarey Keyna is a labyrinth of mud brick and limestone. Walls are flush and tight, bellowing out the sun, like the neighbourhoods of Fez. But they aren’t crutched by wooden scaffolds. Instead, there are rubble-toothed gaps where bricks have tumbled and tents have been pitched. Here, nomad architecture is often more durable.

  Goats and sheep wander between these palm-reed hemispheres, which belong to recently sedentarised black Tamashek families (also known as ‘Bella’, indicating their status as former Tuareg slaves), who live cheek by jowl with the Songhay-speaking majority. It is a characteristic quarter of the old town, its narrow streets slick with dirtwater, its doorfronts spilling out children, its grown-ups benched on ledges, sipping tea and chatting to their neighbours. And, as my friend Mahmoud pointed out, ‘it’s impossible to find your way, so the jihadists will have a lot of trouble catching you’.

  Mahmoud was waiting on his motorbike. He had missed out on the crisis: he was in Bamako when the jihadists arrived and stayed there until after their departure. Throughout the intervening period we had exchanged emails, and he was one of my main sources of information in that time.

  ‘Things are starting to get back to normal,’ he said, as his bike juddered into Sarey Keyna, ‘but it’s still not completely safe. We need to keep you somewhere the jihadists won’t know to look.’

  Although Mahmoud’s family lived on a dune at the edge of town, he didn’t recommend it as a lodging place for a toubob. So he had found a friend in the quarter: Sidi, a local gardener, who lived in a sprawl of limestone and mud off a narrow alley. Tall and loose limbed, welcoming but relaxed, Sidi was an ideal host.

  ‘You are in your own home now,’ he said, guiding us behind a gate of battered tin with a flashbulb smile.

  Heaped rice sacks took the strain off our backs and a canopy of palm-reed matting kept out the sun. Planted in front of the white-limned wall around the drop loo was a satellite dish, transmitting football matches from the European leagues that Sidi’s sons were watching with their friends inside.

  ‘The Salafistsfn2 never left us alone,’ said Sidi. ‘They told us to wear our trousers short, they wouldn’t let us pray for our ances
tors in the cemeteries, they beat people for smoking cigarettes. They wanted us to put our hands on our chests when we pray, but this is not our way. It was a foreign idea of Islam, it wasn’t our Islam. It was hell.’

  Sidi’s work as a gardener had taken him to the Place d’Independence, where among his jobs before the crisis was responsibility for the vegetation around the city’s symbol, the genie known as ‘Al-Farook’ (an icon so beloved his name was taken by Timbuktu’s football club and its FM radio station). I remembered the monument – a turbaned figure in white, riding a winged horse on a slab of forked concrete, among feathery bushes and palm trees. At least, until the jihadists came and declared it blasphemous.

  Sidi was working in the square that day. He saw the jihadists arrive with hammers and farming tools. The monument was too strong, so they requisitioned a road-laying tractor.

  ‘They attached some cables,’ said Sidi, ‘and after a long time the monument fell to the ground. One of my friends, Harbey the tailor, tried to talk to them. He explained how it’s our symbol. People in Timbuktu are proud of the fact we never worshipped pagan gods, because our city was established by Muslims. But the Salafists just said “it’s pagan” and refused to listen.’

  That first morning back in Timbuktu, I wandered over to the monument. It was still lying as the jihadists had left it: a fallen giant, bony with iron rods. Painted blocks and shards of rock were scattered around the carcase. It was one of the town’s many wounds, gaping and unbandaged, waiting to be treated.

  Nearby was the Cemetery of Three Saints, one of the city’s most important places of contemplation. An old man in a turban was wandering between cairns of piled stone, offering prayers at amputated graves. In the heart of the cemetery was a hump of earth, a broken door lying on top, banked in heaps of rubble. Another saint was marked across the path; another pile of rubble. Although little known outside Timbuktu, the saints were locally revered. The desecration of the tombs had become one of the most widely broadcast events of Ansar ad-Dine’s occupation.

  You could walk all around the city with destruction as your guide: from the smashed-in prayer niches on the wall of the Djingereyber mosque in the centre, east to the mosque of Sidi Yahia (its grand door ripped down to disprove a tradition that it couldn’t be destroyed until the End of Days), to the house of the vindictive shariah judge Hamid Moussa in the south, which had been torn down by his long-suffering neighbours after the jihadists fled.

  Equally prevalent, swirling around Timbuktu like the wind-tossed dust, were stories of human suffering. Sometimes I didn’t even have to leave Sidi’s house to hear them. His wife, Assaytoun, told me about women she knew who had been attacked by the jihadists; his son Hamid recalled running from the jihadists when he was spotted talking to a girl on the street; his friend Harbey showed me the banner he’d made to welcome the French ‘liberators’, proclaiming President Hollande as an ‘honorary citizen of the city of 333 saints’.

  ‘The hardest thing was getting any work,’ said Harbey. ‘I’m a tailor and most of my work is for women’s clothes. But most women were afraid to come out of their houses. And when they did, they usually got harassed. The Salafists said they were being provocative, just because they had big arses. They can’t help that! Songhay women are big that way. I got a visit from one of my customers, and straight afterwards a soldier knocked on my door. “What are you doing with these women?” he said. I told him: “It’s my livelihood. Don’t you think you’ve made it hard enough for us?” But those Salafists never listened. “If I see any more women going into your house,” he said, “I’ll have you whipped for adultery.”’

  Well, at least there are the books. Nothing, surely, binds our period more pleasantly to Leo Africanus’s. As he remarked, ‘hither are brought diverse manuscripts or written books out of Barbary, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise’. The manuscript business was so lucrative that trade routes to Timbuktu were known as ‘the Ink Road’.fn3 And the centuries have only made the manuscripts even more valuable. So what did the jihadists do about them? Surely they were keen to preserve this symbol of Timbuktu’s past? Hmmm …

  That’s how screwed up Ansar ad-Dine’s occupation was. They tore down shrines, brought back flagellation and mandatory hijaab, any throwback to the past they could think of – but they burned the manuscripts, most of which were written by Islamic scholars who understood their religion far better than any of the jihadists ever would.

  One of Sidi’s friends, Abdramane Moulaye, was a marabout who ran a small Islamic school and managed his family’s collection of 20,000 manuscripts. Realising they were under threat, he hid them in metal boxes and distributed them among his neighbours until he could ferry them down the Niger. As an extra precaution, he used a technique that is all the more appealing because it would have infuriated the puritanical jihadists: a magic spell made from verses in the Quran, hung from the back of his door and buried in the sand.

  ‘Because of this,’ said Moulaye, ‘the house was protected and the Salafists couldn’t find it. They tried to look for it. They gave the children sweets to show them the way. But the house became invisible.’

  For Abdel Kader Haidara, more worldly methods were required. As the manager of Timbuktu’s most celebrated family-run library, he was in charge of an extraordinarily valuable collection, amounting to 370,000 manuscripts, ranging from works of philosophy, religion, poetry and astrology to medieval merchandise bills, biographical dictionaries and legal testimony.

  ‘In the years before the crisis, we made a lot of progress,’ said Haidara. I visited him in a scruffy apartment block in Bamako, shortly before my latest journey to Timbuktu. A thick-set man with round, penetrating eyes, he was sitting on a frayed rug, tearing a baguette and pouring tea from a samovar. ‘The books were well treated and well guarded,’ he explained, ‘and we were improving our equipment for the cataloguing process.’

  However, with the arrival of the jihadists, it was clear something had to be done.

  ‘They didn’t threaten us directly. But they seized books from people in the street and destroyed them. So we made a plan: we brought up steel trunks from Mopti and filled them with the books. And gradually, one at a time, we transported them by cart to be stored in different houses around Timbuktu.’

  Haidara had joined the trail of refugees to Bamako, and with the occupation showing no sign of ending, he was anxious to bring the books with him. So he sent a series of couriers, first to carry back hard drives, then to ferry boxes of manuscripts down to Mopti. Every available mode of transport was used – car, four-wheel drive, bush taxi, pirogue and pinasse.

  ‘The boats were the easiest,’ said Haidara, ‘because you could carry dozens of boxes with just a couple of couriers. But we didn’t want to risk too many at a time, in case the boats sank. Coming by road was harder, because of the checkpoints. If the jihadists or MNLA saw the books, they would try to destroy them, or steal them if they knew their value.’

  There were many close calls. Once, in a village near the Niger, the couriers were held at gun point. They were only released after Haidara called up a friend who knew the local imam. Yet eventually, all the manuscripts were transported and dehumidifiers set up to preserve them, taking account of the more tropical conditions in Bamako. Still, I wondered if there was a feeling of dislocation; if Haidara felt the books were out of their proper place. He shook his head: he was too pragmatic to be troubled by such thoughts.

  ‘These books are our identity.’ He lifted a manuscript, running his fingers gently across the spine. ‘They are our history, our pride, everything. But they aren’t just for Timbuktu. They are for all humanity. The most important thing is to preserve them. It is not simply a question of having them in Timbuktu, it is a question of having them at all.’

  Whippings, women forced into hiding, magic spells to fight the jihadists. At times, it felt as if Timbuktu had been trundling along some kind of reverse time track. Or, as Almehdi Dicko told me, ‘the shariah brings
back all the old things’. As an anti-slavery campaigner, he had seen plenty of this for himself.

  ‘I have been to villages’, he said, ‘where masters took back their slaves and made them work: preparing the milk and food, cleaning their tents, looking after the animals. We are pursuing justice against these people, because slavery is illegal in Mali, but with this crisis it is hard to enforce the law. Many former slaves have moved back with their masters by their own choice, because they are scared in these times of uncertainty.’

  While officially slavery was abolished across the French Soudan in 1908, it has never fully disappeared in Mali. The colonial officers exploited it themselves, using slave labour for construction, domestic service, haulage and military employment.fn4 So deeply did slavery endure under French rule that Modibo Keita (later Mali’s first post-independence president) argued there could only be full manumission when the yoke of colonialism was broken. But post-independence governments have failed to eradicate the phenomenon, largely because they have failed to create an economic system in which there is sufficient motivation for everybody to walk away from the security of bondage.

  I met Almehdi in the office of Pastor Mohammed, a convert who was in charge of Timbuktu’s small (and mostly ex-slave) Evangelical Christian community. Sitting in front of a bogolan mud cloth depicting Jesus the shepherd (an attractive image for people who’ve grown up in a pastoralist environment), the pastor called up Almehdi to give me a glimpse into life for Timbuktu’s slaves.

  ‘It’s not like you think in the West,’ he said.

  His eyes fiery, he talked in punchy sentences, his own childhood in bondage simmering at the surface of every example. ‘It still exists in Timbuktu in many forms, that’s why it is so hard to eradicate. There are masters who use their slaves to work the fields in the harvest, but the rest of the year they leave them alone. There are people who are no longer slaves, but still the former master has influence over them. Let me tell you about my colleague. I work with him in the municipality, he has a very high position. But when he wanted to give his son a turban [a traditional coming-of-age ceremony], his former slave master found out. He was furious – he came out of the desert and criticised him for breaking the wala [the code of respect between manumitted slaves and their former masters]. He’s a nobody, just a herder in the desert. But still, my colleague felt obliged to cancel the ceremony. Even in this neighbourhood, there is an Arab lady who still has many slaves and everybody knows about it.’