The Timbuktu School for Nomads

by Nicholas Jubber

  What a mess, when slavery is top of the links to Leo Africanus’s time, while the wonders of his age, like the shrines of saints or the beautiful manuscripts, have been trashed. In Leo’s era, the average price of a slave was less than the price of a book. His Description is chock-full of slaves. In Timbuktu, he tells us, ‘they keep great store of men and women slaves’. But that’s what makes the survival of slavery all the more unsettling: Leo was writing half a millennium ago. Listening to Almehdi, I thought of the slaves of Mauritania, and wondered how many others I had passed without being aware of it. That is one of the hazards of travel in faraway places. Life is so intricately coded you are constantly in danger of missing the signals. Throughout these journeys, I often felt like a blind man groping in the dark.

  The effect of Ansar ad-Dine’s occupation hung over Timbuktu like a foul-smelling miasma. Mahmoud rode me around the quarters, introducing me to people who had stayed during the crisis: shopkeepers whose wares had been set on fire; marabouts whose students were too scared to attend their classes; even Bouge – manager of the ill-fated Refuge de la Paix, where the four Europeans had been abducted in 2011 – who unsurprisingly had been struggling for customers.

  ‘Now it’s better,’ he told me. ‘Some of the staff working for the foreign armies are here. So we have more guests now than any time since the disaster.’

  If anybody’s trade was going to cause him trouble, it was the man known locally as Baba Toubob, ‘father of the whites’. His real name is Frederic Gordey, and he is the son of a French officer who left his Arab-Malian wife after independence. With his mixed identity, Frederic was always an outsider in Timbuktu society, and he established himself in that classic outsider’s role, as manager of the only bar in town.

  ‘You wanna meet someone interesting?’ asked Mahmoud. Tumbling over precipitous sand hills, we rode like cowboys on a bucking bronco. By the time we arrived my nerves were milkshaked and I could really use a drink. Which was lucky, because here in the sand-clogged Sanfil district, Baba Toubob had established his post-occupation bar, discreetly tucked behind a metal gate. Pitchers and crates of empty Castel cluttered the yard. Behind them sat the barkeep, next to a stack of fresh Bavaria, smoking at the flies.

  ‘Look at this place. Who comes now? Mais autrefois … if you came before the occupation, you would have nowhere to sit!’ Baba Toubob had the sort of distinguished, clay-like head that looks like it has been glaze fired in a kiln. He shook it over a lopsided metal table, tapping ash into a rusty tray, occasionally mumbling instructions to his lackeys.

  ‘Lots of people came to the bar, it was in the centre of town,’ he continued. ‘Local people, especially young people, used to come. They aren’t concerned about Islam so much, that’s for when you’re older. They were Songhays mostly, but we did entertain some Arabs.’

  ‘Didn’t you think of leaving when the jihadists came?’ I asked.

  ‘Hmmm … I thought this is just something temporary, so I decided to stay. I kept the bar open, but in secret, just with people I knew. Then, a month after the occupation, someone called one of my customers and said “you need to get out of there”, so we all left from a door at the back. The Islamists came in that evening and wrecked the bar. They broke the freezer, carried all the bottles out to the street and smashed them, and set the whole place on fire. I stood at the corner of the street and watched it burn.’

  ‘I guess that was pretty hard,’ I said, ‘seeing your livelihood go up in smoke.’

  He took a drag on his cigarette, pushing up his shoulders like some Parisian roué dismissing a bad run at the casino. ‘I wasn’t hurt, so I thought, it’s not serious.’

  ‘Did they give you any more trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘They tried to. One day, they took me in for an interrogation. But I had something on my side. You see, I’m related to some pretty important people. I’m from the Ould Aish, which is a famous tribe round here, and my family has produced a lot of jihadists. In fact, the head of Al-Qaeda in Timbuktu was one of my cousins.’

  I could feel the flies taking advantage of my dropped-open jaw. How paradoxical! How ridiculous! And yet – how Timbuktu! Here was this French officer’s son, sipping Castel beer at 11 in the morning, chain smoking, flapping his hands like any Parisian barfly – and he was related to some of the region’s most prominent jihadists. It was a double-sided identity as stark as any I had come across.

  ‘Do you feel a connection to your … cousins?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, we don’t talk so much, as you can imagine. But I feel close to the Arab community as a whole. People say a lot of bad things about the Arabs. But you know what? Without them, this city is nothing. The Arabs are the masters of the economy here.’

  I thought of the stories about Berabish Arabs from the nineteenth century, trading in salt and cloth and tobacco, outmanoeuvring the French on export taxes – people like Lamina and the caravaneers of the desert. They were the link between the town and the dunes. How much poorer Timbuktu would be without them.

  As Baba Toubob pointed out, he wasn’t hurt. In that respect he was lucky, because one of the most disturbing features of Ansar ad-Dine’s occupation was the appetite for vicious corporal punishment. There’s a fine line when you’re visiting a place that has been through horrific trauma. You want to probe the dark heart of the matter, to look the thing square in the eye. Yet if you push too far, there is a risk you’re sensationalising, foregrounding the most violent stories irrespective of context. I felt that I needed to hear some of these stories. I wanted to understand what Timbuktu had been through – and why it was proving so hard for the nomads to return. I think, I hope, I was trying to learn, and not just being a torture junkie.

  Among the people I met through Mahmoud was a restaurant chef in the Abaradjou district, arrested for having a baby out of wedlock. He had been struck a hundred times with a cowskin camel whip and his wife (his girlfriend at the time) was so traumatised by the incident that she wouldn’t speak about it. There was a boy whipped for chatting to his neighbour, who was so badly wounded he had to be phlebotomised to bring down the swelling. And there was a distant relative of Mahmoud’s, a girl called Hady, who sat drawing patterns in the sand beside her mud-brick home. Of all the stories I was told, I found hers the saddest to hear.

  ‘I was with my boyfriend,’ she said, ‘his name’s Abdullai. We were just talking in the street. The jihadist soldiers saw us, so we ran. They fired in the air and another jihadist came round the corner and he grabbed Abdullai. I just carried on running.’

  It took a while for the details to leak out. She drifted off sometimes, so we sat in spells of delicate silence, waiting for her to resume. It was as if the cord tying her to the world had been cut, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted it reattached. Mahmoud, who knew her family, said she had been very different before the crisis.

  ‘I went to a friend’s house. I knew they’d look for me at home so I stayed there. But then my brother came. He told me they had taken my mother, they were saying they had given her the punishment in my place. So I put on my strictest Islamic clothes and went to the commissariat.’

  There was a twig beside her in the sand. She picked it up and traced a line, her eyes fixed on the pattern she was drawing. Behind us was a palm-reed tent, which her family used in the hottest months. Its shadow had shifted a couple of inches by the time she resumed.

  ‘I was in prison for four nights. I was so scared, I couldn’t eat any of the food they brought me. I was on my own, in a big room, and all I could think about was what they were going to do to me.’

  When she stood before the qadi, the shariah judge, she could barely stop herself shaking. She offered her excuse – she had been doing an errand for her parents and only greeted Abdullai out of courtesy. But it was given short shrift.

  ‘The judge said I had made a big mistake, and it was his duty to make sure I didn’t do it again. So he ordered me to be whipped a hundred times.’

  She had to wait anothe
r night – ‘the worst night of my life’ – before the sentence was carried out. Flanked by jihadists, blinking at the fierce morning light, she could see hundreds of people gathering on the dusty square behind the Sankoré mosque – site of the university where so many of Timbuktu’s intelligentsia had studied. The jihadists covered her face with a turban and stood behind her, taking turns to wield a stripped branch from an acacia tree. Every strike, said Hady, she thought she was going to buckle.

  ‘I cried all the way through. I kept thinking, I’m not going to survive this.’

  The whip tenderised her skin, breaking down its resistance; by the end it was tearing open at every lash, as if the whip had been spliced with razor blades.

  ‘I had a lot of blood and there were scratches all over my back. My family took me home, massaged me and fed me meat to give me strength. I was sick for about a week and couldn’t go out, but slowly I started to recover.’

  It was hard to think of the right words after hearing a story like this. I asked Hady if she felt anger towards her persecutors. For many townsfolk, the jihadists were people from the desert, which was why many nomads were facing so much hostility when they tried to return. But Hady’s answer showed the tensions were more complicated than a simple town–desert split: they sliced through the very heart of Timbuktu society.

  ‘Sure, I hate those people. Sure, I want to shoot them with a big gun! But also … the people who watched. I don’t understand why they could do that. Just stand there … and watch me getting beaten. I think I will always find that hard to understand.’

  Everybody agreed: it was the ‘perfect time’ to visit. After the nightmare of the last couple of years, Timbuktu was sloughing off its trauma. One night after supper, we could hear the drumming of tam-tams and the pounding of feet, the double-time flowering of feast and song. Looking through the door with Mahmoud, I saw mobile phones and torches lighting people’s way, painting the muddy alleys with trails of LED.

  ‘Come on! You want to see?’

  I followed Mahmoud down a zigzag of mud. We floated along vectors of light, lured like moths towards the glow in a cul-de-sac. A dozen women were dancing there, languidly turning their limbs around the bride.

  ‘She’s a beautiful one,’ said Mahmoud, ‘and she comes from a very popular family.’

  The bride was luminous in her yellow headdress, strobed by the bright cottons and fluent limbs of her friends and relatives. Each woman rotated on her own turntable of dust, wreathed in an amber mist, ethereal in the glare of torches and phones.

  ‘There haven’t been any weddings since the crisis.’ Mahmoud’s face was wider than I had ever seen it. ‘When I was younger, we used to have weddings every day at this time of year. It’s good to see this again!’

  I thought of Leo Africanus, who writes so enthusiastically of the marriage festivities in Timbuktu. He describes how the inhabitants ‘spend a great part of the night in singing and dancing through all the streets of the city’. Here was one of the loveliest moments in his Description brought to life: a reminder, after the miseries of shariah and slavery, that not all throwbacks to the past are rotten.

  The next day, the Place d’Independence throbbed to the backfire of motorbikes and a crowd swelled in front of the mayor’s office. The town had come out to greet the newlyweds emerging from the civil registration. Boys sat on car bonnets playing tam-tams, while military trucks swung around the square, drawing appreciative cheers from the crowd. At the moment, people wanted to feel they were protected.

  Men in glossy-fronted boubous, heads smothered under turbans or squeezed into filigree caps, batted greetings and gossip about. The women glowed even brighter. Gold swung from their ears in fans and triangles, pins and squares, sparkled on Songhay headdresses, flashed in finger bands, traced glittery loops down goffered dresses. This was no superficial obsession with ornament. This was couture as culture: a celebration of survival, a fist in the face of the jihadists. Their hair frizzy, braided, curled, straightened, triumphantly bared or caught up in crisply folded cloths, these women were brilliant in the literal as well as the conventional sense. They sparkled with a brightness that, in the light of Timbuktu’s recent troubles, was magnificent.

  As soon as the couples had emerged from the mayor’s office to be swamped by well-wishers, the crowd bobbed on motorbikes, long speeding chains rattling under inkily lit limestone walls.

  ‘Come on!’ said Mahmoud, grinding his engine. ‘Let’s go and join the wedding party!’

  ‘Do you know any of the grooms?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course, I’m the future mayor. I know everyone!’

  Headlamps strobed the night, draining the colour from boubous and dresses, flashing on the folds of headscarves and lacquered wigs. The roar of engines drowned the beat of tam-tams; the odour of burned fuel smothered the hot scent of fritters in street-side pans. A boy leaped off his seat in the middle of the traffic, break-dancing with his motor, swinging it by the handles. Horns and klaxons beeped triumphantly. For a shining, breathtaking moment, it felt as if the whole of Timbuktu was united in celebration.

  ‘We’ve been asleep for so long,’ said Sidi that night. ‘Now at last the city is waking up.’

  25

  Licking the Desert’s Wounds

  OFFICIALS CALL TIMBUKTU ‘THE CITY OF PIROGUE AND CAMEL’, WHERE the river and the desert meet. A rainbow city joining different ethnic groups together as one happy family. If you want more than sound-bites, you have to hang out in the dusty back rooms of shops and the fly-misted alleys. There, you pick up the tensions, and among the most articulate voices was Sidi’s friend Harbey. We had met at a wedding party, sticking our fists in the same platter of greasy rice. He leaned in, one hand on my shoulder, and told me about a Songhay he knew whose hand was cut off for stealing some bags of rice and a few pieces of furniture.

  ‘They brought him out in front of the Gaddafi Hotel’, said Harbey, ‘and cut off the hand with a sword. They threw it in a bowl and put the stump in a pot of hot butter to stop the bleeding. You should’ve heard him cry! Now, here’s the thing. That boy was black, a Songhay, I know his family. But at the same time there was another thief, an Arab from the desert, who took a really big haul from the Gaddafi Hotel. And do you know what they did to him? They let him off with the whip. So tell me, what’s the difference between those crimes? Why did they let off the Arab, but the Songhay lost his hand? I’ll tell you why: because the Salafists were Arabs. They came from Algeria, from Libya, from Mauritania.’

  One of the most disturbing developments of the twenty-first century is the rise of identity politics. Ideology took a beating in the Cold War, and tribalism has clambered on its grave. The conflict in Mali should have been ideological – what form of society do you want? – but it was ratcheted to ethnic lines. Hearing the stories of people like Harbey and poor Hady, it was clear the wounds were still raw. That wouldn’t make them easier to probe: walls can rise very quickly when outsiders are stomping around. So I wasn’t expecting to come across the kind of story that Emad told me. It was as heartbreaking as any I heard in Timbuktu, because it illustrated the terrible cost of the crisis to Mali’s nomads.

  Emad was a teacher who lived near the Sankoré mosque, sinewy and high browed, with large eyes that bulged and blinked when he talked. After meeting him at an evening ‘peace concert’, I was invited to his house. There, in a plain tiled room, he opened up a box filled with photographs: boys in handout T-shirts and dusty tunics, a few headscarved girls, gathered in front of a sun-bleached limestone schoolhouse. Tapping a fingertip against the different faces in the picture, he told me their fates.

  ‘This one lost his father … this one’s in the refugee camp in Mauritania … this one’s dead.’

  The school was in a village called Agouni, 21 miles into the desert, not far from where I had stayed with Lamina’s family.

  ‘We had around a hundred students,’ said Emad. ‘It was a good school, and we were all proud of our work. The students�
� parents were all herders, with camels and goats, and this was the first generation to get an education. We were making a lot of progress with them, they’re really intelligent. Especially in maths, because they’re used to counting the herds and measuring out the grains of millet for the goats, so they can work out the answer a lot faster than children in the town.’

  To prove his point, he showed me test papers written on narrow gridpaper, flashing green and red with ticks and high scores and bravos.

  ‘Then,’ said Emad, ‘the jihadists came and they closed down the school because they didn’t approve of the modern education system, they only wanted Quranic schools. So I came back here and stayed in Timbuktu.’

  ‘Have you seen any of the students since?’ I asked.

  ‘Actually, I did.’ Emad tipped his head, his eyes flashing with the memory. ‘I passed the military barracks one day, here in Timbuktu. And I saw them sitting there, three of my students, in the back of a pick-up truck. They were wearing jihadist uniforms and carrying guns. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Why did you enlist?” They said it was necessity. There was no trade between the town and the desert, and the jihadists were offering 150,000 CFA (about £165) every month to anyone who became a soldier. These are poor people, and they were suffering very badly. But I know they regret it very deeply. Those who survived, at least.’