RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2017 by Charlie English
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Ebook ISBN: 9780698197145
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: English, Charlie, author.
Title: The storied city : the quest for Timbuktu and the fantastic mission to save its past / Charlie English.
Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039192 | ISBN 9781594634284
Subjects: LCSH: Tombouctou (Mali)—Discovery and exploration. | Tombouctou (Mali)—Antiquities. | Mali—History—Tuareg Rebellion, 2012—Destruction and pillage. | Manuscripts, Arabic—Mali—Tombouctou. | Libraries—Destruction and pillage—Mali—Tombouctou. | Islamic learning and scholarship—Mali—Tombouctou. | Cultural property—Protection—Mali—Tombouctou.
Classification: LCC DT551.9.T55 E54 2017 | DDC 966.23—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039192
p. cm.
Frontispiece: Nineteenth-century drawing of Timbuktu, based on a description by the French explorer René Caillié
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Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
Version_1
For Lucy
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Prologue: A Man of Enterprise and Genius
PART ONE
OCCUPATION
1. A Seeker of Manuscripts
2. A Wide Extended Blank
3. Hell Is Not Far Away
4. The Fourth Traveller
5. Al-Qaeda to the Rescue
6. It Shall Be Mine
7. Ismael’s List
PART TWO
DESTRUCTION
8. The Armchair Explorer
9. A Headless Horseman
10. The Pope of Timbuktu
11. Secret Agents
PART THREE
LIBERATION
12. Lives of the Scholars
13. The Terrible Twosome
14. King Leopold’s Paperweight
15. Auto-da-Fé
16. Chronicle of the Researcher
17. An Indiana Jones Moment in Real Life!
18. Manuscript Fever
19. The Myth Factory
Epilogue
Photos
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Photo Credits
About the Author
Visit http://bit.ly/2pyoBwS for a larger version of this map.
PROLOGUE: A MAN OF ENTERPRISE AND GENIUS
In among the millions of documents held by the British government’s National Archives is a slim dossier known as CO 2/20. The volume is not much requested. These archives, after all, hold papers that cover a thousand years of British history, and most visitors to the airy reading rooms at Kew come in search of more obvious treasures: Domesday Book, Shakespeare’s will, or the newly opened files of cold war traitors and spies. Every couple of years, however, someone will demand Colonial Office file 2/20, and a message will be passed to the Cheshire town of Winsford, where the dossier is held in a storage facility deep within Britain’s largest salt mine. There, an employee will venture into the arid darkness, pluck the file from more than twenty-two miles of shelving given over to the National Archives, and dispatch it south.
The box that arrives days later at the reading room is made of thick cardboard and bound with white cotton tape. Inside is a sheaf of a hundred or so handwritten communications—manuscripts, we might say—that were sent from the British consul in Tripoli to London in the mid-1820s. Each piece of ragged, well-traveled paper illuminates a small corner of time and place, and a handful have special relevance for our story. These are the last letters of a neglected explorer, Alexander Gordon Laing, and encompass the period of his expedition to discover the “far famed Capital of Central Africa,” as he described the city of Timbuktu.
Laing, a muttonchopped army major from Edinburgh, was fated to become the first European explorer to reach this elusive place. In the 1820s, Timbuktu dominated Europe’s ideas about Africa as El Dorado had once colored its concept of the Americas. Timbuktu was believed to govern a rich sub-Saharan region called the Sudan, after the Arabic Bilad al-Sudan, “the land of the blacks.” Rumors of the city’s existence had circulated in Europe for hundreds of years, and its riches had been trumpeted since at least the fourteenth century. As Marco Polo’s Zipangu was said to be a land where the king’s palace was roofed with precious metal, Timbuktu’s houses too were reported to be covered with gold. Scores of travelers had been sent to find it, but every attempt had ended in death or failure.
In 1826, it was the turn of Major Laing. Laing was a particular British sort, a product of that time between Waterloo and the Charge of the Light Brigade when military men sought death or glory, or a combination of the two. With his good looks and self-absorption, he could have slipped out of the pages of Vanity Fair, but it was a different novel, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, that inspired his life of adventure. “The reading of voyages and travels occupied all my leisure moments,” he once recalled. “The History of Robinson Crusoe . . . inflamed my young imagination.” Like Defoe’s hero, Laing was desperate to avoid the “middle station” of British life; like Crusoe he would cast himself into the world in order to find meaning and purpose. “I shall do more than has ever been done before,” he wrote, “and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.”
Not everyone shared Laing’s immodest assessment of his abilities. While he was stationed in Sierra Leone in 1824, his commanding officer wrote to the minister for war and the colonies that Laing’s “military exploits were [even] worse than his poetry.” But this diatribe apparently had little effect; that year Laing was appointed leader of a new British mission to locate the city he believed it was his destiny to find. Becoming the first to reach Timbuktu would give him what he most desired in the world, as he explained in a poem:
Tis that which bids my bosom glow
To climb the stiff ascent of fame
To share the praise the just bestow
And give myself a deathless name.
Laing set out from Tripoli in the summer of 1825, riding into the 120-degree heat of the Sahara. The land at this time of year was so arid even his camels grew skeletally thin. His guide, a mild and agreeable presence on the coast, became greedier the farther south they traveled, and in the Tanezrouft, a
burning plain the size of California, he appears to have betrayed Laing to a group of Tuareg. Heavily armed men surrounded the explorer’s tent in the night, shot him, and hacked at him before leaving him for dead. Laing’s account of the injuries he sustained in this attack is one of the most remarkable artifacts in the Colonial Office dossier. It was written on May 10, 1826, from a desert camp two hundred miles north of Timbuktu. Until this point, his dispatches were composed in a flamboyant, forward-leaning copperplate. This letter, dotted with mildew now, its folded seams darkened by Saharan dust, is an untidy up-and-down scrawl, written, as he explained, with his left hand.
“My Dear Consul,” he writes, “I drop you a line only, by an uncertain conveyance, to acquaint you that I am recovering from . . . severe wounds far beyond any calculation that the most sanguine expectation could have formed.” The detail of the incident is a surprising tale of “base treachery and war,” but it must keep for another time. For now, he will acquaint the consul with the number and nature of the wounds he has suffered in the attack:
To begin from the top, I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head & three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away, one on my left cheek which fractured the Jaw bone & has divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound, one over the right temple, and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly scratched the windpipe.
He has a musket ball in the hip, which has made its way through his body, grazing his backbone. He also has five saber wounds to his right arm and hand, which is “cut three fourths across,” and the wrist bones are hacked through. He has three cuts on his left arm, which is broken, one slight wound on the right leg, and two, including “one dreadful gash,” on the left, to say nothing of the blow to the fingers of the hand he is using to write.
Scanning this butcher’s bill, as the anxious consul must have done when the letter reached Tripoli six months later, the reader looks for signs of retreat. Laing is planning, surely, to return by the quickest possible route, as soon as he is fit, devising a way to avoid the bandits on the home leg? Not at all. The pull of Timbuktu, which lies over the horizon, as yet unmolested by European gaze, is too strong. He will not dishonor himself by giving up now. He is “doing well” despite his wounds, he tells the consul. He hopes yet to return to England with “much important Geographical information.” He has discovered many things that must be corrected on the map of Africa, and he beseeches God to allow him time to finish the job.
Almost two months later, Laing writes again. His situation has become worse. The camp has been overwhelmed by a “dreadful malady” akin to yellow fever that has killed half the population, including his last remaining servant. “I am now the only surviving member of the mission,” he informs the consul miserably. “My situation is far from agreeable.” Still, so potent is his sense of destiny that he carries on:
I am well aware that if I do not visit it, the World will ever remain in ignorance of [Timbuktu] . . . as I make no vain glorious assertion when I say that it will never be visited by Christian man after me.
Laing achieved his great ambition six weeks later, entering Timbuktu on August 13, 1826. Then something rather odd happened: he went quiet.
For five weeks he sent no word of his arrival to the consul. It was September 21 before he wrote again, and then the letter was barely five hundred words long. He is still holding the pen in his left hand, and his writing now is cramped, tense. His life is threatened, he tells the consul, and he is in a hurry to leave:
I have no time to give you my account of Tinbuctu, but shall briefly state that in every respect except in size (which does not exceed four miles in circumference) it has completely met my expectations. . . . I have been busily employed during my stay, searching the records in the town, which are abundant, & in acquiring information of every kind, nor is it with any common degree of satisfaction that I say, my perseverance has been amply rewarded.
The day after composing this letter, Laing left Timbuktu and walked out of history. The consul forwarded the final dispatch to London with a covering note claiming a victory of sorts—it was the “first letter ever written from that place by any Christian”—but in terms of delivering information about the great object of European geography, Laing’s expedition was a flop. If Timbuktu had met his high expectations “completely,” where was the detail? Most puzzling was Laing’s assertion that there were abundant “records in the town,” from which he had drawn “information of every kind.” What kinds of records could warrant a soldier’s attention? How could they be of use to the British government?
• • •
ALMOST TWO CENTURIES LATER, it is clear that the “records in the town” were some of the great quantity of mostly Arabic texts that are now known collectively as the manuscripts of Timbuktu. The city’s documents, which Laing appears to have been the first European to see, are so numerous no one knows quite how many there are, though they are reckoned in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. They contain some of the most valuable written sources for the so-called golden age of Timbuktu in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the great Songhay empire of which the city was a part. They have been held up by experts as Africa’s equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, proof of the continent’s vibrant written history.
In 2012 that history appeared to be under threat. After a coup in southern Mali, Timbuktu was overtaken by the fighters of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The jihadists began systematically to destroy the centuries-old mausoleums of the city’s Sufi saints. On January 28, 2013, the mayor of Timbuktu told the world that all of the city’s ancient manuscripts had also been burned.
I recall that morning well. I was international news editor at The Guardian at the time, and Mali had a special resonance for me. Many years before, at eighteen, I had developed the idea of driving across the Sahara. I saved money, bought an old Land Rover, and set out from Yorkshire with a friend, traveling via Morocco and Algeria to Mali, which we reached in the spring of 1987. The desert town of Aguelhok marked the end of the crossing, our summit, and once there we cast about for a new idea. What if we traded the clapped-out car for three or four camels and rode to Timbuktu? The story we would tell! We found a vendor and negotiated for a week, but as he only ever managed to produce one small specimen we abandoned the plan and continued south. I sold the car in Gao, the capital of old Songhay, and traveled to Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire and then home. I had not made it to Timbuktu, but I had fallen in love with the idea of the desert. I returned to the Sahara in 1989 in a different vehicle, but it was too unreliable to risk the drive to Mali. Once again, the City of 333 Saints remained tantalizingly out of reach.
In July 2012, with anger and sadness, I watched the footage of the jihadists trashing Timbuktu’s monuments. The following January, when our correspondent was told that the rebels had torched the city’s historic texts, we led The Guardian’s online edition with the news. Days later, it became clear that the manuscripts had not been destroyed after all; in fact, they had been smuggled to safety by the town’s librarians. I became obsessed with the details of this operation. It seemed to me to echo the plot of Robert Crichton’s comic novel The Secret of Santa Vittoria, in which the people of a small Tuscan town save a million bottles of wine from looting Nazis. Only it was far better than that: the treasure in Timbuktu was infinitely more significant; what was more, this evacuation was real. I left my job, determined to turn the story into a book.
Bruce Chatwin once observed that there are two Timbuktus. One is the real place, a tired caravan town where the Niger bends into the Sahara. The other is altogether more fabulous, a legendary city in a never-never land, the Timbuktu of the mind. I planned to give an account of both these Timbuktus by following two alternating strands: that of the West’s centuries-long struggle to find, conquer, and understand the city; and that of the modern-day attempt to save its manuscripts and its history from
destruction. The first narrative would explore the role of legend in shaping our view of Timbuktu; the second would relate the tale of occupation and evacuation.
What I didn’t understand then was how closely these stories would mirror each other.
Charlie English
London, 2017
PART ONE
OCCUPATION
If thou know not the way that leadeth to the City of Brass, rub the hand of the horseman, and he will turn, and then will stop, and in whatsoever direction he stoppeth, thither proceed, without fear and without difficulty; for it will lead thee to the City of Brass.
—The Thousand and One Nights
1.
A SEEKER OF MANUSCRIPTS
MARCH 2012
One hazy morning in Bamako, the capital of the modern West African state of Mali, an aging Toyota Land Cruiser picked its way to the end of a concrete driveway and pulled out into the busy morning traffic. In its front passenger seat sat a large, distinguished-looking man in billowing robes and a pillbox prayer cap. He was forty-seven years old, stood over six feet tall, and weighed close to two hundred pounds, and although a small, French-style mustache balanced jauntily on his upper lip, there was something commanding about his appearance. In his prominent brown eyes lurked a sharp, almost impish intelligence. He was Abdel Kader Haidara, librarian of Timbuktu, and his name would soon become famous around the world.
Haidara was not an indecisive man, but that morning, as his driver piloted the heavy vehicle through the clouds of buzzing Chinese-made motorbikes and beat-up green minibuses that plied the city’s streets, he was caught in an agony of indecision. The car stereo, tuned to Radio France Internationale, spewed alarming updates on the situation in the north, while the cheap cellphones that were never far from his grasp jangled continually with reports from his contacts in Timbuktu, six hundred miles away. The rebels were advancing across the desert, driving government troops and refugees before them. Bus stations were choked with the displaced; highways were clogged with motorbikes and pickups and ancient trucks that swayed under the weight of the fleeing population. Haidara had known when he left his apartment that driving into this chaos would be dangerous, but now it was beginning to look like a suicide mission. Soon he’d had enough: he spoke to his driver, and then they were pointing west again, back toward the skirts of the sprawling African metropolis.
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