The Storied City

by Charlie English

  After his speech, Hamaha took questions, and when he had finished he moved on a short distance and his men went to round up a new audience. He continued in this manner for much of the day, and other jihadists did the same, so their message was broadcast to the people.

  It wasn’t long before these question-and-answer sessions became dominated by complaints about looting. The jihadists listened. Then they started handing out phone numbers that people with grievances could call, and from then on, whenever anyone had an issue with the MNLA—when their car or motorbike was taken or their shop looted—they phoned the jihadists, and if the stolen goods were private property, the jihadists would order the MNLA to hand them back. “Ansar Dine said that looting against private people was not normal,” recalled Sane Chirfi Alpha, Haidara’s childhood friend and a former head of tourism for the city. “If it was against the state, it was okay, but if it was against private citizens, they had no right to do it. Every time someone seized something private, Ansar Dine—and elements of al-Qaeda too—took it upon themselves to get it returned.”

  Some essential state-owned assets were also protected. The city was in a “catastrophic” condition after the looting, the Ansar Dine spokesperson Sanda Ould Bouamama said, so they set about trying to fix it. They made sure the utilities were secured—including the water supply, the Energie du Mali electricity plant, the telecommunications equipment—as well as Radio Bouctou and the hospital. On Sunday night the head of Timbuktu’s health services had been called by an assistant and told that he had no office left: it had been looted and trashed. On Monday morning Ag Ghaly went to the hospital personally and asked the health workers what was missing. The vehicles, including the ambulance, had been stolen, along with medical machines and supplies, so Ag Ghaly found two trucks to replace them.

  After the wave of destruction that had washed through the town on Sunday, people were impressed. “They were psychologists, they knew how to win people over,” Diadié recalled. “They started listening. If there were frustrated people, or people who had lost things, they would make amends and try to buy their esteem.” Even Jansky conceded that Ag Ghaly was a “boss.”

  The looting hadn’t entirely stopped, though, and later on Monday the city elders went to see Ag Ghaly to complain: family homes were still being broken into, they said, and things were being stolen and destroyed. At that moment, the Ansar Dine leader ordered the MNLA out of the city center altogether. From then on, the town would be held by his jihadist fighters, while the southern districts, including the airport and the riverside, would be the domain of the secular MNLA. “The MNLA had the right to come and do its business here, to buy what it needed,” said Sane Chirfi Alpha, “but they were not allowed to stay in the city after eight p.m.” When they came into town, they had to come without weapons or flags, in vehicles without guns.

  Timbuktu would pay a price for Ag Ghaly’s protection, however. That evening, the Ansar Dine leader called the imams to the military camp to explain that they would “fight to the death” against those who wanted to speak of the creation of a secular republic—in other words, the MNLA—and he set out the requirements of the new theocratic regime.

  Details of Ag Ghaly’s political philosophy were broadcast on Radio Bouctou later in the week. He began by citing a controversial hadith in which the Prophet is alleged to have said that he had been “ordered to kill the people until they testify that there is no god except Allah, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and they establish prayer and pay the zakah [give thanks to God].” Ansar Dine was not an ethnic, tribal, or racist group, he said, but an Islamic one that was the enemy of unbelievers and polytheists. The suffering of the Muslim people was the fault of the laws of Jews and Christians:

  It is not a secret, the scale of hardship our Muslim society is suffering, and the worst of it is disabling the Islamic sharia, which Allah has blessed us with, and replacing it with man-made laws that are taken from the Jews, Christians and their followers, which result in oppression, aggression, immorality, disobedience, poverty, deprivation and only Allah knows what.

  For these reasons, he went on,

  your brothers from the mujahideen and the Ansar Dine organization have come together and vowed to uphold what is right, to implement the religion, to lift injustice from the oppressed, to reunify the Muslims, and to unite their efforts around the [belief] that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger.

  To succeed in his endeavor, Ag Ghaly required three things from the people of Timbuktu. First, he called upon “all segments of Muslim society to help . . . in establishing the religion,” spreading justice and security, promoting virtue, and preventing vice. Second, he said, “our brothers the traders” must continue to supply the city with basic foodstuffs, fuel, and medicines, since “Allah will aid the slave as long as the slave aids his brother.” Finally, the population of the city, especially those with “talents and capabilities,” must pull together and help the community, either financially or by volunteering, since it was written in the scripture that:

  He who has done an atom’s weight of good shall see it

  And he who has done an atom’s weight of evil shall see it.

  On Monday evening, Timbuktu began its first night under sharia law.

  • • •

  THE KEEPERS of the manuscripts met the jihadists’ arrival with relief. Whatever strange ideas these people had about the Muslim faith, they would surely not threaten the safety of what were, after all, mostly Islamic texts. They might even help protect them from the looters.

  Abdoulaye “Air Mali” Chabane—a portly figure, nicknamed after the national airline many years before because of his speed on the soccer pitch—was sitting opposite the new Ahmad Baba institute building in Sankore on Monday morning when he saw two vehicles pull up and several gunmen enter. After a moment’s reflection he stood and followed them. Inside the compound, he saw two young men on the lower ground floor and several more in the offices above, all armed, and thought it prudent to leave. Sitting outside once more, he heard a good deal of shouting from the building, and soon the men reappeared, carrying a plastic sack full of loot. He watched them climb into their vehicles and drive away.

  An hour later, another group arrived, in a pickup with a black flag. Their leader was a fat, bearded man who looked foreign. Air Mali approached and told him that the “lunatics” had come to visit. He had heard a lot of noise but did not know what they had done. “Are they still there?” asked the jihadist. When Air Mali said no, the commander said they should go in together.

  Inside, they found the offices smashed up and the windows broken. Air Mali thought the men must have been searching for cash, because there were cellphones lying around that they hadn’t bothered to take. They also appeared to have tried to get into the safe, without success.

  “Where are the workers?” the commander asked.

  “Gone,” said Air Mali. “Fled.”

  The center must be preserved, the commander announced grandly, since it contained the history of the people; the stories of their fathers and grandfathers were all kept in here. Did Air Mali know anyone who could come to evaluate the damage?

  Air Mali felt a wash of relief: it appeared that the jihadists could be made to understand. Even if everything else was looted, this place could at least be saved. He called the institute’s accounts manager and explained the problem. At first he said he couldn’t come, but Air Mali insisted, and the manager arrived that afternoon and checked the contents against his inventory. Everything valuable that was left should be removed to a safe place, he said: the computers, the furniture—everything but the manuscripts. Those were in a safe place and were not going anywhere. Anyway, the thieves had shown earlier that they were not interested in taking them.

  When the inventory had been checked, the manager gave the list of missing items to the jihadists, who said they would investigate. They would also send people the fol
lowing day to guard the building.

  Several days passed, but nobody came.

  Ismael Diadié Haidara meanwhile spent much of Monday in his Fondo Kati library, finishing the job of moving his manuscripts. In the afternoon he was sitting under the tree in his courtyard with a friend when a car pulled up outside. There were five armed men in the back and two in the front, and their leader asked who was the responsable for the house. Before Ismael could speak, his friend said that the director wasn’t there.

  “He has gone to Bamako,” he said. “He fled.”

  “What is this place?” asked the rebel. “Is it an office?”

  “No, a library.”

  “What is inside this library?”

  “Books. Kurans.”

  “Ah,” said the man. “If they are Kurans, then no one will touch them until the return of the owner.”

  The pickup moved off. Fifty yards down the street it stopped and reversed, and the jihadist went to speak to the man who owned the shop next door. Ismael thought they were trying to verify what his friend had said.

  “We must keep calm,” Ismael told his companion. “If they ask us again, this time I will speak.”

  The jihadists bought a few things from the shop, including sugar and tea, then came back. “It was a very delicate, very difficult moment,” Ismael recalled. “They were no more than five meters from the library.”

  “I know you now, you two, I have seen you,” said the leader. “If something happens to this house, I will come looking for you.”

  “No problem,” said Ismael. “Everyone is calm. Nobody is going to touch anything here.”

  When the men had gone, Ismael’s friend turned to him. “Those people are going to come back,” he said. “You have to get out of here. Leave this town, because you are known—everyone knows you. In the end they will come to look for you.”

  “Perhaps,” said Ismael. “Yes.”

  6.

  IT SHALL BE MINE

  1824–1830

  Joseph Banks might have been dead and the African Association in decline, but in the early 1820s a new European competitor was about to join the race for Timbuktu. On December 3, 1824, the central committee of the newly formed Société de Géographie in Paris was given a curious piece of information by one of its founding officers, the cartographer Edme-François Jomard. According to the society’s minutes:

  M. Jomard announced that an anonymous member had donated a thousand francs . . . to recompense the first traveller who has penetrated as far as the city of Timbuktu via Senegal, and who has procured (1) positive and accurate observations on the position of this city, on the course of rivers that run in its vicinity, and the trade of which it is the hub; (2) the most satisfactory information about the country between Timbuktu and Lake Chad, as well as the direction and height of the mountains that form the Sudan basin.

  The idea of a Timbuktu prize evidently caught the imagination of the 217 savants who had established the Société de Géographie, since its value immediately began to snowball. A thousand-franc donation for “geographical discoveries” from Count Grigory Orlov, a Russian senator living in France, was immediately added to it, doubling the prize pot, whereupon the minister of the French navy doubled it again. Not to be outdone, the minister of foreign affairs added another two thousand, and the minister of the interior a further one thousand. Several other members came forward with more, so that by early 1825 it was worth a very healthy 10,000 francs, to which the society itself—which would judge the winner—added the promise of a prestigious Great Gold Medal of Exploration and Journeys of Discovery to go with the cash.

  Still, it would not be easy to claim this substantial sum. As well as being “fortunate enough to surmount all perils attached to reaching Timbuktu,” the society’s Bulletin stated that the victorious contender would have to procure illuminating facts about the geography, produce, and trade of the country. In particular, the society required a map based on celestial observations, and a handwritten report containing information about the nature of the terrain, the depths of the wells and the water in them, the width and speed of streams and rivers, their color and clarity, and the produce of the land they served, the climate, the declination and inclination of the magnetic needle, and the breeds of animals that lived there. They should also return with specimens of fossils, shells, and plants, and a detailed study of the region’s inhabitants:

  By observing the people, [the explorer] will take care to examine their habits, their ceremonies, their costumes, their weapons, their laws, their worship, the manner in which they feed, their diseases, their skin colour, the shape of their face, the nature of their hair, and also different objects of their trade.

  For anyone who lived in the Sudan, this would have made uneasy reading. Although, as with that of the African Association, the research was undertaken in the name of geography—it was “an immense field to cultivate for the knowledge of the human races,” the Bulletin trumpeted, “for the history of civilizations, for their language, their customs and their religious ideas!”—this was also just the sort of information an imperial power would require. The relish with which ministers poured in government money would have been doubly suspicious. In fact, the “Prize for the Encouragement of a Journey to Timbuktu” looked very much like a late entrant’s attempt to buy her way into the Africa exploration game begun by her long-standing rival. The Bulletin admitted as much: it was a British government mission to Central Africa in 1823 that had drawn European attention once again to the continent, and it was only natural that the three-year-old Société de Géographie also should turn its eyes in this direction. It would be to France’s commercial advantage to find a route into the interior that followed Mungo Park, which would conveniently link up with long-established French settlements in Senegal.

  As word of the prize spread, a half-dozen adventurers were rumored to be gearing up for attempts on the city, but there were two who became especially synonymous with the newly incentivized race for Timbuktu: René Caillié and Major Alexander Gordon Laing.

  It was Laing who would send the “first letter ever written from that place by any Christian,” as the British consul in Tripoli, Hanmer Warrington, put it. The son of an Edinburgh schoolmaster, Laing worked briefly as a teacher himself before escaping into the army and postings to the exotic territories of Barbados, Jamaica, and Sierra Leone, where he was sent in 1819. In West Africa he led a number of missions into the interior, demonstrating the courage, physical robustness, and talent for self-promotion that would be essential to the attempt on Timbuktu already taking shape in his head. “I have had for many years a strong desire to penetrate into the interior of Africa,” he wrote to friends in 1821, “and that desire has been greatly increased by my arrival on the Coast [of West Africa].”

  In 1824, in poor health, he was sent home to report the disastrous British defeat by the Ashanti at Nsamanko to the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Lord Bathurst. To the great irritation of his commanding officer in Sierra Leone, Sir Charles Turner—who complained that Laing was “unwize, unofficerlike, and unmanly” and that his “military exploits were [even] worse than his poetry”—the forty-year-old major ingratiated himself with Bathurst and was appointed to lead a “Timbuktu Mission.” In May 1825 he arrived in Tripoli, where he was greeted by Warrington, a hard-drinking patriot who was rumored to be an illegitimate son of George III, and immediately embarked on a whirlwind romance with the consul’s daughter, Emma. They were married at her father’s large estate on the outskirts of the city on July 14, four days before the groom set out for Timbuktu. Warrington had seen too many explorers ride off to their doom in the desert and refused to let the couple consummate their partnership until his return. “I will take good care my Daughter remains as pure & chaste as snow,” he wrote to Bathurst, in one of the more eccentric communications received at the War and Colonial Office.

  Laing engaged a m
erchant, Shaykh Babani, to take him to Timbuktu for the sum of $2,500, a thousand of which was paid up front. Both the explorer and the consul formed a positive view of Babani, who was said to have lived in the mysterious city for many years. He was a man “of the most sterling worth,” Laing noted, “quiet, harmless, and inoffensive,” while Warrington judged him to be “one of the finest fellows [he] ever saw, with the best tempered & most prepossessing Countenance [he] ever beheld.” The shaykh would take Laing to Timbuktu in two and a half months, it was agreed, at the end of which he would pass Laing into the care of his particular friend, the “Great Sheikh, and Cheif Maraboot Mouckta,” who was powerful enough to ensure the explorer’s safe onward passage to the coast. Apart from Babani’s caravan, the expedition included two West African sailors, who Laing hoped would one day build a boat to sail the Niger; a Jewish interpreter; and a much-traveled Caribbean-born army trumpeter named Jack le Bore who acted as the explorer’s manservant. There was little subtlety to Laing’s approach: they would travel in Muslim robes, but lest anyone mistake their true identity, he would read Christian prayers to his attendants every Sunday, when they would all appear together “dressed as Englishmen.”

  The expedition set out into the desert at the height of summer, when the thermometer regularly hit 120 degrees and the land was so arid that, according to Laing, “as little herbage was to be found as in the bottom of a tin mine in Cornwall.” It took almost two months to reach the ancient oasis town of Ghadames, less than three hundred miles from Tripoli, after Babani led the caravan on a roundabout route of a thousand miles. Seven camels went lame on this first part of the journey, while the men ran out of food and were down to their last rations of water. Most of Laing’s scientific equipment was also broken, as was his only rifle, which had been trodden on by a camel’s “great gouty foot.”