The Storied City

by Charlie English

  On April 24, a new director had taken over at the Ahmad Baba institute. Abdoulkadri Idrissa Maiga was a bullish, powerfully built man, and he couldn’t have begun his new job at a worse time. His predecessor had handed him a dog-eared document in a plastic ring binder that listed the organization’s assets, but God only knew how many of them were left. His Timbuktu headquarters was being used as a barracks, its employees had fled, and he had no money, since one of the government’s few substantive acts since the coup had been to shut off all spending for the north. There was also a tangible threat to the manuscripts it was his job to safeguard. What, then, could he do?

  He started out by scraping together four hundred dollars a month to rent a couple of rooms above a rat-infested fish-and-chicken shop in the south Bamako district of Kalaban Coura. From here he would try to figure out how to pay his employees, and how to keep in touch with the few who remained in Timbuktu. He had been in regular contact with Haidara in the run-up to starting his new job—Haidara, in fact, had been the one to tell him he would be offered the position—and now the Timbuktien suggested they should hold a meeting.

  “Who with?” asked Maiga.

  “Ismael Diadié Haidara. I’ll call him.”

  Since Maiga was the only one with an office in Bamako, the three men agreed to meet there. Soon, the directors of the most famous manuscript collections in Timbuktu, who among them could claim to control around 90,000 of the city’s documents, were meeting almost daily. “We met, we spoke about the manuscripts, we talked about what we had to do to get help,” recalled Abdel Kader Haidara.

  The contrast among these three characters was pointed. Maiga, straight-talking and occasionally abrasive, was a former head of the Arabic department at Bamako University who had worked on a project to digitize and catalogue the manuscripts called MLI/015—“Mali Quinze”—so he knew the material, but he was a novice next to his manuscript-owning colleagues. Ismael, meanwhile, was effete, aristocratic, charming. He was descended, he said, from the sixteenth-century Timbuktu scholar Mahmud Kati, after whom his Fondo Kati library was named, and he kept a home in Granada. Then there was Haidara himself, who also claimed to be the scion of a scholarly Timbuktu family. He could be capricious, distributing information as it suited him, but he liked to make people laugh, even in moments of deep stress. He and Ismael would jokingly address each other at these meetings as “my son,” and even Maiga was occasionally caught up in this horseplay. “At first, it was really a strong team,” he recalled. “We really trusted each other at the beginning. It was a really friendly atmosphere.”

  At these meetings, the librarians shared whatever information they could glean from their contacts in the north. The greatest risk to the manuscripts at this stage, they believed, was from bandits and MNLA looters.

  For a month, UNESCO had been issuing regular statements about the threat the rebels posed to Timbuktu’s heritage. In mid-April the organization had warned that the jihadists’ move into the new Ahmad Baba building was cause for “great alarm,” since it contained documents that dated back to Timbuktu’s glory period between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries: “This heritage must be protected,” said Director-General Irina Bokova. “The citizens of Timbuktu have rallied to protect these ancient documents, and I salute their courage and dedication. But they need our help.” She appealed for concerted action from Mali’s warring factions, neighboring governments, Interpol, customs organizations, the art market, and collectors to prevent the loss of these treasures, which were so important for the whole of humanity.

  While UNESCO broadcast its concern, the librarians’ instincts were to do the opposite, and the first decision they took was to try to keep the manuscripts out of the public eye. Haidara got his chance to try to silence the UN organization on May 18, when an emergency delegation landed in Bamako for the first major meeting with the Malian government since the start of the crisis. Haidara was invited to a conference in the culture ministry with the officials who worked on Malian heritage, and he went along with his own agenda. When he was asked to report on the state of the manuscripts, he told the politicians, officials, and journalists who were present that though he had just returned from Timbuktu he could not say anything about the collections. Why not? Because the manuscripts were the most fragile things in the cultural heritage of the city, he said, and they must not be mentioned on radio or television. The officials discussed the issue briefly, then the culture minister, Diallo Fadima Touré, stood up and asked the journalists not to publish or broadcast anything that was said about the manuscripts. “You must leave out everything you hear,” she said.

  Satisfied, Haidara went on to explain what had been done so far, telling them that many of the collections had been moved into people’s homes, where they were safe enough for the moment. The only help he really needed at this point was for the manuscripts not to be mentioned in the media. “That is all,” he said. The librarians’ message had been delivered to his press and the most vocal world-heritage body, and would be passed to others. “In our many meetings we elaborated these strategies of communication,” said Ismael. “We asked certain authorities not to speak too much about the manuscripts in the papers or on the television or the radio.”

  With the media blackout in place, the librarians moved on to discuss other contingencies. There was little prospect that the situation would improve; in fact, they had to assume it would get worse. What then? Maiga had been wondering how to get the institute’s manuscripts to safety since he had taken up his new job, and now the three men openly discussed the idea.

  Haidara didn’t believe evacuation was the right answer at first. Shipping tens of thousands of fragile documents out from under the noses of the occupiers and across the dangerous desert carried huge risks, and not only for the documents. The tally of beatings and maimings in the north was growing daily, as were the rapes and killings committed by gunmen of various groups; by the end of April, Ansar Dine’s sharia justice had led to summary executions, floggings, amputations, and even the cutting of the ear of a woman for wearing a short skirt. What would these people do to someone caught moving manuscripts? Then there was the issue of money: a one-way ticket on public transportation from Timbuktu to Bamako cost 25,000 West African francs, or around forty dollars. Given the number of shipments, and the extra sums that would be needed to spend on couriers and the essential bribes for police and customs men, a full evacuation would be expensive.

  “We said, we must wait,” Haidara recalled. “We didn’t think the evacuation was a good idea at that time. There was a lot of tension, and if we started, we didn’t think it would succeed. We said it was necessary to leave things for now, for the moment.”

  They did, however, begin the groundwork.

  There was a fourth character in Bamako who occasionally met with Haidara, an American woman named Stephanie Diakité. Diakité was an attorney, she said later, and a trained book conservator who now ran a development consultancy called D Intl. She was in her fifties, gray-blonde, dynamic, international with a capital I. She had houses in Seattle and Bamako, and though her talent for language meant she could swear vigorously in both Bambara and English, she was most at home with the argot of consultancy, in which she could produce such phrases as “revolve hardware and software” and “investment facilitation” without breaking a sweat. She and Haidara had first met in the late 1990s, when she was traveling around the Timbuktu region assessing a girls’ education project, and they struck up a lasting but tempestuous friendship over the manuscripts. (Their spouses—he had two wives; she, a Malian husband—liked to call them “the terrible twosome,” she later said.) He was the owner of a major collection, while she had access to the world of international development, and was good at process to boot. Together they had turned Savama, the NGO that Haidara set up to safeguard the future of the city’s written heritage, into an institution with which the international donor community could do business.

 
Diakité drafted an appeal and sent it to all the major international cultural institutions in her contacts book, while the librarians themselves toured the embassies to try to drum up financial support. At one point Haidara was convinced they had the backing of South Africa: they had only to prepare a letter requesting help and sign it jointly with the president of the High Islamic Council of Mali, he was told. “In the letter, we asked for our Muslim brothers of South Africa to come to our aid, or else to come with us to Timbuktu to see how we should do things,” recalled Haidara. They sent the letter off, and every day expected good news, but no reply ever came, and gradually they realized the South African support wasn’t going to materialize. “We were really discouraged,” Haidara said. “It was the only hope we had, and it had gone.”

  They continued to approach others—embassies, foundations, NGOs—but no one wanted to take on such a bold and politically risky task. “UNESCO said smuggling did not fit into its remit,” Maiga remembered. “They said they would not get into that game.”

  • • •

  IN THE NORTH, the jihadists were consolidating their grip on Timbuktu. In the last week of April, the unemployed tourist guide Bastos watched a flurry of activity at the empty Malian Solidarity Bank (BMS) across the street from his house. From the vantage point of his roof terrace, he saw a group of jihadists arrive in a truck piled high with mattresses and bedding they had taken from the luxury La Palmeraie hotel, which in different days had been a favorite of the pop stars who sometimes came to Timbuktu. They entered the looted bank, looked around, cleaned it, then moved in with all their furnishings.

  Bastos, who nowadays had little to do but tend his garden down by the river, spent much of the next year watching the day-to-day activities of his neighbors in the building across the street. It was mostly the foot soldiers who lived there, the policemen, customs officers, and guards. The leaders chose accommodation elsewhere, but treated the BMS building as an office. Abou Zeid, “the big chief,” would arrive each morning at eight, with his Kalashnikov slung over a shoulder and a satellite phone in his pocket, in a vehicle driven by a young man Bastos was told was his son. Abou Zeid wore only three changes of clothes during the whole occupation, Bastos said, but he carried huge amounts of cash: “I saw the way he spent it. For them, money was nothing.” There was a canteen in the BMS building, and each morning Abou Zeid would discuss the menu with the cook before doling out enough notes for him to buy what he needed at the market. To Bastos’s irritation, the cook would often come to him and take condiments and utensils from his kitchen. He couldn’t refuse: “I saw their mentality,” said Bastos. “If you say no, they will think you are against them. If you once refuse him, you become the enemy. So you say nothing.”

  Each day, Bastos observed Abou Zeid leaving the BMS at around three p.m., and each evening he watched the more junior fighters walk across the roof to a dormitory building next door. He came to recognize these men well, and knew from their accents that they came from all over the Muslim world. As word of Timbuktu’s capture had spread, jihadists of all nationalities had come to the city. Many were Algerians, but there were also Pakistanis, Somalians, Moroccans, Tunisians, and even a Frenchman, Gilles Le Guen. Le Guen had spent thirty years in the merchant marine before moving to the desert, embracing Islam, and adopting the jihadist nom de guerre Abdel Jelil.

  There were Malians among the jihadists too, many of whom had been converted by the extremist preachers who had been coming to Timbuktu for decades. According to Mohamed “Hamou” Dédéou, a modern-day Timbuktu scholar, the proselytizers had arrived in caravans up to forty strong, and stayed in the city’s mosques. At first they were welcomed. People were even keen to listen to their philosophy and engage them in religious discussions. They were called Wahhabists, after the puritanical eighteenth-century cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, or Salafists, after the Salaf, the first three generations of Muslims, of whom the Prophet said: “The people of my own generation are the best, then those who come after them, and then those of the next generation.” The Salafist-Wahhabists believed that the pure faith of Islam’s early days had been polluted by religious innovations and foreign influences, and these had to be purged so that Muslims could return to the blessed original state. In time, though, the Timbuktiens largely became sick of being harangued and patronized, and grew suspicious of the missionaries’ means. Who was funding them? Who could afford to spend three months away from his wife and family, preaching in Africa? When they began to speak in the mosques, the congregations would stand up and file out. But the visitors did not give up.

  Some Salafists were homegrown. Redbeard Hamaha was one of these, but the most extreme was Hamed Mossa. Mossa had been born into a Tuareg family not far from the city and lived for a time in Saudi Arabia before returning to Timbuktu, determined to convert the city to his way of thinking. He was deeply unpopular—“a dark soul,” one neighbor recalled; a racist who believed black people should be slaves and who loved to humiliate—but he had access to large amounts of money for his radicalization project, and when his sermons were no longer welcome in the city’s mosques, he built his own. Mossa’s mosque became a haven for radicals and foreign preachers, and ordinary worshippers who lived nearby decided they would be safer praying at home. To lure them back, Mossa and his friends handed out food and money on the condition that they came to listen, and the keener acolytes were invited to attend weeklong radicalization camps in the bush.

  Ag Alfousseyni Houka, known as “Houka Houka,” was one Timbuktien who was radicalized in this way. He was an intelligent man, a teacher at the Franco-Arab school, whose faith was anchored by his older brother, Mohamed Issa, a serious soul with a deep knowledge of the Kuran. When the Salafist preachers spoke, Issa would tell Houka Houka and the younger men to be careful. “They are trying to deceive you,” he would say. But Issa died young, and after his death, Houka Houka fell under the sway of Mossa. He started attending the camps in the bush, and soon he was preaching in Mossa’s mosque. Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was another local man who became a Salafist convert. Al-Mahdi would later be the first man to be sentenced for cultural destruction by the International Criminal Court.

  Mossa, Houka Houka, and al-Mahdi were quick to join the rebels in April 2012, and as the Islamic revolution in Mali needed high-profile Malians, all three were given prominent roles in the city’s new administration. Houka Houka was made the sharia judge, while Mossa and al-Mahdi joined the Islamic Police, the latter as head of the “morality brigade,” or Hizba. These men were tasked with enforcing the new penal code in accordance with a literal interpretation of the six hadd punishments prescribed in the Kuran and hadiths:

  For theft: amputation of the hand

  For illicit sexual relations: death by stoning or a hundred lashes

  For making unproven accusations of illicit sex: eighty lashes

  For drinking intoxicants: eighty lashes

  For apostasy: death or banishment

  For highway robbery: death

  Several days after the jihadists’ arrival at the bank opposite his house, Bastos saw they had put up a plaque that read “Islamic Police” in Arabic. A group of gunmen who wore blue tabards adorned with a badge of two crossed Kalashnikovs moved in and began patrols around the town, though at first they were careful not to enforce the new laws too harshly.

  “They were very cunning,” Bastos remembered.

  • • •

  THROUGH APRIL AND INTO MAY, the population of Timbuktu was tossed between the two fractious rebel groups. The MNLA still occupied the southern fringes of the town, and whenever they wanted something to be done, they went to the city’s civic leaders, while the jihadists went to the religious authorities on the High Islamic Council, led by the grand imam, Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti. The town’s administration was therefore chaotic and its people confused. Decisions were sometimes made twice or not at all, and when people were arrested under the new laws, no one kn
ew whom to approach to plead their case. Issues of urgent civic importance began to stack up. Who would manage the shipments of charitable aid sent to Timbuktu from the south? Who would organize the irrigation of the fields, now that the rainy season was approaching?

  The elders of Timbuktu—a democratic city if ever there was one—did what they always did in times of trouble: they held a meeting. The meeting resulted in the creation of a new civic body, the Crisis Committee, which consisted of the leaders of the eighteen Timbuktu neighborhoods, with Mayor Cissé as president and the former deputy mayor Diadié as vice president. It was decided that the Crisis Committee should meet at the mayor’s office twice a week, and as a precaution the elders set out their purpose in writing and sent it to the jihadists for approval.

  While awaiting a response, the elders decided to address the most urgent issue, that of organizing the irrigation of the fields. They put out a message on the community radio station calling all the farmers who worked in the major agricultural districts to the mairie the following morning. At nine a.m. the next day, just as people were starting to gather, the Islamic Police pulled up in front of the building in two vehicles and told them to disperse. Four members of the Crisis Committee, including Diadié, decided to remain in the courtyard, and thirty minutes later the jihadists returned. They cocked their weapons and climbed down from their truck.

  “Didn’t you hear us say everyone had to leave?”

  “Yes,” said Diadié. “You did tell the people to leave. They have left.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We are the officials,” said Diadié. “We told the people to come. Now we have to wait to tell people who arrive why there is nobody here and why there is no meeting. When we have finished telling them, we will go, but we can’t leave before that. We are the representatives of the people.”