The Storied City

by Charlie English

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH OFTEN CONFINED to his house, Barth was at times able to roam the city, and during his lengthy stay he was able to make the most extensive European observations yet of Timbuktu life. He didn’t contradict the findings of Caillié, who had visited the city for just thirteen days and was hampered by his false identity, but with his much greater knowledge of the region, and with far better contacts and resources, the Prussian portrayed Timbuktu in a different light.

  He drew a detailed ground plan, noting the separate quarters of town and describing the nature of each. The city’s most significant buildings were its three large mosques, and the stately Jingere Ber made a lasting impression on him. Timbuktu’s defenses—including a wall which “seems never to have been of great magnitude”—had been destroyed during the Fulani conquest in 1826, Barth wrote. He counted 980 clay houses and a couple hundred huts, which led him to estimate that the town had a permanent population at that time of about 13,000, but during the trading season, from November to January, it grew by 5,000 to 10,000, and it had probably at one time been twice as large, extending a thousand yards farther north to include the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmud, which was now in the desert.

  Timbuktu’s shrines had a special role to play in the spiritual lives of the people. When al-Bakkai’s mother-in-law died, the shaykh went to pray for her soul at the sepulcher of Sidi al-Mukhtar, on the east side of town. This was an indication of the reverence in which women were held, Barth noted, adding, “There are . . . several women famed for the holiness of their life, and even authoresses of well-digested religious tracts, among the tribe of the Kunta.” Later, he witnessed another role for the saint: as a peacemaker. Al-Bakkai, his brothers, and the sons of Barth’s guard “attempted to bring about a friendly understanding among themselves,” and the explorer was surprised to be told this would take place at “the venerated cemetery a few hundred yards east of the town, where Sidi Mukhtar lies buried.” Barth inspected Sidi al-Mukhtar’s mausoleum closely and found it to be “a spacious clay apartment, surrounded by several smaller tombs of people who were desirous of placing themselves under the protection of the spirit of this holy man, even in the other world.”

  Barth’s portrait of the economic life of the historic city, meanwhile, would not be bettered. The richest area was the one in which he was staying, Sane-gungu, where the most expensive houses were owned by merchants. The only goods made in Timbuktu were leatherwork and the products of the blacksmith, he noted, and the city’s wealth was based on foreign commerce, which found this “the most favoured spot for intercourse.” Goods flowed into the city along three great trade routes: two led across the desert, one to Morocco and the other to Ghadames, in Libya; the third ran southwest on the river. On Christmas Day 1853, Barth witnessed the Niger’s inundations reach right up to Timbuktu, flooding the southern and southwestern part of the city, and noted that “small boats very nearly approached the town.” Gold, produced in the famous mines of Bambuk, in what is now western Mali, was the principal traded material, although by this time it did not exceed £20,000 in value a year. It was brought to the town in rings, but must have been traded in dust form too. A mithqal of gold in Timbuktu weighed the same as twenty-four grains of the carob tree, and was worth three or four thousand cowrie shells.

  Timbuktu’s other main commodity was salt, brought from the mines at Taoudenni. The salt here formed in five layers, each of which carried a different value, and was dug out in slabs weighing up to sixty-five pounds. A midsize slab would be worth three to six thousand cowrie shells, the highest prices being paid toward spring, when the caravans became scarce because of the blood-sucking flies that infested the region. The salt was exchanged principally for cloth manufactured in Kano, the Sokoto caliphate. Kano was such a significant producer of textiles that Barth called it the “Manchester of Africa.” The third most valuable commodity was the kola nut, a luxury item of which there were many different varieties. Slaves, as far as he could ascertain, were not exported in “any considerable amount.” The chief agricultural products in the market were rice, sorghum, and millet, as well as vegetable butter, which was used for cooking and lighting. As Caillié had, he also found European merchandise, including cloth, looking-glasses, cutlery, tobacco, and swords of German manufacture, imported across the desert. Barth saw calico printed with the name of a Manchester firm in Arabic letters, and noted that “all the cutlery in Timbuktu is of English workmanship.”

  Recognizing that the city was no longer what it had been, he concluded that there was an immense opportunity for Europe to revive the trade that had formerly animated this quarter of the globe. After all, the situation in Timbuktu was still “of the highest commercial importance,” lying as it did between the great river of West Africa and the north.

  During his prolonged stay, Barth also returned to his study of the manuscript of the Tarikh al-sudan he had found in Gando. On December 15, 1853, he sent his notes, via caravan, to Professor Emil Rödiger at the German Oriental Society in Leipzig. The chronicle, he wrote, had apparently been completed by the scholar Ahmad Baba in 1653/1654, and it threw a “completely unsuspected light” on the history of a region that had been totally neglected, while his account of the Songhay emperor made Leo Africanus’s description look “hollow and empty.” Time pressure meant he had been forced to leave out an infinite number of details—“naturally a traveler in these regions does not have the peace of a scholar in his study,” Barth noted—but he had little doubt that someone would bring an entire copy of the book to Europe in the near future.

  “You will have heard about my circumstances in this peculiar city from other sources,” he told Rödiger. “They are not entirely pleasant, but God the Merciful will protect my life and lead me home, happy and unharmed, to develop to his glory what I began here.”

  Barth was finally able to leave Timbuktu in the spring of 1854. Al-Bakkai accompanied him to Gao, the once splendid capital of the Songhay empire, which Barth found was now a disappointment. There, on July 8, they parted company. “Although I felt sincerely attached to my protector,” Barth wrote, “I could not but feel greatly satisfied at being at length enabled to retrace my steps homeward.”

  • • •

  ON LEARNING OF THE DEATH of Richardson, the British government had appointed a new assistant for Barth, a young German named Eduard Vogel, who had set out from Tripoli in the summer of 1853 with instructions to find the explorer. A year later, Vogel was told that Barth had died one hundred miles from Sokoto, and he wrote to the consul in Tripoli to relay the bad news. The letter was forwarded to the Foreign Office, and Barth’s siblings and parents in Hamburg were informed. They were “thrown into the deepest grief,” Barth wrote, and held a funeral during which, lacking a body, they buried all the explorer’s possessions.

  On December 1, 1854, Barth was traveling through an inhospitable stretch of forest toward Kukawa, the capital of Bornu, when he met the source of the false report. He saw a small group advancing toward him, led by a man of “strange aspect—a young man of very fair complexion, dressed in a tobe [a simple cloth garment] like the one I wore myself, and with a white turban wound thickly round his head.” Barth recognized one of the travelers as his servant, Madi, whom he had left to guard a house he had taken in Kukawa two years before. Madi told the pale young man it was “Abdel Karim,” at which point the stranger rushed forward.

  Seventeen years later, Henry Morton Stanley would greet another lost African explorer on the banks of Lake Tanganyika with the premeditated line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” and create one of the most celebrated encounters in history. The chance meeting of the two Prussians is rather less famous. Where Stanley wrote a book, Barth devoted less than two pages of his published journal to this, his first contact with a European in two years. They were both surprised, he noted. They gave each other a hearty greeting, then dismounted and sat down. Barth had some coffee boiled, “so that we were quite at hom
e,” whereupon Vogel told Barth—to the older man’s “great amazement”—that he had used all the expedition’s supplies, including the stores that had been carefully placed at Kukawa and Zinder. If this was not grievous enough, Vogel had also failed to bring any alcohol:

  The news of the want of pecuniary supplies did not cause me so much surprise as the report which I received from him that he did not possess a single bottle of wine; for, having now been for more than three years without a drop of any stimulant except coffee . . . I had an insuperable longing for the juice of the grape, of which former experience had taught me the benefit.

  It had taken Vogel eighteen months to find Barth. After two hours, the pair decided to separate, Vogel to continue to Zinder, and Barth to Kukawa.

  “I hastened,” Barth wrote, “to overtake my people.”

  11.

  SECRET AGENTS

  JUNE–SEPTEMBER 2012

  Cheikh Diouara remembered exactly where he was when the jihadists began their wholesale destruction of Timbuktu’s tombs. It was early on the morning of Saturday, June 30, and the video journalist was traveling to a meeting of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Saint Petersburg. He had been in Timbuktu filming the profaned tomb of Sidi Mahmud, and UNESCO had invited him to show the committee his footage as evidence of what had happened. There had been a mix-up with his baggage, however, and he’d missed his connecting flight, so he was stuck in Casablanca. At seven a.m. his cellphone rang.

  The voice at the other end belonged to a young al-Qaeda fighter Diouara knew from Timbuktu. They had become friends after the journalist took a few photos of him posing with his gun.

  “I think they are going to smash the mausoleums,” the mujahid told him. “They’ve just been talking about it.” A group of jihadists had gone to the hardware store in Timbuktu’s market to buy the pickaxes and hoes they needed, he said, “then they’re going to go and do it.”

  Diouara was stuck. His instincts told him to hurry back to Mali, but the next flight he could get to Bamako was four days away. He wrote a quick story for Reuters, then called his young fighter friend back. The destruction hadn’t yet begun.

  “When we’re over there near the tombs, I won’t be able to talk to you,” said the fighter. What about just sending a text? No, he didn’t know how to write. That didn’t matter, Diouara persisted; it could be empty, as long as they both knew it was the signal that the attacks on the mausoleums had started. The jihadist agreed.

  A short time later, Diouara received a blank message.

  It wasn’t entirely a coincidence that the destruction began in the week the thirty-sixth session of the World Heritage Committee was meeting in Saint Petersburg. Tension between the MNLA and AQIM had been simmering for months, and on Wednesday, June 27, at Gao, it finally broke out into an open firefight. It ended with the MNLA’s secretary-general, Bilal Ag Cherif, fleeing his own headquarters, while the body of a senior MNLA commander, a Malian army defector, Colonel Bouna Ag Teyib, was dragged through the streets behind a pickup. Al-Qaeda followed this victory by ordering the MNLA to leave their base at Timbuktu airport by five p.m. the following afternoon. The MNLA meekly complied, leaving the jihadists the sole authority in northern Mali. “From that moment it was their kingdom,” the city elder Jansky recalled.

  The delegates at the UNESCO meeting gathered at the Tauride Palace, an opulent eighteenth-century mansion created for Catherine the Great’s lover Prince Grigory Potemkin, with views over the Neva River. Their business was essentially to manage two lists. The first of these, the World Heritage List, consisted of a thousand of the world’s most precious treasures: monuments, archaeological sites, and natural phenomena that were deemed of “outstanding universal value.” The second, the List of World Heritage in Danger, was a subset of the first, and comprised those locations threatened by deterioration, natural disaster, or war. The UN body deemed that “major operations” were necessary to protect these sites, and assistance was requested.

  After a late Malian government submission, the committee that week debated whether to move the mausoleums of Timbuktu onto the Danger list. Giving its formal response, recorded in the minutes as Decision 36 COM 7B.106, the committee congratulated the Malian government for having expressed its concern, appealed to the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States to ensure that the cultural heritage of north Mali was protected, and—the fateful decision—agreed to inscribe the monuments in question on the list of threatened world sites. UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova would later try to explain this move. It was not her decision, but that of the committee. It was also a no-win situation. “I know there is this thinking that we don’t have to tease [the jihadists]; we have to appease them, which I understand in some cases,” she said. “But there are others, especially now when everything is so globalized, everything is so visible and so connected, where UNESCO is more criticized for not doing enough than for provoking destruction.”

  What was most unfortunate was the committee’s timing: the decision was made on Thursday, June 28, the day the jihadists, still pumped up after their victory at Gao, forced the MNLA to retreat from Timbuktu. The next morning, on the Muslim holy day, they went to the city’s mosques to speak against the cult of Timbuktu’s saints. The morning after that, Diouara received his phone call in Casablanca.

  Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, the Islamic Police leader from a nearby village, was ordered to carry out the destruction. He began on the northern edge of the city, in Abaraju, with the mausoleum of Sidi Mahmud. They had already attacked the tomb of this powerful saint, and now they finished it off. The tomb was a boxlike construction made of rammed earth and stones, which stood on a hill by a tree, encircled by the graves of the saint’s disciples, who were said to number 167. It was a quiet spot, a place where people came daily to pray, pay their respects, and ask for the saint’s help. At eight a.m., around a hundred jihadists, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and carrying the hoes, pickaxes, crowbars, and hammers they had bought in the hardware store, surrounded the tomb and started to attack it. Bystanders were kept away by machine guns pointed in their direction. “Nobody was allowed to approach,” Jansky recalled.

  The tomb was not built to withstand any kind of assault. The men were soon able to pry away one of the walls with a crowbar and hack it into rubble. A black-bearded jihadist explained to camera his reasons for desecrating the mausoleum. “There is a Kuranic law that says a tomb must be only a few centimeters above the ground,” he said. “And that no one must be venerated but God. It is for that reason that we are destroying the tomb.” By the time they had finished, the building was a heap of earth, stones, and timber spars. The demolition team then moved on to the tomb of Shaykh Muhammad Mahmud al-Arawani, in the same cemetery.

  “We are all Muslims,” said the jihadist spokesman Sanda Ould Bouamama. “UNESCO is what?” This was just the start of their cleansing of the city: “Today, Ansar Dine is going to destroy all the mausoleums in the town. All of them, without exception.” Redbeard Hamaha described those who had worshipped at the shrines as being “driven by Satan”: “It is forbidden by Islam to pray on tombs and ask for blessings,” he told a reporter. “Ansar Dine is showing the rest of the world, especially Western countries, that whether they want it or not, we will not let the younger generation believe in shrines . . . regardless of what the UN, UNESCO, the International Criminal Court, or ECOWAS [the Economic Community of West African States] have to say. We do not recognize these organizations. The only thing we recognize is the court of God, sharia. Sharia is a divine obligation. People don’t get to choose whether they like it or not.”

  At around ten a.m., the men with the hoes and pickaxes moved east, to the cemetery of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti, where Barth had witnessed al-Bakkai negotiate with his brothers 158 years before. They destroyed more mausoleums here, including that of the shaykh himself, and al-Mahdi declared: “We are going to wipe out from our landscape all tha
t does not belong there.” In the afternoon, al-Mahdi’s gang moved south to the cemetery of Alfa Moy, where they worked until sunset.

  Some residents cried as they watched their holiest sites being smashed; others were mute, uncomprehending. That night, the town went to bed at dusk. “Everyone was exhausted,” Air Mali recalled. “It felt as if the days of Timbuktu were finished.”

  The rampage continued the next day, with three more mausoleums demolished in Jingere Ber. Air Mali sensed a method in their assault: they were attacking the tombs at the edges of the town, the cornerstones of its spiritual defense. On the third day, the jihadists chose a new target. In a wall on the west side of the Sidi Yahya mosque, beneath a triangular lintel, was an elegant wooden door embossed in traditional Timbuktu style with decorative metalwork. According to local belief, it was to remain shut until the end of days. “The symbolism of the Sidi Yahya door was quite simply there are people who said when you open the door, it is the end of the world,” Grand Imam Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti explained. It wasn’t magic or idolatry—just a myth that had been invented for a pragmatic purpose. “The ancients told the story to the little children to stop them from approaching the door, because behind it the wall was not very solid and there was a risk it would collapse on people. The people thought that you had to leave it. It was a way of keeping people safe.”

  The Salafists saw it as heresy. “Their mentality was to defy that,” said Ben Essayouti. “They wanted to demonstrate that it was not true, although of course everyone knew it was not true. It was simply something we told the children to make them afraid.”

  On Monday morning, a group of gunmen in turbans approached the mosque. They dragged out the wooden lintel first, which came away easily. The doors posed more of a problem: the men had to put their backs into that, ripping them out of the sunbaked earth that held them in place. A black-turbaned jihadist, aware of the video camera filming him, came away from the task rubbing his neck. “God is great,” he said, adding with sarcasm: “And now is the time of the end of the world.”