The Storied City

by Charlie English

  Overall, though, the men from the ministry were overjoyed. They spoke of giving medals to Maiga and Haidara. “No, no, no,” said Haidara. What else, then, could they do for him?

  “You have the manuscripts,” Haidara said, “but what I ask is that you must not speak about it, because our manuscripts are still there.” He was referring to the private collections, which, he said, made up 85 percent of the total number of documents in the city. Those were still in danger. “Soon we are going to start evacuating them,” he said. “It is not over. So the best present you could give me would be to not talk about it.”

  The men from the government agreed.

  • • •

  THERE WERE TWO STRANGE POSTSCRIPTS to the operation to smuggle the Ahmad Baba institute’s manuscripts south. The first was that Maiga was called in by the minister of higher education and berated for what he had done. “Who gave you the order to move the manuscripts?” the minister asked. Maiga explained that in the times they were living through he had decided not to wait for approval, whereupon the minister brusquely told him he must be informed of anything that was done and dismissed him.

  “People always think the worst,” said Maiga.

  The second consequence was that relations between the librarians began to deteriorate.

  At the start of September, Haidara had traveled to Dubai to set out his problems to Juma al-Majid, a veteran Arab philanthropist who ran a center for the preservation of Arabic manuscripts and had funded previous projects in Timbuktu. Haidara explained how they had been forced to move the documents into people’s houses, where they were now kept in poor conditions in wooden or steel trunks, and that the jihadists’ behavior was increasingly threatening. Al-Majid told him not to delay but to shift them from Timbuktu in any way he could. “I will help you immediately,” he said. “You must start working on it from today.” He would send Haidara $30,000 to get him started.

  Maiga felt cut out of this transaction. “He told me, ‘Once the money is there, I’ll give you a part that you will use to take out the manuscripts,’” the Ahmad Baba director recalled. “But—these are things that are not good to say—I knew he already had the money. And he had already contacted merchants and traders who had already bought lockers and trunks for manuscripts in Timbuktu. He knew that I had just arrived [in the job], and I had no means, and he played on that.”

  Maiga expected to get a financial breakdown of how much Haidara had raised and how much they could spend, and to have a discussion with him about how large a share would be allocated to the Ahmad Baba manuscripts. But Haidara didn’t provide any of this information. “I was shocked for two reasons,” said Maiga. “First, when we started the meetings in my office, we said we were going to manage it together, to the end. But when he had the money, this was not the case. Second, if I had known he had the money, I would not have paid for things out of my own pocket.”

  Later, Haidara maintained that he had never promised Maiga any of the money he raised—“We never spoke about it,” he said—and that anyway it was he, not Maiga, whom the government had authorized to evacuate the manuscripts.

  By September, the alliance of three powerful librarians who had begun meeting in May had collapsed. Haidara would pursue his evacuation of the privately owned manuscripts without Maiga’s help.

  “He pushed me away,” said Maiga.

  PART THREE

  LIBERATION

  Somewhere . . . someone had to do the saving and keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.

  —RAY BRADBURY, Fahrenheit 451

  12.

  LIVES OF THE SCHOLARS

  1854–1865

  The extracts of the Tarikh al-sudan Heinrich Barth had copied in Gando didn’t reach Europe till late the following year, after a tortuous journey across the desert. The task of reconstructing parts of the manuscript from Barth’s notes fell to the German Arabist Christian Ralfs, who spent much of the winter of 1854–1855 trying to make sense of the fragments he had been given. Whole sections were missing from the text, and the Arabic itself was wooden and occasionally ungrammatical. Nevertheless, by the spring Ralfs believed he had managed to produce a faithful German translation of the main points of Barth’s extracts, which were published in the journal of the German Oriental Society of Leipzig later that year. The explorer himself had not yet returned from Africa.

  These new “Contributions to the History and Geography of Sudan” filled seventy-six pages, thirty-nine of which were devoted to the pair’s copious footnotes. In Ralfs’s opinion, the text showed the extreme poverty of all previous contributions to the knowledge of West Africa, including those of Ibn Battuta and Leo Africanus. Leo had made brief mention of a Songhay king, but the newly uncovered chronicle revealed a powerful empire ruled by a dynasty called the askiyas, including the “mighty conqueror” Askiya al-hajj Muhammad. This was but one example of the wealth of new historical information, which now enabled the Europeans to unlock the story of an “entirely unknown and now destroyed world.”

  Barth had been told the chronicle was composed by Ahmad Baba, and indeed part of it was, since it included lengthy extracts of his biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars, the Kifayat al-muhtaj. In his haste, however, the explorer had missed key evidence pointing to the identity of its real author, Abd al-Rahman Abd Allah al-Sadi. Al-Sadi had been born into a Timbuktu family on May 28, 1594, and in 1626/1627 was made imam of the Sankore mosque in Jenne. A decade later he returned home, becoming an imam and administrator in Timbuktu. His chronicle was written in the seventeenth century in Arabic and ran to thirty-eight chapters, some of which were based on earlier histories, and some on the author’s own observations and interviews. Its grammar was imperfect enough to make later historians believe Songhay, rather than Arabic, was the author’s first language, and its style at times recalled the folk stories of the brothers Grimm or the tales of The Thousand and One Nights.

  Barth, short of time and desperate to fill in the immense gaps in European knowledge, had extracted as much data as he could, focusing on the parts of the chronicle devoted to kings, identifiable dates, and empires. The broad sweep, in other words, of history.

  The tarikh began with a list of ancient Songhay rulers, the Zuwa dynasty, and went on to relate the founding myth of their kingdom. The first of these princes was Zuwa Alayaman. This person, it was said, had left Yemen with his brother to travel the world, and destiny had brought them, starving and dressed in ragged animal skins, to the town of Kukiya, an “ancient city” on the Niger that had existed, according to the chronicle, since the time of the ancient Egyptians: it was even from Kukiya that the pharaoh had brought the troupe of magicians he had used in his argument with Moses. When the people of the city asked the strangers their names, one of the brothers misunderstood the question and said that they were from Yemen—jaa min al-yaman—so the Kukiyans, who had difficulty pronouncing the Arabic words, called him Zuwa Alayaman.

  Zuwa Alayaman found that the people in this country worshipped a demon that appeared in the river in the form of a fish with a ring in its nose. At these times a crowd gathered to hear the demon’s instructions, which everyone would obey. After witnessing this ceremony and recognizing that the people were on a false path, Zuwa Alayaman determined to put an end to the creature. He threw a harpoon at the fish and killed it, and soon afterward the people took an oath to the slayer of the fish-god and made him king. “Zuwa” became the title of all the princes who ruled after him. “They bred and multiplied to such an extent that only God Most High knows their number,” al-Sadi recorded. “They were distinguished by their strength, intrepidness, and bravery, and by their great height and heavy build.”

  Later in its history, the country of Songhay was subjugated by Mali, the empire that supplanted ancient Ghana in the Western Sudan, but th
e kingdom won its independence thanks to two princes of Songhay, the half brothers Ali Kulun and Silman Nari. It was tradition that princes of vassal states such as Songhay were sent to serve the Malian emperor and that they would disappear from time to time to pursue their fortunes. Ali Kulun, an “extremely intelligent and clever” prince, had another project in mind: the liberation of his kingdom. He prepared the ground artfully, traveling ever farther from the sultan’s court and closer to his Songhay homeland, building up caches of weapons and provisions along the way. One day, the brothers gave their horses a special strengthening food, and then they made their escape. The sultan of Mali sent many men to stop the fugitives and there were many skirmishes, but the princes always routed their opponents and safely reached their homeland. Afterward, according to the chronicle, Ali Kulun became the Songhay king. He took the title “Sunni” and delivered his people from the yoke of Malian rule.

  Al-Sadi devoted a full chapter to the establishment of Timbuktu. The settlement was founded at the start of the twelfth century by Tuareg people who came to the region to graze their flocks, he wrote. In the summer they camped on the banks of the Niger, and in the rainy season migrated to the desert wells of Arawan, 150 miles north. Eventually some of them chose to settle on this route, a short distance from the river:

  Thus did they choose the location of this virtuous, pure, undefiled, and proud city, blessed with divine favour, a healthy climate, and [commercial] activity which is my birthplace and my heart’s desire. It is a city unsullied by the worship of idols, where none has prostrated save to God the Compassionate, a refuge of scholarly and righteous folk, a haunt of saints and ascetics, and a meeting place of caravans and boats.

  The travelers who came to this crossroads soon began to use it for storage. The traders entrusted their utensils and grain to the supervision of a slave woman called Tinbuktu—a word, al-Sadi reports, that signifies someone with a “lump” or perhaps a protuberant navel—and it was from her that the blessed place took its name. Settlers arrived in great numbers from neighboring regions—from Walata, the emporium of ancient Ghana, in modern Mauritania, and also from Egypt, Fezzan, Ghadames, Tuat, Fez, Sus, and Bitu—and little by little Timbuktu became a commercial hub for the region. It was filled with caravans from all countries, and scholars and pious people of every race flocked to it. The prosperity of Timbuktu sucked all the caravan trade from Walata, and brought about that city’s ruin. Meanwhile, in Timbuktu, straw huts enclosed with fences were gradually replaced by clay houses, which were surrounded by a low wall, of the sort that from the outside one could see what was happening inside.

  The town’s development accelerated after Mansa Musa returned from his pilgrimage in 1325. On his way back from Mecca, Musa—“a just and pious man, whom none of the other sultans of Mali equalled in such qualities”—ordered the construction of a mosque wherever Friday found him. He built one of these at Gao, and then moved west to Timbuktu, becoming the first ruler to take possession of it. He installed a representative there and ordered the construction of a royal palace. He was also said to have built the tower-minaret of the Jingere Ber mosque, al-Sadi recorded. Musa and his successors ruled Timbuktu for a hundred years.

  Malian power faded in the fifteenth century, according to al-Sadi, and the Tuareg leader Sultan Akil dominated Timbuktu from 1433/1434 until the rise of the Songhay king Sunni Ali, who reigned for twenty-four years, from 1468/1469. Sunni Ali was a great tyrant and an oppressor of the scholars of Timbuktu, al-Sadi wrote, but a man with tremendous physical strength and energy who turned his Songhay kingdom into a great empire. After his death, his son was deposed by one of Sunni Ali’s regional governors, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Turi, who took the throne in 1493 and was the first to assume the name “askiya.” Al-Sadi had nothing but praise for Askiya al-hajj Muhammad, or Askiya the Great, as he became known. He founded a dynasty of askiyas and built on his predecessor’s conquests to establish Songhay as the largest empire West Africa had ever seen, stretching from the Senegal River in the west to Agadez in the east, and from the salt mines at Taghaza in the north to Borgu in the south, an area the size of Western Europe. The reign of the askiyas would last 101 years, until the sultan of Marrakesh sent an army across the desert to seize the Songhay lands.

  In Barth’s eyes, the Tarikh al-sudan was immensely significant. “I have no hesitation in asserting that the [chronicle] will be one of the most important additions which the present age has made to the history of mankind, in a branch which was formerly almost unknown,” he would write. The extracts demonstrated that Timbuktu was home to a rich and sophisticated society capable of recording its own account of the past, and it at last gave Europe access to more than the few isolated facts recorded by foreign visitors to the empire such as al-Bakri, Ibn Khaldun, and Leo Africanus. It also overthrew many of the ideas Europe had about this part of Africa: the kingdoms of the region were much older than anyone had believed, their geographical locations were at last adequately defined, and the chronology of the empires of ancient Ghana, Mali, and Songhay at last seemed complete.

  Of course, the chronicle included embellishments and accounts that were based on oral histories and legends—perhaps the fish-god was based on a manatee, a real creature of the Niger? Or was it a representation of the holy river itself?—but it was unquestionably a work of history, and its discoverer would become the founding father of the discipline of Songhay studies.

  Ralfs finished his translation with an entreaty to Barth to return safely so that he could enjoy the “reverence and admiration” he richly deserved.

  The explorer reached London on September 6, 1855, in the company of two slaves Overweg had bought and freed, Dorugu and Abbega, whom Barth had promised to look after. They were amazed by England, a country that had grand houses but not even the least amount of sand. The Prussian, who had been away for nearly five and a half years and traveled more than ten thousand miles, logging every village, tribe, and geographical feature along the way, was “most kindly received” by Palmerston, who was now prime minister, and Lord Clarendon, now secretary of state for foreign affairs. Clarendon congratulated him on his “fortitude, perseverance and sound judgement” during the expedition.

  The London Times, which had noted the false report of Barth’s death, made no reference to his safe return. In the decades to come, this newspaper and others would heap praise on successive African explorers, such men as Livingstone, Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Grant, and Samuel Baker. For Barth, though, there was no interest. It was an ominous indication of the way in which the public would treat him.

  On October 1 he left England to see his family in Hamburg, with Dorugu and Abbega in tow.

  • • •

  WHILE BARTH WAS IN GERMANY, extracts from a second major text by a Timbuktu scholar appeared in Europe. These were taken from Ahmad Baba’s biographical dictionary of the scholars of Maliki Islam, the Kifayat al-muhtaj, the same work whose partial inclusion in the Tarikh al-sudan had fed confusion over the chronicle’s authorship. Barth had read this material but, in his haste to record the historical data, had not copied it out. Now two versions had been sent to the eminent French Orientalist Auguste Cherbonneau, who published translated sections of it in the Annuaire de la Societé Archéologique de Constantine, along with an introductory essay on the Arab literature of the Sudan.

  Cherbonneau was as excited about Baba’s dictionary as Barth had been about the chronicle: it was “a singular and unexpected revelation of a literary movement in the heart of Africa, in Timbuktu!” he wrote, which opened up “new horizons” whose existence Europeans had never even suspected. The book contained numerous short biographies of the eminent scholars of the Maliki sect, who had been born in Timbuktu or had come there to teach. It revealed the existence of an education system in Timbuktu that was on a par with those in the great Islamic cities of Córdoba, Tunis, and Cairo, with schools run by learned men and attended by large numbers of students. It sho
wed that considerable libraries containing hundreds of books had been kept in the city and explained how the scholars were eagerly supported by the princes of the country. Baba’s work did nothing less, wrote Cherbonneau, than demonstrate the participation of the black races in intellectual life, and reveal the almost infinite number of connections that existed between the Western Sudan and the Arab world.

  Reading the extracts of Baba’s dictionary in conjunction with those from al-Sadi’s chronicle, Europeans now had a clear picture of the working lives of Timbuktu’s scholarly elite.

  By the mid–fourteenth century, the city was a substantial commercial center and more and more scholars came to settle there. At its peak, there were an estimated two to three hundred scholars at the top of society, drawn from the leading families of the town. The most powerful citizens in the elite were the qadis, who dispensed justice based on their knowledge of Islamic law. Then came all manner of other holy men, including imams, jurists, and counselors, drawn mostly from the wealthy merchant class, as well as schoolteachers, mosque workers, and scribes, plus a large number of alfas, scholars of lower birth who earned a living from their Islamic education. The Sankore quarter was the center of scholarly activity in the city, and it was here that the influential descendants of Muhammad Aqit, the great-great-grandfather of Ahmad Baba, settled. The Timbuktu scholars were in regular contact with North Africa and Egypt, and some traveled there, while others came south to study in Timbuktu. They were therefore familiar with a wide range of secular sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, and history, although all such knowledge was taught in an Islamic context.

  The preeminent Timbuktu scholars were not simply religious leaders and teachers; they were also believed to possess divine grace, or baraka, which enabled them to perform acts that would be impossible for lesser mortals. One of the earliest holy men mentioned by Baba was known simply as al-Hajj; he came to Timbuktu from Walata and held the post of qadi in the early fifteenth century, during the last days of Malian rule. One day, a group of people were sitting down to eat when they heard that the army of the neighboring kingdom of Mossi was approaching Timbuktu. Al-Hajj murmured something over the shared plate and instructed them to eat, then told them: “Go off and fight. Their arrows will do you no harm.” The Mossi army was driven off, and all the men returned except one: al-Hajj’s son-in-law had not eaten, as it would have been a sign of disrespect to share food with his wife’s father.