In the mid–fifteenth century, when the Tuareg chieftain Akil ruled over the town, the influx of Islamic scholars to Timbuktu reached new heights. Akil and his people continued to pursue their semi-nomadic lifestyle outside the city, leaving the town in the care of a governor who worked to promote its scholarly activities. One of the prominent men to arrive at this time was Modibbo Muhammad al-Kabari. According to Ahmad Baba, al-Kabari “attained the very pinnacle of scholarship and righteousness,” instructing a great number of students, and was also the source of many miracles. On one occasion, an influential Moroccan scholar started to slander him, punning that he was not so much al-Kabari as “al-Kafiri,” the Unbeliever. God afflicted this man with leprosy as punishment, Baba relates. Doctors were brought from far and wide to try to treat him, and one recommended that the only cure would be for him to eat the heart of a young boy. Many boys were slaughtered, but the man died “in a most pitiable condition” for disrespecting the great qadi.
Al-Kabari was even said to be able to walk on water. One year, on the feast day of Tabaski, he needed to cross the river to collect a sacrificial ram, so he simply marched across its surface. A pupil chose to follow him, but he sank, and when the shaykh reached the far side and saw his student struggling in the river, he went to rescue him. “What made you do that?” he shouted.
“When I saw what you did, I did the same.”
The shaykh was unsympathetic. “How can you compare your foot to one that has never walked in disobedience to God?” he asked.
A virtuous scholarly life was not only filled with divine grace; it could also be healthy and extremely long. The qadi Katib Musa was blessed with such an extraordinary constitution, it was said, that he never had to delegate a single prayer in the mosque. He attributed his great well-being to four simple rules: he never slept outdoors, always oiled his body before going to bed, took a hot bath every morning, and made sure he had breakfast.
Perhaps the most famous immigrant to Timbuktu in the fifteenth century was Sidi Yahya al-Tadallisi. Sidi Yahya was invited to Timbuktu by its governor, Muhammad-n-Allah, who built the mosque that still carries his name. In Baba’s description, Sidi Yahya “became famous in every land, his baraka manifesting itself to high and low. He was the locus of manifestations of divine grace, and was clairvoyant.” On the day al-Kabari died and his body was placed in a mausoleum, Sidi Yahya pronounced an elegy for him, which is one of the earliest examples of Timbuktu poetry. It included the following lines:
Muhammad Modibbo the professor, possessed of a fine intelligence, long suffering, and fortified with continuous patience.
I wonder if after him there will be one who makes things clear. O Arabs, is there any champion after him?
It was said of Sidi Yahya that “no foot more virtuous . . . ever trod the soil of Timbuktu.” He was a sought-after teacher, and one day he was giving a lesson at the foot of the minaret when dark clouds gathered overhead and a peal of thunder was heard. His students hurried to collect their things and get inside, but Sidi Yahya told them to stay where they were. “Take your time!” he said. “[Rain] will not fall here while the angel is directing it to fall on such and such a locality.” The rain passed them by. Weather forecasting wasn’t Sidi Yahya’s only talent: on another occasion, his servant girls spent all day trying to cook a fish, but the fire had no effect on its flesh. “This morning,” he told them, “when I went out for the early-morning worship, my foot brushed against something damp in the entrance hall; perhaps it was that fish. Whatever my body touches cannot be burned by fire.”
Of all the virtues that were valued in fifteenth-century Timbuktu, modesty does not seem to have been one of them.
Toward the end of his life, governor Muhammad-n-Allah had a dream in which he saw the sun setting and the moon disappear immediately after. He recounted it to his friend Sidi Yahya, who told him that as long as he promised not to become afraid, he would explain the dream.
Muhammad-n-Allah declared that he would not be afraid.
Very well, said Sidi Yahya. “It means I will die and you will die shortly afterwards.”
Muhammad-n-Allah became deeply upset.
“Did you not tell me that you would not be afraid?” said Sidi Yahya.
“My distress comes not from the fear of death,” the governor said, “but rather from concern for my young children.”
“Place them under the care of God Most High,” Sidi Yahya responded.
The holy man died soon afterward, and Muhammad-n-Allah followed him to the grave. The friends were buried close to each other in the same mosque.
The scholar for whom Baba reserves the greatest affection, and whose life he recounts in greatest detail, is his own teacher, Muhammad Baghayogho. A gentle and considerate soul, Baghayogho was “given by nature to . . . benign intent.” He was “guileless, and naturally disposed to goodness, believing in people to such an extent that all men were virtually equal in his sight, so well did he think of them and absolve them of wrongdoing.” He had great reserves of patience: he could teach all day without growing bored or tired, and took particular attention with the dull-witted, to the extent that Baba once heard a colleague say that he thought Baghayogho “must have drunk [holy] Zamzam water so that he would not get fed up during teaching.”
Baba gives a detailed account of the hardworking Baghayogho’s day. He would begin his lessons after the predawn prayers, breaking off only to perform the mid-morning worship, after which he would sometimes go to the qadi to plead on behalf of people who had asked for his help. Noon would find him teaching again, then taking the midday worship, and after that he would alternate teaching and prayers until the evening, when he would return home. Even then his day was not over, since he would spend the last part of the night in devotions.
Baghayogho’s saintliness was especially evident when it came to his books, some of which were the most rare and precious “in all fields.” He was so generous with these works that he would loan them out and not even ask for them back, wrote Baba:
Sometimes a student would come to his door asking for a book, and he would give it to him without even knowing who the student was. In this matter he was truly astonishing, doing this for the sake of God Most High, despite his love for books and [his zeal in] acquiring them, whether by purchase or copying.
In this way, Baba recorded, Baghayogho gave away a large portion of his library of books.
• • •
IT IS A CLICHÉ that the traveler makes unexpected friends abroad and finds unexpected hostility at home, but this was precisely the situation in which Barth now found himself. Yes, he had twice navigated the great Sahara; he had talked his way out of a dozen lethal scrapes and even come back from the dead, but he would prove poor at plotting a course through the smoke-filled rooms of nineteenth-century European society. In a just world, his heroic voyage would immediately have sealed his reputation as a great scientist-explorer, his name ranked with that of Humboldt. In this, as in so many ways, he would be disappointed. The prickly twenty-eight-year-old who had left for Africa had returned with a proud, almost haughty demeanor, and his native mistrust now reached alarming levels. “Everywhere he went,” his brother-in-law Schubert wrote, “he sensed deliberate and calculated attempts being made to exploit him.”
He was initially well received in Germany. He was lauded by Humboldt and dined with the king of Prussia. He was given a gold medal by the city of Hamburg, offered honorary doctorates and decorations, and invited to speak at the Geographical Society in Berlin. Even in England, his achievements were recognized: the RGS awarded him its prestigious Patron’s Gold Medal, and he was nominated for the Companion of the Order of the Bath. But Britain liked its heroes British, and as Hanmer Warrington had demonstrated three decades before, the doings of foreign gentlemen such as Barth were subject to a skepticism that bordered on paranoia. Even when he was traveling, officials in London had harbored suspicions about
his loyalty. Why, the Foreign Office wondered, had he sent his infrequent dispatches to the Prussian ambassador in London and not to the government that was paying for the expedition? Why did his reports end up in German journals before they reached the RGS?
At the end of October, Barth received a poorly phrased letter from the RGS secretary, Norton Shaw, asking him to dine with some of the society’s members before the speech he would give there. Shaw’s presumption angered Barth, who fired back a letter saying that he had no such engagement and—forgetting his lecture to the Geographical Society in Berlin—would not address any scientific institution until he was ready to publish the narrative of his journey. Shaw became openly hostile after that, and an embarrassing feud ensued that lasted into the new year, when the explorer had returned to London. This was not Barth’s only problem: despite the fact that his expedition had for years been short of money, several British newspapers ran stories about his alleged excessive spending. The impression of financial irregularity was made worse by the British consul in Murzuk, in Fezzan, who accused him of pursuing German commercial interests ahead of British ones, and he found himself being investigated by the Foreign Office.
He began to wish he had never come back. “How I long for the freedom of a bivouac in the desert,” he told Schubert, “in that unfathomable expanse where, free of ambitions, free from the thousands of little things that torture people here, I would savor my freedom as I rolled out my bed at the end of a long day’s march, my possessions, my camels, and my horse around me. I almost regret having put myself in these chains.”
As a distraction, Barth threw himself into writing up the narrative of his journeys. The first three volumes of his Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa appeared in April 1857, beautifully published by Longman, with color illustrations based on Barth’s sketches. There would be five volumes in all, 3,500 pages of densely packed information, a magnum opus of Humboldtian proportions. In the eyes of a later geographer, Lord Rennell of Rodd, the work would raise Barth to the status of “perhaps the greatest traveller there has ever been in Africa,” but reviews at the time were less generous. No general reader could be expected to sustain an interest in the region over such an epic scale, critics said. This response pointed up the schism between Barth and the public: he believed his role was to deliver voluminous quantities of new data about Africa, much as his mentor, Humboldt, had compiled twenty-three volumes of scientific observations from his tour of the Spanish Americas. But the British audience was accustomed to more lightweight adventure stories of the sort Mungo Park had produced. They had devoured edition after edition of Park’s account of his first journey in Africa, while David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa would sell more than fifty thousand copies. By contrast, the first three volumes of Barth’s account sold poorly, and Longman printed only one thousand copies each of the last two.
None of that would have mattered if it had won Barth the academic acclaim he craved, but no British university offered him a position, and even Cooley was dismissive of his discoveries, failing completely to mention the new sources Barth had unearthed in his appraisal of the explorer’s work for The Edinburgh Review:
A splendid and powerful empire in Negroland, extending its sway even northwards over the desert, would be remarkable enough, were there any proof of its existence. But no ingenuity of conjecture, no nice adaptation of dry and scanty traditions, can convert these hypothetical glories into history.
Further dishonor for Barth could be found in the government’s treatment of his friend Shaykh Ahmad al-Bakkai. Barth had encouraged the Timbuktu holy man to establish diplomatic contact with the British government, believing it would be to the advantage of both: Britain would get a commercial partner in the heart of Africa; al-Bakkai would get the protection of a Great Power to stand with Timbuktu against the increasingly predatory French. The shaykh acted on Barth’s advice, sending emissaries to Tripoli in 1857 to open talks. But Britain and France were now allies, and when the emissaries asked for permission to proceed to London, the Foreign Office said that since it was October it would be rather chilly for such warm-blooded men, and would they wait for spring? Reading this brush-off for what it was, the delegation retired south while al-Bakkai wrote a letter to Queen Victoria complaining about their treatment.
The following year, fed up with England, Barth returned to Berlin, hopeful of finding the recognition that Britain had failed to give. Instead he ran into the mirror image of the problem he had encountered in London: the Prussians derided him for working for the country that was now blocking German unification. His evidence for the depth and breadth of culture and history in central and western Sudan and his positive attitude toward Islam were not, meanwhile, what the German intelligentsia wanted to hear. In 1859 his nomination for full membership in the Royal Academy of Sciences, one of the highest accolades in European academia, was rejected. He had been opposed by the historian Leopold von Ranke, who argued that while Barth was no doubt a bold adventurer, he was not a serious scholar.
Barth continued to travel, to Spain, the Balkans, and the Alps. In 1865, he returned from one of his journeys to learn that al-Bakkai had died in battle, fighting for Timbuktu. Later that year, on November 23, the explorer was poleaxed by a massive pain in his abdomen: his stomach had burst, most likely as the result of an intestinal disease picked up on his travels. He lived for two more agonizing days before dying on November 25. He was forty-four.
Almost a century later, in 1958, the RGS’s Geographical Journal commissioned a young lecturer from Liverpool University, Ralph Mansell Prothero, to write an appraisal of Barth’s contributions to African exploration. Prothero, who would later be an eminent geography professor, described Barth’s Travels and Discoveries as “without doubt the greatest single contribution to knowledge of the Western Sudan” and commented that it was odd that he had subsequently been so overlooked. One fact in particular struck Prothero: he had searched the RGS catalogue for all the papers published in Britain that had picked up on Barth’s work. To his great surprise, he had found only one.
13.
THE TERRIBLE TWOSOME
SEPTEMBER 2012–JANUARY 2013
Haidara did not yet have an office in Bamako—“We wanted to be hidden,” he said, “we didn’t want people to know what we were doing. If we had had an office, it would have been official”—but Stephanie Diakité did, and in a much nicer part of town than Maiga’s rat-infested premises. ACI 2000 was a newly zoned quarter on the north bank of the river, and Diakité’s house was a modern building within it, almost pretty in a city of cinder-block monstrosities and slums. It was arranged around a small courtyard, which was planted with trees and flowers that struggled to survive at the hands of a bungling gardener, and consisted of a couple of bedrooms, a lounge with an exotic carpet, a kitchen, and a large office. The office was equipped with the fastest Internet connection Diakité could buy and a handful of phones, to supplement the ones Haidara kept in his voluminous robes. One wall of this room would become increasingly populated with the schedules and spreadsheets Diakité produced to model the evacuation.
Haidara and Diakité were now a team, as were their organizations: in future months they would describe themselves as a “consortium,” consisting of Haidara’s NGO Savama and Diakité’s development organization D Intl. They met seven days a week and worked from morning until ten or eleven at night, according to one source. Haidara would sit in an easy chair by the coffee table, often with a cup of Lipton, while Diakité sat at the desk working on Excel spreadsheets. She liked to start early in the morning, while Haidara lived on desert time: he didn’t reach the office till around nine or ten a.m. and did his best thinking at night. At noon they ate: Diakité was fond of her kitchen; she made sure they had good food—couscous, bulgur—at least twice a day, which Haidara avidly consumed. If he came to the house and nothing was offered, he would ask, “Where’s the food?”
> In between times, “the terrible twosome” worked on the plan for the evacuation of the private libraries. How many people did they need? How many SIM cards? How much would it all cost? What if the couriers were stopped? It took four days on average to get shipments from Timbuktu to Bamako. Each courier should be responsible for no more than three lockers per trip—an amount that would not be crippling if lost, and which could be carried on a single push-push. The number of lockers divided by three was the number of runs needed; that number divided by the number of trips each courier could make was the number of couriers required.
“There were plenty of details, a lot of organization,” Haidara said.
One of the first concerns was where to put the manuscripts: they needed safe houses in Bamako. An unexpected benefit of the crisis was that the capital was now brimming with families who had fled the north, and Haidara called on them personally to find out if he could rely on them to take in his lockers. He wanted households that were calm, quiet, and free of inquisitive acquaintances. After a month of looking he had identified a string of twenty-seven families across the capital. “Most of them were people we had known very well for a long time,” he said.
The Storied City Page 20