The Storied City

by Charlie English

  Many of these assertions would later be regarded as overblown, but they were tame compared with a theory that had first been aired in 1880, and to which Shaw now gave credence: that Malians had sailed to the Americas long before Columbus, and their descendants had helped found the Aztec empire. The source of this story is said to be an anecdote Mansa Musa related during his pilgrimage. Asked how he had come to be king of Mali, Musa responded that his predecessor had launched an extraordinary voyage of exploration, equipping two hundred ships with men and a further two hundred with enough gold, water, and provisions to last them for years, and telling their commander not to return until he reached the other side of the Atlantic. Only one of these ships returned, Musa said, with the story that the others had reached a river estuary with a powerful current. Thereupon, according to Musa’s alleged anecdote, the sultan prepared a new expedition:

  [He] got ready 2,000 ships, 1,000 for himself and the men whom he took with him and 1,000 for the water and provisions. He left me to deputize for him and embarked on the Atlantic Ocean with his men. That was the last we saw of him and all those who were with him, and so I became king in my own right.

  Was it possible that the mighty estuary reached by the Malian armada was the Amazon? Or that the Malians had continued from there to Mexico, where they and their descendants had helped establish the Aztec empire? Shaw cited several pieces of evidence for this unlikely scenario. One was the fact that in Ibn Battuta’s account of visiting the Malian court, he recorded that “poets wearing masks and dressed like birds were allowed to speak their opinion to the monarch”:

  The description [Ibn Battuta] gives in some detail can hardly fail to recall similar practices inherited from the Tezcucans by the Aztecs, who in nearly the same latitude on the American continent were at this very moment, in the middle of the 14th century, making good their position upon the Mexican plateau.

  Further coincidences included traditions in both countries in which people summoned to court were expected to change into shabby garments, while the Sudanese custom of putting dust on one’s head before speaking to the emperor echoed the Aztecs’ bowing down to touch the earth with the right hand. Chief among Shaw’s exhibits, though, was the color of the two races’ skins: “The Aztecs were, it will be remembered, though not negroes, a dusky or copper-coloured race, apparently of the tint which Barth describes as that of the ‘red races’ of the Soudan.” This skin tone, according to Shaw, had been produced by a mixing of “the virility of the Arab” with “the gentle nature of the Soudanese black,” which had produced a genetically superior race. “In the shock and amalgamation of these two forces, black civilization attained the greatest height which it has ever reached in modern Africa.”

  Despite the absence of concrete evidence, the tale of a fourteenth-century Malian naval expedition to America would still be stated as fact in some quarters a century later.

  By the early twentieth century, the myth of a wealthy Timbuktu with golden roofs had long been jettisoned, but it had been replaced with the idea of the city as an enlightened university town where orchestras entertained emperors and astronomers plotted the tracks of comets even as Europe struggled out of the Dark Ages. There was more substance to this myth than the old one, but it was still a gross exaggeration, a story written to fit the new requirement for exoticism. Timbuktu, it seemed, reflected to each of the travelers who reached it something of what they wanted to find. The romantic Laing had discovered his vainglorious end. Caillié, the humble adventurer, had found a humble town. Barth, the scientist, had unearthed a world of new information. Dubois, the journalist, had landed his world exclusive, uncovering the region’s secret past.

  La Mystérieuse was nothing if not obliging.

  15.

  AUTO-DA-FÉ

  JANUARY 2013

  On Sunday, January 20, the video journalist Cheikh Diouara slipped through a Malian army checkpoint south of Douentza and paid a young man with a motorbike to take him across the front line. He had been traveling and filming all day. It was now dusk and he needed to eat, so when he reached the town he went into a café and ordered some food. He should be careful, the owner warned him: the jihadists who still occupied the town were twitchy and angry and had recently shot at a civilian.

  A few seconds later, Diouara recalled, the neighborhood was turned upside down by an immense explosion. “I have seen earthquakes and landslides,” he said, “but that has nothing on this.” Anyone who was standing was blown to the ground by the force of the shock wave, and for five minutes there was nothing in Diouara’s ears but white noise. Douentza itself appeared “all muddled up.” As people struggled to get back to their feet, he could see jihadist vehicles racing out of town at speeds that didn’t seem possible, their lights extinguished. When one of their precious vehicles didn’t start, they simply abandoned it.

  Still in a daze, Diouara watched a man pick up a packet of dried milk that had fallen from one of the trucks as it sped off. It struck a group of citizens then that it would be a good idea to go to the school the jihadists had used as a base to see what they had left. They climbed on their motorbikes and rode toward the building, but as they approached it a second bomb struck. “Boom! I swear it was louder than the first,” said Diouara. The people fled, leaving their motorbikes. They refused to go back for them, even the following day.

  These days of the French air campaign were remembered in Timbuktu as the most frightening of the entire occupation. “It was terrible,” Air Mali remembered. Even when the bombs fell some distance away, people could feel the ground shake, and sometimes sections of the city’s fragile rammed-earth homes would collapse. It was little better when the planes weren’t bombing, since they could be heard screaming overhead every night. Targets included the gendarmerie and the ten-bedroom, fourteen-bathroom Gaddafi mansion outside the city that Abou Zeid had used as a headquarters. The building was reduced to rubble, and personal effects and correspondence were strewn across the lawn, including an electricity bill addressed to a “Mr. Khadafi.”

  While the planes terrified the townspeople, they had a similar effect on the occupiers. In the daytime the jihadists parked their vehicles beneath the sparse trees to try to hide them from the sky, and when they heard the sound of a jet they would open their Kurans and begin to read. They also began to take their families out of the city, evacuating them at night in convoys. They told the Arab population to leave too, Air Mali recalled: “They said, ‘If you do not leave they will kill you all. In three or four days you will all be dead in Timbuktu.’”

  In these days, relations between the jihadists and the population became more strained than ever. The occupiers tried to organize marches against the airstrikes to use in propaganda videos, but no one except their own fighters and a few people from the Arab community showed up. More irritating still, some civilians couldn’t contain their glee at the French advance and had openly begun to mock the jihadists. At dawn, they would awake to find that the flag of Mali had been hoisted above civic buildings in the night, and after Konna was recaptured on January 18, street children could be heard conducting loud, imaginary phone conversations with government soldiers.

  “Hello, Konna?” they would say. “Konna! What’s the news? Is everything going well there? Ah, very good, very good!”

  A few brave opportunists even took to looting the occupiers’ houses. One jihadist leader, who had commandeered the home of the director of waterworks and forestry, found that while he was away someone had stolen several guns he had left in the house. He was furious. “The jihadists searched everywhere,” Abdoulaye Cissé said. “Finally they arrested one young man, saying he was one of those involved. At that moment they were really angry with the town, because they knew the people thought they were going to be driven out and they were taking advantage.” The jihadists tortured the suspect for days, Cissé said, but they never found the weapons.

  On Tuesday, January 22, the Islamic Polic
e commissioner, at this time a man named Hassan, called Diadié and told him to bring the Crisis Committee to the governorate right after the dusk prayer for an urgent meeting. The other committee members were skeptical. What if it was a trap? What if Hassan intended to hold them hostage? Diadié and six others felt honor-bound to go: “I said we had been doing this for ten months, we had made commitments and the two parties had respected those commitments up until today.”

  From the governorate they were sent on to the mairie, where Diadié was surprised to find a group of Arabs was also present. The atmosphere was tense from the start. Hassan began by delivering a warning. People had broken into the jihadists’ homes and stolen their property. They were making fun of them in the streets. The Crisis Committee must warn people that the Islamic Police no longer had time to make arrests, and if they broke the law from now on, if they came close to the jihadists’ houses or stole from them, they would simply be shot. It was the committee’s job to make people aware of this. He had hardly finished speaking when an Arab merchant took the floor and said he had heard that the town’s youth were preparing to loot their shops, and that the committee should warn people that the Arab shopkeepers were armed, and if anyone went near them they would also be shot. The people of Timbuktu were racist toward them, he added. They had not stood side by side with them, and had even refused to march against the airstrikes.

  Diadié was incensed. He told Hassan he had not come to make threats, and did not expect threats to be made against him. “If you want people to be calm, do not allow these people to lecture us, or say that we cannot walk past their shops. Who are they to tell us to march? Should we just follow like sheep? We are not Islamists and we do not march with Islamists. And if that is why you have called us here, we will leave.”

  Hassan tried to calm him, but Diadié and the other committee members left shortly afterward. It was their last meeting with the occupiers. The next day, the jihadists shot a young man dead. He was called Mustapha, and according to one account, his crime was to have shouted “Vive la France!”

  “They killed a child,” recalled Diadié. “A child who had jumped. They shot him dead.”

  The jihadist leadership tried to make amends. They presented their excuses to the family, saying it was a mistake, and gave Mustapha’s father a sum of money. But relations continued to sour.

  “Those were the days when we saw their terrorist face,” said the tour guide Bastos. “We were all kaffirs [unbelievers] because they asked that we go out to march against the airstrikes and everyone was afraid to go. They told us, ‘You guys deserve to go to hell.’”

  As Haidara’s contacts had predicted, the occupiers started to destroy things after that. They burned trucks and agricultural machinery. They burned the city’s electricity plant. “Everything that they could do to hurt the town, they did it before leaving,” recalled Abdoulaye Cissé. Timbuktu now entered the most desolate phase of the occupation. “The last days were the hardest,” recalled the grand imam. “The reality was very heavy. The people were traumatized by shooting, thieves were in all corners of the town from nightfall to sunrise. The people were not able to go out. Everyone stayed at home. They were so frightened they were not able to eat.”

  There was no light and the electric water pumps on which Timbuktu depended no longer worked, so people had to pull water from the old wells by hand. But it was the destruction of the cellphone network that hurt the most. Bastos saw it happen: “I was there at the exchange one evening,” he said. “There was a man who came with a Kalashnikov. He stopped in front of a group of us and started shooting: bop, bop, bop, bop, bop! The exchange exploded.” The jihadists distributed walkie-talkies among themselves, but everyone else was now cut off.

  “There were no phones, no communication,” said the grand imam. “We did not hear anyone speak of Timbuktu. That was what traumatized people even more, because we were abandoned. No one knew how we survived.”

  The only positive news was that under the weight of the airstrikes, the last jihadists were leaving. On Wednesday, January 23, Bastos saw Abou Zeid paying off a group of his fighters in the street. They took what they could with them, including motorbikes, which they strapped onto the backs of their 4x4s.

  “They began to withdraw because they understood that the cause was lost,” said Diadié.

  • • •

  AT DAWN ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 24—the day of the banned Mawlid festival—the caretaker of the new Ahmad Baba building in Sankore hurried to Abdoulaye Cissé to tell him the jihadists had left. This news was followed by a second report: there seemed to be a fire burning inside. Cissé hurried to look and saw wisps of white smoke emanating from the open roof. It could have been anything burning: electrical wires, furniture, a wood fire built to make tea. Or it could be coming from burning manuscripts.

  Cissé was aware of the jihadists’ warning that anyone who entered one of their buildings would be shot, but the caretaker felt sure the militants had gone, and as the senior man responsible for the Ahmad Baba institute in Timbuktu, he felt a duty to investigate. The two men entered by the small door on the west side and walked cautiously down one of the internal alleyways designed in the Sahelian vernacular by the South African architect. The building was quiet and cool, sheltered from the desert sun that filtered through screens of hand-chiseled stone. The smoke led them to a spot just outside the conference room. As Cissé and the caretaker approached, they saw a pile of ash that had been pushed up against a square pillar. Heaps of discarded manuscript boxes, carefully labeled with their catalogue numbers, lay to one side. The pyre was still smoldering. It appeared that the jihadists had emptied the boxes, Cissé said, then set the contents on fire.

  Years later, Cissé still had difficulty comprehending this act. “To believe that these people who said they were Muslims could take something that is Islamic and set fire to it—we never thought that would happen. It was the worst thing they could do to us. Anything but that.” Why had they done it? “They had no other motivation than to do bad,” he said. If the manuscripts had somehow been against their ideology, they would have destroyed them when they arrived. Instead they had occupied the building for ten months and waited till the eve of their departure to burn them. “Because they were defeated, they had to leave,” Cissé said. “They knew the international and scientific value of the manuscripts, and what they are worth, so they had to burn them.”

  He and the caretaker did not stay long, which was fortunate because the jihadists returned soon afterward. “If they had found us there, we would have been finished,” said Cissé.

  When Maiga learned what had happened, he took it as a personal failure. “God made it my responsibility, and now the manuscripts had burned. Manuscripts that date back centuries and centuries. So for me it was a failure. The night I learned that, I could not sleep.”

  Haidara was also devastated. “The day that they burned them I felt very, very ill,” he said. “It was as if we had saved nothing. That was how bad I felt.”

  16.

  CHRONICLE OF THE RESEARCHER

  1911–1913

  For almost two decades after Dubois’s return, the Fatassi, “the phantom book of the Sudan,” played on the minds of the Paris Orientalists. Dubois had described this work with typical hyperbole as the “fundamental basis of all historic documentation of the Niger region,” but all anyone had been able to find of it were a few remarkably similar scraps. When they were asked, the people of Timbuktu shrugged and said that as far as they knew, all copies of the manuscript had been destroyed.

  In 1911, the French governor of Upper Senegal and Niger sent the explorer Albert Bonnel de Mézières to Timbuktu. There, Bonnel de Mézières befriended the scholar Sidi Muhammad al-Imam Ben Essayouti, and gained enough of his trust for the Timbuktien to show him a precious document from his personal library. It was incomplete, its paper crumbling and its ink faded, but it was believed to be the only su
rviving copy of an ancient history of the Sudan. Bonnel de Mézières asked if he could have a duplicate, and Ben Essayouti supervised the creation of a new manuscript, which was sent to Octave Houdas in Paris with an accompanying note explaining that it was a “collection of biographies of the kings of Songhay and a fragment of the history of the kings of the Sudan prior to the kingdom of Songhay,” and was believed to have been written in the fifteenth century.

  Houdas could tell from the first glimpse that it was “a document of highest importance for the history of the French Sudan,” and added information to that contained in the Tarikh al-sudan. Since its opening pages had been lost, the manuscript was missing the title and the name of its author, but it was soon clear to Houdas that it was the work Dubois had heard about, the Fatassi.

  To fill the gaps in the text, Houdas and his assistant Maurice Delafosse pressed Bonnel de Mézières to find another copy. The explorer wrote to Ben Essayouti asking again for his help, and the Timbuktien replied with good faith that though he knew of no more copies, he would send them his original. The translators received this document in May 1912, naming it Manuscript A, while the copy was named Manuscript B. Later that year, another document was found and copied on the instruction of a French colonial administrator in Kayes. Manuscript C, as it became known, included a preface and a chapter missing from Ben Essayouti’s copy, and clearly named the work as the Tarikh al-fattash, or, to give it its full title in English, The Chronicle of the Researcher into the History of the Countries, the Armies, and the Principal Personalities. Its author was named as Mahmud Kati. According to the Tarikh al-sudan, Kati had been born in 1468 and was a close friend of Askiya al-hajj Muhammad.