The Storied City

by Charlie English

  On the evidence Brouwer had seen, Hall’s objections were misplaced. Why, he wondered, were such accusations being made? “Apparently there is a lot of competition and envy around these manuscripts,” he wrote. “And Savama has bypassed all academia with this rescue operation.”

  In Brouwer’s view, then, there was no doubt.

  • • •

  BAMAKO IN LATE 2015 was reeling from a new terrorist attack. On Friday, November 20, two jihadists walked into the Radisson Hotel, took 170 people hostage, and shot twenty dead. In the years since the French intervention, the armed groups in the north had reasserted themselves: tens of UN peacekeepers had been killed, terrorist violence had crept into southern and central Mali, and foreign journalists had left after receiving personalized death threats. In the wake of the latest attack, international organizations were pulling their people out, and the country was in a formal state of emergency. Giant Hesco sandbags blocked the entrance to the government village, and soldiers in flak jackets inspected the undersides of vehicles looking for bombs. Police stopped cars in the streets, and guards waved metal-detecting wands over hotel guests before allowing them entry. Asked to sum up the security situation, one diplomat said simply, “Not very good.”

  Haidara was unwell that week, but agreed nevertheless to meet several times. The first of these encounters was in the early evening, the petit soir, the time he most liked to talk, in his apartment in Baco Djicoroni. We sat, as we had so many times before, on the floor between the sofas, and he set out confidently across the now familiar foothills of the occupation’s early days, as usual brushing aside disagreements over the details. We worked through the narrative, past the Ahmad Baba evacuation toward the heights of the private libraries. There, confronted with the greatest discrepancies in the story, his assertiveness seemed to slip.

  The fleet of forty-seven boats and the vast numbers of taxis, the calls to each of the three hundred couriers several times a day, the schedule on the wall with people to phone every few minutes, was all that true?

  Not exactly a “Yes” this time. More of a “Hmmm.”

  What about the October “window of opportunity,” which culminated in the October 17 contract with the Prince Claus Fund and the start of the evacuation of the private manuscripts the following day? Could he confirm that had happened?

  “I don’t know. We had begun in August.”

  He’d begun with the private libraries in August?

  “Hmmm,” he said. “We did a lot of operations.”

  What of the idea—which Diakité had spelled out in an e-mail to the Prince Claus Fund—that they had used the track that followed the left bank of the river and passed through Lere as much as the main route via Mopti? What did he make of that?

  “Hmmmm.”

  What about the incident at the edge of Lake Debo, where bandits had ambushed the boats and held the manuscripts ransom, and Haidara had to pay for their release. Had that really happened?

  He coughed spectacularly. “Il faut le laisser comme ça,” he said. “Leave that as it is.”

  What did he mean, leave it as it is?

  “It’s good.”

  The conversation turned to numbers. It wasn’t just Hall and his fellow academics who questioned them. Few of Haidara’s colleagues in the business—including Ismael and Maiga—believed such vast quantities of manuscripts existed. “If you do the sums of the different libraries,” Ismael had said, “how are you going to get 200,000? Is it possible?” Maiga, who had worked with the Luxembourg-funded project MLI/015, said that they had done a catalogue of all the manuscripts in Timbuktu and had not even reached 100,000. How could Haidara possibly claim to have evacuated 377,491?

  These people were not specialists, Haidara said. Bruce Hall had worked mainly with the Ahmad Baba institute and had not even been to Mali for years. Even Maiga, in his view, was not a specialist. Previous, lower estimates had been made before they had been able to do a proper count.

  If the 377,491 private manuscripts figure was real, how could he explain that it had taken almost 2,500 lockers to move them, while the Ahmad Baba institute’s 24,000 manuscripts were shipped in just thirty-six lockers?

  “Ah, that is easy to respond to,” he said, sitting up and taking a long drink from a water bottle. The manuscripts were different sizes. Some of them consisted of a single page. You could fit a lot of these single-folio manuscripts into a locker, but very few large manuscripts.

  That didn’t explain why, on average, Savama shipped 157 manuscripts per locker, whereas more than six hundred fit into each Ahmad Baba box. At that density, he could have moved almost two million manuscripts in 2,500 lockers.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps the [Savama] manuscripts are bigger.”

  The following day we met in the Savama building. There, I asked him to go through the list of private libraries on the organization’s website to check which he had moved and which he hadn’t. The results were surprising. Of the thirty-five libraries in the town listed on savamadci.net, he claimed to have evacuated only seventeen. These included two private libraries whose owners had told me their manuscripts had not been moved by Savama: Ismael’s Fondo Kati and Sane Chirfi Alpha’s Bibliothèque Alimam Alpha Salum. There were further discrepancies: Abdoul Hamid Kounta, the owner of the Zawiyat al-Kunti library, told me in two separate interviews that Savama had moved his books in June—four months before the “window of opportunity.” Worse, another manuscript owner in Timbuktu, Abdoul Wahid Haidara, said that three major private libraries had been moved long after the liberation, in what he believed was an effort to prop up Savama’s exaggerated claims.

  How, I wondered, could this much-reduced number of libraries, which excluded such notable repositories as those of the grand imam and the al-Wangari family, amount to the 95 percent evacuation he claimed?

  The more famous libraries were not always the biggest ones, was Haidara’s response.

  “There is not only one account of the evacuation,” he had told me in his apartment. “Each person will have his own take on it. Bruce [Hall] will have one account, Ismael another, Maiga yet another, while I have my own version. All these accounts will be different, but they will all be true. If everyone agreed what the story was, then it would certainly not be true.”

  • • •

  ON MY LAST EVENING in Bamako, Haidara played his trump card, taking me on a tour of the safe houses. Once again it was dusk, and as we drove across Bamako’s Bridge of Martyrs the sun was dropping, pink and heavy, into the Niger. It was the time of the harmattan, and the dust churned up by this strong, warm wind hung heavy over the city. Dressed in a bronze-colored gown of shining waxed cotton with a matching kufi cap, Haidara led a wild ride around southern Bamako, through the gathering darkness and the rampant crosstown traffic. Following him along the back roads of this unknowable city, in pedantic pursuit, was a surprising endgame in a story that had once seemed straightforward.

  The car would pull in suddenly, and he would step out, heading cheerfully into the slow-streaming traffic and hurrying up a gloomy alley. He would shout a greeting to the watchmen talking or praying on a mat outside without breaking stride, flick on his phone to light a stairwell and scatter a rat. Up flight after flight, I followed the big man, both of us breathing hard. A blank-walled corridor, a steel security gate, a trusty with a key, and a room filled with tens or hundreds of lockers, some in plain colors, some in brushed steel, some decorated with pictures of rockets and abstract stencil shapes. They were stacked in piles, some closed with a single padlock, some with two, some not clasped at all. A dehumidifier hummed.

  The lids of the unlocked chests could be opened, and inside there were always manuscripts, some still in the acid-free boxes in which they had been brought south, some in colored folders, others bound in animal hide. Here were a hundred in one sheaf; there a single volume eight inches thick. Rooting through to the back
, to the middle of a stack of lockers, I found documents in there too. Prying open the lid of a chest closed with a single lock, peering inside: more documents.

  Sometimes the drive between stops was five minutes; sometimes it was half an hour across the suburbs of the Malian capital, headlights picking out the trucks, the policemen, the army 4x4s, the clouds of buzzing scooters. Another destination. More lockers, more shelves of manuscripts. Here a printed card announcing the library of Aboubacrine Ben Said, which possessed 7,610 manuscripts; there it was Alpha Mahamane of Diré, who had 6,450. Another room, another tally to add to the spiraling total.

  So many boxes. So many manuscripts. Could it really all add up? Skepticism, in the face of this confident, charming man, was oddly hard to maintain. Maybe he had exaggerated a little; was that so bad? The donors didn’t seem to care. It was now more than three years since the evacuation, and even the team from the University of Hamburg who were studying the manuscripts and whose government had put in millions of euros of funding hadn’t done a full count, even a rough one. Did it really matter?

  The double-locked boxes were heavy, no doubt. Could Haidara open one of those? He’d left the keys at the apartment, he said. It was too far away to go back now. Anyway, there was one at the top of a stack there, with a key already in its padlock. The caretakers must have left it by mistake. Look in there. What do you see? Manuscripts!

  The last location was a grand house with a pleasant garden in a walled compound. There was a broad entrance gate, a drive covered with flagstones. In a room here were 140 more lockers—the running total was now above 1,000, and more would be produced the following day. These were all still full, he said. They were also all still double-locked.

  A final request, as we left the storeroom. Could we go back to the apartment together, pick up the keys, and return to open a handful of the double-padlocked boxes? This would be the final, crucial proof; then we would be finished.

  “No,” he said.

  It was the first point-blank refusal in two days of difficult questions.

  “You have to have trust,” he said, his voice rising. “You are accusing me of being a thief! I have my dignity. I have been ill, and tonight I have driven all over Bamako and I have opened everything up. I have shown you everything. I have my dignity. I am not a child.”

  No one is calling you a thief, I said, but there are people who don’t believe this is quite real. They need evidence that it is.

  “Those people will never believe it, even with all the proof in the world,” he said, strident now. “People put words in people’s mouths—they even put words in the mouth of the Prophet! These are our manuscripts, not yours. These are the manuscripts of Mali. They belong to us! They are not for you!”

  You will not open the locked chests?

  “No.”

  There were no more questions. There was nothing else to see. Haidara did something surprising after that. He reached over suddenly and pulled me in, taking my arm under his own large biceps, holding my hand in his in an unexpected embrace, smiling. Was he asking for forgiveness? Clemency?

  We marched in this clasp down the dimly lit corridor, toward the front door, and out into the garden, with its tropical flowers and chiming crickets, to where his assistants and his chauffeur were waiting.

  EPILOGUE

  This book is as much historiography as history. That is to say, it is an account of the interpretations of Timbuktu’s past at least as much as it is the story of what actually happened there. The reasons for this will, I hope, have become clear: Timbuktu’s story is in perpetual motion, swinging back and forth between competing poles of myth and reality. Spectacular arguments are made and then dismissed before another claim is built up, in an apparently continuous cycle of proposition and correction.

  From its earliest days, the legend of the New Jerusalem across the desert—called Timbuktu or Tombouctou, Tenbuch or Tombut—was fed from a mix of misinformation, credulity, and the European greed for gold. Why this place? Why was it this city that became the focus of the world’s misconceptions about Africa, and not, say, Jenne or Gao or Kano? It was partly a matter of geography: since Timbuktu lay at the southern end of the caravan routes to Morocco and Libya, exaggerated reports of its wealth that were carried across the desert were easily passed to Europe. It helped that the place had such a resonant name, an unforgettable slogan that “catches the ear and conveys images of wonder,” as the historian Eugenia Herbert put it. Crucial, too, was the city’s elusiveness: you could say what you liked about Timbuktu and no one was going to correct you. Robert Adams, an American sailor who improbably claimed to have reached the city in 1812, told the world it was governed by King Woollo and Queen Fatima, who never washed but greased their bodies daily with goat’s-milk butter. In a later era, Bruce Chatwin learned that Timbuktiens ate mouse soup, which was served complete with little pink feet. Even as momentous geographical discoveries were being made in the Arctic and South America, explorers failed time after time to penetrate La Mystérieuse. When Alexander Gordon Laing finally struggled, half dead, into its precincts in 1826, Europeans had been fantasizing about it for at least five centuries.

  The “Timbuktu of the mind” overpowered the little-known reality of the place, and deflating it was not an inviting task. Having at last attained his prize, the normally verbose Laing seems to have wrestled with what to say. He stayed five weeks without sending a word home, and when, finally, he was forced to put pen to paper, he revealed almost nothing. We can imagine why: his discovery was that the great city that had dwelled so long in the European imagination was a small town of humble, earth-built dwellings. In those circumstances, who would not have written, as he did, that “the great Capital of central Africa” had “completely met my expectations”—and, well, gotta run?

  René Caillié’s description of Timbuktu as “nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses” did more to correct the misconception, but it was widely disbelieved, and those who followed him only mined deeper for myth. The journalist Félix Dubois’s excitement seventy years later at discovering the fantastical backstory of a culture founded by ancient Egyptians that “still dazzled . . . three centuries after the setting of her star” is palpable. Not satisfied with the city’s genuine tradition of scholarship, he inflated it, repackaging Timbuktu as Carthage and Alexandria combined, and elements of his “Timbuktu University” legend were still being repeated a century later. Even Heinrich Barth, a genius of African exploration, mistakenly introduced the tradition of reading the Tarikh al-sudan as history, when in fact its narrative proved to be synthetic, an imaginative reworking of past events to suit the politics of the time. This confusion was compounded by the Orientalists Houdas, Benoist, and Delafosse, who understood the chroniclers’ pedestrian Arabic to mean their authors were capable only of relaying the information accurately laid down by their forebears, rather than inventing history anew. For a century, the supposed facts in the chronicles edged out the contradictory but more reliable epigraphic evidence.

  Europe was not the sole author of the Timbuktu myths: the citizens of the town played a splendid part in its aggrandizement. Neither tarikh passed up the opportunity to elaborate on what al-Sadi called a “virtuous, pure, undefiled and proud city, blessed with divine favour,” which, the Fattash said, “had no parallel in the land of the Blacks.” Ahmad Baba, writing in an earlier generation, talked up the Timbuktu scholars’ miraculous deeds: these holy men could walk on water and make people impervious to enemy arrows and fire. The exaggeration of the city’s divinity may have grown up as a way to protect it, a sort of mystic defense, much as saints in medieval Europe were invoked to intimidate would-be invaders.

  The great twenty-first-century story of Timbuktu, the account of the manuscript evacuation, fits neatly into this tradition. As Joseph Gitari pointed out, it appeared as an Indiana Jones story in real life, one in which the people of the sainted city, led by librarians, rescued their se
mi-magical patrimony from the hands of the book-burning jihadists. With such resonant, universal themes of good versus evil, books versus guns, fanatics versus moderates, this modern-day folktale proved irresistible. It was all the more powerful for being built around a kernel of truth, just as the more glorious legends of the city’s past were: only the most skeptical academic would deny that Timbuktu was once an important center of Islamic scholarship in the Western Sudan. The manuscript owners, I believe, worked to protect their literary heritage from the threat of looting, mostly by hiding the documents, some by evacuating them in operations overseen by Savama. The Ahmad Baba manuscripts in particular were saved in the manner that was described to me. These operations undoubtedly took chutzpah and courage, from the directors of libraries as well as more junior colleagues who braved the jihadists’ sharia punishments. From these fundamentals, the operation was spun into something larger and more dangerous than it really was.

  Legend, by its nature, is oversimplification. E. P. Thompson described the tendency to simplify the lives of people who have gone before as “the enormous condescension of posterity.” We might add the condescension of distance, the impulse of one culture to imagine the people of another to be less sophisticated, more two-dimensional than they really are. This was what led the West to mistake the Timbuktu chronicles for first-rate history but second-rate literature, when the reverse was true: the chroniclers had embroidered heavily on the past, producing the most innovative writing ever to come out of the city. As Farias pointed out in that context, we outsiders underestimate the intellectual originality of Timbuktiens at our peril. Narratives of the place and its history are still distorted by this failing: our inability to imagine the city’s full complexity. Yet the misreadings of it have been the making of Timbuktu. What else would draw the world to this remote town but legends, rumors, its “far fame,” in Laing’s description? How much reduced would the city be without them?