The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  This was Big Data, Saharan edition. The books are “heirlooms of an African renaissance,” says South African historian Shamil Jeppie, who runs the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town. They include everything from astronomy to zoology, from Turkish maps to Jewish wedding contracts, along with a mother lode of commercial records about caravans and the salt trade. One of the few scholars to have examined the works firsthand, Jeppie has found law and theology but also poetry, a history of tea, and two sex manuals, which he describes as “very practical—I mean, very impractical.”

  Yet, by 2012, the institute had digitized just 2,000 manuscripts. You couldn’t exactly slap them on a scanner: the paper was as fragile as a mummy, and the ink (typically made of charcoal mixed with gum arabic) could burst into flames from the hot beam of light. When the jihadis arrived to trash the library, this inefficiency turned out to be a partial blessing: compared with the tens of thousands in state hands, there were hundreds of thousands still in private homes, waiting their turn for restoration and copying with cold-circuit photography. The people of Timbuktu had been careful, even grudging, with their books. As in centuries past, this was a winning strategy.

  The State Library building is big for Timbuktu—a whole block—but blends in nicely, with the trapezoidal walls and open galleries of a Saharan home. Out in the ochre-colored courtyard was Bouya Haidara. Short and sober-faced, with a scruff of white chin hair and a white scholar’s cap, he was the guardian of the library, an important position with elements of security chief and casino greeter. From a loose pile of burned books sitting against a wall—books that had been outdoors for seven months—he pulled a cardboard box, black all over. Inside were stacked pages of beautiful calligraphy, perhaps a hundred sheets, all scorched around the edges.

  I asked Bouya what this manuscript had been. A consultation was held; a bony man lounging on a mattress by the front door turned out to be a locally prominent scholar. He casually flicked through the charred contents, turning ancient pages that crumbled at his touch. “Botany,” he said, in French. “The useful plants of the desert. Flowers. Herbal medicines.”

  He probed deeper into the pile. “Verses of the Holy Koran.” Yes, the jihadi warriors had thoughtlessly burned their own sacred book—multiple copies were destroyed in the fire, Bouya noted.

  I leaned over for a whiff, but a desert blast swept the fine, powdery ash up my nose, into my eyes, into my suddenly gasping mouth. I gagged and couldn’t find water anywhere. In Mali, Koranic scholars sometimes sell amulets that contain tiny verses, and in extreme cases of need customers may soak the paper in a glass of water and drink the inky result, literally absorbing the words into their bodies. Maybe snorting parts of the Holy Koran was not blasphemy but a blessing.

  We followed Bouya into the basement, where he showed me how he stood back that afternoon as the rebels ripped a locked gate off its hinges and entered the storage rooms, tossing books into piles on the floor.

  Thousands of manuscripts were added to the fire, but French fighter jets were overhead, and the rebels left many behind. Even better, they missed two rooms entirely, including the Salle de Manuscripts No. 4, which held 14 shelves of uncataloged volumes. These were recent donations that no one had even opened yet: piles of paper were stacked everywhere. Some manuscripts were big and neatly bundled; others were tiny scraps, stuffed into French airmail envelopes from decades ago.

  Aboubacrine Abdou Maiga, the library director’s representative, was grieving like a man who had been stabbed—“Four hundred books from Andalusia were burned!” he moaned to me—but he produced a final tally: 4,203 books had been destroyed by fire, but another 10,487 had survived.

  That’s not counting the works that had already been spirited out. Even though the rebels had been camping for 10 months in the institute’s courtyard, Bouya and others had smuggled out some of the most important books inside their robelike boubous. He mimed stuffing a parchment into his underwear and laughed at the awkward gait and unseemly bulge that ancient literature created.

  This is why I had gone all the way to Timbuktu. To see how people acted under pressure, when there was no plan, only instinct. The librarians simply grabbed books and walked out, passing with fake confidence by armed men ready to kill them. The sound of a culture surviving was the discreet rustling of men’s underpants.

  The news kept getting better. Bouya pointed out that thousands of other books were still across town at an old archive called the dispensary. The next day, we drove over to a one-story mud-and-stone building in a walled compound. There we met Hassine Traore, a 32-year-old whose grandfather had been the dispensary’s official guardian.

  “The first day they penetrated the town, the rebels came,” Traore said. They looted computers and other equipment. The dispensary books—another mound of uncataloged mysteries—were in locked storerooms, and the rebels demanded entry.

  “They came and faced us and said, ‘Give me the key to the manuscripts,’ and we answered that we didn’t have it,” Traore said. “They pushed. They came every day, asking, ‘Where are the manuscripts?’”

  The rebels were put off again and again, for four long months, but the pressure was continuous, Traore said, and he and his father grew desperate. They talked with neighbors, with families that had donated the books, and with Haidara, who had fled to Bamako. Government officials in the capital were sympathetic but helpless.

  “Then, in August, we found the solution,” Traore said. Late at night, they began to pack up manuscripts, stuffing them into old rice sacks. Just the packing took a full month and involved dozens of men from several book-owning families. Traore hired five donkey drivers to carry the thousands of manuscripts—no one could count them all—out of the dispensary around midnight, every night for a week. They loaded the donkeys, and then Traore’s 72-year-old grandfather, the retired guardian, walked point, scouting for jihadi patrols. Each night they distributed books to a different house, joining the small number of high-priority works smuggled out of the main library by underwear.

  Traore’s grandfather, Abba al-Hadi, was dozing in a chair nearby, his beard of white scruff touching his chest. He woke up when I approached; like me, he spoke little French, but he understood my question well enough: Can you read?

  Non. An illiterate old man had gone out ahead, keeping the ink moving, the blood flowing in this system of survival.

  By August 2012, it was clear that the books had to escape not just the library buildings but Timbuktu itself. That meant transporting them over one of two roads. The road through the Sahara was one of the world’s most unsafe and difficult pieces of terrain, controlled partly by Tuareg sentries who regarded looting as a kind of divine right. The road through the Sahel began in rebel territory but reached Mopti and government control after 10 hours. That was in the best vehicle and conditions; now the rainy season was here. On August 28, Bouya and his colleagues at the state institute loaded 781 manuscripts into boxes, rolled them across town in a vegetable cart, and put them in the back of a quatre-quatre, the 4x4s that plow the desert. It was a test shipment. When it reached Mopti safely, they began shipping every day. They got about 24,000 state-owned manuscripts out by vehicle. But rain made the passages worse, and bandits were taking advantage of the war, robbing people in any part of Mali.

  Although Haidara had fled Timbuktu by car himself, he left behind his own collection. In addition to the manuscripts escaping the library in those donkey-borne rice sacks, there were 27 major family collections still in Timbuktu houses, totaling at least 200,000 books. During the fall of 2012, Haidara urged those families to set up their own smuggling route. They bought up all the shipping trunks in Timbuktu’s Grand Marché and started sending them out by road to Bamako or hiding places along the way.

  More than half the books were still stuck in Timbuktu, but war and chaos were about to close off the roads. The only other escape route—the Niger itself—was dangerous to the manuscripts in a new way.

  Old rag
paper and soluble inks do not belong on a river. Stephanie Diakité, the lawyer and conservator, said she nearly panicked when Haidara told her of his scheme. One tippy canoe could erase centuries of irreplaceable work. Reluctantly, she agreed. During early January 2013, cargo motorcycles and beater taxis began carrying a few trunks at a time away from the family libraries, to Kabara, the river port. Only light pirogues were available, and each could hold maybe a dozen boxes. Strong boys carried the footlockers down to the waterline, working for coins. The little chugging motors of the canoes kicked in, and the books of Timbuktu went out of the desert and onto the water for the first time in their lives. Three or four canoes left every day, headed upriver toward Djenné or Mopti.

  By mid-January, the war had entered a more deadly phase: a French rapid-reaction force was attacking the rebel coalition, and Gazelle gunships appeared over the Sahara. Moving a few boxes at a time was suddenly no longer enough.

  Haidara used his cell phone to encourage a book breakout. Diakité sat next to him some days. In the fall, she had been raising support from her international contacts: a Dutch royal charity gave money, and at one point a European embassy donated a paper bag full of cash. Now they had to funnel money to help comrades in Timbuktu pay off soldiers and functionaries. These traditional cadeaux, or gifts, are unsavory yet inescapable in Mali—when I refused to pay for an interview, one Koranic scholar told me, “You have your culture, we have ours.”

  This makeshift book club then put together a bigger shipment: about 25 pirogues, leaving Timbuktu in one convoy. But as the boats crossed Lake Débo, they were intercepted by a French helicopter gunship. The Bozo skippers understood the innocence of paper; they opened some footlockers, showing that their cargo was not RPGs but worm-eaten books. The French pilot also understood; Diakité said that he saluted before flying away.

  The conspirators now made one final push, sending a true fleet upriver past Mopti to Djenné. This lengthy convoy—45 pirogues in a row—drew more unwelcome attention. In the narrow channels west of Lake Débo, armed men stopped the convoy and demanded (and eventually got) a large ransom. They were robbers, not holy warriors; once paid, they let the boats move on.

  The final convoy reached Djenné just two weeks before the squad of jihadis arrived at the main library with orders to destroy everything they could find. But they were too late, or nearly so: hundreds of thousands of books had already escaped. Not one had been lost to the road or the river.

  The threat now is from nature, not man. The arid Sahara has preserved this paper for centuries; Bamako’s humidity is a prescription for destroying it. (A calligrapher showed me works on salt slabs that were already fading.) Haidara’s stash, perhaps 90 percent of the known manuscripts, is still at risk, despite his efforts to install dehumidifiers and air-conditioning in the still-secret rooms. He estimated it would cost $10 million just to put them in acid-free boxes; conserving and copying them could take a decade. But, like the scores of families who trusted him with their books, he was determined to return them eventually, when Timbuktu was stable. “The books must go back,” he said.

  Aside from the occasional suicide bombing, Mali was in recovery mode, and Marco and I witnessed a round of peaceful elections that returned popular ex-president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, known as IBK, to the national palace. The environment was hardly safe: in November, two French radio journalists working in the desert were kidnapped and then executed, presumably by al-Qaeda leftovers, and French and Malian forces were still conducting sporadic raids on jihadi holdouts in the far north. Yet normalcy kept building, and in 2014, Malians would restage a Festival on the Niger, in the town of Ségou, with some of Afropop’s biggest stars.

  Last August, early in the rainy season, Timbuktu felt safe, even joyous. Marco and I walked the streets with caution, greeted with extraordinary warmth by a people hungry for outsiders, for tourists, for stability and trust. Grateful old men took my hand like I was Bill Clinton. We stumbled on an Islamic wedding, a noisy, wild event full of rapturous Sufis and unveiled women gyrating on the dance floor like so many Aretha Franklins. After the somber soldiers patrolling in technicals, after the nearly yearlong rule of the jihadis, the dames of Timbuktu were literally letting their hair down, bursting out of short skirts and tight tops, throwing off head scarves and going down in butt-bumping contests.

  Verdict from the dance floor: the jihad was over, and Timbuktu had won. Yet we left the party quickly, Marco warning that our very presence could draw a suicide bomber down on these people.

  We spent days touring the small libraries of Timbuktu, empty for the first time in centuries. In one low adobe home, a robed Koranic teacher named Dramane Moulaye Haidara opened a small trunk and displayed what he’d hidden from the occupiers: a few illuminated manuscripts in vermilion and gold, works full of astrological diagrams. He made a living casting fortunes and putting blessings on people. This was how the war had been won, he told us, not with bombs but with magic. “We bombed them with charms,” he said of the jihadis. “So many charms.”

  We looked up. It had started raining. The books were sitting outside, the rag pages getting pelted with fat drops of water. We rushed out and pulled the sixteenth century back to safety.

  Marco and I left soon after that, catching a ride on an elderly MD-80 jet painted white and labeled UNITED NATIONS—the flight we had waited for in vain back in Bamako. It was extracting a fact-finding mission, which arrived in a convoy of commando-staffed pickup trucks and some black SUVs, delivering a vital top-level Italian diplomat shaped like a meatball and his boss, a lean and silent Nigerian general. On the plane I squeezed in next to a red-bearded Swedish officer sweating in his jungle fatigues.

  Under my arm I had a book. Not one of the actual books, just a single page, copied out in calligraphy by a Timbuktu artist. The passage was from Ahmed Baba, the namesake of the research institute. In 1591, an army from Morocco had sacked Timbuktu, destroying many books and forcing scholars like him to flee across the desert. The lonely passage urged any traveler to “make a detour by Timbuktu, murmur my name to my friends and bring them the scented greeting of the exile.”

  In the end, after many trials, Ahmed Baba was able to return. Someday, scanned and measured, conserved and protected, the books of Timbuktu will follow him home.

  PAUL THEROUX

  The Soul of the South

  FROM Smithsonian

  THE SOUTH is easy to find but hard to sort out, and it is full of paradoxes. Once I was talking southern fiction with William Styron and he said, “I come from the High South”—he was from Virginia, and he was mildly boasting. Like many writers who had left the South to find a life in the North, he often talked fondly about the region that had formed him.

  There is plenty to boast of in the Deep South, with its cultural pleasures, where the cities in particular are vibrant, the art galleries of Atlanta, the gourmet restaurants of Charleston, the cities with pro sports or great college teams. The Alabama Symphony Orchestra in Birmingham is scheduled to perform César Franck’s Symphony in D minor, as I write, and the Mississippi Symphony is scheduling six concerts for its Bravo Series (Mozart, Beethoven) in Jackson. There are presidential libraries, playhouses, and botanical gardens. Civil War battlefields abound—these solemn places are well kept and enlightening: you could spend months profitably touring them. The golf courses of Georgia and Alabama are famous, there is motor racing, and every large city has a grand hotel or two, and a great restaurant.

  Parts of the Deep South are commercially prosperous, too, with booming industries—medical research and technology, aerospace and aviation, car manufacturing. The Mercedes you bought could have been made in Alabama, BMW’s plant in South Carolina will soon be its largest in the world, Nissan makes cars in Mississippi, and so does Toyota. There are many associated businesses, suppliers of car-related components. This is a testament to the enduring pride and work ethic of the South, not to mention labor laws.

  I think most people know this. They may als
o be aware that the Deep South has some of the highest rates of unemployment, some of the worst schools, the poorest housing and medical care, a vast number of dying and depopulated towns. As for being hard up, the states I visited in the Deep South have nearly 20 percent of their people living below the poverty line, more than the national average of 16 percent.

  This other Deep South, with the same pride and with deep roots—rural, struggling, idyllic in places, and mostly ignored—was like a foreign country to me. I decided to travel the back roads for the pleasure of discovery—doing in my own country what I had spent most of my life doing in Africa and India and China—ignoring the museums and stadiums, the antebellum mansions and automobile plants, and, with the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights struggle in mind, concentrating on the human architecture, in particular the overlooked: the submerged fifth.

  Part One: South Carolina

  The South began for me in Allendale, in the rural Lowcountry of South Carolina, set among twiggy fields of tufted white, the blown-open cotton bolls brightening the spindly bushes. In a lifetime of travel, I had seen very few places to compare with Allendale in its oddity; and approaching the town was just as bizarre. The road, much of it, was a divided highway, wider than many sections of the great north-south interstate, Route 95, which is more like a tunnel than a road for the way it sluices cars south at great speed.

  Approaching the outskirts of Allendale I had a sight of doomsday, one of those visions that make the effort of travel worthwhile. It was a vision of ruin, of decay and utter emptiness; and it was obvious in the simplest, most recognizable structures—motels, gas stations, restaurants, stores—all of them abandoned to rot, some of them so thoroughly decayed that all that was left was the great concrete slab of the foundation, stained with oil or paint, littered with the splinters of the collapsed building, a rusted sign leaning. Some were brick-faced, others made of cinder blocks, but none was well made and so the impression I had was of astonishing decrepitude, as though a war had ravaged the place and killed all the people.