In the days after Mayor Cissé’s dramatic announcement, news of the evacuation was slow to filter out. No one seemed to want to reveal the truth, that almost all the manuscripts were safe, too soon. At the University of Cape Town, the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project team took calls from journalists looking for an expert analysis of what had happened. The academics urged caution. As soon as they had seen the TV pictures from the Ahmad Baba building, they knew that not all the documents had been burned: there simply wasn’t enough damage, not enough ashes. When they called their colleagues in Mali they were surprised that none of them would explain exactly what had happened. “They wouldn’t tell us about it,” remembered Susana Molins Lliteras, then a doctoral student with the project. “They told us it was for security reasons, that it was too unsafe.” By that time, it seemed to her, such caution was unnecessary.
For those who knew Haidara well, however, selected information was starting to drip out. Jean-Michel Djian, a French writer who specialized in West African culture, told The New Yorker on the day of liberation that the majority of the Timbuktu manuscripts—“about fifty thousand”—were safe and that Haidara had transported more than 15,000 to the capital two months previously to protect them. Later that week, the veteran Africa correspondent Tristan McConnell wrote articles for GlobalPost and Harper’s in which Haidara revealed details of the evacuation. Working with “a handful of volunteers,” the librarian had set about hiding Timbuktu’s manuscripts, he wrote. With “15 colleagues,” he had worked every night for a month to pack them into lockers, starting with the Mamma Haidara collection and then moving on to others. “Well over 1,000” boxes of manuscripts had been buried beneath mud floors, hidden in cupboards and rooms in private houses, or sent upriver. Haidara had refused offers of further help, he told McConnell, because he didn’t want anyone else to know where the manuscripts were hidden.
As the world’s media came to realize that what was thought destroyed had really been saved, a new round of coverage began, and the number of manuscripts evacuated began to mount. By February 25, according to Der Spiegel, the 15,000 Djian reported had become “more than 200,000 documents, or about 80 percent of [the manuscripts in Timbuktu],” citing the German foreign ministry as a source. A German briefing document later put the number at 285,000, while in April, in The New Republic, Haidara was cited as claiming that “roughly 95 percent of the city’s 300,000 manuscripts made it safely to Bamako.” By 2015 this 95 percent would be 377,491 manuscripts, shipped in almost 2,500 lockers. This was not counting the 24,000 or so evacuated from the old Ahmad Baba building, which would put the total over 400,000.
On March 13, 2013, six weeks after the liberation, Diakité launched a new fund-raising drive, T160K: Timbuktu Libraries in Exile, with a talk at the University of Oregon. (“T160K” refers to “the first 160,000” manuscripts that had been evacuated from Timbuktu, she said.) In her lecture, Diakité recollected how the people of Timbuktu and the villages surrounding it, afraid for their lives and futures, not receiving any kind of income because their businesses or jobs had disappeared with the crisis, had come forward to help save the heritage. She was moved to tears by the power of the story. “I’m going to start crying any second here again,” she said. “Here I go.”
She spoke for fifty minutes—“a pretty short amount of time for an adventure of this magnitude,” as she put it—but enough for her to reveal intriguing new findings about the manuscripts. During the evacuation, the workers had made a rough inventory, she said, and discovered for the first time that religious texts were far outnumbered in the collections by secular works, which included poetry, novellas, essays, cookbooks, works of medieval science, medicine, music, and “much, much more.” What she still found most exciting, however, was a theme she had mined a decade earlier under the aegis of the Special Conflict Resolution Research Group in Mali: the manuscripts contained texts that had once been used by a corps of Islamic diplomats called the “ambassadors of peace,” she said, and in her opinion these texts should now be deployed to spearhead the Malian reconciliation process. They could even contain the template to resolve conflicts all over the continent.
The way the manuscripts alone brought people together during the evacuation leads us to believe that they, and this material, could drive the process of enduring peace in Mali, and this may be the destiny of the manuscripts, at least in this iteration of their existence.
Before the manuscripts could fulfill this destiny, though, more funds were needed. Far from being secure, the manuscripts in Bamako were threatened by the city’s humid climate, and this new crisis required even larger amounts of cash than the evacuation. T160K’s target—promoted in old and new media alike—was $7 million. Two months later, on May 15, Haidara published an “Action Plan for the Rescue, Preservation and Valorization of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Evacuated in Bamako,” which detailed the costs of conserving, digitizing, cataloguing, and researching the Savama documents. The price tag for this three-year program was set far higher, at a little over $22 million: an enormous sum in a country where the average annual income was just $1,500.
Several donors answered the new shout-outs. The German foreign ministry and the Gerda Henkel Foundation contributed around $1 million a year, while a University of Hamburg team led the effort to preserve the manuscripts and examine their contents. Dehumidifiers were bought, and a large building in southern Bamako was restored to serve as Savama’s base. There, the slow process of making new acid-free boxes for the manuscripts and photographing them began in earnest, with Haidara recruiting a growing army of employees. Savama was now well on its way to eclipsing the state-run archive as the principal authority for Malian manuscripts.
Offers of help for the famous little city meanwhile began to flood in from all over the world. UNESCO pledged to rebuild all the demolished mausoleums; it would complete the job in the summer of 2015. An American-led initiative, the Timbuktu Renaissance Action Group, was founded with the intention of reviving Mali through its cultural heritage. Timbuktu Renaissance’s project included a deal with Google to let the company film the city for a Street View version, in which, for a fee, distant users would be able to take a virtual tour and watch footage of locals telling stories about the city. “It’s going to be a tourist tool for us,” said the Malian culture minister, N’Diaye Ramatoulaye Diallo. “They wanted to make it in a way that you can visit Timbuktu completely, you can see the manuscripts, you can visit the mosques, the monuments, everything that is in Timbuktu.” There were even plans afoot to construct the city’s first real university, at an estimated cost of $80 million, with courses in everything from literature to farming to renewable energy.
In autumn 2014, Haidara traveled to Europe to receive the prestigious German Africa Prize, in recognition of his efforts to save the manuscripts and avert an “unimaginable loss” to world heritage, and for his tireless commitment to the development and preservation of African history. Presenting the award, the German foreign minister said, “It could have had quite a different outcome, but today we are pleased that 95 percent of the manuscripts were saved.”
NOT EVERYONE CAUGHT the new outbreak of Timbuktu fever. In autumn 2015, a multinational group of Africanists gathered at the leafy campus of the University of Birmingham for a symposium in honor of the institution’s honorary senior research fellow, Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias. Academics from all over the world gathered in white-walled conference rooms to deliver presentations on subjects as diverse as Catholic missionary education in the kingdom of Kongo and the role of the West African griot. Among the delegates were leading experts on the Islamic heritage of West Africa, including Farias, Shamil Jeppie, Charles Stewart and Mauro Nobili of the University of Illinois, and Bruce Hall.
Hall, a tall, soft-spoken assistant professor from Duke University, had known Diakité, Haidara, and Hunwick since 1999, when, as a young Ph.D. student, he had spent several years in Timbuktu working with the manuscripts. He was one of the few Westerners who could read and understand the texts that filled West Africa’s Islamic libraries. Since 2013 he had become the most outspoken critic of Savama. Watching a video of Diakité’s lecture at Oregon and reading her shout-out for funding, he had felt a growing sense of frustration. He had experienced firsthand the commercialization of the private collections and the restrictions on access for researchers that often ensued. The sums Savama was trying to raise, the secrecy, and the mystic terms in which the manuscripts were being described had been red flags to Hall, who sent out a highly skeptical response to Diakité on the Mansa-1 mailing list, which went out to African studies departments around the world.
According to Hall, Diakité had mischaracterized the nature of the documents. Contrary to her claims that they were polyglot, encyclopedic, and secular in nature, 98 percent were written in literary Arabic and, apart from the many single-page letters and contracts, the vast majority were Islamic religious texts. This was not to underestimate them: “They provide a wonderfully important resource for scholars, both Malian and non-Malian, but they are best understood as the product of a wider tradition of Islamic scholarship across West Africa and the broader Muslim World,” Hall wrote. They did not need to be made into objects of veneration.
Hall continued to mine this theme in Birmingham. He was now using the F-word—“fraud”—openly. Since the founding of the Ahmad Baba center, millions of dollars had been given to people in the manuscript business, and the number of manuscripts had been inflated to attract further funding. But any group that tried to work with the documents in Timbuktu had become frustrated, he said: “The money [for Timbuktu] depends on a certain fraud, a misrepresentation of materials and amount of materials.” For Hall, 300,000 was a best guess of the “total number of Arabic manuscripts that are extant in Northern Mali altogether.” Even Haidara himself in 2011 had put the number in the whole Timbuktu region at 101,820, Hall said. Unless they were being imported on a huge scale, the number in the city itself must therefore be far lower. The state-owned Ahmad Baba institute was by far the most significant collection: if all the single-page letters, contracts, poems, and other material were counted, it might reach 30,000 items. Haidara’s was the largest private collection. Most others were small, Hall said, with the majority numbering only in the several hundreds.
At the heart of the issue of numbers lay a problem of definition. In 2000, London’s Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation had catalogued the Mamma Haidara collection and found just four thousand documents, but this did not include the large numbers of single-page bills of sale, legal judgments, and so on, each of which was now commonly defined in Timbuktu as a manuscript in itself. In my first meeting with Haidara in 2013, he had plumped for an even broader definition by scribbling on a Post-it note and declaring that, in his father’s view, even this would have been called a manuscript. For Hall, such a definition was meaningless.
Hall did not doubt that the evacuations of the old Ahmad Baba building, the Fondo Kati, or the Mamma Haidara library had taken place. “Well-placed officials in the Malian government insisted early on that the manuscripts from [the old Ahmad Baba building] were mostly safe, and that they had been hidden or smuggled out of Timbuktu during the Salafist occupation,” he wrote in a footnote to his paper. But contacts in Timbuktu had told him that many other manuscript collections had remained in the town during the occupation, and that some had been moved to Bamako only after liberation, in order to support the claims that such vast numbers had been evacuated. The story had then been grossly inflated for the international media, and the result was a huge injection of Western money into Savama.
“The narrative of rescued manuscripts is at best misleading,” he noted, “and, at worst, completely dishonest and fraudulent.”
None of the experts in the room disagreed with the substantive points of his deeply critical assessment. How, asked Tom McCaskie, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, had it come about that Timbuktu’s manuscripts had been inflated into something they were not? “Are we talking about an entire structure built on … I was going to say ‘lies,’ but I now say ‘nothing’?”
If Hall was right, the hero of Timbuktu had greatly exaggerated the scale of the rescue operation, and Savama had received money to evacuate manuscripts that had either never moved or didn’t even exist.
Reexamining the narrative of the private library evacuation with Hall’s skeptical eye turned up many unanswered questions. Putting the significant issue of the numbers aside for the moment, why had Haidara provided no eyewitnesses to corroborate the more dramatic parts of the operation, though he had repeatedly been asked for them? At first he had said that it was a matter of security; later, that people had been angry with him for giving their names to reporters. Why did some of his associates initially agree to talk, then become mysteriously unavailable? Even the most willing interviewees from the state library would clam up when asked about the evacuation of the privately owned manuscripts: “Ah, no, no, no!” one Ahmad Baba employee said, laughing. “I cannot talk about the private libraries!”
When other accounts were finally obtained, they often disagreed with Haidara’s or Diakité’s version of events, and the terrible twosome even disagreed with each other. Why, for instance, would Diakité have told Deborah Stolk that the Lere route was used just as much as the Douentza route—and that “supervisory and security personnel” were “camped out all along it”—when Haidara said it had been tried only once, and that had resulted in a hijacking? Why would Haidara initially deny the great kidnapping of twenty Niger boats, since he supposedly ransomed it “like he was using his credit card”? Why had other Niger captains who plied the river at that time not heard about this major incident, which would have had a direct bearing on their trade? Why would Diakité say that French helicopters saluted the couriers while they held up manuscripts, when Haidara said, “That’s false. That’s just commentary”?
While certain details appeared unreliable, the academics raised more fundamental questions with the Savama story. How great, really, was the jihadist threat, when all the private collections were hidden? Thomas Strieder, the German chargé d’affaires, came away from his meeting with Savama believing that documents were being destroyed “again and again,” but Haidara himself recalled only vaguely hearing of two early instances of destroyed manuscripts, which he said were “little, little things.” To Tjoelker, meanwhile, was led to believe the jihadists had promised a ceremonial book-burning, an auto-da-fé, on the day of Mawlid, and Haidara made this part of his grant request to the Dutch embassy. They needed money urgently, he wrote in his application letter, since they had to evacuate “before … 24 January next, the date at which the jihadists threaten to take action and to proceed to destroy this cultural heritage.” The correspondent of The New Republic was even told that librarians had been instructed to gather their manuscripts together for just such an occasion. Yet none of the Timbuktiens I interviewed recalled any such threat. Asked specifically if the jihadists had spoken of burning the manuscripts at Mawlid, the head of Timbuktu’s cultural mission, El-Boukhari Ben Essayouti, responded: “No, I have not heard that.” The grand imam, the man who led negotiations over Mawlid with the jihadists, and a most unimpeachable source, denied it outright: “They did not threaten to burn the manuscripts of Timbuktu,” he told me.
While the destruction of the mausoleums was evidence of the clash between the Salafists’ beliefs and those of most Timbuktiens, the jihadists’ attitude toward the manuscripts was different. Certain documents would no doubt have been viewed as haram, forbidden, but given that it could take an expert hours to decipher a single page, how likely was it that these often illiterate fighters would find time to weed out the works they disapproved of, or else burn the manuscripts wholesale, including many copies of their holiest texts? On several occasions, the jihadists had promised to protect them, and if Diadié and Sane Chirfi Alpha were correct, the Islamic Police had not even objected to their being shipped south for conservation.
And what of that widely reported act of destruction on the day of liberation itself? If Mayor Cissé really believed they had “torched all the important ancient manuscripts,” as he told the world’s media, why did it take so long to correct this mistake? Later, the Ahmad Baba institute estimated that 4,203 documents had been lost, but few seemed to believe even this many had been burned. They had probably been stolen, most said, and the fire was set to cover the theft. This seemed plausible, and could perhaps explain how 10,000 manuscripts had been left in the basement. Still, it was odd that no one seemed to care what the missing manuscripts actually were, or know which families had given them to the institute.
(Later, when I asked Haidara if he had exaggerated the threat, he responded: “If you believe that there was no threat, that’s your opinion and it does not concern us. The threat existed before Mawlid, during, and after this event. To understand this … it is sufficient to look to the case of the manuscript burnings that the world media broadcast.”)
The academics’ skepticism extended even to the biggest question of all: the manuscripts’ vaunted contents. Many of these experts thought the documents’ historical value was as overrevved as the numbers: great claims were made for the private collections, but access was so tightly controlled that few of these claims could be verified. Most damning in this regard was a new study by a South African academic of the documents Hunwick had become so excited about in the Fondo Kati, which were said to have contained the original notes for the Tarikh al-fattash. According to the study, at least some of this material had been forged.
With almost everything about the private evacuation now in doubt, I turned to the Dutch diplomats, at least three of whom—To Tjoelker, the ambassador Maarten Brouwer, and his press attaché, Mirjam Tassing—had witnessed lockers of manuscripts arriving in Bamako in early 2013. They were astonished by the accusations. Tjoelker, who had done so much to find money for Savama, produced photographs of stacks of lockers in Bamako, some of which were open and filled with manuscripts. “There were hundreds of boxes of metal lockers of the kind you would transport when you are going on a long journey. It was really very, very impressive,” she recalled. “They kept coming in and we made a very rapid count—I can’t remember how—and there were something like 150,000 manuscripts there.” Every locker was numbered, so they could tell who paid for it and which family the manuscripts came from, so they had “a registration of all those big lockers.”
Brouwer was similarly incredulous. “Whatever people are saying, I can tell you the story is for real,” he said. He was alarmed enough by Hall’s accusations, however, to make inquiries of his own. He met with Haidara and was shown the contents of his Bamako safe houses, where many of the manuscripts were still being stored. The result was conclusive, he wrote in an e-mail:
We observed a large quantity of manuscripts that were already inventoried and/or registered, in total 110,000. This number would equal an estimated 800–1000 containers. We have seen ourselves roughly 1300 full containers with manuscripts not yet unpacked, making a total of 2100–2300 containers. Of course these are rough calculations, but we feel comfortable to say that the total of 2400 mentioned by Haidara is most certainly correct. We visited all seven locations within a timespan of three hours and no containers have been moved in the meantime … At all locations we opened some containers and boxes, and manuscripts were inside. We lifted containers to check if they were full or not and all were fully loaded.
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.