My account of Timbuktu in 2012–2013 is drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews conducted in Mali, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and South Africa between 2013 and 2016. Supporting material, including correspondence, reports, and grant applications, was provided by foreign ministries and donor organizations, often willingly, and occasionally under Freedom of Information legislation. The narrative of exploration, meanwhile, is drawn from the rich range of works written by explorers and their sponsors. The African Association was diligent in documenting its purpose and activities, issuing Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa periodically to members. These were made publicly available in a two-volume edition in 1810, and in 1964 were collected by Robin Hallett, along with other papers from the association, and published as Records of the African Association 1788–1831, with an insightful introductory history of the organization. Papers relating to other West African explorers, Alexander Gordon Laing in particular, were definitively compiled by the amateur historian E. W. Bovill in his series Missions to the Niger. In addition to these works, I returned again and again to a handful of more recent sources. Chief among them were translations of the Timbuktu scholars, including John Hunwick’s Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, which provides the most authoritative translation of the Tarikh al-sudan, and Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse’s earlier translations into French of the Tarikh al-sudan (Houdas) and the Tarikh al-fattash (Houdas and Delafosse). Pekka Masonen’s The Negroland Revisited provides one of the few detailed narrative accounts of Europe’s relationship with the region, while Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias’s Arabic Medieval Inscriptions from the Republic of Mali is a salutory warning that the history of Timbuktu is in a state of perpetual flux.
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND NAMES
As readers of early drafts of this book pointed out, there are few greater obstacles to cross-cultural understanding than a profusion of unfamiliar names or foreign words with unrecognized diacritical marks. So although I have opted to follow the style used by the journal Sudanic Africa for Arabic transliteration, I have removed some of these marks, including in quoted passages, in an attempt to simplify the experience of the general reader.
Names of people and places have provided a particular challenge, since they have often been romanized differently in different languages. This has created some inconsistencies: I have used the English spelling “Timbuktu,” for instance, as opposed to the Francophone “Tombouctou,” but have spelled the name of modern Malians who share their name with that of the Prophet as “Mohamed,” the way they would spell it, and not as the standard English “Muhammad,” which is the spelling used for historical figures. The relatively small pool of surnames in Mali, meanwhile, has made a mockery of the Western style of using the last name on second mention. (In this story, there are at least five Haidaras, four Maigas, and five Tourés.) Malians get around this by using a variety of names or name combinations. The country’s current leader, President Keita, for example, is known universally as Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, or IBK, and his predecessor Amadou Toumani Touré as ATT. Nicknames—such as “Jansky,” “Air Mali,” and even “John Travolta”—are also widely adopted, and are sometimes printed on people’s business cards.
My guiding principle has been to try to make everything as straightforward as possible for the reader, without intending any disrespect.
PROLOGUE: A MAN OF ENTERPRISE AND GENIUS
For E. W. Bovill, Alexander Gordon Laing was “the most neglected of the African explorers,” partly because he did not survive to tell his tale, and partly because his journal was not recovered. My account of his expedition to Timbuktu is drawn largely from his papers, which I found in the British National Archives (“Major Laing’s Mission to Timbuctoo: Papers Relating to His Death”) and in Missions to the Niger, volume 1, edited by Bovill. Details of Laing’s early life have been drawn from Robert Chambers, A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, volume 3, and from Christopher Fyfe’s entry on him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. An entertaining modern retelling of his story can be found in Frank T. Kryza’s The Race for Timbuktu.
Bruce Chatwin’s reflections on “Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, Tumbuktu or Tembuch?” were published as “Gone to Timbuctoo” in Vogue in 1970 and later included in his Anatomy of Restlessness.
The excerpt from The Thousand and One Nights is drawn from Edward William Lane’s 1841 translation.
The accounts of Abdel Kader Haidara’s childhood and early life, and his actions on March 30, 2012, are derived largely from many interviews with him. He included a brief portrait of his father’s career and the history of the Mamma Haidara library in his essay “An Overview of the Major Manuscript Libraries in Timbuktu.” His childhood friend Sane Chirfi Alpha picked out the visit to Timbuktu by Amadou Hampâté Bâ as the moment Haidara identified his purpose in life. Anyone seeking a detailed exploration of the country’s culture and West African Islam could do no better than read Hampâté Bâ’s A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar.
The group of which Haidara is executive president is the Organisation Non Gouvernementale pour la Sauvegarde et la Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Défense de la Culture Islamique (SAVAMA-DCI), referred to generally as Savama. The manuscript research institute founded in Timbuktu was called the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba, or CEDRAB, but was later renamed the Institut des Hautes Études et de Recherche Islamique Ahmad Baba, or IHERIAB. For simplicity, I have used neither of these official names but have referred to it as the Ahmad Baba center or institute. Minutes of the founding meeting were published in “Report of the UNESCO Meeting of Experts on the Utilisation of Written Sources for the History of Africa Held at Timbuktu” in 1968, and its early history was recounted by John Hunwick in “CEDRAB: The Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba at Timbuktu,” and in Louis Brenner and David Robinson, “Project for the Conservation of Malian Arabic Manuscripts.” Hunwick noted the presence on the center’s staff of “a young sharif,” Haidara, who had inherited a considerable library from his father and carried out “prospection campaigns” in the city to establish lists of manuscripts that were available for purchase. Details of Haidara’s work as a manuscript prospector, including the figure of 16,000 manuscripts collected in twelve years, come from interviews with him and from the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town (tombouctoumanuscripts.org).
Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1963 comments on African history are in cited in M. E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa, among other sources. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s visit to Timbuktu was documented in the PBS film Wonders of the African World. The PBS microsite www.pbs.org/wonders has further information about Gates’s journeys, including extracts from his diaries. Thabo Mbeki’s pronouncement that the manuscripts opened up possibilities for thinking in new ways about the world was delivered on August 7, 2008, at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town. I found the full text on the website of the Presidency of South Africa, at http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/pebble.asp?relid=3336. John Hunwick, Sean O’Fahey, and David Robinson were quoted in Ron Grossman’s article “African Manuscripts Rewriting History: Northwestern Professor Uncovers 16th Century Writings by a Black African That Contradict Many Western Preconceptions.”
The 2011 claim of more than 100,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu’s collections is from Haidara’s “An Overview of the Major Manuscript Libraries in Timbuktu.” He writes that “the most recent surveys suggest the existence of about one million manuscripts preserved in several private and public libraries [in Timbuktu and surrounding areas]. The most important of them in Timbuktu hold a total of no less than 101,820 manuscripts.” Haidara later told me that this represented only the number that had been tallied by that time.
An authoritative take on the causes of the 2012 Malian conflict can be found in the International Crisis Group report Mali, Avoiding Escalation. Judith Scheele describes the scale of the desert’s black economy in Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara, in detail worth recounting: “Flour, pasta and petrol come down from Algeria on small jeeps, on antique trucks, or even on the backs of camels and donkeys. Livestock and cigarettes come up from Mali. . . . Veils, perfumes, jewellery, incense and furniture arrive from southern Morocco and Mauritania, places at the forefront of feminine fashion with harbours wide open to Chinese imports; these commodities are often traded by women. . . . Narcotics arrive from Mauritania, via the Western Sahara, or from the Gulf of Guinea, and travel themselves around the southern tip of Algeria through Niger and Chad to Egypt, and thence to Israel and Europe. Arms come up from long-standing crisis zones, such as Chad, or are unloaded in the large ports of the Gulf of Guinea and are sold throughout the area.”
Details of the establishment of the African Association and its early exploits are drawn from Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, and from Robin Hallett, Records of the African Association 1788–1831, which gives a clear picture of what was known in Europe about the continent and why Joseph Banks and his associates wanted to explore it. A colorful modern retelling of the association’s activities can be found in Anthony Sattin’s The Gates of Africa.
Banks has been the subject of several biographies, among them Harold B. Carter’s Sir Joseph Banks 1743–1820 and Joseph Banks: A Life by Patrick O’Brian, a writer best known for his Aubrey–Maturin seafaring novels. Some 20,000 pieces of Banks’s correspondence are said to survive; many of these have been collected by Neil Chambers in The Letters of Sir Joseph Banks: A Selection 1768–1820.
The scientist’s own observations on visiting the African continent in 1771 can be read in The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks. Jonathan Swift’s thoughts on African maps are part of his 1733 poem “On Poetry: A Rhapsody.” Horace Walpole’s remarks about James Bruce’s exploits in Ethiopia can be found in Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann: His Britannic Majesty’s Resident at the Court of Florence, from 1760 to 1785, volume 2. The English merchant’s comments on the significance of the African trade are drawn from John Peter Demarin’s anonymously published A Treatise upon the Trade from Great-Britain to Africa, Humbly Recommended to the Attention of Government, by an African Merchant.
The various theories of the origins of Timbuktu’s name have been explored by Riccardo Pelizzo in his article “Timbuktu: A Lesson in Underdevelopment” and by Sékéné Mody Cissoko in Toumbouctou et l’empire Songhay. Sources on the geography of the Niger bend include John Hunwick’s Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire and Sanche de Gramont’s The Strong Brown God. The climate history of the Sahara is explored in Susan Keech McIntosh and Roderick McIntosh, “West African Prehistory,” which presents evidence that between 8000 and 5500 BCE the Sahara was a mosaic of shallow lakes and marshes, roamed by elephant, giraffe, rhinoceros, and crocodile. Evidence for this Saharan “green period” was found by Heinrich Barth in June 1850, in the form of prehistoric rock carvings of hunters and oxen in the arid central desert.
My summary of classical geographers’ knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa is drawn from Hallett’s Records and from C. K. Meek, “The Niger and the Classics: The History of a Name.” Further information about the trans-Saharan gold trade can be found in Ward Barrett, “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” and Ian Blanchard’s Mining, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, volume 3. The marvel that is Abraham Cresques’s 1375 map, the Catalan Atlas, which contains the first representation of Timbuktu in Europe, is in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and can be viewed online at gallica.bnf.fr.
Quotations from Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa are from John Hunwick’s translation, found in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire. The “architect of Béticos” who built the Jingere Ber mosque is often said to have been the Andalusian man of letters Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, one of several educated Muslims who returned from Mecca with Mansa Musa (for more on al-Sahili, see here). There was no “king of Timbuktu,” as such, and Leo was probably referring to Askiya al-hajj Muhammad, who reigned at Gao.
Richard Jobson’s exploits were recorded in The Golden Trade; Or, A Discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians, first published in 1623. The growth of Timbuktu’s allure in the European imagination is drawn in part from Pekka Masonen, The Negroland Revisited, as well as Eugenia Herbert’s “Timbuktu: A Case Study of the Role of Legend in History.” The metaphor of Timbuktu as the magnet that drew Europeans to West Africa was coined by A. S. Kanya-Forstner in The Conquest of the Western Sudan. The wonderfully pithy put-down of African exploration—“There was nothing to discover, we were here all the time”—has been attributed to a former president of Malawi, Hastings Banda.
The naive explorer’s kit—little more than a pistol and an umbrella—is drawn from Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, although Park also carried “a small assortment of beads, amber and tobacco . . . a few changes of linen, and other necessary apparel . . . [a] pocket sextant, a magnetic compass, and a thermometer; together with two fowling pieces, two pairs of pistols, and some other small articles.” Later explorers would set out with more extensive resources, though few returned with them.
For data on European death rates in West Africa, see Philip D. Curtin’s Disease and Empire and “The End of the ‘White Man’s Grave’? Nineteenth-Century Mortality in West Africa.” In the lecture “Rivers of Death in Africa,” Michael Gelfand stated that “there is no other illness I know that humbles a clinician as greatly as [malaria],” and estimated that 80 percent of the Europeans in Mungo Park’s second expedition died from it.
John Ledyard’s life story was compiled by Jared Sparks in 1828, in Memoirs of the Life and Travels of John Ledyard from His Journals and Correspondence. Ledyard’s canoe journey down the Connecticut River inspired the creation of the Ledyard Canoe Club at Dartmouth College in 1920; it still runs paddling trips in New England. Ledyard’s last mission is documented in Proceedings and in Hallett, Records. Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on meeting John Ledyard can be found in the third U.S. president’s Autobiography.
The dunetop negotiation of Friday, March 30, 2012, was related to me by Kader Kalil and Boubacar “Jansky” Mahamane, who was also present, and by Mayor Halle Ousmane Cissé, Diadié Hamadoun Maiga, and Governor Mamadou Mangara, who were told what had happened. According to Kalil, the idea for a meeting was floated by leaders of the Arab militia; without exception among my interviewees in Timbuktu it was seen as a trick to ensure that the southerners, and the military, left without a fight. Jansky believed the strange circumstances of the meeting were a deliberate tactic to mystify the delegates: it was “a joke, a great production,” he said. It seems that the junta had already ordered a withdrawal anyway; according to a soldier in the reinforcement column from Niafounke, as soon as the troops reached Timbuktu they were told to retreat toward Sevare. Governor Mangara said of the decision to abandon the city: “After the coup d’état there was no immediate force that could defend it in a way that was suitable, despite the desire that was there.” Gaston Damango declined to be interviewed.
In addition to the interviewees mentioned in the text, I have used a few published sources for the events of April 1, including Houday Ag Mohamed’s Tombouctou 2012: La ville sainte dans les ténèbres du jihadisme. The resident who recalled grenades falling from a pickup like mangoes from a tree was speaking to researchers from Human Rights Watch, who included it in the organization’s 2012 report Mali: War Crimes by Northern Rebels. The MNLA’s statements from the period can be read in large part in the archives of the Toumast Press website. There are two aspects of the day’s events worth noting here: First, several theories exist about why the ammunition store in the army camp exploded; without being able to find an eyewitness, I have gone with the theories of Jansky and Ag Mohamed, who agree that someone was trying to shoot the lock off. Second, there were differing accounts of how the young man was killed; some say he was hit by a shell fragment. Fatouma Harber’s account, however, seems reliable, as she was with him minutes before he died.
Jenny Blincoe and the community of the NaturePlus program at London’s Natural History Museum helped identify the Madagascar periwinkle, Catharanthus roseus, in the garden of the Hôtel Bouctou, from photographs.
More detailed accounts of the extraordinary lives and travels of Simon Lucas and Daniel Houghton can be found in Proceedings of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa and in Robin Hallett, Records of the African Association 1788–1831. The account of Mungo Park’s first journey, drawn from interviews by the African Association’s Bryan Edwards and published in Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, is still an easy and unpretentious read. Christopher Fyfe’s entry on Park in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that some readers of his Travels were disconcerted that he failed to condemn slavery explicitly, and indeed he lived for some time with two slavers, Dr. John Laidley and Karfa Taura. Nevertheless, as Pekka Masonen has pointed out, on this first journey he seems to have encountered African people without many of the prejudices of earlier or later generations. The Duchess of Devonshire’s rewriting of the hospitable Bambara girls’ song can be found in Lindley Murray’s Introduction to the English Reader; or, A Selection of Pieces, in Prose and Poetry . . . with Rules and Observations for Assisting Children to Read with Propriety (first published 1816). Two likenesses of Park are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The first, painted around the time of his first voyage, shows a bold, blue-eyed young adventurer; the second, painted around 1805 by the satirist Thomas Rowlandson, shows an aging, balding individual who appears to have a broken nose. Joseph Banks’s remarks at the Star and Garter in 1799 are recorded in Proceedings. The account of Park’s second journey and death is from “Isaaco’s Journal of a Voyage After Mr. Mungo Park, to Ascertain His Life or Death” and Park, The Life and Travels of Mungo Park.
Park’s voyages played a key part in building the Timbuktu myth, according to E. W. Bovill, and in driving other explorers toward it. Banks in particular was quite carried away by Park’s account of “gold in abundance in all the torrents that flow into the Joliba.”
Reliable information about jihadist groups in the Sahara is hard to come by, but I found interviews and the following sources useful: Wolfram Lacher, “Organized Crime and Conflict in the Sahel-Sahara Region”; Andrew Lebovich, “The Local Face of Jihadism in Northern Mali”; Stephen Harmon, Terror and Insurgency in the Sahara-Sahel Region; and Mohammed Mahmoud Abu al-Ma’ali’s report “Al-Qaeda and Its Allies in the Sahel and the Sahara.” The biographies of several of the most wanted jihadists can be found in the American Foreign Policy Council’s World Almanac of Islamism. The U.S. diplomat’s cable describing Iyad Ag Ghaly as a “bad penny” can be found on the WikiLeaks website. For a hostage’s firsthand view of living with jihadist brigades in the desert, see A Season in Hell by Robert Fowler, a Canadian diplomat who was kidnapped in 2008.
Sanda Ould Bouamama’s complaints about the conditions in the looted city were published by the Al-Akhbar news agency: “You know that we came here late, and found the city partly destroyed. . . . Many of the institutions were plundered, and its headquarters were smashed, and its cars stolen.” Iyad Ag Ghaly’s declaration of sharia was published in Arabic by the Nouakchott News Agency; I have used an English translation by Aaron Y. Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute. The Bamako paper La nouvelle république reported Kalil’s interview with Ag Ghaly on April 4 and summarized it as blaming “all the misfortune of the people [on] their lack of faith in God and [on the fact they had] abandoned the practice of sharia, which has been transformed under the guidance of white Westerners. . . . Because of that there is misery, debauchery, and other scourges [on] our society.” Kalil and Mayor Cissé both spoke to the Associated Press for a piece titled “Islamists Impose Sharia in Mali’s Timbuktu.” Kalil said that under sharia, women would be forced to wear the Salafist veil, thieves would be punished by having their hands cut off, and adulterers would be stoned to death. “Things are going to heat up here,” said Mayor Cissé. “Our women are not going to wear the veil just like that.”
The 1823 British expedition to Africa that inspired a response from the Société de Géographie included Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton, and Walter Oudney. In The Bornu Mission, volume 2 of Missions to the Niger, E. W. Bovill observed that “it remains difficult to recall in all the checkered history of geographic discovery . . . a more odious man than Dixon Denham.” Clapperton, by contrast, was a successful and respected explorer whom Alexander Gordon Laing would regard as his closest rival in the race for Timbuktu.
Details of the Société de Géographie’s snowballing Timbuktu prize are found in the relevant issues of the society’s Bulletin.
For the principal sources for Alexander Gordon Laing’s journey, see the notes to the prologue. It is worth clarifying here the identities of the Kunta Arab shaykhs, who sometimes confused Laing. The “Cheif Maraboot Mouckta” to whom Babani was supposed to deliver the explorer was probably the scholar Shaykh Sidi al-Mukhtar, who had died in 1811, leaving more than eight children. His son Shaykh Sidi Muhammad, who received the injured Laing in 1826, died of a fever later that year. Next in line was al-Mukhtar al-Saghir, who enabled Laing to continue to Timbuktu and eventually wrote to the pasha about the explorer’s death. Al-Mukhtar al-Saghir died in 1846 or 1847 and was succeeded by his younger brother Ahmad al-Bakkai, who lived until 1865. This family represented something of a mini-renaissance in the scholarly activities of the region. More details of their lives and works can be found in Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Meanings of Timbuktu.
Baron Rousseau’s letter announcing the death of Laing, first published in L’étoile on May 2, 1827, and datelined Sukkara-Ley-Tripoli, begins: “Major Laing, whose tragic end has been announced, perished as a result of his courageous perseverance after having nevertheless been able to visit the famous town of Timbuktu.” It can be found in E. W. Bovill’s Missions to the Niger, volume 1. The baron’s mention of a “detailed history of the town,” probably a reference to the Tarikh al-sudan, is in a letter published in the Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, volume 7, while excerpts from letters on the history of “Sidi Ali Baba of Arawan,” dated March 3 and June 12, 1828, can be found in volume 9. Baron Rousseau described Timbuktu as having become for Europeans what the enchanted pleasure city of Irem-Zatilemad was to the ancient Arabs, or the fountain of youth to Eastern mythology. It was Rousseau who appears to have first used the adjective “mysterious” to describe the city.
Réné Caillié’s account of his successful visit to Timbuktu—and his critique that “the city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth”—is told in English in Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo. The 1830 edition is prefaced by a survey of the awful toll of African explorers: “In vain, however, have Houghton, Browne, Hornemann, and Park—in vain have their successors, our countrymen, Tuckey, Peddie, Campbell, Gray, Ritchie, Bowdich, Oudney, Clapperton, Denham and Laing—in vain have other European travellers, Burkhardt, Beaufort, Mollien, Belzoni, started from different points of the coast of Africa, animated with the hope of removing the veil which enveloped the mysterious city:—all have either perished or been baffled in the attempt.”
The critical reception of the French edition of Caillié’s book was published in The Quarterly Review in 1830. In “Timbuktu: A Case Study of the Role of Legend in History,” Eugenia Herbert summarizes the British response to Caillié: “There is no need to repeat the arrogant incredulity with which the news was received in Britain, the bitter charges made against [Edme-François] Jomard, his champion and the president of the Société de Géographie, or the insinuations in some quarters that the entire story was a fabrication drawn from the papers of the murdered Laing. The sad truth was that Laing had been cast in a heroic mold befitting the conqueror of Timbuktu and Caillié was uneducated, a provincial, a man obsessed, acting entirely on his own. Not until [Heinrich] Barth verified the essentials twenty years later was Caillié grudgingly given his due in England.”
According to estimates at measuringworth.com, Caillié’s 10,000 franc prize would be worth roughly $60,000 today, while the Peddie expedition’s 1816 budget of £750,000 is the equivalent of around $72 million currently.
The mystery of what had become of Laing’s papers rumbled on for another century. In 1910, a further account of Laing’s death was given to the French explorer Albert Bonnel de Mézières. He found an eighty-two-year-old Barabish Arab who had been brought up by his uncle Ahmadu Labeida. The old man told Bonnel de Mézières that Labeida had often told him how and where he had killed Laing. In this account, Labeida and three other men on horseback caught up with Laing while he was resting in the shade of a tree and asked him to renounce his faith and become a Muslim. Laing refused, and Labeida ordered the other men to kill him. They hesitated, so Labeida had to stab him himself while the other three held Laing’s arms. They also killed the Arab boy who accompanied Laing, and cut off the explorer’s head before burning all his papers in case they contained magic.
Bonnel de Mézières found two buried skeletons at the spot he had been shown. Medical officers in Timbuktu examined the remains and confirmed that they had belonged to a European adult and an Arab youth. They were buried in the local Christian cemetery.
Joshua Hammer’s recent book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts contains a claim that Laing’s journals are in the Mamma Haidara collection. “One of his father’s most prized works was the original travel diary of Major Alexander Gordon Laing. . . . A few years after Laing’s murder, a scribe had written a primer of Arabic grammar over the explorer’s papers—an early example of recycling.” This would be remarkable if true: Dmitry Bondarev of the University of Hamburg, who is working closely with Haidara, told me it was a “shaky claim.”
Ismael Diadié Haidara’s comment “We do not know really what is happening” was made to Valérie Marin La Meslée and published in “Tombouctou, patrimoine mondial aux mains des islamistes?” Warnings about the manuscripts’ future are culled from various news sources: UNESCO chief Irina Bokova sent out her warning on April 2, 2012; the petition to preserve the manuscripts circulated by the West African Research Association can be found at http://www.bu.edu/wara/timbuktu/; Shamil Jeppie was quoted as saying, “I have no faith in the rebels,” in Pascal Fletcher, “Timbuktu Librarians Protect Manuscripts from Rebels”; Hamady Bocoum’s words about the secular order were published in Serge Daniel, “Timbuktu’s History at Risk As Rebellion Moves In.”
Evidence of a long-standing threat against secular education in Mali can be found in Amnesty International’s report Mali: Five Months of Crisis: Armed Rebellion and Military Coup. A resident of Timbuktu told Amnesty’s researchers that AQIM had sent several warnings to teachers forbidding them to instruct pupils in French, starting in 2008. Other educators told me in interviews that girls and boys had to be separated, and that early on, certain subjects were removed from the curriculum.
The figure of approximately half a million refugees or internally displaced from northern Mali in 2012 is taken from the International Organization for Migration report The Mali Migration Crisis at a Glance. According to the IOM, by March 2013, a total of 175,412 people had been forced to flee to other countries, and 260,665 were internally displaced. The pre-crisis population of the north as a whole was estimated at 1.3 million.
The account of Ismael Diadié Haidara’s departure from Timbuktu is his own. It corresponds with what he told Susana Molins Lliteras of Cape Town University, who has worked closely on the Fondo Kati collection and who verified his smuggling of four manuscripts south. According to her article “The Making of the Fondo Ka‘ti Archive: A Family Collection in Timbuktu,” these included a Kuran dating from 1482 and three manuscripts with marginal notes written, Ismael said, by famous ancestors.
There is some discrepancy in the timing of the hiding of other libraries. Mohamed Touré of the Mamma Haidara library said he had begun to take manuscripts off the shelves on the night of Saturday, March 30, 2012, after discussing the matter on the phone with Abdel Kader Haidara, who was in Bamako that morning. Haidara denied this, and said no manuscripts were moved until at least a week later. Haidara also disputed Mohamed Cissé’s timing on the move of the al-Wangari library, saying it was moved on the eve of the occupation rather than afterward. Since it was Cissé who evacuated the al-Wangari manuscripts, I have gone with his version of events.
The jihadist Adama was colorfully profiled by La dépêche in “Révélations sur les hommes qui sèment la terreur au nord Mali”: “Known by the name Commissioner Adama, for having protected the people of the town at a certain time against the looters of the MNLA . . . Of Chadian nationality, he was always noticeable in the town for his particular style of dress: cartridge belt, explosive vest, and Kalashnikov on his shoulder.”
The Ford Foundation confirmed it had indeed awarded a grant to Haidara to learn English at Oxford.
The footage shot by the Al Jazeera crew on Saturday, April 14, showing the Mamma Haidara library empty, was available online. The Manuscrits de Tombouctou Facebook account, run by Haidara’s assistant, Banzoumana Traoré, referred to Al Jazeera’s visit in a posting on April 18, and said the manuscripts had been moved by this time: “At the level of private libraries . . . particularly Mamma Haidara and Imam Ben Essayouti, which contain a large amount of manuscripts . . . the manuscripts were transferred to other premises away from the usual depositories.”
Several days after he was barred from the building, Abdoulaye Cissé was told that Abou Zeid was staying inside “with his people.” The AQIM emir had his hostages there too, Cissé was told, including for a time a Swiss national, Beatrice Stockly. According to the tourist guide Bastos, Stockly was also briefly held in the bank opposite his house. She was released, after a ransom was reportedly paid, on Tuesday, April 24. She returned to Timbuktu and was abducted again by AQIM in January 2016.
The quotation from Omar Khayyám, a favorite of the late Christopher Hitchens, is with Richard Le Gallienne’s paraphrasing.
I owe William Desborough Cooley’s presence in the narrative to Pekka Masonen, who gives him “the real honour of establishing [the] modern historiography of Sudanic Africa” and describes his book The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained as “epoch-making.” Aside from Masonen, and Cooley’s own work, I have drawn from R. C. Bridges, “W. D. Cooley, the RGS and African Geography in the Nineteenth Century,” and Bridges’s entry on Cooley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Cooley’s review of Jean-Baptiste Douville’s three-volume Voyage au Congo et dans l’intérieur de l’Afrique équinoxiale was published in The Foreign Quarterly Review in 1832. The Arab sources Cooley used, including al-Bakri and Ibn Khaldun, are in N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History. John Ralph Willis was writing in the introduction to the 1966 edition of Cooley’s Negroland of the Arabs.
The description of life for the librarians in Bamako in May 2012 is drawn from interviews with all three. Their accounts largely correlated. According to UNESCO’s press office, the high-level meeting in Bamako from May 18 to 20 was attended by UNESCO’s assistant director-general for Africa, Lalla Aicha Ben Barka, and the director of its World Heritage Centre, Kishore Rao, who met senior government officials, among them the interim prime minister, Cheick Modibo Diarra, and the culture minister, Diallo Fadima Touré. The account of what happened at the meeting is Abdel Kader Haidara’s.
Acts of brutality by the rebels in the occupied north were documented by Human Rights Watch in its April 2012 report Mali: War Crimes by Northern Rebels. These acts included the alleged gang rape of a twelve-year-old girl in Timbuktu by three Arab militiamen, though I have not independently verified this.
My description of the creeping radicalization of Timbuktu is based chiefly on interviews, in particular with Mohamed “Hamou” Dédéou, a respected Timbuktu scholar who works with manuscripts, who told me the visits of Salafist preachers began in the 1990s. Many Timbuktiens like to emphasize the foreignness of the jihadists, though there were many influential Malians and Timbuktiens among them, including Oumar Ould Hamaha, Mohamed Ag Mossa, Ag Alfousseyni Houka (“Houka Houka”), and Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, known also by the jihadist name Abou Turab. Al-Mahdi, who is described in some reports as Houka Houka’s son-in-law, was indicted in 2015 by the International Criminal Court for the war crime of attacking religious and historical buildings in Timbuktu. He was sent to The Hague, where on August 22, 2016, he pleaded guilty to all charges against him and sought the forgiveness of the people of Timbuktu. “I would like them to look at me as a son who has lost his way,” he said. He was subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison. Transcripts of evidence given at the trial can be found on the ICC’s website, at www.icc-cpi.int (see especially https://www.icc-cpi.int/Transcripts/CR2016_05767.PDF). A film portrait of al-Mahdi’s time as a leader of Timbuktu’s Islamic Police, made by the journalist Othman Agh Mohamed Othman of Sahara Media, Mali sous le régime des islamistes, was broadcast as a special report on France 2 on January 31, 2013. It can be found online.
There was some confusion among interviewees as to who led the Islamic Police during the occupation. It seems clear that al-Mahdi and Mossa were in charge of the Hizba, or morality brigade, at different moments. According to both Kader Kalil and transcripts of the ICC trial of al-Mahdi, the now dead Chadian Adama was initially head of the Islamic Police. The Malian reporter Baba Ahmed, in “Mali: Le fantômes de Tomboctou,” meanwhile, describes a man named Khoubey as commissioner, with Hassan Dicko as “superintendent”; and according to Diadié Hamadoun Maiga of the Crisis Committee, at the end of the occupation Hassan was the commissioner. It appears the Hizba was separate or a subdivision of the Islamic Police, and that four or five different jihadists occupied these leadership roles at different times.
For the description of al-Farouk’s role in Timbuktu, I am indebted to Miranda Dodd, a former Peace Corps volunteer who lived in the city for many years and married a Tuareg chief, poet, and historian. Her Explore Timbuktu website was a useful source for local traditions, while Bruce Hall told me that the legend exists in other parts of the world, and is an Islamic idea given a Timbuktu gloss. Explaining the mausoleums’ “spiritual rampart,” Sane Chirfi Alpha related that an army colonel told him that in 1992 rebels had fired enough grenades and rockets to blow up the city, but no damage was done: “The colonel never understood how . . . they were all thrown and not a single one exploded,” Alpha said. “He said he could not scientifically explain it.”
The aptly named Mohamed Kassé was interviewed on video by Cheikh Diouara, who gave me the footage, which can also be found on the Al Jazeera website. The April 21, 2012, march on the military camp was reported in Aljimite Ag Mouchallatte, “Tombouctou: Manifestation anti Ansar Adine/AQMI ce weekend.” The account of the Friday, May 4, attack on the tomb of Sidi Mahmud is drawn from contemporary news reports, including “Mali Islamist Militants ‘Destroy’ Timbuktu Saint’s Tomb” and “Mali: Un mausolée profané par Aqmi à Tombouctou,” and from UNESCO’s Decisions Adopted by the World Heritage Committee at Its 36th Session. Baba Akib Haidara and Cheikh Oumar Sissoko were interviewed for “Mali: L’indignation des artistes et intellectuels après les profanations de Tombouctou.” The city’s May 14 cry for help was published on tombouctoumanuscripts.org and elsewhere. Hamaha’s explanation of the Salafists’ belief in low-level tombs was recorded by Diouara. Abdel Kader Haidara revealed his fears about Mawlid to me in interviews, while the festival itself was explained to me by Ismael Diadié Haidara and by Fatouma Harber.
Students of Heinrich Barth are lucky to have a recent account of his life and expedition to Central Africa in Steve Kemper’s A Labyrinth of Kingdoms, from which the translations of Gustav von Schubert, Barth’s brother-in-law, are drawn. Other details of Barth’s life come from A. H. M. Kirk-Greene’s introduction to Barth’s Travels in Nigeria and from Heinrich Barth: Ein Forscher in Afrika, edited by Heinrich Schiffers. The greatest source on Barth is, of course, the explorer’s own monumental Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. The Longman edition (1857–1858) contains evocative color illustrations by Johann Martin Bernatz, which are based on Barth’s sketches. It can be viewed online on the British Library website, at www.bl.uk.
The italics in Barth’s “to be useful to humanity” are mine.
The review of Barth’s Wanderings Along the Punic and Cyrenaic Shores of the Mediterranean (Wanderungen durch das punische und kyrenäische Küstenland; the book was published in German only) appeared in The Athenæum in 1850.
James Richardson’s eight volumes of journals were published posthumously as Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850–51. Richardson was deeply interested in the people who made up his expedition, and to a modern reader his account is more gossipy and somewhat more engaging than Barth’s. G. W. Crowe’s opinion of Richardson is cited in Kemper, A Labyrinth of Kingdoms.
John Nicholson’s translations of two poems written by al-Bakkai to the sultan of Masina in defense of Barth were included as an appendix in the explorer’s Travels.
The opinion that Barth’s portrait of the economic life of the historic city would not be bettered is from Elias Saad’s Social History of Timbuktu. Details of the funeral in which Barth’s grieving relatives buried all the still-living explorer’s possessions are found in Kemper, A Labyrinth of Kingdoms.
Eduard Vogel did not return alive to Europe. He was murdered in 1856 in Wara, the capital of Waday, by the sultan of that kingdom.
The connection between the cultural destruction and UNESCO was well understood by Timbuktiens. “Every time UNESCO spoke about the manuscripts, we told them, ‘No, no, really, do not speak about them, because if you do, this is how [the jihadists] will react,’” said Sane Chirfi Alpha. The United Nations body was nevertheless in a difficult position, as director-general Irina Bokova explained to me in 2016: “I know there is this thinking that we don’t have to tease them, we have to appease them . . . [but] we have to speak out.”
There are numerous contemporary news reports of the battle of Gao, including “Nord du Mali: Gao est aux mains des islamistes.” The best sources for the account of the destruction in Timbuktu, meanwhile, are the videos shot by journalists who had been told in advance what was going to happen. The smashing of the Sidi Yahya door can be seen in Othman Agh Mohamed Othman’s film Mali sous le régime des islamistes (Sahara Media). Sanda Ould Bouamama’s question “UNESCO is what?” was reported by Serge Daniel in “Mausolées détruits au Mali: Bamako dénonce une furie destructrice.” Hamaha was cited by Julius Cavendish in “Destroying Timbuktu: The Jihadist Who Inspires the Demolition of the Shrines.” Transcripts from the ICC trial of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi (especially “23 August 2016 | Trial Chamber VIII | Transcript,” https://www.icc-cpi.int/Transcripts/CR2016_05767.PDF; and “24 August 2016 | Trial Chamber VIII | Transcript,” https://www.icc-cpi.int/Transcripts/CR2016_05772.PDF) were also useful in reconstructing those days.
Reaction to the destruction has been culled from contemporary news reports, including “Mali Separatists Ready to Act over Destruction of Tombs” and “Destruction des mausolées de Tombouctou: Un ‘crime de guerre’ selon la CPI.” Pages from the memo penned by Abdelmalek Droukdel were authenticated by the French counterterrorism expert Mathieu Guidère. Portions appeared in Rukmini Callimachi, “In Timbuktu, al Qaida Left Behind a Manifesto,” and Jean-Louis Le Touzet, “La feuille de route d’Aqmi au Mali,” while the full eighty-page document was published in Nicolas Champeaux, “Le projet du chef d’Aqmi pour le Mali.” Details of the fractious relationship between Droukdel and Belmokhtar are analyzed by Guidère in “The Timbuktu Letters: New Insights about AQIM.”
According to Haidara, Maiga and Ismael accompanied him to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, where they met with the ministry’s secretary-general, the adviser in charge of the Ahmad Baba institute, and the national director of higher education.
Haidara did not want to give the name of the friend who paid for his ticket to Geneva, or of other contacts he met there.
The account of the Ahmad Baba rescue operation was related to me principally by Alkadi Maiga, Bouya Haidara, Hassini Traoré, Mohamed Diagayeté, and Abdel Kader Haidara. Their individual accounts agreed in most significant aspects. The “little cocktail” at which the men from the ministry were shown the evacuated manuscripts was confirmed by the civil servant responsible for the Ahmad Baba institute, Drissa Diakité. The minister in charge of the institute at this time, who berated Maiga for moving the manuscripts without permission, was Harouna Kanté.
The quotations from Juma al-Majid were remembered by Abdel Kader Haidara, although the Juma al-Majid Center confirmed its contribution to the evacuation.
Heinrich Barth’s letter of December 15, 1853, announcing the discovery of the Tarikh al-sudan was published in 1855 as “Schreiben des Dr. Barth an Prof. Rödiger” in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. Christian Ralfs’s “Beiträge zur Geschichte und Geographie des Sudan, Eingesandt von Dr. Barth” appeared later in the same publication.
Abd al-Rahman al-Sadi described the first settlers of Timbuktu as both Tuareg and Massufa. According to John Hunwick in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, the chronicler conflated distinct Berber groups: the Massufa were part of the great tribal federation known as the Sanhaja, who dominated the Timbuktu region and spoke Znaga, while the Tuareg speak Tamasheq, a different Berber dialect. For Hunwick, a plausible derivation of the name Timbuktu is from the Znaga root b-k-t, “to be distant or hidden,” combined with the feminine possessive particle tin. The city, he points out, is situated in a slight hollow.
Al-Sadi also describes the rule of Askiya al-hajj Muhammad and his descendants as lasting “one hundred and one years,” from April 2, 1493, to April 12, 1591—a period that is of course only ninety-seven years. In fact, askiyas descended from Muhammad are listed in the Tarikh al-sudan to at least 1656, but after the Moroccan invasion they split into those who fought a guerrilla war from a much-reduced territory, and those who became puppets of the Moroccan administration. “One hundred and one years” nevertheless corresponds loosely to the period the askiyas ruled independently at Gao.
Ahmad Baba’s best-known work, the Kifayat al-muhtaj, is an abbreviated and revised version of his Nayl al-ibtihaj, which was intended as a complement to the Dibaj al-mudhahhab (a biographical dictionary of the scholars of the Maliki school) by Burhan al-din ibn Farhun, a sage from Medina, who died in 1397. Auguste Cherbonneau’s translation was made from two reasonably accurate manuscripts that were sent to him by students, according to his “Essai sur la littérature arabe du Soudan d’après le Tekmilet-ed-dibadje d’Ahmed Baba, le tombouctien.”
In his Social History of Timbuktu, Elias Saad estimated that by 1325, when it was incorporated into the Mali empire, Timbuktu had around ten thousand inhabitants. The city’s presence on the Catalan Atlas in 1375 is often cited as evidence of its status as a commercial center in the mid–fourteenth century. It continued to grow: Saad is also the source of estimates that at its sixteenth-century peak it housed as many as 150 to 180 Kuranic schools, where basic reading and recitation of the Kuran were taught, and had a maximum enrollment of four to five thousand students. Nehemia Levtzion, Pekka Masonen, and others have suggested that two to three hundred individuals were able to attain the status of fully qualified scholars in the sixteenth century. Not everyone agrees with the portrait of the city as an intellectual hub, however: Charles Stewart argues that Timbuktu’s historical significance has been exaggerated at the expense of other Sudanese centers of scholarship, which lay in what is now Mauritania, in part because of the prolific Ahmad Baba. “There may have never been much of a center of learning in Timbuktu,” Stewart wrote to me, “since early authors there have left almost no trace of teaching the Arabic language.” This contrasts with “the lands to the west where Arabic grammar was a blockbuster of a topic—clear indication of an aspiring and expanding, literate Arabic culture. . . . This does not negate the importance of 20th century book collecting in and around Timbuktu or the current libraries there, but there certainly is dubious evidence that any of the recent fame has much of an historical foundation.”
My portrait of Barth’s later life is drawn from Steve Kemper, Pekka Masonen, and R. Mansell Prothero. W. D. Cooley’s review of Barth’s work appeared in “Barth’s Discoveries in Africa.” Barth’s contribution to the world’s knowledge of Africa was not fully recognized until a century after his death, with Heinrich Schiffers’s Heinrich Barth: Ein Forscher in Afrika, which detailed the advances Barth had made in the fields of history, geography, botany, medicine, linguistics, archaeology, and ethnology.
The portrait of life in the house in ACI 2000 was provided by sources close to the operation who preferred to remain anonymous. Abdel Kader Haidara confirmed that he worked in Stephanie Diakité’s house, and parts of the account of their early setup are drawn from interviews with him. Details of the communications between Savama and the Prince Claus Fund were provided by Deborah Stolk. She also confirmed that much of their correspondence was written by Diakité.
Hamed Mossa’s crackdown on the women was related by numerous interviewees in Timbuktu, who remained outraged by it years later. A valuable source was Tina Traoré, a fishmonger who was persecuted by Mossa and his men; she was one of the instigators of the women’s march on October 6, 2012, and was among the women who were brought before the jihadist leadership. Reports of the march appeared in Admana Diarra, Tiémoko Diallo, and Agathe Machecourt, “Manifestation de femmes contre la charia à Tombouctou,” and Baba Ahmed, “Mali: À Tombouctou, près de 200 femmes marchent contre les islamistes,” which estimated that up to two hundred women were involved. Asa Ag Ghaly described her persecution by Mossa, including her time inside the women’s “prison,” which I visited in October 2014 when it had returned to its former use as an ATM kiosk.
Deborah Stolk received the “window of opportunity” e-mail between October 10 and 17, 2012, she said. The approximate forty-dollar (25,000 West African francs) cost of traveling between Bamako and Timbuktu at this time was mentioned by the inveterate traveler Alkadi Maiga. The New Republic’s piece on the evacuation, “The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu: How a Team of Sneaky Librarians Duped Al Qaeda,” by Yochi Dreazen, was published online with one of the verification photographs that had been sent to Stolk.
The story of the problems with the Savama office in Timbuktu and the subsequent trouble between Mohamed Touré and the jihadists was related by all four of the protagonists (Alpha, Diadié, Touré, Haidara). The timing of events was difficult to pin down: Alpha dated the threat to requisition the office to August, but this seems to be at odds with Touré’s statement to the commissioner that he was moving the manuscripts before the rainy season, which in Timbuktu lasts from July to September.
Touré’s account of his “worst trip” was supported by Haidara, although Touré’s employer said he was not traveling alone: “There were four people traveling with the lockers,” according to Haidara.
The kidnapping incident near Niafounke was recounted by Haidara. I was unable to verify it with others.
Diadié and others recalled the gathering at Essakane. The figure of three hundred pickups was reported by Xan Rice in “Day a One-Eyed Jihadist Came to Timbuktu.” The eyewitness to the destruction of five more mausoleums using “picks and shovels” was Othman Agh Mohamed Othman of Sahara Media, who spoke to France 24 for “Dans Tombouctou coupée du monde, le règne de la débrouille.” Iyad Ag Ghaly’s demands to the Malian government and the subsequent assault on the south are drawn from media reports, including Laurent Touchard, “Mali: Retour sur la bataille décisive de Konna,” and Moussa Sidibe, “Comment les populations ont vécu la bataille de Konna et l’occupation des régions du nord,” as well as “Bataille de Konna” on wikipedia.fr.
Shamil Jeppie’s fears about the military intervention were shared with Vivienne Walt, “For the Treasures of Timbuktu, a Moment of Grave Peril.” The date of January 4 for Haidara and Diakité’s visit with Thomas Strieder comes from the German embassy in Bamako; Strieder, the former chargé d’affaires, told me about it. Diakité’s lecture at the University of Oregon, “The Evacuation of the Tumbuktu Manuscripts and Their Life in Exile: The Work of T160K,” was posted on March 13, 2013, to the university’s media channel and is available at http://media.uoregon.edu/channel/archives/5647. The accounts of Diakité’s and Haidara’s meetings with the Dutch, and of their donations, are based on interviews with To Tjoelker and the Dutch ambassador, Maarten Brouwer, and on internal Dutch foreign ministry documents. I am grateful to Klaas Tjoelker for sending me photographs he and To took of manuscripts in Bamako in late January 2013. Details of autos-da-fé and Nazi book burning were taken from J. M. Ritchie, “The Nazi Book-Burning.”
14. KING LEOPOLD’S PAPERWEIGHT
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness first appeared as a three-part serial in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, and was included in his 1902 book Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories. The estimate of ten million deaths under Leopold’s regime is drawn from Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, which cites a Belgian government commission of 1919 and other sources. Georg F. W. Hegel is quoted from John Sibree’s translation in The Philosophy of History (1900).
There is dispute over the exact causes of the Scramble for Africa, but the drivers most frequently cited are those I have mentioned, including the Western economic slump, the technology gap, racism, and the competitive atmosphere generated by the activities of Leopold, France, and other players; for further discussion, see M. E. Chamberlain in The Scramble for Africa. In “European Partition and Conquest of Africa: An Overview,” G. N. Uzoigwe states that although the Berlin conference did not dole out specific parts of Africa to particular countries, it did establish the legal framework for doing so. “The argument that the conference, contrary to popular opinion, did not partition Africa is correct only in the most technical sense. . . . To all intents and purposes, the appropriation of territory did take place at the conference and the question of future appropriation is clearly implied in its decisions. By 1885, in fact, the broad lines of the final partition of Africa had already been drawn.”
The racist remarks of Samuel Baker were made at a banquet in his honor in Brighton in 1874, and were reported by The Times, while those of A. P. Newton are cited in A. Adu Boahen, Africa Under Colonial Domination 1880–1935.
The reasons for Barth’s rejection by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin are explored in Steve Kemper, A Labyrinth of Kingdoms; A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, introduction to Barth’s Travels in Nigeria; and Heinrich Schiffers, Heinrich Barth: Ein Forscher in Afrika. My account of the French conquest of Africa is drawn chiefly from Robert Aldrich, Greater France, and A. S. Kanya-Forstner, The Conquest of the Western Sudan. The lack of European university chairs in African history was pointed out by Pekka Masonen in The Negroland Revisited. Details of what happened to Louis Archinard’s looted manuscripts are from Noureddine Ghali and Mohamed Mahibou’s Inventaire de la Bibliothèque ‘Umarienne de Segou. It also tallies the contents of the library, which included, among other highlights, a 189-page Tarikh al-sudan; a 363-page copy of the Nayl of Ahmad Baba; a noted treatise on slavery by the same author; fragments of a Tarikh al-fattash; and several letters from Ahmad al-Bakkai. A biography of Archinard by Richard Roberts is in Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Dictionary of African Biography, volume 6. Joseph Joffre’s account of his recapture of the region is in My March to Timbuctoo.
The best source for Félix Dubois’s journey is his own Timbuctoo the Mysterious. Further details of his life, and that of his famous chef father, are found in Yves-Jean Saint-Martin’s Félix Dubois 1862–1945: Grand reporter et explorateur de Panama à Tamanrasset. The gift of Dubois’s copy of the Tarikh al-sudan to the Bibliothèque Nationale is recorded in Octave Houdas’s introduction to his 1900 French translation, which also includes details of the various manuscripts from which he and Edmond Benoist worked. For his 1999 translation in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire, John Hunwick found further copies of the manuscript in the Ahmad Baba collection and in the National Library of Algeria, Algiers. Details of al-Sadi’s life and the Tarikh al-sudan are from Houdas and Benoist and from Hunwick, and excerpts from the Tarikh are from Hunwick. A short biography of Houdas by Alain Messaoudi and Jean Schmitz can be found in the Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française.
Flora Shaw’s A Tropical Dependency remains a fascinating period piece. Details of her extraordinary life are in Dorothy O. Helly’s “Flora Shaw and the Times: Becoming a Journalist, Advocating Empire.” My skeptical take on the likelihood of a Malian armada’s making it to Mexico follows that of Masonen in The Negroland Revisited, but there are many modern proponents of the theory, including Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus, and Gaoussou Diawara, Abubakari II, explorateur mandingue.
I am grateful to Cheikh Diouara for sharing his memories of being on the receiving end of French airstrikes during Operation Serval. Details of what remained of the Gaddafi mansion after it was hit were recorded by Drew Hinshaw, in “In Gadhafi’s Timbuktu Villa, an al Qaeda Retreat.” Diadié remembers that the last meeting between the Crisis Committee and the jihadists took place the day before the young man was killed by the jihadists, which media reports record as January 23. It was David Blair, who interviewed the dead man’s sister for “Timbuktu: The Women Singled Out for Persecution,” who reported that Mustapha was shot for shouting “Vive la France!” on a street corner.
Like Abdoulaye Cissé, Air Mali, who lived near the Ahmad Baba building in Sankore, recalled the moment when he realized manuscripts had been destroyed. “We got up in the morning, and we found the manuscripts right away. They had taken them out into the courtyard and gathered them together. Everything they could, they had burned.”
16. CHRONICLE OF THE RESEARCHER
Octave Houdas and Maurice Delafosse gave a detailed account of their difficulties with the Tarikh al-fattash in the introduction to their own work of synthesis, Tarikh el-fettach ou chronique du chercheur, in 1913. Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee, in “Towards a New Study of the So-Called Tarikh al-fattash,” have authoritatively argued that what Houdas and Delafosse thought to be a single chronicle is in fact two separate texts, one produced in the seventeenth century by a scholar known as Ibn al-Mukhtar, and the other a nineteenth-century forgery produced by a counselor of Ahmad Lobbo, the sultan of Masina, which was falsely attributed to Mahmud Kati. In 2011, Christopher Wise and Hala Abu Taleb published an English translation, Ta’rīkh al fattāsh: The Timbuktu Chronicles 1493–1599, but failed to take into account the problems with the text. The quoted sections here are my translations from Houdas and Delafosse’s French version, and should be treated with caution. The Tarikh’s “full title in English” is given by Paul E. Lovejoy, “Islamic Scholarship and Understanding History in West Africa Before 1800.”
Timbuktu’s sixteenth-century standing as a “city of scholars” is from Elias Saad’s Social History of Timbuktu, as is the estimate that the population was no higher than 50,000: “The data at our disposal indicate that the population of the city ranged between 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century when Timbuktu experienced its ‘golden age’ of prosperity and Islamic learning.” The expression “acute bibliophilism” is from Brent Singleton’s “African Bibliophiles: Books and Libraries in Medieval Timbuktu.” Mahmud Kati’s rare dictionary, according to the Tarikh al-fattash, was al-Qamus al-muhit. The price of the Sharh al-ahkam is from Saad, and the dictionary that came in twenty-eight volumes was the Muhkam fi’l-Lugha, also mentioned by Saad. Details of the cost of copying a manuscript are from Singleton.
Sources for the Moroccan invasion of Songhay and the reign of Ahmad al-Mansur include Stephen Cory’s “The Man Who Would Be Caliph,” as well as the tarikhs. Most of the account of the Day of Desolation is from the Tarikh al-sudan, which has the greater detail; relevant passages in the Tarikh al-fattash agree with the main points. For additional details of Ahmad Baba’s life, see Mahmoud Zouber’s Ahmad Baba de Tombouctou.
The extract from Ahmad Baba’s poem of longing for Timbuktu was recorded by the Moroccan scholar Muhammad al-Saghir al-Ifrani, who was born in 1669/1670. It is written in the entrance to the old Ahmad Baba building, and can also be found in John Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire.
17. AN INDIANA JONES MOMENT IN REAL LIFE!
The account of the French advance on Timbuktu was related to me by Colonel Frédéric Gout. It was he who recollected Colonel Gèze’s offer of drinks to the officers at Goundam airstrip, General Barrera’s interest in Caillié, and their visit to the house where the explorer had stayed in 1828.
News reports of the fire in the Ahmad Baba institute have come from numerous sources. Twitter’s timeline on January 28, 2013, puts Thomas Fessy’s “burning ancient manuscripts” tweet at 8:47 a.m. and Jenan Moussa’s at 9:08 a.m. Luke Harding’s story in The Guardian was headlined “Timbuktu Mayor: Mali Rebels Torched Library of Historic Manuscripts.” Not everyone believed what Mayor Cissé said: in “The Secret Race to Save Timbuktu’s Manuscripts,” Geoffrey York hinted that many had been moved, while in Vivienne Walt, “Mali: Timbuktu Locals Saved Some of City’s Ancient Manuscripts from Islamists,” Mahmoud Zouber commented that “the documents which had been there [in the institute] are safe.”
Innocent Chukwuma of the Ford Foundation kindly provided details of the organization’s correspondence with Abdel Kader Haidara in the last days of the occupation, including Dr. Gitari’s immortal line “An Indiana Jones moment in real life!” Asked why manuscripts still needed to be moved to Bamako after the city had been liberated, Haidara argued that it was better to complete the evacuation than to leave them in the villages.
John Hunwick’s description of the founding of the Ahmad Baba center was published in the article “CEDRAB: The Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Ahmad Baba at Timbuktu.” Concise profiles of other major libraries in Timbuktu can be found on the website of the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, at tombouctoumanuscripts.org.
The part that Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s documentary played in inflating the reputation of the manuscripts was emphasized by Jean-Louis Triaud in “Tombouctou ou le retour du mythe.” Triaud, without wishing to diminish the interest and the value of these documents, stated that Gates’s visit had led to their celebration as much more than simply the rich patrimony of knowledge that they really were. “There is something of a heroic and mythical saga in their mediatized rediscovery,” he wrote. For more details of Gates’s visit, see the notes to chapter 1.
More details of Thabo Mbeki’s visit to Timbuktu are recounted in Shamil Jeppie’s “Re/discovering Timbuktu.”
Jean-Michel Djian was quoted by Lila Azam Zanganeh in “Has the Great Library of Timbuktu Been Lost?” According to Zanganeh, Mayor Cissé had been told by his “communications attaché,” who had just escaped the city, that the Ahmad Baba center had burned and more than half of its manuscripts had been consumed in the fire. “Yet,” reported Zanganeh, “he also seemed to hint that not all of the city’s manuscripts had been destroyed.” Tristan McConnell’s pieces were “Meet the Unlikely Group That Saved Timbuktu’s Manuscripts” and “How Timbuktu Saved Its Books.” Der Spiegel’s online story, in English, was headlined “Most Timbuktu Manuscripts Saved from Attacks.” The figure of 377,491 private manuscripts rescued was given to me by Haidara in December 2015.
On May 28, 2013, an e-mail from T160K signed by Stephanie Diakité was sent to the Mansa-1 mailing list, stating that “the estimated $7 million cost is an ambitious goal, but raising this money is imperative.” Not all recipients of the shout-out were happy about it. One eminent anthropologist responded: “Thanks for the scam but I don’t buy this. . . . It’s a shame that you use academic networks to sell your bogus project.” The figure of $1 million a year paid by the German foreign ministry and the Gerda Henkel Foundation was mentioned to me in interview by a source closely involved with the project. Some of this money goes to other libraries in Mali.
More details about Timbuktu Renaissance are at www.timbukturenaissance.org. The proposal for Google to film the city, and the plans for Timbuktu University, were shared with me by N’Diaye Ramatoulaye Diallo, the Malian culture minister. Details of Abdel Kader Haidara’s German Africa Prize of 2014 can be found at the Deutsche Afrika Stiftung website.
The conference at the University of Birmingham, “Symposium in Honour of Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias,” was held on November 12 and 13, 2015. At the time of this writing, Bruce Hall’s “Rethinking the Place of Timbuktu in the Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa” was due to be published in a collection of papers from the conference.
In April 2016, Stephanie Diakité’s name surfaced in a bizarre $4.25 million legal case unrelated to the evacuation. In a motion filed in the Illinois Supreme Court, she was accused of being a “fraudster” who orchestrated a “series of illegal payoffs to government officials in Mali” in return for false documents (Frank Main, “Inmate Says Bribes Led to Contempt Case, Ordered Freed on Bond,” Chicago Sun-Times, April 26, 2016). The documents Diakité obtained had secured the conviction of a Malian man, Bengaly Sylla, who was sentenced to six years in prison, the court was told. Diakité, it was alleged, was also not an attorney as she had at times claimed. A lawyer for the company that was said to have hired her in the Sylla case stated that there was no proof that illegal payoffs had been made. The case is ongoing at the time of this writing.
The official figure of 4,203 lost Ahmad Baba manuscripts was given to me by Alkadi Maiga. It was impossible to determine what exactly they were. Abdoulaye Cissé said they were documents that had been acquired but not yet processed, and therefore not much was known about them.
The study of the Fondo Kati documents was made by Susana Molins Lliteras of Cape Town University for her Ph.D. thesis, “Africa Starts in the Pyrenees: The Fondo Kati, Between al-Andalus and Timbuktu.” The thesis had not been made publicly available at the time of this writing, but an abstract, published online, notes that the dissertation “raises questions around the authenticity of the marginalia, in terms of their dates of production and authorship.”
On the subject of the movement of libraries after liberation, the Timbuktu manuscript proprietor Abdoul Wahid Haidara told me: “There were two or three libraries that were moved just after the occupation, when Savama had already announced that they had taken all the manuscripts from Timbuktu, and they had to find other libraries to follow them.” He named these collections as Bibliothèque Ahmad Baba Aboul Abbass, Bibliothèque Moulaye, and Bibliothèque Zawiyat al-Kunti, and gave timings of specific conversations about these post-liberation moves that he had had with the libraries’ owners.
LAST WORDS
In September 2016, I put a number of the allegations that arose in the course of researching this book to Abdel Kader Haidara, Stephanie Diakité, and selected protagonists via e-mail. In particular, I asked them to address the question of whether the threat to the manuscripts had been exaggerated, along with their numbers and the story of their rescue.
Abdel Kader Haidara replied that he had not heard the allegations from anyone but me. “We have neither seen nor read anything about it. Would you be the only one to hold this information? What are your sources?” He and his colleagues had worked hard in this area for twenty-seven years and knew the approximate number of manuscripts from their time as professional prospectors. He had also worked hard to build trusting relationships with his partners, who all came to Mali to monitor the actions carried out in Bamako during the emergency and the evacuation. It would be foolish for him to have been “lying to the whole world,” he stated.
“We remain convinced that nothing led us to undertake what we have accomplished but the love of our heritage and the conscience that drives us to protect this heritage,” he wrote. “We did not invent a story. Today, our manuscripts are saved and we will continue to work for their conservation with all the financial, human, and technological resources that the moment gives us.”
Stephanie Diakité declined to comment, about either this or the case in Illinois Supreme Court.
Dmitry Bondarev, who is leading research into the manuscripts for the University of Hamburg’s Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures, told me he believed some international specialists had recently started changing their tone to be less condemning and more realistic: “There might soon be the time when the others will feel as uncomfortable about their assertive verdicts on what happened in 2012 (whichever side of the ‘truth’ they take) as I feel now whenever I have to make allusions to ‘the rescue operation.’” There was “so much irrational going on in the rational minds of my colleagues,” he wrote, that he found his blood pressure rising. In his view, the current estimate of around 377,000 privately owned manuscripts was “realistic, inasmuch as one takes into account the different approaches to what constitutes a manuscript.” As for his dealings with Savama, which had once been difficult, he said, “We are now in much better relationship—these things take huge time and need patience, especially in West Africa and especially if one wants to be more practical rather than destructively critical.”
Bruce Hall, meanwhile, maintained that aspects of the Savama story were a “huge fraud.”