The Treasures of Timbuktu

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/opinion/the-treasures-of-timbuktu.html

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LONDON — On Jan. 28, 2013, news broke of an epic cultural catastrophe. That morning, the mayor of Timbuktu, Halle Ousmane Cissé, told journalists that the jihadist occupiers of the town had destroyed its famous literary heritage.

“They torched all the important ancient manuscripts,” Mr. Cissé told The Associated Press. “The ancient books of geography and science. It is the history of Timbuktu, of its people.”

Within hours, the internet was reverberating with paeans to these priceless documents of Islamic scholarship, some of which are said to date to the 12th century. Experts declared it to be a disaster of incalculable proportions, the greatest loss of the written word in Africa since the destruction of the library of Alexandria.

But the story was not as it seemed.

It was true that a number of documents from the state-owned Ahmed Baba Institute had indeed been destroyed or stolen, but over the following days and weeks, the tale acquired a delicious twist. Almost all of Timbuktu’s precious manuscripts had been smuggled to safety in a daring rescue operation that a Ford Foundation executive described as “an Indiana Jones moment in real life.” The architect of this astonishing reversal was Abdel Kader Haidara, a titan of the Timbuktu manuscripts world, the owner of the largest privately held collection in the city and the founder of Savama, a nonprofit organization set up to safeguard the private libraries.

How had Mr. Haidara pulled it off? How had he and fellow Timbuktiens covertly carried hundreds of thousands of historic documents, from the institute and dozens of private collections, out from under the noses of the occupiers? Intrigued by both the story and the artifacts at its core, in 2014 I determined to find out.

The Malian town of Timbuktu lies at the point where the lifeblood of West Africa, the River Niger, bends into the Sahara. In the late medieval period, it was an important terminus in the network of trans-Sahara trade routes, the place, according to local tradition, where camel met canoe. Timbuktu grew wealthy, and with wealth came literature. Islamic scholars and holy men settled there, and in the 16th century, the traveler Leo Africanus reported that manuscripts were “more profitable than any other goods” in its markets.

Reports of the city’s riches crossed the desert to Europe, where they were spun into myth. As the British writer Bruce Chatwin has observed, there are two Timbuktus: One is the real place, a tired caravan town; the other is altogether more fabulous, a legendary city in a never-never land, the “Timbuktu of the mind.” For five centuries, until the first modern explorers stumbled, half dead, into the town’s precincts in the 1820s, this latter Timbuktu, an African El Dorado, dominated Western thinking about sub-Saharan Africa. The myth was founded on truth, but inflated by a mix of misinformation, wishful thinking and lust for gold.

There is little gold to be found in Timbuktu today. Beside its mosques and the mausoleums of its saints, the city’s greatest cultural treasures are its manuscripts.

At the end of March 2012, Timbuktu was overrun by a coalition of heavily armed rebels, many of whom had recently returned from fighting the Libyan regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi. They included the Tuareg separatists of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and an array of jihadist groups, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and others. For the next 10 months, Timbuktu would be governed by Shariah law.

The town was widely looted in the first days of occupation, and library owners responded by hiding their documents in their homes. Some manuscripts were taken out of the city, too, at this time: One proprietor smuggled his four most precious documents at the end of the first week. But it was several months before the evacuation began in earnest.

In May, Mr. Haidara was in Bamako, Mali’s capital, in government-held territory. There, he began to meet regularly with the new director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, Abdoulkadri Idrissa Maiga. The Ahmed Baba collection was by far the most vulnerable of Timbuktu’s libraries, since it was kept in two well-known city landmarks: an old building on the Rue de Chemnitz, and a new, South Africa-funded center next to the Sankore mosque, which the rebels were using as a barracks.

By July, as the jihadists began to destroy Timbuktu’s centuries-old mausoleums, Mr. Maiga and Mr. Haidara decided that they must do what they could to move the state archive. On July 23, Mr. Maiga assigned agents for the secret mission to pack the manuscripts from the institute’s depository and transport them covertly across town to a safe house. There, an agent placed the documents in steel lockers of a sort that were used all over Mali for carrying goods. They were then passed to a trader who hid them deep in the cargo of trucks that continued on the route south.

By mid-September 2012, all 24,000 manuscripts in the old Ahmed Baba building had been packed. When they reached Bamako, Mr. Maiga organized a reception to show delighted government officials what he had done. Still, Mr. Haidara told them, the manuscript operations had to remain secret, since many privately owned collections remained in Timbuktu.

At this point, the two librarians parted company, and Mr. Haidara joined forces with a Seattle-based entrepreneur named Stephanie Diakité. Ms. Diakité, who founded a consultancy called D Intl, was well versed in the world of cultural development.

In October, Ms. Diakité and Mr. Haidara signed a 100,000-euro contract with a Dutch foundation, the Prince Claus Fund, to transport 200 more lockers of privately owned manuscripts south. This shipment contained roughly half of the 160,000 that still needed to be removed from Timbuktu, the Dutch were told. More money was raised from the Ford Foundation, the Al Majid center in Dubai, the German foreign ministry and a second Dutch charity, DOEN. Toward the end of the 2012, staff members at the German Embassy in Bamako were told that between 80,000 and 120,000 manuscripts had been moved south.

By early 2013, however, the Malian crisis was approaching a denouement. In January, the jihadists began to push south, and President François Hollande of France responded by ordering a military intervention. Under a French air assault, the Malian rebels were soon forced to retreat. Ms. Diakité and Mr. Haidara began a new fund-raising round among the European embassies in Bamako. The threat to the collections was extreme, diplomats were told: The French action had angered the occupiers of Timbuktu, who had ordered that the city’s manuscripts be gathered together on Jan. 24, the day of the festival of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, to be burned.

The Dutch foreign trade minister, Lilianne Ploumen, was persuaded, and approved a new donation of 323,475 euros for the evacuation of 136,000 manuscripts. The overall cost of the private evacuation was approaching $1 million.

The renewed fighting in the north meant the land route from Timbuktu was now too dangerous; instead, Mr. Haidara and Ms. Diakité told their donors, the couriers would use the Niger. Ms. Diakité later related dramatic stories about how great fleets of boats carried the lockers upstream. At one point, 20 were hijacked by bandits, but Mr. Haidara calmly ransomed them. On another occasion, French military helicopters threatened to sink the manuscript boats until the couriers waved their documents, at which point the pilots “saluted and pulled away.” When the manuscripts reached Djenné, about 300 miles southwest of Timbuktu, they were loaded onto a hundred bush taxis for the final 350 miles to Bamako by road.

On Jan. 28, Timbuktu was liberated by French and Malian forces. According to Mr. Haidara, the private evacuation had moved 377,491 manuscripts in almost 2,500 lockers, which represented more than 95 percent of the Timbuktu manuscripts. It was an extraordinary story — too extraordinary for some among the small cadre of international academics who had actually worked with the manuscripts.

For Bruce Hall, a professor at Duke University who lived in Timbuktu for several years while conducting research, the giant claims being made about the evacuation of the private libraries were red flags. In his view, 300,000 was a best guess for the total number of Arabic manuscripts that existed in the whole of northern Mali. How could Mr. Haidara claim to have moved almost 400,000?

There were other problems with the Haidara-Diakité narrative. One was that many of Timbuktu’s more famous collections never left the city. The claim that the jihadists had threatened to burn all the documents during the festival of the Prophet’s birthday also seemed shaky; no one I interviewed in Timbuktu recalled this moment. The grand imam, Abderrahmane Ben Essayouti, who led negotiations with the jihadist leadership over the festival, said simply, “They did not threaten to burn the manuscripts of Timbuktu.”

For Professor Hall, all the money raised for the evacuation “depends on a certain fraud, a misrepresentation of materials and amount of materials.” Mr. Haidara responded to these allegations by taking me on a tour of the Bamako safe houses where the manuscripts were being kept. I saw large quantities of documents and counted more than 1,000 lockers, many of which were closed with padlocks. When I asked to look inside, he said he had forgotten to bring the keys and refused to get them.

He rejected the allegations of fraud, telling me he would not have been so foolish to have been “lying to the whole world.” Ms. Diakité declined to comment. The Dutch ambassador in Bamako, Maarten Brouwer, remained convinced that the evacuation of the private manuscript collections was genuine: “I can tell you the story is for real.”

At its core, the story of the rescue of Timbuktu’s manuscripts is significantly true. But if it is more complex than it first appears, and vastly embellished, we should expect no less. The most fascinating part of the Timbuktu tale is that the doubts and distortions surrounding the 21st-century “Indiana Jones moment” mirror the myths that have arisen about the city throughout its history. Timbuktu has always traded on legend. The misreadings of this city have been the making of this place; they are what draws the world to it.