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Kitabı oku: «The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures», sayfa 2
I have no time to give you my account of Tinbuctu, but shall briefly state that in every respect except in size (which does not exceed four miles in circumference) it has completely met my expectations … I have been busily employed during my stay, searching the records in the town, which are abundant, & in acquiring information of every kind, nor is it with any common degree of satisfaction that I say, my perseverance has been amply rewarded.
The day after composing this letter, Laing left Timbuktu and walked out of history. The consul forwarded the final dispatch to London with a covering note claiming a victory of sorts—it was the “first letter ever written from that place by any Christian”—but in terms of delivering information about the great object of European geography, Laing’s expedition was a flop. If Timbuktu had met his high expectations “completely,” where was the detail? Most puzzling was Laing’s assertion that there were abundant “records in the town,” from which he had drawn “information of every kind.” What kinds of records could warrant a soldier’s attention? How could they be of use to the British government?
ALMOST TWO CENTURIES LATER, it is clear that the “records in the town” were some of the great quantity of mostly Arabic texts that are now known collectively as the manuscripts of Timbuktu. The city’s documents, which Laing appears to have been the first European to see, are so numerous no one knows quite how many there are, though they are reckoned in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. They contain some of the most valuable written sources for the so-called golden age of Timbuktu in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the great Songhay empire of which the city was a part. They have been held up by experts as Africa’s equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, proof of the continent’s vibrant written history.
In 2012 that history appeared to be under threat. After a coup in southern Mali, Timbuktu was overtaken by the fighters of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The jihadists began systematically to destroy the centuries-old mausoleums of the city’s Sufi saints. On January 28, 2013, the mayor of Timbuktu told the world that all of the city’s ancient manuscripts had also been burned.
I recall that morning well. I was international news editor at The Guardian at the time, and Mali had a special resonance for me. Many years before, at eighteen, I had developed the idea of driving across the Sahara. I saved money, bought an old Land Rover, and set out from Yorkshire with a friend, traveling via Morocco and Algeria to Mali, which we reached in the spring of 1987. The desert town of Aguelhok marked the end of the crossing, our summit, and once there we cast about for a new idea. What if we traded the clapped-out car for three or four camels and rode to Timbuktu? The story we would tell! We found a vendor and negotiated for a week, but as he only ever managed to produce one small specimen we abandoned the plan and continued south. I sold the car in Gao, the capital of old Songhay, and traveled to Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire and then home. I had not made it to Timbuktu, but I had fallen in love with the idea of the desert. I returned to the Sahara in 1989 in a different vehicle, but it was too unreliable to risk the drive to Mali. Once again, the City of 333 Saints remained tantalizingly out of reach.
In July 2012, with anger and sadness, I watched the footage of the jihadists trashing Timbuktu’s monuments. The following January, when our correspondent was told that the rebels had torched the city’s historic texts, we led The Guardian’s online edition with the news. Days later, it became clear that the manuscripts had not been destroyed after all; in fact, they had been smuggled to safety by the town’s librarians. I became obsessed with the details of this operation. It seemed to me to echo the plot of Robert Crichton’s comic novel The Secret of Santa Vittoria, in which the people of a small Tuscan town save a million bottles of wine from looting Nazis. Only it was far better than that: the treasure in Timbuktu was infinitely more significant; what was more, this evacuation was real. I left my job, determined to turn the story into a book.
Bruce Chatwin once observed that there are two Timbuktus. One is the real place, a tired caravan town where the Niger bends into the Sahara. The other is altogether more fabulous, a legendary city in a never-never land, the Timbuktu of the mind. I planned to give an account of both these Timbuktus by following two alternating strands: that of the West’s centuries-long struggle to find, conquer, and understand the city; and that of the modern-day attempt to save its manuscripts and its history from destruction. The first narrative would explore the role of legend in shaping our view of Timbuktu; the second would relate the tale of occupation and evacuation.
What I didn’t understand then was how closely these stories would mirror each other.
Charlie English
London, 2017
PART ONE
OCCUPATION
If thou know not the way that leadeth to the City of Brass, rub the hand of the horseman, and he will turn, and then will stop, and in whatsoever direction he stoppeth, thither proceed, without fear and without difficulty; for it will lead thee to the City of Brass.
—The Thousand and One Nights
1
A SEEKER OF MANUSCRIPTS
MARCH 2012
One hazy morning in Bamako, the capital of the modern West African state of Mali, an aging Toyota Land Cruiser picked its way to the end of a concrete driveway and pulled out into the busy morning traffic. In its front passenger seat sat a large, distinguished-looking man in billowing robes and a pillbox prayer cap. He was forty-seven years old, stood over six feet tall, and weighed close to two hundred pounds, and although a small, French-style mustache balanced jauntily on his upper lip, there was something commanding about his appearance. In his prominent brown eyes lurked a sharp, almost impish intelligence. He was Abdel Kader Haidara, librarian of Timbuktu, and his name would soon become famous around the world.
Haidara was not an indecisive man, but that morning, as his driver piloted the heavy vehicle through the clouds of buzzing Chinese-made motorbikes and beat-up green minibuses that plied the city’s streets, he was caught in an agony of indecision. The car stereo, tuned to Radio France Internationale, spewed alarming updates on the situation in the north, while the cheap cellphones that were never far from his grasp jangled continually with reports from his contacts in Timbuktu, six hundred miles away. The rebels were advancing across the desert, driving government troops and refugees before them. Bus stations were choked with the displaced; highways were clogged with motorbikes and pickups and ancient trucks that swayed under the weight of the fleeing population. Haidara had known when he left his apartment that driving into this chaos would be dangerous, but now it was beginning to look like a suicide mission. Soon he’d had enough: he spoke to his driver, and then they were pointing west again, back toward the skirts of the sprawling African metropolis.
Responsable is a French noun whose meaning is easy to guess at in English. There were few better words to describe the librarian then than as a responsable for a giant slice of neglected history, the manuscripts of Timbuktu, a collection of handwritten documents so large no one knew quite how many there were, though he himself would put them in the hundreds of thousands. Few had done more to unearth the manuscripts than Haidara. In the months to come, no one would be given more credit for their salvation.
In person the librarian was an imposing man with a handshake of astonishing softness, a drive-by of a greeting that left a hint of remembered contact, no more. He was well versed in the history and content of the documents, but appeared not so much a scholar as a businessman who controlled his affairs in a variety of languages via his cellphones, or in person from behind a desk the size of a small boat. He was not the only proprietor of manuscripts in the city, but as the owner of the largest private collection and founder of Savama, an organization devoted to safeguarding the city’s written heritage, he claimed to represent the bulk of Timbuktu’s manuscript-owning families.
Haidara had been raised in a large Timbuktu house made of banco and built around a courtyard, like a hundred thousand others in the region. He was one of fourteen children of Mamma Haidara, a Timbuktu scholar, and the town in which he grew up had changed little in a hundred years. At the heart of the city were the three large mosques: Jingere Ber, the “great mosque,” in the west; Sidi Yahya in the center; and Sankore in the north. The spaces between the mosques were filled with houses and markets, and the old medina, in the shape of a fat teardrop, was a mile and a half around. The people had buried their relatives close to their houses, and as the city had grown, the burial grounds had been absorbed into the network of alleys and streets. The living and the dead now existed side by side, and in the tradition of mystical, Sufi, Islam, the divide between them had become blurred: the most holy ancestors, the scholars and judges and leaders of former times, lay in grand mausoleums where they were worshipped as saints. Someone had counted 333 such saints, and since it was an auspicious number, that was what Timbuktu had come to call itself, the City of 333 Saints.
There were no cars or trucks in Timbuktu when Haidara was growing up; the city did not get its first gas pump until the mid-1970s. Instead it was filled with animals. Sheep and goats and cattle and chickens picked at the sparse vegetation and at the scraps thrown in the streets. Caravans of donkeys brought cereals in from the river port to the south, while the biggest events of the year were the arrivals of the salt caravans, thousands of camels strong, from the mines in the desert.
At the age of six, Haidara had been sent to Kuranic school to learn the holy texts, and afterward to the Franco-Arab school to learn everything else. He remembered it as a childhood sans souci, free from worry, but like most Timbuktiens the family had little money. Their principal assets were the manuscripts. These were stored all over the house, Haidara would later recall, on shelves that bowed under the weight of paper, and in relatives’ homes in and around Timbuktu. They were written mostly in Arabic, and were bound in cracking camel and gazelle hide, their fabric eaten by termites and stained with water. They covered almost every subject under the sun. There were works on astronomy, poetry, and medicine, as well as mundane documents of ownership, legal rulings, and bills of sale. More than anything, they were Islamic, commentaries on the holy texts and interpretations of their legal meanings.
