Militants lay waste to Africa’s cultural heritage
Retreat of government forces has left ancient sites free to be pillaged by armed groups, say experts
ARMED groups operating in Africa’s Sahel region are looting hundreds of cultural and archaeological sites in the same way as Isil did in Syria, experts have claimed.
Over the last few years, government forces have retreated from vast areas of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger after an onslaught of jihadist attacks.
As lawlessness has spread, armed groups – many allied to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) – have gained influence in an area the UN describes as “potentially one of the richest [cultural] regions in the world”.
The Sahel boasts archaeological remains dating back to the Neolithic period. In medieval times, West African civilisation blossomed along the banks of the Niger river into myriad kingdoms and empires.
During the 13th century, the cities of Gao, Djenné and Timbuktu rose as great centres of trade and learning. Leaders grew fabulously wealthy from the gold and salt trade routes that crisscrossed the Sahara.
At a time when Europe was burning heretics at the stake, books became status symbols in the Malian Empire. Islamic scholars collected hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in libraries in the region, famously in Timbuktu.
But archaeological experts say that the region’s extraordinary heritage is now under attack. Museums, tombs and villages have been raided for antiquities, and photos show historical sites studded with newly dug holes.
Samuel Sidibé, director of Mali’s National Museum in Bamako, says: “It’s a disaster. Sites have been raided everywhere. We don’t know how many because we can’t get access to them. There are hundreds [of damaged sites] across the country. You cannot estimate the value of what’s being lost. This is our history. When that goes you have nothing to bind you.”
Details on the theft of artefacts are scarce. Historically, the Sahel has not received as much attention from archaeologists as North Africa and the Middle East. There are countless sites of historical significance that are unmapped and unprotected, says Mr
Sidibé. One Western official told The Sunday Telegraph: “The armed groups and jihadists are not taking pictures of themselves [looting], like Islamic State did in Syria. But everyone assumes they are involved. It’s happening right across Mali and Burkina Faso,”
Local villagers often know the whereabouts of historical sites. But as security in the Sahel continues to deteriorate, many are being forced by poverty, hunger or armed groups to excavate the antiquities.
The artefacts – everything from statues and masks to jewellery and dinosaur bones – often end up in auction houses and private collections in Europe, China and America.
It is unclear how much money is being made from the trade but previous seizures of trafficked Sahelian antiquities in Europe have been valued at tens of millions of pounds. There are fears there could be an even bigger market in the Gulf states.
“Objects are often passed around different countries before they reach the international market, which makes it difficult to build up a clear picture,” says Guiomar Alonso Cano at Unesco’s Office for West Africa and the Sahel.
“As the crisis escalates, we must ensure the Sahel’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and does not fund organised crime and terrorist groups,” says Ms Alonso Cano, who is helping to train customs officials to identify stolen cultural goods.
The scourge is not without precedent. When jihadists from Ansar Dine, a group allied to al-Qaeda, invaded northern Mali in 2012, they unleashed an iconoclastic frenzy on Timbuktu. For the militant Islamists, few places were more attractive, with its 333 Sufi saints whose shrines were frequently visited by locals hoping to propitiate their gods.
The jihadists used pickaxes, hoes, Kalashnikov rifles and their bare hands to tear down the city’s mudbrick mausoleums: 15 of the 16 most important were destroyed, says Prof El-Boukhari Ben Essayouti, who heads the Malian government’s Timbuktu Cultural Commission.
Worse, more than 4,400 ancient manuscripts were burned or stolen during the city’s year-long occupation. Thankfully, the situation for Timbuktu and its treasure trove of knowledge has improved. With donor help, the shrines have been rebuilt and the damage to mosques repaired.
And with the help of Minusma, the UN peacekeeping mission, three libraries holding some of Timbuktu’s private manuscript collections have been restored. Greater damage could have been done had it not been for people like Prof Ben Essayouti, who, when the city fell, bundled 8,000 manuscripts into sackcloth, stacked them in crates and hid them. He and a network of concerned citizens then managed to smuggle 300,000 manuscripts to safety. Today, most of the documents are hidden in vaults near Mali’s southern capital, Bamako.
The man who masterminded the smuggling operation, Dr Abdel Kader Haidara, is leading a project to restore and digitalise the manuscripts, with the support of the British Library.
He hopes that by digitalising the manuscripts, he can safeguard them for the next generation and eventually make them available online for everyone around the world to read.
In small rooms at Dr Haidara’s Bamako-based NGO, researchers painstakingly leaf through the manuscripts, taking camera shots of every page and logging the contents.
Some are hundreds of pages long. Even by digitalising an estimated 20,000 manuscripts a year, researchers say it will take at least a decade to complete the task.
But with each flick of the page and camera flash, another small part of the Sahel’s history is saved.
‘We must ensure the Sahel’s cultural heritage does not fund organised crime and terrorist groups’