A dream as frail as those of ancient time
Robert Eustace applauds an often gripping chronicle that teases the remarkable facts about Timbuktu from the elaborate myths
‘Geographers in Afric-maps,/ With Savage-Pictures fill their gaps;/ And o’er unhabitable downs/ Place elephants for want of towns…”, or so quipped Jonathan Swift in 1733. A century later, as the first European explorers began to fill in their globes with the hazy outline of central Africa, the sense persisted that, whatever else might be “discovered”, there was no literature or history to be found south of the Sahara. As Hegel asserted, this land was simply “unhistorical”.
In reality, from the Gambia and Senegal rivers in the west to the Niger river in the east, great civilisations had been waxing and waning for centuries, of which Europeans felt the occasional glimmer, more as legend than history.
Mansa Musa, for instance, the Malian Emperor, had made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325 accompanied by a train of “12,000 slave women” and such astonishing largesse – beggars were showered with gold dust – that it upset the gold market of the Mediterranean for a generation. Most potent of these gilded myths, however, was that of Timbuktu: a byword for unobtainable distance. The romance of it persisted into the 19th century, when young Tennyson fantasised of “a wilderness of spires, and crystal pile/ Of rampart upon rampart, dome on dome… dazzling peaks of pyramids”.
Charlie English’s often gripping study The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu is preoccupied with this “idea” of the city – “Timbuktu of the mind” – but the treasure he follows is not gold but rather the vast stores of manuscripts held in the dusty desert city, populated since the 12th century by bibliophiles. The book’s conceit is to juxtapose the story of the first attempts to reach Timbuktu from Europe with the remarkable – and remarkably complicated – tale of the movement of the great manuscripts to safety during the city’s 2012-13 occupation by rebels and an offshoot of al-Qaeda.
The better part of the book is the story of the European “discovery” of Timbuktu, which has the classic appeal of such narratives: terrible privation, bungling, foolhardy courage and enormous moustaches. Explorers had to choose between the harsh vastness of the Sahara or the malarial gauntlet of what is now Guinea and south-western Mali, with the enticing prospect of a hostile reception from the devoutly Islamic – and understandably Christianophobic – city before them. The first Englishman to reach Timbuktu, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, practically crawled in, half-starved, sick with “something to similar to yellow fever” and 25 shot or stab wounds inflicted by Tuaregs. He died there. His successor, Frenchman René Caillié, arrived in disguise, but found the city a disappointment: “at first view... nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth”.
It would be decades before Europeans perceived the wealth in these “ill-looking houses”. The city had, in fact, been in decline since the Moroccan invasion of 1591, two centuries before the first European expeditions to it, but Timbuktu was still a haven of written scholarship, manuscript-collecting being one of the few indulgences open to the devoutly Islamic elite. By the 21st century, the city’s collections, private and public, held hundreds of thousands, among them the great chronicles of the region – chronicles that early European visitors refused to believe could exist. As Hamner Warrington, Consul General of Tripoli in the early 19th century, wrote: “Believe me a Bowl of Cuscus is more an object of research to any Moor than such a history…”
English’s account of the 2012-13 “rescue” of these great manuscripts, though it forms the meat of the book and is written with journalistic verve, is somewhat overshadowed by the drama of the historical chapters with which it is interleaved. The heroism of the small group who smuggled the texts to safety in grain sacks is undoubted, but despite liberal discussion of the “bok bok bok” of automatic weapons fire, we find little high drama, and overlong descriptions of how millions of dollars were raised to secure the manuscripts’ future.
English’s book comes hot on the tail of Joshua Hammer’s The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu (2016), a more simplistic account of the rescue, with the heroes and villains sketched in black and white and the manuscripts’ “inconceivable value” unquestioned. English’s scruples prevent him from offering so appealing a narrative: his point is rather how Europeans have always romanticised and simplified this extraordinary place, and the story of the evacuation is no different. He notes that the threat to the texts was at its height after Unesco condemned the vandalism of Islamic insurgents, a toothless decree that only riled the occupiers, who had expressed little interest in the manuscripts and even guarded them from looters: “Unesco is what? The only thing we recognise is the court of God!” Calls then came from the city itself, begging the UN and foreign media to keep silent.
Tennyson knew that the Timbuktu of the mind was just “a dream as frail as those of ancient time”, but despite its lack of gilded roofs, this strange city of dusty earth is still remarkable; and English deserves credit for his sophisticated teasing out of the facts from the myths.
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It would be decades before Europeans perceived the wealth in these ‘ill-looking houses’