Tag Archives: Ahmad al-Bakkay

Lost and Found: the Treasures of Timbuktu

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Niger River running through Sahara, with TImbuktu in upper center as a small gray oval.

“Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men,” runs a proverb from West Africa, “but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu.”

The town was already known for its scholars when Ibn Battuta passed through around 1352, shortly after the construction of Timbuktu’s most famous mosques, the Djingere Ber and Sankore. Sidi Yahia, the third important mosque, is the youngster, dating from the mid-1400s.

Djingere Ber mosque

Leo Africanus visited around 1510 and claimed that manuscripts and books “sold for more money than any other merchandise” in the market—probably an exaggeration, given the town’s lucrative trade in gold, salt, and slaves. But throughout the 16th century Timbuktu’s mosques and their associated schools did draw hundreds and perhaps thousands of scholars, students, and mystics from all over north central Africa and the Middle East.

Sankore mosque

The scholarship focused on Islam but also encompassed mathematics, astronomy, law, geography, botany, medicine, and music. Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Hippocrates were studied in Arabic translations. Because of all the visitors, Timbuktu was a polyglot town. Scholars wrote books in Hausa, Fulfulde, Tamasheq, and Songhai as well as Arabic. Ahmed Baba, one of Timbuktu’s most learned men, wrote dozens of works in Arabic and had a library of 1,600 volumes, which he described as one of the city’s smaller collections.

This golden age ended brutally in 1591 with the invasion of a mercenary army sent by the Sultan of Morocco. Their muskets shredded Timbuktu’s defenders. The town’s libraries were plundered, its scholars marched to Marrakesh and imprisoned. Timbuktu’s tradition of learning seemed demolished, its libraries obliterated.

In fact the conquered inhabitants saved many manuscripts, which spent several centuries, including the years of imperial conquest and French occupation, hidden in villages, desert camps, and houses on dusty side-streets in Timbuktu. As the years passed, some owners could no longer read what they possessed, but they treasured the manuscripts as family patrimony.

In the 1970s scholars began trying to find and preserve these precious relics before they were destroyed by other marauders—bugs, mold, neglect, time. These efforts gained steam over the next 30 years with help from the Ford Foundation, the government of South Africa, and other groups. Agents went into the countryside to find ancient manuscripts and to persuade their owners to sell them for the sake of preservation. Some owners were paid in cows or camels, some in cash. The result was a flood of recovered manuscripts—according to the Ford Foundation, more than 700,000 of them.

As a result, Timbuktu is once again dotted with private libraries holding ancient manuscripts—about 60 such libraries, according to The Hidden Treasures Of Timbuktu, by scholars John O. Hunwick and Alida Jay Boye. “The historic manuscripts of Timbuktu,” they write, “are revolutionizing our understanding of Africa, increasing our knowledge of African history and unveiling the mysteries of this paradoxically famous yet almost unknown city.”

Ahmed Baba Institute

I visited two of these libraries. The Ahmed Baba Institute, which was about to move into big new quarters on the site of Ahmed Baba’s old residence, holds about 30,000 manuscripts. Among the texts on display at the time of my visit were treatises from the 16th century on astronomy and mathematics, and from the 11th century on law, cataracts, and a commentary on the Qur’an.

Bouya Haidara among manuscripts

Somewhere amidst the 30,000 manuscripts, said Bouya Haidara, a commentateur at the library, was a letter in Arabic sent by Sheikh al-Bakkay to the Tuareg tribes to the east, asking them not to kill a white Christian named Heinrich Barth who was traveling through their lands. The letter was found with a family in Timbuktu. Haidara told me about another letter somewhere in the stacks from Queen Victoria, thanking al-Bakkay for helping Barth. The libraries are so overwhelmed with manuscripts that their first priorities have been preservation and cataloguing. A filing system will come later.

Mamma Haidara Library

The Mamma Haidara Library holds about 22,000 manuscripts, most of which had been cared for by a single family since the 16th century. Its oldest manuscript is a commentary on the Qur’an written on gazelle skin. The display there included poems and documents written in Arabic, Tamasheq, Songhai, Fulfulde, and Bambara between the 14th and 19th centuries, on subjects ranging from morality to chemistry, medicine, prosody, geography, physiology, logic, and inheritance laws, as well as business documents covering every sort of commodity traded between Timbuktu and Barbary, Kano, Bornu, and Egypt.

The rich wonders in these places demolish the canard, popular during the age of imperialism and still reeking today, that Africa was a continent of savages with no written tradition. Yet the libraries and their relevance to our understanding of African history are still barely known, not only in the West but in Africa. I met a Cameroonian engineer in Timbuktu who had just spent a day scoping out the market for solar panels. He had stumbled across a few of the libraries and been astonished. “This was all news to me,” he said. “Ancient works on geometry, astronomy, and history written by Africans—I  couldn’t believe it. It’s not taught in university.”

Recently a new threat to Timbuktu’s patrimony has emerged. There have been reports that the fundamentalist Tuaregs who captured Timbuktu in the recent coup in Mali have looted some of the libraries, including the Ahmed Baba Institute, possibly for the purpose of selling these ancient examples of Islamic scholarship to fund their violent distortion of Islam.

Barth Slept Here (Uneasily)

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Barth entered Timbuktu in September 1853. He didn’t expect to stay long. When explorers make plans, the gods snicker. He got stuck in Timbuktu and environs for eight months. For much of that time he was under a death threat. He would have been expelled and probably killed if not for his protector, Ahmed al-Bakkay, Sheikh of Timbuktu, who risked his own life to defend Barth’s.

Barth’s residence in Timbuku

The house where al-Bakkay lodged the explorer is now a private residence on the Rue Heinrich Barth. A plaque commemorates it. A small front room in the house has been designated as a museum open to the public, admission about $2. The room features several small pictures of Barth, some placards in English, French, and German about the explorer’s accomplishments and significance, and a poster-map of the route, with small portraits of the expedition’s four Europeans. A five-volume German edition of Travels and Discoveries sits behind glass on a shelf. The room is probably mildly interesting to people who have never heard of Barth, but to me it was all familiar and hence disappointing.

Doorway of Barth’s house

Luckily, the house’s owner, Alassane Alpha Sane Haidara, was at home, and when he heard that I was writing a book about Barth, he graciously let me look around the rest of the two-story residence. The house had been in Haidara’s family since his forebears bought it from Sheikh al-Bakkay after Barth’s departure.

Alassane Alpha Sane Haidara in his house’s inner courtyard

The floor plan had changed over the decades, but some of it remained just as Barth described. It was stirring to imagine him here, where he spent so much time and weathered so many threats. For much of his stay in Timbuktu he was essentially under house arrest, for his own safety.

Stairway to rooftop

His favorite spot in the house was the rooftop terrace, where he could exercise and look out over the town. From there he could see rounded huts made of matting, squarish mud-brick houses, and a small market. To the north, towering over its neighborhood, was the earthen Sankore mosque, built in the 14th century by Mansa Musa. It had been the heart of Timbuktu during the town’s golden age of scholarship, drawing learned men from all over north Africa and the Middle East. Beyond the buildings, in every direction, was the Sahara.

Barth’s rooftop view, with Sankore in background. From Travels and Discoveries

Much of what Barth saw remains unchanged, with the additions of cinder blocks, electrical wires, and satellite dishes.

View from rooftop today

View from rooftop with Sankore mosque in left-central background

Sheikh al-Bakkay lived 25 paces from Barth’s house, cater-corner across a small square. It’s a modest place. The two men often crossed the square to discuss religion or history or the latest machinations of Barth’s enemies.

Sheikh al-Bakkay’s house

View of Barth’s house from Sheikh al-Bakkay’s

The explorer made many friends during his journey, but the Sheikh was the greatest of them, partly because they spent so much time together but mostly because al-Bakkay’s open-minded curiosity and intelligence matched Barth’s. Their friendship survived many challenges both in Timtuktu and after Barth returned to Britain, where the government rebuffed his efforts on behalf of the man who had saved his life.

In one of history’s pleasing parallels, after Tuareg plunderers and cutthroats left Alexander Gordon Laing for dead, the explorer found refuge and care in the desert encampment of al-Bakkay’s father. This kindness allowed Laing to resume his journey to Timbuktu. Al-Bakkay met him there, the only Christian the Sheikh had ever seen before Barth arrived. (Al-Bakkay was unaware, until Barth told him, of the visit by René Caillié, who had come and gone in disguise.)

Barth doesn’t mention the houses in Timbuktu where his European predecessors stayed, but plaques now mark these places, a nod at the bravery of the first Europeans who dared to visit–a Scot, a Frenchman, a German. Coming across these places while wandering the town is a reminder that Timbuktu once signified the far edge of the world.

House where Laing stayed

House where Caillié stayed

Cast of Characters: in Africa

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Here are a few of the people most important to Barth during his five-year journey, and hence prominent characters in A Labyrinth of Kingdoms:

James Richardson

The expedition’s first leader. A British evangelical abolitionist, Richardson had traveled to Ghat in the Sahara several years earlier to gather facts about the slave trade for Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society. Soon after returning, he began urging the British Foreign Office to fund a more ambitious expedition that would bring back strategic information about caravan routes and the prospects for commercial profit in the little-known immensity called the Sudan. When he finally got the go-ahead in August 1849, he recruited Barth and another young German, Adolf Overweg to handle the science.

Almost from the start, Richardson and Barth chafed each other—too bad for them, fortunate for readers. Barth found Richardson slow, indecisive, and imperceptive in dangerous situations. Richardson considered Barth rash and overeager, and often on the edge of insubordination.

This was partly a matter of age—Richardson was 11 years older—and partly incompatible temperaments and values. For Richardson, science was a secondary issue; for Barth, it was the highest human endeavor. Clashes were inevitable.

Adolf Overweg

German geologist and astronomer. Overweg was born just a year after Barth but seemed much younger because of his boyish enthusiasm and lack of travel experience. Both Barth and Richardson acknowledged that Africans liked Overweg the best among the three Europeans, because of his sunny disposition and his willingness to spend hours trying to repair an African’s broken watch or distributing specks of medicine (he wasn’t a doctor and his prescriptions were random).

Barth regarded Overweg as an amiable, talented younger brother who was sometimes exasperatingly naive and messy. As an explorer and scientist, Overweg was as keen and tireless as Barth, but was less careful in every way, both personally and as a record-keeper.

El Haj Beshir ben Ahmed Tirab, the Vizier of Kukawa

In Kukawa, Barth spent a lot of time with the shrewd, worldly vizier, second-in-command to the Sheikh of Bornu. Barth admired Haj Beshir’s erudition and openness to new ideas, but thought his faults undercut his virtues. His “luxurious disposition” made him “extremely fond of the fair sex”–he had lost exact count of his harem, which numbered between 300 and 400 concubines. He could wax eloquently about Ptolemy, yet his greed and laziness were hastening the decay of Bornu. Barth accompanied Haj Beshir and his army on a horrifying razzia, or slave raid, the most disturbing section of Barth’s book.

Weled Ammer Walati

Scoundrel extraordinaire. Barth met the Walati, as he called him, while en route to Timbuktu. The rogue spoke six languages and knew the country, so Barth hired him as a fixer to ease his passage through unknown territories. “He was one of the cleverest men whom I met on my journey,” wrote Barth, “in spite of the trouble he caused me and the tricks he played me.”

The Walati did occasionally do his job. At one point, for instance, Barth was surrounded by 150 men with spears, “brandished over their heads with warlike gesticulations. The affair seemed rather serious.” The Walati saved the day by shouting that Barth was a friend of the Sheikh of Timbuktu and was bringing him books. “They dropped their spears and thronged around me, requesting me to give them my blessing.”

More typically the Walati saved his own skin while skinning the explorer.

Sidi Ahmed al-Bakkay, Sheikh of Timbuktu

Kunta tribesman, late 1800s

Barth almost surely would have been murdered in Timbuktu if not for the protection of Sheikh al-Bakkay, a member of the Kunta tribe, renowned desert scholars and religious leaders. Timbuktu had been conquered in 1826 by Muslim fanatics and was nominally under the rule of the Emir of Hamdallahi. When Barth arrived, the Emir ordered al-Bakkay to drive the unbeliever out of town. (The same order had been given in 1826 about the presence of Major Alexander Gordon Laing, who was expelled and murdered.) But al-Bakkay, at tremendous risk from both the Emir and his own political enemies, including a couple of his brothers, defied the emir and took Barth under his wing.

Al-Bakkay alternately charmed and exasperated Barth. The two men intrigued each other and had many intense conversations about history, theology, slavery, polygamy. No African meant more to Barth than al-Bakkay.

These were some of Barth’s companions as he traveled through the Sudan, and they became mine as well, as I traveled through Barth.