Timbuktu

Every year, just before the rains, the people of Timbuktu climb their own mosque. Men knead river clay in pits by the wall, boys run buckets of it up the wooden beams that stick out of the façade like rungs, and by evening the whole of the Djinguereber mosque wears a new skin of mud. It has to. A mosque built of earth, in a place where a single rainy season can wash a wall away, survives only if the town renews it by hand. They have been doing this for roughly seven hundred years.

That annual ritual explains the city better than any date does. Nothing in Timbuktu stands on its own.

Where The Camel Meets The Canoe

The town sits a few kilometres north of the Niger River, at the point where the river bends closest to the Sahara. It began, probably in the eleventh or twelfth century, as a seasonal camp of Tuareg nomads; one story says it is named for an old woman called Buktu who kept the well. Geography made it rich. Slabs of salt came down from the desert on camels; gold and kola nuts came up from the forests by canoe. The two met here, were weighed against each other, and the margin built a city.

In 1324 Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, made the pilgrimage to Mecca with so much gold that, the chroniclers say, he depressed its price in Cairo for years. He came home with a poet and architect from Granada, Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and the great Djinguereber mosque, usually dated to around 1327, is attributed to him. There was no stone to build with, so he built with what the river offered: clay, sun, and timber. The protruding beams are not decoration. They are permanent scaffolding for the replastering that has kept the building alive ever since.

Books Worth More Than Cloth

Timbuktu's best century came under the Songhai empire, which took the city in the late 1400s. Around the Sankore and Sidi Yahya mosques, students read law, astronomy, mathematics and medicine; scholars kept private libraries; copyists worked paper imported from North Africa. Leo Africanus, who passed through in the early sixteenth century, wrote that books sold better in Timbuktu than any other merchandise. Europe read that line for three hundred years and refused to believe it, preferring a city with roofs of gold that nobody had seen.

The end came from the north. In 1591 an army sent by the sultan of Morocco crossed the desert with firearms and broke the Songhai at Tondibi. The city's most celebrated scholar, Ahmad Baba, was marched in chains to Marrakesh a few years later. When he was eventually allowed home, he remarked that his confiscated library of sixteen hundred volumes had been the smallest in his family. Trade drifted toward the Atlantic coast, the city shrank, and the books went into hiding: in chests, inside walls, under the sand, passed down through families.

Nineteenth-century Europe was still trying to find the place. The Geographical Society of Paris offered a prize to the first European to reach it and return. Gordon Laing, a Scottish officer, got there in 1826 and was killed on the way out. René Caillié, a Frenchman disguised as a Muslim traveller, arrived two years later, stayed a few weeks, and collected the prize in Paris with a report that disappointed everyone: no gold, only mud. French troops occupied the town in 1894. By the time Mali became independent in 1960, Timbuktu was a provincial backwater the caravans had long since abandoned.

The Year Of The Pickaxe

In April 2012 the armed group Ansar Dine seized the city and declared the tombs of its saints idolatrous. Fourteen of the sixteen mausoleums on the World Heritage list were levelled with pickaxes and sledgehammers; the door of the Sidi Yahya mosque, kept shut for centuries by local tradition, was smashed in. Meanwhile a librarian named Abdel Kader Haidara was going from house to house at night collecting metal footlockers. Over the following months he and a network of families packed the manuscripts into them and moved the trunks south by donkey cart, truck and wooden boat along the Niger to Bamako. Hundreds of thousands of pages left the city that way. Not all of them, but most.

French and Malian forces retook Timbuktu in early 2013. Local masons, working with UNESCO, rebuilt the mausoleums in the same clay by 2015. And in 2016 the International Criminal Court in The Hague sentenced Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, who had directed the demolitions, to nine years in prison; it was the first time the court had convicted anyone for destroying cultural heritage.

Today

Most of the rescued manuscripts are still in Bamako, where the humid southern climate is harder on paper than the desert ever was, and the digitisation work has been going on for years. The city itself went back on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2012 and has not come off. Security in northern Mali never fully returned, the tourists stopped, and the desert edges a little closer each year, filling streets and mosque courtyards with sand.

And still, before the rains, the town climbs its mosque. Same clay, same beams, same hands. Whoever has claimed Timbuktu over the centuries, the building has belonged to whoever turned up with a bucket.