The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save Its Treasures
Two tales of a city: The historical race to reach one of the world’s most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.To Westerners, the name ‘Timbuktu’ long conjured a tantalising paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for discovery tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city. But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, climate, and disease.Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval centre of learning, it was home to tens – according to some, hundreds – of thousands of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When al-Qaeda-linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents, a remarkable thing happened: a team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the manuscripts into hiding.Relying on extensive research and firsthand reporting, Charlie English expertly twines these two suspenseful strands into a fascinating account of one of the planet's extraordinary places, and the myths from which it has become inseparable.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Charlie English
Maps by Meighan Cavanaugh
Frontispiece: Nineteenth-century drawing of Timbuktu, based on a description by the French explorer René Caillié
Charlie English asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008126650
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008126643
Version: 2018-05-01
For Lucy
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: A Man of Enterprise and Genius
PART ONE: OCCUPATION
PART TWO: DESTRUCTION
PART THREE: LIBERATION
14. King Leopold’s Paperweight
16. Chronicle of the Researcher
17. An Indiana Jones Moment in Real Life!
Picture Section
In among the millions of documents held by the British government’s National Archives is a slim dossier known as CO 2/20. The volume is not much requested. These archives, after all, hold papers that cover a thousand years of British history, and most visitors to the airy reading rooms at Kew come in search of more obvious treasures: Domesday Book, Shakespeare’s will, or the newly opened files of cold war traitors and spies. Every couple of years, however, someone will demand Colonial Office file 2/20, and a message will be passed to the Cheshire town of Winsford, where the dossier is held in a storage facility deep within Britain’s largest salt mine. There, an employee will venture into the arid darkness, pluck the file from more than twenty-two miles of shelving given over to the National Archives, and dispatch it south.
The box that arrives days later at the reading room is made of thick cardboard and bound with white cotton tape. Inside is a sheaf of a hundred or so handwritten communications—manuscripts, we might say—that were sent from the British consul in Tripoli to London in the mid-1820s. Each piece of ragged, well-traveled paper illuminates a small corner of time and place, and a handful have special relevance for our story. These are the last letters of a neglected explorer, Alexander Gordon Laing, and encompass the period of his expedition to discover the “far famed Capital of Central Africa,” as he described the city of Timbuktu.
Laing, a muttonchopped army major from Edinburgh, was fated to become the first European explorer to reach this elusive place. In the 1820s, Timbuktu dominated Europe’s ideas about Africa as El Dorado had once colored its concept of the Americas. Timbuktu was believed to govern a rich sub-Saharan region called the Sudan, after the Arabic Bilad al-Sudan, “the land of the blacks.” Rumors of the city’s existence had circulated in Europe for hundreds of years, and its riches had been trumpeted since at least the fourteenth century. As Marco Polo’s Zipangu was said to be a land where the king’s palace was roofed with precious metal, Timbuktu’s houses too were reported to be covered with gold. Scores of travelers had been sent to find it, but every attempt had ended in death or failure.
In 1826, it was the turn of Major Laing. Laing was a particular British sort, a product of that time between Waterloo and the Charge of the Light Brigade when military men sought death or glory, or a combination of the two. With his good looks and self-absorption, he could have slipped out of the pages of Vanity Fair. “I shall do more than has ever been done before,” he wrote, “and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.”
