Posted
on September 22, 2014
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The Great Mosque of Djenne is the
largest mud building in the world. |
Today
the African nation of Mali celebrates its 1960 independence from
France.
How
does a nation that is the third largest supplier of gold in the whole
continent still have about half of its people living below the
International Poverty Line? (Shockingly, the International Poverty
Line is set way down at $1.25 per day. That's...low!)
Part
of the problem for people in Mali is that quite a bit of the nation
is the Sahara Desert. Most of the people live in the southern region
along the Niger and Senegal rivers. Most Malians fish or farm (or
fish AND farm).
Mali
used to be part of three different empires, at various times in
history: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, and the Songhai Empire.
The power of these empires came from controlling trans-Saharan trade
in gold, salt, and enslaved people. One of the ancient cities,
Timbuktu, was a center of trade but also a center of Islamic
learning. This was back in the 1300s, before the European
Renaissance, and Arabia and Northern Africa were the center of
scholarship, math, and science in the Western world.
Eventually,
however, European sea routes made the trans-Saharan trade routes
obsolete, and much of the African empires' power dissipated. Science,
art, and other studies took off in Europe, and European nations began
to establish colonies and military outposts in Africa and elsewhere.
“
You
live way out in Timbuktu!”
Do
people use “Timbuktu” to mean the farthest-away, unreachable
place in the universe? Back when I was a kid, I would hear that
fairly frequently. Why did this Mali city become code for faraway and
hard to reach?
Mali
is landlocked, so there is no way to access any part of it by sea.
That right there limits access to the nation, especially in the past.
Mali and Timbuktu in particular are deep inland, and Timbuktu is
perched on the edge of the Sahara. As I mentioned earlier, it was a
big-time trade center, back in the day – but of course the crossing
of the continent-wide desert was difficult.
So,
yeah, Timbuktu was far from most, and hard to reach.
But
there had to be thousands of towns as far away and hard to reach. Why
Timbuktu?
Part
of the reason for Timbuktu's fame was that it was the home of one of
the first universities in the world. The Sankore Masjid, an Islamic
university, had evolved from visitors and travelers congregating at
three mosques and was established as a university by the early 1300s.
It could house up to 25,000 students at a time, and the library was
the largest in Africa since the famed Library of Alexandria, with
between 400,000 to 700,000 manuscripts.
The
university was very different than those developing in medieval
Europe. Students were not registered, and there was no central
control; rather, students associated themselves with a single
teacher. Classes took place in the open courtyard of one of the
mosques or in private homes.
Which
sounds pretty great!
What
is Timbuktu like now?
Everyone
heard about Timbuktu, partly because several historians described it
in their books, and at first it came to symbolize a fabulous, wealthy
place. Eventually it became thought of as sort of an outlandish place
– very far away, very exotic, very strange.
These
days it suffers from desertification. Desert sands have been blowing
more and more into the city, and the streets (made of sand) have
become higher than the entrances of the houses, which means that
people have to go down to get into a house.
But
there is another danger. Get this: in 2012 northern Mali, including
Timbuktu, fell into the hands of Muslim extremists—and many of the
residents fled to other towns. Apparently the extremists destroyed
many shrines and mausoleums, apparently feeling that the brand of
Islam represented by those structures was the wrong brand.
Later, in early 2013, as French and Malian troops approached the city
to take back Timbuktu, the Islamic rebels set fire to many buildings
and fled themselves, back into the Sahara, back where they couldn't
be found.
Yes, you got that right: Islamic extremists
torched Islamic mosques and also Islamic homes and
libraries, including an important 16-million-pound library with
thousands of ancient documents from Islamic scholarship!
Why????
 |
| Burned books |
But
here's a cool twist: Abdoulaye Cisse, acting director of the library,
and Abba Alhadi, an illiterate man who helped to take care of the
manuscripts, had worked for months to save the majority of the
documents. When rebels first poured into Timbuktu, Cisse stopped
moving the ancient manuscripts to the new state-of-the-art building
the extremists had taken over. And Alhadi had begun stuffing
thousands of books into empty rice and millet sacks. Every night he
had loaded the millet sacks onto a trolley and pushed them across
town. He had piled the sacks into a lorry and onto the backs of
motorcycles. Others drove the manuscripts to the banks of the Niger
River, and from there they had traveled by boat south to a town that
the extremists didn't control, where they were openly loaded into
cars and taken to Mali's capital, Bamako.
Apparently
the extremists never thought to worry about Alhadi. He was, after
all, a little old man who walked with a cane and who couldn't even
read!
Two
weeks of moving manuscripts in millet bags ended up saving around
28,000 texts. Unfortunately, nobody was able to rescue the 2,000
documents that had been moved to the new library building before they
arrived. However, most of those documents were in a basement room
that the rebels had never discovered. Even those manuscripts that
were burned, Cisse explained, had been digitized. They were
irreplaceable, and their destruction is horrifying—but it could
have been SO much worse!
Also
on this date:
Anniversary
of the Peace of Basel in Switzerland
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ahead:
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