On the spine of a hogback hill overlooking Bamako, the capital of the West African nation of Mali, is a green sliver of a park, decorated with effigies of Mali’s historic explorers. On a recent visit, I stopped one piercingly hot morning to admire a bronze bust of a turbaned, bearded man set on a plinth. The nameplate was missing, but, judging from the man’s wide brow and Arab features, it seemed likely that this was Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, who journeyed through the Empire of Mali and visited its capital, near the River Niger, in 1352.
When Battuta arrived, the empire was at its zenith. Mali had converted to Islam, and Battuta, a Muslim, was impressed by the sight of boys bound in chains to force them to memorize the Koran. In his diaries, Battuta marvelled at the Niger’s crocodiles, so ferocious that a local man stood guard when he went to urinate on the riverbank. A few decades earlier, Mali’s emperor Mansa Mūsā had crossed the Sahara on a pilgrimage to Mecca, with a vast entourage carrying thousands of gold bars; in his zeal, he gave away so many of them that the value of gold in Cairo’s bazaar was depressed for years. The Emperor’s largesse established Mali’s reputation as a place of fabled bounty—a notion that never entirely vanished.
Yet Mali, the proud home of an ancient civilization, has never quite managed to maintain itself as a sovereign state. Slavery has dominated its history, with the lighter-skinned Arab-descended peoples of the north often in positions of control over the darker-skinned Africans of the south. (Battuta was offended by the sight of slave girls going naked in the capital.) Mali has also been attacked from outside: conquered, neglected, and then conquered again. A century after Battuta’s visit, the empire was invaded by the Songhay people, and not long after that the Songhay collapsed, too—their warriors, armed with spears and arrows, overwhelmed by invading Moroccans with muskets. Mali lapsed into obscurity for two hundred years; the ancient northern city of Timbuktu, once a flourishing outpost for the exchange of salt, slaves, minerals, and cultural knowledge, was reduced to a mustering point for camel caravans crossing the Sahara.
In the park, another statue depicted a European man, holding a sword and wearing a fastidiously buttoned uniform and a peaked kepi hat. There was no nameplate there, either, so I asked a group of teen-agers sitting in the shade of a nearby tree if they knew whom the statue represented. They looked blank. One of them said, “A Frenchman?”
It was a fair guess. To judge from appearances, it may have been General Louis-Léon-César Faidherbe, who oversaw France’s colonial expansion into Mali. The French regime lasted nearly eighty years, and ended only with the country’s independence, in 1960. It had complicated effects. The French outlawed slavery—after decades of taking slaves themselves—but they tolerated it in the north, where it still persists. And they created the outline of a state in Mali, but also conscripted tens of thousands of its men to fight in the First and Second World Wars. It seemed odd that Malians continued to pay tribute to their former conquerors. Do statues of King Leopold still stand in Kinshasa? Maybe Malians were more sanguine than other Africans about their colonial legacy. Or perhaps, after centuries of subjugation, Mali has got used to being defined by whoever comes to dictate the terms of its existence—usually by force.
Early last year, the latest wave of conquerors came. First were the Tuaregs, traditional nomads, slavers, and warriors who had been fighting for decades to win the north for themselves. Days later, they were joined by an international group of Islamist radicals. In three months of combat, they seized the entire north and declared an independent state, which they called Azawad, from a Tuareg word meaning “the land of pasture.” Before long, though, the occupiers began fighting among themselves for control. The Islamists won, and, as Azawad’s new rulers, they espoused fealty to Al Qaeda and decreed strict adherence to Sharia law. It was a unique victory in the history of contemporary extremism. For decades, Al Qaeda had acted as a largely rootless and amorphous agent of terror. Now its brash new affiliate had secured itself a state.
The rules were harsh. Music and television were banned, graven images were destroyed, and men and women were obliged to wear conservative dress. Transgressors were publicly punished with amputation, whipping, and stoning. Three hundred thousand people fled. For ten months, as the Islamists secured their hold, the world powers dithered, and the United States pointedly stayed on the sidelines. Many Malians believed that their best hope was France. But its new President, François Hollande, had behaved diffidently in foreign affairs—even in Africa, where France has intervened militarily dozens of times since 1960. “I’m adamant,” he said in October. “We will not put boots on the ground.”
Just before Christmas, the United Nations passed a resolution authorizing an African-led military force to be trained and sent to Mali—but the mission would take nine months to prepare. The Islamists were buoyed. On January 10th, a force of about eight hundred barrelled south, and swiftly overran the town of Konna, close to a strategic airbase and two days’ march from Bamako. Foreigners began to flee the capital, and embassy workers sent their children home. “There was real alarm,” an American diplomat in Mali told me.
France, finally spurred into action, launched a series of blistering air strikes, and began airlifting in troops. Along with soldiers from several neighboring countries, the French retook Mali’s northern towns in rapid succession. Except for one helicopter pilot, who was shot down on the first day of the campaign, there were no French casualties. In a few weeks the rebels had retreated.
In the end, Mali was rescued by the people who had occupied it for eight decades. But the insurgents were still in hiding, preparing to fight again. Worse, the essential cause of Mali’s problems—the racial divide, which effectively split the country—persisted, and, with it, the unresolved question of Mali’s identity. Was it one country or two? For rogue groups like Al Qaeda, broken states are appealing havens—and excellent bases from which to strike at the West. But what can hold a country together when centuries of occupation and bigotry have forced it apart?
Afew weeks after the insurgents were chased out, Bamako, hundreds of miles to the south, showed few signs that the country had been at war. A state of emergency had been declared, and weddings and baptisms rescheduled for safe private places. But the schools had reopened, and the roads were crammed with cars and cheap Chinese motorbikes. In Bamako, the life styles of past centuries coexist with those of the present day. Amid the telecom ads and battered Peugeot taxis were horse carts carrying firewood. Outside the National Assembly, a line of redolent fetish stalls sold monkey skulls, desiccated parrots, and pots of lion fat. One featured skins of serval, a ferocious nocturnal wildcat, which had lent its name to the French military mission: Opération Serval.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
A Street Musician Fights the Stigma of Albinism in Africa
Most people seemed consumed with everyday work. On the riverbank, women in bright print dresses tilled the soil, using every available square inch. Mali’s population is more than eighty per cent Muslim, and the fighting had not interrupted devotions. At one workshop, where a team was painting prayer-time boards, the owner smiled and said, “Everybody wants to pray nowadays. This war is good for business.”
Still, it was clear in Bamako that the war in the north was a symptom of Mali’s larger problems. When the Islamists began their attacks, it was widely interpreted as a sign that the government was weak. Soon afterward, an Army captain named Amadou Sanogo staged a coup in Bamako, deposing the President. Under pressure, he quickly stepped aside to allow the speaker of parliament to become the interim leader, but he retained the real power, controlling the ministries of defense and of the interior.
In early February, two rival groups of soldiers, on opposite sides of the coup, got into a firefight outside a garrison in Bamako. Two bystanders were killed and several children injured, just months after a previous clash that had killed fourteen people. Civilians expressed their outrage to local reporters, but that was as far as things went. With the military in effective control of the country, its soldiers could do anything they wanted.
A couple of days after the clash, a soldier with a Kalashnikov stopped my car near the Presidential residence. The walls of the houses by the roadside had been sprayed with bullets. Ibrahim, a Malian who was with me, reminded me that the President’s house had been attacked twice in 2012. It had happened first during the initial coup. Then, a few weeks after the interim President, Dioncounda Traoré, was sworn in, a mob of soldiers and civilians stormed the palace, stripped him naked, and beat him badly. “The soldiers did not behave properly,” Ibrahim scowled. “They also took things—televisions, refrigerators, curtains. It was very shameful.”
Now the Army was moving north to assist the French in holding the newly liberated towns. For many of these towns’ residents, this was little comfort. The Army, made up mostly of black southerners, is deeply distrusted by the light-skinned inhabitants of the north. Some northerners are of Moroccan extraction, and consider themselves as much Arab as Malian; others are ethnically linked to the Tuaregs, who have been essentially at war with the south since independence. In the course of five decades, the Tuaregs have launched several uprisings, which have been brutally put down. These attempts at holding the country together had, in their merciless implementation, further estranged its two halves. Now, as the soldiers moved toward Timbuktu, they were again behaving badly; reports were coming back of drunkenness, beatings, and, in some towns, summary executions.
Alarge, poor state straddling the River Niger and bisected by the Sahel—the great drought belt that separates the forests of southern Africa from the vast Saharan wasteland—Mali has few conspicuous advantages. Like many former colonies, it has made fitful progress as an independent nation: its recent history contains a failed attempt at revolutionary socialism, an abortive merger with Senegal, a couple of border wars, three coups, and one long military dictatorship. Its first free elections came only in 1992.
But, until recently, Mali was regarded as a modest success among African states, having avoided the large-scale civil wars that ravaged many of its neighbors. Despite its large Muslim majority, it was renowned for a spirit of moderation and tolerance, with most people practicing the comparatively relaxed, cheerful Sufi brand of Islam. This has permitted a rich culture to flourish, and, for a number of Malians I talked with, the Islamists’ cultural depredations seemed as offensive as their political dominance. The director of the National Museum, Samuel Sidibé, showed me a number of old wooden fetish gods that fleeing northerners had brought in, hoping that he would preserve them. He was still enraged. “The Islamists’ ideology cannot be spread without destroying culture,” he said. The museum, three large buildings situated in a splendid expanse of park, is a reminder that Mali is a place of long and diverse artistic traditions. Its rooms hold intricately woven and elaborately decorated textiles, gold jewelry and ornaments, and stylized sculptures of iron, wood, and terra cotta, representing a spectrum of human activity from farming to war and maternity.
The cultural scene is still thriving. The portrait photographer Malick Sidibé, who chronicled Bamako life in the nineteen-sixties, recently became the first photographer to win a lifetime-achievement award at the Venice Biennale. Malians are also fixtures on the world-music scene, with Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keita, and Amadou and Mariam especially renowned. Every year since 2001, Mali has hosted the Festival in the Desert, a three-day musical extravaganza at which foreign bands come to play alongside their Malian counterparts. Last year, the special guest was Bono.
In Mali, music is the maximum expression of public emotion, and musicians are essential for every kind of celebration. The jihadis’ ban on music was especially devastating. Many musicians had deserted the north, including Khaira Arby, one of the country’s best-known singers, whom I met one afternoon in the house she had rented in Bamako. A regal woman in her fifties, wearing a bold red-and-beige print dress, Arby was seated in a heavily upholstered living room, where she was rehearsing with several young guitarists. The aroma of burning frankincense filled the air. Children sat obliviously in front of a TV on the carpeted floor, watching a French version of “The X-Factor.”
Arby told me that she was in Bamako when the jihadis took Timbuktu, and she had stayed there ever since. Musicians she knew in the north told her that the jihadis had destroyed their instruments and sent her a message. “They threatened to cut off my tongue,” she said sourly. She continued to record new music, but she felt that she was in limbo, and wanted nothing more than to return home. So far, Timbuktu was too insecure for her to go back.
Not long after I arrived in Mali, I went to see a storyteller named Muhammad Djinni. In his seventies, with a worn, lined face, Djinni sat on a low stool in the alleyway of his house, wearing a dirty saffron smock. He was a butcher, like his father. But when he was young he had hung around old soldiers and his town’s most renowned historian, and in this manner he had learned a great deal. People came to him to learn their tribal history, especially orphans, who were always eager to know their real origins.
“What history do you want to hear?” he asked me.
I asked him to tell me about the French.
“The dominations we have had, we didn’t call for any of them,” Djinni said. “They just came. When the French came, we were surprised. We didn’t know why they had come. They would take your kids, and you wouldn’t know where they were, sometimes for years. Later, you would see your son and know that he was a soldier.”
Djinni was born in 1938, in the house he lived in now. “I grew up under the French—I saw many Frenchmen,” he said. They had forced him to go to school when he was nine, he said, but he had run away after two months; his father wanted him to learn the family trade. Life under the French had been simple, Djinni recalled. “It was easy because we did everything they said. The French named chiefs for each area of Timbuktu, and when they wanted to do something they called them and told them what to do.”
I asked what it was it like seeing the French return after fifty-three years.
“It was like a dream,” Djinni said. “They came to free us, and removed the noose from our necks.”
Many Malians seemed thrilled to have been rescued. On February 2nd, five days after French troops reached Timbuktu, Hollande was flown in for a brief, joyous reception in the dusty central square. In front of a cheering crowd, he cautioned that the Islamists still posed a threat, but declared, “We have liberated this town.” For a moment, Hollande seemed to approach the grandeur of de Gaulle—a rarity for a man known during his electoral campaign as Mr. Normal. The intervention was a coup de foudre for Hollande, whose approval ratings had slid well below the halfway mark; sixty-three per cent of his citizens endorsed the invasion. In Mali, French troops were met by crowds waving the tricolor and chanting “Merci, France.” Malians began referring to the French President as Papa Hollande, and during his quick visit they gave him a camel as a token of gratitude. Hollande declared his appearance there to be “the most important day of my political life.” The camel was left in Timbuktu, where its host family innocently made it into tagine.
Imade my way to Timbuktu with a force of a hundred and fifty French marines, who drove from Bamako in a three-day convoy in order to relieve the troops there. The marines moved in a light column of armored personnel carriers and open jeeps, without the heavy anti-I.E.D. armor that U.S. Army vehicles have. They were watchful with Malian civilians—this was unfamiliar territory for most of them—but there was a great deal of joking around, too. The French in Mali, unlike the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, enjoyed the advantage of a common language, and some shared history, with the citizens. Along the way, soldiers broke open their ration boxes, some of them complete with canned Camembert, to distribute to children.
There was danger out there, even so. After the French strikes, Mali’s Islamists fled to remote mountain hideouts to regroup. In the town of Gao, they had begun to strike back, sending suicide bombers on motorbikes. Outside Timbuktu, a sizable Islamist convoy had been spotted, and jihadis were suspected of hiding in the surrounding villages. A few more French soldiers had been killed as the campaign wore on, and the men in the convoy were taking no chances; at night our camps were like wagon trains, the vehicles pulled up in concentric circles, with sentinels on the perimeter.
However marginal and remote Mali may seem to Westerners, its travails exemplify the security problems posed by neglected places in the age of Islamist terror. With little effort, criminal and terrorist groups can seize countries, or parts of them—just as narcotraffickers have effectively taken over West African states like Guinea Bissau. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Islamist cause has grown more popular, and tensions have risen throughout the Maghreb, the northwestern region of North Africa. In 2006, a franchise of Al Qaeda formed in the area, calling itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (aqim). It originated in the nineteen-nineties, in Algeria, where a decade-long Islamist insurgency was crushed at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. That confrontation left behind bitter memories and a core group of survivors, who gained further expertise in Iraq and Afghanistan and new adherents throughout the region.
The Arab Spring provided the jihadis with an unusual opportunity. Before 2011, the Mediterranean coast of Africa—the great borderland facing Europe from the south—was guarded by a series of secular states, where Islamists were ruthlessly pursued, jailed, and killed. Now only two of those states, Algeria and Morocco, remain, leaving a new, more chaotic political environment. In Libya last September, Islamist extremists mounted a murderous attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. In April, Al Qaeda carried out a car-bombing attack against the French Embassy in Tripoli.
Mali, like the other weak, underpopulated states of the Sahel, is ideally situated for outlaws. Its northern territory is a hub for jihadis and smugglers for the same reason that Timbuktu was an ancient trading center: it offers easy access to Europe, and to the rest of West Africa and North Africa. From here, guns and insurgents and immigrants can be trafficked along the old caravan routes that once carried slaves, salt, and ivory. Even before the jihadis came, Azawad was a sanctuary for kidnappers, a place where government emissaries went to negotiate ransoms and get their people back.
But the West has largely ignored the region. On the French convoy, the officers grilled me politely about why the Americans had not got openly involved in Mali. Initially, their government had requested help in refuelling aircraft, and the U.S. had responded by asking France to repay its costs, of about seventeen million dollars. Although the request was later rescinded, it left the distinct impression that the Obama Administration was either extremely cautious or simply uninterested.
France’s European allies had also done very little, and the young commander of the convoy, Captain Aurélien, said that the lack of solidarity had been disappointing. “This is a French area, because of history, but we don’t have the resources to do it alone. We need a collective effort to defeat terrorism in this area.” With Europe’s economies as bad as they were, he doubted that help would come. “If the Islamists gain a foothold here, it will not be good,” he said. “This is the doorstep to all of Europe, not only France.”
These days, no bridge connects the lower part of Mali to Timbuktu, which sits on a desert plain about eight miles from the northern bank of the Niger. Travellers from the south must cross on a flat barge propelled by motor-powered canoes lashed alongside. Near the landing, on a bare riverbank, is a cluster of stalls made out of sticks, and when I arrived it was market day. Several Tuaregs were there, dressed in indigo robes and turbans, one wearing a sword in a leather scabbard and gold-rimmed sunglasses that concealed his eyes. Women carried dried hides on their heads. Small families, led by men with beards and wooden staffs, walked out of the desert to wait for the barge to come.
Timbuktu is a small, unlovely city in shades of brown and gray, a warren of low, flat-roofed homes made of mud or concrete. Interspersed are beehive-shaped tents covered with hides and scrap—the hovels of the nomadic Bella, former slaves who remain in serflike conditions, working as goatherds and as servants for their former owners. Other than one paved street, the roads are dirt. At the outer edges, the city peters out amid sand dunes and piles of uncollected refuse. In Timbuktu, as in many parts of Africa, plastic rubbish is so prevalent as to seem part of a new ecology.
Two weeks after its liberation, Timbuktu was subdued and wary. Many of the city’s fifty-five thousand inhabitants had fled after the Islamist takeover, and more when the French invasion began. Perhaps a third of its prewar population remained. Most of the shop fronts in the downtown marketplace were shuttered, and homes stood empty. Like vandals, the Islamists had scrawled graffiti and painted over road signs that showed human and animal images, leaving messy swatches of brown paint. Hair salons, which in Mali advertise their services with portraits of men and women, had also been targeted. There was little electricity, and not much water; the Islamists had also destroyed the city’s telecommunications system before they left.
There was no visible authority. The French military was based a couple of miles outside of town, at a small airport, and, except for several daily patrols in jeeps and armored cars, it was an unseen presence. Across the street from the grand mosque, a group of Malian soldiers lounged amid crumbling buildings in a colonial-era barracks. The town hall had been vandalized, its computers stolen or wrecked, its archives trashed. The only garbage truck had been shot up, and sat in front of the mayor’s office like a broken yellow toy. The mayor, like many of the civic authorities, had run away.
The Malian Arabs made up much of Timbuktu’s merchant class, and many of them had lived in Abaradjou, a neighborhood of well-built stone houses. Most of the homes had been ransacked; their doors and windows were gone, and their contents plundered. The shops had also been raided, the metal security doors yawning open, the interiors gutted. Virtually all the Malian Arabs, like the light-skinned Tuaregs, had fled when the French invasion began, making their way to refugee camps on the border with Mauritania or to villages in the desert. (The city’s few Christians were already gone, having left to escape the Islamists.) Timbuktu was no longer a city of several races; except for a few stragglers, there were only black Malians left.
Hollande had declared that France’s troops would begin withdrawing by April, leaving the area to an all-African force. But even though the city had been formally liberated, few people felt secure enough to return. Many feared that the Islamists were lying low until the French left. For the Arabs and Tuaregs, the threat was more immediate; they believed that their safety was at risk from the Malian Army.
There was only one hotel open, the Colombe, a dusty two-story structure, made of dun-colored brick, where the electricity and water ran for only two hours a day. In the evenings, the few paying guests shared the bar uneasily with Malian military men, armed and in uniform, who sat around drinking beer until they were in a sullen stupor.
My translator in Timbuktu was Idrissa, an unemployed tour guide in his twenties. He had learned English from a Peace Corps volunteer, before the organization pulled out of Mali, in April, 2012. Idrissa had earned a living taking intrepid Western travellers on expeditions into the desert, but he hadn’t had any customers in a year. He wore a turban and an electric-green robe and carried a cell phone with a startlingly loud call-to-prayer ringtone.
In the ten months of Islamist rule, there had been an execution by firing squad, an amputation, and several whippings in Timbuktu. One impoverished couple had been whipped because they were not married, though they had a child and the woman was pregnant with another. A young woman was accused of fornication and given ninety-five lashes. In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.
Near the town center was an unfinished hotel complex, built in single-level faux-Islamic style, which Idrissa explained had been financed by Muammar Qaddafi. We climbed a sand dune behind the hotel and looked down into a natural depression that had been filled with water, forming a large pond. Idrissa said that until recently it had been dry, and that it was where the jihadis had executed a man who was accused of murdering someone in a nearby village. Idrissa, along with many other people, had been summoned by the Islamists to gather on the dunes above the killing ground; jihadis with guns kept them in place. As the victim’s family stood by, they carried out the sentence. At the crucial moment, Idrissa had turned away, but he had heard the gunshot, and then the guards shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great.”
On the day I visited, there were a dozen women and girls washing clothes at the edge of the pond. Some were standing waist deep in the water to clean themselves as they washed. As we walked around, little children danced and chanted, “Mali, França, Mali, França.” It was a new kind of game for them. Their parents smiled and waved.
Timbuktu, at the edge of the vast Sahara, has served for centuries as a repository of culture. In 1510, the Moroccan geographer and scholar Leo Africanus visited, and described a city of veiled women and thatched mud dwellings, with a large mosque and an adjoining palace, and a thriving market in which European fabrics were sold and great amounts of gold traded. “The people of Timbuktu are of a peaceful nature,” he wrote. “They have a custom of almost continuously walking about the city in the evening (except for those that sell gold), between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., playing musical instruments and dancing.” Timbuktu was ruled by an immensely rich warrior king, whom Africanus described as merciless yet cultivated: “There are in Timbuktu numerous judges, teachers, and priests, all properly appointed by the king. He greatly honors learning. Many handwritten books imported from Barbary are also sold. There is more profit made from this commerce than from all other merchandise.”
That legacy persists. In the center of town is the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research, a modern archive library—all clean lines and sand-colored planes, to suit the surroundings—where tens of thousands of the city’s ancient documents were preserved. During the jihadis’ invasion, all the researchers fled, and when Idrissa and I arrived the building was still abandoned. A custodian let us inside, in exchange for a tip, and allowed us to wander with him through floors of mostly empty rooms. He showed us in to a locked storeroom filled with ancient manuscripts: shelves of little yellowing bundles. The custodian explained that the room was intact because the jihadis had not known about it. Most of the other manuscripts had, like the city’s several private collections, been hidden away by a network of librarians.
The jihadis had destroyed a few hundred documents that they found in the preservation room, where fragile pages were microfilmed and then preserved in specially made folders or boxes. The custodian led us out to a garden patio, where the charred remains of the documents lay. I was surprised to see that they had not been cleaned up; in the ash piles, there were scraps of ancient paper with identifiable calligraphy. The custodian said that no one from the center had returned, and so he was leaving everything as it was.
As well as a literary center, Timbuktu was known as the home of shrines to three hundred and thirty-three Sufi saints. The Islamists, who regarded the shrines as idolatrous, demolished as many as they could. In the Old City, a labyrinth of dirt alleys, was the grand mosque, built in 1327 by Mansa Mūsā, the “gold” emperor. Idrissa pointed to piles of dirt outside the rear wall, and explained that they were the remains of the first two shrines that the jihadis attacked. He had been there that day. “They blocked the street both ways, held people back with Kalashnikovs, and destroyed them.”
Before that, they had gone to the imam in the mosque, to inform him of their intentions. He had told them, “Go ahead. You are going to do what you are going to do.” The imam had maintained this neutral policy throughout the jihadi occupation, and told his flock to go along with whatever they ordered, so as to avoid violence. Everything was God’s will, he said.
At another mosque, the Sidi Yahya, a piece of sheet metal was propped up over an entrance to the back courtyard. There had been a door there, a massive wooden slab covered with geometric metal decorations, which had traditionally been kept sealed, in the belief that it led to a tomb of saints. Idrissa told me that the door was hundreds of years old, and that, according to an old superstition, if it was ever broken, the world would end. During the occupation, a squad of Islamists arrived with axes and destroyed the door. Afterward, they jeered at onlookers, “Has the world ended?”
In many respects, Azawad was regulated with almost parodic strictness; at one point, a spokesman decreed that tombs more than six inches tall would not be tolerated. But, compared with the harshest applications of Sharia law, the rule of the jihadis was not so stringent. At times, they seemed to be as concerned with establishing a government as with enforcing the holy writ.
On a nondescript street near the center of town is a small boutique hotel, La Maison, owned by a Frenchwoman. It is a simple two-story stone building, its rooms hung with Moroccan lamps and furnished with cushions and rugs. The jihadists evidently approved of La Maison’s style, because they took it over during their stay and turned it into their Sharia court. I went there with Cicce, a local man who had been arrested by the jihadis and held for three days. When we arrived, a caretaker wordlessly brought out great old-fashioned keys and allowed us into a dusty downstairs room, with furniture stacked up, where some of the jihadis had lived. The upstairs had functioned as the court’s chambers. Suspects were held under guard in the hotel’s restaurant; the trials took place next door, in a spacious room with two rugs on the floor and a chest of drawers that was used to store evidence. A short coil of rope, used for tying suspects’ hands, had been left behind.
Cicce had been arrested at a checkpoint, when jihadist fighters found a gris-gris—a traditional good-luck charm—in his glove compartment. “I thought my life was over from the moment they brought me in,” he said. He showed me where he had knelt on one rug in front of three judges, who sat cross-legged on the other. He had explained that an elderly man to whom he had given a ride presented the gris-gris to him in gratitude. He had thrown it in his glove compartment and forgotten about it. The judges asked him again and again about the incident, but also discussed religion with him, as if to test his fealty. The trial had gone on for many hours, and he had said what he could and hoped they believed him. But they had treated him courteously, he said. When it was lunchtime, they invited him to share their food. Eventually, he had been released, and considered himself very lucky.
The Malians’ reasons for complying with the Islamists were complex. After centuries of subservience, they understood when they had to accede in order to survive. The north of Mali is a neglected place, with no highway and few signs of development; what money flowed into the area in recent years came not from the government but from Qaddafi and from international charitable agencies. Kidnappers and other criminals operate with impunity in the surrounding desert. According to at least a few locals I talked to, the Islamists were tolerated because they brought order to Timbuktu. “The Islamists fought corruption, and the privilege of one citizen over another,” one told me. “Whether the person is white or black, they are lashed with the same whip.”
The jihadis had also made some effort to cultivate the city’s residents. Although they silenced most journalists, they allowed a middle-aged radio reporter named Yehia Tandina to continue working. When I visited Tandina, at his house, he explained why. “The Islamists wanted to make propaganda through me,” he said, matter-of-factly. “At the beginning, I had trouble with their fighters, but then they gave me an authorization.” He showed me the document, on Al Qaeda letterhead: stamped by the “Sécurité Islamique,” with a logo of a crossed Kalashnikov and sword, it was a tangible sign of the Islamists’ attempt to acquire the trappings of official power.
We were sitting in his family room, which had cushions around the edges and a small desk with a Dell laptop. Outside, in an alley courtyard, women ate rice from a communal bowl. Tandina wore Western clothes: tan trousers and a blue long-sleeved shirt. He explained that the first rebels who had arrived in Timbuktu were the Tuareg separatists, and there were no problems. “Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”
Tandina told me that afterward the people of Timbuktu, who were mostly moderate Muslims, had coped as well as they could. “We created a crisis committee, and if the Islamists wanted something to be done they went through the council,” he said. “The council didn’t want violence, and so it advised the people to do whatever the Islamists said. For example, the Islamists once wanted to collect money from each family for the electricity, and the crisis council went and politely collected the money from the people. There were also times when the council members disagreed. They wanted the boys and girls to have separate schools, and when we opposed them they said, ‘O.K., then, no school.’ So the schools closed after that.”
One of the few schools to stay open was a religious academy, led by a marabout, or Koranic teacher, named Baba Moulay al Arby. A thin man of thirty-four, Arby received me graciously in his home, which doubled as his school, and showed me the downstairs room where he held classes. Dozens of wooden prayer tablets were stacked against the wall. In a marabout school, groups of children learn the Koran by rote from the age of six to about fifteen. “Those who want to go on to learn other topics, like history, math, or geography, go on to a madrasah,” Arby explained.
Arby, one of the few Arabs remaining in the city, had a mustache and wore a brown djellabah. His family had been in Timbuktu since the time of his great-great-great-grandfather, he emphasized; he was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. “I know Islam better than these Islamists, but I was afraid of them and disliked them, because they are violent,” he said. “What they do in the name of Islam is just to trick the people.” He said that he had stayed on “because I have the support of the people of Timbuktu. I teach their children.”
His school had fared little better under the liberators. He normally had two hundred pupils, he said, but, since the French arrived and the town’s Arabs had fled, his classes had been reduced to forty. “Most of the Arabs were afraid of the French and the Malian Army,” he said. “They knew what they would do.” The Arabs feared that their houses and businesses would be looted, he said; a new home he was building had been broken into and plundered.
Outside the city, an A.P. reporter named Rukmini Callimachi had found shallow graves containing the bodies of two Malian Arab men, their hands bound behind their backs. Both had been shot in the head. The day before I arrived, an Army unit had grabbed eight other Arab men off the streets, including an older man named Ali, who had given interviews to journalists after the French arrived. The men had not been heard of since, and most people believed that they had been murdered. When I mentioned the killings and disappearances to Arby, he responded carefully. “I don’t think those killed were innocents,” he said, and added, “Ali was not an Islamist, but his children were. The military have him, and I don’t know what will happen to him. This kind of thing makes me afraid.”
He was in touch with some of the Arabs who had fled into the surrounding desert, and many of them were hungry and increasingly desperate. “I have talked to the military and arranged to send them food,” he said. “They were not with the Islamists, but they are afraid, and ashamed of what the Arabs did.” He had sent his mother and sisters to Niger for safety, he said, but he believed that Timbuktu’s “innocent” Arabs would eventually be able to return. The Arabs had owned most of the city’s businesses and had provided most of the employment, and they were needed. “If the imams and the notables come back and give their excuses, the black people will excuse them,” Arby said.
Two weeks after Hollande visited Timbuktu, Colonel Paul Gèze, the commander of the French invasion force, was getting ready to leave. In the dirt square where Hollande was greeted as a liberator—and where the Islamists carried out most of their whippings—the city’s residents organized a celebration for him. Gèze, a burly man with a gray buzz cut, sat with a few fellow-officers and local dignitaries in plastic chairs that had been arranged for the V.I.P.s. A bunting in the red, yellow, and green of the Malian flag hung around the edges of the plaza, alongside a banner with the French tricolor that read “Merci à La France et Les Pays Amis.” Crowds of people had gathered noisily all around the square, where gendarmes and men with sticks sought to keep them in place. There were drummers, and women singing and laughing. A group of male dancers wearing cows’ horns on their heads represented the butchers of Timbuktu, and one man with a black turban wore a hot-pink robe that was festooned, pirate style, with a great sword and crossed belts.
As the sun set, a kind of order prevailed, and the speeches began. A young Malian man performed a hip-hop verse he had composed in honor of the French. Commander Gèze smiled graciously throughout, and then he spoke, praising the people of Timbuktu and promising undying French support. As dancers came before the V.I.P.s to perform, my eyes were drawn to a man standing nearby. He was extremely tall and broad, with skin the color of old mahogany, and he wore a tunic made out of what looked like a grain sack. On the front were some words I couldn’t make out, and on the back was an image of a man sexually penetrating a woman from behind.
While the dance troupe performed, the man began a performance of his own. He pulled out a large black dildo, strapped it around his waist, and began grinding lasciviously, wearing a lewd expression. Eventually, he stopped dancing and stood, slowly stroking his dildo. People in the crowd stared at him with fixed, unbelieving looks; others smiled, or put hands over their mouths to suppress laughs. It was plain that everyone was familiar with his performance, and that many people were delighted. A pair of officials flanked him and tried to get him to stop. He pushed them away and, with a mischievous look, continued dancing.
It seemed extraordinary that Malian society could accommodate such opposing impulses. For most of the past year, jihadis had meted out lashings in the town square, where a man now danced around pretending to masturbate—and no one seemed overly perturbed by it. Idrissa explained that the man was a griot, one of the hereditary West African figures who carry on the oral traditions of their communities, through storytelling, history, poetry, or music. This particular one, according to Idrissa, was a bit of a rascal. When I asked him to translate the words on the griot’s tunic, he refused: “They are very bad words. You have seen the picture, so you can imagine.”
A few days later, we found the griot in his home, an improvised mud dwelling in the dunes at the edge of town. His wife was peeling vegetables on a patio, accompanied by several young children. The griot, wearing trousers and a shirt, invited me to sit with him under a veranda of woven grass, where songbirds flitted in and out. I asked if they were his birds. He gave a surprised laugh and said no, they just lived there.
His name was Boubakar Traore, but he preferred to be called Chief Firga, after the name of his village. He had been born a banya, or slave, of the Songhay people, and had taken on the role of a highly sexed buffo as an escape. Around the time of his birth, forty-seven years ago, slavery had been formally outlawed in Mali, but in the north the tradition of hereditary servitude persisted. The slave trade in Mali had a tangled legacy. “At the beginning of all this history, there were the poor black people and then the rich, intelligent people,” he said. “They would take you by force and make you work for them. If they lost their wealth, they would take you to the market and sell you. Later, some of the slaves got some money and learning, or became Muslims, and were able to buy their freedom.”
When Boubakar was a young teen-ager, he came to understand that his parents were slaves, and that he was, too. He went to his owners, a local family called Heydara, and asked if he was their slave. Embarrassed, they told him that slavery was a thing of the past, and that they thought of him as a son. But he knew the truth. Later, he told his parents that by law they were free, but they were afraid and couldn’t change. “They were slaves until the end of their lives,” he said. “My parents’ generation had no rights. My generation is the first to demand their rights.”
Boubakar’s father told him that he shouldn’t live with bitterness, and encouraged him to become a griot, as his grandfather had been, and his grandfather’s grandfather. Boubakar learned that if he donned his costume and went to the homes of his former masters they would pay him to go away. He had made a career of haunting them, appearing at their special occasions and brandishing the dildo. If necessary, he added, he blackmailed them: “I can tell stories about my former masters, and since I am their former slave, people will believe me. This gives me power over them.” He had been successful, he felt. “They paid for this house,” he said, smiling, and waved at his hovel. He said that he did it because he had resolved not to go through life concealing the fact that he had been a slave. Although he conceded that he was not a truly free man, because he lived off his former owners, he had found a way to make use of his heritage.
While the Islamists were in Timbuktu, Boubakar concealed his costume. The day I had seen him in the town square was his first day out in ten months. He had feared the Islamists, he said. “They cut off people’s hands and told our women that their clothes were not suitable. I think they wanted slavery to come back.”
Boubakar had ten children, and he was training several of them to be griots, including a couple of his daughters. When I expressed surprise at the idea of female griots, Boubakar explained how it worked. Former slave women wearing nothing underneath their dresses showed up at the social occasions of their former owners. “If they don’t pay them, they throw up their dresses and try to sit on them.” He laughed heartily.
Boubakar had no national history he could be proud of. Slavery was illegal now, but its social structures remained in place, and the state had provided no means of overcoming them. Being a griot, on the other hand, was something he could proudly pass on to his children; during his performances, he could make his former masters submit to him. But the larger question of belonging to Mali had no easy answer. Even Boubakar’s former owners considered themselves Arabs, and did not feel truly Malian. Where did that leave him?
As I prepared to leave Timbuktu, President Obama announced that he had sent a hundred U.S. troops to neighboring Niger, to work at a new base for surveillance drones that would help the French track Al Qaeda. A week later, Chadian troops fighting with the French announced that two aqim chiefs had been killed. But the Malian Army seemed far from ready to take over. In the main garrison, I found Colonel Kéba Sangaré, the newly arrived military commander for the city. A courteous man in his early forties, Sangaré insisted that people felt safer since his forces had arrived, and pointed out that the schools had reopened. “People now walk around freely, and Western journalists are able to go where they want. We’re slowly moving into a new phase, in which we are depending on the support of the local population to defend against the insurgents.”
In fact, he and his men relied far more on the French, which Sangaré acknowledged cheerfully. “We are not capable of taking care of all of Mali,” he said. “We have a big land and a small population and Army, and we don’t have the technology to see everywhere.” His own area of command, he pointed out, was two hundred and twenty thousand square miles.
Sangaré’s boss for Opération Serval was Captain Aurélien, my host on the convoy to Timbuktu. One morning, Aurélien came to the Hotel Colombe to speak with a group of reporters. Security had been reëstablished, but only wherever the French military was at any given time. He explained that the French would remain at the airport and had begun patrols around the city. He warned journalists against straying too far. “There may still be terrorists among the Arabs in the villages outside the city. I ask for your help in this matter—please don’t go there.”
When I mentioned that Hollande had said that his troops would hand off to the Malians by the end of April, Aurélien was noncommittal. “I am not sure about the dates,” he said. “I think it’s a little more open-ended.” A few feet away, in the restaurant, a uniformed Malian soldier sat drinking beer in a determined way. It was eleven in the morning.
In Bamako, I went to discuss Mali’s prospects with a well-regarded political activist named Tiébilé Dramé. A tall, affable man in his fifties, Dramé told me apologetically that he had not gone to the north since the French had ousted the Islamists. He had helped to organize fact-finding teams, but a recent trip he hoped to go on was cancelled for security reasons. When I told him about the disappearances and murders, he looked gloomy: “The country is in a real crisis, and too few people seem to be aware of the extent of it.”
He thought that the Western powers had allowed the Islamist occupation to persist. “My conclusion until recently,” he said, “was that the U.S. government did not believe that the situation in Mali represented a threat to international security—that’s the bottom line, I believe.” A few months earlier, he said, a senior U.S. diplomat in the region had bluntly asked whether aqim represented a threat to the United States. “Can you imagine?” Dramé said, with a disbelieving look.
Across town, the U.S. Ambassador, Mary Beth Leonard, offered a robust defense of America’s role in Mali. She explained that the government had given logistical support to the French mission, spent a hundred and twenty million dollars on humanitarian aid, and pledged an additional hundred million to a U.N.-backed stabilization program. (There were also reports of small numbers of Special Forces at work in Mali.) “But we cannot deal with the Malian military until after it holds elections and democracy is restored,” Leonard added. “We are very firm on what we think Mali’s priorities are. Governance is the main issue. Reconciliation is also near the top of the list.” She believed that the Islamists could be defeated only if all the groups in the north, including the Tuaregs—who had broken their ties with the Islamists during the French invasion—were brought to the table. There was still a war to be fought, though, Leonard said: “aqim did not prevail on the battlefield, so it will shift to asymmetrical tactics. We’re all waiting to see what those tactics are going to be.”
Soon after our meeting, aqim said that it had executed one of the six French hostages its forces were holding in North Africa. A week later, in Timbuktu, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the airport, killing a Malian soldier and wounding several others. Ten days after that, another bomber and two squads of gunmen attacked simultaneously at points around the city. One group sneaked into the back of the Hotel Colombe and opened fire on the rooms where several Westerners and Malian officials were lodged. It took forty-eight hours, and several more firefights, before the town was quiet again. On a visit to Mali in April, Laurent Fabius, the French Foreign Minister, announced that France intended to leave a permanent force of a thousand troops, in order to “fight terrorism.”
In the end, the United States’ hands-off strategy seemed to have had benefits. The U.S. had paid relatively little; the French did most of the work; and, for the moment, Al Qaeda was on the defensive. But the jihadis’ ten months of statehood may have long consequences. The short existence of the Islamic state of Azawad showed extremists that the West is more fractious, and perhaps weaker, than before, and less eager to take on armed fighters in faraway lands. It seemed likely that those jihadis who survived might want to repeat their experiment, perhaps with greater sophistication. In the meantime, the extremists hiding out across the region have shown their ability to strike, as they did in Niger, where suicide bombers killed twenty-six people in May.
If Mali is to stop being an appealing haven for terrorists, it must somehow pull together as a cohesive nation. But a considerable challenge remains. Mali has few leaders of note, and no civic culture adequate to the task of demanding more of its politicians—not to mention better behavior from its Army. When I met Tiébilé Dramé, he told me that the country badly needed “a national discussion about how we can lay a new foundation for democracy. Equally important are the internal discussions we Malians need to have about how we are going to maintain peace and hold the country together.” At the moment, he said, Mali was ruled by “a cohabitation between the coup and the constitution.” There was a transitional President, but the rogue elements of the military still exercised enormous influence. “The truth is,” he said, “no one really seems to be in charge of anything.”
In the past few weeks, though, there have been some promising signs. New elections are scheduled for July 28th, and it is possible that they will help allay the problem of governance. On April 25th, the U.N. decided to deploy peacekeeping troops. In mid-June, Dramé announced that he had completed weeks of negotiations, in which the insurgent Tuaregs of the north had agreed to stand down and, for the moment, rejoin the Malian nation.
There are many countries with unresolved sectarian and ethnic differences, and some of them manage to move forward, however fitfully. With help, it should be possible for Mali, despite all its problems, to limp along. But a comprehensive political solution seems far off. Until one can be found, Mali’s best hope may be its cultural verve and its spirit of tolerance, which, at least on the scale of a neighborhood or a town, can reconcile its people as politics cannot.
When I was in Bamako, public festivities were still on hold, but one Friday night the dimly lit Djandjo Club was open for business. The headliner was the Malian guitarist and singer Baba Salah, a thin man in his thirties, who wore a dark suit and a white shirt with a collar worthy of Billy Eckstine. As his band members set up on a nearby stage backed with mirrored glass, we sat and talked.
He was from Gao, he said, and though he and his wife and children were lucky enough to live in Bamako, many of his friends and relatives had endured life under the Islamists. “After a year of oppression, the people there had lost hope,” he said. “It had become clear that no one had the ability to do anything about the situation. So it was an incredible relief when the French came.” He was waiting a little while longer before he went back for a visit. “The cities are liberated, but the roads are not yet safe,” he said. He was frightened when the jihadis charged south from Timbuktu. He was known to have spoken out against them, and he was concerned that they would make him stop playing. The melancholy title track of his latest album was “Dangay,” which means “north.” In the song, he asks listeners to pray for the people of the region.
The club began filling up with exuberantly dressed men and women, who waved and smiled at Baba Salah. Most of them drank Coca-Cola; a few drank beer. There seemed to be no stigma to adhering more or less zealously to the faith.
Baba Salah’s guitar was a black-and-white Schechter, and before he got up to play he told me how he acquired it. In 2000, he was on his first trip outside Mali, touring with the great Oumou Sangaré, and in New York the songwriter Jackson Browne came to watch. “Afterward he called me over and said, ‘You play like an angel. What can I do for you?’ ” Baba Salah told me. “I didn’t know what to say. He said, ‘It’s O.K., I know what to do.’ So later he flew from California to here. I was living like a bachelor in a really small room. We played together. He said to me, ‘This is the guitar I play, and I want you to have it.’ ” Baba Salah had played Browne’s guitar ever since.
Onstage, he picked up the guitar and said a few words about how happy he was that the north was free, which drew applause and joyful shouts. Then he and his band began playing. Their music, driven by his guitar, was a looping, riffing, electric sound that evoked the sixties underground yet was distinctly African. Baba Salah’s singing was casual, comfortable, and as he launched into the first song people filled the floor to dance. ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment