Timbuktu and the River

Having left Djenne in a canoe I was able to take advantage of a more sophisticated means of transport from Mopti as I boarded the little UNHAS (United Nations Humanitarian Air Service) plane to Timbuktu. The plains of the Niger delta stretched out beneath us green and watery all the way to Timbuktu- an unusual spectacle. Normally the palette is increasingly  the ochre of the desert with the Niger snaking its way northward in a network of silvery tracks that lose themselves into the sands more often than not, making the progress of the river something of a miracle.
                                                                       

I was thrilled to see that the legendary airport of Timbuktu where every tourist took pictures in happier times  had been repaired and once more made functional after the Jihadist attack some months ago.                                                     

This time I was met by two young Swedish soldiers in a little jeep who whisked me off to Camp Nobel where I was initiated in all safety procedures and given my very nice little room in the guest  tent.                                                                                 

 I had of course been here before , on that ill fated trip in August 2017 when we were rescued by the Swedish UN forces and taken here after the attack on the UN head quarter in town, just next to the hotel where we were staying.  I had been made to understand that it was no longer considered to be safe to stay at the Auberge du Desert, my normal Timbuktu abode. Jessica, the new Swedish Ambassador had kindly pulled her weight on my behalf and been able to arrange my stay at the Camp Nobel: a marvellously well run place full of beautiful blonde, extremely athletic young  people- my own people of course, but with that extra politeness and correctness which comes with being part of the military. The Force Commander of all the UN troops in Mali is a Swede this year- General Gyllensporre. Unfortunately I did not meet him...

Timbuktu is always a struggle... and not always  because of the Jihadists. The Timbuktu staff are very demanding and bossy in comparison with the Djenne staff, who were just so grateful to have a job that they rarely complained about anything. But here I am always faced with a mini up-rising, and it has been about the same problem for close to a year now. It is a question of MILK. For some reason the staff feel that the work with manuscripts produces dust which can be unhealthy, and the traditional means of combating this is through drinking milk. When I was first faced with this in December last year, I shrugged my shoulders, smiled and said that sure, they could buy some milk, thinking that it would be a negligible amount in the budget and could be lost somehow. But in July this year the MILK budget had ballooned into over £200 per month, so I put my foot down. No more milk I said, until I had checked with London. And when I came back, I told them the truth, which is that nowhere in the world in the hundreds of digitization projects run by both EAP and theHMML- the Minnesota Benedictines- is there any budget for the purchase of milk. Therefore it would have to stop, although I was able to increase their tea, coffee and sugar budget with nearly fifty per cent, and said that if they wanted to buy milk with that it would be their business. I now had a mutiny on my hands. I told them that I only have a precious two days with them and could we please get on to other subjects of a more pressing nature? Or talk about something interesting, like what treasures they might have discovered in the manuscripts? Well, it was, as I said, something of a struggle, but in the end we managed to patch things up enough for a family photograph of all the team:
                                                                         

I chose to return south on the river once more- last December I had travelled north with the  river vessel Modibo Keita, and here we are leaving the port of Kabara last week:
                                                                               

I was in distinguished company: the Timbuktu historian and Eminence Grise Salem Ould ElHadje travelled south too and he told me tales of old Mali as we gazed  at the river’s shore where ancient  villages with  magnificent mud mosques, entirely untouched by time, sped by.
                                                                       

                                                                                

Other fellow passengers were a friendly and interesting lot as usual, among whom was Hawa, a primary school teacher from Timbuktu and Cheik Mohammed Ag Abdarrachman,  a Tuareg land and cattle owner . The water stood so high that I feared for some of the villages- and Hawa told me that indeed, there had been certain areas that had to be evacuated- such as a large part of the town of Dire, where many houses had collapsed. And still the water is rising... A year of extremes it seems. Before the rains this year, the drought had been so severe that thousands of cattle had perished: Cheick Mohammed had lost over a hundred head of cattle...
                                                                               

We talked of the security situation in Timbuktu of course. The Swedes would be happy to hear that my fellow passengers from Timbuktu  thought that if it had not been for them - and the other UN troops, Timbuktu would have been over run by Jihadists a long time ago.
They also thought little of the MOC- the camp in Timbuktu where representatives of those armed groups that were previously  separatist  but have signed the peace accord such as the MNLA (now CMA) are lodged together with representatives of the  government friendly militia Gatia. They are supposed to be keeping the peace in Timbuktu and patrolling the town but this seems to be a failure, according to Hawa and Cheik Mohammed. The unrest in Timbuktu is only escalating, but seemingly at the moment in waves of ordinary  banditism, such as car thefts and petty crime.

In the morning, before arrival in Mopti  the preferred Malian breakfast was served: Mayonnaise sandwiches.  It is quite amazing how delicious they can be...