Beginnings

The 12 of July was an auspicious day. After all it was the beginning of my new life.  But it is not always that such days live up to their expectations; they may turn out to be disappointingly ordinary. Not so this one: it was remarkable from sunrise to way beyond sunset.

It started at the Hotel Flandres in Sevaré, where I had stayed the night when I finally took leave of Djenné after 11 years. I had not left forever of course, but nevertheless it had been the symbolic farewell from my old life. (www.djennedjenno.blogspot.com).  As I finished my breakfast and sat waiting for my taxi to take me to the airport a distinguished looking African man sat down at the next table. Judging from his gold braided uniform  and elaborate  hat he was clearly important official and I assumed him to be the Governor of Mopti. So I asked him who he was and, lo and behold, he was the Governor of Timbuktu. That was of course a stroke of luck, since I was on my way to Timbuktu and so was he. And of course, one must always go and say hello to the Governor when one is about to embark on a new project. I therefore had a head wind start and was able to tell him a little about the project. When he found out that I was Swedish he told me that he knew the commander at the large Swedish UN Camp Nobel in Timbuktu, and that he had suggested an exchange:  he would present the Swede with a Malian wife and the Swedish commander would reciprocate and give him a Swedish one. At this he laughed very long and heartily and I thought it politic to join in with the hilarity. Our paths then parted as he was whisked off to the airport in the Governor’s limousine.

The Project I told him about, which will give me the ticket to commute between my flat in London’s Ladbroke Grove and Timbuktu for the next two years is the joint effort between the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme and the Benedictines of Minnesota and their HMML: Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. These are the two partners in the new digitization project in Timbuktu for the libraries that decided to stay put in Timbuktu and not join the now famous rescue mission by Abdel Kader Haidara’s SAVAMA. They instead hid their manuscripts in Timbuktu when the Jihadists occupied the north. And the unlikely project leader of this potentially important project for West African manuscript research is this ex- hotelier from Djenne...

Some choices that seem insignificant at the time have great consequences. In February I was sitting on the sunset terrace at my little mud hotel Djenné Djenno trying to make a decision: I had been invited by UNESCO to go to Timbuktu for a conference regarding the manuscripts of Mali. This in itself is fairly unusual: it would normally only be Malians who would take part. But Diakité, the chef of the Djenne Mission Culturelle insisted that he wanted me to go to represent the Djenné Manuscript Library, where from 2009 onwards I have been running three consecutive projects with the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. This is an unusual situation, since I am not an Arabist. I just happened to stumble across the Djenné Manuscript Library by chance one day. This was something that excited me: I had heard about the manuscripts of Timbuktu of course, and should have understood that there must be some in Djenné too, considering the fact that Djenné is even older by a large margin than Timbuktu and  that the two cities have been called les villes jumelles and  share the same history of trade and scholarship and early conversion to Islam. I threw myself into finding funding for the library with more enthusiasm than expertise, and was successful.  And now there was this conference in Timbuktu coming up. But the dilemma was that at the same time, there was my beloved stepfather Gillis who had just rung and invited me to his 90^th birthday the following week. I was to jump on the first plane to Sweden and arrive as a surprise for my mother. This would be lovely: how many more times would I see them? During the night I had tossed and turned and tried to make a decision. Timbuktu or Sweden? I  had still not decided.  Although on the face of it this seemed not to be a life changing decision there was something that made me hesitate and I must have had a premonition that this decision would have deeper consequences than appeared at the surface, so I dithered. Now I was joined on the sunset terrace by Hans, the Dutch/ Swedish friend who has been coming to Djenné every year and who always stayed at the hotel. “What would you do, Hans?” I asked. He came down on the side of Timbuktu. Eventually I agreed and boarded my first UN flight northward to this celebrated desert outpost.  

During the conference I was approached by the owners of three Timbuktu manuscript libraries. I had been successful in finding funding for the Djenné Manuscript Library, could I not try and find them some too? It appeared that all the funding that had been flooding in for Mali’s manuscripts in the wake of the celebrated rescue mission described in numerous articles, documentaries and  in two recent best- selling books (‘The Bad Ass Librarian of Timbuktu’ and  - miles better- Charlie English’s The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu) had been going through SAVAMA, the organization led by Abdel Kader Haidara who organized the rescue mission. There was nothing available for Timbuktu’s remaining manuscript libraries, although a major effort was underway in conservation and digitization in Bamako on all the manuscripts that had been ‘rescued’ and transferred south.
So, yes, I agreed to try and find them something and eventually, many months later, and many rewrites of the proposal later, I was now sitting at the airport of Mopti; on my way to Timbuktu to begin recruitment of the staff who will begin the work in August. And this would of course never have happened if I had chosen to go to Sweden for my step fathers 90th birthday!

 I reflected  as I sat waiting for my flight that Timbuktu has always been difficult to reach: for centuries it held an almost mythological position in the collective imagination of the West: an African Shang-Ri-La, where the street were paved with gold. Superhuman efforts were expended by numerous early explorers but most perished on the way.( Anthony Sattin’s The Gates of Africa gives a good account as does the above mentioned new 'Book Smugglers of Timbuktu').  Today we know where it is and we know how to get there but it is still out of reach for most: I am one of the lucky ones with a free flight on a UN plane through UNESCO. But it says on my ticket: Priority 5. Well that does not sound particularly reassuring; I could at any moment be shifted out of the way if someone more important should arrive... UNESCO’s cultural efforts such as missions to do with manuscripts are not priority of course. Nevertheless, I was lucky this time and formed  part of the group of passengers that eventually walked across the tarmac in the searing heat to the awaiting enormous UN cargo plane which conveyed us to the fabled desert city. My fellow passengers were made up of some civilians- Malian women fingering their prayer beads at take off, perhaps the wives of Malian military men or civil servants, and UN soldiers, from countries as far and wide apart as El Salvador, Ghana and  Egypt while the plane itself was manned by  Danish soldiers and a Danish flag presided over us all as the large plane thundered and shook its way northward.  

I had only one and a half day in Timbuktu. Toubabs are not supposed to stay longer and authorities get quite fidgety about this: it is regarded as dangerous. Timbuktu is a city more or less under siege. A large number of UN soldiers patrol the town and the attacks by the Jihadists who remain hidden in the desert surrounding the town are frequent. One is not supposed to walk around in the streets and one should keep a very low profile. I was met at the airport by M.Sow, an employee of the Mission Culturelle in Timbuktu. He suggested I should wear Hijab around town since I had to spend time in the Grand Marché to shop for air conditioners etc for the up-coming project. Alas I had totally forgotten to bring a scarf! But with some imagination there is of course always a solution to such problems and this time it came in the shape of an ordinary black T shirt, which makes a perfectly serviceable Hijab (just remember to turn the sleeves to the inside so they don’t flap around looking like big ears).

My main mission in Timbuktu this time was the recruitment of staff for the digitization project which is starting in the middle of August. But that was the following day. After my foray into the Grand Marché in my improvised disguise I returned to the Auberge du Desert where I decided to have a beer in the garden as the sounds of the call to evening prayer drifted across from the many mosques of Timbuktu. And it turned in to one of those evenings of unusual meetings and enchanted conversations that sometimes come our way if we are lucky. First my friend Sidy arrived. He was here during the Jihadist occupation and he visited Djenné then. I phoned him a few times in Timbuktu during those difficult times and he gave me insider information of daily life in the occupied town.  We were joined by his uncle, a journalist who was also present here in those days. He had been working with Abderahmane Sissako on the film Timbuktu, parts of which were filmed here. It turns out that the film has never been shown in Timbuktu! We started to hatch a plot how we could get it shown here for the population of Timbuktu: maybe through UNESCO? 

When they left I spent some time pondering over the only choice on the menu: Chicken and tinned French beans or Fish and tinned French beans. I eventually chose the fish and settled in happily with another beer. At this point a nice looking, tall, silver haired toubab that looked as if he might be a UN officer of some sort walked past. I must have smiled at him because somehow he came to sit down at my table. Well, there is not too much to do in Timbuktu at night so people tend to strike up conversations. And we talked and we talked. And then we talked some more. We talked about music mainly because we had the same taste in music (basically unrepentant old hippie stuff: Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Doors, Dylan- he liked the Grateful Dead while I preferred Jefferson Airplane) But not just “I like that one”, which do you like best?” No, our conversation was inspired and seemed to be about things deeper, although it was anchored on music. Occasionally we would get side tracked into the situation in Mali or in the world, but when that became depressing we escaped happily back into music again. We recited poetry too: I did Milton and he, not to outdone, provided some Chaucer. All in all an inspirational and beautiful day and evening and a great beginning to my new life.