The sun falls, and we must stop for the night, on our way to Timbuktu. We didn’t make into Mopti but to nearby Severé, the furthest point north that the Malian government was able to control, before the French intervention.
Our first leg of the trip is now completed after an 11 hour drive in grueling, dusty, pot holed roads. It’s dark and we arrive to our hotel. It’s a very exotic establishment named Via Via. The place is eerily empty. Mali’s already precarious economy is hurting by the near total annihilation of its tourism industry.
The further we go north, the more surprised people seem to be to see white visitors. The airport in Timbuktu remains officially closed, and only receives military planes and a few flights from UN envoys. The airport first opened in 2006, as a way to overcome the historical geographical isolation of the city, but now that airport remains officially and indefinitely closed. And Timbuktu is once more isolated from the world.
So far, we haven’t seen any French or International troops, which doesn’t make me feel particularly safe.
My room at Via Via Hotel is called, sure enough, Timbuktu. It has a simple bed with a mosquito net over it, one more precaution against the feared Malaria. There is running water with only one temperature, lukewarm.
And, one may wonder, why does Timbuktu matter so much?
When I was growing up, the name Timbuktu represented for me the furthest and most exotic of places. In Spain, we call it Tombuctú. My dad tells me that growing up in Chicago, they used to say: “I’m going to kick your us from here to Tickbucktu.”
For centuries, it was a place from where white explorers didn’t return alive. The first adventurer who reached Timbuktu and lived to tell the story was René-Auguste Caillié in 1827. He narrated his adventures in a three volume work published in 1830.
Timbuktu may be one of the most legendary cities of Africa. It historical importance is so vast that in 1988 it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Unfortunately, in response to the recent abuses committed by jihadist, UNESCO added Timbucktu to the List of World Heritage Sites in Danger. The city is, no doubt, an invaluable inheritance from our ancestors.
In the 1300’s, Timbuktu became a flourishing center for Islamic culture. An architect from Granada, now Spain, was commissioned to design the Sankore mosque, around which the University of Sankore was built. This is one of the many historical mud buildings that still stand.
It was a land where gold and salt were traded, but it was also a land of knowledge and universal wisdom. The manuscripts of Timbuktu are a true treasure for the human race and more so for the muslin world; a surviving proof of the powerful intellectual past of Africa.
You can see a BBC documentary about the libraries of Timbuktu here.
The history of Timbuktu is a history of invasions and attacks, alternated with long periods of abandonment and isolation. From the invasion by Morocco in 1591, to the attacks by many of the regional ethnic groups, to the domination by France between 1893 and 1960.
That is the story of Timbuktu, a precious legacy of enlightenment and knowledge, dismantled and abandoned, time after time, century after century, to the comings and goings of invaders, mercenaries and ideologues.
But the mud buildings and libraries of this town, still speak volumes, and the people who live here are the keepers of that flame.
As I read in an African magazine: “As long as we pass our heritage, our history will never end.”
Timbuktu is rich, in many important aspects, and it matters. Even if it doesn’t have oil. (One can’t help but wonder if the international community would have allowed this city to be tortured by fundamentalists invaders for nine long months, if it had oil.)
We wake up at Via Via and encounter a nightmare trip of security, bureaucracy and red tape. As expected, nobody wants to be responsible for our access to Northern Mali. We come and go to the internal border, three times, each time we are requested to have a different, more difficult to obtain paper, even if we have an invitation to exercise an “action humanitaire” in Timbuktu.
First, we are requested to obtain a special permit from the local police to travel into the northern territories. Then, the Malian Army chief at the last check point doesn’t want two westerners to travel to Timbuktu without military escort. This requires us to receive permission from the military authorities and the green light from the commanders in charge of movements within the northern territories. While not exactly easy, we gather the necessary documents and permissions.
This takes one day.
Between our comings and goings to the border, Dr. Murphy has a chance to give medical advice to a Malian soldier suffering from back pain. Dr. Murphy gives the soldier a referral to a specialist in Mopti, the advice to drink a lot of water, as well as two pain killers, “to use only at night, at home, and when you’re not carrying a gun”.
We overcame every obstacle. But now it’s too late to leave for Timbuktu. We’re asked to wait one more night. We do.
We check-in into another beautiful, empty hotel. There is only another group staying there. Five American civilians driving impressive white SUV’s. They didn’t exchange a word with us. Didn’t seem to us that they were free to chit chat about why they were there. If was to shoot a film about the Iraq war, I would cast all of them as employees of Halliburton.
The hotel faces the river Niger. The sunset is beautiful. Long boats cruise the silver, glittering water. Local groups of kids swim naked, playing and screaming, while their mothers wash their cloths in the river.
A beautiful moment of grace, before tomorrow we face the ugly gravity of war.
(For security reasons this blog entry was not releases in real time)
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