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September 22 – Independence Day in Mali

September 22, 2014

nPostednon September 22, 2014

The Great Mosque of Djenne is the
largest mud building in the world.

nTodaynthe African nation of Mali celebrates its 1960 independence fromnFrance.

nHowndoes a nation that is the third largest supplier of gold in the wholencontinent still have about half of its people living below thenInternational Poverty Line? (Shockingly, the International PovertynLine is set way down at $1.25 per day. That’s…low!)

nPartnof the problem for people in Mali is that quite a bit of the nationnis the Sahara Desert. Most of the people live in the southern regionnalong the Niger and Senegal rivers. Most Malians fish or farm (ornfish AND farm).

nMalinused to be part of three different empires, at various times innhistory: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, and the Songhai Empire.nThe power of these empires came from controlling trans-Saharan tradenin gold, salt, and enslaved people. One of the ancient cities,nTimbuktu, was a center of trade but also a center of Islamicnlearning. This was back in the 1300s, before the EuropeannRenaissance, and Arabia and Northern Africa were the center ofnscholarship, math, and science in the Western world.

Eventually,nhowever, European sea routes made the trans-Saharan trade routesnobsolete, and much of the African empires’ power dissipated. Science,nart, and other studies took off in Europe, and European nations begannto establish colonies and military outposts in Africa and elsewhere.

n
n
n“Younlive way out in Timbuktu!”
n

nDonpeople use “Timbuktu” to mean the farthest-away, unreachablenplace in the universe? Back when I was a kid, I would hear thatnfairly frequently. Why did this Mali city become code for faraway andnhard to reach?

nMalinis landlocked, so there is no way to access any part of it by sea.nThat right there limits access to the nation, especially in the past.nMali and Timbuktu in particular are deep inland, and Timbuktu isnperched on the edge of the Sahara. As I mentioned earlier, it was anbig-time trade center, back in the day – but of course the crossingnof the continent-wide desert was difficult.

nSo,nyeah, Timbuktu was far from most, and hard to reach.

nButnthere had to be thousands of towns as far away and hard to reach. WhynTimbuktu?

Partnof the reason for Timbuktu’s fame was that it was the home of one ofnthe first universities in the world. The Sankore Masjid, an Islamicnuniversity, had evolved from visitors and travelers congregating atnthree mosques and was established as a university by the early 1300s.nIt could house up to 25,000 students at a time, and the library wasnthe largest in Africa since the famed Library of Alexandria, withnbetween 400,000 to 700,000 manuscripts. n

nThenuniversity was very different than those developing in medievalnEurope. Students were not registered, and there was no centralncontrol; rather, students associated themselves with a singlenteacher. Classes took place in the open courtyard of one of thenmosques or in private homes.

nWhichnsounds pretty great!

nWhatnis Timbuktu like now?

nEveryonenheard about Timbuktu, partly because several historians described itnin their books, and at first it came to symbolize a fabulous, wealthynplace. Eventually it became thought of as sort of an outlandish placen– very far away, very exotic, very strange. n

nThesendays it suffers from desertification. Desert sands have been blowingnmore and more into the city, and the streets (made of sand) havenbecome higher than the entrances of the houses, which means thatnpeople have to go down to get into a house.

nButnthere is another danger. Get this: in 2012 northern Mali, includingnTimbuktu, fell into the hands of Muslim extremists—and many of thenresidents fled to other towns. Apparently the extremists destroyednmany shrines and mausoleums, apparently feeling that the brand ofnIslam represented by those structures was the wrong brand.nLater, in early 2013, as French and Malian troops approached the citynto take back Timbuktu, the Islamic rebels set fire to many buildingsnand fled themselves, back into the Sahara, back where they couldn’tnbe found.

Yes, you got that right: Islamic extremistsntorched Islamic mosques and also Islamic homes andnlibraries, including an important 16-million-pound library withnthousands of ancient documents from Islamic scholarship!nWhy????

Burned books

nButnhere’s a cool twist: Abdoulaye Cisse, acting director of the library,nand Abba Alhadi, an illiterate man who helped to take care of thenmanuscripts, had worked for months to save the majority of thendocuments. When rebels first poured into Timbuktu, Cisse stoppednmoving the ancient manuscripts to the new state-of-the-art buildingnthe extremists had taken over. And Alhadi had begun stuffingnthousands of books into empty rice and millet sacks. Every night henhad loaded the millet sacks onto a trolley and pushed them acrossntown. He had piled the sacks into a lorry and onto the backs ofnmotorcycles. Others drove the manuscripts to the banks of the NigernRiver, and from there they had traveled by boat south to a town thatnthe extremists didn’t control, where they were openly loaded intoncars and taken to Mali’s capital, Bamako.

nApparentlynthe extremists never thought to worry about Alhadi. He was, afternall, a little old man who walked with a cane and who couldn’t evennread!

Twonweeks of moving manuscripts in millet bags ended up saving aroundn28,000 texts. Unfortunately, nobody was able to rescue the 2,000ndocuments that had been moved to the new library building before theynarrived. However, most of those documents were in a basement roomnthat the rebels had never discovered. Even those manuscripts thatnwere burned, Cisse explained, had been digitized. They werenirreplaceable, and their destruction is horrifying—but it couldnhave been SO much worse!

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