The Storied City
The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past
Riverhead, April 2017
Throughout history, Timbuktu has been the stuff of legend, an exotic, possibly imaginary place that Alfred Lord Tennyson characterized in his poem Timbuctoo as “a mystery of loveliness”. It was said to a be civilization so wealthy that even its slaves were said to wear gold; it was a center of learning whose libraries rivalled those of Alexandria, whose population was outnumbered ten to one by its books. The challenge, for centuries, had been to separate truth from legend. Yet legend is often based on elements of truth, and in 1970, UNESCO learned that Timbuktu did, in fact, possess an extraordinary trove of medieval texts – hundreds of thousands of them — dating back to its heyday in the 16th century and beyond, telling the story of an ancient civilization more advanced and learned than ever believed to exist in “the dark continent.” So began an international effort to collect, preserve and study these ancient texts.
And in this remote city on the Niger River in Mali – the nearest road ends two hundred miles away – no man was better at locating and collecting those manuscripts, hidden for centuries in private hands or buried in the desert, than Abdel Kader Haidera, a bibliophile who would soon become custodian of the largest collections of these documents. As late as 2012, Haidara believed that the main threat to their preservation was the climate and the termites. But when fighting broke out among various factions in Mali that year, and Timbuktu itself seized by Ansar Dine (an Islamist group more extreme than Al Qaeda) and placed under Sharia law, it became clear to Haidara that this vast treasure trove of ancient manuscripts would be destroyed, unless it could be smuggled out of the city and hidden. In an extraordinary operation worthy of a John Le Carre novel, Hadeira and his fellow librarians and archivists risked their lives, and managed to safeguard almost the entire collection of over a half a million documents — in effect, the history of an entire civilization.
But what, exactly, was that civilization? The question had been burning since Victorian times, and alongside the story of Haidara’s efforts to save Timbuktu’s history from destruction, Charlie English also tells the riveting story of its discovery – of the European and American explorers who raced to reach Timbuktu, in search of what they believed was “the mysterious capital of a remote but intensely rich African kingdom.” English brings to life the excesses and the courage of these men who crossed continents in search of the legend – in one case carrying a boat sawed into quarters and strung across the backs of eight camels – whose chances of survival in this ‘white man’s graveyard’ were slim. (One would have a better chance of surviving the Battle of the Somme.)
In the tradition of great works of narrative non-fiction like David Grann’s THE LOST CITY OF Z, Adam Hochschild’s KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST or Benjamin Wallace’s THE BILLIONAIRE’S VINEGAR, Charlie English’s THE STORIED CITY combines the stories of a present day adventure and a historical mystery, as the two converge to give us a fuller understanding of the world we’ve inherited.