People used to go to there just to collect the postmark, but now art dealers go to plunder the region’s priceless heritage, reports Alex Duval Smith
‘The trouble with Timbuktu,” says Mohamed Galla Dicko, “is that most people think it does not really exist. The world behaves as though it were just a mythical place.”
Soon its history will be little more than imaginary, according to Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba library which houses 15 000 priceless Arabic manuscripts. They date from the days when Timbuktu was a centre of learning and nomads who had followed the stars through the Sahara tethered their camels to hooks made from the local metal, gold.
Today Timbuktu, situated in the centre of one of West Africa’s poorest countries, Mali, is a market town living from salt quarried in slabs in the desert. To the few eccentric tourists who can afford to fly here or take a boat along the Niger river, Timbuktu is also a collectable postmark. According to legend, it is the furthest a human being can travel. But this windswept town in the dunes, with 5 000 years of history, four medieval mosques and some 200 dwellings, which look as if they were moulded in a child’s beach bucket, is not too distant for the world’s art dealers.
They come to the Valley of the Niger – whose heritage is rated by historians and archaeologists as equal in wealth to Ancient Greece and the Nile Valley – to plunder in the name of the current fashion for “primitive” African art. At a rate of thousands of objects each year, artefacts ranging from the neolithic to the medieval are being removed from the Malian sand and smuggled out by air freight.
Beads, tombstones and terracotta figures usually disappear into private collections in Europe and the United States. Last year, a stolen 12th-century terracotta ram caused a diplomatic stir when it was given to President Jacques Chirac by his daughter, Claude. After a year of wrangling, the ram was returned last month to the Mali National Museum bearing the plaque “gift from the president of France”. At present, the government of Mali is in conflict with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts which is exhibiting two figures that may have been plundered.
According to Tim Insoll of St John’s College, Cambridge, who is one of Europe’s leading experts on West African archaeology, the rape of the Niger Valley is costing the world a major chapter of its history. “Once objects are out of the ground, even if we do see them, which is rare, they tell us very little because they are deprived of their context. In Timbuktu and Gao, also on the Niger River, we have found 11th-century Chinese pottery and even beads from India. These objects tell us that they were brought by traders through the desert, probably from Cairo. Deprived of their provenance, they just become pottery and beads,” says Insoll.
He and a handful of other foreign archaeologists, who work in co-operation with the government of Mali, remove objects for cataloguing and photographing before returning them to the National Museum in the capital, Bamako. But they are increasingly caught in a race against unscrupulous dealers who pay impoverished farmers to dig up artefacts.
“The dealers are extremely quick and well- informed, the profits are huge and, for the government of Mali, which has to deal with starving people, the objects are not a priority, I suppose,” he says.
For Dicko, guarding a treasure trove ranging from 16th-century illuminated manuscripts to Korans and 17th-century trade contracts in Arabic, Hebrew and even Spanish, there is also a crisis of attitude. “Some European institutions think they are doing us a favour because they use the old colonial argument that we cannot preserve books properly,” he says.
Dicko is currently in dispute with the French culture ministry after it borrowed a work by the 16th-century poet Ahmed Baba and returned photocopies which are partly illegible.
John Hunwick, a British professor of history and religion from Northwestern University, Chicago, says: “In 25 years of visiting Mali, I have seen the landscape literally change. Burial mounds I photographed in 1972 have now been flattened.”
Some old objects, but few of any value, are in Timbuktu Museum where the curator, El Boukhari Ben Essayouti, receives regular visits from dealers looking for collectables. “Plundering has been going on here since the 15th century. But we have the technology and the knowledge to learn about the past and we should not squander that opportunity,” he says.
Ben Essayouti says a man describing himself as a tour guide recently offered him 500 000 West African francs (500) for a medieval oil lamp on display at the museum. “My uncle is the imam at one of the mosques and had brought me the lamp for safekeeping at the museum. People think we are stupid.”
While there are a number of international efforts to stop plundering – ranging from Internet sites and treaties to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s (Unesco’s) listing of the world’s historic places – little appears to be effective in a poor country like Mali, with huge tracts of deserted land.
Salia Mal, deputy director of the National Museum of Mali, says: “Anyone exporting antiques is supposed to bring them to the museum for a certificate. But what the dealers do, after they have paid a couple of men to dig a site and have sifted the objects, is come here with a mediocre or new object, obtain the certificate, then switch the artefacts. Last month, we organised a course for customs officers in the hopes of teaching them to recognise valuable objects. But terracotta, especially, is very hard to date, even for experts.”
Part of the problem is that Malian peasants are approached by dealers for their heirlooms and offered sums which, in a country where earnings average 5 a week, are irresistible. One new effort, in the small village of Fombori, north of Mopti on the Niger, is a “pawn museum” at which peasants may hand in their heirlooms in return for loans.
Occasionally, there is an international outcry when objects come up for sale at auction houses in London, Paris and New York, or when, as happened last year, the French president was photographed in Paris- Match with a valuable figurine. Last month, Ethiopia won the right from Italy – but not the funds – to ship back the Axum Obelisk, taken from Abyssinia by Mussolini’s invading troops in 1935 and erected in Rome.
Insoll believes the only solution to plundering lies in raising consciousness among governments through lobbying, and among individuals by, for example, printing warnings in guide books. Later this year, a centre for the study of illicit antiquities will open in the British town of Cambridge. “It has to become socially unacceptable to buy these objects, just as it has become taboo to wear fur coats or to trade in ivory and endangered species,” Insoll says.