Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (25 page)

The living connection that Malians felt with their past was just as critical. “Our people have produced great empires,” Konaré told me in parting. “Djenné and Timbuktu are there for all to see. People who know their own history, as we Malians do, develop a strong personality. That, more than anything else, is why I am confident in our struggle for democracy.”

In sharp contrast to the Malian experience, for most Africans colonization had obliterated memories of self-government and cultural achievement alike. In places like Zaire and Nigeria, huge, populous countries that should have been the crossroads and anchors to entire regions, the confusion sown by arbitrary borders, by the abrupt and haphazard imposition of alien political systems, by deliberate Western destabilization and finally by the economic turmoil that logically ensued, had further undone any sense of hope or self-determination. The hasty amalgamations left behind by colonialism rendered the citizens of “independent” countries like these just as alienated from their governments and from their past as black America’s urban underclass, and with similarly crippling consequences.

With a tolerant form of Islam nearly universal, and a dominant African lingua franca—Bambara—Mali, though, had become one of a select group of African countries that had succeeded in cobbling together its own cultural space, independent of Europe’s colonial intrusion. And with the exception of the northern Tuareg, and a few other small minorities that hewed closer to the Arab-speaking Maghreb, Mali’s ancient architectural treasures, still largely preserved in the country’s arid vastness like dinosaur bones in the desert, remained a source of psychic strength for all its citizens.

Eager to see for myself what Konaré was talking about, I, together with Robert, drove to Djenné, setting out north along the same narrow strip of highway I had taken years before to Mopti. A few minutes after crossing the bridge that leads from Bamako’s administrative heart to open countryside, the city vanished from view, as suddenly as the popping of a flash bulb. The immediate signs of change since my first, memorable visit to Mali were few, save for the expansion of the
bidonvilles,
sprawling squatters’ camps that hugged the dusty edge of town like a tattered canopy.

Once we were clear of this wretched sprawl, though, the first thing I noticed was that the roadblocks, so common under the dictatorship, had disappeared. We sped along in our Toyota Land Cruiser on the open, single-lane national highway for what seemed like an eternity, only stopping a couple of times for gas. For hour after hour, the landscape was unrelieved flatness. Occasionally, a village popped up over the horizon, all circular, brown mud-walled houses with peaked thatched roofs that, from their appearance, might have been the inverted caps of some gigantic species of mushroom.

Anthills, baroque stucco structures the height of a tall man, were the only sign of animal life on these scorched plains. But the winner of the evolutionary race in these parts, hands down, appeared to be the giant baobab trees, whose stripped trunks and arthritic branches towered mightily over an emptiness of tortured bushes and dry, rough grasses. The trees mocked the termites with forms even more gnarled than the insects’ mounds. They had resisted millennia of bushfires, and the cycles of drought, plague and pestilence that had emptied the Sahel’s villages too many times to count meant absolutely nothing to them.

We arrived in Djenné late in the afternoon, and our exhaustion melted away at the sight of the great mosque, whose earthen walls glowed orange in the mellowing sunlight of the town’s nearly deserted market square. It was the world’s largest earthen structure, and although I had often seen pictures of it since standing in its shadow two decades before, I was floored by the creative genius that went into its design. The mosque wore its skeleton on the outside, like some huge, sculpted insect. Palm-wood pegs protruded outward in a geometric pattern of scaffolding so neat and regular that its function, which was to allow maintenance men to clamber up its sides every spring to spackle the walls with fresh mud, had been harnessed in the creation of extraordinary form.

At the summit of the rectangular structure, serrated panels with spiky peaks reminded me of the wooden Scripture boards carried around by young Islamic students, or
talibé,
to help memorize their prayers, which were written in Arabic. Three massive towers rose up from the facade, peaking into spires, with the wooden pegs projecting outward here, too, almost all the way to the top, lending the building the appearance of a proper mosque. Each of these peaks was capped with an ostrich egg, a symbol of fertility and purity.

The sight of the mosque brought to mind a dinner I had many years before in El Salvador, in a gathering of reporters and UN officials. After a couple of drinks, a colleague began to boast about his travels to India, Nepal and Tibet, and then sneered upon hearing that I was about to be assigned to West Africa.

“Has Africa ever produced anything memorable?” he asked. “Most cultures distinguish themselves through architecture. Have Africans ever produced anything more than mud huts?”

As the only African-American in the crowd, the comments came not just as an affront to the land of my ancestors and of my wife and children, but as a direct personal assault as well. But as feelings of resentment welled up inside, I was momentarily at a loss for a reply, and I let the conversation drift in another direction, after only a mild rebuke about his ignorance.

As I stood before the giant mosque, the shame I had felt at not answering this challenge more forcefully was replaced by a feeling of pity and anger at the arrogance of a Western world that has always denigrated Africa, ignoring its accomplishments and constantly emphasizing its ills. The building before me could comfortably stand comparison with virtually any of the world’s great cultural monuments. It was an esthetic jewel, and at the same time, a functional masterpiece, made entirely from locally available materials, which were easily and perpetually renewable. The towering spires cleverly concealed ventilation ducts that carried away hot air. Its walls, sixteen to eighteen inches thick, depending on their height, absorbed the sun’s blistering heat only gradually, keeping the interior cool by day and comfortably warm even on the chilliest of nights during the harmattan, or cool season.

Mali had its own cathedral at Lourdes, its own Taj Mahal on the Niger, a Pentagon made entirely of mud bricks, and yet the outside world failed to take notice of the very existence of this fantastic building. What is even more remarkable, I learned later, is that this great mosque is perhaps the least impressive of the three religious structures that have stood in the heart of this ancient city.

Koi Kunboro, a rich sultan who converted to Islam, created the first great mosque here in 1240 by converting his palace into a place of worship, but an early-nineteenth-century ruler deemed the structure too sumptuous, and built an entirely new mosque in its place in the 1830s. His name figures almost nowhere in textbooks, or in the annals of architecture, but a local master builder, Ismaïla Traoré, who was head of Djenné’s guild of masons, designed the present mosque early in the French colonial period, at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The secret of this city’s greatness, like the capitals of all of Mali’s fabled ancient kingdoms, lay, in large part, in its location. Djenné sat astride a huge inland delta, nestled between the converging flows of the Niger and Bani Rivers. Its floodplains assured a steady supply of fish and abundant crops. Moreover, much like the cliffs of the Dogon to the northeast, the rivers and surrounding marshland shielded the population from easy attack by the invaders who had swept these plains through the centuries. For Djenné’s settlers, as for those of Timbuktu, location was everything. The great fortunes that were amassed by individuals in each city were derived from their roles as brokers and middlemen in an ancient caravan trade of gold and slaves marched up from the coastal forests to the south, and salt and metalwares borne southward by camels from the Maghreb and Arabia.

What had drawn me back to Djenné was the work of Susan and Roderick McIntosh, two Rice University archaeologists who had begun excavating a site adjacent to modern Djenné that had distinguished itself with the title of sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest city. Extensive excavations at the site had shown that the long-lost original settlement, known as Djenné-Jeno, was inhabited 250 years before Christ and mysteriously abandoned nearly a century before Columbus set out on his first voyage.

Roderick McIntosh had telephoned me in Abidjan with something close to panic in his voice to alert me to the ongoing plundering of long-buried artifacts from the ancient city. “What is happening is a looting of history on a scale not seen in Africa since Napoleon’s armies looted Egypt,” he said. He then gave me the names of several Malian archaeologists with whom he had worked for years, to act as my guides at the site.

One of the Malian scientists, Boubacar Diaby, met us in the unremarkable “modern” town of Djenné, a scorching, dusty place without electricity or running water, where tailors work their machines by pedal in the shade of mango trees, goats troop freely through the streets, bleating as they go, and the vehicular traffic is mostly two-wheeled, whether bicycle or scooter.

As we approached the site, what I could see of Djenné-Jeno above ground was little more than a low, mile-long mound that rose tear-shaped from the delta. But when we crossed the water and began to tread the mound itself, the history began to come alive, almost literally, in the crunching of a million shards of clay underfoot. These were fragments of a civilization that had created black Africa’s first known city, a great walled agglomeration where perhaps twenty thousand people lived in the year 1000—bits and pieces from a broken figurine here, pieces of earthen burial jars there, iron fishing hooks, fragments of spears, pieces of bone from both humans and their domesticated animals.

Here and there, one could see eroded mud bricks, the traces of a massive wall twelve feet high and ten feet thick that had once surrounded the entire site. The McIntoshes and their team had dug twenty feet deep into the clay-bearing soil to meticulously document the story of Djenné-Jeno, proving that its inhabitants’ ironworking technology, skill with pottery and finesse in crafting gold ornaments, which surpassed even the best of Bamako’s contemporary jewelry makers, all predated contact with Arabic-speaking people of North Africa by four hundred years.

Djenné-Jeno’s elite lived in spacious, rectangular mud-brick houses, whose design has been carried forward largely intact to the present day, as have sophisticated burial rites and ancestor-worshipping practices, at least among a handful of this region’s smaller ethnic groups. Here was the past evoked so proudly by President Konaré—who had worked this site himself with the McIntoshes years before. In a world where the achievements of Africans get scant recognition, Djenné-Jeno’s archaeological treasures resonate with the message that the people of this continent are capable of great things, and indeed always have been.

This city of gold traders, fishermen and farmers of the heavily silted Niger River delta was no mere spin-off from the cultures of the Maghreb, as many European historians once claimed, in a stroke depriving sub-Saharan Africans of credit for any genius of their own. Nor does it seem to have had any links with Egyptian civilization, as some Afrocentric academics have tried to claim, as part of a broader and longstanding effort to tie ancient Egypt together with other parts of the continent to the south. The truth is far more prosaic, and yet for Malians and for other West Africans who knew and understood it, potentially far more inspiring. A great culture had sprung up here locally, thriving for sixteen centuries before succumbing to a series of successor cultures that were driven by a powerful religious import, Islam.

Listening to the terrible crunching sound of the colored shards of clay underfoot as we surveyed the site, though, I realized there was also an awful irony at work here. Mali, one of the world’s poorest countries, had sacrificed precious budgetary funds for more than fifteen years to help make this excavation possible. With so few means at its disposal for conservation, though, it was powerless to stop the pillagers and the steady erosion, which were working in unholy tandem to ravage the mound, along with dozens of satellite sites in the surrounding delta.

“There is no sign of fire, and there is no hint of war to explain why Djenné-Jeno suddenly died out,” my guide, Diaby, told me. “It appears as if a devastating epidemic swept through the area and wiped everyone out. Today, you could say that the pillagers are the city’s second great epidemic.”

Vultures lurked on the few scrubby acacia trees that dotted the surrounding floodplain, creatures either already sated or, as seemed more likely, too lazy to bother to scavenge in the stifling afternoon heat. Here and there, peasants plied the river in their long pirogues. In the distance, a huge herd of cattle advanced slowly, pulling away at the sparse cover of fresh shoots of grass.

With each step, my tour with Diaby was turning into a seminar on the organized crime of archaeological theft, and at bottom, it all seemed remarkably similar to the diamond racket that was ravaging economies in Zaire, Angola, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, next door. In the badlands of the Malian Sahel, the rhythms of life have always been determined by the angle of the sun in the sky, and digging for artifacts, or what every villager in these parts called in French
les
antiquités,
was no different.

With temperatures rising to 110 degrees or higher by early afternoon, Diaby told me, the sound of digging echoes across the floodplains only during the early pre-dawn hours, when many people are still asleep. “The only thing that saves us here is that the thieves rarely dig more than two feet deep,” he said. “The pillagers know lots of sites that we haven’t discovered yet. In order to properly excavate them, though, you have to go down at least six meters [twenty feet].