Vashna Jagarnath, The Con
On the first day of 2015
Times Live published a piece titled The Sands of indifference bury Mbeki’s Timbuktu
dream. It detailed another epic failure of Zuma’s presidency. The article
explained that Zuma’s government has dumped the Timbuktu Trust that was set up
by President Thabo Mbeki. It declared that the dissolution of the trust,
through which, “South Africa channelled its aid for the preservation of
priceless documents and artefacts, marks the final chapter for one of former
president Thabo Mbeki’s proudest legacies.”
While Mbeki was
instrumental in setting up the trust, and supportive of efforts to secure the
documents’ preservation, the loss of this trust is not just a personal blow to
the former President. It is a sad day for all of us, from Johannesburg to
Bamako. The closure of the Timbuktu Trust confirms, once again, what we already
know about Zuma: He has no emancipatory vision and no interest in building or
preserving anything of social value. Zuma might have been willing to travel to
Tripoli in search of support for his own ambitions, but he has no genuine
concern for the Pan-African vision and no interest in the ongoing intellectual
battles being waged from the formerly colonised world.
Speaking on the 1st of
October 2005, President Mbeki explained some of the contemporary value of these
manuscripts:
These manuscripts debunk
the myth that the tradition in Africa was always and only an oral tradition.
The manuscripts point to the significance of the written tradition – a
tradition that long predates the arrival of European colonisers on the soil of
Africa.
Timbuktu represents very
important dimensions of Africa’s greatness and its contribution to the history
of humanity. It is world renowned as a centre of trade and a centre of research
and scholarship in the fields of science, mathematics, religion. Timbuktu
produced and attracted artists, academics, politicians, religious scholars and
poets.
It was this recognition
of the tremendous importance of this treasure trove of medieval books, scrolls,
paintings and other artefacts that led Mbeki to conclude his visit to the
Republic of Mali in November 2001 in the now isolated and small town of
Timbuktu on the outskirts of the Sahara desert. Mbeki’s poorly documented
journey into the Sahara would signal the start of a transnational African
project aimed at preserving and archiving thousands of precious documents and
other artefacts.
The collection that Mbeki
along with many others, including local historian Shamil Jeppie aimed to
preserve and archive includes remnants of the intellectual life in a 16th
century cosmopolitan city, enriched by trade – especially in gold and salt –
that reached from Africa into the wider Islamic world and Europe. Up to 25 000
scholars at a time worked, as Kgalema Motlanthe has noted, on “the synthesis of
what knowledge was available in the world then”. This collection is part of a
universal inheritance. Just like the texts and art that come to us from all the
other great centres of historical learning, it belongs to us all and is not
solely of interest to Africans or Muslims. But the depth of the wound that
colonialism ripped into our shared humanity, together with the contemporary way
in which Islam has been caught between imperialism and a set of fascist
responses to imperialism, gives this universal inheritance particular weight in
relation to both the African and Islamic presence in the contemporary world.
One of the central ideas
at the heart of colonial racism was the claim that reason – traced back to
Ancient Greece in a way that denied its location in a cosmopolitan network
stretching into North Africa, the Middle East and India – was peculiarly white and
European. When South African students return to lectures in 2015, many of them
will endure courses that still remain committed to this epistemic violence
against most of humanity. At the same time, many students will arrive at
university with the view, shaped by both the horrors of European and North
American imperialism, and their fascist rivals rampaging through Nairobi,
Kobani, Peshawar and Paris, that Islam has no space for the pleasures of art,
learning and the exploration of the human condition. The collection of
documents and artefacts that Mbeki wanted to preserve and archive – including
texts on science, maths, religion, art, astronomy, and economics – represents a
direct challenge to the inhuman ontological order of the modern world.
Timbuktu became one of
the main pillars in Mbeki’s attempt to build an African Renaissance – a concept
that struck at the heart of the racist imagination. The cosmopolitan
sophistication of this medieval centre of learning provided the perfect
complement to Mbeki’s own vision for contemporary Africans. And Mbeki, we
should remember, was not just interested in the African presence in the modern
world in the manner of a professor. Things were not purely academic for him. In
January 2004, on the eve of the coup that would, once again, deny Haitians the
right to determine their own future and instead make their country a vassal of
the United States, Mbeki defied critics at home, along with international
pressure, by travelling to Haiti to celebrate the bi-centenary of the Haitian
revolution. This was a revolution, waged largely by enslaved Africans, which
ended slavery in Haiti and created the first independent black republic in the
modern world. Mbeki offered the Haitians military equipment, as well as words
of support. In his speech in Port-au-Prince he declared that:
Today we celebrate
because from 1791 to 1803, our heroes, led by the revolutionary Toussaint
L’Ouverture and others, dared to challenge those who had trampled on these
sacred things that define our being as Africans and as human beings.
Today, we are engaged in
an historic struggle for the victory of the African Renaissance because we are
inspired by among others, the Haitian Revolution.
We are engaged in
struggle for the regeneration of all Africans, in the Americas, the Caribbean,
Africa and everywhere, because we want to ensure that the struggle of our
people here in Haiti, in the Caribbean, in the Americas, Europe and Africa must
never be in vain.
For Mbeki, the Haitian
Revolution was among the most important events in the history of modern Africa,
and the documents he saw at Timbuktu were among the “most important cultural
treasures in Africa.” But, as with Haiti, Timbuktu’s past seems clearer than
its future.
According to various
archaeological sources, several complex Iron Age settlements existed around the
area of present-day Timbuktu. Although by the late 11th century Timbuktu had
already developed into a small town, it was still of too little significance
for many Arab geographers of the region to recognise or document. When the
Muslim King of Kings Mansa Musa travelled on his now legendary pilgrimage from
contemporary Mail to Mecca, he passed through both Gao and Timbuktu.
Recognising the commercial viability of these small trading towns, Musa incorporated
both into the Malian Kingdom. He also commissioned the building of the
Djinguereber Mosque and paid the
designer Abu Es Haq es Saheli 200 kilograms of gold. This was a paltry portion
of Musa’s legendary wealth. He is now considered to have been the richest man
in history. His wealth at the time of his death has been estimated as the
contemporary equivalent of 400 billion dollars.
When the Berber historian
Ibn Battuta travelled to Timbuktu in 1353, it had become an established part of
the Malian empire. Despite Malian control of Timbuktu, it remained largely
independent and over the next century, Timbuktu grew and became an important
trading point for the nomadic Tuareg and the Songhai, an ethnic group under the
control of the Malian Empire. As the Mansa Empire weakened, the Songhai grew in
strength, eventually gaining control of the entire North West region of Africa.
Under the Islamic emperor Sonni Ali, the Songhai dynasty went on to run the
largest empire in Saharan Africa.
It was during this period
that Timbuktu began to develop into a globally important centre of learning. It
reached its political, cultural and intellectual golden age in the late 15th
century during the reign of Askia al-Hajj Muhammad (1493-1528). By the 15th
century, Timbuktu was an intellectual centre within the African and Arab world
that attracted intellectuals from Western Sahara to Moorish Spain and Persia.
It was a culturally sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, home to African, Arab,
Jewish, and European traders, among many others. The scholarly riches of
Timbuktu reveal that these were not just narrow religious scholars, but
thinkers, artists and scientist dedicated to understanding the world around
them. They worked on art, astronomy, geography, history, medicine, architecture
and engineering.
Timbuktu was not an
anomaly within pre-colonial Africa. North African empires and cities like their
counterparts in East Africa, Kenya and Tanzania, traded and were home to
various groups of people from as far East as India and as far North as Italy.
When the religious fundamentalists, Isabelle and Ferdinand, ascended to the
throne of Spain many Muslims, Jews and others fleeing the persecution of the
inquisition escaped to North Africa.
By the time Europe was
lumbering out of its cold, dark ages and dusting off the shackles of Christian
fundamentalism to enter into the world of trade, science, art, and industry,
Timbuktu was already declining. A series of regime changes had pushed the once
great city into quick decline, and it split into smaller parts controlled by
various Pashas. But despite its decline, Timbuktu continued to hold the
fascination of the European expansionists who still hoped to gain access to the
now-fabled wealth of the region.
Fuelled by the tales of
the Berber diplomat and later Christian convert Joannes Leo Africanus, many
Europeans hoped to find this mythical city, imagined much like El Dorado or
King Solomon’s Mines, and gain control of its treasures. The dream of treasure
for the taking in distant lands would become the advance guard of colonialism
around much of the world. The gold found in the Aztec and Mayan Kingdoms built
grand palaces in Spain. But by the time the treasure seekers arrived in
Timbuktu, Mansa Musa’s gold was long gone. This is probably why the Timbuktu
manuscripts escaped the fate of those in the Mayan libraries that were burnt by
the Catholic missionary, Fray Diego de Landa, another ruthless religious
fundamentalist, after the Spanish conquest.
Despite the ravages of
time and various conquests, including the most recent assault by an off-shoot
of Al-Qaeda in 2012, many of the old manuscripts survived. But Zuma has as
little interest in developing an African strategy to secure their preservation
as he has in developing an education system, a public broadcaster or an energy
network that can meet the aspirations of our people.
At the centre of the
intellectual work that aimed to legitimate colonialism was the creation of a
racial and civilizational hierarchy – with white people and Europe at the top
and Africans and Africa at the bottom. One consequence of this has been, as
Fred Cooper notes with reference to Mamadou Diouf, that Africa’s history
becomes “a story of ‘progress’ inevitably leaving Africans or Asians on the
side, lacking some crucial characteristic necessary to attain what is otherwise
‘universal’”. But of course the problem is not that some of us are still
struggling to catch up and attain the universal, but that for hundreds of years
some of us have been actively excluded from the universal. This is one reason
why Jamaican philosopher Lewis Gordon insists on the imperative to ‘shift the
geography of reason’.
The Timbuktu manuscripts
would have been a great resource to challenge many of the contemporary
prejudices that not only exist in the halls of academia, from Oxford to Rhodes
University, but still shape popular understandings of Africa around the world.
The colonial narrative that, as Chinua Achebe put it, “presented Africa in a
very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms” continues to flourish
everywhere from the Daily Mail to the comments section of any online newspaper
in South Africa. Despite his various intellectual, political and moral
failings, and there were serious failings, Mbeki had the vision and commitment
to understand the importance of these manuscripts. But today we are governed by
a man with no progressive vision for society as a whole, a man who is willing
to destroy the institutions that we have for his own narrow interests.
Patrimony has replaced principle. Zuma is, in many ways, the antithesis to many
of those that have struggled to liberate this continent and its people. Here in
South Africa we need to remember that there was a time when the struggle
against apartheid was so much more than just a struggle to take the oppressor’s
place.
