Booms from rocket launchers and automatic gunfire crackled around
Mali's fabled town of Timbuktu, known as an ancient seat of Islamic
learning, for its 700-year-old mud mosque and, more recently, as host of
the musical Festival in the Desert that attracted Bono in January.
On
Sunday, nomadic Tuaregs who descended from the people who first created
Timbuktu in the 11th century and seized it from invaders in 1434,
attacked the city in their fight to create a homeland for the Sahara's
blue-turbanned nomads. Their assault deepens a political crisis sparked
March 21 when mutinous soldiers sized power in the capital. The Tuaregs
have rebelled before, but never have they succeeded in taking Timbuktu
or the major northern centers of Kidal and Gao, which fell Friday and
Saturday as demoralized government troops retreated.
The
expression "from here to Timbuktu" conjures up the end-of-the-earth
remoteness of the sun-baked frontier town. It does not express the
town's dynamic role as a major crossroads for the caravan trade between
the Arab north and black West Africa, bringing together black Africans,
Berbers, Arabs and, above all, the Tuaregs.
The Tuareg set up
their camel-skin and palm-mat tents in the dry season, attracted by
Timbuktu's location where the Niger River flows toward the southern
brink of the Sahara Desert, prompting some to call it the point where
"the camel meets the canoe."
The tents soon gave way to sun-dried
terracotta-colored mud brick buildings built in the Moorish style as
traders, medical doctors, clerics, artists, poets and others settled.
From
the sizzling desert sand and burning sun, one enters walled enclosures
with a central courtyard and archways leading to the welcome cool of
shadowy rooms where men chat over copious cups of strong, mint-flavored
tea brewed thrice in a time-honored tradition. Women bake bread in the
sand and cook spice-perfumed dishes of goat, cow and camel meat flavored
with dried wild hibiscus flowers or the powdered leaves of the okra
plant fried in shea butter.
Arab traders brought salt and other
goods that reached North Africa's Mediterranean shores and traded it in
Timbuktu for gold and, above all, the books that make the town a center
for intellectuals.
"According to the inhabitants of Timbuktu, gold
came from the south, the salt from the north and divine knowledge from
Timbuktu," the Timbuktu Foundation says on its website.
Before the Americas were discovered by Europeans, Timbuktu had a population of some 30,000.
The
city has been honored as a UNESCO World Heritage site for its
architecture and as a spiritual and intellectual capital for the
propagation of Islam on the continent during a golden age that began as
early as the 13th century and ended around the 16th century. It remains
home to the prestigious Koranic Sankore University and other Islamic
schools.
The town has been attacked and conquered in the past,
most recently in 1591 by Moroccan troops who sacked Timbuktu and burned
libraries.
Timbuktu is home to a library of ancient, camel-skin
bound manuscripts covering science, astrology, medicine, history,
theology, grammar and geography.
When France colonized West Africa starting in 1893, Timbuktu came under French rule until Mali became independent in 1960.
Throughout
the invasions, the Tuareg considered Timbuktu their city. As France was
negotiating Mali's independence, Tuareg leaders wrote to Gen. Charles
de Gaulle in the 1950s, appealing for an independent homeland for the
nomadic people made up of several tribes united by their common culture
and Tamashek language.
Sporadic rebellions failed to wrest
Timbuktu from government hands. When the 1990-1995 uprising to win
autonomy for Tuaregs in Mali and Niger ended in peaceful negotiations,
Timbuktu was the chosen site for the symbolic burning of weapons
signaling an end to the conflict.
Recently, the town's tourism
industry has been threatened by the rise of a thriving African branch of
al-Qaida, whose fighters in November kidnapped a Dutch, a Swedish and a
South African citizen from a restaurant in Timbuktu. A German man who
refused to be taken hostage was executed.
Despite fears of
insecurity, the Festival in the Desert was held in January, attracting
people from 50 countries, according to its website, including a special
appearance by U2 frontman Bono.
Source: www.jakartapost.com
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