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Editor's note:
The following recent report in the
*Los Angeles Times* raises some key
issues which historians face not
only in Mali, but throughout Africa
as well. Comments on this case, and
the general issue, are welcome.
mep
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"Pillaging the Past in Mali:
The remote West African nation is battling
looters who are ransacking one of the continent's
richest troves of medieval artifacts."
By JOHN BALZAR TIMES STAFF WRITER
DJENNE, Mali - History crumbles underfoot. Shoes crunch down upon
Africa's Middle Ages. In every direction, the ground here is
carpeted with multicolored fragments of pottery, broken figurines,
oxidized iron castings, human bones and burial jars--a vast medieval
settlement exposed incrementally by rain and erosion. In this Niger
River region of Mali is a lode of one of Africa's rarest
treasures--splendid evidence of its heritage.
Here, 600 years ago, an urban family prepared dinner in a clay pot,
put the children to sleep safeguarded by elaborate fetishes and poked
at the embers of the cook fire, sending sparks trembling into a vast,
dry sky. Who were these Africans who bartered gold for salt, pound
for pound? These city dwellers, connected by river to fabled Timbuktu
along one of Africa's greatest trade routes? This family whose
dinner pot today lies broken on the ground?
Oral traditions continue to link the generations in Africa, as do
religions and architecture, and techniques of fishing and farming.
But tangible artifacts that connect epochs are rarer. Random holes in
the ground, some disturbingly fresh, attest to the plunder of
historical riches. Grave robbers are busy ransacking Mali--perhaps
the most gluttonous pillage since Napoleon raided Egypt.
But Mali is fighting back. Landlocked in West Africa, straddling the
Sahara, one of the poorest and most remote nations of the world, the
country is battling to preserve its patrimony--electing an
archeologist as president, confronting the great antiquities
collectors of the West and cultivating among its own peasants an
appreciation of Africa's history. Slowly over 15 years, even as it
struggles to feed itself, Mali has squeezed its public treasury to
fund the crusade.
Public buildings are papered with anti-looting posters, cultural
centers have been established in outpost communities, and village
leaders have been enlisted to make the country's heritage a subject
of everyday discourse. At home, Mali has imposed laws with
three-month to two-year prison sentences for archeological pillage,
and abroad it has secured the cooperation of the United States and
others.
"Why is this important? Because it shows that in West Africa there
was an urban, developed culture, arising locally," says Samba Thiam,
research and conservation director of Mali's Cultural Mission in
Djenne. "Mali holds a very important role in African history because
of its position in trans-Saharan trade."
Compared to the treasures of more comprehensively studied regions of
the world, physical evidence of Africa's history is scarce. And what
is known has been largely ignored in African schools, many of which
were started by Western colonists and missionaries. To outsiders,
the idea of archeology in Africa almost always conjures up the Leakey
family's discovery of the roots of prehistoric humans, the link
between man and ape.
"We know how the world looks at us--as if we climbed out of the
trees," says Mamadou Dembele, a bartender at a tourist hotel in
Mali's capital, Bamako. Like thousands--maybe tens of thousands--of
Malians, Dembele has become attuned to his country's drive for
cultural awareness. It is an astonishing campaign, considering that
literacy in Mali is low (variously estimated between 18% and 32%),
income as measured by the World Bank is among the lowest on the
continent, the United Nations says one-third of children younger than
15 are malnourished, and not quite half the population has access to
clean water.
Mali's economy is based on subsistence agriculture and is almost
wholly dependent on unreliable rains for the millet and sorghum that
sustain its people. Drought has been a persistent roadblock to
progress since 1971. But President Alpha Oumar Konare sees a clear
reason for the cultural awareness campaign even amid such need: "In
Mali, our greatest riches are those which have been created by man.
It is important that our people understand this, to know their
history and culture, and respect it, understand its place in daily
life. Only by this can we guarantee the possibility of enrichment. .
. . These are the only real values. The rest are perishable."
Konare, 50, is the former director of the national museum, an
archeologist and onetime culture minister who was elected in 1992.
Mali, formerly a French colony known as Soudan, has endured a stormy
independence--including coups, military rule, friction with its
neighbors and street violence in its cities. Konare talks as if
history has already taught him what some African leaders have not yet
considered. "My background as an archeologist helps me understand
that my role is limited," he says. "The cemeteries are full of people
who thought they were indispensable." Now, if only Konare and his
government can save enough of Mali's heritage to secure its benefits
for the country's nearly 10 million citizens.
In a 1994 account, Archaeology magazine concluded of Mali: "Not since
the wholesale rape of Egypt's archeological treasures in the first
half of the 19th Century has a country been so methodically stripped
of [its] national heritage." In 1990, the magazine ARTnews said the
plunder of archeological sites and the decay of collections in West
African museums was "so vast and so widespread that the African
cultural heritage is in danger of being lost entirely."
The plunder is evident everywhere, driven by the novelty of African
historical objects and the increasing popularity of Malian artifacts
among private collectors and museums. Impoverished farmers
supplement their income by hiring out as looters. The historic
cultures were created by religious animists, with powerful beliefs in
spirits and demons, myth and ritual. Reflecting their world, they
produced vast quantities of fetishes, castings, carvings and
terra-cotta sculptures in strange, stylized anthropomorphic shapes.
Such was their influence that European artists, including Henri
Matisse and Pablo Picasso, maintained collections of African designs.
Here in Djenne, a short walk from the existing river town with its
narrow alleys and Sudanese mud architecture, is the raised, 80-acre
mound site of the city of Djenne-Djeno, the oldest known urban
settlement in sub-Saharan Africa. Scientists calculate that the city
was established 250 years before Christ and lasted 1,600 years,
dying out in the 14th Century with the rise of Islam and the decline
of the Sahara trading caravans in favor of ocean routes. A survey of
this and 833 similar sites found that 45% had been raided and 17%
virtually stripped. The prizes from these finds include terra-cotta
statues and figures, whose uses and meanings are only dimly
understood.
Roderick J. McIntosh is an American, and to some in Mali the best
known of all Americans. An archeologist from Rice University in
Houston, McIntosh and his wife, Susan, pioneered exploration of the
ruins of Djenne-Djeno. "Outside of Egypt, Mali is the African country
most richly endowed with archeological sites," he says. But because
uncovering and cataloguing each relic is so painstakingly slow, and
the theft of hundreds more so rapid and indiscriminate, McIntosh
says he feels helpless after nearly 20 years' work.
He likens it to the problems that future archeologists would have if
they found themselves trying to decipher 20th-Century transportation
after uncovering a bicycle and a few hubcaps, while thieves ran off
with the automobile, airplane, railroad and spaceship. "But it's an
amazing sight, isn't it?" McIntosh says of the unguarded Djenne
ruins. "I've brought archeologists from all over the world. They see
the carpet of pottery and relics, and it blows their minds."
East and north of Djenne, the remote Dogon people live in mud-and-
thatch villages tucked into the base of a colossal Grand Canyon- like
sandstone escarpment. And above the Dogon villages are the cliff
dwellings of the mysterious, now-vanished Tellem people. Both
cultures are famous for animist artifacts. The Dogon are known for
their wood carvings, particularly their unmistakable and intricate
doors and house pillars, as well as masks and fetishes. The Tellem
cast slender figures in metal and carved them from wood, which the
dry climate of the caves has preserved.
Looters have combed through this countryside for years. Not so long
ago, the Tellem caves were regarded with terrible superstition by
other Malians and left alone. But with a revival of Islam here in the
mid-20th Century, some of the fears have vanished and the caves have
been ruthlessly pillaged.
"Pssst. You want antiquities?" asks a man under a shade tree in the
sun-scorched trading outpost of Bandiagara, at the edge of the Dogon
region. Visitors follow him to his mud-walled home. In his living
room, they are shown artifacts one by one--a huge and splintered
Dogon door, a tree trunk carved by the Tellem into a ladder, Tellem
figurines and Dogon masks. Some may be authentic and, if so, illegal
to sell. "It is no problem, really," the trader says by way of
reassurance. He asks up to $4,650 for the best of the items--which
could be a bargain. In Europe and America, Malian treasures have
fetched up to $275,000 at auction.
Authenticity, of course, remains problematic. Mali's cities are
swollen with kiosks, shops and market stalls offering reproductions;
metal objects are carefully oxidized to evoke a feel of antiquity,
and wood carvings are buried in termite mounds to age. Even though
its tourist traffic is light, Mali is a favorite of African traders,
and these reproductions spill into the cities in Ghana and Ivory
Coast, Kenya and South Africa, on to France, Belgium and the United
States.
Nairobi art collector and merchant Alan Donovan, owner of the
artisan shop African Heritage in Kenya and supplier to at least one
Southern California gallery said that Malian art was in such
abundance at the most recent Los Angeles Gift Show that "it's totally
ruining the concept that these things are exclusive. But this is
always what happens."
Even at Mali's national museum in Bamako, small but well-regarded
among West African institutions, director Samuel Sidibe says: "We're
only beginning to know about our ancestral art. . . . The discovery
of our heritage, unfortunately, has gone hand in hand with its
plunder." He picks through terra-cotta statues in the museum's back
room. What is this? "Maybe a horse." How much would this bring on the
European antiquities market? "Maybe $10,000, but I really don't
know."
Director Sidibe and Malian scientists are trying to reduce the
pillage before it is too late. For nearly a decade, Mali has tried to
protect its artifacts by law. An export permit is needed to leave the
country with virtually any trinket, even cheap tourist jewelry and
new textiles. This requirement, though, like much bureaucracy in
Africa, seems easily overcome by forgery, bluff or bribery.
More recently, the government began asking--and winning-- the help
of powerful interests abroad. Eighteen months ago, the United States
became the first country to ban outright the importing of
archeological material from Mali without written government
authorization."The level of pillage from archeological sites in this
region is of crisis proportions, and Mali's cultural heritage is in
jeopardy," a U.S. government statement concluded. The U.S. Embassy
said it was the first time that Washington acted to protect artifacts
from outside the Americas.
Since then, Malian authorities said they have received cooperation
from France and Belgium. Three months ago, French authorities seized
a terra-cotta human figure on display in a museum. Mali says it was
the first time that "something important has been recovered."
The greatest hope for Mali is also the most daunting: persuading
hungry Malians that, for reasons of pride and patrimony, they should
leave untouched the remaining mounds of open treasure. But some
Malians remain skeptical. "When the government stops them from
digging and takes their artifacts, the peasants suspect that
officials are just keeping the treasures to sell themselves," says
Amadou Cisse, a souvenir seller in Djenne. And anyway, he insists,
dealers like himself know the truth, that "most of the good things
are long gone already."
Tereba Togola, a scholar with the government's Science Institute,
conceded that looting of Mali's culture began seriously 100 years ago
with French colonists and gained great momentum with the discovery of
the Djenne-Djeno site in 1977. "But to say the best is gone is to say
we know what the best is. And I don't think we know," he says. "What
we need to do is help people here make the connection with their
past. Everybody, even poor people, like their history."
Copyright 1995 Times Mirror Company; Fair Use reprint for scholarly
use only