Makeda (28 page)

Had bona fide world historians been polled in the year 1200 on where the three major world regions would place 800 years thence, not one of them would likely have placed Europe first. Similarly, and with equal assurance, not one of them would likely have placed Africa last. For Europe, by the year 1200, had been by far the most backward of the three major world regions for 10,000 years.

The afternoon shadows stretched long. The streets and old buildings appeared redder than they had only moments before.

We reached the front gate of Sankore University, the last stop on our walking tour of the city.

The university’s buildings were surrounded by a massive masonry wall which had been interlarded at ten-foot intervals by a series of tall obelisk columns. A towering pyramid-like structure behind the wall was visible from where we stood. The heavy wooden door in the wall was closed. There was no one within sight. The old door had something of a forbidding sacred aura about it. Discouraged by its evident antiquity, we did not try to push it open.

Before leaving the guesthouse for our walk, we had been told by a visiting historian from Belgium to “be sure that you visit Sankore University. It is older than Europe’s first university, which is Salamanca in Spain, built by the Moors after they reached the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD. There were three departments of the University of Timbuktu: Jingaray Ber, Sidi Yahya, and Sankore, perhaps the most important of the three. Students were introduced there to all of the branches of Islamic knowledge: physics, astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, law, philosophy. Modern surgery was pioneered and performed there behind those walls.”

I looked at the walls of Sankore in the day’s dying light and thought of what an African-American professor had said to our freshman literature class at college: “You cannot rightly consider yourselves educated persons until you have mastered the Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare.”

The ironic timing of the thought’s arrival brought with it an emotion of considerable sadness and anger and private embarrassment. I had been forced to face the beast of my own inert ignorance. Ignorance of the world and of the ages, and of so much in the world that had happened completely unbeknownst to me. I knew not a jot more about anything than some unseen force or forces had allowed me to know.

Jeanne and I came down from the separate rooms we had taken to have dinner in the small meeting room on the first floor at the front of the building. There were four round wooden tables in the tiny room pushed inconveniently close to each other, requiring Jeanne and me to snake ourselves between them and into our chairs.

It was seven o’clock. Dinner for the guesthouse visitors was Western-style, modest, and palatable. Unless whispered, anything said could be heard by everyone.

Into Jeanne’s ear I said in a low voice, “I’m prepared to talk about Gordon.”

She awarded me a look of affording kindness. “Oh, Gray, I love you so much,” whispering, “you tell me when you think the time is right.”

“Okay.” Relieved.

“Let’s talk about tomorrow’s work. What time do the libraries open?”

The libraries were the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and the Library of Cheick Zayni Baye of Boujbeha.

“I’ve made appointments for us in the morning and in the afternoon.”

The solicitous man who was in charge of the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library said, “Between the two libraries, there are over 700,000 manuscripts that survive from long ago. There were once many more. Some have disintegrated because of poor storage conditions. Some have been stolen because of their great value on the world market.”

The man looked around the manuscript-laden room and then back at us as if he were gauging the good faith of our inquiry. Expecting astonishment to register on our faces, he said, “Most of the works here were authored by Africans between 600 A.D. and 1500 A.D.” His expectations realized, he carried forward with heightened enthusiasm.

“They are not all here, of course, but African literatures from this period are virtually limitless. Epics, poetry, diaries, letters—written in our own African languages, many in Arabic, some now translated into French.” His aspect teased with mild sardonic amusement. “Have no books been written in America about what is here—
has
been here, for what, more than a thousand years?”

We didn’t know how to answer him. The librarian then smiled modestly and stopped to consider what more he would say to us. The government in Bamako was military and humorless. We were foreigners from a powerful country. One had to be careful.

“The documents are not organized as they would be in America. We are a poor country and have no resources for such.” He then paused and reset the expression on his face to something somewhat less administrative.

“In these rooms rest the surviving literary evidence of Africa’s golden age—our heritage.” His tone changed as he said this.

The librarian had closed the main entrance door behind us after he ushered us in. The air in the large main room was cool and slightly scented with the odor of mildew that would dissipate with the arrival of the dry season.

“Was there something specific that you were looking for?” he asked in the French he’d begun to speak once he discovered that Jeanne spoke the language.

“No sir, not immediately. We’d like to read first and make inquiries of you in an hour or two.”

“Please sit over here.” He pointed to a long table on which some of the manuscripts were stacked.

“Thank you,” Jeanne said, and bowed slightly in her long dress that was blue for the occasion, but otherwise not unlike the modest dress she had worn on her arrival the day before.

The man started to leave and then turned back, facing us. “You are Afro-Americans. Not so?”

“Yes,” Jeanne said, welcoming the implied suggestion of a bond.

“We don’t see many Afro-Americans here. Why is that? Do you know?” His voice bore no trace of accusation.

“I am not sure, sir, but I think it is because we have not been told about it.”

“Well then, we shall have to do something about that, won’t we?” And then for the second time, the librarian smiled. Before leaving the room, he placed on the table before us two newish-looking scholarly monographs that had been written in English. The first monograph focused on the Greek historian Herodotus and was authored by Gertrude Stryker, an antiquities specialist at the University of London. The second monograph was written by Khalid Said, an Egyptologist at Cairo University.

While Jeanne was deciding which of the Frenchtranslation documents to read first, I began paging through Stryker’s monograph. I, of course, had read of the muchheralded Herodotus in my humanities courses at Morgan. He’d been described by my professors, and by the Western academy generally, as “the father of history.”

On page 3 of the monograph, I came upon the following passage written by Herodotus himself:

At the foot of the same page, I saw the following connective passage written in 50 B.C. by Diodorus Siculus:

After reading the first three pages of Said’s monograph on ancient Egypt, which incorporated photographs of ancient Egyptian statuary, I understood why the librarian had wanted us to examine these two documents before delving into the library’s great trove. The Egyptians Herodotus had referred to—Pharaoh Narmer of the first dynasty (3000 B.C.), Cheops, builder of the Great Pyramid, Mentuhotep, founder of the eleventh dynasty, and others—were all very unmistakably black.

The moldering ancient manuscripts that immediately surrounded us had been originally written in Arabic and in African languages by African scholars between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Most had been translated into French. Jeanne read from them aloud in English translating for me as she went. The treatises touched on every imaginable area of scholarly study. The full run of the sciences. Philosophy. Law. Religion. And medicine, as well, studied forward from the seminal work of the ancient Egyptian physician Imhotep (circa 2300 B.C.), to whom the Greek, Hippocrates, following more than 2,000 years behind, owed a great debt.

Jeanne read to me like this deep into the morning. Giving me an overview of the general tenor of the works, she read a little from one manuscript, and rather more or less from others.

One document, for example, described the manufacture of pots in the Khartoum (Sudan) of 7000 B.C. Coming well before such had been accomplished in Jericho, the world’s earliest known city. Another described the method used in implementing terraced hillside cultivation at Yeha in Ethiopia that Europeans would borrow and later claim to have invented.

She read from the writings of the eighteenth-century Timbuktu scholar El Hadj Oumar Tall, and indicated with a telling look her appreciation of the passage’s modern application:

My grandmother liked summer mornings and she liked them best for the moments just after sunrise when she could feel the touch of the cool air’s innocent promise upon her skin. Save for the sleepless crickets’ song, the neighborhood, carved up by the city’s fathers, was stockstill and quiet.

Jeanne and I, in the late Malian afternoon, were reading documents in the Mamma Haidara library in Timbuktu when my grandmother in the retreating darkness of early morning on Duvall Street made her way down the groaning stair and into the little parlor. She’d raised the window sash six inches and sat down in her padded rocker to breathe in the new day. While trying to envision us a world and eight time zones away, she’d fallen ever so seamlessly into the arms of Morpheus. With little to remind her of the time and place in which she was at present living, the space between the dream and her little parlor seemed to cover scarcely more than an instant. The dream itself may have begun the moment she’d slipped into sleep. It may have lasted little more than a second or two.

As she would later remember it to me, she as a young woman had been standing tiptoed in the orangish late-afternoon sun. She had been waiting—excited and expectant—amongst a crowd of thousands outside the colonnaded stone portico at the Great Hypostyle Hall in the monumental city of Thebes. The massive columns from base to capital measured some thirty feet in height and more than nine feet in diameter. There were 134 of the richly inscribed columns arranged in sixteen rows by the overwhelming structure’s architect.

The crowd had then sent up a deafening roar. My grandmother had looked toward the hall of columns and seen what had caused the crowd to erupt. From between the towering columns, Pharaoh Mentuhotep, leader of the eleventh dynasty and uniter of two Egypts under one rule, strode out onto the great hall’s tiled forecourt. The great pharaoh, now the ruler of all of Egypt, was tall and handsome and very very black. (His complexion, of course, was quite unremarkable and meant nothing to my grandmother at the time. Indeed, his color had been much the same as that of all the people she had ever seen.) My grandmother had looked then upon the mammoth stone structures that were evidence of Thebes’ undisputed greatness and raised her arms to the sky in praise of the setting sun. All that she beheld that day was of her people’s making and her people’s making alone.

Emerging from the scales of her short dream back into the cramped drabness of her Duvall Street parlor, she’d said aloud into the tiny room’s barren space, “We can only save ourselves from the inside out.” She had uttered the words while passing through the space—a measureless metaphysical membrane—that separated the life in Thebes she had just visited from her waking contemporary life in the little walk-up on Duvall Street.

Jeanne was tired but did not feel so, and read further, until it became unmistakably clear how greatly advanced was Africa in the arts and sciences during the whole of the Middle Ages.

She leaned against me and continued to read. She rested her face on my arm. She read like this until she could read no further, having been overcome by the immensity of the experience that we were sharing. At some point she stopped reading and turned her face to mine. Only then did I realize that what I’d felt on my arm were her tears. I smiled at her, and with my fingertips scarcely brushing her skin, I wiped away her tears.

I thought about what my grandmother had said metaphorically to me when I was a boy about most people wasting their lives staring at fences. Thinking about her now—sense-messaging her from the marrow of my excited spirit:
We’re not staring at a fence here, Grandma. Thanks to your
exquisitely special soul, we’re not staring at a fence. It’s like I’m seeing
myself whole for the first time.

My thoughts wandered to Dr. Abana and how what he had said had shocked Morgan’s students but not me. Not me, because of what my grandmother had read to me from the Book of Matthew in the Braille Bible of hers when I was scarcely more than ten. Words that Grandma told me were the words of Jesus:

And then, from the Book of Chronicles, she had read to me more than once:

For some reason I’d never thought about, my grandmother read to me from the Bible more about Ethiopia than about anything else. Once I remember her reading to me about a Candace, queen of the Ethiopians; another time, about the wife of Moses—an Ethiopian woman named Zipporah; and just months ago, about an African ruler named Tirhakah, the king of Ethiopia and Egypt (689–664 B.C. twenty-fifth dynasty), who had fought to defend Palestine from domination by the Assyrians. Then, lastly, her reference on the phone to the queen of Sheba’s son Menelik, who had taken the Ark of the Covenant from his father, King Solomon, and carried it home to Ethiopia; a story she had learned from her dreams of Lalibela, as it was not, I now knew, found in the Bible.