Africa’s Afghanistan

For centuries, the people of Timbuktu have sought guidance from their Sufi saints. They took pride in the mausoleums of these medieval Muslim holy men, who spread their faith around the world from a city built on the profits of gold, salt and slaves.

When I visited six years ago, a teenager showed me around, pointing out the shrines. As we stood by a monument to peace built in 1995 to mark the end of the last Tuareg uprising, with guns embedded in its concrete, I handed him a few coins. He gave them to children standing nearby. ‘My religion says we should share,’ he said.

Today, the mood is different. Islamic extremists, who hold the shrines and tombs to be idolatrous, are tearing them apart with pickaxes, iron bars and shovels. There are fears for the great libraries, which hold hundreds of thousands of precious manuscripts. The monument to peace only serves to mock the murder and mayhem engulfing Mali.

The demolition of the tombs is a ­tragedy. But the bigger tragedy is that it took the destruction of buildings — rather than lives — to bring the world’s attention to what’s happening in Mali. A decent democracy has disintegrated, families have fled their homes and allies of al-Qa’eda have seized control of an area of Africa the size of France. Al-Qa’eda has never come closer to power.

How did this happen in a tranquil nation famed for mangoes, music and mud houses? Like many African countries, Mali has borders bequeathed by colonialism, containing diverse and often disharmonious groups. It is also suffering collateral damage from the uprising in Libya. Gaddafi pumped money into Mali, and kept Islamists at bay, but also backed Tuareg separatists in the north.