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.