Destroying History, Destroying Souls
Ibrahim’s statement reminds me of a comment made by columnist Ikhide Ikheloa, regarding a recent Huffington Post article regrettably named “Tragic Losses in the Heart of Darkness,” which mourns the killing by rebels of six people and thirteen okapi in the Congo’s Okapi Wildlife Reserve. Ikheloa writes “One cannot help but come away with the […]
Ibrahim’s statement reminds me of a comment made by columnist Ikhide Ikheloa, regarding a recent Huffington Post article regrettably named “Tragic Losses in the Heart of Darkness,” which mourns the killing by rebels of six people and thirteen okapi in the Congo’s Okapi Wildlife Reserve. Ikheloa writes “One cannot help but come away with the feeling that the death of several Africans caught in the undertow of the war against poaching is secondary to the fate of okapi and other wildlife that are deemed ‘rare’.”
The problem here, it seems, is in the framing—in how international attention seems to focus on the non-human over the human—when there should be more attention paid to broader structural problems that endanger both humans and their environment. Rebels in the Congo, Mali, and Nigeria who kill people and destroy their habitat continue a culture of violence found in earlier colonial conquests and in the disrespect for African history evident in the label “Heart of Darkness.” Militants are, on some level, both victims of structural injustice continued in neocolonial political regimes, and perpetuators of it. By disregarding the lessons of history, they re-enact its atrocities.
At the same time, framed properly, a lament for lost art and wildlife is not a denial of human dignity but an affirmation of it. Human beings are more than bodies. In response to my earlier piece on the Easter violence and the destruction of the Brooklyn mural, author Abubakar Adam Ibrahim texted me “These art works evolve a life of their own and become silent members of our communities, our existence. And the loss of such works represents an obliteration of a part of us, a part of our history. We are daily losing the things that have defined our existence and the way we live.”
Timbuktu is one of West Africa’s most well-kept repositories of written history. It is out of Timbuktu that Sufi scholars travelled, spreading Islam across West Africa. The ancient city is still the home of hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable ancient manuscripts, many of them from the 13th century. When I heard of the manuscripts at risk in Timbuktu, I immediately thought of the destruction of the great ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt. Historians are conflicted over who was ultimately responsible for destroying the library, but it seems to have disappeared in cycles of politics and war. First came the fire set by Julius Caesar in BCE 48, then another attack on the city by the Roman emperor Aurelian in 270-275 CE, then the Christian demolition under Bishop Theophilus of the Serapeum temple that held part of the library in around 391 CE; and finally destruction by Muslim general Amr ibn al ‘Aas in 642 CE. The loss of the library, and centuries’ worth of manuscripts, is one of the world’s greatest tragedies for historians seeking to understand the ancient world and its literature. The pattern of disregard for culture and history was continued in more recent colonial history, in which colonizers sacked and carried away treasures such as Benin masks and Egyptian sculpture.
If destruction of historical sites is not new in human history, neither are attempts to demystify religious belief by destroying sacred monuments. As the empires of the ancient world spread, they destroyed everything in their paths, including the Jewish temple in Jerusalem first sacked by the Egyptians, then the Assyrians and finally demolished by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Rebuilt, it was again desecrated by Greek rulers, sparking off the Jewish Maccabean rebellion, and was finally completely destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. In the years following the institutionalization of Christianity, Christian rulers followed such trends, destroying Roman temples and shrines. Such destruction also mars the recent history of Christianity in Africa. In Chinua Achebe’s historical novel Arrow of God, the fanatical character John Goodcountry, who urges church members to kill the sacred python, holds as heroes “the early Christians of the Niger Delta who fought the bad customs of their people, destroyed shrines and killed the sacred iguana.” More recently, in the past decade, the Pentecostal Christian group, the United Congress of Mbaise, in Imo state destroyed over one hundred shrines. Muslims have demolished the sacred sites of other religions, as well, including the Taliban’s 2001 dynamiting of gigantic 6th century statues of Buddha carved in a cliff in Afghanistan.
Different sects within the same religion have also destroyed each other’s holy sites in the name of combating “superstition” and “idolatry.” Author and art historian Teju Cole, for example, points to Calvinist rioters who in 1566 sacked and destroyed the Catholic church of Sint-Laurensklooster, a pilgrimage site, in the Flemish town of Steenvorde, which sparked off similar riots in Antwerp and Ghent. Cole quotes merchant Sir Richard Clough’s description of the violence in Antwerp. “All the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of thing left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed, being done after such order and by so few folks that it is to be marveled at.”
The demolition of the tombs in Timbuktu is recognizable in this historical trajectory, though it is something I am dismayed to see happening during my lifetime. Some have speculated Ansar Dine is defiantly reacting to global outrage, continuing in age-old attempts to prove power by erasure of another’s history. What gets lost in the power struggle are the lives of Timbuktu’s people, their culture, history, and identity—a loss not dissimilar to what is happening in northern Nigeria under terrorist onslaught. It is a loss both universal and intensely personal.
The questions that haunt me are: When we keep destroying historical records, how can we learn? What else is vanishing in the fog of war and terrorism? When the violence ends, what will be left?