Despite its downtrodden appearance, however, Timbuktu still has a few gems that revealed themselves as I explored the town. The town was a center of trade and Islamic learning in the middle of the last millennium, and a few beautiful mosques and libraries of old manuscripts remain to tickle any traveler’s imagination. Trudging through the sand berms that passed for streets, I stumbled upon the Sankore mosque, a an mud-brick mosque with a pyramid-shaped minaret that dates back to the 14th century and used to house Timbuktu’s biggest madrassa (Islamic school).
Unfortunately most mosques in Mali have signs posted outside their gates that specify that entry for non-Muslims is interdite (forbidden), and Sankore was no exception. Rumor has it that foreigners used to have free access to mosques until Vanity Fair used the Great Mosque of Djenne as the scene for a risqué photo shoot that did not go over so well with Malians. While the profit motive ultimately triumphed over religious concerns in Djenne (my guide there informed me that I could have a look inside the mosque if I forked over $10 to a man sitting in a ambiguously official manner beside the mosque’s rear door), Timbuktu still seemed to be holding out. Sankore was closed and the prominently posted sign next to the front door discouraged me from knocking.
After I had circumambulated the mosque, I came upon a small group of low-slung mud buildings where, lo and behold, I heard a language that sounded a lot like Arabic. As I moved closer to investigate, I found myself peering into a classroom filled with students listening intently to a teacher lecturing them in Arabic as he gestured at pictures on a chalkboard. I paused for a few seconds outside the window to listen, but in that short period of time the attention of the entire class had shifted from the teacher to me (the large white man at the window). Not wanting to distract them, I decided to keep walking. After I had taken a few tentative steps, however, I stopped and thought to myself, “this is an opportunity that you should not pass up.”
“Salaamu aleikum,” I said to the teacher as I appeared at the door to the classroom, “can I sit for a few minutes in your class?”
“Please, here you go,” He responded with a mixture of surprise and bemusement as he pointed me to an empty desk in the front row, but he was able to pick up his train of thought immediately after I sat down.
The lesson of the day was about reptiles. The teacher had written out all of the material on the chalkboard, and he led the class through it in a sing-song voice.
“What types of reptiles are there?” he asked rhetorically in flowing, formal Arabic. “Some have legs, like the turtle and the lizard, and others, like snakes, just slither.”
To emphasize key points, he would take a statement that he had just made and turn it instantly into a question, expecting that the students would answer in unison.
Teacher: “Most lizards live in dry, desert-like climates. Where do they live?”
Students (in unison): “In dry, desert-like climates.”
Before attending this class, I had not realized that some Malian madrassas taught more than just how to read the Quran. In Djenne, for example, madrassa students begin their lessons at the crack of down and finish a few hours later so that they can head off to their conventional schools. They study Arabic primarily through the Quran, and as a result most students can read and understand Quranic Arabic but have no practical mastery of the language. This school in Timbuktu, however, was clearly different. As I learned from the teacher after the lesson ended, these seventh graders had been learning in Arabic since kindergarten, and they were expected to speak it in class as well.
Mali, like almost every other country in sub-Saharan Africa, must navigate some rocky terrain when it comes to language and education. The affairs of state are conducted in the colonial language, French, but two Malians speaking to each other on the street are much more likely to use a local language – “mother tongue.” Bambara, the most prominent of the mother tongues, is widely spoken in the southern part of the country, but it becomes less common as you head north. In Timbuktu, for example, you are just as likely to hear Tamashek (the language of the Tuareg nomads) or Songhai (the descendants of the great Songhai Empire that ruled Mali in the 15th and 16th centuries). This mixture of languages poses a serious pedagogical dilemma: should students learn in their mother tongue, the language that they speak with their family and on the street, or should teachers throughout the country use French as a unifying language? In fact, the Malian educational system seeks to find a middle ground: in government schools, students learn in the dominant mother tongue of their particular region for their first three years, after which all lessons are taught in French.
Unfortunately, this language dilemma has no perfect solution. The problem with the current arrangement is that children whose parents do not speak French find it very hard to connect what they learn in school with what they do at home. Ideally, a positive learning environment at home can reinforce the knowledge that a child picks up at school, but in rural Mali (and to a lesser extent in the cities), school and home are two different worlds.
The students at the Sankore madrassa also learned French, further strengthening their status as true polyglots. Their French skills enable them to navigate the world of Mali’s capital Bamako, and their Arabic enables them to communicate with their neighbors to the north (although they have to cross the desert in order to do so). But as residents of Timbuktu, their education still sells them short: if the leaders of tomorrow still conduct official business in Arabic or French, what hope is there for the vast number of people who will never make it past primary school? As long as this language dilemma persists, the prospects for comprehensive economic and social development remains slim.
