Africa

On the fringes of the SxSW festival two years ago, I found myself at a TEDx event where, among other foolishness, a presenter was congratulating social media for its success in tearing down Arab dictatorships. It was an especially goofy form of hyperbole, considering the lowtech carnage that was taking place at that moment in Libya, where Facebook had proven useful, but not nearly as useful as air strikes, Kalashnikovs, and a generation brave and desperate enough to choose death over dictatorship.

At this year’s SxSW, then, when I sat in a nearly-full conference room at the Austin Convention Center to listen to a conversation between Bassem Youssef and YouTube’s former News Manager Olivia Ma, I was predisposed to be skeptical. The redemptive power of social media is easily overhyped, especially when the real world is still ruled by stuffed ballots and riot police and grubby backroom deals.

Youssef will be in a Cairo court tomorrow, not long after being the subject of an arrest warrant issued on charges of “insulting President Mohamed Morsi, denigrating Islam and spreading false news with the aim of disrupting public order.” It’s part of a process that began unfolding even as Youssef was at SxSW, and from which not even YouTube can spare him.

And yet.

Just consider Youssef’s instant empire. 85 million views on YouTube, a million subscribers there, two million followers on Facebook. He’s called “Egypt’s Jon Stewart”, not just because it’s an easy analogy, but also because Youssef modeled his first videos—shot in a closet at his home—on the Daily Show. By now, though, Al Bernameg (translation: The Program) has graduated from its home studio to a renovated theater in Cairo. It has risen beyond YouTube to become the most-watched television show in all of the Middle East. For the Arab world, it is now more important than the Daily Show is to Americans.

Youssef looked very much the part, even in Central Texas. Trim, handsome, wearing a dark blazer that could have come from Stewart’s coatrack, he was funny on- and off-script (“you don’t want to ask me how to make falafel?”, he asked, dismayed at the lack of cowboy hats in the room). He had been a cardiologist before he became a media star. Suave, political, near-perfect English. The crowd numbered no more than a hundred, but they had the nervous energy of people in a room with their idol. It was, at least, a high-protein group: beyond the media and tech attendees, there was a large contingent of young Arabs and Arab-Americans who spent much of their hour livetweeting on laptops. The pinging of Hootsuite filled the silences between questions.

In his conversation with Ma, which started off with a rather smooth video about Al Bernameg rags-to-ratings story (a forgivable slickness—his media company is currently looking for investors) Youssef was not shy about invoking the power of these followers.

“The show is very popular,” he said in response to a question about the private lawsuits that have been filed against him and his show. “Your greatest protection is not lawyers, it’s the people.” Applause. “I think it would be a very stupid move if they started targeting media people, it’s not just me,” he said. “I think we have come to a point where the government is actually much weaker than the people.”

But part of the threat to Al Bernameg may bleed beyond political conservatism and into social conservatism. Sarah Carr has an intelligent dissection of the ingrained hypocrisy of Egyptian society, which curses wildly at traffic but will not stand for immodest language on TV, or that discourages men from talking to unrelated females in the villages but remains silent about molestation in the cities. As Carr put it, the social underpinnings of Youssef’s persecution are as intriguing as the “dreary, Mubarakist attempts at censorship.”

Youssef acknowledged the line he has to walk in Egypt. “We are challenging so many taboos, but we can’t challenge all the taboos at once,” he said. “We can’t really use very graphic stuff. I can’t drop the f-bomb. I wrote it twice but it was beeped… Basically, we’re trying to be socially sensitive.”

“We are pushing the limits. Sometimes because it’s funnier. Sometimes because we are sitting there and saying, you know what, stop being hypocritical,” Youssef said. “We use that language in the community, and TV is a reflection of the community.”

Less clear is to what extent that community will unite to protect him. It is sad but not surprising that a government elected by so few, now proving so incapable of tackling Egypt’s real problems, would instead try to set fire to its critics. What has been far more revelatory in these past years is the will of the people to push back against those types of leaders, before and after the revolution. In Egypt, activism has not restricted itself to Liking Facebook pages. It has spilled to the streets when needed.

Youssef has already proven than YouTube can make him famous, can produce a bespoke theater and the funds for a professional show filmed before live audiences. But can social media now conjure up its next miracle, and save free speech?

There are always a few kids hanging out by the St. Frances de Sales hilltop perch, and indeed, on the day I arrived from Accra, there was a boy at the top, waiting on a bench in front of the church’s wooden doors. He and I chatted for a few minutes. And then he had a question for me: “Are there gay people in America?”

This kid wasn’t waiting in front of just any African church; this cathedral was the former spiritual ward of Cardinal Peter Turkson, a Ghanaian clergyman who is one of the top candidates to become the next pope. As the cardinals meet this week in Rome to decide who will be the next to lead the world’s largest church—they are currently locked in a conclave and won’t come out until they’ve chosen—oddschecker.com, an online bookkeeper that compiled a list of odds from 13 papal handicappers, gives Turkson a 22 percent of getting the job—higher than all but Angelo Scolo of Italy.

Turkson’s candidacy is now being talked about with the type of what-if enthusiasm that typified the early days of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Not only would he be the first black pope, he would be the first non-European pope ever—a reflection of the church’s gravitational shift from the States and Western Europe to Africa and Latin America. Electing Turkson would break down an enormous barrier in a church that’s often accused of being insular and stubbornly tradition-bound.

But if you look beyond where he comes from and what he looks like, you’ll find that Turkson isn’t exactly the candidate of hope and change. His deep conservatism has been parsed plenty by the media, but it took a visit to the cardinal’s former dioceses here in the Cape Coast of Ghana for me to understand that if any change would come Pope Turkson, it would be the kind that sends the Catholic world even deeper into its past.

This is not to say that Ghana has to hear from the rest of the world, much less answer to me, for its bigotries. The country has its own path to take, its own battles to fight on homosexuality and the biggest civil rights issue of our time. But if the mission of the papal conclave is to unite and heal wounds in the church, it’s worth considering how different Turkson’s and Ghana’s views on sexual issues are from the larger church.

Despite Turkson’s frontrunner status, his relatively short stint as cardinal has not been without controversy. Last year he showed a YouTube video that used phony demographics to overhype the spread of Islam in Europe. He later apologized.

But it’s the sexual politics of his teachings that most concern reformers.

“Some say that we can control the disease through the use of condoms, but that’s where the church has difficulty,” Turkson told American Catholic magazine in 2010. “At the end of the day, the question we find ourselves asking is: What is the condom really for?”

Though he opened the door during a news conference for their use by a married couple where one partner was infected, he also said you couldn’t trust condoms to hold up properly in the African heat. Yet a warm climate is not an insurmountable barrier to latex condom use.

Through all of this lies a tendency toward denial and scapegoating of gays. Consider his take on the church sex abuse scandal. Turkson recently told CNN that African communities had natural defenses against homosexuality—which, according to him, explains why the abuses hadn’t been reported in such large numbers on the continent.

“In several communities, in several cultures in Africa homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society,” Turkson said.

These views, however, are a reflection of the beliefs of many in his country. As my conversation with the boy on the steps of St. Frances suggests, the existence of gays is regarded with a sort of lurid fascination in Ghana, as if they’re some kind of sexual insurgency that will overrun the country’s traditional mores any day now.

Just the other week, Ghana’s press was ablaze with homophobic articles after the prospective minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection hadn’t been sufficiently deprecatory to gay people during her parliamentary vetting.

This clashes strongly with the views of the richest and arguably most influential bloc of Catholics in the world, the Americans. A 2011 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that a majority of American Catholics support gay rights on some level—53% supported gay marriage. In Ghana, where there is neither legal protection nor legal status for homosexuals, the conversation is not whether gays deserve rights, but whether homosexuality exists at all.

I met quite a few of Turkson’s former flock during my time in Cape Coast. There was the expected excitement about the possibility of a Ghananian pope. But whispers of reform were absent, even among the white-robed young men at St. Peter’s Seminary’s leafy campus, where Turkson once taught. They are the church’s future, and they are on board with the conservative stance reflected in Benedict and Turkson’s teachings.

“I would prefer that whoever is appointed as the new Pope change nothing,” said Augustine Abakah, a fourth-year student at the seminary. “If we start listening to what everyone is saying and dancing to that tune, it could be disastrous for some time.”

“From us, coming from here, we have a very traditional way,” said Matthew Edusei, rector of St. Peter’s. The church cannot just change, he said, and he did not expect Turkson to attempt to do so.

“Because it is Catholic, you cannot so easily fit it to the time now,” Edusei said of the church’s teachings. “If you do that you will be called to account.”

But for most parishioners here, it’s not a matter of reform versus tradition, condoms versus AIDS, or even black versus white; it’s about having one of their own rise to the highest seat in the Catholic church. I met Matthew Nkewsi Mensah at the top of the 42 steps leading up to St Frances, a lung-searing climb he has done every Sunday for the last 24 years. He wore a colorful print shirt with Pope John Paul II’s face patterned on it, along with Turkson’s image from his years in charge of the archdiocese here.

Of course he remembered Turkson, Mensah told me. Turkson was the Archbishop who would give out toys and books to kids around the holidays. He would answer your questions about Mass at his residence face-to-face. Mensah described him the way almost every Catholic I spoke with during my time in Cape Coast did: an open, humble leader, who didn’t see his status in the church as an opportunity to gain power, but as a job to be done. He tenderly referred to him as “my Cardinal Turkson.”

And what if he were to made Pope?

“It would be a blessing,” he replied.

The question is, for whom?

—
Chris Stein is an Accra-based correspondent for the AFP and the Christian Science Monitor. You can follow him on Twitter or on muckrack.com.

Port Said's El-Dorado Theatre: built by a Greek businessman in the early 20th century, abandoned since 1970

I reached photographer Xenia Nikolskaya in Moscow while she was on an assignment for her new job as director for education and exhibition projects at Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency. She gamely answered questions from her iPad while on a break, but the topic was far from mid-winter Moscow. It was, instead, about her extraordinary book DUST: Egypt’s Forgotten Architecture. The book documents the abandoned palaces and salons of an Egypt you don’t often see in the headlines: the golden age of Cairene opulence.

But Nikolskaya’s interiors, shot from Esna in the south to Port Said in the northeast, largely with an old Horseman 6×9 camera, say as much about the decay of modern Egypt as about the luster of the country’s early years. Nasser may have kicked the wealthy owners of these mansions out of Egypt, but it was Mubarak who oversaw the political and financial rot that allowed a country to let its own history fall into such disrepair. And Mohamed Morsi’s new government doesn’t seem to value its cultural patrimony any more than its predecessors.

An exhibition of Nikolskaya’s work opened this weekend at the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm. If you, like me, won’t be making it to Sweden in the next little while, you might instead enjoy this (slightly) edited version of our conversation.

Roads & Kingdoms: How did you originally find your way from Russia to Cairo? I thought most Russians in Egypt stay in Dahab or Sharm.

Xenia Nikolskaya:Well, I am not most Russians… My grandmother is Danish. And my husband is Swedish.

R&K: Such handsome men.

XN: Oh yes they are. And strong. Vikings!

R&K: Tell me about how your book Dust started out.

XN: The first time I got to Cairo was in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2006 that I discovered this unknown—for me at least—colonial architecture that looks like my home city St. Petersburg.

R&K: Throughout Cairo, or in one area in particular?

XN: It was one house I first saw and got inside. It is on the cover of the book: the Sarageldin Palace in Garden City, next to my apartment now. I got inside and got in touch with relatives of the original owners. I made a small story about it, [but] no one could believe it is Egypt… I was truly amazed that Egypt has 5000 years of history, but the urban environment is [no more than 140] years old, literally. So in the end of XIX century Egypt was an architectural playground for politicians, business people, Egyptians and foreigners. People with money.

R&K: Your interview with Polis goes into the history well. Why was that detailed history important to include? Why not just let the photos, the interiors, speak for themselves?

XN: [The abandoned buildings are] a portrait of the very important time, an Egypt that nobody knows about. So I worked with historians and architects. And it remind me home [St. Petersburg] in a way. But you can’t do it at home. It’s too personal. Back home if I saw something like this I would cry, but not take pictures.

R&K: The old buildings there are in much less danger than in Cairo, yes?

XN: Less so, but still in danger.

R&K: I am not sure I’ve seen a shot of Cairo with no people in it. And now you have a whole book of them.

XN: Absence in Cairo is a luxury you never face. I wanted to do something that looks totally not Egyptian. Something about absence like Vermeer paintings. I got this idea in New York’s Metropolitan Museum in 2009 when I saw Vermeer’s Milkmaid. In this case ‘dust’ is a metaphor of it. And of course on the other side it is a portrait of Mubarak’s Egypt and the stagnation.

R&K: The project finished at the end of 2011. What has changed with these buildings since then after the revolution?

XN: Some got burned and looted, some destroyed. I am trying to follow up and record video interviews about them.

R&K: How sad. Which ones?

XN: Casgaldy villa, the Geographical Society. Some got “renovated”.

R&K: What does that mean?

XN: It means stupidly cheap fast painting all over, or something else that destroys the atmosphere.

R&K: Are there forces or organizations trying to preserve them now?

XN: Well, my book got a lot of attention and it created discussions about heritage. There are some organizations, but Egyptians are too busy with other stuff. And architectural heritage is a luxury problem.

R&K: Why do you think it should be something that post-revolution Egyptians should care about? Why is it important?

XN: It is a history. They should learn by their own experience. History is a knowledge. Knowledge is a result of education. [But] in Egypt about 50% of population—57% of women, for example—can’t read or write. Education is a key for everything.

R&K: You said that your book started conversations about heritage. Where? On blogs? At universities?

XN: Blogs of course. There is a great blog, the Cairo Observer, written by my friend Mohamed Elshahed, [that talks about how] architecture reflects economical and political decisions.

R&K: Has the Morsi government made any move, positive or negative, on the topics of these old buildings?

XN: Morsi’s government did nothing about nothing. It is a joke. People from outside don’t really know he was elected. By 10% of Egyptians. The rest did not vote at all.

R&K: Not that the situations are the same, but the Islamists from Timbuktu to Bamayan are very concerned with erasing history. Does the Muslim brotherhood, in your mind, have the same goals?

XN: Of course religious fanatics are not interested in educated, smart people. How can they manipulate them?

–
For more from Xenia Nikolskaya, visit her website or follow her on Twitter at @XNikolskaya

I do not have experience in tracking down dictators’ houses. But I do have experience with how hard it is to keep a secret in Senegal. No matter how confidential the address of Hissène Habré, the exiled “African Pinochet”, word must have gotten out somehow, to someone, in this town. So I had Assane, my regular taxi-driver and long time partner in adventure, arrive to pick me up for what he assumed was a shopping trip. “Assane,” I said, scrabbling for the right phrase in French, “we have an investigation to conduct.” He nodded and elbowed open the passenger-side door, which had lost its handle. I climbed inside the yellow-and-black taxi, and he started the engine. “We’re going to find the house of Hissène Habré.”

Habré’s dark history goes back a long way, and implicates not just his own country, but also mine and likely yours too. When Colonel Gaddafi invaded Chad in 1980, the U.S. under Reagan, with the aid of France, helped boost Habré to power and then provided him with massive amounts of aid to keep him there. The CIA had a secret base in Chad where they were training an anti-Gaddafi force. Habré was seen as the United States’ last line of defense on the continent against the Libyan leader.

But what an ally! While he was in power, according a 1992 Chadian Truth Commission report, Habré killed and assassinated 40,000 people, aided by his dreaded Documentation and Security Directorate. When he was deposed by the current leader and was looking for exile, the U.S., who felt they owed him a debt, struck a deal with Senegal’s then-president to give Habré a home in Senegal.

This is where the story becomes part of Senegal’s shameful past, something that Senegal, and Africa, is hoping to put right today with the opening of a special court established to try Habré. He found a warm welcome amongst the political elite in Senegal, his social standing greased with the riches he brought with him. On the day he fled Chad, he emptied the nation’s coffers and brought much of it to Senegal. No one knows how much of this money ended up directly in the hands of his new hosts, but we know that when he was indicted for crimes against humanity by a Senegalese judge in 2000, the new President then, Abdoulaye Wade, had the judge transferred from the investigation and the charges were dropped. Wade’s minister of justice, Madicke Niang, would later serve as lawyer to Habré, as would Wade’s Prime Minister, Souleymane Ndene Ndiaye.

Habré also found favour with Senegal’s religious elites who had campaigned to prevent Habré’s possible extradition to Chad, where there is a death warrant for him. Extradition requests, rulings and international arrest warrants from the European Parliament, Belgium (where Chadian victims had pressed charges), the African Union, even the United Nations Committee Against Torture could not convince Abdoulaye Wade to give Habré up. Habré was bringing too much to the table to let him go that easily.

Wade lost his own battle to hang on to power and in May 2012, he was voted out in elections. The new President, Macky Sall, wanted nothing more to do with this thorn in Senegal’s side. Within two months of coming to power, Senegal and the African Union had agreed to set up a special court to try Habré after 22 years of safe harbor.

Assane and I arrived in Ouakam, a tatty neighbourhood dotted with large villas belonging to diplomats and middle-classed Senegalese (it’s also home to the military base where French politician Ségolène Royal was born) and squeezed our way along the narrow road bordering the market. We weaved around horse carts. We dodged women dashing across the road carrying buckets of medicinal leaves on their heads. Stopping at a strip of plastic-strewn dirt where some taxis were doing car repairs, Assane leaned an arm out the window and hissed. “Hey,” he called, “Habré’s house, where is it?”

The taxi men shrugged their shoulders. They weren’t from this neighbourhood. Some buses had parked on a makeshift sandy football pitch up the road, and a pretty girl in dangly earrings waited, maybe for a bus. Assane asked her, giving an extra-broad smile, where Habré’s house was. She didn’t know either.

I wondered if my deputy was employing the right tactic. I thought it was all a bit, well, overt. I had imagined we would at least get out of the taxi first, perhaps snoop around a bit, sit on a bench, make some friends. What we were doing now from the taxi didn’t seem very investigative.

Then Assane saw a mama—the respectful term for an old lady here—making her way through the sand in a bougainvillea-pink boubou (flowing robe) with an embroidered yellow head scarf framing her black wrinkled face.

“Mama,” he called out, “Habré’s house, fou mou nekk?”

“Over by the pharmacy,” she said, pointing the way we had come. “Ask over there, everyone knows it.” She marched off.

We turned the car around.

“Mamas know everything,” said Assane.

At the pharmacy, we found three men sitting on a bench under an acacia tree. Over there, they pointed, keep going across the main road. It’s the red house on the left.

Hissène Habré’s street (Rue 201, according to a blue and white metal street sign) was as pot-holed as the rest of Dakar, more sand and rocks than tarmac, and we wobbled along it in the taxi, me holding onto the furry dashboard in an attempt to stabilise my stomach. A derelict patch of land to the right was home to a horse and his owner. He also pointed at the red house, which had a row of spikes along the top. The house’s paintwork was, by Dakar standards, in good shape.

Assane asked a man who sat on a chair outside a house on the other side if the red one was the house of Habré. He said it was.

Large gates and the wall hid any of the house’s features. I got out of the car to talk to the man, who sat with one foot resting on the other knee. I wasn’t sure what to ask next.

“Is Mister Habré home?” I enquired.

“No,” he answered, looking at his watch. “He left at midday.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“He went to his other house in Almadies” (an upper-crust neighbourhood nearby).

Two houses in Dakar means only one thing: two wives.

“When will he be back?” I asked.

“In 48 hours,” said the man matter-of-factly. “This is the house of his second wife.”

I thanked him and got back in the car.

Assane and I continued along the road to Almadies, a booming neighbourhood where footballers and mining executives live alongside flashy clubs catering to French soldiers and their long-legged nightclub companions. At a tin shed with a magnificent view of the Atlantic ocean, a young girl carrying a baby on her back bought a five-cent packet of milk powder. Assane shouted out our business, and all the customers of the lunch shack next door turned around to see who was looking for the dictator. Everyone looked at me.

The shop owner shouted back to the road that Habré lived behind the bank. We thanked him and moved on. At the bank, a man in a bullet-proof vest politely directed us to a patch of rubble and trash behind the bank and indicated the path through the trash. Out the other side was a building, barely noticeable at first for all the debris around it, but getting larger as we got closer.

We followed the wall, longer and higher than the last, around the property and I admired the flowering bougainvillea that trailed magnificently up and over the walls from the inside. I wondered how many gardeners he had. The walls were painted a tasteful cream colour, and the gate, wide enough to accommodate the throbbing Hummer of his footballer neighbours, were flanked by handsome lanterns. A guard’s booth stood to one side, a ripped mosquito net across the window.

We followed the wall for dozens and then a hundred metres, and then continued around the corner the same distance again. A group of men sat lazing on a narrow wooden bench in the shade of another tin shack.

I asked Assane to turn the taxi around and drive back; I hadn’t got a good look at the gate.

Suddenly a man dressed in khaki guard’s uniform appeared, his face dripping with water, his pant legs rolled up, his feet wedged into plastic flip-flops. He had been washing himself for afternoon prayer. He positioned himself between us and the wall of the mansion.

“We are lost!” I said, hopelessly. He wasn’t fooled. We drove off as fast as the road would allow.

I had seen what I had set out to see, and had been impressed both by how easy it was to find and how closely he lived with ordinary Senegalese people. I wondered if they might be upset about living next to a dictator, an alleged murderer and embezzler.

Before I could ask, Assane began to laugh.

“He has no problems,” he said, navigating the taxi back through the trash pile and onto the main road. “Two villas, two wives. He has no problems at all.”

It would be fair to say that the Hotel Colombe wasn’t ready to receive guests. Since closing down at the end of March last year when the latest incarnation of the global Jihad swept south out of the Sahara desert and into Timbuktu it had been quietly falling apart. The hotel’s faultlessly polite manager Mohamed Toure had little to do after that other than doze the days away in the shade on the Colombe’s front step.

It stayed that way until last week, when a convoy of war reporters appeared 10 months to the day from the hotel’s closure, arriving hard on the heels of a French expeditionary force that drove the Islamic militants back into the wastes of northern Mali. Their sudden arrival was hard to comprehend for Mr Toure: “I never expected to see another European.”

Outside the hotel, the whole of Timbuktu, with its dry-mud mosques and storied libraries, dressed itself in the tricolore and rampaged through the dusty alleys yelling: “vive la France, vive le Mali!”

The literalist sharia law that had been imposed on the famous tolerant city was over. Television sets were playing soccer matches, girls were talking to boys and music was suddenly everywhere.

The singer Akia Malouda Coulibaly was entertaining a small crowd outside her house swaying her considerable frame in a vivid green dress: “We haven’t danced or sung while they’ve been here,” she said of the militants. “We’ve been prisoners.”

Back at the hotel, the staff as if woken from a deep sleep, tried to remove at least some of the Sahara from long-closed rooms. Nightfall in desert city meant darkness as the power had long since been disconnected. Timbuktu’s first night of liberté on the hotel terrace was lit by the glow of a dozen journalists’ laptops with the clanking soundtrack provided of hastily-purchased generators as news of the liberation was transmitted to the rest of the world. In the absence of a phone network—the transmitter masts had been destroyed during the fighting—a cluster of satellite dishes decorated the rooftop. The hotel served journalists the local specialty of roasted goat stuffed with couscous, a reminder of a long past occupation by the Moroccans.

After a cold night spent on unwashed sheets and lightly-sanded blankets, Tuesday morning saw restored light and electricity but brought the realisation that there was no running water. Corridors of cracked walls and dirt-encrusted armchairs spoke of neglect just as the empty swimming pool reminded of lighter days.

These seemed small concerns laid next to a tour through the ransacked Ahmed Baba Institute—one of the great repositories of learning in the Maghreb region. Thousands of historic manuscripts had been emptied from their handcrafted boxes and thrown on a bonfire in a spiteful parting gesture from the Jihadis. Antique leather binders had been scorched and disfigured in the fire while blackened fragments of science and literature blew in the breeze. Padding around in the ash was a bewildered Abdoulaye Cisse, the resident historian, noting the catalog numbers on the boxes and trying to estimate the losses. Some 2,000 manuscripts had been destroyed or stolen. “The Jihadis know how much value they represented to Mali, to Africa and the entire world. They are at war and they wanted to hurt us.”

Wednesday morning at the Colombe, the electricity and water return for a few precious hours. But the mood on the street had darkened with a wave of reprisals against the Arab and Tuareg communities, whom residents accuse of collaborating with the AL-Q’aida affiliates during their occupation. Wild-eyed young men smashed open padlocked storefronts as a prelude to stripping them bare. Everything was taken from iron roof sheets to wooden shelves and metal door frames. The anger was palpable.

Sitting cross-legged on a beautifully woven rug in the comparative gloom of his reception room, the meticulously mannered Imam of Timbuktu declined to be interviewed. He considered his own words to be potentially dangerous in the tense political climate of a divided country. He did, however, want us to listen to someone else’s words. Taking out his smartphone and swiping the touch screen he played a recording of a sermon by an Egyptian preacher. A former Jihadi who has since moved to Belgium, he spoke in French with passages of Arabic, in an impassioned call to young Muslims to turn away from violent fundamentalism and remember that “Islam is not about toughness, it is about kindness.”

The Imam says he asked one of the extremist groups which took power in northern Mali to listen to this sermon and allow it to be played to their followers. Their leaders refused.

Thursday begins with the bitter and sweet of instant coffee and honeyed flat bread as basic supplies return to the hotel kitchen. In the courtyard among the broadcasters, turbaned trinket sellers have laid out a dark blanket with wood carvings, waxed cotton shirts and Tuareg paraphernalia. The framed posters from Mali’s tourist board, boasting of “Timbuktu the Mysterious” start to look less like relics. The night before, alcohol had made a low-key return to the menu. Suspiciously grimy bottles or warm Guinness were being sold for outrageous prices. Apparently they had been buried nearby during the fundamentalist occupation and had been dug up along with the beloved but forbidden American Legend cigarettes.

On the second floor of the artisans’ market, Baba has unbolted the door to Radio al-Farouk. With a smile like the sun outside he flicked cobwebbed switches and prepared to put the station back on air. Hunting around for music he realised the studio was emptied. No matter, pulling out his phone and he was in no doubt what the moment called for: Ali Farka Toure, the grand-daddy of desert blues, who brought Mali’s haunting music to the attention of the wider world.

Timbuktu’s own town crier was already walking the streets with a wailing megaphone announcing that schools would reopen the next day. Children dancing wildly in the wreck of a looted shop to Malian reggae didn’t pay him much heed.

Cigarettes and stout, desert blues and cavorting children; a serenely calm Imam and an irrepressible DJ; Mali has started to feel more like its old self. The closest thing to tourists are dusty journalists and heavily-armed French soldiers. The only Arab or Tuareg left in town is a half-mad veteran of Gaddafi’s army who wanders the lanes of Timbuktu playing the fool. He wears a green beret and three different army belts in shades of green and khaki to commemorate the desert campaigns he has fought. No-one pays him much heed despite his fairer skin and the rancorous hatred that the repressive period of sharia law has left behind. When asked what this war was for he has no doubt: “It’s not about religion, it’s about racism,” he said. And it’s not something that he expects to see a cure for in his lifetime.

Daniel Howden covers Africa & some other places for The Independent and is a contributor to The Economist and Co-Producer of Stolen Seas, a documentary on Somali piracy. Follow him at @howden_africa