Remembrance of Things Past

 

There is something symbolic and some even say Freudian about losing diaries and computers : I seem to do so every 10 years or so when  there is a great change in my life. Now, on the Turkish Airways flight back to Mali, between Istanbul and Bamako, I lost my old laptop. The air steward was taking his job seriously. He  told me I couldn’t keep my laptop with me as we landed at Niamey and  he snatched it away before I had time to object. He put it into the overhead compartment. And there it remained and it might even still be there, as far as I know. The next day I went to the Turkish Airways office here and reported the loss : emails were sent in order to try and retrieve it but to no avail.

And of course nothing was backed up. I am starting a new life, yes, but I do not want to wipe out all memories of my old life in Djenné ! But that is what I had more or less done. All my pictures of my ten happy years in Djenné with Keita were gone. Keita too is gone now, and so is my hotel.  I felt bereft once more, as if one layer after another was being stripped from me and there was nothing left.  It is my own fault. I am irresponsible in the extreme about my own life and safety, so everyone tells me. I have no insurance for anything at all ; I have lived for years in Djenné, a place other toubabs feel is out of bounds for safety reasons and now I am going into Timbuktu to run a project which makes everyone nervous apart from myself ; I do not back anything up; I have never paid anyting into any pension schemes: in short, I am hopeless.

When I calmed down from the shock of this most recent calamity of the losing of my laptop with all its precious data, it dawned on me with a great sense of relief, that of course all is not lost : I have my blog (www.djennedjenno.blogspot.com) written for eleven years, recording my life in Djenné in words and pictures. And then I made a wonderful discovery : my friend Nicholas had arranged something called Dropbox to be installed on my computer because we were working on a project together. I normally take no notice of the possibilities such installations give me, but just this once I had transferred a file called ‘My Life with Keita’ onto the Dropbox.  I vaguely recalled this, and once I had gone through the painful process of buying a new laptop, installing everything and ‘moving in’ to it, I made a half- hearted attempt to see if I could find this Dropbox thingy. And YES ! Alhamdilullah ! Unbelievably, there is was, waiting for me out in the ether :  my loveliest memories of happy times which will never return. Here, above is Keita on our holiday in Togo in 2008, still healthy.

And not only that, but my dear friend Eva, the Swedish ambassador to Mali, with whom I always stay when I am in Bamako, tried to comfort me for my loss and looked into her files where she  found pictures of me and Keita that I had never seen before, like the one below from the autumn of 2015 when both Keita and I were very sick but nevertheless enjoying our time staying here in the Swedish residence : good company, good food and always plenty of laughter.

So all is not exactly well, but little but little I am recovering many precious pictures. If you read this and you have archives from the hotel in Djenné, or even from my European visits in the last ten years, please let me know, I would love to recover some more.

And soon, soon I am off to Timbuktu, in the company of Fr Columba the Benedictine Friar and Walid the Lebanese digitization teacher. As I write this they are winging their way into Bamako airport. Our newly recruited staff is waiting for us in Timbuktu where we are starting on the manuscripts of the Imam Ben Essayouti’s library next to the Jingerey Ber Mosque. The air conditioners for the studio  have arrived in Timbuktu  after their long dusty journey from Bamako ; the three boxes of precious cameras and computer equipment have been flown up on the UN cargo flight. All is finally ready, so let the show begin…