Timbuktu: What Call to Action?

This article is the product of a collaboration between a scholar of West African cinema (Fofana) and a historian of northern Mali (Hall), who together offer an interpretation of the politics of Abderrahmane Sissako's film Timbuktu (2014). This film is about the Islamist jihadist occupation of the Malian town of Timbuktu in 2012–13, and it succeeds in demonstrating some of the ways that the jihadist project tried to reorganize the lives of people in northern Mali by using violence or its threat to force women and men to dress according to Salafi sartorial codes, preventing men and women from socializing together outside of their immediate families, and banning soccer and music. Sissako's style of filmmaking lingers on a number of scenes in which the jihadists reveal themselves to be alternately confused and hypocritical about the edicts that they enforce, but also deeply intolerant and uninformed about the sophisticated Muslim culture that has thrived in Timbuktu for centuries. Yet the violence depicted in the film is not all at the hands of the jihadists, and in fact the climax of the film is produced by a conflict between a fisherman and a herder. This article is a close reading of Timbuktu in an effort to unpack what appears to be an urgent call to action by one of Africa's finest filmmakers, but also to appreciate Sissako's film aesthetic while problematizing the shortcomings of his representation of an otherwise complicated history.