COLUMN ONE : Pillaging the Past in Mali : The remote West African nation is battling looters who are ransacking one of the continent’s richest troves of medieval artifacts.

History crumbles underfoot. Shoes crunch down upon Africa’s Middle Ages.

In every direction, the ground here is carpeted with multicolored fragments of pottery, broken figurines, oxidized iron castings, human bones and burial jars--a vast medieval settlement exposed incrementally by rain and erosion.

In this Niger River region of Mali is a lode of one of Africa’s rarest treasures--splendid evidence of its heritage.

Here, 600 years ago, an urban family prepared dinner in a clay pot, put the children to sleep safeguarded by elaborate fetishes and poked at the embers of the cook fire, sending sparks trembling into a vast, dry sky.

Who were these Africans who bartered gold for salt, pound for pound? These city dwellers, connected by river to fabled Timbuktu along one of Africa’s greatest trade routes? This family whose dinner pot today lies broken on the ground?

Oral traditions continue to link the generations in Africa, as do religions and architecture, and techniques of fishing and farming. But tangible artifacts that connect epochs are rarer.

Random holes in the ground, some disturbingly fresh, attest to the plunder of historical riches. Grave robbers are busy ransacking Mali--perhaps the most gluttonous pillage since Napoleon raided Egypt.

But Mali is fighting back. Landlocked in West Africa, straddling the Sahara, one of the poorest and most remote nations of the world, the country is battling to preserve its patrimony--electing an archeologist as president, confronting the great antiquities collectors of the West and cultivating among its own peasants an appreciation of Africa’s history.

Slowly over 15 years, even as it struggles to feed itself, Mali has squeezed its public treasury to fund the crusade. Public buildings are papered with anti-looting posters, cultural centers have been established in outpost communities, and village leaders have been enlisted to make the country’s heritage a subject of everyday discourse.

At home, Mali has imposed laws with three-month to two-year prison sentences for archeological pillage, and abroad it has secured the cooperation of the United States and others.

“Why is this important? Because it shows that in West Africa there was an urban, developed culture, arising locally,” says Samba Thiam, research and conservation director of Mali’s Cultural Mission in Djenne. “Mali holds a very important role in African history because of its position in trans-Saharan trade.”

Compared to the treasures of more comprehensively studied regions of the world, physical evidence of Africa’s history is scarce. And what is known has been largely ignored in African schools, many of which were started by Western colonists and missionaries.

To outsiders, the idea of archeology in Africa almost always conjures up the Leakey family’s discovery of the roots of prehistoric humans, the link between man and ape.

“We know how the world looks at us--as if we climbed out of the trees,” says Mamadou Dembele, a bartender at a tourist hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

Like thousands--maybe tens of thousands--of Malians, Dembele has become attuned to his country’s drive for cultural awareness.

It is an astonishing campaign, considering that literacy in Mali is low (variously estimated between 18% and 32%), income as measured by the World Bank is among the lowest on the continent, the United Nations says one-third of children younger than 15 are malnourished, and not quite half the population has access to clean water.

Mali’s economy is based on subsistence agriculture and is almost wholly dependent on unreliable rains for the millet and sorghum that sustain its people. Drought has been a persistent roadblock to progress since 1971.

But President Alpha Oumar Konare sees a clear reason for the cultural awareness campaign even amid such need:

“In Mali, our greatest riches are those which have been created by man. It is important that our people understand this, to know their history and culture, and respect it, understand its place in daily life. Only by this can we guarantee the possibility of enrichment. . . . These are the only real values. The rest are perishable.”

Stormy Independence

Konare, 50, is the former director of the national museum, an archeologist and onetime culture minister who was elected in 1992. Mali, formerly a French colony known as Soudan, has endured a stormy independence--including coups, military rule, friction with its neighbors and street violence in its cities.

Konare talks as if history has already taught him what some African leaders have not yet considered. “My background as an archeologist helps me understand that my role is limited,” he says. “The cemeteries are full of people who thought they were indispensable.”

Now, if only Konare and his government can save enough of Mali’s heritage to secure its benefits for the country’s nearly 10 million citizens.

In a 1994 account, Archaeology magazine concluded of Mali: “Not since the wholesale rape of Egypt’s archeological treasures in the first half of the 19th Century has a country been so methodically stripped of [its] national heritage.”

In 1990, the magazine ARTnews said the plunder of archeological sites and the decay of collections in West African museums was “so vast and so widespread that the African cultural heritage is in danger of being lost entirely.”

The plunder is evident everywhere, driven by the novelty of African historical objects and the increasing popularity of Malian artifacts among private collectors and museums. Impoverished farmers supplement their income by hiring out as looters.

The historic cultures were created by religious animists, with powerful beliefs in spirits and demons, myth and ritual. Reflecting their world, they produced vast quantities of fetishes, castings, carvings and terra-cotta sculptures in strange, stylized anthropomorphic shapes. Such was their influence that European artists, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, maintained collections of African designs.

Here in Djenne, a short walk from the existing river town with its narrow alleys and Sudanese mud architecture, is the raised, 80-acre mound site of the city of Djenne-Djeno, the oldest known urban settlement in sub-Saharan Africa.

Scientists calculate that the city was established 250 years before Christ and lasted 1,600 years, dying out in the 14th Century with the rise of Islam and the decline of the Sahara trading caravans in favor of ocean routes.

A survey of this and 833 similar sites found that 45% had been raided and 17% virtually stripped. The prizes from these finds include terra-cotta statues and figures, whose uses and meanings are only dimly understood.

Roderick J. McIntosh is an American, and to some in Mali the best known of all Americans. An archeologist from Rice University in Houston, McIntosh and his wife, Susan, pioneered exploration of the ruins of Djenne-Djeno.

“Outside of Egypt, Mali is the African country most richly endowed with archeological sites,” he says. But because uncovering and cataloguing each relic is so painstakingly slow, and the theft of hundreds more so rapid and indiscriminate, McIntosh says he feels helpless after nearly 20 years’ work.

He likens it to the problems that future archeologists would have if they found themselves trying to decipher 20th-Century transportation after uncovering a bicycle and a few hubcaps, while thieves ran off with the automobile, airplane, railroad and spaceship.

“But it’s an amazing sight, isn’t it?” McIntosh says of the unguarded Djenne ruins. “I’ve brought archeologists from all over the world. They see the carpet of pottery and relics, and it blows their minds.”

Cliff Dwellings

East and north of Djenne, the remote Dogon people live in mud-and-thatch villages tucked into the base of a colossal Grand Canyon-like sandstone escarpment. And above the Dogon villages are the cliff dwellings of the mysterious, now-vanished Tellem people.

Both cultures are famous for animist artifacts. The Dogon are known for their wood carvings, particularly their unmistakable and intricate doors and house pillars, as well as masks and fetishes. The Tellem cast slender figures in metal and carved them from wood, which the dry climate of the caves has preserved.

Looters have combed through this countryside for years. Not so long ago, the Tellem caves were regarded with terrible superstition by other Malians and left alone. But with a revival of Islam here in the mid-20th Century, some of the fears have vanished and the caves have been ruthlessly pillaged.

“Pssst. You want antiquities?” asks a man under a shade tree in the sun-scorched trading outpost of Bandiagara, at the edge of the Dogon region.

Visitors follow him to his mud-walled home. In his living room, they are shown artifacts one by one--a huge and splintered Dogon door, a tree trunk carved by the Tellem into a ladder, Tellem figurines and Dogon masks.

Some may be authentic and, if so, illegal to sell.

“It is no problem, really,” the trader says by way of reassurance.

He asks up to $4,650 for the best of the items--which could be a bargain. In Europe and America, Malian treasures have fetched up to $275,000 at auction.

Authenticity, of course, remains problematic. Mali’s cities are swollen with kiosks, shops and market stalls offering reproductions; metal objects are carefully oxidized to evoke a feel of antiquity, and wood carvings are buried in termite mounds to age.

Even though its tourist traffic is light, Mali is a favorite of African traders, and these reproductions spill into the cities in Ghana and Ivory Coast, Kenya and South Africa, on to France, Belgium and the United States.

Nairobi art collector and merchant Alan Donovan, owner of the artisan shop African Heritage in Kenya and supplier to at least one Southern California gallery said that Malian art was in such abundance at the most recent Los Angeles Gift Show that “it’s totally ruining the concept that these things are exclusive. But this is always what happens.”

Even at Mali’s national museum in Bamako, small but well-regarded among West African institutions, director Samuel Sidibe says: “We’re only beginning to know about our ancestral art. . . . The discovery of our heritage, unfortunately, has gone hand in hand with its plunder.”

He picks through terra-cotta statues in the museum’s back room.

What is this?

“Maybe a horse.”

How much would this bring on the European antiquities market?

“Maybe $10,000, but I really don’t know.”

Director Sidibe and Malian scientists are trying to reduce the pillage before it is too late.

For nearly a decade, Mali has tried to protect its artifacts by law. An export permit is needed to leave the country with virtually any trinket, even cheap tourist jewelry and new textiles. This requirement, though, like much bureaucracy in Africa, seems easily overcome by forgery, bluff or bribery.

More recently, the government began asking--and winning--the help of powerful interests abroad.

Eighteen months ago, the United States became the first country to ban outright the importing of archeological material from Mali without written government authorization.

‘Heritage in Jeopardy’

“The level of pillage from archeological sites in this region is of crisis proportions, and Mali’s cultural heritage is in jeopardy,” a U.S. government statement concluded. The U.S. Embassy said it was the first time that Washington acted to protect artifacts from outside the Americas.

Since then, Malian authorities said they have received cooperation from France and Belgium. Three months ago, French authorities seized a terra-cotta human figure on display in a museum. Mali says it was the first time that “something important has been recovered.”

The greatest hope for Mali is also the most daunting: persuading hungry Malians that, for reasons of pride and patrimony, they should leave untouched the remaining mounds of open treasure.

But some Malians remain skeptical. “When the government stops them from digging and takes their artifacts, the peasants suspect that officials are just keeping the treasures to sell themselves,” says Amadou Cisse, a souvenir seller in Djenne. And anyway, he insists, dealers like himself know the truth, that “most of the good things are long gone already.”

Tereba Togola, a scholar with the government’s Science Institute, conceded that looting of Mali’s culture began seriously 100 years ago with French colonists and gained great momentum with the discovery of the Djenne-Djeno site in 1977.

“But to say the best is gone is to say we know what the best is. And I don’t think we know,” he says. “What we need to do is help people here make the connection with their past. Everybody, even poor people, like their history.”