TIMBUKTU index
"Ah, Tombouctou la Mysterieuse!", intoned Hamadoun Kontao, as we sat on our bunks in the steel-walled cabin of the River Niger steamer. "You know what the mystery of Timbuktu is?", posed my Malian fellow traveller, a commerce official from the capital, Bamako. "They eat very well there, several courses to a meal, yet they grow nothing." I dearly hoped there was more to Timbuktu than that, as I lolled in the delirium of a fever, immured in a hot tin coffin, chugging upon a grey immensity flanked by a featureless desert.
I had ample consolation: the knowledge that I lay in the lap of luxury and the peak of health compared with the 19th century European explorers who first travailed this way, taking months, trudging on blistered feet or sore-buttocked on camel-back, felled by debilitating disease or murderous violence, cheating death, struggling on to reach the sandy grail. Rene Caillie succumbed to scurvy in a poor Niger village. "The sore in the roof of my mouth became quite bare, a part of the bones exfoliated and fell away, and my teeth seemed ready to drop out of their sockets…. To crown my misery, the sore in my foot broke out afresh…. I was soon reduced to a skeleton… I wished for [death], and prayed for it to God."
Gordon Laing was shot in the side and hacked with swords in the middle of the Sahara by treacherous Tuaregs. In a letter he wrote, "I shall acquaint you with the number and nature of my wounds, in all amounting to twenty-four, eighteen of which are exceedingly severe. To begin from the top: I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head and three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away; one on my left cheek which fractured the jawbone and has divided the ear…." And so it went on. The "blue men" of the desert left him for dead, but being a hardy Scot and true Brit, he picked himself up and carried on.
We’re still doing it, seeking Timbuktu. Why bother? Romanticism? Thirst for knowledge? Fame and fortune? Madness? A bit of them all. Timbuktu has pricked the European imagination for centuries, originally as a fabulous golden city in the desert, holding out the promise of untold wealth for he who could reach it. It wasn’t that the streets were paved with gold, no, it was the roofs that were tiled with it. And not only did it hold infinite riches, it was also a repository of wisdom, a city of sages, perhaps possessing the secret of life. Add to this the enigma that no European knew quite where it was and you had an irresistible magnetism.
It was somewhere in the Sahara, that they knew, but for centuries no European got there, because infidels entered this Muslim-ruled region upon pain of death. Typically vain was the voyage of Jacobean adventurer, Richard Jobson. Lead on by reports from Morocco, where gold-laden trans-Saharan caravans terminated, he sailed up the less-than-mighty Gambia River thinking it was the Niger, expecting to see the golden city round every bend.
Was it all a mirage, the greatest illusion the desert had ever conjured up? No, far from it. Once upon a time, Timbuktu was indeed a fabulously rich city. Located where the Sahara meets the Niger, it was a natural place for the camel caravans of the trans-Saharan traders to meet the river boat traders of West Africa. From the Mediterranean came European cloth and Arabian horses, from tropical Africa came gold, ivory and slaves. From the early 14th century, Timbuktu was the major entrepot of the powerful Kingdom of Mali, which controlled the goldfields. Business was brisk and lucrative, and the city became extremely prosperous, endowed with palaces, mosques and mansions of "Timbuktu stone", a hard clay cut from the desert, even as most of the 60,000 citizens dwelled in mudbrick houses.
This city was the major source of gold for medieval Europe; more than likely, Timbuktu gold crowned the heads of the Kings of Spain, France and England. Secreted beyond a sea and a great desert, sending signals of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, which became exaggerated and elaborated with every league that they travelled, Timbuktu’s gilded legend gripped Europe. Within West Africa and the Arab world, however, a more spiritual reputation spread far and wide.
Arab travellers, able to enter the area without hindrance, gave glowing reports. Leo Africanus visited Timbuktu at its height in the early 16th century. "The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and sceptres of gold, some whereof weigh 1300 pounds; and he keeps a magnificent and well furnished court…" recorded the Granada Moor. "He hath always three thousand horsemen and an infinity of foot-soldiers..." But wealth, splendour and might were matched by scholarship and piety. "Here are great store of doctors, judges, priests and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king’s cost and charges. And hither are brought diverse manuscripts or written books out of Barbary, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise."
Respect for the word was as impressive in Timbuktu as the esteem for gold.
Rich, strong and Islamic under the emperor Mansa Musa of Mali, who built three mosques which still remain, in 1468 Timbuktu fell to the Empire of Songhay and rose to its height of power and wealth during the ensuing century. Its Koranic university had 25,000 students and was renowned throughout the Muslim world. Its population may have reached 100,000, enormous by the standards of the age. The emperor Askia Muhammad, like his great predecessor Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca with a huge retinue and 300,000 pieces of gold.
This was the solid basis of the outlandish fantasies which Europeans entertained about the desert city. It was a true wonder in its time, but its time was up as early as 1591. The Sultan of Morocco, desirous of capturing the goose instead of trading for the golden eggs, sent a mighty army across the Sahara. Greatly outnumbered but armed with rifles against the Songhay spears, the Moroccans routed Songhay - and killed the goose. Unable to control the prize, the Moroccans took the riches and massacred the learned elite, ruining the society in which the wealth was created. Songhay collapsed. At the same time, the Portuguese and other seafaring Europeans were syphoning trade down to the Atlantic coast and away from the desert. Caravels and galleons were more efficient cargo carriers than camels, and the trade routes switched from the sand sea to the true sea.
The double blow sent Timbuktu into precipitous decline, but its increasing obscurity only fuelled the legend in Europe. By the time that European explorers got serious about reaching Timbuktu, the glitter and glory had long gone. In 1828, after twelve months and 1,500 miles of pain and struggle, Rene Caillie reached Timbuktu. "I looked around and found that the sight before me did not answer my expectations," he rued in chilling understatement.
Caillie was the first European in more than 300 years to reach Timbuktu and return to tell the tale. Bewildered and crestfallen, he noted at first view "nothing but a huddle of ill-looking houses built of earth." But his damning report met general disbelief in Europe. In the age of romanticism, the dream could not be abandoned. In the same year that Caillie’s account was published, 1830, a hallucinating English poet called Hallam wrote:
Thou fairy city, which the desert mound
Encompasseth, thou alien from the mass
Of human guilt, I would not wish thee found!
Perchance thou art too pure…
Though Tennyson at the same time debated: " Is the rumour of thyTimbuctoo, A dream as frail as those of ancient time? ", it was not till the turn of the century that the truth sank in.
The French conquered Timbuktu in 1896. For six decades it was a far outpost of colonial French West Africa, then from 1960 a remote provincial capital of the Rupblic of Mali. Its delapidated state became well-known to those who cared to notice. Many still don’t. Bob Geldof, in his Live Aid days of feeding Africa, took a tour of Timbuktu and said, "Is that it?" (You’d think he’d have felt at home, being in a customary state of disrepair himself, but no matter). If you’ve done your homework these days, you are ready to be chuffed by anything more than a sand-blown mudbrick huddle.
"Wake up, wake up, we’re there!", urged Hamadoun. It was well past midnight and the steamer lurched against a moonlit pier; a motley horde surged up the gangplank and scurried through every deck, looking for pickings, touting as porters or guides, or just for the hell of it. Some were even boarding passengers. (This was par for the course at River Niger ports.)
A Land Rover rattled us along the road to the inland oasis and deposited us in the dead of night at the Hotel Boctou, one of only two hostelries remaining in the city that once hosted multitudes of merchants and camel-drivers. "Welcome, we’re full up," greeted a somnolent night porter, offering me the lounge sofa. But at 4 am, several dozen Dutch tourists suddenly fled and I had the pick of the place, a simple two-storey structure, rectangular, with cloisters, echoing the caravanserais of old, where animals rested in the courtyard, goods were stored in the lower rooms, and travellers billeted in the upper ones.
"All nature wore a dreary aspect; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard", bemoaned Caillie. Things have certainly looked up since then: I awoke to merry chirruping. Low-angled sunlight pierced the caravanserai’s colonnade and picked out exquisite little grey-brown birds with dashes of single colour, some orange, some crimson, some purple – the Saharan canary, so unexpected, so pretty, so light-hearted, so at odds with the harsh environment.
From the roof, eastward, Timbuktu spread flat-topped mudbrick houses across a broad low hill, like endless battlements, a sand castle city. It was considerably more than Caillie’s huddle, and reminiscent of Morocco. Westward lay desert, and some of the very same dwellings that Leo Africanus described, "built in the shape of bells, the walls are stakes or hurdles plastered over with clay and covered with reeds." Indigo-robed Tuareg nomads and their Bella servants live in these movable huts, herding sheep and goats, and tourists.
As soon as I step out of the hotel, turbanned Tuaregs, aristocrats of the desert turned tourism touts, start their pitches. "I will be your guide." "Take a camel ride to my camp." "This is a Tuareg dagger with silver inlay. I’ll make a good price for you." But you don’t need a guide at Timbuktu: it’s best to go wandering, armed with a basic map and a few salient facts.
City of sand and daub, Timbuktu is poor in construction, rich in apparel. Through a labyrinth of monochrome dusty alleys float gorgeously dressed people, in flowing robes of magenta and turquoise, cream and peach, topped with embroidered headcaps or mountainous turbans. "Bonjour, madame"; "Bonjour, monsieur" – the exchange of greetings is de rigueur. Such is the splendour of some passers-by that you feel "mon seigneur" (my lord) would be more apt.
Yet the houses seem to contain little. From dark doorways emanate shrill cries of "M’sieur, cadeau!", the begging of dimly discerned housewives, seated on sandy floors. Why such abasement, even if not wholly serious? By contrast, the baker goes about her work at a great beehive-shaped clay oven in the street, turning flat loaves above a wood fire. Children appeal for "un bic" – a ballpen – for their schoolwork. Often, it sounds like a mantra, a Pavlovian response to a white face, playtime, rather than a plea: "M’sieur, donnez-moi un bic… un bic, m’sieur, un bic."
The beehive oven, organically aesthetic as it is, is outclassed by the extraordinary termite nest minaret of the Djinguereber Mosque, one of Mansa Musa’s medieval creations. The caretaker, emerging from a silver-studded door, announces a major event. "Stay until this weekend. We are renovating the mosque. Hundreds of townspeople will come and stick new mud on the walls. You must stay to watch this." It is a yearly ritual in Mali, the repair of the mudbrick mosques after the rains have washed away the surface – even in Timbuktu where rain is rare. I cannot stay, the boats are only once a week, the planes are cancelled (yes, you can fly to Timbuktu, if you’re lucky, if you want) and the road is terrible. "Missing the boat" takes on huge meaning here.
The great university is long gone, but a few scholars survive and an institute preserves ancient manuscripts. Koranic schools still teach the children and, being a provincial capital of the Republic of Mali, Timbuktu has a high school. Students of both genders emerge from the Lycee Franco-Arabe in western clothes, books under arms, chatting, much like their peers around the world.
Timbuktu still trades, but as a local market town. The Petit Marche is a straggle of thatch and wattle stalls offering multi-coloured spices and fly-blown meat. The Grand Marche stretches to plastic basins, toys, batteries; its covered hall offers cloth and goats, tools and animal feed. Everywhere there are battered radios playing Mali’s brilliant soundtrack: the vaulting cry of Salif Keita and Oumou Sangare, the mesmeric Sahelian blues of Ali Farka Toure and Lobi Traore.
On the north edge of town, where the Sahara begins and doesn’t stop for a thousand arid scorching miles, three turbanned men ponder a sorry-looking camel. It has a nasty open sore on its flank. The men are splendidly berobed, the "capitaine" in swathes of purple and green. He tells me he is the leader of a salt caravan. "This camel was wounded by the slabs of salt he carried from the mines. They cut into him. The women are making a compress to heal him."
It is here, at the quarter called Abaradiou, that the caravans have always arrived, and still do with the last commodity now traded, rock salt. "I spend four or five months at Taoudenni each year," the captain says. "I take workers there and oversee them. It takes 15 days to get there."
This is the last echo of an age old commerce, for in the Middle Ages salt was so valuable that it was traded weight for weight with gold. The black peoples of tropical Africa were willing to equate the gold of their rainforest mines with the salt of the desert mines.
Taoudenni is some 600 miles north in the fierce heart of the Sahara. There in the fearful void, in the dried-up bed of an ancient lake, the miners toil in appalling conditions, living in rock salt caves, tantamount to slaves, another "commodity" that once made Timbuktu rich. Some things don’t change.
Copyright Keith Mundy 2000. All rights reserved next