In search of Timbuktu

No one is sure how Alexander Gordon Laing really felt upon becoming the first European to reach Timbuktu after crossing the Sahara from north to south. We might assume that he indulged in a moment of self-congratulation. His outward journey had been nothing if not eventful. Aside from a whirlwind romance and marriage in Tripoli, from where he had set out in July 1825, he had survived attacks from Tuareg nomads, sustaining multiple injuries, and endured a torrid, year-long trek through the expanses of the desert. Having entered the city he had one figurative hand on the prize that the Société de Géographie in Paris had recently offered for the first European to visit Timbuktu and return. But he never made it home to claim his prize, nor to recount his adventures. Some six weeks after arriving in the fabled city in August 1826, Laing was murdered as he turned homewards.

Timbuktu had long lingered in the European imagination. Medieval legends and Middle Eastern travellers’ accounts had conjured a fabulously wealthy urban utopia in the empty expanses of the Sahara. Being the first modern European to enter Timbuktu would, accordingly, bring considerable bragging rights. It would also, theoretically, unlock the African interior – in 1826 largely still a blank on the map – and its purported riches for expansionary European powers. That it was unreached for so long enhanced its allure and perpetuated the illusion of unrivalled wealth, yet the quest for Timbuktu, amid other journeys of discovery in Africa, ultimately revealed gaps between myth and reality and brought – in some quarters – new understandings of the continent and its peoples.

A driving force in the quest for Timbuktu was the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, commonly referred to as the African Association, established in 1788 and led by Sir Joseph Banks. Its goals included ‘to explore the mysterious geography, [and] to ascertain the resources’ of the continent. It was thus motivated by scientific inquiry, but if trade and conquest could be expedited so much the better. The Association immediately swung into action, sponsoring a succession of expeditions to Timbuktu. None of the gallant men achieved their goal. Most died by misadventure. Perhaps the most successful was Mungo Park, who followed the Niger River as far as Ségou and returned home to publish Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in 1799. Fired with his initial success, Park set out a second time several years later. As he proceeded eastward down the Niger, he unwittingly passed within 20 miles of Timbuktu, but after surviving an encounter with a hippopotamus he later came to an untimely end.

Timbuktu had entered the European consciousness through its association with Mansa Musa, the 14^th-century ruler of the Malian empire. Mansa Musa had won a reputation for extreme wealth as he undertook the Haj in 1324 passing through Cairo and Medina with an enormous entourage, dazzling all as he liberally dispensed gifts of pure gold. Europe was agog. Musa was duly portrayed in the 1375 Catalan Atlas and the 1413 portolan chart of Mecia de Viladestes clutching a golden orb, his realm imagined as one of unbounded wealth and Timbuktu an entrepot grown rich on the trans-Saharan trade in spices, slaves and gold. Portuguese seafarers, who began peppering the Atlantic coast of West Africa in the 15^th century, boosted the allure of the region by claiming ‘Arab gold’ was to be found in the interior.

Leo Africanus’ The Cosmography and Geography of Africa, published in 1550, further shaped European perceptions of Africa. Not only was Leo’s the most detailed source on Africa then available in Europe, but the author had been raised in Fez, and thus was deemed ‘African.’ (He had been born Al-Hassan Al-Wazzan in Arab-held Granada, later being captured by Spanish pirates, converting to Christianity and taking a new name.) In Leo’s estimation Timbuktu was ‘well-ordered’ and the royal court ‘magnificent.’ His observation that here ‘instead of coined money they used pieces of pure gold’ and his claim that the king of Timbuktu had ‘many sceptres of gold’, some of them weighing 1300 pounds, seemingly added authenticity to the rumours that had circulated since reports of Mansa Musa’s munificence.

Leo Africanus described Timbuktu as one of fifteen kingdoms along the course of the Niger and its tributaries. Timbuktu had been established as a summer encampment by Tuareg bands in the early 12^th century. The Malian empire brought it under its control in the late 13^th century, allowing it to develop as a centre of trade and Islamic learning. Mansa Musa, too, passed through after his Haj pilgrimage of 1324, accompanied by Muslim scholars and others who then oversaw the building of significant architectural works.

The city grew increasingly important within the networks of trans-Saharan caravans and its reputation as a centre of Islamic thought attracted scholars from across North Africa, from Cairo to Fez. Later it was absorbed by the expanding Songhai empire, before the Moroccans marched south in 1591 and defeated the last Songhai emperor. As the pashalik of Timbuktu, it gradually fell into decline, later being overrun by Tuaregs. Leo Africanus had seen 16^th-century Timbuktu thriving, a centre of trade and hub through which African peoples moved, but by the time Laing arrived its heyday had passed.

Shortly after Laing’s demise, Frenchman René Caillié, following a road ‘very sandy and wearisome’, succeeded in ‘entering this mysterious city, which is an object of curiosity… to the civilised nations of Europe.’ Having spent two years learning the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic used in the Sahara, he travelled incognito, disguised as a Muslim. As anthropologist Judith Scheele notes, having foregone the breeches and waistcoats that most explorers had previously insisted on wearing, Caillié was able to traverse the desert unmolested. This was in marked contrast to most of those sent by the African Association, and particularly to Laing, who in one of his last missives, sent to the British consul in Tripoli, recounted that following a Tuareg attack he had sustained twenty-four wounds, ‘eighteen of which are exceedingly severe,’ including sabre cuts to his head, a musket ball in his hip and his right hand being cut ‘three-fourths across.’

Caillié achieved his goal of setting foot in Timbuktu with all of his limbs intact, yet his first impressions were underwhelming. Scanning the city, he noted, ‘The sight before me, did not answer my expectations. I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo. The city presented… nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses… Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand… not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard.’ He encountered no trade in gold, never mind potentates with dazzling orbs or weighty sceptres. This was a city with little accumulated wealth, reliant for its daily needs of rice, millet, butter and honey on nearby Djenné. After staying two weeks in Timbuktu, he departed with a caravan heading north across the Sahara, reaching Fez, Tangier and then France, where he duly claimed the prize offered by the Société de Géographie.

It may have been sour grapes at having been pipped by a Frenchman, but the British public, as Scheele notes, initially denounced Caillié as a fraud, refusing to believe the legendary city could be anything other than magnificent. Denunciation of Caillié came despite his spending considerable time trying to determine what had befallen the hapless Laing. (In a separate sporting gesture, the Société de Géographie not only awarded a Gold Medal for Exploration to Caillié in 1830 but to Laing as well.) After departing Timbuktu, Caillié encountered a desert nomad with a compass of English design. He could only conclude that it had belonged to Laing, and he wished to retrieve it. ‘I would have given a good price for it’, he wrote, but doing so would have meant abandoning his Arab disguise, thus jeopardising his own position.

With time, the mundane truth was accepted. Timbuktu was a figurative flash in the pan, its glory days long over and its fabulous wealth just that: fabled. At Cambridge in 1829, a young Alfred Lord Tennyson wove the symbolism of this diminished legend into his Chancellor’s Medal-winning poem, ‘Timbuctoo,’ positing the ‘rumour of’ the city as ‘a dream as frail as those of ancient time.’

Learning about the real nature of Timbuktu brought into sharper focus the paucity of knowledge about and the pervasiveness of ill-informed hypotheses about Africa in Europe. The city had been conceived as a beacon, an entrepot grown aglitter on the gold trade, in the empty space of the Sahara, which according to cartographical depictions was occasionally crossed on clearly defined paths by orderly caravans.

All of these assumptions were false, or at best overstated. As Scheele notes, rock salt was a much more tradable commodity in Timbuktu, the desert was by no means empty and movement across it did not follow set routes but required cooperation and dialogue with both nomadic pastoralists and settled oasis inhabitants to negotiate shifting geographical, climatic and human dynamics. This latter point was something that Laing and his ilk failed to register, believing that European fortitude and sturdy breeches were all that was required to conquer the hitherto unconquered sandy expanses. Caillié’s experience demonstrated the opposite. Living and moving amongst native populations, he was able to tap local knowledge and patterns of travel to make it both to and from Timbuktu without serious mishap.

Yet bad habits persisted even after Caillié’s success. European ambitions often exceeded capacity because travellers and colonial administrators had little to no knowledge or understanding of material and practical realities. Scheele documents that, in Algeria, French officials initially insisted on following ‘fixed supply routes’ to outposts in the Sahara. This policy was abandoned because caravans that stuck rigidly to centrally administered routes and schedules came a cropper in the desert. Colonial records documented ‘numerous dead camels from the preceding convoys…. lying on the road… smelling very bad.’

Lessons were learned eventually. Hard-won experience brought new knowledge. Travellers’ accounts, such as those of Mungo Park, highlighted the diversity and complexity of the human populations, societies and landscapes of Africa. Much like misperceptions about Timbuktu, European attitudes to Africa were generally simplistic and reductive: Hegel claimed that sub-Saharan Africa was devoid of history. Peter Brent argues that the African landmass was conceived even in its variety of forms – desert, mountain, savannah – as uniformly wild, untamed and thus dangerous, and the African peoples were all lumped into amorphous ‘native’, ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ categories, classifications that had for centuries been used to justify the slave trade.

Yet many of those involved in the quest for Timbuktu, and explorations elsewhere, developed a deeper understanding and entirely new outlook. Mungo Park, even though he had a reputation for being trigger-happy, contended that despite differences in appearance between Europeans and Africans there was no difference ‘in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common nature.’ Hugh Clapperton, who undertook journeys through West Africa and to Lake Chad, argued, ‘The people of England erroneously regarded the inhabitants as naked savages, devoid of religion… whereas I found them… to be civilised, learned, humane and pious.’ Such first-hand accounts served to humanise Africans, underlining that they should not be categorised among the wildlife of the continent and that they had their own diverse patterns of life, language, community and trade. It is conceivable that the emergence of these narratives added weight to the campaigns that led to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 in Britain, even though, at the same time, Orientalist, essentialist attitudes prevailed, asserting clear distinctions between continental identities, cultures and stages of development, which therefore validated colonialist projects.

In the modern era, stubborn misperceptions and stereotypes about Africa persist, to say nothing of general ignorance about its intricate history and pattern of human societies. Still, it is a safe bet that most people know of Timbuktu. (Whether they could locate it on a map is another question.) Bruce Chatwin upon returning from the city in the late 1960s was asked by a friend if it was lovely. He responded that it was anything but, ‘unless you find mud walls crumbling to dust lovely.’ Chatwin argued that there were two Timbuktus: the real place, a drab administrative centre in the desert, and the imagined place. Today the imagined Timbuktu fluctuates between two poles: an alluring beacon, or symbol of desolation and remoteness. As history grinds on, even in our hyperconnected world, there is no permanent, paved road to Timbuktu. And, due to ongoing political violence and conflict in the Sahel, it remains, as it was in Laing’s day, almost inaccessible.