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Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold

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_Timbuktu_ by Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle is an engaging history of that fabled Saharan city, its name once synonymous in the West with both remoteness and as a place of wealth beyond imagination, of golden spires and wise and tremendously rich kings, exerting a "hypnotic attraction on the Mediterranean world." It was similarly revered in the east as a major urban center in the Islamic world, for centuries a nexus of caravan trade in Saharan salt, gold from Ghana, and slaves as well as a center of learning and scholarship.

Surprisingly (at least for Western travelers past and present) for all its great fame Timbuktu has always been a city made largely of mud and unpaved streets of sand. Not a city made of gold, reflecting its local earthly origins, the city is "all beiges and dun, shading into the desert and scarcely distinguishable from it." Though there are a few mosques and houses made of brick and some stone, most buildings are mainly made of dried mud (pisé or pounded clay, which the locals call banco). Even the newer parts of town, laid out in a grid, are made of mud brick. Sadly, a shrinking population in the city has no money or manpower to repair an entire city of mud, one that melts in the wet-season rains unless protected by fresh plaster. By the way the spines that appear on Timbuktu buildings "like porcupine quills" are actually stone beams which serve as in-place scaffolds to help repair buildings when the rains come.

Timbuktu is even today a multi-ethnic city, reflecting its cosmopolitan past. The authors provide a quick profile of many of the ethnic groups that make up the city, including the Tuareg ("the most recalcitrant and farthest-traveled of the Berbers"), the Mande people (the dominant black African people along the Niger, governed two of the most powerful ancient African empires, and are the dominant ethnic group in Mali today), the Fulani (their origins reflecting a mixture of incoming Berbers and native Wolof), as well as the Dogon and the Songhai.

I found the information provided on the landscape and surrounding region of Timbuktu - particularly prior to its foundation and in its earlier years - quite fascinating. The Niger River used to flow much closer to the city and with greater volume. Hippos once wallowed near the city. Even more astonishing, a sizable forest once grew near Timbuktu, with many travelers and residents reporting elephants. That forest is now long gone, to some degree caused by direct human activity - Sonni Ali, a ruler of Gao, hewn down entire forests to construct boats to strike at his upriver enemies - but quite possibly the forest was doomed in any event due to gradual human attrition and increasing desiccation. Sadly, though elephants appear to have been gone from the area for centuries, others, such as giraffes and lions, vanished as recently as the 20th century.

All too briefly the authors touch on the recent discoveries of settlements, including dozens of large cities, that were abandoned along the Niger seven or eight hundred years ago, part of a trend reversing thinking in academic circles that equatorial Africa never developed cities, major monuments, or was in any way independent of Mediterranean trade.

Along the way Villiers and Hirtle provided in-depth portraits of the nature of the three main types of trade that sustained the city. "White gold, yellow gold, and black gold" were the basis of all Saharan trade, as the demand for salt made trade initially possible, gold financed it, and the slaves made it work (being both a tool and a luxury item, as many rulers used gifts of slaves as incentives). The authors visit a salt mine working not unlike how it did in the days of Timbuktu's golden ages (the whole salt-mining town of Taoudenni is salt; the house are made of slabs of salt, the roofs reed mats supported by poles!).

While salt is still being mined and sold for local use, gold no longer passes through the city. Gold was "the engine of Timbuktu's expansion;" African gold (particularly alluvial gold from the Senegal and Niger Rivers) became the "essential lubricant" of Mediterranean commerce, as two-thirds of the world's gold supply in the late Middle Ages came from West Africa. While these areas still produce gold, they have much diminished in importance thanks to modern mining techniques and more productive gold fields elsewhere.

The city once had a rich scholastic tradition, the authors describing the staggering numbers of ancient texts (estimates range from 30,000 to 300,000) squirreled away in many areas of the city, on topics as diverse as law, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and religion, many only now coming to the attention of researchers, translators, and preservationists who are struggling with meager funds to save these priceless books for the future.

The heart of the book though is the epic history of the city, from its foundation in the early 11th century by Tuareg nomads (a number of debated legends surround the founding of the city, though the most common ones center around a well of Buktu, or Tin'buktu, an old Tuareg woman who set up a camp in the dunes a few miles north of the Niger River as a convenient pasturing place that eventually became permanent), through its rise in two golden ages as a wealthy and learned metropolis (the first golden age began when the great and wealthy sultan, Mansa Musa, came to town in the middle 1300s, and the second and more significant golden age was several centuries later under the rule of the askias of Gao, starting with Askia Mohammed in the 1490s). The authors also recount the various conquests it has suffered, how it was a destination during the great age of European exploration of Africa in the 19th century, and how today it is a dusty, decaying desert town, its "glorious past turned to dust by invasion, conquest, jihad, and the long, long debilitating passage of time."

This book has been a pleasure to read. In addition to providing a superb historical overview of a fabled (if little understood) region, the authors also supply snippets from their own visits, spiced with tales and information gleaned from friendly local families. Anyone who has interacted with or is interested in the Tuareg, Bambara, Fulani, Mande/Mandinko, Jews, Moors and Songhai (still living between Mali and Niger) or medieval history will find the book of value, if not irresistible.

While Europe was still stewing in darkness that followed the fall of Rome, the Sahara was brimming with vitality and power. Timbuktu and Central/West African kingdoms traded across the continent but also with Europe (through Moors and Turks), India, Yemen and the Arab peninsula. Their aristocracy was as cosmopolitan as they come. Timbuktu itself was founded strategically on the banks of Niger between the kingdoms of old Ghana (Djenne and Walata) and Gao (Songhai). This enabled its merchants to profit from 3 immense streams of wealth: salt coming from mines in the north; gold from Ghana, Ife/Yoruba and Hausa city states in the south and slaves from Djenne and Sudan. Other trades of interest included spices, cereals, fabrics, dates, cola nuts, shea butter and ivory; unlike today, the city was surrounded by immense forests and grasslands that supported both animal life and agriculture. The trees were cut down to make navies - and never grew back. Instead, the desert moved in, and animals moved away.

The city grew rich, allowing it to invite scholars from Mecca and Cairo; famous universities were founded, thriving for centuries. When the 13th century emperor Mansa Musa visited Cairo on his way to Mecca, he brought with him 60 000 slaves, each carrying 3 kg of pure gold. This aroused Venetian interest; however, Europeans tended to have little luck with Timbuktu. Up to the XXth century, the majority of would-be visitors (who had to travel incognito, often as Turkish merchants/doctors) died of thirst, were murdered by the Tuaregs (a common fate those days) or were discovered to be Christians and killed. Intolerance is fanned anew today with Saudi money paying for imported yet highly toxic Wahhabi-style preachers spreading sympathy for Al Qaeda (the State Dept. warns against visiting Mali or Timbuktu).

de Villiers and Hirtle provide some of the best descriptions of the great (unconquered) Songhai emperor Sonni Ali BEr I've ever read. There is much else - descriptions of courtier intrigues, palace coups, insurrections, fratricides, Tuareg depredations and wars, tensions between Islam and ancient animist religions, invasion from Marrakesh by moulay Ahmad al-Mansur; descriptions of contemporary city are superposed on tales told by medieval travelers such as Leo Africanus and Ibn Battuta. Imho, this book in many ways matches Burkhadt's masterpiece on Italian Renaissance. Recommended.