A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  At another place, a Tuareg chief entered Barth’s tent unexpectedly and caught him reading a book—Cooley’s—written in characters that were not Arabic. Barth’s sun-darkened skin and mastery of Arabic allayed the man’s suspicions. Yet Barth’s looks were different enough, and his supposed pedigree as a Syrian sherif was exotic enough, that he attracted unwanted attention wherever he went. People wanted to see him, talk to him, ask for his blessing—and incidentally request a small gift. The women pestered him for tobacco.

  In several places he was again taken for a rain king and implored to use his powers. He always refused, but since the rainy season had started, he often got credit for downpours. (After one of these coincidences, the town’s governor praised Barth as a rain god. This man was later shocked to learn that the rainmaker was a Christian. This greatly amused the sheikh of Timbuktu, who jibed the governor about appealing for rain to an infidel.)

  The landscape now consisted of flat marshes and sheets of water laced by, in Barth’s words, “a labyrinth of creeks, backwaters, and channels.” At Sareyamou, Barth gave up land travel and hired a boat for 10,000 cowries. Using 18-foot poles, the boatmen pushed the vessel through a maze of narrow watercourses flanked by a “sea of reeds.” The boatmen worked to the rhythm of songs about the deeds of Askia, the great king of the Songhai empire in the late fifteenth century.

  Barth had been fighting illness since Say, so he enjoyed this respite from hard travel. He did have to get out and walk through shallow water several times each day, and in the boat his feet stayed immersed in sloshing water, aggravating his rheumatism. But he relished the novelty of fresh fish dinners and the watery scenery, which included the massive heads of hippos breaking the surface.

  On the evening of their fourth day afloat, the channel opened into the Niger. The river was a mile wide here and looked immense, unspooling beneath a rising new moon and a sky fractured by lightning. Barth’s servants stared “with real awe and almost fright.” And then all eyes shifted to follow the water rolling northeast toward Timbuktu, twenty-five miles downstream.

  IN KABARA, Timbuktu’s port town, Barth heard that the sheikh was away, trying to settle a dispute between some Tuaregs and Berabishes. “This piece of information produced a serious effect on me,” he wrote, since “this whole region is plunged into an abyss of anarchy and misrule.” Barth had premised the entire journey on hopes that the sheikh would protect him if he made it to Timbuktu. His situation was delicate, “for as yet I was an outlaw in the country, and any ruffian who suspected my character might have slain me, without scarcely any body caring any thing about it.” Having no alternative, he sent El Walati to Timbuktu to feel out the sheikh’s brother about the possibility of entering the city under his protection.

  Meanwhile, Barth took up quarters in Kabara, about eight miles away. His presence immediately attracted bloodsuckers. As he sat eating a plate of rice, a Tuareg ruffian entered with a spear and sword. He sat down and glared at Barth from within his head-shawl. Barth told him in Arabic and Fulfulde that he was dining and couldn’t speak to him. The Tuareg replied by calling himself a great chief and demanding a gift. Barth demurred. The Tuareg warned that he was a great evil-doer about to do great harm. “After a very spirited altercation,” wrote Barth, “I got rid of him.”

  During the next hour, 200 armed men crowded into his house. They squatted on his floor and stared at him, talking among themselves about this stranger who stared back while lying across his smaller luggage and guarding the larger boxes behind him. Barth took advantage of this frightening situation to write a detailed description of the men’s clothing and weapons.

  After they cleared out, Barth went to bed. El Walati returned around midnight with the sheikh of Timbuktu’s brother, Sidi Alawate, and several companions. To reduce the torment from mosquitoes, the guests were taken to the second-floor terrace, and given supper. Then Barth joined them to meet Sidi Alawate. “For the present I was entirely in his hands,” wrote Barth, “and all depended on the manner in which he received me.”

  El Walati had told Sidi Alawate that Barth was a Christian under the protection of the sultan of Istanbul. Alawate asked Barth for proof. This was precisely why Barth had asked the British government several times to get him a letter of protection from Istanbul. Such a letter would often have eased his way during the journey. But he never got one. Barth talked his way around Sidi Alawate’s request, and the man agreed to protect him until his brother, the sheikh, returned.

  After they left, Barth tried to sleep but tossed restlessly until dawn. Nine-and-a-half months after leaving Kukawa, he was about to enter Timbuktu. It was September 7, 1853.

  24

  Golden City

  FOR CENTURIES BEFORE BARTH’S ARRIVAL, THE WORD “TIMBUKTU” conjured magic in Europe. Timbuktu was gold, mystery, exotic isolation. Its geographic position was unfixed, like a dream’s. Accounts of it were few but enticing. In 1324 when Timbuktu belonged to the kingdom of Mali, Mali’s emperor Mansa Musa made a haj across Africa to Mecca. En route he passed through Cairo and into legend. His caravan of 60,000 included 12,000 slaves dressed in silk, 500 of whom walked with golden staffs. Eighty camels carried 300 pounds of gold each, which Musa spent lavishly. The fame of this spectacle circulated throughout Europe and the Middle East, and generated fabulous tales about golden cities somewhere in the heart of Africa.

  The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited Timbuktu in 1353. He was struck by the inhabitants’ learning, religious devotion, and beautiful clothing, and also by the number of concubines and naked women. About 150 years later the Spanish Moor Leo Africanus stayed in Timbuktu. Though unimpressed in most ways, he admired the king’s many golden plates and scepters. He too commented on Timbuktu’s abundance of scholars, who came from all over northern Africa to study and teach under the patronage of the king. Leo wrote that the most profitable commodity in Timbuktu’s market was books—probably an exaggeration, since the city’s wealth was based on gold, salt, and slaves, but the observation reinforced Timbuktu’s reputation for learning. Like Ibn Battuta, Leo was also impressed by Timbuktu’s lighter side. He described its people as peaceful and highly social, singing and dancing in the streets until one o’clock every night.

  In Europe these tales and fragmentary reports got inflated to the proportions of myth. Timbuktu began appearing on maps that were fanciful not only for where they placed the city, but for portraying it as a city of gold. Africa’s El Dorado inspired dreams. Governments coveted its wealth. The Portuguese evidently sent several missions to Africa’s interior in the mid-1500s, though it’s doubtful they reached Timbuktu.

  For the next couple of centuries Europe’s interest in Timbuktu subsided as countries turned their focus to India, the Far East, and the Americas. But in 1788 a group of prominent British citizens, led by Sir Joseph Banks, who had circumnavigated the globe with Captain James Cook, formed the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. Better known as the African Association, the group’s purpose was to erase the “stigma” of geographical ignorance about Africa. “The map of its interior is still but a wide extended blank,” noted the association’s manifesto. The association began sending explorers into Africa with three main goals: to trace the Niger River, investigate commercial possibilities, and geographically pinpoint Timbuktu.

  Their first recruit, the American John Ledyard, died without getting far. So did Irishman Daniel Houghton. The Scot Mungo Park reached the Niger alone on his first expedition and survived, but on his second trip he was afraid to stop at Timbuktu and was killed farther downstream; none of his forty-six companions survived. Subsequent missions, whether from the north coast, the west coast, or by river, also ended fatally. Friedrich Hornemann (German), Jean-Louis Burckhardt (Swiss), Henry Nicholls, Major John Peddie, Captain Thomas Campbell, Dr. Joseph Ritchie—all died in Africa, though Ritchie’s subordinate, Captain G. F. Lyon, survived to write about their journey to Murzuk.

  Since reaching Timbuktu me
ant glory, the city also inspired hoaxes. In 1816 an American sailor who sometimes called himself Robert Adams, other times Benjamin Rose, caused a sensation in London by claiming that he had been shipwrecked on the African coast and taken to Timbuktu as a slave, where he lived for five months. A publisher smelled a bestseller and paid Adams to describe his adventures. Adams was soon discredited by his absurd errors, including the howler that Timbuktu, renowned as a center of Islamic learning, had no mosques. Other shipwrecked sailors with similar stories came forward in 1821 and 1824, and were likewise sunk by their silliness.

  In 1824 the French Société de Géographie offered 10,000 francs to anyone who reached Timbuktu and—the small print—returned alive. The British were determined to get there before the French. The following year the African Association launched another explorer toward Timbuktu from Tripoli—Major Alexander Gordon Laing.

  Captain Hugh Clapperton, recently back from his three-and-a-half-year journey to Bornu and Sokoto, felt that the prize of Timbuktu was being handed to an upstart. Whoever reached the fabled city first was assured of fame, and Clapperton believed, with some justice, that he had earned the right to it. When he was ordered to send Laing advice about traveling in Africa, he at first refused. Even after complying, he remained determined to beat Laing to Timbuktu by taking the shortcut through “the white man’s graveyard” of tropical West Africa. Just three months after returning to London from Bornu, he took ship back to Africa.

  His small party, which included his servant Richard Lander, struck inland from Badagri on the Guinea Coast. Malaria soon wracked them. Lander lost his mind several times with fever. Dr. Robert Morison died. He was followed to the grave by Captain Robert Pearce and a servant, George Dawson. Clapperton and Lander made it to Sokoto, where they got stranded and Clapperton died of dysentery.

  Meanwhile the dashing and supremely confident thirty-two-year-old Laing had been in Tripoli preparing his expedition and falling in love with Emma, daughter of the eccentric British consul, Hanmer Warrington. Two days after marrying Emma in July 1825, Laing left for Timbuktu. (Consul Warrington refused to let the newlyweds consummate their marriage, on the grounds that Laing was unlikely to return.) Seven arduous months later, in the section of the Sahara called the Tanezrouft, about two dozen Tuaregs began shadowing Laing’s caravan of forty-six men. One night as he slept, his escort of Arabs betrayed him to the marauders. The Tuaregs fired muskets into Laing’s tent, then attacked with swords and spears, hacking until they were sure he was dead. He should have been.

  “I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head,” he wrote to Consul Warrington, “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, forming a very unsightly wound. One over the right temple, and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly scratched the windpipe &c. I am nevertheless, as already I have said, doing well, and hope yet to return to England with much important geographical information.” He wrote the letter with his left hand, since his right arm was maimed.

  Several of Laing’s servants had escaped the attack by running into the dunes. The next day, after the caravan departed, they tied Laing to his camel and proceeded. He rode 400 miles in this wretched condition before reaching an oasis where he was taken in by an Arab chief named Sheikh Sidi Muhammed—the father of the man who would become Barth’s protector in Timbuktu. Laing convalesced there for three months. Then a plague, probably dysentery, struck the village, killing the sheikh and sickening Laing. But the apparently invincible explorer survived again. He left for Timbuktu.

  In mid-August of 1826, after traveling for more than a year and 2,000 miles, he became the first European in centuries to see the legendary city. It disappointed him. Instead of glitter, he found sand and mud. In his only surviving letter from Timbuktu he downplayed that reaction, focusing instead on his achievement. He also mentioned that he had been searching the city’s written records, “which are abundant,” a discovery whose significance he didn’t fully comprehend.

  His timing was bad. Just a few months earlier, the Fulani fundamentalists of Hamdallahi had conquered Timbuktu. The Christian stranger was unwelcome. Five weeks after Laing arrived, Hamdallahi’s ruler ordered him expelled. On September 22 he started north toward Morocco with an escort of Berabish nomads. A few days into the desert, they murdered him. His journals disappeared.

  A YEAR AND A HALF later a poor Muslim traveler walked into Timbuktu. Its inhabitants barely noticed him, just as he had planned. His name was René Caillié, a French dreamer inspired by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. No summary can do justice to Caillié. To achieve his life’s goal of seeing Timbuktu, he worked for years, saving money for the journey. To improve his chances of survival, he lived for months among Moors in North Africa, learning their ways and languages. He also perfected a cover story, told many times during his long trek through Islamic lands: my parents were Egyptians who took me to France as a boy, and now I am returning to my Muslim faith and roots by traveling overland to Cairo.

  Caillié started for Timbuktu from Africa’s west coast in 1827. After a year of appalling ordeals, including guinea worm, he reached the city in April 1828. Reality shattered his dream. “I looked around,” he wrote, “and found that the sight before me did not answer my expectations. I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuktu. The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish white color… . all nature wore a dreary aspect, and the most profound silence prevailed; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard.”

  He estimated the population at 10,000 to 12,000, and described the people as cheerful and gentle. Tuaregs prowled the town’s outskirts and sometimes entered to take whatever they wanted. Caillié heard about the recent murder of Laing and decided not to linger. After staying only two weeks, still in disguise, he went north with a caravan through the Sahara to Morocco, another hellish journey.

  When he reached Europe, his trials didn’t end. Though he collected the 10,000-franc prize, the Legion of Honor, and a small government pension, some people doubted his account, which couldn’t be verified. The British, who wanted the laurel of Timbuktu for themselves, and who knew that their man Laing had gotten there first, were especially ungracious. Consul Warrington was driven nearly insane by Caillié’s claim. For him the loss of British prestige was compounded by his son-in-law’s death and his daughter’s grief. He accused Caillié of somehow acquiring Laing’s missing papers and then colluding with the French consul and the pasha of Tripoli to defraud the public.

  Caillié’s book, published in French and English in 1830, was a bestseller but disappointed serious readers looking for thorough information about Africa’s interior. Though incredibly intrepid and tenacious, Caillié was no scholar, and his need to stay disguised impaired his ability to collect material. This too played into the hands of his British detractors. “We shall offer no opinion on whether M. Caillié did or did not reach Timbuctoo,” wrote John Barrow, second secretary of the Admiralty and a founder of the Royal Geographical Society, “… but we do not hesitate to say, that, for any information he has brought back, as to the geography of Central Africa, or the course of the Joliba [Niger], he might just as well have staid [sic] at home.”

  The accusations and insinuations of fraud devastated Caillié. “I must confess,” he wrote at the end of his account, “that these unjust attacks have affected me more sensibly than all the hardships, fatigues, and privations, which I have encountered in the interior of Africa.”

  No European would reach Timbuktu again until Barth, so for twenty-five years no one could prove or disprove Caillié’s account. Doubts about it festered. In 1833 the French government cut off Caillié’s pension. His travels had shattered his health. He died in 1838, aged thirty-nine, impoverished. Such were the laurels of being the first to r
eturn from Timbuktu.

  Barth no doubt nettled some people in England by corroborating most of Caillié’s account and by praising him as “that very meritorious French traveler.” Barth might have been describing himself when he added, “Following close upon the track of the enterprising and intelligent, but unfortunate Major Laing, who had been assassinated two years previously on his desperate journey from Timbuktu, Caillié naturally excited against himself the jealousy of the English, to whom it could not but seem extraordinary that a poor unprotected adventurer like himself should succeed in an enterprise where one of the most courageous and noble-minded officers of their army had succumbed.”

  WHILE EUROPE SPUN fantasies about golden desert kingdoms and explorers lost their lives pursuing a chimera, Timbuktu’s actual history unfolded in ways that were fantastic enough. Always a pawn in desert politics, it was swept by savagery, scholarship, tolerance, and fundamentalism.

  The place began around 1100 A.D. as a Tuareg seasonal encampment, where the edge of the Sahara touched the big northern bend of the Niger. Perhaps there was a well nearby, perhaps associated with a slave woman—the common translation of Timbuktu was “the well of Buktu.” Barth dismissed this, attributing the name to a Songhai word for “hole” or “womb,” because the town was built in a hollow among the sand hills. Others said the place was named after an old woman, Tin Abutut, who watched the Tuaregs’ goods near the well, and whose name in Tamasheq meant “woman with the big naval.”

  Whatever the etymology, by the twelfth century Timbuktu was a flourishing trade hub where “the camel met the canoe.” Africa’s ancient cultures, Islamic and pagan, rubbed together there: Arabs, Moors, and Tuaregs from the north, black tribes from the south, Hausas and Fulanis from the east. Gold from mines in the south was traded for salt from desert mines in the north, and for goods from the Barbary Coast.