A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

As it grew, Timbuktu began attracting Muslim scholars. This reputation increased after Mansa Musa conquered it in the fourteenth century and encouraged scholars to settle there. Musa also returned from his haj with an Egyptian architect who built the town’s Djingereber mosque and its attached school, which attracted hundreds of scholars. (Religion and learning are intimately connected in Islam. The Arabic word for mosque is the masculine jami; the feminine form, jami’a, means university.)

  The Malian empire waned, and in 1433 the Tuaregs took back the city, which they considered theirs. Several decades later the rising empire of Songhai, led by Sonni Ali, conquered Timbuktu and massacred many people, including scholars. The town withered as Gao, the Songhai capital 250 miles downstream, prospered.

  When Sonni Ali died in 1492, he was succeeded by the visionary Askia Muhammed. Askia expanded Songhai into a great kingdom that covered much of central Sudan—Barth likened him to the renowned expansionist kings of Spain and Portugal. Askia also revered learning. Under the patronage of him and his successors, Timbuktu entered its true golden age. For the next hundred years the city blossomed as a center of Islamic learning. “Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men,” said a proverb, “but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuktu.”

  Hundreds of scholars and mystics congregated there and taught hundreds—some estimates claim thousands—of students. Most of the scholarship was religious, but also included mathematics, astronomy, Islamic law, rhetoric, geography, botany, medicine, and music. The schools used Arabic translations of works by Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Hippocrates. There were also books in Hausa, Fulfulde, Tamasheq, and Songhai. Ahmed Baba, perhaps Timbuktu’s most celebrated scholar, wrote at least seventy works in Arabic. He had a library of 1,600 books, which he said was among the city’s smaller collections.

  Timbuktu’s golden age ended brutally in 1591. Sultan al-Mansur of Morocco sent an army of mercenary Spaniards, Berbers, and Arabs, known as the Arma, or Ruma, across the desert to Songhai. Their 4,000 muskets decimated the Songhais, who carried bows, spears, and swords. Timbuktu and Gao were overrun. The Arma, garrisoned in these towns, soon married into the population and became part of the ruling caste.

  Timbuktu’s libraries were plundered during the war. Its scholars, suspected as agitators and traitors, were jailed for five months, then forced to walk across the Sahara to Marrakesh. Sixty-four days. For many it was a death march. The survivors were imprisoned. Timbuktu’s tradition of learning was temporarily erased.

  The sultan released the scholars from prison after two years, but refused to let them go home, where they might cause trouble. The celebrated Ahmed Baba wrote a poem of longing for Timbuktu:

  O traveler to Gao, turn off to my city.

  Murmur my name there and greet all my dear ones,

  With scented salams from an exile who longs

  For his homeland and neighbors, companions and friends.

  This forced exile lasted about a decade, until the sultan died. By then all of Timbuktu’s surviving scholars had died in a plague, except one. Ahmed Baba alone returned to Timbuktu, where he spent twenty years before his death in 1627.

  For two centuries, while Europe’s imagination turned Timbuktu into an isolated mystery and a metaphor for the most distant and desirable place imaginable, the real Timbuktu baked in its sand and dust, and rebuilt itself into a commercial hub for trade in gold, salt, and slaves. Learned men gathered there again.

  Waves of violence continued to disturb it. The Fulani jihadists of Hamdallahi conquered it in 1826. Hamdallahi’s founding ruler, Ahmadu Lobbo, banned tobacco and decreed that men and women must be segregated. Residents of Timbuktu, a relatively cosmopolitan center of trade, learning, and pleasurable diversions, considered such ideas preposterous and acted accordingly. This resistance boiled over in 1844 when the Tuaregs retook the city. Lobbo starved the rebels by stopping corn from moving downriver.

  In 1846, Sheikh Ahmad al-Bakkay, who was trusted by all parties and adept at skating the thin edges between them, brokered a compromise. Timbuktu would pay tribute to Hamdallahi but would be left alone, with no occupying army. The town would be run by a Songhai administrator and a Fulani judge and tax collector. Serious matters would be referred to the ruler of Hamdallahi. Sheikh al-Bakkay had no official position but exercised considerable influence as a holy man, scholar, power-broker, and liaison to the Tuaregs. The Tuaregs, unpredictable and unfit for politics, remained a wild card. The compromise chafed all the parties. The precarious balance between them could be upset by almost anything.

  That was how things stood as Barth prepared to enter the city.

  25

  In Timbuktu

  W ITHIN A MILE OF LEAVING THE GREEN MARGINS OF THE NIGER at Kabara, Barth was in the desert. The sand was powdery, like fine sugar. Its color was buttery or, in the right frame of mind, golden. Thorn bushes and dusty stunted trees lined the sandy road to Timbuktu. Rags fluttered from branches—fetishes offered in hopes of a new shirt. Donkeys were nearly invisible under their immense loads of river grass, sold as fodder in the city. About halfway into the eight-mile trip came a notorious stretch called “He Does Not Hear,” where Tuaregs regularly robbed and killed travelers, beyond earshot of port and town.

  The sky was overcast, the daylight blurred by blowing sand. At first Timbuktu’s beige silhouette was indistinguishable from this murk. When it emerged, Barth also saw a group of riders coming to welcome and inspect him. He tensed. If they suspected him in any way, he would be turned back or worse. In the traditional greeting, he raised his gun and spurred his horse into a gallop, pulling up sharply as he reached them.

  They exchanged many salaams. One of the men complimented Barth in Turkish, a language familiar to any Syrian sherif. But Barth hadn’t spoken Turkish since his excursion around the Mediterranean and had almost forgotten it. The moment “might have proved fatal,” he wrote, “not only to my enterprise, but even to my own personal safety.” But he recovered and muttered a Turkish phrase, then urged his horse forward, anxious to avoid questions and enter the city.

  His protector, Sidi Alawate, quartered him in a house catercorner from the sheikh’s. Until the sheikh returned, Alawate instructed Barth, the explorer must submit to voluntary house arrest—no excursions, no visitors. This was immediately violated by droves of curious people who entered the house with Barth’s luggage, eager to examine and question the stranger. He ignored them. He was surprised that word of the traveling Christian hadn’t beaten him here, but knew that his cover story would soon crumble.

  At this moment of triumph, just as he reached his goal and felt momentarily safe, exhaustion and illness finally overcame his willpower. He collapsed with severe fever. “Yet never were presence of mind and bodily energy more required,” he wrote, “for the first night which I passed in Timbuktu was disturbed by feelings of alarm and serious anxiety.”

  The next morning brought the first death threat. The sheikh’s nephew and rival, Hammadi, had learned Barth’s true identity and had informed the Fulani judge that the infidel among them must be killed. Barth wasn’t alarmed, at first, since he had the protection of Sidi Alawate.

  This illusion evaporated within hours. Barth had already promised Alawate a generous gift, but once the Christian became public news, Alawate seized the chance to bleed him. He demanded another formidable gift, including burnooses, waistcoats, tobes, English razors, two pistols and gunpowder, 10 Spanish dollars, “and many other articles.” The next day he demanded the same again.

  Barth was exasperated, but his health and mood had improved, and he felt energized by making it to Timbuktu. “I began to enter with spirit upon my new situation,” he wrote, “and to endeavor by forbearance to accommodate myself to the circumstances under which I was placed.”

  Since he couldn’t go out, he went up. His house had a terrace on the second floor, where he could exercise and view the northern part of the city. He
saw a small market, round huts made of matting, and many clay houses, some low and ugly, some with two stories and architectural ornamentation. Nearby rose the earthen mosque of Sankore, with its striking four-sided pyramidal minaret studded with projecting wooden beams. Built in the fourteenth century, Sankore had been the heart of Timbuktu’s golden age of scholarship. Like the city, it had deteriorated. Sheikh Ahmad al-Bakkay had recently restored it. Barth couldn’t see either of the city’s other ancient mosques: the Djingereber, built in 1335 on the orders of Mansa Musa, or the Sidi Yahia, built in the fifteenth century. Surrounding everything, the Sahara.

  Though Barth could see a slice of the city from his terrace, people also could see him. When exercising or sketching, he often had to step back out of sight. He was grateful for the terrace, but it also confined him in a prison of perspective. He wanted the ground’s-eye view, down with the people. For the moment, that was too dangerous.

  He wrote a letter to the British vice-consul at Ghadames, W. Charles Dickson, informing him that he had reached Timbuktu, “which so many daring spirits have in vain attempted to reach! May I be more fortunate than the late Major Laing and return in safety.” He ended, “May God Almighty lead me safe back to the sea!”

  Morning in Timbuktu began before dawn, when the muezzins’ high plaintive song called the faithful to the day’s first prayer. This was answered by a chorus of crowing roosters, which inspired bawling goats and braying donkeys. Soon after came the aromas of cooking fires, and then the thudding rhythms of women pounding millet with tall wooden pestles.

  On his third day of confinement Barth was down with fever again when an unfamiliar servant rushed in to say that a mob was coming to storm his house, and he must run for his life. Barth smelled a ploy by Sidi Alawate and his pal El Walati to steal all his goods. Instead of fleeing, he loaded his guns and armed his servants. When Alawate and El Walati sauntered into the house, they were shocked to find Barth’s militia protecting the storeroom. They left grumbling about Barth’s crazy pluck. He began posting armed servants on the terrace at all times.

  In a scholarly footnote to this episode he observed that when the servant warned him to leave, she also advised him to secure all his animals. He responded that he had only one animal there, his horse. He later learned that in Timbuktu’s idiosyncratic jargon, the word for animals had come to mean any moveable property—a link, surmised the linguist, to the days when Timbuktu’s people lived mostly in the desert and owned mostly livestock.

  That afternoon Sidi Alawate stormed Barth’s house with several learned and aggressive men, who pressured Barth to renounce Christianity and become a true believer. The infidel professor never declined a chance for intellectual exercise. He challenged them: if they could prove Islam’s superiority to Christianity, he would convert. The scholars eagerly agreed and the theological jousting began. After breaking many lances against the adamantine German, the learned Muslims retired from the field.

  Sidi Alawate showed up every day with a new list of gifts required to maintain his indiscernible protection. He said he used some of the gifts to grease the town’s important people, but Barth doubted whether any of the goods got beyond this blackmailer and his coconspirator, El Walati. The explorer’s stock of merchandise dwindled at an alarming rate.

  His fever surged and faded. He was exhausted but felt too threatened to sleep much, and kept his loaded weapons at hand. He spent most of his time either on the terrace or in an open area downstairs where he could see anyone who entered.

  On September 26 at three o’clock in the morning, clamorous music woke him from a feverish sleep. The music heralded the return of the sheikh, whose house was about twenty-five paces from Barth’s across a tiny square. Barth desperately needed the sheikh’s goodwill, but was too ill to rise from bed the next day and pay his respects. He sent his regrets. The sheikh, with the humanity that characterized him throughout Barth’s stay, urged the visitor to rest. He also sent a generous gift—two oxen, two sheep, two large vessels of butter, and camel-loads of rice and corn. He assured Barth of safe passage toward his homeland, though he added that, to thwart poisoners, Barth probably shouldn’t eat anything that didn’t come from the sheikh’s household.

  The next afternoon, still ill with fever, Barth crossed the narrow street to meet his prospective benefactor and to present his first gift, a new Colt six-shooter. No other person in Africa would be as crucial to Barth as this man.

  Ahmad al-Bakkay al-Kunti belonged to the Kunta family, an Arab-Berber clan influential throughout western Africa since at least the fourteenth century. The Kuntas were famous as merchants, scholars, and Sufi holy men. Barth wrote that they were “distinguished by their purer blood and by their learning above almost all the tribes of the desert.” They also functioned as intermediaries who brokered arguments, especially between the merchants of Timbuktu and the Tuaregs, and between the Tuaregs and other desert factions. “It is really surprising,” wrote Barth, “that a family of peaceable men should exercise such an influence over these wild hordes, who are continually waging war against each other, merely from their supposed sanctity and their purity of manners.” When Barth arrived, al-Bakkay had been away mediating a dispute. The sheikh was also renowned as a poet and scholar, who attracted many religious students to Timbuktu. Barth later described him as the city’s “eminent religious chief—the Pope of Timbuktu, as I might call him.” The explorer had come more than 1,200 miles in hopes that a man with these qualities would welcome him.

  Al-Bakkay rose and greeted the explorer affably. “At the very first glance which I obtained of him,” wrote Barth, “I was agreeably surprised at finding a man whose countenance itself bore testimony to a straightforward and manly character.” The contrast with Sidi Alawate, the sheikh’s younger brother, was a wonderful relief. Al-Bakkay was fifty, “rather above the middle height, full proportioned, with a cheerful, intelligent, and almost European countenance, of a rather blackish complexion, with whiskers of tolerable length, intermingled with some gray hair, and with dark eyelashes.” He wore a simple tobe, trousers, and fringed head-shawl, all black.

  The two men felt an immediate rapport and fell into easy conversation, “an unrestrained exchange of thoughts,” wrote Barth, “between two persons who, with great national diversity of manners and ideas, meet for the first time.” The sheikh praised Laing, the only other Christian he had ever seen, and lamented his murder and missing papers. He again pledged that he would arrange Barth’s safe passage from the city, with an escort to take him beyond the reach of the emir of Hamdallahi.

  Barth left in good spirits, his hopes vindicated. He had started the day feeling gloomy—it was the anniversary of Overweg’s death. He had confided to his journal that he felt so frail he half-expected to follow his companion to the grave. But he also hoped that when another year had passed he would be almost home. Al-Bakkay had strengthened that prospect by assuring him that he could leave Timbuktu soon. After three and a half rigorous years in Africa, he was feeling the pull of home.

  Four days later these hopes blew up. “If at that time I had known,” wrote Barth, “that I was still to linger in this quarter for eight months longer, in my then feeble condition, I should scarcely have been able to support such an idea; but fortunately Providence does not reveal to man what awaits him, and he toils on without rest in the dark.”

  ON THE FIRST DAY of October twenty men armed with muskets rode into Timbuktu from Hamdallahi. They carried orders from Emir Ahmadu Ahmadu: Drive out the Christian and seize his goods. The sheikh’s scheming nephew issued a statement that the emir must be obeyed immediately, and if Barth resisted, to kill him.

  Timbuktu’s delicate balance of power wobbled. The Songhai and Fulani appointees felt compelled to obey Ahmadu Ahmadu but were reluctant to clash with Barth’s influential protector, Sheikh al-Bakkay. The sheikh wanted to keep his promise to Barth, but by temperament he was a mediator, not a fighter. The explorer judged him too timid to defy the emir.

 
But the sheikh surprised Barth—surprised all Timbuktu. He had long resented the despotism and fundamentalism of the ruler of Hamdallahi. The new demand offended him. He also saw this as an opportunity to ingratiate himself with Britain, a wealthy nation that might show its gratitude with weapons, books, and other valuable gifts, or might even make possible Timbuktu’s independence from the puritanical overlords of Hamdallahi.

  Al-Bakkay ignored the emir’s order. But he told Barth that it was now unsafe for him to leave. Everyone knew what had happened to the last Christian expelled from the city—Laing, murdered in the desert. The sheikh’s concern seemed sincere, but Barth’s continuing presence also provided an excuse to defy the emir.

  The sheikh was not all strength and insight. Like Barth, he fell for El Walati’s charm. This scoundrel and his partner, the sheikh’s brother Alawate, persuaded al-Bakkay to hold Barth hostage until the British government sent a large ransom of goods. Barth was instructed to write a letter explaining the conditions. The avaricious duo also convinced the sheikh to demand that Barth turn over his horse and guns.

  Barth was an infidel and an illegal alien in Timbuktu, with a death threat on his head. Without al-Bakkay’s protection, he was finished. In such circumstances most people would choose discretion. Barth replied to the sheikh that Britain would not send “so much as a needle” until he had safely returned home. As for his horse and gun, he added, neither would leave his house “until my head had left my shoulders.”

  This grim standoff among all parties was broken a few nights later. A party of armed Tuaregs, known to be unfriendly toward the sheikh, cantered into town from the Sahara. This was Timbuktu’s historical nightmare—squeezed between the ferocious desert tribes of the north and the severe Fulani peoples to the south.

  Al-Bakkay, alarmed at the momentum of events, woke Barth at two o’clock in the morning and told him that they must keep armed watch from his terrace throughout the night. Tomorrow, he said, they would leave the city for a tent camp seven miles away. They would return when Timbuktu was less dangerous for them both.