Sahara Unveiled

by William Langewiesche

But when Truth and Falsehood separated, each took the path to his own destiny, and the disagreement between them was never resolved.

  28

  SKIPPING

  TIMBUKTU

  THE BOAT STOPPED along the way at the villages where deep water allowed it to nestle against the shore. The scenes played like small repetitions of Gao, but without the thieves. The boat blew its whistle upon arrival. People emerged from adobe houses and came to the river down wide dirt streets. Food markets sprang up by the lowered gangplanks, selling smoked fish, a few vegetables, batteries, and rice. Villagers and passengers streamed through the boat. Pirogues circled around. I took every chance to leave the boat and walk through the villages. Away from the river, they were somnolent places of ruined walls, where women ducked out of sight and children chased after me asking for presents. I gave the children pens. They responded by showing me the local attractions—a well, a garden, a litter of day-old puppies, a ruined French fort.

  At most of the villages I was accompanied by a man I had met on the boat, a quick young Fulani named Amadou, who came from the capital Bamako and was wandering through the backcountry eager for any opportunity. Amadou was twenty. He had a flat-top haircut, a strong chin, and wore neatly pressed trousers and a short-sleeved shirt with the short sleeves rolled up. He smoked. He spoke seven African languages and French. He had seven brothers and five sisters. Sitting in the shade of a tree one day, I asked him why he had left Bamako, and what he was doing here. He grinned and showed me a shoebox of music cassettes from the capital that he had thought he could sell along the river.

  “How is business?”

  He shook his head. “Bad, very bad. These people here don’t have any money. If I had known I would not have come, but once you are on the river you stay on the river, n’est-ce pas?” He had spent the last of his own money on the fare. But he smiled because he remained strong, and he was accustomed to adversity.

  He befriended me because he thought I might prove useful. I befriended him because he shared my interest in the world. He was energetic. We climbed the slopes above the villages and stood looking over the wide brown river sweeping from the horizons. Amadou seemed to enjoy observing his country through the eyes of a foreigner. He loved Mali and he worried about it.

  He said, “It’s good of you to give gifts to the children, but they should not be such beggars.”

  A straight answer would have been awkward. I said, “Amadou, I promise you, children everywhere are natural beggars.”

  But of course I pitied those children. This desert, no fault of their own, would take away their lives.

  Amadou lived in it too, and despite his energy was unlikely ever to find opportunity there. The Sahara is not cruel, but it is indifferent. An American can pass through, thankful that the boat’s whistle blows before every departure. Because a Malian cannot, I could never quite talk honestly with Amadou.

  In the larger villages, traders stacked sacks of American and Canadian wheat on the muddy banks. The sacks were marked with the symbols of international aid. The wheat was not originally intended to be sold, but nevertheless had slipped past corrupt officials and into the market. I mentioned my annoyance to Amadou: it was precisely such siphoning that had sparked the Tuareg rebellion in Niger. Amadou acted mystified. He wanted to be my friend, so he agreed with me. But given the chance he would have bought and sold the wheat as well.

  The bottler from Bamako said, “Do you think your American farmers don’t make money on these supplies? Why shouldn’t we Africans make money too?” He pinched his fat forearm. “Is it because of our black skin?”

  “It’s because of your famines.”

  The bottler chuckled and spread his hands. “But look around you, there is no famine this year.”

  I did look, and had before, and knew this much: famine in the Sahel never quite resembles the images of it that appear on television and in the newspapers. Even during the worst years of drought, whether in refugee camps or villages, the sort of living skeletons who have come to symbolize African famine are, in fact, quite rare. This is because among the poor, they are the resilient ones. Ordinary Africans get sick and die before losing so much weight. They also murder each other. And a large number of them continue to prosper by robbing the weak. If at its origin famine is a natural phenomenon, it inevitably also becomes a political one. Even in the hardest hit areas, the rich and the well armed never lack for food.

  The bottler from Bamako was right that the rains this year had been ample, that the rice harvest was good, that international donors had continued to send wheat, that there was plenty of food to go around. What he did not say was that the Tuaregs who chose neither to fight nor to flee, who tried to live peacefully within the new democracy of Mali, continued nonetheless to go hungry. And they were not the only ones. Nearing Timbuktu late one afternoon, the boat stopped at a village that was no longer just desperately poor, a place where people were actively going about the dying of starvation. The residents were not Tuaregs or rebels, but were black Africans on the Malian government’s side of the war, and would have farmed or fished if they could have. The bottler from Bamako kept calling them nomads because he did not care.

  Gone were the sacks of grain. No cargo came off the boat. At the gangplank market, vendors offered only peanuts and soap bars. I walked away from the riverbank through the silence of the dead. There were adults here who did not hide from me, but simply turned to watch listlessly. Dressed in rags, they had arrived at the pre-skeletal stage of open sores and predominant mouths. I’m sure there were others who were stronger. But the children who followed me did not smile or offer to show me around. They had contracted a respiratory infection, which choked them, and caused mucus to run from their noses. They coughed constantly, and could not bother to keep the flies from their eyes. A young boy stood in front of me and silently extended his hand. I gave him a coin. The others crowded around. Hopelessly, I distributed the last of my cash—a few dollars’ worth of French and West African francs. When my pockets were empty, the children continued to watch me numbly. Amadou came wandering up looking somber. The whistle blew dully for Timbuktu. Twilight flattened the sky.

  TIMBUKTU, LONG FAMOUS for being far away, has again become difficult to reach. It is a town of about 20,000 people, of sandy streets and mud-walled houses, six miles inland from the river. Founded by wandering Tuaregs, inhabited first by their vassals and later by black merchants of the Niger, it became a caravan center during the twelfth century—one of the string including Gao and Agadez that dotted the Sahara’s southern edge. The Tuaregs did not live within the town, but they claimed the right to it, and they extracted tributes. Only when they were chased off could Timbuktu prosper. This happened under the empires of Mali and Songhai, from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. A mud mosque and a university were built. Word filtered back to Europe of a mysterious and powerful city of native palaces, where the ruling classes ate on plates of gold. The city was thought to lie somewhere in the West African unknown, below the hostile Sahara, in a land of warrior kings, near a great river that might someday be discovered. Geography left plenty of room for embellishment. The myth of a glorious Timbuktu endured because of the real city’s nearly perfect isolation.

  Time was hard on Timbuktu. The Songhai Empire collapsed in the early seventeenth century, and the new Moroccan masters lost interest in the city. Although money was still made in the caravan trade, the Tuaregs returned, and Timbuktu reverted to its natural condition of chaos, suspicion, and civil war. Then as now, the anarchy choked off commerce and kept visitors away. The situation was made worse by the growth of the European trading and slaving posts on the African coasts, which undercut most trans-Saharan trade. By the end of the eighteenth century, even the myth of Timbuktu had suffered: for lack of news, astute Europeans surmised that the famed city had declined. Their interests in it were now largely scientific. But they still had Timbuktu on their minds.

  In 1824, the Paris-based Société de G�
�ographie offered a 10,000 franc award to the first European to reach Timbuktu and return alive. The following year a British army officer, a rigid Scotsman named Gordon Laing, set out by camel from the Mediterranean at Tripoli. In the company of a paid guide, two African boatbuilders, a Jewish interpreter, a West Indian servant, and eleven camels, he angled southeast across the Sahara toward the famed city. Laing was an immodest and jealous man, convinced that he was destined for greatness, and worried that someone might beat him to it. He dressed in robes and a chèche, in reluctant acceptance of the climate, but at the start of the trip he declared his intention to don English attire every Sunday, and to read aloud from the Bible. From the string of letters he sent back to his father-in-law, the British consul in Tripoli, it is not clear that he managed to accomplish this. It was high summer. The way across the desert was hard and hot, with temperatures rising to 120 degrees. Banditry forced the men to take an indirect route. The Saharans they met cheated them. The boatbuilders, the guide, and the interpreter all misbehaved. The camels suffered, as camels do.

  The unhappy little expedition went to Ghadames, rested, then passed below the Great Eastern Sand Sea, and came after five months to In Salah, where Laing was the first European the residents had seen. There Laing and his companions joined a southbound caravan of 150 merchants who had been waiting nearly a year, out of fear of the Tuaregs. It is said that Laing shamed the merchants into proceeding southward.

  In January 1826 the caravan passed west of the Hoggar Mountains, not far from Tamanrasset, and headed out across the terrible flat Tanezrouft, making twenty miles a day. The emptiness of the Tanezrouft spooked the merchants, who were armed, but disorganized and frightened. Laing wrote disdainfully that “every acacia tree in the distance became magnified … into troops of armed foes.” He should have paid attention.

  Two weeks south of In Salah, twenty Tuaregs attacked—not by galloping over the horizon, but in the standard manner, by riding up quietly and joining the caravan. The merchants reacted with typical timidity, each distancing himself from the others in the hope of avoiding trouble. Laing, on the other hand, was fooled. He wrote that the Tuaregs were friendly, and had offered protection to the caravan. None of the merchants bothered to set him straight.

  The Tuaregs realized that Laing was vulnerable. Late one night they made their move: they fired into his tent, then cut the ropes, and in the confusion of falling canvas, rushed in with swinging swords. Several of Laing’s companions were killed. Laing survived, but suffered two dozen wounds, including deep cuts and broken bones from his skull to his legs and two nasty slashes that nearly severed his ear and his right hand. The Tuaregs left him for dead, and looted the ruins of his camp. The caravan reacted by packing up and leaving. Laing’s remaining companions strapped him to a camel, and took him 400 miles across the Tanezrouft to recuperate in the camp of a friendly Berber. There they all died of fever—except for Laing, who got sick but recovered.

  On August 13, 1826, after more than a year in the desert, Laing reached Timbuktu. To Tripoli he sent back a message: “I have no time to give you my account of Timbuktu, but shall briefly state that in every respect except size … it has completely met my expectations.”

  But the real Timbuktu was a sleepy, sandy, inglorious place, with only the faint traces of history to recommend it. Then as now, war swirled around it—the Fulanis had recently seized the town from the Tuaregs, who nonetheless controlled the desert. Laing stayed in a mud house, which stands today. He sneaked one night to the river port at Kabara and sneaked back. He wrote furiously in his journal—what, we do not know. He was well treated, but after five weeks the local sheik received a letter from the distant Fulani sultan ordering his exile or execution.

  Laing left town on September 22, 1826, heading northwest in the company of a guide from Timbuktu. The guide was a Fulani agent or a religious zealot, or both. On the second night, only thirty miles from Timbuktu, he demanded that Laing renounce his Christianity and accept Islam. When the stubborn explorer refused, the guide killed him with a sword. He cut off Laing’s head, burned his writings, and left his remains to be eaten by vultures. An ex-slave escaped to tell the story. A passing Tuareg later discovered Laing’s body and buried it. Eighty-four years later, in 1910, the French colonial army dug up Laing’s bones at the base of a tree, and reburied them in Timbuktu.

  The greatest tragedy about Laing’s life was not his death, but his public devotion to the Timbuktu myth even after it should have been obvious that the myth was false. He may never have admitted even to himself his only important discovery: that Timbuktu was not worth the visit. Such an admission would have seemed to him like a failure.

  The man who finally brought the truth home, and who won the 10,000 franc prize, had an important advantage over Laing: he came from the lowest level of European society, and in his modesty he was willing to accept Africa as he saw it, and to report on it simply. His name was René Caillé—an uneducated French peasant, frail-looking, gaunt, uncommunicative, the orphan of a prison convict from La Rochelle. His family wanted him to become a cobbler. He became instead one of history’s most supple travelers, a model for the thousands of young Frenchmen who drift through the world today, living close to the earth, managing usually to survive.

  Caillé was an antihero, the opposite of a military man. He read Robinson Crusoe as a child, became obsessed with the idea of the tropics, and managed at the age of sixteen, in 1816, to sail for the west coast of Africa. He joined a disastrous British expedition, during which he learned firsthand the difficulties faced in Africa by large and overequipped European forces. Weighed down by weapons and trading goods, slowed by the sick, the expedition plowed ponderously through a land where native people practiced the lightest forms of life and travel. It was no wonder that the expeditionaries were seen as foreigners and fools, to be resisted and plundered.

  Caillé left Africa, and returned in 1824 determined not only to reach Timbuktu, but to reach it alone. The trick would be to pass quietly, drawing as little attention to himself as possible. This meant that he would have to pose as a Muslim. In preparation, he went to live among the Moors of Mauritania, seeking religious instruction, and learning Arabic, the Koran, and Islamic ritual. Afterward he worked for the British at an indigo factory in Freetown, Sierra Leone. After saving up 2,000 francs, he decided the time had come.

  Caillé was the freest of men. He lived unrestrained by a proper upbringing, unrestricted by family or friendship, unconcerned with his dignity or comfort, and unafraid of dying. His plan was simple. Carrying an umbrella and a few pounds of trading goods, he would approach his goal from the west, secretly taking notes in the Koran that he carried, explaining his “strangeness” by presenting himself as an Egyptian captured as a boy by the cruel French, freed finally in West Africa, wishing only now to go home, via the great Islamic city of Timbuktu.

  In March 1827 he walked out of Freetown, and headed inland, unfinanced, unknown, and utterly alone. Laing was already dead, though no one knew. Caillé made his way slowly across the West African landscape, through forests, over mountains, across the savanna, following the narrow trails with slaves and native traders. He told and retold his story, and was accused of being an impostor. He suffered extreme hunger, thirst, fever, scurvy, and lay near death for weeks. He floated down the Niger in a slave boat, among chained slaves. He escaped Tuareg pirates. And thirteen months and 1,500 miles after leaving the coast, on April 20, 1828, he arrived in Timbuktu. The city was of course a disappointment. Having spent his entire life getting there, Caillé, the realist, stayed only two weeks. Posing still as an Egyptian, among hostile and increasingly skeptical Saharans, he joined a caravan northbound across the desert, and during three hellish months to Morocco managed to survive. After his return to France he wrote, “The idea I had formed of the city’s greatness and wealth hardly corresponded to what I saw … It presented at first view nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in any directio
n but immense plains of sand of a yellow-white color. The sky was a pale red as far as the horizon: all nature wore a dreary aspect, and the most profound silence prevailed; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard.” Food and water were scarce and expensive; the streets were too quiet; the market was moribund. “In one word, everything was suffused with the greatest sadness … I was surprised by the lack of activity, and I would say even by the inertia that dominated the town.”

  After Caillé admitted it, there was little to add. The next European to visit Timbuktu, in 1853, was a German named Heinrich Barth who confirmed Caillé’s judgment, laying to rest lingering doubts about the Frenchman’s honesty. Since then Timbuktu has known few important dates.

  In 1883, the Berlin Conference awarded Timbuktu to France, and nothing changed.

  In 1893, the French arrived to take possession of it, and they were welcomed.

  In 1960 Mali became independent, after which the French were missed.

  In 1983, the Sofitel corporation built a forty-two-room hotel in Timbuktu, not to make money from it, but to find glory in a famous name. The name explains why, despite the onset of war, Sofitel kept the hotel open. In theory you could make a reservation there from the United States by dialing 1-800-763-4835. This was supposed to be amazing, more evidence of a shrinking world, because even to people who do not know where it is, Timbuktu still means “distant and far away.”

  In fact, even before the war, when the airline still flew to Timbuktu, the hotel drew few tourists. Blame good information, starting with Caillé. The consensus is now nearly universal: guidebooks, travelogues, and letters home all agree that there are better places to visit. I was tired. I was sick.

  When the last boat of the season stopped there, at the port called Kabara, it was late in the night. I wandered through the darkness among the crowds on the riverbank, and on hands and knees vomited behind the ruins of a pirogue. I caught a ride to Timbuktu proper, and by the skewed yellow lights of a Peugeot saw crumbling mud walls and the closed expressions of soldiers at an army roadblock. There are three mud mosques in Timbuktu, as there have been for centuries. I returned to the river, where the boat was scheduled to leave before dawn. I preferred to miss Timbuktu. It has an attractive name, but is now known mostly for what it is not.