The Storied City

by Charlie English

  So Geographers in Afric-maps,

  With Savage-Pictures fill their gaps;

  And o’er unhabitable downs

  Place Elephants for want of towns.

  Interest in this neglected continent had been sparked in the mid-1770s by James Bruce, a Scottish squire who had set out to discover the source of the Nile and ended up living in Ethiopia for two years. “Africa is indeed coming into fashion,” Horace Walpole wrote in 1774. “There is just returned a Mr. Bruce, who has lived three years in the Court of Abyssinia, and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen.” As a result, Banks’s own exploits, Walpole noted cattily, were “quite forgotten.”

  If Africa was indeed in fashion in London, it was also the subject of a looming moral crisis that would shape British foreign policy for the next half century. By the late 1700s, trade on the Guinea coasts—which had been named for their principal commodities of ivory, gold, slave, and grain—had become a key plank of the British economy. In the half century to 1772, the value of the African trade had increased sevenfold, to almost a million pounds a year. “How vast is the importance of our trade to Africa,” wrote an anonymous English merchant that year, “which is the first principle and foundation of all the rest; the main spring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.” Much of the trade was in humans: sea captains based in London, Liverpool, and Bristol swapped guns made in Birmingham and East Anglian cloth for slaves, who were shipped to the West Indian tobacco and sugar plantations that kept the British economy afloat. In the 1760s British vessels had carried forty-two thousand slaves a year across the Atlantic, more than any other European nation.

  Now, though, Britain’s conscience was beginning to be pricked, as people came into contact with the victims of slavery for the first time. There were ten thousand black people working as domestic servants in England in 1770, and by the 1780s a small spate of popular books appeared that set out the trade’s evils, including The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which became a classic text for the Quaker antislavery activists who would found the abolitionist movement. For Saturday’s Club members such as Henry Beaufoy, the finding of alternative African commodities held the prospect of bringing the trade to an end. Others, including Banks, sniffed new commercial opportunities that could be good for Britain.

  These motives were not spelled out in the club’s literature. The reason put forward for the new push into Africa, laid down by Beaufoy and approved by Banks, was the pure, age-old call of discovery:

  Of the objects of inquiry which engage our attention the most, there are none, perhaps, that so much excite continued curiosity, from childhood to age; none that the learned and unlearned so equally wish to investigate, as the nature and history of those parts of the world, which have not, to our knowledge, been hitherto explored.

  Such was the success of British seafaring, and of Cook’s voyages in particular, that “nothing worthy of research by Sea, the Poles themselves excepted, remains to be examined,” Beaufoy continued. The future of exploration now lay onshore: at least a third of the habitable surface of the earth remained uncharted, including much of Asia and America, and almost the whole of Africa. Thanks to the efforts of George Forster, an East India Company employee who had traveled from Bengal to England through Afghanistan, Persia, and Russia, knowledge of Asia was likely to “advance towards perfection.” The fur traders of Montreal could meanwhile be relied upon to deal with the problem of western Canada. The African interior, however, was still “but a wide extended blank” on which geographers had traced, with hesitating hand, “a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations.”

  Such ignorance, Beaufoy noted, “must be considered as a degree of reproach upon the present age.” To remedy this geographical stigma, the Saturday’s Club would establish a new body, the African Association, devoted to promoting the exploration of the continent:

  Desirous of rescuing the age from a charge of ignorance, which, in other respects, belongs so little to its character, a few individuals, strongly impressed with a conviction of the practicability and utility of thus enlarging the fund of human knowledge, have formed the plan of an Association for promoting the discovery of the interior parts of Africa.

  The society’s rules were quickly hammered out: a membership subscription of five guineas a year was agreed on, and a committee of five was chosen. Banks would be treasurer and Beaufoy secretary, while Lord Rawdon, the bishop of Llandaff, and the lawyer Andrew Stuart were appointed assisting members. It would be the task of these men to recruit “geographical missionaries” to undertake the first journeys of discovery.

  The remaining question, then, was where on that great uncharted landmass they should be sent.

  • • •

  TIM-BUK-TOO. The toponymy of these three short syllables is disputed. Do they refer to the “wall” or “well” of Buktu, a slave woman who lived in this storied place, five miles beyond the northernmost bend of the Niger River? Or are they Songhay, meaning “the camp of a woman with a large navel”? Or do they signify simply a low-lying place, hidden among dunes? There are many theories, many pronunciations, and many spellings of this word, which Bruce Chatwin described as a “ritual formula, once heard never forgotten.” What seems clear is that a settlement was established here around 1100, and it grew into an influential town thanks to its position at the juncture of the world’s largest hot desert and West Africa’s longest river.

  The Sahara extends over 3.6 million sun-blasted square miles, stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Sahel. It covers more of the earth’s surface than the contiguous United States, China, or the continent of Australia. In popular imagination it consists of an ocean of dunes, and although these sand seas do exist, they account for less than a sixth of the whole. The Tuareg call the Sahara tinariwen, meaning “deserts,” plural, to reflect its many different personalities. There are skyscraping mountains 11,000 feet tall and salt flats the size of Lake Ontario where the quicksand can swallow a car. Mostly, there are hundreds of thousands of square miles of flat, bare rock.

  Six thousand years ago, the Sahara was green; it was roamed by elephants, giraffes, and rhinoceros that drank from its lakes and ate its vegetation. Now much of it sees no rain for years at a time. When rain does fall, roaring torrents appear that scour deep trenches in the land before vanishing moments later. It is by some measures the earth’s hottest place, where shade temperatures can approach 140 degrees, but on winter nights, without the blankets of cloud cover, soil, and plant life, the desert can freeze white. Above this naked expanse, colliding layers of hot and cold air create violent winds that blow for fifty days at a time, stirring a suffocating dust that blocks out the sun and kicking up sand spouts that kill animals and uproot trees.

  If the desert abhors life, on its southwestern edge it encounters the vital force of West Africa, a body of water locally called Joliba, the “great river” or “river of rivers,” and known to the rest of the world as the Niger. The Niger is born in a ravine 2,800 feet up in the Guinea highlands of Futa Jallon, one of the wettest places on earth. Futa Jallon is the source of three great West African watercourses, the others being the Gambia and the Senegal. Each of these gives its name to a country, but the mighty Niger gives its name to two. If it followed the shortest route to the Atlantic, this river would be a steep 150-mile torrent; instead it sets out confidently in the wrong direction, wandering northeast to slide miraculously among desert dunes in the great boomerang of the Niger Bend before emptying, 2,600 miles from its source, into the Bight of Benin.

  Roughly a third of the way along its epic journey, the Niger becomes lost in a flat, 300-mile-long inland delta. From the air this looks like a stream running out across a beach: the water branches into dozens of shallow channels and creeks. Two-thirds of its flow evaporates here, and by the end of the dry season large tracts of riverbed are dead. In July, when the
rain falls again and immense volumes of water pulse their way downstream, the dried-up channels and lakes fill, and life blossoms once more. Floating grasses and wild rice burst forth; fish and insects hatch; egrets and spoonbills arrive, joining hippos, crocodiles, and manatees. Cattle herders drive their animals to the grass that has grown along the river’s edge; farmers harvest rice, sorghum, and millet.

  Timbuktu lies at the downstream end of the delta, and at the most northerly part of the bend. It is at the crossroads of the river trade and the desert caravan routes: the meeting place, in the old dictum, “of all who travel by camel or canoe.”

  As the annual inundations of the Nile gave birth to the kingdoms of ancient Egypt, the Niger’s fertile inland delta nurtured its own civilizations. Even in classical times, reports of these lands filtered back to Europe. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus noted the existence of a river on the far side of the desert that abounded in crocodiles, with a city on its banks that was inhabited by black sorcerers. Pliny the Elder, writing five centuries later, described monstrous tribes who lived there, including the Aegipani, who were “half men, half beast”; the Troglodytes, who couldn’t speak except to emit a batlike squeaking noise; and the Blemmyes, who had “no heads, their mouths and their eyes being seated in their breasts.” These malformed humans would survive long into the Middle Ages: the Hereford Mappa Mundi, created around 1300, depicts both Blemmyes and Troglodytes in Africa, while later historians would exaggerate Pliny’s Africans into people with one eye in the center of their forehead, or one giant foot that was large enough to shelter them from the sun.

  In the seventh century, Christian Europe’s route to Africa was cut by the Muslim armies that swept west across the Mediterranean’s southern shore to the Atlantic, and for twelve hundred years information from beyond the Sahara was reduced to echoes that filtered back via the merchants who plied the desert. These were often fantastical—several reports reached medieval Europe of giant ants that harvested gold from African riverbeds—but there was substance to the rumors of the region’s wealth. Before the Spanish colonization of the Americas, two-thirds of all gold circulating in the Mediterranean came from the Sudan. The Muslim geographer al-Idrisi, writing in the twelfth century, related that the king of ancient Ghana was so rich he had “a Lump of Gold, not cast, nor wrought by any other Instruments, but perfectly formed by the Divine Providence only, of Thirty Pounds Weight,” while in the fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta—one of the most widely traveled people in history—chronicled the exploits of the Malian emperor Musa I. Musa—sometimes known as Mansa Musa, meaning “King Musa”—was said to have performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 with an entourage of sixty thousand soldiers, five hundred slaves, and one ton of gold as spending money, and was so free with his wealth that he depressed the price of the precious metal in Cairo for a generation.

  Timbuktu first appeared in European geography fifty years later, on the Catalan Atlas, a 1375 map of the known world prepared by the Mallorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques for the king of Spain. The city’s name was spelled “Tenbuch,” and from the beginning it was associated with riches, since Cresques placed Musa next to it, holding a giant golden scepter and a huge gold nugget and wearing a heavy gold crown. Later reports seemed to confirm Cresques’s information: in 1454, a Venetian captain in the pay of the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator reached Waddan, a trading oasis south of Tripoli, and brought back an account of how camel caravans took rock salt to “Tanbutu” and then to “Melli, the empire of the blacks,” where it was exchanged for large quantities of gold. It wasn’t until the sixteenth century, however, that a firsthand account of Timbuktu was published in Europe that put the seal on the gilded legend.

  The traveler’s name was al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Zayyati. Details of his biography are sketchy, but he is thought to have been born in Granada and to have moved when he was young to Fez, where he was well educated. Sometime between 1506 and 1510, at age seventeen, he was said to have accompanied one of his uncles on a diplomatic mission to the Sudan and visited Timbuktu. A decade later he was captured by Christian corsairs, who took him to Rome, where he was freed by Pope Leo X and converted to Christianity, adopting the name Johannis Leo de Medicis, which later became Leo Africanus. Leo settled down in Italy and wrote several books, but it was his Description of Africa, with its account of life in the Sudan, that was met with the greatest excitement: he had discovered a new world for Europeans, it was said, much as Columbus had by finding America.

  In Leo’s description, Timbuktu was a wealthy and charming city. Though its houses were made mostly of mud and thatch, in the middle of the town there was “a temple built with masoned stones and limestone mortar by an architect of Béticos [in southern Spain] . . . and a large palace built by the same master builder, where the king stays.” The town’s several wells provided sweet water, and there was an abundance of cereals, cattle, milk, and butter; salt, however, was very expensive, as it had to be brought five hundred miles from the desert mines. The city’s inhabitants were “very rich,” he noted, and instead of using coined money they used pieces of pure gold. As well as keeping a standing army of three thousand horsemen plus a large number of foot soldiers who shot poisoned arrows, the king of Timbuktu owned “great treasure in coin and gold ingots,” one of which weighed thirteen hundred pounds, and his court was “magnificent”:

  When the king goes from one town to another with his courtiers, he rides a camel, and the horses are led by grooms. If it is necessary to fight, the grooms hobble the camels, and the soldiers all mount the horses. When anyone wants to address the king, he kneels before him, takes a handful of dust and sprinkles it over his head and shoulders.

  The people of the city had a lighthearted nature: “It is their habit to wander in the town at night between ten p.m. and one a.m. playing musical instruments and dancing,” Leo wrote. There were also many educated people there. This meant there was a great appetite for manuscripts, which were valued more highly in the city’s markets than were other goods:

  In Timbuktu there are numerous judges, scholars and priests, all well paid by the king, who greatly honours learned men. Many manuscript books from Barbary are sold. Such sales are more profitable than any other goods.

  Leo’s work was widely translated. An English version was published in 1600 that sparked a wave of interest in Africa: it was a probable source for Shakespeare’s Othello, and its account of sub-Saharan wealth would have encouraged English adventurers to pursue the Portuguese farther down the Guinea coast. In 1620, an expedition led by the English gentleman Richard Jobson reached Tenda, on the Gambia; here an African merchant told him of a town farther upstream called Tomboconda, where there were “houses covered with gold.” Jobson’s account of his expedition was republished in 1625 by the anthologist Samuel Purchas, who exhorted his countrymen to further investigate the African continent. “The richest Mynes of Gold in the World are in Africa,” Purchas noted, “and I cannot but wonder that so many have sent so many, and spent so much in remoter voyages to the East and West and neglected Africa in the midst.”

  By the late eighteenth century, the legend of golden Timbuktu was fixed in the European imagination. This was the magnet that would draw Europeans into the heart of West Africa.

  The African Association committee did not waste time. Four days after the meeting at the St. Alban’s Tavern, they gathered in Banks’s house in Soho Square to discuss dispatching their first recruit “with all expedition” in search of new discoveries. It mattered little that, as one twentieth-century African statesman put it, “there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time.”

  • • •

  WHAT KIND of character would walk out into the extended blanks of the African Association’s maps? Who was brave, desperate, or arrogant enough to bet on the lottery of exploration, to chance his life—and it was always his—in a land whose principal features were unknown, never mind the nature of its inhabi
tants, its beasts, its climate and diseases? What reward could possibly entice a man to wander out among the Blemmyes and Troglodytes, armed with little more than a pistol and an umbrella? Any well-informed European asked in 1788 to travel into the continent’s interior should have recognized the journey as the death sentence it was and stayed at home. But the African Association’s recruits were not well informed. That, in many ways, was the point.

  The geographical barriers were not insurmountable. Yes, the routes across the desert were littered with the skeletons of pack animals and slaves alike, but much like an ocean, the Sahara was crisscrossed with trade routes and had been traversed by caravans for centuries. In the tropics, the explorer could be brought to a halt by torrential rain, but there were no forbidding mountain ranges of the Asian sort, no impenetrable forests such as those in the Amazon basin. A traveler could move from one village to another via a network of established pathways and tracks.

  More potentially dangerous was the reception a Christian explorer was likely to meet. After centuries of religious conflict, Muslims in northern Africa knew that Europeans wanted their trade and their land, while wandering infidels were a gift for desert tribesmen seeking legitimate sources of plunder. As the Senegal-based merchant Antoine Pruneau de Pommegorge noted in 1789, “It is impossible to have knowledge of the far interior of the country, because . . . the white who would be brave enough to attempt such a voyage would have his neck chopped off before he reached it.”

  Farther south, people were more tolerant of non-Muslims, but a far greater threat lurked here, as an old slavers’ adage made clear:

  Beware, beware the Bight of Benin,

  For few come out though many go in!

  Disease made West Africa the deadliest place in the world for Europeans. In the early nineteenth century, almost half of any company of soldiers stationed on the West African coast, which became known as the “white man’s grave,” could be expected to die within a year. The interior was reputed to be even more deadly: trade missions inland, which would have meant almost certain death for a European, were subcontracted to African-born merchants.