The Storied City

by Charlie English

  Timbuktu had been aware of European encroachment for decades. In 1830, an army of thirty-four thousand French soldiers had seized Algiers from the Ottomans, and by the 1850s, after a series of campaigns against local resistance movements, they had conquered most of the surrounding territory. Hundreds of thousands of “colons” had crossed the Mediterranean to settle in northern Africa, and the coast was now dotted with vineyards, farms, and French architecture. In West Africa, meanwhile, they had pushed inland from their centuries-old bases in Senegal and the Gulf of Guinea. The French advance here was a more patchwork affair, often led by private traders or military officers who would use any fracas to call up gunboats or military detachments, whereupon local chiefs were forced to sign treaties ceding land. Bit by bit, Paris had taken control of Guinea, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, and parts of the Niger valley.

  Even knowing all this, the leaders of Timbuktu would have been surprised to learn that they were about to become part of France.

  • • •

  FOR A HUNDRED YEARS, European investigation into Timbuktu and the Niger had been driven by the exploration societies, geographers, and a handful of Orientalists. The study of Africa now ceased to be a discipline worthy of academic thought. No European university created chairs in the history of the continent or its languages: if Africa had had no civilization, what was the point? The study of the past depended on written source material, and since Africa had none, there was nothing to be researched. In the decades to come, the role of exploring Africa’s culture would fall in the main to soldiers, colonial officers, and journalists.

  Few places on the continent excited the new breed of French imperialist more than Timbuktu. Caillié’s disappointment had not much dampened European curiosity about the city, or belief in the region’s essential wealth. Several failed attempts to reach it were made in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In 1884 a ship was specially constructed to work its way down the Niger: it sank in Jenne in 1885, was salvaged, and set out again for Timbuktu in 1886, when it was finally forced to retreat after coming under attack from a group of Tuareg.

  Even when their superiors in the colonial department in Paris tried to restrain them, expansionist senior officers looking for promotion would take it upon themselves to push deeper into West Africa. The most aggressive of these soldiers was Colonel Louis Archinard, commander of French forces in the Sudan from 1888 to 1893. The Middle Niger at this time was controlled by the Islamic Tukulor empire. French attitudes to the Tukulor sultan, Ahmadu Seku, were summed up by Archinard’s predecessor, Joseph Gallieni, who noted that “we must look on all these chiefs as people to be ruined and made to disappear before very long.” In April 1890, Archinard launched an unprovoked attack on the Tukulor capital at Segu, which fell without resistance. As his men rifled through Ahmadu’s possessions, searching for his famed wealth (which was not as advertised), they found a large number of manuscripts. Archinard’s account of the day reveals no interest in these documents, but they were seized nevertheless and shipped out in four chests. They remained in a colonial supply depot until the end of 1892, when they were given to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. They would remain there, untouched, for several years.

  After crushing the Tukulor, Archinard continued to push toward Timbuktu, acting against direct orders from his superiors in Paris. In April 1893 he took Jenne after heavy fighting, and Mopti fell later that month without a struggle, but a political shift against military expansionism finally cost Archinard his position. Two rival French officers—Lieutenant Colonel Eugène Bonnier and the naval lieutenant Henri Boiteux—now took up the baton in this new race to Timbuktu, against express orders from Archinard’s replacement, who was making his way from France. Boiteux was first out of the blocks: taking two gunboats and a contingent of soldiers downriver, he entered Timbuktu on December 16, 1893. The furious Bonnier, who had nurtured a lifelong ambition to conquer the city, reached the area with a column of colonial troops a month later. Near Goundam, the party was attacked in the night by Tuareg, and Bonnier, ten of his officers, an interpreter, two European noncommissioned officers, and sixty-eight Senegalese soldiers were massacred. The city now had to be recaptured and the Tuareg punished, tasks which were efficiently done by Major Joseph Joffre, who advanced along the left bank of the Niger from Segu, killed one hundred Tuareg, and took fifteen hundred head of their cattle. Joffre was promoted for his action, and not for the last time: in 1914 he would be commander in chief of the French forces on the western front.

  The capture of Timbuktu and the unwillingness of French officers in the Western Sudan to obey orders provoked fury in Paris, where the administration was split between pro-military and pro-civilian factions. Nevertheless, the occupation was a fait accompli. It was approved by the colonial office on two conditions: one, that it could be maintained without risk; two, that it would incur no additional cost to the government.

  • • •

  FÉLIX DUBOIS was the son of a noted chef who spent twenty years cooking for the Kaiser. His father’s contacts in the upper echelons of nineteenth-century European society proved useful to Félix as he embarked on a career as a journalist, but his forays into literature were even more valuable: Dubois père wrote an encyclopedic range of bestselling cookbooks, and the royalties from recipes for such dishes as sheep brains in warm remoulade and veal’s feet à la genevoise kept Félix afloat whenever his other income threatened to run dry. By 1894, at the age of thirty-two, he was an established foreign correspondent, having reported colorfully for the Paris papers from Vienna and Berlin, and from Henri Brosselard-Faidherbe’s expedition to Futa Jallon. It was only natural, when news of the conquest of Timbuktu reached Europe, that the editor of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro should turn to him for an account from this exotic new jewel in France’s crown.

  The reporter landed at Dakar in August 1894 and, after exploring the coast, began to make his way east. The road to Timbuktu no longer held the perils Park and Caillié had faced: Dubois traveled into the interior under the protection of the French administration, on supply roads constructed for the military and even on the new railway that had been built between Dakar and Saint-Louis. He stopped at Jenne, where he was excited to find manuscripts, including a complete Tarikh al-sudan, which he had copied, and extraordinary Sudanese architecture. These two discoveries persuaded him that the Songhay civilization, which demonstrated such “intelligence and science,” must have come from ancient Egypt. From Jenne he pushed north on the river, determined, he wrote later, to “raise completely the veil which has hidden the Sudan from us for so long.” He traveled the last few miles from Kabara with an armed escort, and as the sandy track rose to the top of a dune, he saw for the first time his goal, which appeared to him as “an immense and brilliant sky, and an immense and brilliant stretch of land, with the grand outlines of a town uniting the two. A dark silhouette, large and long, an image of grandeur in immensity—thus appeared the Queen of the Sudan.”

  Entering the town, he was rapidly brought back to reality. Timbuktu in January 1895 was “tragic,” in near ruin. Even the house of the Shaykh al-Bakkai, a man “known all over Europe, all over the world, and the Queen of England corresponded with him,” was a wreck, with little trace of the brilliant mind that had once occupied it. The buildings of the city were in such poor condition that Dubois considered camping out, before his guide found a house to his liking. The following day he sent out letters of introduction he had acquired in Jenne, inviting the city’s scholars to visit. As he conversed with these men, probing them for historical information, and as he was shown more manuscripts, his opinion again performed a volte-face. Timbuktu’s glories were not a fantasy after all: they merely lay over the horizon of the distant past. The wretched spectacle that had greeted him on his arrival dissipated bit by bit, and, without his yet having set foot in the street, a new Timbuktu was built up before him:

  A secret had clearly hovered over Timbuc
too the Mysterious. I had the eyes that saw; and at last the image of the great city, the wealthy Timbuctoo of the legends, was restored to me.

  The journalist had found his scoop.

  Caillié had not been wrong: the Queen of the Sudan was outwardly drab. But by digging deep through its manuscripts, which were merely what remained of the marvelous libraries that had been plundered already by the Fulani and Tukulor empires of the Niger bend, Dubois uncovered “Timbuctoo the holy, the learned, the light of the Niger.” Such had been the town’s splendor during her golden past that “our imaginations are still dazzled by its reflections, three centuries after the setting of her star.” He rushed to make parallels with Europe: Sankore, the center of the city’s learned activity, had been much like the Latin Quarter in Paris, and its schools constituted a “university of Sankore”—a term coined by Dubois—whose professors “astounded the most learned men of Islam by their erudition.”

  Timbuktu was not merely the great intellectual nucleus of the Sudan . . . she was also one of the great scientific centres of Islam itself, her university being the younger sister of those of Cairo, Cordova, Fez and Damascus. Her collection of ancient manuscripts leaves us in no doubt upon the point, and permits us to reconstruct this side of her past in its smallest detail.

  In contrast to the miserly European book-collectors of the day, he wrote, the learned doctors of Timbuktu had experienced real joy in sharing their most precious manuscripts; they were bibliophiles “in the best sense.” Dubois envisaged these scholars searching passionately for volumes they did not possess and making copies when they were too poor to buy what they wanted. In this manner they swelled their book collections to between seven hundred and two thousand volumes. Among them were works of poetry and imagination, and compositions “of a kind peculiar to Arabian literature,” including those of the famous scholars al-Hariri and al-Hamadhani. He found a copy of the Book of Wonders, a collection of travels and legends composed at Mosul by Abu Hamid of Granada in the twelfth century. “The historical and geographical works of Morocco, Tunis and Egypt were well known in Timbuktu,” wrote Dubois, “and the pure sciences were represented by books on astronomy and medicine.” In short, the libraries of Timbuktu might be said to have included almost the whole of Arabian literature.

  The greater part of the Timbuktu collections were “entirely without interest to us,” he noted, since they comprised serious scholastic and judicial treatises and Islamic texts, but a fraction of Timbuktu’s literary collections were of the “highest importance,” containing “those historical works which shed so much light upon the obscure past of these vast regions.” Chief among these was the Tarikh al-sudan, but he found other chronicles as well: the anonymous Diwan al-muluk fi salatin al-sudan, which described the history of the city from 1591 onward, and the Tadkhirat al-nisyan fi akhbar muluk al-sudan, a rearrangement of the Diwan into a biographical dictionary. All the city’s books were so highly valued, however, that Dubois was unable to purchase a single one.

  Dubois’s greatest literary discovery was not a manuscript at all, but a mere rumor. He was told of a work he called the Fatassi, a “history of the kingdoms of Ganata, Songhoi, and Timbuctoo, from their origins to the year 1554,” written by the scholar Mahmud Kati. Finding this document would be of inestimable value, but no matter how many people he asked in Timbuktu, he was shown only fragments. Everyone in the city knew about it, but no one admitted having it. It was, he concluded, “the phantom book of the Sudan.”

  The Timbuktu qadi Ahmadu Sansarif, who claimed descent from Kati, told Dubois there was a reason why no copies could be found:

  The Fatassi has never been so well known as the other histories of the Sudan because it dealt with the concerns of many peoples and many men. Families, since grown rich and powerful, and the chiefs of various countries, were shown with very humble origins, sometimes being the offspring of slaves. The book caused great annoyance to many people on this account, and those interested bought all the copies they could procure and destroyed them.

  Among those said to be annoyed by the book was Shaykh Ahmad Lobbo, the founder of the Fulani empire of Masina, who had ordered Laing’s death in 1828. Lobbo had declared himself the twelfth caliph, the last of the successors of Muhammad, whose coming the Prophet himself had foretold. But the Fatassi, which was written centuries before the founding of Lobbo’s empire, neglected to mention him in its list of prophecies. Was it not likely, Dubois mused, that the Fulani had destroyed copies of the Fatassi in order to stop the work from exposing Lobbo’s trick?

  The original manuscript of the Fatassi had been lost in unusual circumstances, Sansarif told Dubois. It had been inherited by one of his great-aunts, who lived in Kati’s home village of Tindirma, sixty miles southwest of Timbuktu. To keep the controversial work safe, she had placed it in a wooden box and buried it under a small mound close to her house. She was a popular and witty woman with a gift for conversation, and people often came to visit her, sometimes asking what was under the mound. She always replied in the same way. “It is [Mahmud Kati], my venerable ancestor who is buried there,” she would say, whereupon her friends never failed to murmur a short prayer over the mound, for Kati had a great reputation for piety and wisdom.

  Eventually she became friendly with a Fulani man and told him the secret of what lay beneath the earth. The man immediately hurried to Lobbo to tell him about the complete Fatassi, and shortly afterward the sultan sent his men to dig up the precious document. As they were returning on the river to the capital, “the bearer of the priceless volume capsized his canoe.” The manuscript disappeared under the waters of the Niger and was lost to the world forever.

  • • •

  DUBOIS’S DESCRIPTIONS of Timbuktu’s Golden Age were soon enlivening the pages of Le Figaro and L’illustration, accompanied by pictures of the country he had traveled through. The full account of his journey was published in book form in France in 1897. Tombouctou la mystérieuse was expertly crafted to meet the popular appetite for colonial literature, conjuring a fabulous vision of a newly European land. In Dubois’s hands, the city was rescued from the debunking of Caillié and the grinding observations of Barth and restored to the poetical high ground. Reprising the metaphor once used by Warrington’s rival in Tripoli, Baron Rousseau, Dubois turned Timbuktu into an exotic female waiting to be “unveiled.” The author would boldly undress the dusky “Queen of the Sudan” before his audience’s eyes, and the glimpses of the wonders beneath would take the reader’s breath away. The book was a tremendous hit.

  Dubois gave the Tarikh al-sudan he had brought from Jenne to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, where it joined the 518 volumes Archinard had looted from Segu, including a further copy of the tarikh. Both of these were now sent to the eminent Orientalist Octave Houdas at the School of Living Oriental Languages in Paris. Working from the two manuscripts, Houdas and his collaborator Edmond Benoist began to compile a complete Arabic version of the chronicle, which they published in 1898. A French translation, bolstered by the arrival of a third manuscript discovered by the explorer Louis Tautain, was produced in 1900. Together with Dubois’s own book, this work would breathe new life into the myth of gilded Timbuktu.

  It was ironic that the promoter of the new Timbuktu legend believed unabashedly in the superiority of his own kind. Dubois had written of Joffre’s punitive expedition against the Tuareg, for instance, that it would “still be necessary from time to time to show them that their nefarious dominion is at an end, and that they have found their master.” For the colonialist historians, however, it was possible simultaneously to applaud the empire and marvel at the achievements of its recently subjugated people. To legitimize the occupation of the continent, African culture had been reduced to a nothing; now that it was in European hands, it seemed its wonders could be safely proclaimed. Indeed, in Dubois’s view, it was only under French occupation that Timbuktu would be able to flourish again. “I picture the city become a
center of European civilisation and science, as it was formerly of Mussulman culture,” he wrote in one of his many grandiloquent passages. “The reputation of her scholars will again spread from Lake Chad to the mountains of Kong and the shores of the Atlantic, and Timbuctoo will once more be the wealthy and cultured Queen of the Sudan which her distant view now so deceitfully promises her to be.”

  Other colonialist writers, keen to demonstrate the achievements of the newly conquered lands, would follow Dubois’s lead. Among these was the intriguing figure of Flora Shaw, also known as Lady Lugard. Shaw was born into an army family in Woolwich, southeast London, and had no formal schooling, though she spent much of her childhood reading in the library of the Royal Military Academy. When she was seventeen the critic John Ruskin made her his protégé, encouraging her to write, and she became a moderately successful author. Yet it was in journalism that she would excel: she became the first woman to join the permanent staff of The Times and in 1893 was named its colonial editor. She was a friend and promoter of Cecil Rhodes and even coined the term “Nigeria” in a Times article in 1897. According to one of her contemporaries, she was “a fine, handsome, bright, upstanding young woman, as clever as they make them, capable of an immense amount of work, as hard as nails and talking like a Times leader.” In 1902 she married the British high commissioner for Northern Nigeria, Frederick Lugard, and three years later published a history of West Africa, A Tropical Dependency, which pulled together an immense range of source material, including what she described as the “treasure house” of the tarikh.

  Shaw’s self-appointed task in A Tropical Dependency was to explain the region to a Western audience and expound on its delights. In doing so she drew often questionable parallels between Songhay history and experiences her readers might comprehend. The state prison of the askiyas thus served “a similar purpose to that of the Tower of London,” while under Askiya the Great’s successors, “orchestras, provided with singers of both sexes, were much frequented.” In many respects the Songhay empire had been far ahead of contemporary Europe: there were celebrated eye surgeons who could perform cataract operations, she wrote, and enough was known about astronomy that “the appearance of comets, so amazing to Europe of the Middle Ages, is also noted calmly, as a matter of scientific interest, at Timbuctoo.” But the Songhay people’s greatest achievement was “Timbuktu University,” the institution Dubois had conjured from his researches into the Islamic schools around the Sankore mosque. According to Shaw, the university had made Timbuktu a “very active centre of civilisation” during the Sudanese Middle Ages.