Our wine arrived before the meal, and without any preamble, I said to Janice, somewhat desperately, “It’s only six months away. I’ve got to pick something to do and start getting ready!”
Her eyes clouded. A pause stilled the air. Exasperated, she finally said across the table: “Why don’t you just go to Timbuktu.”
Stunned by the perfection of her suggestion, my head jerked. I could feel my lungs fill with oxygen. “Brilliant,” I said. My heart took stag leaps. “Absolutely brilliant.” We looked at one another. Janice sipped her red wine, unsure of what she had wrought.
“I’m going to Timbuktu,” I committed, so profound was the image. “Just as soon as I find out where it is.”
Touch a map of the world. Move your hand to Africa. Press a finger to unfamiliar West African names like Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso. Look north, above Ouagadougou, to the nation of Mali, and there, near the River Niger, find the most ethereal of names, Timbuktu.
It is easier to point out countries of terror and despair, of dictators and abusers. The facts of sub-Saharan Africa are awful, the past mired in exaggerations, the future one of faint hope. Perhaps we understand Africa only marginally better than those who, in the not too distant past, hid their geographic ignorance by filling in the uncharted voids on their maps with sketches of fantastic monsters.
To exploration-mad societies like France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Timbuktu lay at the unknown edges of cartography. Its sheer unassailability challenged even their most intrepid travellers. It acquired such an aura that even today many people believe Timbuktu is fictitious. It is assuredly not.
Our globe’s most exotically named travel destination is rooted in the language of Berber, though it has been distorted to the point that only myth explains its genesis. I’ve found it commonly written as Timbuctoo, Tombooctoo or Tombuctou, Tombouktou, and less often Tumbyktu, Tembuch, Tombuto, Timkitoo or Tambuta, as well as the word used here: Timbuktu. The most frequently used label is the French, Tombouctou. which one finds on Mali maps and postcards.
In Tuareg folklore, the place began with an old woman who looked after the nomads’ well when the men went trading or hunting. Tuareg Imashagan, desert people, first set camp in Timbuktu around A.D. 1OOO. Their well, tin in Berber lingo, provided water that was free of the illnesses they contracted nearer the River Niger, where they grazed camels and cattle on the burgo grass, and it became their preferred spot. As summer annually gave way to autumn’s temperate rains, these nomads moved on and left their goods in care of the old woman, commonly referred to as Bouctou, which translates as “woman with the large navel.” It was her well, and thus her name, that became renowned. The linking of proprietress and place formed “TinBouctou.” Timbuktu, one of the world’s finest names, is “the well of the lady with the big belly button.”
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