The very name evokes mystery, riches, faraway places and unknown lands.
Timbuktu — the forbidden city in the heart of Africa.
It was founded in 1080. And within 300 years, it had already become one of the era’s most important trading points, an influential Islamic intellectual center, a cosmopolitan multicultural city of commerce and learning and the second-largest imperial court in the world.
When much of Europe was still struggling out from under the Dark Ages, the emperor of Timbuktu was having stunning mosques built, and thousands of scholars studied in the city, coming from as far as Islamic India and Moorish Spain.
At one time, it was a city of 100,000 and so rich that even the slaves decorated themselves with gold.
Its history is quite wondrous considering the city was named for a freshwater well guarded by a slave woman with an overgrown belly button.
In the language of Timbuktu’s founders, the word for a well is “tim.” Buctu was the name of the slave woman who guarded the well. Her name means oversized belly button. So the nomadic Tuaregs who created the city called the spot “Buctu’s well.”
Eventually it came to be known as Timbuktu in English, or Tombouctou in French.
In some ways, Timbuktu today remains what it always has been — a city of intriguing mud brick mosques and houses isolated on the white-hot southern rim of Africa’s vast Sahara, the world’s largest desert.
Its side streets are narrow, exuding an Arabic flavor. But the main streets are wide, graceful boulevards, at least by regional standards. All of Timbuktu’s streets are made of white desert sand. The area has only one asphalt road. That one leads from the airport to the city of 25,000.
Long gone are Timbuktu’s enormous wealth and its role as a major goods exchange — sort of a Wall Street of the Sahara.
A re-creation of Buctu’s well is located in front of Timbuktu’s museum as an attraction for tourists, the city’s latest trade.
“This is the first place of Timbuktu,” said Mahamoudou Djitteye, 37, a local high school English teacher who also works as a guide, pointing to the sandy ground around the well. “This is where the founder Buctu lived.
“At the time, Timbuktu was a summer camp of the Tuaregs,” he said.
“Buctu was a slave of the Tuaregs. She was black. Tuaregs left their heavy baggage here. They left Buctu with it. They went to the nearby Niger River and stayed during the dry season. And they came back here and took their baggage in the rainy season and went north. When the Tuaregs came back, they brought salt. The people from the south came by boat. They brought millet. Then we had a cultural exchange between the north and the black south.”
A cynic would say that the museum well is representative of Timbuktu’s lost glory. It’s dry, with an old crankshaft lying on the sand at the bottom.
In Timbuktu’s centuries of prosperity, tens of thousands of camels in caravans traveling from the north carried salt from vast deposits in the middle Sahara and finished goods from Egypt, Arabia, Europe and even as far away as the Orient. The camels had to stop at the desert’s southern edge. Below the Niger River, blood-sucking tsetse flies would kill the beasts of burden.
At the same time, goods came up from the tropical south. Gold, ivory and slaves arrived by boat and on the heads of porters.
Timbuktu’s reputation in the outside world as a place of opulence deep in Africa’s interior emerged in the early 1300s during the reign of Mansa Musa, the ancient Mali kingdom’s best-known emperor. Helping maintain its air of mystery was the fact that non-Islamic infidels were not allowed to visit until the 19th Century.
It was Mansa Musa who left the city its most enduring monument — the 669-year-old Djinguereber mosque, Timbuktu’s heartbeat and greatest treasure, where Muslims go to pray five times a day.
In 1324, Mansa Musa made a pilgrimage to Mecca. “He found a Spanish architect in Cairo named El Saheli,” Djitteye said. “El Saheli was from the south of Spain, from Andalusia. Mansa Musa brought him here to Timbuktu. He built five mosques.”
El Saheli was almost certainly influenced by the Grand Mosque in the Andalusian city of Cordova. That mosque was built in the 8th and 9th Centuries by the Moors from North Africa, who ruled part of Spain from 711 to 1492. Although Timbuktu’s Djinguereber mosque is less grand than the Cordova mosque — the most magnificent Islamic structure in the Western world — it has a striking similarity.
The Timbuktu mosque has nine rows of square pillars, providing prayer space for 2,000 people. Cordova’s mosque is supported by similar rows of pillars supporting graceful Moorish arches.
But El Saheli didn’t have the plentiful stone of Cordova to work with. All he had was mud. As a result, the exterior of the Djinguereber mosque is similar to much of the Islamic architecture in the Sahara Desert and Niger River valley — it resembles a giant ant hill.
The mud construction, finished in 1327, has led to a 660-year-old tradition. Each year before the torrential rains fall in the summer, all of Timbuktu turns out to replaster the mosque’s high walls and flat roof with mud.
Another enduring Timbuktu institution is the Ahmed Ababa Center for Historical Research.
Ahmed, who lived from 1556 to 1627, in the time of Shakespeare, wrote 50 books on history, geography and mathematics. He also wrote poetry.
In 1591, the Moroccan army invaded Timbuktu, ending the city’s grandeur. The conquerors looted the city of its wealth and took thousands of Timbuktu citizens to Morocco as slaves.
Ahmed was among the slaves. Morocco’s king asked Ahmed to teach his children. He refused on the grounds that the king was an evil man.
In addition to his other talents, Ahmed must have been something of a diplomat. “Of all the slaves taken to Morocco by the invaders, Ahmed was the only one to comeback to Timbuktu,” Djitteye said.
The research center’s 13,000 Arabic language documents, most on microfilm, make it an important source of information about Africa and Islam during Timbuktu’s golden era.
The once-proud Tuaregs — the lords of the desert who considered robbery and slave trading their highest professions — saw their days of glory fade too.
Severe droughts in 1973 and 1984 killed their camels and cattle. Most people were forced to survive on emergency food provided by foreign donors. Thousands starved, and some left the country to fight in wars in Libya, Lebanon and Afghanistan.
They returned to Mali in the early 1990s to wage a guerrilla war for establishment of their own nation. About 300,000 of Mali’s 10 million population are Tuaregs, believed to be the descendants of Libyan Berbers.
A cease-fire between the Tuaregs and the Mali government has been holding for about a year, making it safe for travelers.
The salt trade, a 17-day camel trip from the north, has resumed, injecting new life into Timbuktu’s economy. These days, some Tuaregs try to make money from the few tourists who find their way to this remote destination.
Times are hard. But a statue in the city’s central square, built by the French after they colonized the region in 1894, stands as a reminder of the past greatness of Timbuktu and its founders.
The statue is of a Tuareg warrior. Looking wondrously heroic, he is wrapped, except for his piercing black eyes, from head to toe in a flowing white robe and turban astride a charging white stallion with flashing black hooves, ready to dash across the desert.
GETTING AROUND MALI
Traveling in Mali is for the stout-hearted. Facilities are far from what first-world tourists are accustomed to. But any troubles are offset by the pleasant, understanding, often bemused Malians.
Tourists can move about day or night without fear of crime. The biggest danger of walking from a restaurant to a hotel at night is that of falling into an open sewer.
Bamako, the capital, and other cities frequently have power failures at night. Visitors quickly learn to choose restaurants with generators and to carry flashlights.
Taxis are plentiful, highly unreliable and often hilarious. You may have to share one with a sheep.
The Boucto Hotel provides a romantic Sahara Desert setting, air conditioning and exceptional fried carp, couscous and cold beer. Mali is a Muslim country, but alcoholic beverages are available in most restaurants.
The best time to visit Mali is between October and April — the dry season. The temperatures will be in the 90s during the day and probably over 100 in Timbuktu.
French is the main language in Mali cities, but a surprising amount of English is spoken in the former French colony.
Air France and Air Afrique make regular flights to Bamako. Mali’s state airline provides flights to Timbuktu and other cities in the country.
If you stop in Bamako, the Grand Hotel is worthy of its name if you don’t eat anything but breakfast there. Lunch and dinner are awful. For a few dollars, you can eat well at the Ali Baba restaurant next to the U.S. embassy. The Rebelais, a French restaurant, is Bamako’s best and reasonably priced. The Relax restaurant serves excellent Lebanese food. Go to D’jenne Restaurant in Bamako for Malian dishes. At the national museum, exhibitions tell of Africa’s extraordinary history.
As for shopping, the Tuaregs make wonderful silver jewelry — bracelets, necklaces, rings and talismans. They also use brass. They sell the jewelry in their homes, but have no signs out front, so ask at the hotel how to find them. You enter, are served tea and then get an elaborate presentation. The designs are from various regions in Mali, and may resemble camel tracks.
Malians love to bargain. They are honest, but among the world’s sharpest traders. After all, they have been at it for more than 2,000 years. So if the first asking price is, say, $85; you might start bargaining at $5 and settle on $15. But think of it this way: Even if you pay too much, it’s probably still a bargain given what you might pay in New York City for the same thing.
Timbuktu’s central market is fun to visit. But it is mostly a food market, with almost no souvenirs.
Guidebooks published by Rough Guide and Lonely Planet on traveling in West Africa are fairly reliable and informative.
