The legendary city of Timbuktu has lived in our human consciousness for centuries as a mystical wonderland full of gold and other treasures. Hidden in the south west corner of the Sahara desert (in what is now Mali), the city thrived during the Golden Age of Islam for its bustling trade and standing as a centre for scholars from across the world.
Timbuktu’s foundation can be traced back to its first use as a seasonal trading encampment by Tuareg nomads in around 1100 CE. These traders went back and forth in camel caravans across North Africa and the Sahara, selling wares. Timbuktu’s location by the Niger River therefore made it a valuable outpost for the storing of such goods since, from Timbuktu, they could be either transported up to the Mediterranean world or redistributed to other parts of West Africa.
Over time, Timbuktu developed into a city as many of these traders decided to settle permanently on the land. The city was later absorbed into the Mali Empire at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries. Gold from Mali poured into the city and was exchanged for salt from the north, a valuable commodity for preserving food products such as meat and fish. As this trade flourished, the city attracted merchants from across the Muslim world, leading to an influx of travellers which only accelerated Timbuktu’s development and increased its prosperity.
During this period, Timbuktu not only became known throughout Africa and the Middle East: in fact, stories of the city’s wealth and opulence spread to Europe during the late Middle Ages. One particular tale stands out from the rest. This was the claim that Mali’s sultan Mansa Musa (often said to hold the title for the world’s richest man in history) made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. He brought with him, it is said, 60,000 slaves and so much gold that during his visit to Cairo in Egypt, the price of the commodity fell drastically. Importantly, there were accompanying reports that all this gold had come from Timbuktu, fuelling an image of Timbuktu as an African ‘El Dorado’. (El Dorado was famously a mythical city of enormous wealth somewhere in South America.)
The Arabian explorer Ibn Battuta visited Timbuktu in 1352. He substantiated the rumours already swirling in Europe about Timbuktu, detailing the city’s abundant gold and riches. On a well-known atlas made by Abraham Cresques (‘the Catalan Atlas’), there is a depiction of Mansa Musa on a thone wearing a gold crown and holding a gold ball in his hand. A massively important city in the empire, Timbuktu is also shown on the map.
Musa himself held great influence over the city. During his return journey from his aforementioned pilgrimage to Mecca, the ruler ordered the construction of the ‘Great Mosque’ (also known as the Djinguereber). Not long after, the equally impressive Sankore mosque was constructed in the north of the city under the supervision of Granada scholar Al-Sahili at whose initiative wooden frames were built into the structure – the best reason for its excellent preservation.
These mosques were not only places of worship in the modern sense, becoming centres of learning and culture at the same time. For instance, the Sankore mosque was home to a large group of Islamic scholars who acquired books for the community and led classes on Islamic scholarshp. The city’s rise to prominence as a place of learning can also partly be attributed to the work of Askia Muhammad, a great patron of scholars in the city and the first ruler of the Askia dynasty of the Songhai Empire, the successor to the Mali Empire.
In addition to mosques, scholars studied at Maktabs, Qur’anic schools of which there were, it is estimated, around 180 hundred in Timbuktu alone. Some of the schools contained as many as four or five thousand students, revealing the existence of a large student population living in Timbuktu during this period. While only around two or three hundred earned the right to be ulama (scholars), the level of education in Timbuktu was unmatched by anywhere else.
Predictably in a society with such a strong tradition of learning, books were prized possessions, signalling the wealth and power of their owners as well as pointing to their intellectual standing. Leo Africanus, a famed Spanish traveler who visited Timbuktu in the 16th cenutry, recorded that books and manuscripts ‘sold for more money than any other merchandise’. By this time, books had become so central to Timbuktu’s society that the city developed its own booming trade in them – a crucial factor behind the its golden age. Almost certainly, Timbuktu’s scholars were aware of this fact and made it their mission to persuade visitors of the city to share their writing and learning with them. Consequently, scholars and travelers coming to the city were effectively treated like royalty.
One of the best known scholars from Timbuktu was Ahmad Baba who wrote more than forty works during his lifetime on topics ranging from jurisprudence to grammar and syntax. One of his most influential pieces of writing was a treatise against the enslavement of Black Africans. Specifically, Baba opposed the claim that they were descendants of Ham who, as the story in Genesis goes, were cursed by Noah. Additionally, Baba composed critical biographies of celebrated Mailiki jurists (those who practiced law from one of the four Islamic schools). In honour of these achievements, a centre for the conservation of manuscripts which opened in 1970 in Timbuktu was named after him.
Timbuktu remained the learning capital of the world up until 1591, the year when the city was invaded by marauding Moroccans from the north. As a result of the invasion, there was an exodus of many of Timbuktu’s greatest and most prolific scholars and writers. Some were either executed on the spot, or, in the case of Ahmad Baba, taken to Morocco to be imprisoned. This effectively destroyed the city’s impressive scholarly tradition, leading to its steady decline.
Nevertheless, reports of this decline were slow to reach those in Europe whose imaginations were still sparked by fantastical stories and accounts of the city as an African ‘El Dorado’. The fantasy was fed further by the Romantic movement around Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries in which myths and dreams played a central role. Poets, unaware of Timbuktu’s fate, still wrote of Timbuktu’s majesty and splendour. Even the great poet Alfred Tennyson kickstarted his own poetry career by winning the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge for a poem about Timbuktu.
The fervour to find the exact whereabouts of city lasted long after the Moroccan invasion. The first European to do it and return alive was the Frenchman René Caillié in 1828. This was no small feat since all the travellers who attempted the treacherous journey before Caillié either died of hunger along the way or were killed by local nomads. Caillié wrote a narrative of his trip; however, after his long exploit, even he was disappointed by the city’s lacklustre appearance. So he writes:
“I found it to be neither as large nor as densely populated as I expected; its commerce is considerably less grand than its reputation claims; one doesn’t see, like at Jenné [another Saharan town along the Niger Delta], this great rush of strangers coming from all parts of Sudan. In the streets of Timbuktu I only met camels coming from Cabra, laden with merchandise carried by a flotilla … In a word, everything exuded the greatest sadness. I was surprised by the lack of activity, I’d say even the inertia that reigned in the city.”
Needless to say, Timbuktu still today conjures up the same emotions and fantastical images it did then. While getting there does not require the same courage displayed by Caillié and the countless other explorers who undertook the treacherous trek to the city, Timbuktu is still relatively inaccessible and lies in a very unstable part of the world. In March 2012, there was a military coup and the north of Mali, including the ancient city of Timbuktu, was taken over by Islamic fundamentalist rebels who destroyed many of the city’s treasured mausoleums and manuscripts. Another constant worry is desertification which has the power to wipe out the city completely.
If there is anything that can save Timbuktu, it is greater awareness about the city’s glorious past. Only then may it stage a comeback.