The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

378 Pages·2006·2.81 MB·English

by  Frank T. Kryza

THE RACE FOR
TIMBUKTU
In Search of Africa’s City of Gold
FRANK T. KRYZA
IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER
E. GREGORY KRYZA
(1922–1998)
FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER
(1950–1980)
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: AFRICA’S GOLDEN CITY
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE / A SCOTSMAN AT TRIPOLI
CHAPTER TWO / THE AFRICAN ASSOCIATION
CHAPTER THREE / A WEDDING IN THE ENGLISH GARDEN
CHAPTER FOUR / WHITE MAN’S GRAVE
CHAPTER FIVE / THE “AFRICAN TRAVELER”
CHAPTER SIX / THE TRIPOLI ROUTE
CHAPTER SEVEN / HUGH CLAPPERTON
CHAPTER EIGHT / THE JOURNEY TO BORNU
CHAPTER NINE / UNDISCOVERED EMPIRES
CHAPTER TEN / THE RACE BEGINS
CHAPTER ELEVEN / OVER THE RIM OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER TWELVE / CLAPPERTON CATCHES UP
CHAPTER THIRTEEN / THE IVORY MINIATURE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN / THE WIDOW ZUMA
CHAPTER FIFTEEN / TREACHERY IN THE TANEZROUFT
CHAPTER SIXTEEN / TROUBLES FOR CAPTAIN CLAPPERTON
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN / THE CITY OF LEGEND
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN / THE LONG SILENCE
CHAPTER NINETEEN / THE LOST PAPERS
CHAPTER TWENTY / THE MYSTERY SOLVED
AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PRAISE FOR THE RACE FOR TIMBUKTU
ALSO BY FRANK T. KRYZA
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
AFRICA’S GOLDEN CITY
of the nineteenth century, no place burned more
N THE FIRST TWO DECADES
I
brightly in the imagination of European geographers—and fortune
hunters—than the lost city of Timbuktu. For five centuries, legends
about its wealth and culture had circulated from Venice to London. Like
El Dorado in the Americas, Timbuktu assumed the quality of a mythic
dream hidden in the unseen sprawl of Africa, a city paved with gold that
lay just beyond the next range of mountains or a bit deeper in the
unexplored African jungles.
Timbuktu, like El Dorado, held the explicit promise of riches and
fame. No European explorer had been there and returned since the
Middle Ages. Whoever got there first was guaranteed worldwide renown,
but the journey would be bitter and hard—and could be fatal.
El Dorado, it turned out, was a city never found for the compelling
reason that it did not exist. But Timbuktu was a real place. It is easily
located on any modern map of Mali, near the center of the country, on
the southern edge of the Sahara, about eight miles north of the river
Niger.
From that moment in the 1780s when an armchair-bound coterie of
British aristocrats decided they would find it, along with the termination
of the Niger, a determined search for Timbuktu was to occupy European
explorers for the next fifty years.
Beyond its attraction as a center of great wealth, no city was more
worthy of discovery for geographical and scientific reasons. Arabic texts
documented that merchants from Tripoli to Morocco had gathered at
Timbuktu since the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, when it
was incorporated into the great Malian Empire, to buy gold and slaves in
exchange for prized European manufactured goods, cloth, horses, and
the mined salt of the desert. Scholars reputedly made up as much as a
quarter of the city’s huge permanent population of 100,000, many of
whom had studied in Cairo and other seats of Islamic culture, and who
had themselves attracted students from an even wider ambit, stretching
as far away as Mecca and Baghdad and deep into the northern reaches of
sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam had made inroads unimagined in
Europe.*
The Sahara was known mainly as a vast swath of inhospitable desert,
but there was evidence in Moroccan archives that trade had been
conducted across the region since early times. Evidence from the pre-
Islamic era was sketchy, but it seemed likely that gold, animal skins,
ivory, gemstones, perfumes, and black slaves from the Sudan states (in
the terminology of the age, here, as elsewhere in this book, Sudan or
“Soudan” refers to all those states southwest of the Sahara, not the
modern nation of Sudan)† were exchanged for the manufactures and
trinkets of the Phoenician, Roman, and Byzantine worlds. The Muslim
Arab conquest of North Africa from the seventh century onward saw the
establishment of a regular trans-Saharan trade in black slaves.
Having taken their empire, the Arabs sealed it off. Foreigners who
dared set foot in any part of it were confronted with a harrowing choice:
either take a vow of abiding allegiance to Islam, forsaking all other
loyalties, or face decapitation. An idea of the Arab empire’s extent
emerges from the documented travels of the indefatigable Berber
wanderer Ibn Batuta, who spent forty years touring a score of countries
from western China to modern-day Mali without once leaving the Arab
hegemony.* Soon the integrated web of lands under Arab sway became a
vast trading commonwealth, the principal objects of commerce at
Timbuktu being salt, gold, and slaves.
Gold and slaves were paramount. The importance of the slave trade is
illustrated by estimates suggesting that from the seventh to the end of
the nineteenth centuries, between 9 and 13 million slaves were
transported north across the Sahara. This is comparable to the numbers
shipped seaward during the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade,
though the Saharan traffic has received less public discussion.
TIMBUKTU TODAY is an insignificant place, a village that festers, foul-
smelling and intractable, in the heart of modern-day Mali. It has a
population of less than 19,000, a fifth of the inhabitants it boasted in its
golden age half a millennium ago. Though there is sporadic air service to
Timbuktu, visitors to the town at the dawn of the twenty-first century
can reach it reliably only by camel, Land Rover, shallow-draft riverboat,
or on foot.
It is an ancient settlement, likely founded around 1100 as a seasonal
camp by Tuareg nomads. Within the next hundred years, Timbuktu
became an important crossroads and trading post for tribes who would
otherwise have slaughtered one another in encounters outside its
purlieus. Word of the goods for sale spread to the north, and it soon
became a caravan destination for Arab traders from the Barbary States
flanking the Mediterranean. Timbuktu was uniquely situated: although a
desert town of the southern Sahara, it flourished on the banks of the
Niger, in proximity to the great lakes and swamps of the upper river,
thus connecting it to Africa’s canopied rain forests and jungles, the place
where “camel met canoe.” Timbuktu was thus a nexus, a bridge—the
only one in fact—between black Africa, a region into which even Arabs
were loath to wander far, and the Sahara, a land blacks saw as off limits
because of its inhospitable climate and the risk of abduction.
Timbuktu grew to become an opulent city boasting real infrastructure
—markets, mosques, and important Islamic libraries and schools. The
wealth to fund this cultural and intellectual development was generated
from the gold mines of West Africa, worked by black slaves for their
black and Arab masters, and the merchants who carried their goods on
camels, oxen and asses, and men’s heads, and in the canoes of tropical
Africa’s rivers and lakes.
This trading community was a strange hodgepodge—Arabs, Berbers,
and black Africans, Muslims and pagans, the occasional Jew, and even,
apparently, the rare Christian merchant from Venice or Lisbon. They
gathered in sprawling covered markets to exchange salt and dates for
grain from the savannas, slaves, ivory, feathers, and kola nuts from the
forests beyond, and above all, gold from the far south.
By 1200, word of Timbuktu’s wealth extended to the coasts of Guinea
and the northern Mediterranean, where merchants bartered for gold
thought to have come from Sudan. Europeans were dimly aware that the
precious metal had originated far to the south. Some of this gold, in the
form of a particularly fine dust packed in leather pouches, found its way
to Europe, especially Venice. The gold dust was alleged to have
originated in elusive Timbuktu.
The shroud clinging to the city, from the distant perspective of those
merchants who traded along the Mediterranean littoral, did not lift until
the fourteenth century, when Timbuktu’s greatest ruler made his first
appearance in the wider world. His name was Mansa* Musa, and his
spectacular arrival in Cairo in 1324, accompanied by a vast and
magnificent caravan, convinced medieval Europe in a way no rumor or
speculation could that immense wealth lay hidden in the heart of Africa.
It was in that year, the seventeenth of his reign, that the great
Mandingo emperor of ancient Mali crossed the Sahara on a pilgrimage to
Mecca, passing through Egypt on his way. Cairo received the emperor
goggle-eyed. His procession of soldiers, courtiers, wives, and concubines
“put Africa’s sun to shame,” in the words of one chronicler.
Surviving accounts tell us that Mansa Musa was accompanied by a
caravan of sixty thousand men, including a retinue of twelve thousand
slaves dressed in brocade and Persian silk. The emperor himself, on
horseback, was preceded by five hundred slaves, each carrying a gold
staff. A baggage train of eighty camels trailed, each carrying three
hundred pounds of gold.
It is alleged that during the passage across the Sahara, the emperor’s
principal wife asked to have a bath. Mansa Musa put scores of slaves to
work digging a ditch into which thousands of water bags were poured.
The wife and concubines “swam with intense joy” in this artificial lake.
The story makes no mention of the hundreds who must have died of
thirst because of the loss of those water bags.
Tales of the camel trains and servants, along with the emperor’s wives
and women, gifts and arrogant horsemen, all the trappings of a king
whose realm was as large as all of western Europe and, arguably, more
civilized, lingered as familiar gossip after the ruler’s departure from
Egypt. The Cairenes, cynical and jaded, considered southern Africa to be
inhabited by savages who were barely human, but Mansa Musa created
an indelible impression to the contrary. An Arab historian who visited
Cairo twelve years after the emperor’s visit found the city still singing
his praises. So deep had been his pockets that the flood of gold into
Cairo markets had led to a persistent diminution in price from which the
metal had not yet recovered. Even allowing for the exaggeration
characteristic of ancient accounts of great rulers, by any standard of his
time Mansa Musa was uncommonly wealthy and powerful.
Mansa Musa completed his pilgrimage and returned to his capital.
Nothing more was ever heard from him, but he had left his mark.
Timbuktu made its first appearance on a European map within fifty
years, when Abraham Cresques, a cartographer based in Majorca, drew
his famous Catalan Atlas for Charles V. He called the city “Tenbuch” and
marked it as the capital of a huge Malian Empire ruled by a powerful
Mandingo dynasty. He depicted a monarch on a throne. “This Negro
lord,” the inscription reads, “is called Musa Mali, Lord of the Negroes of
Guinea. So abundant is the gold which is found in his country that he is
the richest and most noble king in all the land.”
FOR TWO MORE CENTURIES the written record again lay blank. Then,
in 1546, came the publication of The History and Description of Africa and
the Notable Things Contained Therein by Leo Africanus (Leo the African).
Leo, a Spanish Moor, had visited Timbuktu at the beginning of the
century as a representative of the ruler of Fez. Still a young man, he was
captured by Christian pirates and presented as an exceptionally learned
slave to the Renaissance pope Leo X, who freed him, baptized him under
his own name (Johannis Leo de Medici), and commissioned him to write
a detailed survey of Africa. Leo’s lavish portrayal of Timbuktu
mesmerized European courts. It was mainly on the basis of his account
that the legend of a gabled romantic city arose—a city poor men could
dream of reaching to make their fortunes, magical in its remoteness yet
tangible in its wealth:
The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and scepters of gold, some whereof weigh
1,300 poundes. He keeps a magnificent and well-furnished court. He hath always three
thousand horsemen, and a great number of footmen that shoot poisoned arrows. Here
are a great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men that are bountifully
maintained at the king’s expense. And hither are brought diverse manuscripts of
written books out of Barbaric, which are sold for more money than any other
merchandise. The coin of Tombuto is of gold.
The Italian edition of Leo’s travels was widely read, but it didn’t make
its real mark on European consciousness until 1600, when it reappeared