Salt caravans from Tegusa, almost two thousand kilometres away, crossed the Sahara southward, laden with Mediterranean merchandise to swap at Timbuktu, close to the River Niger’s water commerce. There, the caravans would meet northbound traders to exchange their goods for gold from southern African mines in Banbuk and Boure.
In a common trading scene, a pile of salt tablets would be offered, and its visual impact weighed against an offered stack of gold. Over days of unhurried negotiations, traders would add gold ingots or take pieces of it from this pile. In response, or when pre-emptive bartering served their purposes, salt merchants would enlarge or diminish their own stack. Guarded night and day, the resulting mounds reflected the patient deliberations. The individual salt tablets, carved from the mines in rectangular blocks, weighted nearly ninety kilograms each. It is said that on occasion, a given weight of gold was traded for an equivalent weight of salt.
Tribal differences often defer to trade needs. Bruce Chatwin, in West Africa, observed that trade functioned as “a language which prevents people from cutting each other’s throats.” The Songhai met in Timbuktu with the Fulani, who traded with the Wangara, all of them leery of the Tuareg and reliant on the Arabs.
Merchants and nomads also arrived on the River Niger with all manner of goods: weapons, cooking utensils, foods, and medicines. Slave trading — African slaves for African owners — existed prior to the American and European trade in slavery and Timbuktu offered a convenient venue for the exchange. Timbuktu, the marketplace, soon became permanently settled.
While documents exist from the time when the expansive Ghana Empire of the eleventh century controlled Timbuktu, it was when the Malian Empire emerged in the early 1300s that the city became infatuated with the written word. This was the beginning of its intellectual reputation, created by the Mandigo Askia dynasty. Later the Songhai, proud descendants of Askia, ruled with a merchant fleet and military vessels to dominate Timbuktu’s culture and trade. With its Muslim scholarship, and unparalleled influence on the central Sudan, as well as rumours of wealth and powerful knowledge, Timbuktu attracted unwanted attention.
The Moroccans sent an army of four thousand into the Songhais’ tranquil desert community in the late sixteenth century. The plundering Moors exiled religious leaders and burned libraries; religion is the devil’s left hand when it comes to destruction. With the death and the deportation of scholars, thousands of books and manuscripts went to Fez and Marrakech. Basil Davidson’s perspective in Africa: History of a Continent is this: “If their invasion cost the Moroccans much more than it was worth, it cost the Songhai its place in history. For it demolished the unity and the administrative organization of the state, and while it left Timbuktu and Gao and Djenné as considerable cities, it robbed this civilization of its vitality.”
Trade shifted like sand dunes, taking the trans-Saharan caravans farther west. Eventually Portuguese traders undermined Timbuktu’s commercial supremacy by providing ports on the west coast of Africa and ships capable of navigating the River Niger. Timbuktu’s decline had begun.
“I’ll tell you a story,” said Ebou, his eyes wide, white, and watching to see if I’d believe him. “It is true.”
I smiled. “Okay.”
“This very train, a few years ago, was travelling fast, then slowed. Near a village it popped off the rail.”
“Popped?”
“Yes. Derailed.”
“Was anyone hurt?” I asked, reasonably enough.
“No, nothing like that. That’s not the story.”
“Okay.”
“Only the last car popped off the track. And it was slowing down. It dragged a little and then stopped. It would take a day, longer, for the repair crews to come. Everyone was anxious to go. Word went out to the village and to nearby places. Three hours later, there were many people, mostly men and big children.”
“You’re not going to tell me …” I started.
“Yes, it is what you think. They all together lifted the train back onto the track.”
My expression must have conveyed my disbelief.
“It is true,” he repeated.
Ebou was a shoemaker. His family name, Coldonneur, reflected that. He said he had sore feet, which seemed odd, but I said nothing while offering powder and a salve from my medicine staples. He appreciated that.
The train’s occasional village stops let a few locals on board and as many off. Vendors rushed the tracks beside the train. They handed up for sale cloth sashes, cooking oil, oranges for refreshment. Children acted as porters, their heads balancing platters of corn. Or they asked passengers for permission to collect our empty bottles.
From in the crowd and onto the tracks stepped an astonishingly beautiful woman in a yellow dress. Ussegnou saw her first and nudged us in time to catch the elegant toss of her right foot as she stepped on a wooden box to make her way into a coach.
Cash and carry sales continued well past the train’s warning whistle, from ground to window through outstretched arms. The train moved off, slowly at first, and the sellers ran alongside, closing deals. Their bartering was clipped short by the steel wheels.
“Rick.”
It was Ebou. His dusty fingers were pulling aboard two loaves of the freshest bread. His hands twisted and tore the baguettes in two. Crumbs scattered everywhere.
My French worked when I worked at it. Ebou took the lead, describing himself as mon professeur for the coming days. He taught phrases, repeated French words for objects, and had fun with my ineptness. My fellow travellers’ English was better than my French, and they were more confident in it. They didn’t feel silly trying to help me learn. I began to relax, having fun with the repetition, and that they liked.
Our train stopped again. To the window we went. It had been only fifteen minutes since the last station stop, and the throng of merchants pressed their wares on us. Atop heads were baskets of fruit, baskets of meat, and baskets of smaller baskets. The heads were old, they were young. They were all women’s heads.
Again Ebou spotted the stunning woman we’d noticed earlier. She stepped briefly off the train and retrieved something from a man. She had a new red sash wrapped around her hair. It hung over a bare shoulder above her yellow shift. How could the drape of cloth on skin say so much?
Later, lying in my upper bunk with my stocking feet wedged to the metal roof above my pack, I recalled my initial unhappiness about the crowded roomette. I wrapped it in my mind and tossed it aside. I could see clearly through the open window, and if I were on a lower berth I’d have to look through a pane soiled with smoke that had been ironed on by the wind. The roomette’s dome light didn’t work. The reading lamp sputtered. The fan had been torn from the ceiling. The radio on a lower bunk carried the Senegal soccer game, audible everywhere on the train. The train wobbled. “It’s like a ferry boat!” Ebou exclaimed, rocking, his sea legs strong. I was starting to love this place.
Pierre asked about our destinations.
“Burkina Faso,” Ebou answered. “Friends are there. We’ll visit them, help them farm. Maybe two weeks.”
“And where are you travelling?” Pierre asked me.
Ebou leaned into the conversation before I could answer, presuming the train’s destination was mine. “Why Bamako?”
“I’m going to Timbuktu,” I said.
“Tombouctou,” Ebou corrected. And with awe, added, “It is very far.”
I listened to them talk among themselves, and noticed my frustration with the West Africans’ French accent. I asked about French words that Ebou said were not French. They were speaking Bambara, interspersed with French phrases and uttered with a French lilt. Their conversation and the slapping of wet branches on our window lulled me to sleep.
By the time of our next stop, a bond had been forged. One day into my travels, despite all the warnings I’d received in the previous months, I trusted my bunkmates with my pack and left the train. Every time we stopped for fifteen minutes, each of us wanted time on the gr
ound, mingling and wandering in the market. The only workable way to do this was to have one of us stay on the train, watching everyone’s bags. We took turns. It was a train with thieves, but I knew that none shared my room.
Ebou elbowed me to look at the woman yet again. Three stops, three sightings. She had entered our realm and did not even know it. Looking past her and thirty metres along, I got a sense of our train’s exterior: weathered green trimmed with “stainless” steel that had found a way to stain.
Not having the confidence to buy cooked meat, I moved close to a fire and looked in the market at the meat on the coals. It smelled fine. Smelled, though. Ussegnou was pulling brochettes of goat meat off a stick and into the glove of his bread loaf. English banter filtered his French as he held it up to me. “Try.” It looked delicious. I declined.
I held out a handful of seffe, and it was picked clean by the wizened fingers of a woman with crinkly skin around her eyes. She gave me four loaves of her freshly baked bread. It was a warm gift for our roomette, ensuring we’d all sleep in crumbs that night. When I handed a loaf to each of my roommates back in our couchette, they set theirs down, untouched, and continued breaking from the one I’d started: the bread would stay fresher longer that way. And I realized that everything I ate on this trip would be shared with my roommates. And almost everything I drank.
Our perches, except for sleeping, became interchangeable. You leaned where you wished, lay where you pleased. From a lower bunk I scanned the roomette realizing I’d never, ever, been in such filthy surroundings. It was like a drunk tank without the spittle. But it was home for now, and I was starting to settle in.
The sun was setting in shades of purple. I flopped sideways on the lower bunk to catch its last rays and landed on Ussegnou’s radio, bending the antenna. His big hands cradled it as he would a small bird that some klutz had wounded. “No problem,” he said, assuaging my guilt. “No problem.” Then he smiled, widely, and calmed the room.
Taking in the aisle’s fresher air, Ebou and Ussegnou leaned into the window space. Each had one arm over the other’s shoulder. They had a brothers’ camaraderie. I plunked my chin into the crest where their shoulders met. Out our window was the Sahara, source of three hundred million tonnes of dust every year. Sixty percent of the world’s dust blows around West Africa.
Ussegnou pointed through the open window as the tracks curved, and the front of the train came into view. Rooftop passengers were crouched in a silhouette on the first coach. They started to disappear as a cloud hid the moon. I thought about how differently we travel to the same destination. Night covered them.
“What are you thinking?” Ebou asked later, catching my long stare and breaking my reverie. I looked across the train’s floor to the lower bunk and at his face. His eyes searched me. He was not merely trying to be polite.
“I was thinking about travelling,” I said.
He took that to be a mistake on my part, a daydreaming of trips to come. “No one is promised another journey,” he said. “Enjoy the one you’re on.”
In the hallway of The Express International I met a Frenchman. In the manner of the French, his English was very good and he politely relinquished his mother language so that we could converse. Alec was his name. Maybe thirty-five, his age was made more vague by his balding head and narrow cheeks. A crumpled packet of cigarettes was stuffed in his shirt pocket. He had lived for six years in Chad, Nigeria, and Senegal. It was his first time on this train. He sipped a red drink, a local beverage he’d purchased at the last train stop. “Bissap,” he said. It was semisolid liquid, sealed in a small plastic bag, or so it seemed. “The other is ginger,” he pointed to a Senegalese man holding a similar package. It was browny-green, and the man sucked at it from a bitten-off corner. My distaste must have shown. “They are boiled, then frozen,” he said, pausing to reassure himself. “At least in theory.”
I declined his offer of a sip.
“Doesn’t bother me,” he boasted, patting his stomach. “I’ve had whatever I’ll get.”
He asked how far I was going. “Timbuktu,” I said.
“Tombouctou,” he corrected.
Train travellers Ebou, Matthew, Pierre, Alec, and Ussegnou.
“Have you been?” I asked.
“Never. I was never near enough.” That from a man who had travelled most of West Africa.
Matthew, his friend, came from their roomette into the corridor, unshaven, the arms of his sunglasses stuffed in the bushy sides of his hair. He was thin enough that even with his blue shoulder pack he didn’t take up too much corridor space. Alec motioned at me. “He is going to Tombouctou.”
“I’ve thought of that,” Matthew said. “Too far.”
Seven hundred years ago, there was a dramatic shift in the world’s awareness of Timbuktu, one that reset the salt-and-scholarship centre’s reputation. The Sultan of Mali was Mansa Kankan Musa, whose empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean eastward to what is today northern Nigeria and from what we know as central Mauritania to the border of modern Ivory Coast. It would take a year to cross Musa’s kingdom by camel. Timbuktu was then wealthier than Moscow or Madrid.
The sultan undertook a journey in 1324 that would establish the remarkable association of Timbuktu with unfathomable wealth. A Muslim, he decided to visit Mecca. He crossed the Sahara Desert in the company of sixty thousand people, each responsible for carrying and protecting a three-kilogram rod of gold while travelling to Cairo with “the greatest caravan in history.” Mansa Musa’s 180 tonnes of travelling gold had a profound impact, as he spent and gifted his way across Africa. According to the UNESCO General History of Africa, “When he stopped in Egypt, the Egyptian currency lost its value. Word of incredible richness spread rapidly beyond Africa to Europe.”
A few decades later, the Moroccan Ibn Battutah, “the world’s greatest traveller,” visited Timbuktu. Having spent a lifetime travelling from country to country via every mode of transit then imaginable (and guided by the dictum “Never follow the same road twice”), his writings were sought by royalty and learned men — and they were believed. His reports of his visit to Mali in 1353 were the first outsider’s eyewitness account of Timbuktu. The “City of Gold” acquired a reputation that would take five centuries to lose.
Almost two centuries later, in 1526, the Moor Leo Africanus, who reportedly traversed 120,000 kilometres in his almost continuous journeys around the known world, visited Timbuktu as an emissary of the Sherif of Fez. His account, The History and Description of Africa, is based on his two trips to Timbuktu and extensive travels in the north and west of Africa. Written in Spanish and eventually published in English, the Geographical Historie rightly placed the African metropolis near the River Niger, at the time a river whose source, flow, and mouth were unknown to the Europeans.
Leo Africanus’s tale of Timbuktu was in keeping with the popular perception that vast glories awaited visitors to this city. Never skimpy on superlatives, he wrote of Timbuktu, “The inhabitants are exceedingly rich.” Refreshing the public’s palate, he proclaimed, “The coin of Timbuctoo is gold …” Europeans needed little else to dream of trade and to imagine a primitive people who might be easily subdued by their power. His more modest description of the homes, “built of chalk, and covered with thatch,” rang contrary to the images Europeans wanted, the embellishments missing, and it was ignored. The impression of unimaginable wealth would endure for three more centuries.
But Africanus told the truth as well: “There are many judges, doctors, and clerics here, all receiving good salaries from King Askia Mohammed of the State of Songhai. He pays great respect to men of learning. There is a great demand for books.” Curiously, though, given the extent of markets for gold and salt and other valuables, Africanus claimed that “more profit is made from the trade in books than from any other line of business.”
Galbraith Welch, writing in The Unveiling of Timbuktu, quotes Africanus as referring to “golden scepters and plates used by the King of Timbuctoo, so
me whereof weighted 1,300 pounds.” Welch observed: “It is perhaps not too much to say that in the whole annals of literature there is not another passage which has conduced more materially to the progress of geography.”
Out the train’s window, Africa was black. In the north, the sky bent the Big Dipper off-side.
“We’re not a quarter of the way there yet,” Pierre said with a child’s impatience. It was ten o’clock and cooling.
“We’ll get there Monday, not Sunday,” Ussegnou agreed. I munched a granola bar in my upper bunk, not sharing — worse, not thinking to share in my desire for nourishment.
The train stopped at Guinguinee. Two of us jumped off, landing near a cooking fire. My flashlight skimmed the mounds beside the tracks and canvassed the food stalls, following the tiny glows in the row of brazier fires. Matthew paused at several stands selling bottled water, gently twisted the caps of their product to test the seal and returned every bottle. All were suspect. His flashlight settled on a table of fruit. “Watermelon appeal,” he announced. “Feel this.” He tossed a melon to me, letting go at the last minute.
“Heavy,” I said, accepting its weight.
“Too heavy. The locals fill them with water to make it seem worth more.” And we both realized it was not water from a sealed bottle. “They sell sealed water in the dining car. And beer,” he told me.
I was surprised. “There’s a dining car?”
“Oui. Behind us. We just had dinner there.”
“Dinner? Really.”
To Timbuktu for a Haircut Page 5