To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  “Très bien,” Matthew added as we climbed back into the vestibule.

  At the roomette I found Ebou and Ussegnou eating cooled meat bought through the window. They sliced open the afternoon’s bread and made a sandwich.

  “Like some?” Ebou offered, handing it my way.

  “I’m going to the dining car,” I announced.

  “There’s a dining car?” Pierre asked from behind.

  Putting my shoulder to the heavy metal door leading to the next wagonlit, I pushed and it opened. At first I thought I was seeing the effects of a brawl. A man lay on the bar top, another was asleep on a stool, and two more sat in silence and looked angry. I woke the slumbering man behind the bar.

  “Bière?”

  “Non.”

  “Non?”

  “They’re out,” said Alec, who happened to be tucked against the wall. “Or it may be that we’re toobabs,” he suggested, using their word for white foreigner.

  Through the entrance I found the “dining room” portion of the coach with seven men crowded into a four-person booth, yelling about football. The rest of the room took its tone from that noise. This group had cornered the beer supply. Every seat was taken, save for one in the shadows at the end of the room. I took it. From there I surveyed the space. The windows were dim with night and grime, inside and out. Everyone seemed finished with their dinner. Cards were played. A student reading a book titled Le Petit Voix sat across from me.

  The waiter in village attire walked over to me and I boldly ordered. “Le petit déjeuner, s’il vous plaît.” In for a penny …

  A hesitation. He came back and showed me a can of peas. I nodded. What else would you do? Peas and what? Unsure of what I’d ordered, I watched him go to a hole in the wall at the end of the coach a metre from my back. It was a half metre square and pitch dark behind. He talked to the darkness. A tiny light sparked and wavered, its glow focused down. Propane hissed.

  I tried. “Un bière?”

  A beer was clipped open before me. The waiter gave me a cloth napkin, which I thought was a nice touch. Used, mind you. Next, a plate with chicken, browned from frying, and spaghetti arrived. Clumped nicely at the side, peas. I had an immediate curiosity about hygiene and the likely dishwashing scenarios on board. I pulled from my day pack the knife and spoon I had scrounged from British Airways. Handy. I pushed the peas on the plastic knife and slipped them in my mouth, as Mom forbade. With one finger I held the chicken as I carved sinew. Missing a fork, I wound spaghetti around the knife. It was all quite tasty. I broke my spoon to fashion a spear and poked the chicken.

  Finished with my meal, I moved the plate aside, where the waiter retrieved it and I reconsidered the place. It was a converted baggage car. People slept sitting up. Across from me, the silent student wrote. One table’s bench seat was broken. It had a sturdy end, adjacent to the wall; the other end slanted to the floor.

  The train lurched. I noticed the waiter eating his meal. Or, rather, eating what I’d left on my plate.

  The possessions I’d left in The Express International’s roomette for the past hour while “dining” did not concern me. If they were to be riffled, they had been. I left the dining car knowing they hadn’t.

  In the car’s aisle, I stepped over a sleeper. The dining car ended with a once-silver door, which I pulled open. It slammed shut behind me. All was shiny-dark in the vestibule where I waited. It was impossible to see, but I stepped in one motion over the floor plates that joined the two coaches, straddling the gap between them precariously. The other door would not budge. Mid-stride, I pushed. Then pulled. The gap widened in the dark. My feet shifted involuntarily on the metal sheets as they waltzed frantically in the train’s winding. I leaned against the door, but had poor leverage; my feet were spread too far apart. We were moving at fifty kilometres an hour. There was a small porthole in the door, missing its glass, and I poked my head through, hoping for help. A porter sat in the dark on the other side, barely visible. He motioned me to slide. This opened the door.

  My three companions were asleep. The window was shut and the room was filled with the staleness of exhaled air. It smelled of train iron, old mattresses, and odours you could taste. I pulled the window’s steel frame down as far as it would open. Cool, fresh air poured in as one of my Senegalese roommates tossed in his bed. I’d wakened him. Hoisting myself up to the top bunk, I heard Ussegnou say, “Rick, Rick, use the ladder.” I landed ungracefully, but the bed absorbed me. “I’m in.” Ussegnou, the calm, gentle poultry farmer, rolled over.

  I fell asleep to the measured clack-click, the sound of the train crossing the small welds that held the rails together — a rhythm lost to North America and much of Europe, with their modern, seamless rails.

  Suddenly there was shouting and a scuffle in the hallway. We were all awake and out of the room, a crowded foursome with our backs to the doorway. About ten feet down the aisle, two men struggled with each other, fists flying and shoulders slamming. One man, in military fatigues, kicked the other’s legs out from under him. A second official arrived as the man buckled, and he put his knee into the fallen man’s calf. “He won’t show his papers,” Pierre whispered.

  “Your passport, Rick?” Ebou asked. He looked very worried.

  “In the pack,” I said, tapping it for emphasis.

  “When they ask for it, give it. If he asks for a thousand seffe, it is not normal, but give it. That’s for his coffee.”

  Back in our room I noticed that someone had closed the window again. We all climbed into bed, me last. Before I went up top, I lowered the window once more. There was a resigned silence, one I did not understand.

  THREE

  The Quest for Timbuktu

  I WOKE TO THE TRAIN’S FILTH. THE BATHROOM was at the end of the passage where our coach connected to the next. It was functional to the point of austere, and uncared for. I passed it on my way to the dining car for my morning coffee.

  Alec and Matthew were sitting on the same side of a table and I took a seat opposite them. The side I sat on was the diagonal bench, its aisle end on the floor, broken. I perched on the incline as Alec mixed and poured me a café au lait, all powdered, and offered me his bread and jam. Matthew said, as though I needed to be warned, “Enjoy. Near the Sahara, every meal tastes of sand.”

  “Explain the coffee,” I asked, as Alec reached across the table for a fresh sleeve of instant. “I expected some of the world’s finest in Africa. So far it’s all powdered. Does that change in Mali?”

  “Keep searching,” said Alec. “Nescafé is both the bane and the saviour in these parts.”

  “Bane?”

  “There’s supposed to be a boycott. It’s aimed at Europe more than West Africa. Many years now. It’s a boycott against the commercial pushing of powdered milk to replace the breastfeeding of newborns. Anger at the parent, Nestlé. Anger at the offspring, Nescafé.”

  “But they grow coffee here,” I said. “Mali exports it.”

  “Ivory Coast is right next door,” said Alec. “Largest coffee producer in Africa.”

  “Nescafé is just easier. It’s everywhere,” Matthew said. “You’ll be hard pressed to find Malian coffee.”

  Bringing up another nagging issue, I pointed to the obviousness of my busted seat. Alec sighed, “It is their way,” as though repairs were not a national trend. I was in an awkward posture and turned my back to the window for a brace, stretched my legs floorward to the aisle and shoved a slippery cushion beneath me. On the other side of my angled bench, facing the table behind me, was a Senegalese man in a tar-black robe. He was arguing about yesterday’s football match. Every time he gesticulated, he bounced up and down, propelling my side’s teeter-totter. I sipped the hot coffee slowly, carefully.

  Matthew slunk in his seat, wearing the same clothing as yesterday. “We didn’t think this passenger train ran anymore.”

  “In Dakar, I was told it had started up again only recently,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, smilin
g. “You can see the refurbishments.”

  The teetering seat jolted and my coffee splashed on the table. Matthew used a napkin to mop it up.

  “A traveller I met had once taken the train from Dakar to Bamako, but not the passenger trip,” Alec began. “He and his wife booked on a commercial run, sleeping with the cargo. They were shown to a container, huge, empty, and cheap. Inside it they set up their tent for the trip. At Thiès they were surprised to find goods being loaded into ‘their’ container, but adjusted their space by moving the tent.” He leaned over the table to pour me more coffee so not to disturb my precarious seating, adding the powdered milk and stirring for me as he talked. “At the Kayes station stop, more storage got loaded into their shrinking compartment. At each stop, their accommodation was reduced by new cargo. By the last one hundred kilometres, they had about two square metres, behind shipped goods and uncomfortably close to the container roof.”

  We all laughed, knowing it could have been us, eager to travel by train and naive about the arrangements.

  “These are true stories,” Alec promised us. We knew another tale was coming. “A traveller boarded in Bamako in the popular section of the train, crammed with passengers, over one hundred in the coach. As the train jerked forward he saw he had left his bicycle on the platform. Jumping from the rolling train, he grabbed the bicycle and ran alongside the moving train, gaining slightly on it, hauling his bike with him. A Senegalese man reached out the window and took hold of the handlebars, clasping the bicycle to the side of the coach. Another hand reached out the doorway and hauled the traveller onto the train.”

  Alec paused for coffee and Matthew observed, “That is how they would do it.”

  “True,” Alec said. “Rope was found and the bike was tied to the outside of the coach and lashed around a widow’s frame, where it stayed for the entire trip.”

  Long before the “Timbuktu Rush,” that international competition for the glory of discovery, bloomed late in the 1700s, the destination enthralled Europeans. Their romantic anticipations were not replaced by knowledge until death and dysentery had struck many of those adventurers seeking to be the first to reach the Forbidden City. Government sponsorship of sorties came with the expectation of eventual trade. The salt, the gold, the slaves — all were financial motives. To those were added national prestige, as both France and England sought a countryman to “discover” Timbuktu and return safely to Europe.

  In 1788, an independent London group known as the Saturday Club more formally established an entity of exploration and took the name “Association for Promoting the Discovery of Inland Parts of the Continent of Africa,” soon known as the African Association. Its specific goals were to explore the River Niger and to reach Timbuktu, the finding of the latter held to be that period’s great geographical challenge. It determined resources and retained adventurous travellers to serve its mandate. Its most notable explorer was Park, who failed to reach Timbuktu on either of his journeys.

  Within two decades in the eighteenth century, forty-three European expeditions were launched in search of Timbuktu. Instead of success, they brought death in the Sahara, on the River Niger, or in little-known Malian villages. Their brazen entry sparked retaliation at the hands of suspicious people defending their territory. Frenchmen serving as an armed front for commercial interests drew attacks by itinerant bands that feared losing control of trade and politics. And the British often fell victim to the ignorance of health through their arrogant dismissal of the desert’s extreme temperatures or stagnant waters; mosquitoes to them were irritants, not carriers of malaria.

  The cost in English lives alone was exceptional: one hundred died in 1816, a year when two government-sponsored expeditions faltered. The British debated whether it was proper form to proceed across the Sahara as an explorer while in disguise. Some argued that it was important to be evidently British, to the point of travelling as British officers properly attired in woollens for duties in London while sweltering in West Africa. Most risky of all was to travel openly as a Christian, a faith distrusted by the Africans. Thus it was not long before the interior of Africa became known as “The White Man’s Grave.”

  Geographical “firsts” abounded two hundred years ago, and the acknowledgement of such achievements was as much about scientific findings as about the individual prowess. Recognition and rewards were often substantial. The character traits of the nineteenth-century explorers ranged from bravery and ambition all the way to lunacy, self-aggrandizement, and a befuddling detachment from reality.

  I sought out the stories of the early Timbuktu explorers and used their records as my trip primer, as guides to the rigours of the journey and the attitudes required to accomplish it. Five names stand out in the European search for Timbuktu in the nineteenth century. The Scot Mungo Park, of course. I will cross the River Niger upriver from the place where the Tuareg ambushed his final expeditionary force. The American Benjamin Rose (alias Robert Adams), whose forced trek in the open desert was relentlessly cruel. Alexander Gordon Laing (often referred to as Gordon Laing), the Scot who travelled a circuitous route with a singular goal. Frenchman René Caillié, a man of incredible diligence. And the German Heinrich Barth, of whom it can be said that he put to rest the era’s preoccupation with the myth of Timbuktu.

  Additionally, in the European quest for Timbuktu, there is a first arrival: Gordon Laing, a captain (and a major, but only in Africa) in the British army whose motivation was notoriety. The thirty-three-year-old explorer left Tripoli for Timbuktu, arriving there in 1826. Sheikh Al Bekây favoured Laing with hospitality, a dramatic change from Laing’s encounters with Tuaregs on his desert travels, where he had been badly misled. He described Timbuktu as the place he “discovered,” and therein lies the motivation for travellers there still today: stepping aside from what one’s colleagues or family expects in order to do something different, perhaps singular. It is said that the home Laing lived in can still be found in Timbuktu today.

  The Scramble for Africa frequently consisted of well-funded, harebrained expeditions for reaching Timbuktu. Success even eluded astute and capable explorers, their fame in death hollow compared with the glory they sought. Unable to attract government funding, commercial support, or military backing, the Frenchman René Caillié was forced to make extraordinary preparations in order to be the first white man to both reach Timbuktu and to return safely to Europe. He did that in 1828, at the age of twenty-nine. Caillié developed an affinity for the natives and a desire to be like them. He lived for an extended period in what today is Guinea in order to learn the Muslim culture, became fluent in Arabic, and was not suspected to be European. Disguised as an Egyptian, he ventured to Djenné on the River Niger and from there to Timbuktu. The place where Caillié stayed while in Timbuktu appeared on the map in only one of my guidebooks. Perhaps because it was a nondescript home and because his time there was a mere two weeks, the structure was not one of the main destinations for travellers, though I felt I must go there.

  In 1853, with costs underwritten by the British government, a German, Heinrich Barth, headed south across the Sahara from Tripoli. Experienced and curious, he had all the attributes of a tenacious traveller and has been called “one of Africa’s greatest explorers.” The arduous crossing, inevitable delays, and repeated dangers did not dissuade him. Ineffectively portraying himself as an Arab, his Christianity was tolerated in Timbuktu upon his unlikely arrival, but only through the benevolence of Sheikh Al Bekây. He was permitted to stay for eight months, after which he journeyed in difficult circumstances to Europe. The story of his stay and the resulting sketches were reportedly given a modest display at his one-time residence, which I intended to visit in Timbuktu.

  Europeans knew Africa in the early nineteenth century as “The White Man’s Grave,” where many explorers perished in search of trade, honour, and fame. Those whose journeys are shown here represent diverse backgrounds: two Scots, an American, a German, and a Frenchman.

  La Frontière �
� the border — between Senegal and Mali was formally passed by The Express International at Diboli in the early morning. We stayed on board while the Senegalese locomotive was changed to a Malian one. Customs officials strolled through the train, knocking on doors to wake the sleeping or reluctant, and took our passports with the promise of return at our first stop. Not having our passports made me and my fellow travellers uneasy; a lost passport was reason enough for deportation by the very officials who might “lose” them.

  The train bounced along the warped tracks and finally halted at Kayes a few dry hours later. Kayes has been called Africa’s hottest town, with temperature readings up to fifty degrees Celsius. The heat stifled breath and thought. We were roughly halfway to our destination, geographically, if not time-wise. Uncertainty about our train’s departure time made us anxious to retrieve the stamped passports.

  Paul Theroux has said, “The border is drama, misery, real life, strangeness, and the actual sight of the dotted line one sees on a map. But it is usually the farthest distance from the capital, and so highly revealing of what a place is like.” I had to agree. At the back loading dock of a mud-and-wood warehouse, West Africans frantically sought the return of their identity cards. Africannation workers and non-Malian itinerants jumbled with other foreigners wanting their passports. An official in a short-sleeved shirt with mock epaulets held a fistful of passports as he stood on a loading dock. Another in the same abbreviated uniform emerged on the deck above the crowd with two hands full of documents and the self-satisfied smirk of officialdom that is detested the world over. At their most coordinated, these two alternated the call of a country and a name. More often, they shouted over each other’s announcements, their words colliding. Mayhem ensued, with people on the ground yelling helpful directions regarding which passports were currently being retrieved. Their words flew noisily, voices crashing against one another. Identity cards passed from hand to hand over the heads of a hundred people toward back-of-throng individuals waving when they thought they heard their name. A third official came through a separate doorway. His effort at efficiency added confusion. Then a fourth showed up.