To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  For fifteen minutes more I kicked and defended my nationhood. Mali won.

  There was a chant of school lessons behind me, despite the many children skipping class. A hundred cattle in the foreground were moving toward us as if they were on a guided tour of the schoolyard. The recess bell rang and the kids, cows, and shepherd mingled.

  I wound my way back to the auberge, where passing vehicles were leaving people of various colours and nationalities by the roadside. They hitched a ride with us — at a dear financial cost for their eagerness to get to the Festival au Desert; supply and demand set the price. Arbitrarily, seats were taken in both Land Cruisers, and I sensed Mohammed’s opportunistic influence. Hands were shaken as we loaded. Monica, dark-haired and with deep, brown eyes, was from Portugal and in the company of a lanky lad, John, from the U.K. Helena, a child psychologist near retirement, came from Sweden, and beside her but of no common travels was a fellow Zak’s age from Scotland, who had travelled with his dad across the Sahara by truck. The woman who earlier told me to W.A.I.T. slipped into the back of the vehicle and told folks how lucky we were to have a ride. “I’ve waited since … whatever day that was … three ago.” Cheap and unreliable travel. “I could have left earlier, I was ready,” she said, squeezing with others into the four-by-four’s luggage area. “But … no one … goes north.”

  It was noon.

  Our designated Toyota (there was a seemingly total absence of Land Rovers and a paucity of Jeeps; the Japanese trade with France being an early inroad to the colonies to provide reliable four-byfours for the deserts, ensuring a ready supply of parts and cornered the market) absorbed each additional pack without budging. Its four doors were opened for the get-in, get-out rearrangement of passengers: strangers were apportioned a patch of seating, then told to move.

  It is a Malian government goal to create passable road north from Douentza to Timbuktu. In our first hour we travelled over sparse clay pavement, where only a few years ago untamed ruts and sand drifts slowed movement. The “improved” road was a vehicleand-a-half wide. When that patch of pseudo-pavement ended, our driver lugged the two front wheels with a wrench and we were in four-wheel drive.

  Nema, tucked in the luggage area, was one of eight passengers jammed in the vehicle that Mohammed had reserved and priced for just me. I wondered if I would ever again see Mohammed and, if so, what insult would first come to mind: the sloppy rooms at unfair prices or his brazen crowding of the vehicles for his own profit? Or were there other surprises for me yet to come? Nema flirted across the back of the back seat, tapping a song on my arm as she sang. In Bambara she uttered a pleasing phrase I did not understand while she moved her hand along my bicep. Mamadou laughed so loud that we could barely hear Zak announce to everyone, “Nema says that if you stay in Mali she will take care of you.” Her eyes averted our laughter and she did not smile. Then she bowed her head shyly and let the right corner eye open slightly to take in my appreciation and respectful decline.

  We saw another four-by-four, its hood propped up, its travellers temporarily stranded. A second vehicle we passed was abandoned, its windows rolled up. By the time we reached the first river, we were alone. Slowly, Mamadou nosed our vehicle into the water. Rocking along the uneven waterbed, it made waves that sprayed into our windows. But, as we hoped, in five minutes, the Land Cruiser crawled up the riverbank, shedding muddy water and likely a few fish.

  Two hours later, when we arrived at the bumpy road’s end at the River Niger, we were no longer alone. Donkey-pulled flats, stationary four-by-fours, and a gathering of Malian merchants sat by the shore, waiting for the small boat to ferry them across. Children were strapped to the backs of a variety of hard-working mothers: porter moms, millet-pounding moms, here’s-the-titsuckling moms, cooking moms, and water-carrying moms. Our embarkation dock consisted of packed mud, wet, slippery, and humming with roaming people and defecating animals.

  Any rig that was out of line was hollered at by the native drivers. Even when there was no apparent order, one must not jump the queue. Efficiency was not the goal, respect was.

  I walked a few hundred metres down the shore to get away from the din. I squinted and used a tree to help fetter people and vehicles from my view. I was alone with the river. Some distance down river, at a place known as Bussa rapids, one of my heroes had died, killed by the Tuareg on his journey through these waters.

  Mungo Park had not set out for pleasurable-though-adventurous travels as I had, yet he did hope for a change of pace, a break from his daily life as a country doctor in Edinburgh.

  Mungo Park, the Scottish explorer, twice failed to reach “the great object of my search,” Timbuktu, and died in late 1805 or early 1806 on the River Niger, either killed by the Tuareg ambush or drowned in the Bussa rapids.

  Park’s name became synonymous with West African exploration. His 1795 and 1805 travels provided essential practical and geographical knowledge to later explorers who participated in the rush to “discover” Timbuktu and begin beneficial trade with its residents. He initially travelled at the behest of the African Association, whose directive was to identify the “rise and termination” of the River Niger. Other explorers would eventually place the facts before a European public that was hungry for grandiose stories: Timbuktu was about poverty, not prosperity; its streets were filled with sand, not gold; the homes there were drab.

  Travelling these waters, Park misjudged both the river that made him famous, and its people. His belief held: he was about to determine the direction of the River Niger’s flow, one of the century’s great geographical riddles, on par with the question of the source of the Nile River. In London and Paris, academic debate on the route of the River Niger had narrowed to four views, none of them founded on first-hand accounts. Either it crossed Africa to join with the Nile, as many hoped for reasons of trade, or it flowed east to a vast inland sea, or it curled back on itself to empty in the Atlantic, or it meandered south to meld with the Congo River. Vast patches of contemporary maps of Africa were blank, and the theories were a mixture of false hopes and tall tales. Even Africans told Park that the river ran “to the world’s end,” a place he may have felt he’d already found.

  On the final stretch of his second journey in Africa, Park’s boat was a craft cobbled together from two canoes, damaged during his desert crossing, bolstered with local wood and secured with lashing. The Niger was, however, too great a river for that poor a boat.

  In a self-indulgent gesture, only a few days before attempting passage through these waters, Park had dispatched a courier to London, hoping to make his reputation. In his journal he declared, “I shall set sail to the East, with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt. I have heard nothing that I can depend on respecting the remote course of this mighty stream.”

  Park had arrived in Africa well prepared for his second attempt to reach Timbuktu, and boasting an impressive accompaniment of forty Europeans, including thirty militia. Now, burnt by the sun, humbled by blisters from the sand in their shoes, and diminished by sand blizzards and disease during the desert crossing, the party had been reduced to four soldiers, three servants, and a guide. The crew was ill-prepared to defend itself as it neared Timbuktu. The desert experiences had blinded Park to diplomacy and accounted for his reckless firing at Tuaregs. That action forced him to abandon the overland journey to Timbuktu, “the great object of my search,” and kept him on the fateful river.

  The journey outmatched the man. Bitter, the Tuareg awaited Park’s passage through the River Niger’s narrows, several days’ river-journey from where I stood. There, they attacked. Park’s surviving guide and the victorious Tuaregs told the story of a tattered boat, its fateful travellers, and the River Niger’s swallowing of the mighty Mungo Park.

  The dilapidated ferry rolled to our side of the River Niger, its flange scraping on the water. It rammed aground and disgorged a two-wheeled rig, four donkeys, and six men. Ready. Half a dozen four-by-fours and as
many donkey-drawn carts scampered on and weighed it down. We clambered aboard. Thousands of tiny birds swooped around us in an undulating cloud that then swirled above us and off to the horizon. Our overloaded ferry was ready to head in their direction. Its steel ramp was pulled loose from the mud dock. We were on the Niger.

  Half an hour later, we crashed ashore at Korioumé, wedging into the soft mud of the riverbank. Bustling began on-board, stopping while the ferry adjusted its landing platform, and then starting all over again. Vehicles spilled from the ferry in a rush for solid ground. Donkeys whined at the disorder. Feeling safer outside our vehicle, I walked off the ferry, down the metal flange, and into the mud. Hawkers rushed the boat and nearly reversed the tide of disembarkation. In the bizarreness of it all, darkness fell.

  In the style of Mali travel, we waited around in the afterglow of the temporary market that had appeared for the ferry’s arrival. Three new bags were tossed on the top of our truck and roped tight. Then two Malians were shoved in our midst as we wedged back into the Land Cruiser.

  Our two Land Cruisers rode through the port’s chaos and alongside trees in swampy water. Then we drove in the desert for seventeen kilometres on the Route de Kabara.

  Heinrich Barth, following the same path in the daytime, found his arrival in Timbuktu disappointing. “We approached the town, but its dark masses of clay not being illuminated by bright sunshine, for the sky was thickly overcast and the atmosphere filled with sand, were scarcely to be distinguished from the sand and rubbish heaped all round.” René Caillié’s sentiments, on arriving at sunset, however, reflected what I felt approaching the great city. “I entered Timbuktu the mysterious and I could hardly control my joy.”

  FIVE

  Among the Tuareg

  Upon our nighttime arrival at the hotel in Timbuktu, Zak had announced: “We leave at seven.” I’d come to realize that this was code for “We wake up in the morning.”

  At eight Zak surfaced, showered and ready for the desert dust.

  “Ready to go,” he announced. Ever the optimist.

  “Glad you are,” I said, slowly finishing my coffee.

  “Rick, where’s your pack?”

  “A be na sonni,” I replied.

  Since our Toyota was not actually there, I had time to explore the setting in the early daylight. We were on the outskirts of Timbuktu, and our hotel was built of sandstone. The desert was at our doorstep. I had walked alone on a side road last evening, but it was very dark and I could barely see the Sahara. Now, in the morning, it was clear that we were at the edge of an expanse that went on forever. I walked back to the hotel an hour later and was still early for departure.

  When the four-by-four finally arrived at the hotel, I tossed my pack on the roof rack, strapped it down, and climbed in. With Mamadou at the wheel, we drove along the Route de Kabara into Timbuktu until the pavement ended and then churned sand at the Place de l’Indépendence. Our vehicle fought the stream of Malians, pushcarts, and animals that is the Boulevard Askia Mohammed. Mamadou steered the Land Cruiser into a gathering of young merchants in front of the weary Hotel Colombe, stopping only when they jumped aside. The bags and backpacks on the stairs represented eight fellow travellers who looked anxious about the day’s preparations. Two Toyotas raced from a side street and angle parked with only a foot of space between them, a most inconvenient position for loading.

  There was no apparent sequence in the decision-making that followed. Most likely the purpose was to identify all those going to the festival and to get us into two trucks for the trip. I lazed in the centre seat of one vehicle, avoiding the sun, and over the course of half an hour had four different seatmates. This all before the drive began. A pandering child told me his name was Jimmy Carter. “That American president visited Africa. I gave him a present. The name, my friends then made for me.”

  The Hotel Colombe was on the fringe of Timbuktu’s Old City, its buildings low, sad, and uninviting. The nearby Petit Marché was crowded with sellers of produce, ladies weaving blankets, and pots of boiling meat. In the bustle, another Land Cruiser arrived and from it jumped slim John, whom I’d met while leaving Douentza. He worked with a British tour operator who had used Mohammed’s services in the past, and travelled with Monica, his roommate’s girlfriend. Neither of them could resist the lure of Timbuktu when Mohammed invited them, at their own expense, to ride along with his paying guests on a familiarization trip. They had been all set to see Gao, as Mohammed had promised, but that had changed “because Mohammed’s paying client decided not to go to Gao,” John explained.

  “We’re staying at the L’Auberge Amana,” Monica said. Her eyes wobbled to indicate its stature.

  “Café?” John asked, looking around for somewhere that might serve coffee.

  “There’s a place,” I pointed over his shoulder. A sign was tacked on the awning: Poulet d’Or. It was fifty metres from us, and as we strolled over, we walked through the breath of an open oven, its fire bright. On the street’s shoulder, a lady used a flat pan to remove humps of bread from the oven and slipped them onto a tray beside the stove. We purchased two loaves, breaking pieces from them and eating as we walked. The garnish of sand was subtle. The Poulet d’Or had a few chairs and we commandeered them, found a waiter, and ordered coffee. Soon the café was full of the people who had been crammed into vehicles at Korioumé, had driven here late last evening and dispersed to various accommodations. We had all found each other again.

  “Timbuktu. Can you believe it?” said Monica, pouring the hot water into the mugs of powdered coffee we were preparing. “A month ago I thought it was a made-up name.”

  When we sauntered back to the hotel, the throng of locals had grown threefold, many of them children. Two more trucks had arrived.

  “It’s ten o’clock,” John said as bags were secured in the back of a four-by-four, then jettisoned and stacked in the dirt. But it was of no consequence what the time was. I looked down at the timepiece that hung uselessly on the epaulet of my backpack. It struck me that I had erred in bringing a watch to, of all places, Mali. I unhooked its O-ring, unzipped my pack, and stuffed the chronometer deep inside. Out of sight. Away. Gone for the rest of the trip.

  The ritual of loading and unloading luggage continued for a while. Then, without warning, everyone scrambled for a seat and we were off. In minutes, Timbuktu was behind us and the desert was all we could see. The tracks took us many miles in the first hour. Then the tracks disappeared and the desert shimmered. Where once camel caravans known as Azalai had ruled the dunes, a fleet of five trucks was now trying to keep in file over rough terrain.

  The road became merely a suggestion. When one four-by-four struggled, the others passed, leaving it. When one stalled right in front of us, Mamadou created an alternate route in the sand beside it. But we slipped on one sharp turn and heard the ominous spinning of all four wheels. We were stuck.

  Everyone in the Land Cruiser jumped to the ground to lighten the load. Two weeks earlier I had used my hands to scuff snow from under the wheels of a friend’s Jeep that had got stuck in Canadian mountains. Now, I carved armfuls of sand from behind the Land Cruiser’s wheels to achieve the same effect. We pushed and the vehicle lurched forward.

  We continued toward Essakane. Our vehicle’s shocks abdicated. It was an atrocious experience, and I loved it. These hours, as we bore northwest, were among my most memorable experiences of the land — vast, faraway, uncertain. It was what I’d long envisioned Timbuktu to be. The rough passage rekindled my zeal for travel. I no longer felt a rush to discover Mali, nor to force my plans.

  Hours of jostling followed as drivers and guides raged in debating on where Essakane might actually be. Directional disagreements revolved around opinions, not knowledge. It was not that we were lost; rather, no one knew where we were going. And this in a land where a compass error can mean slow death.

  We stalled in a hollow of sand. Not stuck this time, our engine was overheated. The hood was raised, the hatch opened. It
was a call for help, but no other vehicle was in sight, so we sat on the dunes for an hour. While the engine cooled, however, the travellers’ temperatures rose. Mamadou and another Malian yelled at one another about the cause of the overheated engine and who was to blame. No matter; soon we were off in a bolt of enthusiasm and renewed confidence. We crested a sandbank and saw tents lining the horizon. Essakane. At the moment of its appearance, as if it were a mirage, the four-by-four slowed, lulled, lost momentum, and sank. A few of us picked up our day packs and left the Malians shouting at one another as we set out toward the oasis, half a kilometre away.

  En route through the Sahara to the oasis Essakane, a breakdown means there is little to do until another four-by-four passes by, hopefully that day.

  An hour later, our gear arrived. Only when it was stacked next to the Land Cruiser was the skimpiness of some travellers’ preparations evident. They’d heard that tents would be provided at the festival and were surprised to see broad frames of tree branches being tarped with camel skins. There, lying on the hard sand, they would try to sleep — open to the swirls of dust and bugs, with not even a blanket to cover themselves. I silently thanked Mohammed for his advice as I shook my nylon tent from its sack and sprang its metal ribs. It was up in a few minutes, providing a private space. The netting, designed to protect against mosquitoes, instead sifted wind-blown sand into my sleeping space.

  We were in a large dip between dunes, a dozen tents sprawled between open desert and two Tuareg camps, their placement a shelter against the breeze. Along a ridge of sand, five hundred metres away, the festival’s stage had been built in a desert amphitheatre carved by wind and time.