To Timbuktu for a Haircut

by Rick Antonson

  He was contemptuous. “People can write whatever they want. It is nothing. I have no care for it.” He acknowledged that the hotels and transport were not as he’d portrayed them and agreed to reimburse me: “I’ll do that.” I scribbled an address on a piece of paper and handed it to him. He said, “I will look at everything and wire money Western Union to Janice. You and me can then meet in Ségou on the twenty-sixth.”

  Mohammed might still shirk his responsibilities, but I did not want that possibility to colour my mood, to spoil my lunchtime rest, or to detract from further adventures in Timbuktu.

  I sensed that my greatest discoveries were ahead of us that hot afternoon. Hidden down old roads were the places that Laing, Caillié, and Barth had temporarily called home; I had to find them. More poignantly, there was my immediate need to find even a portion of the Timbuktu manuscripts. I knew that within this old city, centuries of neglect had allowed a wealth of literary and scientific writings to age, deteriorate, and disappear. Would this day provide a way for me to help reverse that trend, to be a part of recovering and saving these documents?

  Lunch was over, and so was my reverie. “Zak,” I said, “let’s go find the manuscripts.”

  We headed out to search for the bibliothèque. For thirty minutes we stepped carefully around garbage, urine, and feces on the streets of Timbuktu. The scene did not reconcile with Caillié’s description: “The streets are clean, and sufficiently wide to permit three horsemen to pass abreast.” After we had walked into the same empty square for the third time, I was becoming exasperated.

  “Zak, do you know where the bibliothèque is?”

  “Here,” he said with a guide’s overconfidence. He led us into yet another alley, and for ten minutes I followed. We circled nicely. Then the same deserted surroundings appeared.

  “Zak, have you ever been to the bibliothèque?”

  “No.” He sulked, unwilling to admit defeat.

  “Do you know if there is one?”

  “No.”

  I had thought that patience was my strong suit, but it was running low. Near us was a dilapidated warehouse. Its loading platform gave us some shade. “Zak, sit down,” I said. “Listen.”

  He cast his eyes at the ground.

  “There are a few things that are going to happen here,” I began. He listened as a child would under reprimand. “One, we’re going to find Laing’s house. Two, Caillié’s home. Three, Barth’s place. They say it’s a museum.” I trumped that many fingers in front of him. “Then we’re going to find the bibliothèque.” I flipped a fourth finger to catch up. “Zak, if we don’t, you get to tell Mohammed that I’m staying tomorrow in Timbuktu.”

  In 1826 Alexander Gordon Laing, the British major, was the first European to reach Timbuktu and wrote that “it has completely met my expectations.” He was attacked and killed by his protectors upon leaving thirty-five days later.

  He nodded, the fear of Mohammed evident on his face, and then he smiled, up for the alternative task of helping me find these places.

  “And,” I added, my full hand flat, the count clear: “We’ll find the centre where I can get my passport stamped.”

  “I don’t know where that is,” he confessed.

  One of the demons of travel is hesitation. “Let’s ask,” I suggested.

  “No, we’ll find it.” (I read that there’s scientific proof that males of our species don’t ask for directions. This was proved by the fact it takes a thousand sperm to find and fertilize one egg.)

  I spotted a boy watching us nearby, and asked him. He looked halfway down the street, at a bend, and there it was: Gordon Laing’s place. His guidance to Caillié’s home was clear, and his directions to Barth’s sounded unimpeachable. I should have hired a local guide.

  Laing’s house was before us. A crooked Mission Culturelle plaque was stuck to the middle of a mud wall, and, to my delight, a carved Moorish door was lodged open.

  In this alcove of time there was silence. This building had been Laing’s home for most of his stay in 1826. Now owned by a local, it did not seek passers-by. As I stood before it, there was no one in view to ask if I might enter, so I did under the pretense of obtaining that permission. The mud walls did not differentiate this building from other homes; neither did the height of its ceiling nor its crowded passageway set it apart. It did have a notable street presence accented from the second storey by two Moorish windows of carved wood.

  “The Timbuctoo Mission,” as Laing’s expedition was officially known, reflected its leader’s ambition. It offered the journey he sought and the fame he craved. Laing complained in his writings from the desert that he was continuously pressed for money by those he’d hired and already paid. He wrote that one intransigent chief “insisted I should go no further if I did not pay.” Death was common in these parts, and robbery convenient. Threats, putrid food, hostilities, and ransom requests were impediments long registered by Africans, Arabs, and the few Europeans who’d ventured this far.

  Laing arrived at Timbuktu in a terrible state, destitute after being attacked in the desert by Tuareg, shot in the side with a musket ball, slashed on his upper leg, crippled by a knife thrust that sliced his ear and cut his face. His companions fled, and the explorer was left for dead. The rest of the caravan’s merchants were unharmed. They patched him up as well as they could, lashed him to his camel with rope, and let him trail the caravan. They believed he would soon die.

  Laing survived the one-thousand-kilometre trek to Timbuktu. With what energy he could muster, and despite the squalid surroundings, he sent optimistic dispatches with native couriers accompanying the northbound caravans. Once he was settled in Timbuktu his wounds healed slowly, and meals of fish and bread helped his recovery.

  Only one of Laing’s letters from Timbuktu arrived in Tripoli at that time. He wrote of Timbuktu that the city had “completely met” his expectations. I chose to believe that Laing had penned that line within the walls where I stood. Those words contrasted with his later accounts portraying “bitter disappointment” with Timbuktu. He was under constant pressure from the Fulan sultan to leave, though he had freedom of movement about the town. He sketched a city plan of Timbuktu and spent his time “searching the records in the town, which are abundant.”

  This man, the first European to knowingly stay in Timbuktu, spent five weeks in the city before receiving permission to leave. A few days out of Timbuktu, heading for Europe, Laing was attacked by his African protectors. Using his own turban, they strangled the man who loved Africa and decapitated him. His remains were left uncovered in the desert. Birds, insects, and sand had their way with him. Laing’s servant, who survived the attack, over the next two years made his way to Tripoli, where he reportedly delivered some of Laing’s letters and told of his murder. The explorer’s journals, which are thought to have been exceptional records of observation and history, were, however, missing. Often presumed to still exist, no trace of these artifacts has yet been uncovered.

  Laing’s former home in Timbuktu was on a street corner and was two storeys high. The house appeared vacant on the lower level; not abandoned, just not in use. Finding no one to give me permission to enter, I walked up a narrow stairway to the second floor. A shaft of sun picked its way through an ornamental window frame and cast an eerie pall on the room’s three-metre-by-four-metre space. There was a complete absence of furniture or any evidence of occupation. Out of all of the potential ghosts of Timbuktu’s European explorers, Laing’s was the most likely to stay in the vicinity. I imagined the two of us sharing a moment in that dank space, separated by 178 years, and I envisioned him writing his last journal notes in this room: “I fear I shall be involved in much trouble after leaving Timbuktu.”

  Finding René Caillié’s house was exhilarating. It stood (if this can be said of an often re-mudded structure, 174 years after his visit) to the west of the fifteenth-century Sidi Yahia Mosque. The building, still lived in, was not set for visitors. I was more in awe of the man than the
structure, yet it was a Mecca-like destination for me.

  Caillié has been called “one of the oddest figures in the history of travel.” He departed for Timbuktu (calling it “the mysterious city which was the object of all my curiosity”) full of ambition and a sense of adventure, and was unknown to the other prominent competitors seeking the glory of first arriving in the fabled city. He travelled without official sanction, having been refused support for his “preposterous” plan. He studied the Koran, learned to speak Arabic, and presented himself, convincingly, as an Egyptian born of Arab parents. In that guise, he ventured through hostile land, attired as an Arab.

  No one responded to my asking, in French, “Is anyone home?” Zak, bemused, offered up Bambara’s version of the phrase. The door was ajar and I sensed it bid me enter. For the moments I spent in Caillié’s former home, I was a tourist in history, not a traveller in the present. With a deferential nod to the past, I walked into the open part of the house and replicated a two-century-old sliver of time, feeling like an imposter.

  While I travelled far beyond the bounds of my own skimpy knowledge, Caillié travelled with an understanding of places and lands far beyond that of his contemporaries, even beyond that of the local guides who passed him on to more local locals when he journeyed across their territory. He battled scurvy and deprivation. His urge to be self-sufficient was at the heart of his explorations. On camel, with the assumed name of Abdallahi, the twenty-seven-year-old son of a French baker approached Timbuktu from the port of Kabara, now Korioumé, riding north under the watchful Tuareg. “My idea of the city’s grandeur and wealth did not correspond with the mass of mud houses, surrounded by arid plains of jaundiced white sands,” he observed. “I looked around and found that the sight before me did not answer my expectations. I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo.”

  Today one can still see the homes once used by explorers Alexander Gordon Laing, René-August Caillié, and Heinrich Barth. Each is marked with a plaque, such as this one on Caillié’s. Only Barth’s residence is open for travellers to visit.

  When he arrived in 1828, Caillié heard details of Laing’s desert misfortunes, his arrival in the city and his death, and he discovered that the explorer had lived in the house behind his only two years earlier. Caillié continued to avoid arousing suspicion of his Christianity. His host, Sheikh Al Bekây, provided sanctuary, freedom of movement, and food while Caillié rested in Timbuktu. Caillié’s candour still resonates: “I cannot help contemplating with astonishment the extraordinary city before me, created solely by the wants of commerce, and destitute of every resource except what its accidental position as a place of exchange affords.” He resolved to leave the city.

  His desire to leave Timbuktu, however, exceeded the willingness of his hosts to let him go. It was Caillié’s goal to travel to Morocco to make the outside world aware of his amazing accomplishments. His efforts to persuade his hosts to allow his departure became increasingly assertive, and he was eventually given leave. Four days’ travel away from that Timbuktu house, en route to Tangiers, Caillié’s caravan stopped near the camp where Laing was killed. There, the Moors showed him confirmation of that terrible deed.

  René Caillié was the first European to return safely home from Timbuktu. He received the Société de Géographie de France award of ten thousand francs, offered in 1826 to the first European to reach Timbuktu and return safely. It was an award he’d heard of in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and of which he’d said: “Dead or alive, it shall be mine …” In addition, France’s King Charles X made him Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

  Caillié’s residence in La Mystérieuse had been short, his observations picaresque, and the eventual telling of his rediscovery reliant on jotted memories and scrupulously kept notations, secretly scribbled after excusing himself from the company of others, requesting time for quiet meditation. Although his writings covered his entire travels, they were not able to persuade a skeptical world that Timbuktu was without the charm and stature created by legend. Controversy would swirl around Caillié’s book, Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo, which appeared in both France and England in 1830. But public acclaim continually fought with scholarly disdain. As Brian Gardner noted, “René Caillié’s book did little to stop the Timbuctoo Rush.” Circling the Sidi Yahia Mosque, I inadvertently found Bouctou’s well. My guess is that most visitors don’t find it, and don’t bother to believe that the propitious well is even marked. Yet that hole in the ground at my feet was the origin of the name Timbuktu.

  René-August Caillié, the French explorer, has been called “one of the oddest figures in the history of travel.” He arrived in Timbuktu in 1828, disguised as an Arab, and became the first European to return safely home after that accomplishment.

  The Tuareg Halis jests with the leather bucket at the alleged “well of Bouctou,” from where originated the world’s greatest travel name.

  I politely shooed Zak away. I wished to be alone in my travel fantasy. The two keepers of the place, oblivious to my presence, talked in their sleep. The Ethnographic Museum encircled its namesake “Tin,” the Berber language’s grammatical kin to “well.” A recent construction, it showcased Tuareg and Songhai artifacts of music and costume. Standing over the well of the woman whose name became the byword for remote, I stared into the hole, its shallow depth blocked by mud. At the end of a rope swung a camelskin bucket that dropped from a wooden winch, itself secured by tree branch props. I looked within the well and sensed Bouctou contemplating her distorted navel.

  Zak sloughed along a block away and waved to me. Bolstered by our logistical success in matching a street name with an explorer’s home, it made sense to Zak that we chance Barth’s Lane to find the house of the man who finally convinced skeptics that Timbuktu’s fame was founded on exaggerated claims.

  Sweating and covered with a day’s dust, we stopped outside the home of Heinrich Barth, to the northeast east side of the Sidi Yahia Mosque. I breathed deeply. Barth’s stay in Timbuktu was the signature piece in his five-year crossing of the Sahara. If there was a hint that Timbuktu might have a tourism future, this house was it: we paid an entrance fee. Pictures on the walls had descriptions in English, French, and German. Barth’s maps and sketches were displayed. Framing was elusive, but some of the documents were protected behind glass, where the heat had melded them to the surface. A pamphlet on Barth’s exploits was for sale. Was the furniture his? Did he slouch in that corner, surrounded by curious and untrusting observers looking on in silence? Did the tall German feel the urge to hunch over, given the lowness of the ceiling, as I did? Was the air as tight in his lungs as it felt in mine?

  Barth arrived in Timbuktu with a debilitating fever and recuperated as a guest in this house, close to Sheikh Al Bekây. He stayed here for the first month, during which the competing authority, the local chief, who challenged the sheikh for power over the Christian, made many attempts to expel Barth. Among other reasons, it was suspected that he was Laing’s son. The result of this competition between two conflicting and influential local rulers was that Barth was unable to move freely about the city. Sheikh Al Bekây eventually moved him to an encampment in the desert, from where Barth, on occasions, visited Timbuktu’s mosques and spent hours among the townspeople and visiting the “lively markets.” But political pressure mounted for this symbol of foreign intrusion, the infidel, to leave. It culminated in a late-night conference between the sheikh, the Tuareg, and the Fulani. The Fulani gained control over Barth and held him for two months in another camp while he tried to resolve the compromises that kept him from departing.

  He remained a total of six months, a stay that resulted in the most thorough European-recorded observations of Timbuktu, including notes on the city’s commerce and customs. Barth undertook language and vocabulary documentation, and wrote of tribes, place names, and daily habits.

  His restricted movement meant that he had time for letter writing. Halfway through his vis
it he wrote, “You will have heard, I think, of my happy arrival in this ill-famed place.” And, predating today’s urban anti-smoking bylaws, he noted, “Amongst other things they have smoking a capital crime, so that even in Timbuctoo, except near the house of Al Bekây, a man smoking is in great danger …”

  His prolonged absence, and the African rumour trade, resulted in an erroneous report of Barth’s death in Berlin. His obituary was published, and all hope of knowing his whereabouts disappeared. He was still 2,700 kilometres from safety. Sheikh Al Bekây, whose father had protected Laing in Timbuktu, travelled with Barth along the River Niger’s north shore for weeks to ensure his safety. Finally, in September 1855, five years and five months after his journey began, Barth wrote from his north African camp: “I set out on my last march on the African soil in order to enter the town of Tripoli.”

  London and the world responded excitedly to Barth’s triumph. Oxford bestowed an honorary degree on him, the Geographical Society of Paris awarded its Gold Medal, and Queen Victoria presented the Order of Bath. Heinrich Barth became president of the Berlin Geographical Society. But his five-volume work, Travels in North and Central Africa, although popularly received, disappointed its readers. Barth’s reputation as a scholar and scientist was strong enough that his portrayal of Timbuktu as a mundane and dilapidated backwater was believed. He validated Caillié’s descriptions of Timbuktu’s unimportance in modern African trade. Barth’s great achievement was that the public and politicians finally accepted the truth about Timbuktu. The myths of the “City of Majesty” began to lose their duel with reality.