The Storied City

by Charlie English

  They reached the ferry at one p.m. but were told it was too dangerous to cross: the fighting on the other side was too hot. So they followed the river downstream for a short distance and hailed a fishing canoe. The fisherman took them to the village of Hondoubongo on the north bank, where Haidara called a friend in Timbuktu.

  “There is shooting everywhere,” the friend told him. Even so, if they waited, he would see what he could do.

  At four p.m. the friend arrived in a Mercedes he had managed to borrow. Getting out of the city had been difficult; getting back in was harder. Every few hundred yards they were stopped by armed men who fired in the air when they approached, Haidara remembered, and at every halt they faced a barrage of questions. Who were they? Whose car was this? Why were they coming into the city? How did they get here? Where was the vehicle that brought them to Timbuktu? It took them two hours to travel the eight miles to the gateway that marked the entrance to the city.

  Driving into Timbuktu in the dark, Haidara got a first glimpse of the anarchy that had reigned for much of the day: the pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa of gunfire was continuous, though he couldn’t even tell which groups were shooting. He hurried to his house on the east side, a short distance from his library in Hamabangou, and closed the door.

  He wouldn’t go out again for a week.

  4.

  THE FOURTH TRAVELLER

  1795–1820

  On May 1, 1797, Joseph Banks wrote a note to his friend the French commissary in London that briefly outlined the state of the African Association. The business of sending “Travellers” to explore the interior regions of Africa was proving more difficult than he had hoped. “[We] have already Lost 3 well Qualified men,” he wrote, “without having much Elucidated the internal Geography of the Country, but [we] Still persevere.”

  In truth, only two explorers had been definitively “Lost.” Lucas had set out shortly after Ledyard, leaving for Tripoli in August 1788, but a rebellion in southern Libya blocked his route south and he had returned safely without leaving the Mediterranean coast. Next came the indebted Irish soldier Daniel Houghton, who offered to try the interior from the Gambia, find the reputed city of “Tombuctoo,” then trace the unknown course of the Niger—all for the modest sum of £260. The association gladly accepted his proposal, and Houghton set out in 1790. On September 1 of the following year he wrote a note in pencil from Simbing, in the Sudanese kingdom of Ludamar, saying he was in good health, and was never heard from again.

  There was a fourth traveler already in the field, however, who Banks very much hoped was now on his way back from “Tambuctoo.” This was the twenty-five-year-old Scotsman Mungo Park, who at that very moment was battling his way toward the West African coast after a two-year journey in which he had lost everything bar his beaver-skin hat. Unpromising as this sounds, Park’s mission would prove to be the African Association’s greatest success, laying down a new archetype of the heroic white-man-in-the-dark-continent against which later explorers would be measured. Park traveled through lands filled with murderous “Moors” and savage beasts, armed with little more than his British pluck, his unwavering faith, and a formidable constitution. Most important of all, he would come back alive.

  The son of a prosperous farmer, Park trained as a surgeon, but it was botany that drew him to Banks’s attention. The Royal Society president arranged for him to travel to the Dutch East Indies to hunt for specimens, and he was hired by the African Association after returning with eight new descriptions of Sumatran fish. He was brave and persistent, even after being told of Houghton’s disappearance: “I knew that I was able to bear fatigue,” he wrote, “and I relied on my youth and the strength of my constitution to preserve me from the effects of the climate.”

  He sailed from Portsmouth on May 22, 1795, carrying a letter of credit for £200 and instructions “to pass on to the river Niger, when arrived in Africa, . . . ascertain the course, and, if possible, the rise and termination of that river,” then use his “utmost exertions” to visit the principal towns or cities in its neighborhood, in particular “Timbuctoo and Houssa”—although Houssa, or Hausa, was not a town but a people. With those tasks complete, Park could return by any route of his choosing.

  On June 21, the little trading brig carrying him reached the mouth of the Gambia, then began to work its way slowly upriver to the community of European traders at Jonkakonda, where it would deliver mail and take on goods of beeswax and ivory. Park was invited to stay sixteen miles farther east, at the village of Pisania, with an English contact of Beaufoy’s, the slaver John Laidley. There he settled down to learn Manding and gather any information he could about what lay ahead. After three weeks he was hit by his first attack of malaria and became delirious, and for much of August and September he was confined to the house, whiling away the “tedious hours” listening to the horrible sounds of the strange world into which he was about to venture:

  The night is spent by the terrified traveller in listening to the croaking of frogs (of which the numbers are beyond imagination), the shrill cry of the jackal, and the deep howling of the hyæna; a dismal concert, interrupted only by the roar of such tremendous thunder as no person can form a conception of but those who have heard it.

  Lesser spirits would have given up there, but Park always demonstrated phenomenal drive, and by early December, when the rains had given way to hot sunshine and the river had dropped, he felt well enough to set out. He left Pisania in the company of a freedman named Johnson, who had once been transported to Jamaica and England, and one of Laidley’s house slaves, Demba, who was promised liberty if the explorer returned alive. Park had a horse; a small assortment of beads, amber, and tobacco to barter; an umbrella; and his beaver-skin hat. At one p.m. on December 3, 1795, he took leave of his European companions and rode out into the African woods. By now, his excitement at the idea of becoming a “Traveller” had given way to dangerous reality, much as it had for Ledyard, and he was in a gloomy and introspective mood:

  I had now before me a boundless forest, and a country, the inhabitants of which were strangers to civilized life, and to most of whom a white man was the object of curiosity or plunder. I reflected that I had parted from the last European I might probably behold, and perhaps quitted for ever the comforts of Christian society.

  Park’s despondency didn’t last long. By February he had traveled three hundred miles inland, reaching the state of Kaarta, where he was well received by the king, Daisy Koorabarri. To avoid the imminent outbreak of war between Daisy and his neighbor Mansong Diarra, the king of Bambara, the explorer turned north toward Ludamar, the land in which Houghton had disappeared. This territory, located near the modern Mali–Mauritania border, was inhabited by “Moors,” the blanket European description for North African Muslims of Berber or Arab origin, and Park’s experiences there would mark him for the rest of his life.

  In his first days in Ludamar he at least learned what had become of Houghton. The Irish soldier had paid some Moorish merchants to guide him toward Timbuktu, Park was told, but after two days he became suspicious of their intentions and insisted on turning back, whereupon the merchants robbed him and went off, leaving him without food or water. After walking for several days Houghton reached a well, but the people he encountered there refused to give him any food. “Whether he actually perished of hunger, or was murdered outright by the savage Mahomedans, is not certainly known,” Park recorded. The soldier’s body was dragged into the woods, and Park was shown the very spot where it had been left to perish.

  This macabre story did not dissuade Park from proceeding deeper into Ludamar, and neither did Johnson’s declaration that he would relinquish every claim to reward rather than go one step farther. Park gave him copies of his papers to take back to the Gambia and continued with Demba, but they were increasingly harassed by the people of the territory, who tried to provoke the explorer by hissing and shouting at him and spitting in his face, and telling hi
m that as a Christian his property was their lawful plunder. On March 7, a group of them entered the hut where he was staying and arrested him. They took him to Benowm, to the camp of Ali, the country’s ruler—a “tyrannical and cruel” man, according to Park. Ali imprisoned the traveler and as an added insult tethered a pig outside the hut where he was held. Ali’s camp followers—“the rudest savages on earth,” in Park’s view—then tormented both the unclean animal and the Christian from sunrise to sunset:

  The rudeness, ferocity, and fanaticism, which distinguish the Moors from the rest of mankind, found here a proper subject whereupon to exercise their propensities. I was a stranger, I was unprotected, and I was a Christian; each of these circumstances is sufficient to drive every spark of humanity from the heart of a Moor; but when all of them, as in my case, were combined in the same person, and a suspicion prevailed withal, that I had come as a spy into the country, the reader will easily imagine that, in such a situation, I had everything to fear.

  Arguably, given the future behavior of Europeans in Africa, Park was a spy, though Banks would have said his journey was being made for the purer motive of increasing human knowledge. In any event, this was the worst period in the young man’s life, and it would haunt his dreams for years to come. While suffering bouts of malaria, he was variously told that he would be put to death or have his hand chopped off and his eyes put out, and was subjected to a mock execution. He was deprived of food and, as the hot season arrived and water became scarce, was reduced to drinking from a cattle trough, since the Muslims feared his Christian lips would poison their drinking vessels. If it wasn’t clear to him already, in April, a sharif—a man who claimed direct descent from the Prophet—arrived in the camp and explained the desert tribes’ attitude to Christians. The sharif had spent a number of years living in Timbuktu and asked if Park intended to travel there. When Park replied that he did, the man “shook his head, and said, it would not do; for that Christians were looked upon there as the devil’s children, and enemies to the Prophet.”

  The sharif evidently took pity on the young Scot, however, and told him where the legendary city was. To reach it, he would first have to go to Walata, ten days hence, and Timbuktu was eleven days beyond that. Park asked again and again in which direction the city lay, and the sharif always gestured to the southeast, never varying the direction by more than half a point.

  In late June 1796, after three months in captivity, Park managed to escape, though he had to leave behind Demba, who had been taken into Ali’s army of slaves. He traveled through the savanna, dodging groups of “Moors,” and approached the Niger near the Bambara capital of Segu. On July 20 he was told by his traveling companions that he should see the great river itself the following day. He was too excited to sleep and saddled his horse before daylight, but the gates of the village where he was staying were kept closed at night to keep out lions, and he waited impatiently for dawn. Finally the gates were opened, and after two hours’ travel he set eyes on his prize:

  As I was anxiously looking around for the river, one of [my companions] called out, “geo affili” (see the water), and looking forwards, I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission—the long sought for majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward.

  He had become the first European explorer to set eyes on a river whose existence had been the source of speculation since the time of Herodotus. He was not surprised to find that it flowed toward the rising sun—in the direction opposite to that the African Association’s scholars believed—since he had been told as much by many of the people he met. As for its outlet: even the merchants who traveled on it did not appear to know where it reached the sea, but said only that they believed it ran “to the end of the world.”

  He hurried to the river’s edge, drank some of its water, then lifted his fervent thanks in prayer to God for having crowned his endeavors with success.

  On the far bank was Segu, the great capital of the Bambara nation, which formed a prospect of “civilization and magnificence” of a sort Park had not expected to find in Africa. Word of his arrival was passed to the Bambara king, but Mansong was suspicious of Park and refused him entry, so the explorer sought shelter in a nearby village. All day he waited beneath a tree, the traditional place for strangers to sit until a host came forward, but the people of the village looked on him with astonishment and fear and refused to take him in. By dusk he was hungry and worried: the wind was rising, rain threatened, and the many wild beasts in the area meant he would have to try to sleep in the tree’s branches. At last a woman returning from her work in the fields took him in, giving him water, a very fine fish for supper, and a mat to sleep on, and while he rested, the girls in the family spun cotton and sang a sweet and plaintive song in his honor that he was moved to record:

  The winds roared, and the rains fell.

  The poor white man, faint and weary,

  Came and sat under our tree.

  He has no mother to bring him milk;

  No wife to grind his corn.

  Chorus:

  Let us pity the white man;

  No mother has he.

  Perhaps because of what he had suffered in Ali’s camp, Park was deeply affected by this act of compassion. After six months of threat and anxiety, the generosity of this stranger unleashed a powerful emotion. “The circumstance, was affecting in the highest degree,” he noted, through a less-than-stiff upper lip. “I was oppressed by such unexpected kindness; and sleep fled from my eyes.” It was one of many acts of charity he was shown in West Africa, and typical of his treatment by women. “I do not recollect a single instance of hardheartedness toward me in the women,” he recalled. “In all my wanderings and wretchedness, I found them uniformly kind and compassionate.”

  When the Bambara girls’ words reached Britain, they became a subject of curiosity and delight. They were “simple and pathetic sentiments,” some said, but they demonstrated that these pagans could exhibit a humanity that many believed to be the exclusive preserve of Christians. The author and political activist Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was moved to rework them into a rhyming poem, which she had set to music:

  Go, White Man, go; but with thee bear

  The Negro’s wish, the Negro’s prayer,

  Remembrance of the Negro’s care.

  In the morning, Park gave his hostess the only things of value he still possessed: two brass buttons from his waistcoat.

  • • •

  PARK REFERRED NOW to his plain but demanding instructions. He had achieved one of the African Association’s principal objectives: finding the Niger and determining its direction. What remained—apart from the impossible request that he also discover the river’s source and its termination—was the task of using his “utmost exertions” to visit the towns along it, especially Timbuktu. It was this goal that Park now set out to achieve. He followed the river’s course for a hundred miles northeast, reaching Silla at the end of July. There, the strain of his exertions finally overtook him. He was “worn down by sickness, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, half naked, and without any article of value by which I might procure provisions, clothes, or lodging.” Above all he recognized that he was heading deeper into the territory of those “merciless fanatics,” the Moors. Fearing that if he was killed his discoveries would die with him, he decided to turn back, but first he would wring from the traders of Silla all the information he could about Timbuktu, “the great object of European research,” which he was told lay farther to the northeast. Park’s questions doubtless focused on his persecutors, and he was duly told the city was filled with Muslims who were “more severe and intolerant in their principles than any other of the Moorish tribes in this part of Africa.” One old black man related how, on his first visit to Timbuktu, the landlord at his lodging house had spread a mat on the floor and laid a rope on it, saying:
“If you are a Mussulman you are my friend, sit down; but if you are a Kafir, you are my slave, and with this rope I will lead you to market.”

  If anyone could overcome these difficulties, however, the rewards would be great, since Park’s inquiries about the city’s wealth seemed to confirm the rumors:

  The present king of Timbuctoo is named Abu Abrahima; he is reported to possess immense riches. His wives and concubines are said to be clothed in silk, and the chief officers of state live in considerable splendour. The whole expense of his government is defrayed, as I was told, by a tax upon merchandise, which is collected at the gates of the city.

  His researches complete, the weary Park turned for home. He followed the Niger southwest to Bamako, then little more than a village, where he left the broad river to strike west to the coast. It was the rainy season and traveling was difficult: three times he had to swim streams in spate, pushing his horse ahead of him, with his journal tucked in the crown of his hat. A short distance from Bamako, robbers stripped him of what little he had left, returning only his worst shirt and a pair of trousers, but he refused to despair, and the headman of the next village ordered an attendant to find and recover his clothes and his horse. Park gave him the emaciated animal as thanks, before struggling on to the small town of Kamalia. By now he was in a dangerous condition: feverish, with an injured ankle that meant he could only hobble, and no food or items for barter. It was five hundred more miles to Pisania, and his route would soon take him through the gloomy wilds of Jallonkadoo, where there were further dangerous rivers to cross and no shelter for five days. “I had almost marked out the place where I was doomed . . . to perish,” he wrote.

  In Kamalia, Park was lucky to stumble upon another exemplary act of hospitality.

  He saw a group of people listening to a man reading from an Arabic text. The reader, a slave trader named Karfa Taura, noticed Park and asked with a smile if he understood what was written in the book. Park didn’t read Arabic, so Taura asked one of his companions to fetch a little volume that had been brought from the west. When Park opened it, he found it was The Book of Common Prayer. Both men were overjoyed by this moment—Taura by the fact that this ragged stranger could read the English words no one else could understand; Park by the discovery of a Christian text in English in West Africa—and an immediate bond was established. Taura offered to put Park up for free until the rainy season was over, and said he would then escort him to the Gambia with the party of slaves he was taking to the coast. Park accepted. Three days later he fell so severely ill he couldn’t walk, and he remained at Kamalia for the next seven months, making notes about the life in the town as he recovered. It was during this time that he became the first European to record how manuscripts were used in the West African interior.