Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

by Frank T. Kryza

  THE RACE FOR

  TIMBUKTU

  In Search of Africa’s City of Gold

  FRANK T. KRYZA

  IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER

  E. GREGORY KRYZA

  (1922–1998)

  FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICER

  (1950–1980)

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: AFRICA’S GOLDEN CITY

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE / A SCOTSMAN AT TRIPOLI

  CHAPTER TWO / THE AFRICAN ASSOCIATION

  CHAPTER THREE / A WEDDING IN THE ENGLISH GARDEN

  CHAPTER FOUR / WHITE MAN’S GRAVE

  CHAPTER FIVE / THE “AFRICAN TRAVELER”

  CHAPTER SIX / THE TRIPOLI ROUTE

  CHAPTER SEVEN / HUGH CLAPPERTON

  CHAPTER EIGHT / THE JOURNEY TO BORNU

  CHAPTER NINE / UNDISCOVERED EMPIRES

  CHAPTER TEN / THE RACE BEGINS

  CHAPTER ELEVEN / OVER THE RIM OF THE WORLD

  CHAPTER TWELVE / CLAPPERTON CATCHES UP

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN / THE IVORY MINIATURE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN / THE WIDOW ZUMA

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN / TREACHERY IN THE TANEZROUFT

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN / TROUBLES FOR CAPTAIN CLAPPERTON

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN / THE CITY OF LEGEND

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN / THE LONG SILENCE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN / THE LOST PAPERS

  CHAPTER TWENTY / THE MYSTERY SOLVED

  AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PRAISE FOR THE RACE FOR TIMBUKTU

  ALSO BY FRANK T. KRYZA

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  AFRICA’S GOLDEN CITY

  IN THE FIRST TWO DECADES of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers—and fortune hunters—than the lost city of Timbuktu. For five centuries, legends about its wealth and culture had circulated from Venice to London. Like El Dorado in the Americas, Timbuktu assumed the quality of a mythic dream hidden in the unseen sprawl of Africa, a city paved with gold that lay just beyond the next range of mountains or a bit deeper in the unexplored African jungles.

  Timbuktu, like El Dorado, held the explicit promise of riches and fame. No European explorer had been there and returned since the Middle Ages. Whoever got there first was guaranteed worldwide renown, but the journey would be bitter and hard—and could be fatal.

  El Dorado, it turned out, was a city never found for the compelling reason that it did not exist. But Timbuktu was a real place. It is easily located on any modern map of Mali, near the center of the country, on the southern edge of the Sahara, about eight miles north of the river Niger.

  From that moment in the 1780s when an armchair-bound coterie of British aristocrats decided they would find it, along with the termination of the Niger, a determined search for Timbuktu was to occupy European explorers for the next fifty years.

  Beyond its attraction as a center of great wealth, no city was more worthy of discovery for geographical and scientific reasons. Arabic texts documented that merchants from Tripoli to Morocco had gathered at Timbuktu since the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, when it was incorporated into the great Malian Empire, to buy gold and slaves in exchange for prized European manufactured goods, cloth, horses, and the mined salt of the desert. Scholars reputedly made up as much as a quarter of the city’s huge permanent population of 100,000, many of whom had studied in Cairo and other seats of Islamic culture, and who had themselves attracted students from an even wider ambit, stretching as far away as Mecca and Baghdad and deep into the northern reaches of sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam had made inroads unimagined in Europe.*

  The Sahara was known mainly as a vast swath of inhospitable desert, but there was evidence in Moroccan archives that trade had been conducted across the region since early times. Evidence from the pre-Islamic era was sketchy, but it seemed likely that gold, animal skins, ivory, gemstones, perfumes, and black slaves from the Sudan states (in the terminology of the age, here, as elsewhere in this book, Sudan or “Soudan” refers to all those states southwest of the Sahara, not the modern nation of Sudan)† were exchanged for the manufactures and trinkets of the Phoenician, Roman, and Byzantine worlds. The Muslim Arab conquest of North Africa from the seventh century onward saw the establishment of a regular trans-Saharan trade in black slaves.

  Having taken their empire, the Arabs sealed it off. Foreigners who dared set foot in any part of it were confronted with a harrowing choice: either take a vow of abiding allegiance to Islam, forsaking all other loyalties, or face decapitation. An idea of the Arab empire’s extent emerges from the documented travels of the indefatigable Berber wanderer Ibn Batuta, who spent forty years touring a score of countries from western China to modern-day Mali without once leaving the Arab hegemony.* Soon the integrated web of lands under Arab sway became a vast trading commonwealth, the principal objects of commerce at Timbuktu being salt, gold, and slaves.

  Gold and slaves were paramount. The importance of the slave trade is illustrated by estimates suggesting that from the seventh to the end of the nineteenth centuries, between 9 and 13 million slaves were transported north across the Sahara. This is comparable to the numbers shipped seaward during the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, though the Saharan traffic has received less public discussion.

  TIMBUKTU TODAY is an insignificant place, a village that festers, foul-smelling and intractable, in the heart of modern-day Mali. It has a population of less than 19,000, a fifth of the inhabitants it boasted in its golden age half a millennium ago. Though there is sporadic air service to Timbuktu, visitors to the town at the dawn of the twenty-first century can reach it reliably only by camel, Land Rover, shallow-draft riverboat, or on foot.

  It is an ancient settlement, likely founded around 1100 as a seasonal camp by Tuareg nomads. Within the next hundred years, Timbuktu became an important crossroads and trading post for tribes who would otherwise have slaughtered one another in encounters outside its purlieus. Word of the goods for sale spread to the north, and it soon became a caravan destination for Arab traders from the Barbary States flanking the Mediterranean. Timbuktu was uniquely situated: although a desert town of the southern Sahara, it flourished on the banks of the Niger, in proximity to the great lakes and swamps of the upper river, thus connecting it to Africa’s canopied rain forests and jungles, the place where “camel met canoe.” Timbuktu was thus a nexus, a bridge—the only one in fact—between black Africa, a region into which even Arabs were loath to wander far, and the Sahara, a land blacks saw as off limits because of its inhospitable climate and the risk of abduction.

  Timbuktu grew to become an opulent city boasting real infrastructure—markets, mosques, and important Islamic libraries and schools. The wealth to fund this cultural and intellectual development was generated from the gold mines of West Africa, worked by black slaves for their black and Arab masters, and the merchants who carried their goods on camels, oxen and asses, and men’s heads, and in the canoes of tropical Africa’s rivers and lakes.

  This trading community was a strange hodgepodge—Arabs, Berbers, and black Africans, Muslims and pagans, the occasional Jew, and even, apparently, the rare Christian merchant from Venice or Lisbon. They gathered in sprawling covered markets to exchange salt and dates for grain from the savannas, slaves, ivory, feathers, and kola nuts from the forests beyond, and above all, gold from the far south.

  B
y 1200, word of Timbuktu’s wealth extended to the coasts of Guinea and the northern Mediterranean, where merchants bartered for gold thought to have come from Sudan. Europeans were dimly aware that the precious metal had originated far to the south. Some of this gold, in the form of a particularly fine dust packed in leather pouches, found its way to Europe, especially Venice. The gold dust was alleged to have originated in elusive Timbuktu.

  The shroud clinging to the city, from the distant perspective of those merchants who traded along the Mediterranean littoral, did not lift until the fourteenth century, when Timbuktu’s greatest ruler made his first appearance in the wider world. His name was Mansa* Musa, and his spectacular arrival in Cairo in 1324, accompanied by a vast and magnificent caravan, convinced medieval Europe in a way no rumor or speculation could that immense wealth lay hidden in the heart of Africa.

  It was in that year, the seventeenth of his reign, that the great Mandingo emperor of ancient Mali crossed the Sahara on a pilgrimage to Mecca, passing through Egypt on his way. Cairo received the emperor goggle-eyed. His procession of soldiers, courtiers, wives, and concubines “put Africa’s sun to shame,” in the words of one chronicler.

  Surviving accounts tell us that Mansa Musa was accompanied by a caravan of sixty thousand men, including a retinue of twelve thousand slaves dressed in brocade and Persian silk. The emperor himself, on horseback, was preceded by five hundred slaves, each carrying a gold staff. A baggage train of eighty camels trailed, each carrying three hundred pounds of gold.

  It is alleged that during the passage across the Sahara, the emperor’s principal wife asked to have a bath. Mansa Musa put scores of slaves to work digging a ditch into which thousands of water bags were poured. The wife and concubines “swam with intense joy” in this artificial lake. The story makes no mention of the hundreds who must have died of thirst because of the loss of those water bags.

  Tales of the camel trains and servants, along with the emperor’s wives and women, gifts and arrogant horsemen, all the trappings of a king whose realm was as large as all of western Europe and, arguably, more civilized, lingered as familiar gossip after the ruler’s departure from Egypt. The Cairenes, cynical and jaded, considered southern Africa to be inhabited by savages who were barely human, but Mansa Musa created an indelible impression to the contrary. An Arab historian who visited Cairo twelve years after the emperor’s visit found the city still singing his praises. So deep had been his pockets that the flood of gold into Cairo markets had led to a persistent diminution in price from which the metal had not yet recovered. Even allowing for the exaggeration characteristic of ancient accounts of great rulers, by any standard of his time Mansa Musa was uncommonly wealthy and powerful.

  Mansa Musa completed his pilgrimage and returned to his capital. Nothing more was ever heard from him, but he had left his mark. Timbuktu made its first appearance on a European map within fifty years, when Abraham Cresques, a cartographer based in Majorca, drew his famous Catalan Atlas for Charles V. He called the city “Tenbuch” and marked it as the capital of a huge Malian Empire ruled by a powerful Mandingo dynasty. He depicted a monarch on a throne. “This Negro lord,” the inscription reads, “is called Musa Mali, Lord of the Negroes of Guinea. So abundant is the gold which is found in his country that he is the richest and most noble king in all the land.”

  FOR TWO MORE CENTURIES the written record again lay blank. Then, in 1546, came the publication of The History and Description of Africa and the Notable Things Contained Therein by Leo Africanus (Leo the African). Leo, a Spanish Moor, had visited Timbuktu at the beginning of the century as a representative of the ruler of Fez. Still a young man, he was captured by Christian pirates and presented as an exceptionally learned slave to the Renaissance pope Leo X, who freed him, baptized him under his own name (Johannis Leo de Medici), and commissioned him to write a detailed survey of Africa. Leo’s lavish portrayal of Timbuktu mesmerized European courts. It was mainly on the basis of his account that the legend of a gabled romantic city arose—a city poor men could dream of reaching to make their fortunes, magical in its remoteness yet tangible in its wealth:

  The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and scepters of gold, some whereof weigh 1,300 poundes. He keeps a magnificent and well-furnished court. He hath always three thousand horsemen, and a great number of footmen that shoot poisoned arrows. Here are a great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men that are bountifully maintained at the king’s expense. And hither are brought diverse manuscripts of written books out of Barbaric, which are sold for more money than any other merchandise. The coin of Tombuto is of gold.

  The Italian edition of Leo’s travels was widely read, but it didn’t make its real mark on European consciousness until 1600, when it reappeared in an English translation by John Pory. “As touching his exceeding Travels,” wrote Pory, “I have marveled much how he should ever have escaped so many thousands of imminent dangers. How often he was in hazard to have become captive or to have his throat cut by the prancing Arabians or wild Moors? And how many times escaped he the lion’s greedy mouth and the devouring jaws of the crocodile.”

  Leo himself was an unassuming man, a self-preserving trait in the papal court of the Medicis. “For my own part,” he wrote, “when I heare evil of Africans being spoken of, I will affirme myself to be one of Granada, and when I perceive the national of Granada to be discommended, then I will professe my selfe to be an African.” These two elements—the widespread distribution of the Pory edition, and Leo’s engaging humanity—guaranteed that his story would have a profound impact.

  For nearly three hundred years (until well into the nineteenth century), maps of the interior of Africa reflected, with hardly any change at all, the geography Leo portrayed. Leo, of course, had described Timbuktu at the peak of its power and prosperity. It was precisely the description a vulnerable Europe, depleted of humanity and wealth by the Crusades, wanted to hear. Timbuktu was a powerful idea as much as a place, its texture and weave to be shaped by each man who heard the tale. To popes and kings who needed money and reinforcements, it was the mythical kingdom of Prester John;* to merchants it was a great center of commerce with streets paved with precious metal and gemstones embedded in every wall; to politicians it was the capital of a great Central African Empire; and to scholars it was a place of learning whose priceless manuscripts would solve the mysteries of the age. Leo also accurately mentioned “cottages built of chalk and covered with thatch,” but those hints of poverty interested no one and were ignored.

  The Moorish conquest of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century cultivated the vision of wealth. Commercial correspondents in Marrakech staggered the European merchants who employed them with reports of Timbuktu’s affluence. In August 1594 one of them, Laurence Madoc, told his principal in London of the arrival from Sudan of thirty mules laden with gold. A month later, Madoc wrote that “the rent of Tombucto is 60 quintals† of gold by the year, the goodness whereof you know…. The report is that Mahomed [the Moorish general] bringeth with him such an infinite treasure as I never heard of; it doth appear that they have more gold than any other part of the world beside…. This King of Morocco is like to be the greatest prince in the world for money, if he keeps this country….”

  Five years later, Jasper Thomson, another English trader at Marrakech, advised London of the arrival of a “great store of pepper, unicorn’s horns … and great quantity of eunuchs, dwarfs, and women and men slaves, besides fifteen virgins,” together with “thirty camels laden with tibar, which is unrefined gold,” and which he valued at 600,000 pounds.*

  Once this trade with other countries took a firm grip of merchants on either side of the Mediterranean, the Arab monopoly in Africa was threatened. It was a time for the expansion of Europe, and in the van of the expansionists came the explorers. Western nations cast their eyes covetously on hitherto unknown lands.

  In the next hundred years the Moors lost their hold on the Sudan and places south, their administration fo
llowed by anarchy. The flow of gold to Morocco dropped sharply, but it never wholly ceased, and the idea that there were huge gold mines near Timbuktu (whether they were presently productive or not) had taken deep root in the West.

  Maps of Africa in the seventeenth century show fairy-tale landscapes drawn from rumor and imagination, liberally illustrated with drawings of fantastic animals and men to fill in the blank spaces. Timbuktu is pictured as a city plated with gold and precious jewels, where gold coins were used by the inhabitants as pocket change.

  The European exploration of North and Central Africa, for all practical purposes, ceased with the fall of the Roman Empire, not to be reactivated for 1,400 years. For two millennia the mystery of Africa’s interior had remained unsolved, despite the progress made elsewhere in the world. Remarkably, at the time of the first British undertaking to explore the southern fringe of the Sahara, planners in London knew more about the geography of the moon than they did of North and Central Africa.

  By 1800, there remained few corners of the earth upon which some restless European foot had not trod, but most of Africa remained a blank on the map, an empty space of eleven million square miles (an area three times the size of the present-day United States, including Alaska). Crossing the Sahara Desert and penetrating the Congo River basin were feats no one had lived to tell about.

  Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s 1630 Afrícae nova descríptío (“Africa newly described”) is thought by many collectors to be the most beautiful seventeenth-century map of the continent. “Tenbuch” is shown where Leo Africanus placed it, but the topographical detail inland from coastal areas is pure fiction—especially, for example, the central lakes, which were based on legends dating to Ptolemy. To fill the remaining blank spaces, Blaeu added colorful drawings. It was in contemplation of an Irish copy of this map in 1733 that Jonathan Swift wrote: