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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Though disgusted by the squalor, Laing found a retreat in the most important building in town, the Sankore Mosque, where the collection of Arabic manuscripts kept him in thrall for days. The building was raised by Mansa Musa after his performance of the hajj in 1324. Though five centuries old, it retained an uncluttered, well-kept interior—eerily quiet and rather dark, the coolest place in the city. Long strips of straw matting, padded with a thick layer of sand, carpeted the hallways and rooms. Nothing but Islamic script decorated the walls.*

  Next door, a pyramid-like building had been the site of a university in the sixteenth century, when Timbuktu was still a center of Islamic scholarship. Mali’s Muslim rulers had built 180 Koranic schools during Timbuktu’s heyday, and black Africa’s greatest Islamic university had been situated there. By 1450, Timbuktu’s population had swelled to 100,000, including 25,000 Muslim scholars from as far away as Cairo. At the time of Laing’s visit, fewer than 12,000 people inhabited the city, a calamitous reduction in population.

  And yet Timbuktu remained, as it does today, the home of some of the southern Sahara’s most appealing peoples. In encampments along the banks of the river, Tuareg women swathed in black, with indigo dye staining their faces and hands, sat cross-legged on the sand grinding millet in mortars and pestles. Baby goats and children frolicked nearby. At night, wet skins were stretched across the mortars and tied firmly, transforming them into drums. The women formed a circle in the sand, and a concert would begin. Younger women accompanied the drumming and singing with miniature one-stringed guitars. Tall, stately Tuareg men swept around the camps in flowing, brilliant robes, heads wrapped in yards of fabric. The men’s faces were veiled, nothing visible but their eyes—inquisitive, but also piercing and hostile. Laing was the first white man they had seen, an object of great curiosity and fear. Men squatted on the ground to trade among themselves. They bartered with leather boxes, knives of all sizes and styles, colorful leather camel bags, and jewelery—simple yet dramatic pieces of silver inlaid with ebony and gold.

  Laing had arrived at Timbuktu during a period of political upheaval that made his stay there even more dangerous than it would have been in peaceful times. Over the centuries, blacks, Berbers, and Arabs fought each other for control of Timbuktu and its trade routes. This troubled history had reached a terminal phase when Laing arrived. While he was crossing the desert, a Fulani zealot and henchman of Sultan Bello, Seku Hamadu, had declared war on the Tuareg who controlled Timbuktu, determined to take it from them. Most of the Tuareg had fled just days before Laing strode through the city gates, but Seku Hamadu had not yet occupied the city with his troops. Timbuktu had thus devolved into a no-man’s-land under the nominal control of Sheikh Othman, the city governor, who took his orders from whichever faction appeared to him most powerful at the moment.

  In this anarchic political environment, Laing’s movements about the city, coupled with the probing questions he asked, created difficulties for him. His high profile in the town and his inquisitive nature created suspicion in Othman’s mind that Laing had come to spy, though it was not clear for whom.

  Back in his clay house, Laing had time to reflect, keep up his journal, and write letters. The discovery of Timbuktu was only a stepping-stone to the discovery of the termination of the Niger, his other important goal, especially now that Timbuktu had, in a sense, failed him.

  For at least five centuries, Timbuktu had been known by name in western Europe, and for the greater part of that time, men had dreamed of a city of dazzling opulence, an African El Dorado. Now Laing saw the reality. He despaired at having to announce to a disbelieving world, in the book he hoped would make him famous, that Timbuktu was little more than a poor collection of mud shanties with no wealth, much less gold. The salt caravans had practically disappeared. Timbuktu had fallen into fatal decline.

  The enduring vision of Timbuktu as a city paved with gold had been fostered, indeed nourished, by rumor and lack of hard evidence. Realizing now that Timbuktu could not live up to popular expectations, Laing was careful not to reveal his disappointment in the letters he sent home lest these revelations precede him to London and diminish the value of his planned book. Though he recognized that Timbuktu would be less exciting to write about than what he had hoped to find, he was by no means indifferent to his accomplishment, nor unaware of the public esteem that would attach to the discovery of what he liked to call, and still believed to be, the “far-famed capital of Central Africa.” Laing knew, no matter its current state, that the discovery of Africa’s most important lost city was bound to be a milestone in the history of geographical exploration.

  The mythical quality of the planet’s last great lost city—a real city, not merely a mythical Shangri-la or El Dorado—which had survived in hiding from Europe since the fourteenth century, died on the day Laing walked through its gates. Timbuktu would never again be the place in Africa “where the map of this world ends.”

  LAING STAYED IN TIMBUKTU for thirty-five days, gathering research, studying Arab manuscripts, copying city records, and talking to scholars. Then news arrived that interrupted his studies and forced his departure. In Sokoto, Sultan Bello, though agreeable to traffic with England by way of Tripoli and the Sahara, was dead against the notion of a thoroughfare open to the coast. He wrote to his satrap Seku Hamadu that Europeans were to be prevented from visiting any Muslim lands of the Sudan. Alarmed, Seku Hamadu wrote the following to the governor of Timbuktu:

  To the Governor Othman ben Al Khaid Abu Bakr, and those who are his brothers in office:

  To give you to know, that having heard that a Christian traveller desires to visit our country, but not knowing whether he is arrived or not (at Timbuctoo), you are to endeavour to prevent his entry, if not already come, and if he is come, endeavour to send him away, and take from him all hope of returning into our dominions. For I have just received a letter from Bello Danfoda [Sultan Bello was the son of the great military ruler Othman Dan Fodio], full of wholesome advice, by which I am instructed to prevent Europeans from visiting the Musulman country of Soudan. This was caused by a letter he received from Egypt, in which the abuses and corruptions the Christians have committed in that country are mentioned, as well as in Andalusia and other countries informer times.

  These orders reached Sheikh Othman only after Laing had been officially welcomed. Seku Hamadu’s comment that Bello’s change of heart occurred as a result of “a letter he received from Egypt” was likely a cover story, for it is improbable that events in Egypt and Spain were of much immediate concern to Sultan Bello, who was safely insulated by vast distance from such places. Unease about interference with the slave trade and his other monopolies was likely the real reason for getting rid of Laing.

  Sultan Bello’s knowledge of conditions in far lands should come as no surprise. Clapperton would document it, and before European penetration of the interior of Africa revolutionized the pattern of African trade, commercial intercourse extending from Egypt on the one hand to Fez on the other, and from Tripoli to the coast of Guinea, was traditional in the northern half of the continent, reaching certainly as far as Timbuktu. Consequently (and ironically), Saharan people were far better informed in Laing’s day about events in remote countries than they afterward became.

  Othman personally had no objection to Laing—indeed, there is every indication that he liked him—but he had many masters and dared not disobey any of them, including the powerful Fulani warrior Mohammed Bello. He therefore warned Laing that if he did not leave at once, Fulani warriors would likely be tasked to kill him. The message was clear. Laing got his things together, taking time to send a final dispatch back to Tripoli:

  Timbuctoo, Sept. 21st, 1826

  My dear Consul,

  A very short epistle must serve to apprise you, as well as my Dearest Emma, of my arrival at & departure from the great Capital of Central Africa, the former of which events took place on the 13th Ulto, and the latter will take place (Please God) at an early hour to morrow
morning. I have abandoned all thought of retracing my steps to Tripoli, & came here with an intention of proceeding to Jenne by water, but this intention has been utterly upset, and my situation in Timbuctoo rendered exceedingly unsafe by the unfriendly disposition of the Foolahs of Massina,* who have this year upset the dominion of the Tuaric & made themselves patrons of Timbuctoo, & whose Sultan has expressed his hostility towards me in no unequivocal terms, in a letter which Al Kaidi Boubokar the Sheik of this town received from him a few days after my arrival. He has now got intelligence of my being in Timbuctoo & as a party of Foolahs are hourly expected Al Kaidi Boubokar, who is an excellent good man, & who trembles for my safety, has strongly urged my immediate departure, and I am sorry to say that the notice has been so short, and I have so much to do previous to going away, that this is the only communication I shall for the present be able to make. My destination is Sego [Segou], whither I hope to arrive in fifteen days, but I regret to say that the road is a vile one and my perils are not yet at an end, but my trust is God Who has hitherto bore me up amidst the severest trials & protected me amid the numerous dangers to which I have been exposed. I have no time to give you my account of Timbuctoo, but shall briefly state that in every respect except in size (which does not exceed four miles in circumference) it has completely met my expectations. Kabra [Kabara] is only five miles distant, & is a neat town, situated on the very margin of the river. I have been busily employed during my stay, searching the records in the town, which are abundant, & in acquiring information of every kind, nor is it with any common degree of satisfaction that I say, my perseverance has been amply rewarded. I am now convinced that my hypothesis concerning the termination of the Niger is correct [presumably, that it emptied into the Bight of Benin].

  May God bless you all; I shall write you fully from Sego, as also My Lord Bathurst, & I rather apprehend that both letters will reach you at one time, as none of the Ghadamis Merchants leave Timbuctoo for two months to come.

  Again, May God bless you all, My Dear Emma must excuse my writing, I have begun a hundred letters to her, but have been unable to get thro’ one; she is ever uppermost in my thoughts, & I look forward with delight to the hour of our meeting, which please God, is now at no great distance.—

  Yours ever truly

  A. Gordon Laing

  When Warrington received this letter many months later, he scribbled a note on it, saying “From Major Laing to Consul Warrington dated 21st September at Timbuctoo, Being the First Letter ever written from that place by any Christian.”

  It would have been out of character for Laing to do anything, or leave any place, exactly on schedule; he typically changed his route at the last minute. But his departure from Timbuktu was the exception. The next day, Friday, September 22, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Laing left with his freed slave Bongola and an unnamed Arab youth, passing out the gates of Timbuktu for the last time. Sheikh Ahmadu El Abeyd, who had agreed to accompany him and offer the protection of his caravan, either started with the trio or caught up with them later, near a place called Sahab (northwest from the city, and away from the river).

  Laing was still a bit weak, but much improved from the state in which he had arrived five weeks earlier. He was elated at having met his first objective, the discovery of a city not visited by Europeans for centuries, though he had found no streets paved with gold nor palace walls embedded with gems.

  About his second objective, he was “at sixes and sevens.” Lord Bathurst had explicitly ordered him to follow the Niger downriver from Kabara (Timbuktu’s port), delineate its course through the African interior, and especially to discover its debouchment into the Atlantic. How was he to accomplish this?

  In one matter, the discovery of Timbuktu, he never wavered, even in the depths of illness. He was convinced it was the will of God that he should discover Timbuktu, and he never doubted that he merited this special favor from heaven. “I shall do more than has ever been done before,” he wrote in the only surviving letter from Africa to his parents, “and show myself to be what I have ever considered myself to be—a man of enterprise and of genius.”

  But whether he could or should pursue the course of the Niger to its mouth—that was a question that dogged his last weeks. There was reason to believe such a trip was not feasible, and might even be suicidal. First, the governor of the town had warned him repeatedly that he risked death merely by staying in the vicinity, ordering him to retrace his steps through the Sahara back to Tripoli. Second, not long after arriving at Timbuktu, he learned that Fulani warriors were in force upon the river in pirogues, both upstream and downstream of Kabara, which precluded his use of a canoe if he hoped to remain undetected.

  Had he decided to follow the river in either direction, he would have had to do so on land, and at some distance from the banks so as not to be seen. It is possible that he abandoned the idea of water travel on the Niger as early as the time of his stay at In Salah, when he had been comically, but dangerously, mistaken for Mungo Park. In reporting that incident to Warrington, he speculated that travel on the Niger would be far too dangerous, given the rage that still lingered from Mungo Park’s vicious attacks on indigenous peoples. He suggests that he had already renounced his intention of following the river to its mouth by canoe, aspiring to make the trek by land, following the riverbank in concealment.

  After much mental torture and deliberation (though not a “team player,” he always took his orders from Lord Bathurst seriously), Laing determined that his only wise course was to abandon the Niger quest and go upriver to Sansanding and Jenne. From there he could make his way to the territories of Africa he knew so well, the hinterland of Sierra Leone, the land of the Ashanti. There he could easily reach the Atlantic and return to Tripoli by ship. His statement that he was bound for Segou, 400 miles upriver from Timbuktu, is consistent with this hypothesis.

  In Tripoli, meanwhile, the first vague reports of the Tuareg attack against Laing in the Tanezrouft Desert were making their way back to the English Garden, where they alarmed the British consul and his increasingly fragile daughter. But the Warringtons had heard unsettling reports from the desert before, and every member of the family had supreme confidence in Laing.

  They continued writing letters to him, dispatching them month by month, week by week, courier by courier, into the vastness, the oblivion, the baleful tranquillity of an indifferent “Zahara.”

  *Islam proscribes images of any kind in a mosque.

  *Massina is a great pastoral plain in what is today Mali. Its center lies about 110 miles southwest of Timbuktu. In Laing’s day, the people of Massina, being closer to the coast, were more likely to have had some knowledge of the presence of European traders in places like Guinea.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE LONG SILENCE

  IN SPITE OF THE MESSENGERS and caravans crisscrossing its infinite solitudes, the Sahara was slow to give up news of Laing’s progress. This was puzzling, for as Consul Warrington knew, in the desert, no matter its vast extent and the tiny number of people who populated it, news traveled fast. Everyone seemed to know what everyone else was doing. The trading caravans carried the local gossip of all the places they visited, from the great cities on the brim of the Mediterranean to the smallest oases in the heart of the Tanezrouft.

  In the early nineteenth century, nothing caused more of a stir than the passage of a European through the desert. The activities of men like Clapperton and Laing were a great source of talk, though usually, and inevitably, unreliable and distorted as it passed from mouth to mouth and ear to ear. Many of the caravans converged at Tripoli, so it was not long before disturbing rumors began to reach the ever-attentive British consul.

  Sequested in the English Garden, Emma Warrington Laing waited anxiously. Tales of the Tuareg attack on her husband had come to the city, but Emma’s family conspired to say nothing about them to her. The first hard news arrived on November 3, 1826, when Hamet, Laing’s camel driver, presented himself at the British con
sulate. He told Warrington of Sheikh Babani’s treachery and death, of the epidemic at the camp, and of the death of Sidi Mokhtar, the desert leader who gave Laing sanctuary after the Tuareg attack. He had left Major Laing, he said, “on the point of proceeding to Timbuktu under Sidi Mohammed’s (Mokhtar’s son) special protection.”

  Hamet produced a letter in Laing’s handwriting. Laing stated he would be in Ghadames by November and hoped to be greeted by a courier from Tripoli with the latest news and “a little tea and sugar and some sort of tin teapot, also half a dozen pairs of stockings and about 400 dollars,” requests that seemed reassuringly quotidian. The consul, who took the camel driver’s deposition, told his wife. But neither could face Emma with Hamet’s account, which had been unsparing in its detail about Laing’s grisly wounds.

  Instead, the consul sent a courier (Jacob, Clapperton’s reliable old servant) to Ghadames, giving him a letter to Laing containing a redacted version of the details of the attack, with the entreaty that he confirm them. He hoped Laing, by now, would have made it that far back. Afraid that it was wrong to keep Emma in the dark, he let her read the archived consular copy of his own letter containing the less vivid version of the attack in the Tanezrouft. Despite Warrington’s effort to hide the worst of the details, Emma was shattered. Having been kept in total ignorance of “all the dreadful, cruel reports,” as she put it, she was utterly unprepared for this sudden revelation of the truth.

  In her anguish, Emma accused her parents of sending Laing to his death. Why had they let her deceive herself with hopes of his quick return? They were speechless, overcome by her anger. Eventually the consul and his wife convinced her that Laing might have survived. Propped up on cushions in her bed at the country estate, she listened to her father and mother discussing arrangements for a second courier’s journey to Ghadames, fondling the purchases—the tea, the sugar, the tin teapot, the stockings, some sweets, a bar of soap—she had selected with her own hands and now insisted be sent to him.