The Caravan of White Gold

by Michael Benanav

  I’d flown first to Dakar, Senegal, where I spent one night in a cheap hotel that doubled as a local brothel, then hopped a plane to Bamako, Mali’s capital. I spent a week making my way across the country to Timbuktu, traveling by bus, minivan, pickup truck, and, lastly, cargo boat down the Niger River. In all, it was a slow, cramped, dirty, sweaty journey—a fairly typical third-world public transportation experience. I looked upon the discomforts as a good opportunity to stretch my tolerance in advance of traveling with the caravan, which I knew would be leagues more demanding.

  Along the way, I quickly saw that Mali is a very poor country. Close to 70 percent of the land within its borders is covered by the Sahara, and is known as Mali inutile (useless Mali). Most of the rest of it lies within a swath of semi-desert savannah-land called the Sahel, a transitional zone between true desert to the north and forest to the south that is particularly vulnerable to the whims of climate fluctuation. Eighty percent of Malians rely on the marginal lands and erratic river flows to sustain simple agricultural lives of small-scale farming, fishing, or herding. Most work is performed by hand, whether planting and harvesting, casting fishing nets, doing laundry, or crushing the millet that is the staple of the Malian diet. Food, even in many restaurants, is cooked over charcoal or wood. The hands and feet of nearly everyone I’d seen were cracked and callused, tough as hide. It was readily apparent why Mali is placed fourth from last on the United Nations Human Development Index, which ranks the standard of living of 177 countries based on a combination of factors, including per capita gross domestic product (Mali’s is about $250 per year), literacy rate (about 45 percent), and infant mortality rate (a quarter of Malian children die before age five).

  But I also quickly realized that it’s the type of country in which I like best to travel: one in which much of daily life takes place outside; where things function with no concern for liability lawsuits; where the local version of order closely resembles the Western notion of chaos; and where poverty does not equal shame, partly because so many people are poor, partly because riches don’t increase one’s status in the eyes of Allah.

  The cacophonous, colorful markets; the sense of solidarity that forms among passengers crammed together in the back of a battered pickup truck that sputters like a wounded turtle along rutted roads; the groups of men arranging prayer mats on the sidewalks at sunset, kneeling and casting long shadows before them as the calls of the muezzins roll from minarets; even the littered streets and putrid gutters that are a regular feature of towns in the developing world—all these reminded me of other places I’d been, other places I’d loved. I felt an instant fondness for the country, a sense of homecoming, though I’d never been there before.

  I approached Timbuktu filled with anticipation. It was a destination of mythic proportion, whose name had been part of the popular lexicon since at least 1863 as a synonym for “the most distant place imaginable.” Arriving at Kourioume, with Timbuktu a short taxi ride away, I was tired but excited. I was a little anxious, too. The thing was, I had no idea how easy or difficult it was going to be to join a salt caravan; if it would take me a day, or a week, or if it was even feasible at all. If it wasn’t, my trip to the proverbial end of the earth was going to be a bust.

  I tried to address this critical uncertainty before I’d left home by contacting a Timbuktu-based tour company whose e-mail address was listed in my guidebook. I told them I wanted to ride with a caravan round-trip to the salt mines at Taoudenni, and asked if they knew how I could arrange such a thing. The agency director wrote back, telling me it would be no problem; he could easily find me a place on a caravan for a mere five thousand dollars.

  Even if I had that kind of money to spend on a trip, it was an insane amount to pay for what promised to be six weeks of Hell. I wrote back, telling him there was no way I could afford it. He responded, asking what I could pay. I felt like I had stepped into a cyber-bazaar. Rather than haggling via e-mail, which would have robbed me of seeing the all-important body language cues that are so much a part of the bargaining ritual, I told him I’d wait until I got to Timbuktu to talk to him, though I didn’t know when exactly that would be. I imagined he was giving me the “tourist over the Internet” price, and believed it would drop significantly when I arrived in person and had the option of shopping around. If it didn’t, I’d be out of luck. Five thousand dollars was about twice my entire savings.

  The taxi that arrived at the port was a decrepit white Toyota Land Cruiser. The seats had been pulled from the back, replaced by wooden benches fitted against the sides. The only way in was through the back door. Among the others inside was a young man who introduced himself and asked me if I knew where I was staying that night. When I named a cheap hotel from my guidebook, he told me I could stay at his family’s house for half the price, claiming that many tourists, especially Peace Corps workers, did so. Since it was late, and I’m never one to turn down a bargain, I took him up on his offer.

  I’m not sure what I expected to experience upon first arriving in Timbuktu, but because it was dark and quiet when we got out of the Land Cruiser, I felt like I could have been just about anywhere. Any mystique would have to wait until morning. My companion and I walked along dirt streets, zigging right then zagging left, the lanes becoming narrower and the buildings more densely packed. Just as I began to wonder if I’d been lured into some sort of a scam, we were at his house.

  He opened the heavy wooden door. We stepped into a large unlit foyer with a round, defunct fountain in its center, then went up a stone staircase that could have been in a medieval castle. While we ascended, he told me that he was a tourist guide. If I wanted to arrange any kind of sightseeing trips, or spend a night or two in the desert, he could set it up for me.

  What I really wanted, I said, was to ride with a camel caravan to Taoudenni and back.

  “I can arrange that, too,” he said.

  I set my backpack down on the terrace where I was going to sleep.

  “Tell me your name again,” I asked.

  “Alkoye. Alkoye Touré.

  I pulled out my guidebook and found the page I was looking for, the one with the contact information for the guide I had e-mailed from home. And there, circled in red pen, was the name Alkoye Touré,

  Alkoye was about five foot five, with a head that was shaped like a peach pit and topped with black fuzz. His skin was dark brown, and his droopy-lidded eyes always seemed half closed. In the morning, he recommended that we go over to the tourist agency office first thing, find out when the next caravan was leaving, and get me on it. It sounded simple. I could hardly believe how smoothly things were falling into place, though I steeled myself for what was sure to be a rigorous bout of haggling.

  We walked down lanes lined by houses like Alkoye’s, two stories tall and as solid as fortresses, whose carved, heavy wooden doors lent them a deceiving air of affluence. We cut through twisting adobe-walled alleyways that resembled severely eroded sandstone slot canyons. Some of the mud-brick buildings, thanks to unusually heavy rains in the previous months, had recently collapsed into ruin; others had lain that way for many years. The dirt streets, even the nice ones, were rutted by wastewater runoff from the houses, which collected every so often in murky, smelly pools.

  The office he led me to was like a windowless walk-in closet whose door opened onto the main paved thoroughfare into town. It had high ceilings, but was just big enough for a desk and a few chairs. Rudimentary xeroxed maps of routes in the Sahara were taped around the room at eye level. I shook hands with the chief, a well-weathered yet well–groomed Tuareg who looked to be about sixty and wore a long, loose robe called a boubou, and a turban, both white. When we were all seated, the games began.

  The chief said there was a caravan leaving the day after next, and I could get on it for $1,750. This would include a guide, one camel for each of us, and all the food for the trip. I asked how much it would cost without a guide, saying that if I was traveling with a caravan, I wouldn’t need one.
No, I was told, I absolutely needed one. No caravan would accept me without a designated minder—someone, essentially, whose job it was to make sure I stayed alive and out of trouble, so the rest of the azalai—the local word, both singular and plural, for “camel driver”—could focus on their jobs rather than on the foreigner who got in over his head. Besides, Alkoye pitched in, the azalai only speak Hasinaya, their Arabic dialect, but the guide would speak French and could translate for me. And $1,750 was the best price I could get.

  Though it was more than I wanted to pay, it was much less than the five thousand dollars I’d been quoted over the Internet—which I refrained from mentioning—and was low enough that I knew we’d be able to come to terms. I was excited but tried to hide it, not wanting to weaken my bargaining position by appearing over eager. Instead, I feigned shock at the price and lowballed the chief with a counteroffer of less than half the amount he’d named. He reacted as though I’d just blasphemed against Allah Himself. Back and forth we went. Despite my efforts to keep a poker face, I couldn’t quite corral my feelings. Riding with a caravan was the reason for this entire trip, and I was being offered a chance to leave with a string of camels in two days. My long-held dream was nearly within my grasp; I badly wanted it to be in my pocket. So I lost my cool. Somehow I forgot the part of the ritual where you stand up and say, “Thanks, but it’s too expensive and I’m going to go see if I can get it cheaper somewhere else.” I made the deal then and there for twelve hundred bucks (which I later learned was a fair price).

  Once we settled on the specifics, we drew up a contract. Alkoye, the chief, and I all signed it. Though I couldn’t help thinking this was little more than a procedural farce, written contracts have been a part of Saharan trading culture for centuries and have always been legally binding. Merchants used them to record the terms of the deals they made with each other and their employees—the traders who actually shuttled the cargo across the desert. As the nomad saying goes, “What leaves the head does not leave the paper.” The importance that Saharans attached to their contracts is evident by the fact that they bothered to write them at all, since paper was rare, very expensive, and never used frivolously.

  Paper had such power that something like traveler’s checks had been an integral part of the Saharan trading system. Rather than crossing the desert with the wealth required to purchase goods in a far-off place and potentially losing it to bandits en route, a trader often gave money to a merchant in his hometown who had connections with another merchant in the destination city. In return, the hometown merchant gave the trader a handwritten note—called a suftaja—redeemable for that amount once he reached his destination. A suftaja could also be exchanged with other traders like money, and could pass through countless hands before finally being cashed in. Thus, traders could successfully cross vast distances, including entire continents, carrying little more than an IOU. Unlike traveler’s checks from American Express, however, if a trader lost his suftaja, he was out of luck.

  I spent the rest of that day and the next getting ready to leave. Timbuktu felt like a true frontier town, a place ever conscious of its smallness and vulnerability beneath searing heat and desert gales. Accessible from the rest of Mali only from the Niger River, by air, or over hours’ worth of dirt tracks, it exudes an island-like sense of isolation, giving the impression that one has come to both the metaphorical and actual end of the road. With its dusty streets, general stores filled with provisions for life in town and on the range, and swarms of dubious—though generally harmless—characters, each trying to hustle a few bucks, I felt like I had stepped into an African version of the Wild West, with cowboy hats replaced by turbans, boots by flip-flops, whiskey by green tea, and horses by camels and beat-up Land Cruisers.

  Timbuktu was founded around 1000 AD. Situated on the southern border of the Sahara and along the northern bend of the Niger River, which flows in a twenty-six-hundred-mile arc through West Africa, Timbuktu could have been the prototype for the aphorism about location, location, location. It became the trading nexus for goods traveling between black Africa and the Magreb, Europe, and Egypt, beginning in the eleventh century. Among the slaves, ostrich feathers, ebony, and salt exchanged in its markets were boggling quantities of gold.

  Its legend began in 1324, when Mansu Musa, the emperor of Mali, traversed the Sahara en route to Mecca, making the hajj required of all faithful Muslims. When he arrived in Cairo, accompanied by perhaps the richest caravan the city had ever seen, tales of the staggering amount of gold he carried from Timbuktu quickly spread across the civilized world. Accounts by the great Arab explorers Ibn Battuta, who visited Timbuktu in the 1350s, and Leo Africanus, who visited in 1526, further stoked the European imagination. In his book A History and Description of Africa, Africanus wrote that the king of Timbuktu “owns great wealth in gold piastre and bullion, some of which weigh 1300 pounds” and that the residents “are exceedingly rich … in place of money, [they] use pieces of pure unadulterated gold….”

  In Europe, Timbuktu became mythologized as an African Eldorado. Its houses, rumor had it, were sided and shingled with gold. But for centuries, only one white man had ever been there: a Florentine merchant named Benedetto Dei, who made it to the city in 1470 when it was near the peak of its prosperity. Dei, however, left little record of his experience, and Timbuktu remained shrouded in such mystery that European geographers didn’t even know where to draw the fabulous city on their maps.

  Lured by its wealth, hundreds of explorers died trying to find it between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those who approached from the west, attempting to follow the Niger River, succumbed to disease or were killed by hostile natives. Those who came from the north were thwarted by the vast desert and the tribal warriors who dwelt there.

  Then, in July 1825, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a thirty-two year-old British army officer of Scottish birth, set out from Tripoli, intending to caravan-hop his way some twenty-six hundred miles southwest across the Sahara. He began his expedition with an Arab guide, a Jewish interpreter, a servant from Sierra Leone, and a couple of West African boatbuilders who, if all went well, would help convey him down the Niger River after reaching Timbuktu. But all did not go well. In the middle of the desert, Laing was double-crossed by his guide, who sold him out to a group of Tuareg bandits. Armed with guns and sabers, the Tuareg pounced upon Laing and his small entourage while they slept. Laing was jarred awake by a bullet in his side moments before a sword sliced into his thigh. Defenselessly absorbing a flurry of blows, he was slashed repeatedly across the face and neck, which left him with a broken jaw, a severed ear, and a fractured skull. One strike to the back of his neck penetrated so deep that it scratched his windpipe. He either lost the use of—or completely lost—his right hand, with which he had shielded his head. His left arm, wounded in three places, was broken.

  A mangled, bloody mess, he incomprehensibly survived, owing no small debt to the sterility of the Sahara. So feeble he had to be strapped into his saddle, Laing trailed the caravan for four hundred merciless miles to the village of Sidi Mukhtar, where he was struck with a yellow feverlike illness. After nine days hovering near death, he recovered, then set out to cross the remaining two hundred miles to Timbuktu. By this time, all of his original companions were dead.

  When I picture Laing limping through the gates of Timbuktu on August 13, 1826, I like to think that he had enough of a sense of humor to laugh through his tears at the cruel joke he must’ve felt had been played upon him. For, after completing his Herculean quest, he became the first European to discover that Timbuktu was a greatly overrated destination. Between the time of Benedetto Dei’s visit and Laing’s arrival, Timbuktu had been sacked by Moroccan forces. Then, European nations longing for direct access to sub-Saharan markets began establishing ports along the West African coast. As a result, the sea replaced the Sahara as the primary trade route between Europe and black Africa, diverting the lucrative intercontinental trade away from Timbuktu. Though it rema
ined an important center of intra-Saharan trade, especially in salt, it had long since fallen from riches to ruin, and was a city of crumbling mud. The Timbuktu I arrived in wasn’t all that different from the one discovered by Laing, though it did have intermittent Internet service.

  Laing headed home after spending nearly six weeks in Timbuktu, traveling north with a guide and a small caravan. He didn’t get far before his new guide betrayed him; three days into the journey, Laing was beheaded and buried beneath a thorn tree. He was not alone in his fate; numerous other explorers en route to Timbuktu, both before and after Laing, were turned on by their guides, stabbed or strangled to death by the very men they had trusted to see them safely across the sands.

  I was a bit uneasy about the historical precedent of guides killing their clients in the middle of the desert. I reckoned I would be in the same position as the explorers—a lone white man, rich by nomad standards, wholly dependent on my native companions in a place beyond the reach of law. Moreover, this was the fall of 2003. Six months earlier, the United States had invaded Iraq and was actively waging war on terrorism—which many Muslims (and some evangelical Christians) perceived as a sequel to the Crusades. It was a new low point in Arab–American relations. Images of Arabs burning the Stars and Stripes and threatening death to America saturated the media. My father, who had a friend in the U.S. State Department, relayed warnings to me about anti-Americanism in Mali, particularly among the Arabs and Tuareg in the north—precisely the people to whom I’d be trusting my life. Though I knew that most people in most places easily distinguish between individuals and their government, I was wary of how I’d be received as an American at that time; it’d be best, I concluded, not to let anyone know that I was Jewish, too.