Timbuktu: From Myth to Modern Struggle
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Timbuktu, a byword for exotic remoteness, has loomed large in the western imagination for centuries. In medieval times the city was a stopping-off point for trade caravans, carrying gold, slaves, salt and ivory, that crisscrossed the Sahara on their way from the west-African kingdoms to the Mediterranean. It became fabulously wealthy. In the 14th century the Malian King Mansa Musa I – possibly the richest man the world has ever known – travelled through Timbuktu on a pilgrimage to Mecca with an entourage of 60,000 men and enough gold to cause hyperinflation in Mecca, Cairo and Medina.
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The city experienced an intellectual golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries. Scholars from across Africa came to Timbuktu and wrote about almost everything imaginable. Tens of thousands of manuscripts were preserved in beautiful universities and mosques were built out of beige mud and timber. Leo Africanus, a north-African traveller, described Timbuktu in glittering terms, helping the fable grow in Europe till the city was more myth than reality: an El Dorado of the sands. In the 19th century European explorers furiously competed to be the first to make it to Timbuktu. It was a perilous enterprise: travellers had to contend with not only the Sahara’s beating sun and deadly diseases, but also bands of marauding warriors. Alexander Gordon Laing, a Scottish explorer, was attacked by desert raiders who shot and stabbed him. Somehow he survived and a few months later became the first European known to have reached Timbuktu, whose streets turned out not to be paved with gold, after all. On his way back he was attacked again by Tuaregs, who reportedly strangled him to death with a turban.
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If Timbuktu’s glory days were long gone by the 19th century, the Timbuktu of 2019 is an even sorrier sight. Decades of neglect by the Malian government and desertification in the surrounding countryside has left it impoverished. Timbuktu used to attract a stream of tourists from Europe and America who’d come to see the magnificent 14th-century Djinguereber Mosque and go for camel tours in the desert. But today, it’s too dangerous for all but the hardiest travellers, thanks to an increasingly complicated conflict that is tearing the country apart. Seven years ago, ethnic Tuareg separatists and jihadists stormed into Timbuktu and took over much of northern Mali. The militants were armed with powerful weapons from Libya’s civil war and enforced a perverse Wahhabi ideology, banning music and destroying or damaging thousands of manuscripts, artefacts and buildings. Alarmed by the militants’ rapid advance in its former colony, France intervened and was soon joined by other international troops. By 2013 the militants had been driven out of the major urban areas and back into the desert.
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But the conflict is far from over. What started as a fight between jihadists and the Malian state has become a struggle between a dizzying array of armed groups. Criminal gangs, ethnic militias and groups affiliated to Islamic State and Al Qaeda, are flitting across the region’s porous borders and wreaking havoc. The violence has claimed over 5,000 lives in the Sahel, the belt of land that runs along the southern edge of the Sahara desert, in the last five months alone. Since Timbuktu was liberated, there have been scores of attacks and kidnappings.
