This book is as much historiography as history. That is to say, it is an account of the interpretations of Timbuktu’s past at least as much as it is the story of what actually happened there. The reasons for this will, I hope, have become clear: Timbuktu’s story is in perpetual motion, swinging back and forth between competing poles of myth and reality. Spectacular arguments are made and then dismissed before another claim is built up, in an apparently continuous cycle of proposition and correction.
From its earliest days, the legend of the New Jerusalem across the desert—called Timbuktu or Tombouctou, Tenbuch or Tombut—was fed from a mix of misinformation, credulity, and the European greed for gold. Why this place? Why was it this city that became the focus of the world’s misconceptions about Africa, and not, say, Jenne or Gao or Kano? It was partly a matter of geography: since Timbuktu lay at the southern end of the caravan routes to Morocco and Libya, exaggerated reports of its wealth that were carried across the desert were easily passed to Europe. It helped that the place had such a resonant name, an unforgettable slogan that “catches the ear and conveys images of wonder,” as the historian Eugenia Herbert put it. Crucial, too, was the city’s elusiveness: you could say what you liked about Timbuktu and no one was going to correct you. Robert Adams, an American sailor who improbably claimed to have reached the city in 1812, told the world it was governed by King Woollo and Queen Fatima, who never washed but greased their bodies daily with goat’s-milk butter. In a later era, Bruce Chatwin learned that Timbuktiens ate mouse soup, which was served complete with little pink feet. Even as momentous geographical discoveries were being made in the Arctic and South America, explorers failed time after time to penetrate La Mystérieuse. When Alexander Gordon Laing finally struggled, half dead, into its precincts in 1826, Europeans had been fantasizing about it for at least five centuries.
The “Timbuktu of the mind” overpowered the little-known reality of the place, and deflating it was not an inviting task. Having at last attained his prize, the normally verbose Laing seems to have wrestled with what to say. He stayed five weeks without sending a word home, and when, finally, he was forced to put pen to paper, he revealed almost nothing. We can imagine why: his discovery was that the great city that had dwelled so long in the European imagination was a small town of humble, earth-built dwellings. In those circumstances, who would not have written, as he did, that “the great Capital of central Africa” had “completely met my expectations”—and, well, gotta run?
René Caillié’s description of Timbuktu as “nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses” did more to correct the misconception, but it was widely disbelieved, and those who followed him only mined deeper for myth. The journalist Félix Dubois’s excitement seventy years later at discovering the fantastical backstory of a culture founded by ancient Egyptians that “still dazzled . . . three centuries after the setting of her star” is palpable. Not satisfied with the city’s genuine tradition of scholarship, he inflated it, repackaging Timbuktu as Carthage and Alexandria combined, and elements of his “Timbuktu University” legend were still being repeated a century later. Even Heinrich Barth, a genius of African exploration, mistakenly introduced the tradition of reading the Tarikh al-sudan as history, when in fact its narrative proved to be synthetic, an imaginative reworking of past events to suit the politics of the time. This confusion was compounded by the Orientalists Houdas, Benoist, and Delafosse, who understood the chroniclers’ pedestrian Arabic to mean their authors were capable only of relaying the information accurately laid down by their forebears, rather than inventing history anew. For a century, the supposed facts in the chronicles edged out the contradictory but more reliable epigraphic evidence.
Europe was not the sole author of the Timbuktu myths: the citizens of the town played a splendid part in its aggrandizement. Neither tarikh passed up the opportunity to elaborate on what al-Sadi called a “virtuous, pure, undefiled and proud city, blessed with divine favour,” which, the Fattash said, “had no parallel in the land of the Blacks.” Ahmad Baba, writing in an earlier generation, talked up the Timbuktu scholars’ miraculous deeds: these holy men could walk on water and make people impervious to enemy arrows and fire. The exaggeration of the city’s divinity may have grown up as a way to protect it, a sort of mystic defense, much as saints in medieval Europe were invoked to intimidate would-be invaders.
The great twenty-first-century story of Timbuktu, the account of the manuscript evacuation, fits neatly into this tradition. As Joseph Gitari pointed out, it appeared as an Indiana Jones story in real life, one in which the people of the sainted city, led by librarians, rescued their semi-magical patrimony from the hands of the book-burning jihadists. With such resonant, universal themes of good versus evil, books versus guns, fanatics versus moderates, this modern-day folktale proved irresistible. It was all the more powerful for being built around a kernel of truth, just as the more glorious legends of the city’s past were: only the most skeptical academic would deny that Timbuktu was once an important center of Islamic scholarship in the Western Sudan. The manuscript owners, I believe, worked to protect their literary heritage from the threat of looting, mostly by hiding the documents, some by evacuating them in operations overseen by Savama. The Ahmad Baba manuscripts in particular were saved in the manner that was described to me. These operations undoubtedly took chutzpah and courage, from the directors of libraries as well as more junior colleagues who braved the jihadists’ sharia punishments. From these fundamentals, the operation was spun into something larger and more dangerous than it really was.
Legend, by its nature, is oversimplification. E. P. Thompson described the tendency to simplify the lives of people who have gone before as “the enormous condescension of posterity.” We might add the condescension of distance, the impulse of one culture to imagine the people of another to be less sophisticated, more two-dimensional than they really are. This was what led the West to mistake the Timbuktu chronicles for first-rate history but second-rate literature, when the reverse was true: the chroniclers had embroidered heavily on the past, producing the most innovative writing ever to come out of the city. As Farias pointed out in that context, we outsiders underestimate the intellectual originality of Timbuktiens at our peril. Narratives of the place and its history are still distorted by this failing: our inability to imagine the city’s full complexity. Yet the misreadings of it have been the making of Timbuktu. What else would draw the world to this remote town but legends, rumors, its “far fame,” in Laing’s description? How much reduced would the city be without them?
I imagine Timbuktu’s story as a series of myths and corrections laid down one on top of the other. In the future, perhaps, some psycho-geographer will drill down through all these tight-packed layers that reach into the Sudanese past. At the bottom they will find the story of Zuwa Alayaman slaying the fish-god at Kukiya. They will watch Ali Kulun riding past on his way to liberate the Songhay, his horse strengthened with special food. They will look on as the powerful slave woman Tinbuktu, with her sticking-out navel, sets up her desert camp, and see Malian armadas preparing to depart for the Americas, and craftsmen sheathing Musa’s palace with gold. And at the top, closest to the present, they will watch combat helicopters circle a great convoy of Niger pinasses that forges its way upstream, carrying its cargo of invaluable books. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of books.