It is still widely believed, at least in the English-speaking world, that Timbuktu is not a real place but imaginary - an unreachable location.  “Going to Timbuktu” means going to a place so far away that it is unlikely to be reached...

The high-point of concern by Europeans with Timbuktu was during the nineteenth century at a time when there were a number of exploration missions sent to “discover” it for Europe alongside all the other missions to penetrate the continent. It is during this period of extensive European exploration on the continent that the town is first characterised as the most unreachable point in Africa and it becomes in popular western imagination, a synonym for the “mysteriousness” of the continent.

 

The Scotsman Alexander Gordon LAING who arrived in Timbuktu in 1826 is considered the “first” European to reach it successfully but he was killed while returning to Europe. The Frenchman René CAILLE followed in his footsteps 1828.

The German-speaking Heinrich BARTH undertook an expedition to West Africa for the British Africa Association between 1849 and 1855. During his travels, BARTH was afforded the protection of Shaykh Ahmad AL-BAKKAI, a leading scholar in the region with whom he engaged in lively discourse. He arrived in Timbuktu in 1853 and resided there for between six to eight months. During his travels and while in Timbuktu, he wrote extensively and in greater detail than previous travellers about the culture and religion of the region. His sensitive description of people he encountered, their social practices and values - quite exceptional in the context of the Eurocentric anthropological viewpoints then current in western scholarship - and his description of places and geography remain a major source of western knowledge about Timbuktu and West Africa in the 19th century.

The great traveller, Ibn BATTUTA, visited the town in the 1350s when it was under the rule of the Malian state. His written impressions of the town at this time are important because there are few surviving accounts of life then. The ruler of the Malian state, mansa MUSA, visited the town on his way back from pilgrimage to Mecca around 1325. With him was the intellectual Abu Ishaq Ibrahim AL-SAHILI who hailed from Andalusia, a region of Spain. He designed a residence for the mansa as well as the Djingere-Ber or Great Mosque, which still stands and remains the main mosque of the town.

 

Timbuktu was incorporated into the expanding Songhay state in 1468 and remained part of it until 1591. For a hundred years after 1493, scholars and scholarship thrived within a milieu of political stability and respect shown them by the Songhay ruler Askiya MUHAMMAD bin Abi Bakr and his descendants. During this period, although it was Gao - about 400km from Timbuktu - which was the capital of Askiya rule, Timbuktu remained a relatively autonomous town, renowned as a place of books and learning, where students frequented the homes of scholars and congregated around reputed masters of various intellectual fields in the mosques of the town.

 

But this golden era came to an end in 1591 when the Sa’dian ruler of Morocco sent a force to attack and conquer the region. Many scholars, such as the famous Ahmed BABA, were taken prisoner and banished to Marrakesh. Others simply left the town. After the initial pacification of the region, the state entered a period of slow decline characterised by internecine conflict between officers left behind by the Sa’dian conquerors. They were furthermore unable to defend the state and the town from incessant Tuareg assaults. Over time the descendants of the Sa’dian invaders came to constitute a distinctive social group in Timbuktu. The unstable situation after the decline under Sa’dian rule continued through the 17th and 18th centuries. A similar situation prevailed in the 19th century but with Fulbe dominance over the affairs of Timbuktu. In 1893/4 Timbuktu fell to French colonial occupation which lasted until independence in 1960. Yet, throughout this period, scholarship and writing never ceased in Timbuktu.

 

In the late nineteen sixties UNESCO convened a conference in Timbuktu to look at the place of the city in African history. It was this conference which placed Timbuktu at the centre of African history. And when it was discovered that a great number of ancient papers still remained, the conference gave impetus to the campaign to preserve Timbuktu’s manuscripts and heritage. The large corpus of work, especially that of Ahmed BABA, led UNESCO to initiate the creation of a manuscripts library in 1973, named after the famed scholar from Timbuktu.

 

The Malian government-sponsored Ahmed Baba Institute has become the major centre for the collection of manuscripts from the region.  

 

The Oxford English Dictionary still retains a definition of Timbuktu as a place that is unreachable. Yet given the trade and intellectual networks which connected Africa with Europe during the first millennium, Timbuktu had already established itself as a place of some importance outside Africa by the 14th century. The earliest recorded reference to Timbuktu in a European source is the Catalan Atlas of 1375 where the city, spelled Tenbuch, is located in West Africa. In later centuries the city gained more recognition by scholars and travellers from Spain and elsewhere in Europe. In the early 16th century the scholar from Granada in Spain, al-Hasan bin Muhammad al-Wazzān al-Zayyātī, who became known in Europe as Leo Africanus, reached Timbuktu. He left a work in which he described his visit to the Songhay state and a number of the towns in the region including Jenne and Timbuktu, remarking on, among other things, the value placed on books and learning among Timbuktu’s inhabitants.