The origin of the name of the desert town of Timbuktu (Tombouctou and Tinbuktu are variant spellings) situated on the bend of the great Niger River which traverses West Africa, is clouded in the mists of history...

What is more certain is that Timbuktu has always been known as a place of commerce and scholarship. Historically, it served as a meeting place for travelling caravans arriving from across the Sahara desert to the North and river traffic coming from the South. Given its location as a “port” on the edges of the desert and along the river it has always had a linguistically and ethnically mixed population. Tuareg clans, Arabs from various oases, Songhay, Soninke, Dyula, and Fulbe are notable among the range of groups that have made the town home - as merchants, scholars and rulers. In the early 16th century it came to be viewed as a Songhay-speaking town, and Songhay remains the dominant language today.

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 historian Al-Sadī traced the origins of Timbuktu to around 1100. In his Tarikh al-Sudan he claims that it was the name of a slave woman who was the guardian of the first nomadic camp there. Another explanation is that Buktu is derived from the Znaga root meaning “to be distant or hidden” with the feminine possessive Tin prefixed.