Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold Read online

  So geographers, in Afric-maps,

  With savage pictures fill their gaps

  And o’er uninhabitable downs

  Place elephants for want of towns

  The British cartographer Sidney Hall produced this continental map of Africa in 1829, just four years after Alexander Gordon Laing set out from Tripoli. It is considered one of the first “honest maps” of Africa, in the sense that Hall kept strictly to known geographical facts, which meant that much of the interior of the continent had to be left utterly blank. Note the enormous amount of white space— terra incognita— amounting to some 80 percent of the surface area of the continent. It was easier to map the surface of the moon with a telescope in 1829 than to produce a detailed map of Africa.

  Until that August day in 1826 when the first white man in three centuries is known to have walked through the gates of Timbuktu, some dozen European explorers tried to find the city. For two of these, Captain Hugh Clapperton and Major Alexander Gordon Laing, winning this prize became an intensely personal competition, crossing that thin line that separates a passionate but realizable dream from an irrational and dangerous obsession. Each man had a sense of entitlement to Timbuktu’s discovery, feeling that the trophy was deservedly his, and both knew that success would be crowned with worldwide fame, a great deal of money, and a permanent niche, like that accorded to the lionized Captain James Cook, in the history of exploration.

  It may be difficult to understand today how tantalizing this unsolved geographical puzzle was nearly two centuries ago, and why men would so willingly risk their lives in its solution. Every expedition into the interior returned defeated or never returned at all. And yet, the remedy seemed, at bottom, so simple: one just put one foot in front of the other. Any young man who could hike the wilds of Scotland could easily imagine himself claiming the prize.

  These European explorers called themselves “African travelers,” meaning they were private persons with amateur status, not trained professionals. They were sponsored (though rarely generously) by learned societies interested mainly in acquiring geographical knowledge. The purpose of early African exploration was scientific and amateur in the old sense: the search for and dissemination of learning thought to be the common property of mankind, undertaken by men who were motivated by love of the task. Of course, there were also the reinforcing motivations of treasure and fame.

  But beneath the veneer of heroism and adventure, African exploration hid more sinister elements. Though Africa was a cipher to white men, caravan routes and rivers were familiar to those black Africans along the western coastline who traded in their own kingdoms, and to the Arabs who had ventured deep into the interior centuries before Europeans arrived. These men were willing to risk their lives no less than Western explorers—and thought nothing of inflicting untold suffering to secure the three commodities Africa offered in abundance: slaves, ivory, and gold.

  To these Africans and Arabs, European travelers were “the devil’s children” and “enemies of the Prophet,” meddlesome interlopers who, with their idle talk of abolishing the slave trade and supplanting Arab caravans with British shipping, challenged the established order. European explorers by this light were self-indulgent and ignorant, though to be treated with respect for they possessed powerful technologies, especially weapons and medicines. They were men whose acts betrayed a disparagement of the indigenous peoples they encountered. Worse, they were incompetent leaders who risked caravans on ill-planned, badly organized missions.

  The fulsome Victorian hagiographies and autobiographies of men like Sir Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley would later dismiss that perspective, if they mentioned it at all. Africans and Arabs were “savages” and “barbarians” in the European worldview (or worse, putting a religious gloss on it, pagans, infidels, and enemies of Christ). The story of African exploration, as recounted in English and French books until the middle of the twentieth century, has been fundamentally one-sided, more or less a boys’ adventure story of heroism, conquest, and duty—history written black and white as a Victorian morality tale suitable for adolescents in upper-class boarding schools. That misses much of the story that is most interesting, and it distorts the truth shamefully.

  The second decade of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of that period when scientific inquiry, industrial expansion, and territorial acquisitiveness coalesced to create the modern world. For Africa, it was an important and dangerous time: colonial expansion would soon put all but a fraction of the continent under a European yoke. By the 1820s, an intense rivalry had developed between France and Britain over control of the West African interior. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize of 10,000 francs for the first expedition from any nation to return from Timbuktu, sparking an international race that pitted British against French explorers to claim the trophy.

  Only one British contestant would succeed in reaching the city, but death would cheat him of recognition.

  His story is the story of this book.

  *Seen from space, the landmass of Africa can be divided roughly in two: a wet green central south and a dry sandy north. For centuries, the perception has been of two dissimilar regions: Africa south of the Sahara Desert, or sub-Saharan Africa; and North Africa. For some, the dividing line is more than the edge of the great sand sea visible from satellites—it is culture, language, skin tone, and more.

  †“Sudan” is a contraction of Bilad-as-Sudan, Arabic for “Country of the Blacks,” referring to the combined savanna and sahel stretching across Africa south of the Sahara. The word “savanna” is also derived from Arabic, meaning the grass-covered land between the sahel and tropical forests. “Sahel,” also Arabic, means “coast” or “beach” and suggests terrain not quite as lifeless as a desert, yet not so grassy as savanna.

  *His Travels of Ibn Battuta, in Sir Hamilton Gibb’s magisterial 1958 translation for the Hakluyt Society, is as readable today as any modern travelogue.

  *Mansa is the word for “king” in the Mandingo language.

  *Prester John was a legendary medieval ruler thought to have reigned over a Christian kingdom beyond the boundaries of the Western world, perhaps in Ethiopia. Rumors about him began to circulate in Rome around the twelfth century. At the time of the Crusades, cash-strapped European monarchs sought him out to help fund conquest of the Holy Land.

  †A quintal weighed anywhere from 100 to 130 modern pounds.

  *It is difficult, but not impossible, to estimate the value in today’s money of this sum late in the reign of Elizabeth I. Tables of prices from the period show that fifteen good laying hens could be had in London for 1 pence (cost today: 20 pounds), a fledged peregrine falcon for 1 pound (4,800 pounds today), and a sword of the highest quality, suitable as a gift from the queen, for 5 pounds (24,000 pounds today). Using such tables, 600,000 pounds would be the equivalent in today’s money of about 2.9 billion pounds sterling, or $5.2 billion U.S. If this parlor game has any value, it is to demonstrate that “600,000 pounds” was not the small sum (from the point of the view of the financial press) that it is today

  PROLOGUE

  THE FRENCH ARMY CAPTAIN with the distinguished double-barreled name approached the Djingerebur Mosque, the oldest and largest house of worship in the fabled if decrepit city. It was here, on the steps outside, that the eighty-two-year-old city notable Mohammed Ould Mokhtar had agreed to meet him.

  It was nine o’clock at night and already the streets were empty. The Frenchman walked in silence, his footsteps muffled by thick layers of sand. Even in the cool of evening, the fetid stench was unbearable—that day he had seen unburied cadavers lying in a trash heap in the city, bloated like balloons. Des rues malades, he thought. Des rues mourantes et des rues mortes.* He longed for his comfortable bungalow in Algiers, where the climate was suggestive of the Côte d’Azure, far from this humid hole. He thought, too, of his family estate in the Ardennes, near the river Meuse. Anything to get his mind out and away from Timbuktu.
r />   In the street by the mosque, an orange glow came from the side of an eight-foot cube of mud bricks—the kerosene lantern in a single-roomed house. The dim light fell on Mohammed waiting on the steps, a handsome man despite his age, with a carefully trimmed gray beard, dressed in a Moroccan gown. One would not have guessed, from his appearance, how bloodthirsty his uncle had been.

  Mohammed insisted on addressing his important visitor in French. He spoke it well for an Arab.

  “Bonjour, Sidi,” said the old man.

  “Bonjour, Hajji, “ said the captain.

  “Vous allez bien?”

  “Ça va, et vous?”

  “Merci. Ça va. ”

  And so it went on for fifteen or twenty seconds—the ritual of greeting that Arabs seemed to love as much as Frenchmen.

  The old man invited his guest to follow him down a labyrinthine alley to a small teahouse a few hundred yards from the mosque. Sweat dripped from the Frenchman’s brow, yet he cupped his hands politely around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them. He noticed that he was trembling. He could not shake the premonition of death. It clung to his back like the entrails of dead animals he had seen rotting in the streets.

  Mohammed was jabbering, something about Africans as a race lacking the sensitivity of Arabs. “They do not feel physical pain,” Mohammed said. “They do not experience mental suffering. They do not feel emotions of love. They are insensate.” He prattled on. What rubbish! This was the twentieth century. It was time to get down to business.

  The tea drinking over, they left for the promised rendezvous with the object Mohammed had agreed to show him. They followed narrow streets winding between the walls of faded gray mud buildings, broken only by doorways and gaps where houses had crumbled into dust. Thick layers of gray-white sand carpeted everything. In every lane, houses had been destroyed by the rains or simply disintegrated from neglect. There was garbage everywhere, and that inescapable stench.

  Does death bring peace? the Frenchman asked himself. Many of the local people were animists, despite their outward profession of Islam. The animist is always on the alert to find the hidden meaning of observable events, he thought, for the invisible is present and active, constantly intervening in a man’s life. This is the animist’s nightmare. What is the meaning of a lance plunged into a man’s chest? What is the meaning of decapitation while one is still alive and can see the sword arcing toward one’s neck?

  Mohammed tapped gently at a wooden door. It was the custom in Timbuktu to leave your door open during the day so that visitors could walk in as they chose, without knocking. At night, doors were closed. Day or night, when one entered a building, one was blinded by darkness, stumbling on ill-lit stones. If the visitor thought his host might be at home, the caller announced his arrival halfway up the stone stairs by clapping. This is what Mohammed did. A female voice answered.

  At the top of the stairs waited a buxom woman in a stained white robe. Mohammed spoke to her in Wolof, which the Frenchman did not understand. She led both men to a table, and there he saw it, gleaming with a blazing light even at night in the poorly lit room. It was certainly made of pure gold, 24 karat, for there was not the slightest sign of discoloration or tarnishing, despite its age. The jeweler had left his mark on the back—the piece was probably Maltese, though perhaps made by a local in Tripoli. He picked it up, felt its solid heft …

  The Frenchman laughed, a soft chuckle, almost inaudible. Certainly this had been worth the trip, staying the extra day in this dank hell. Here was final, definitive proof of the identity of the partial skeleton he had dug up a few kilometers outside the city, the bones that had been languishing in a shallow grave for nearly a century. He had solved the mystery. General Clozel would be pleased.

  The object, of course, was not a rooster at all, as he had been told. He should have guessed! He chuckled again, the old man and the fat woman not comprehending. The golden bird, the golden bird! It was not a rooster, but of course to these simple people who, in a lifetime, had likely not traveled fifty kilometers from this squalid place, it would appear to be a rooster, a golden rooster….

  *“Sick streets, dying streets, dead streets.”

  Chapter One

  A SCOTSMAN AT TRIPOLI

  ON MAY 9, 1825, in the silver half-light of dawn, HM Brig Gannet sailed at six knots into the southern Mediterranean port of Tripoli, all but her foresail furled to reduce her speed in the propelling breeze. Having navigated the rocks at the bay’s seaward end, she passed the dour battlements of the “Old Castle,” the crenellated fortress that served as palace and principal residence of Tripoli’s bashaw or ruler, before steering for the central harbor and the deep anchorage reserved for her. Whirlpooling zephyrs kept her circling for a half hour before she could position herself to drop anchor. The British naval vessel had made the journey from Malta in a leisurely six days.

  On the bridge with Captain Bruce stood the only debarking passenger, a tall, trimly built man in his thirties who carried himself with the self-assurance of a military officer, though he was dressed in civilian clothes. A Scotsman, Major Alexander Gordon Laing was en route from England.

  He surveyed the harbor and coastline with alert interest as the square-rigged vessel’s anchor chain rumbled from its hawsehole. The Gannet’s prow swung slowly into the wind, now a soft south breeze laden with the smells of land.

  Major Alexander Gordon Laing in his late twenties, a year or two before his arrival in Tripoli

  On shore, a half mile from the ship, the gray stenciled silhouette of the Moorish fortress broke the center of the city’s skyline. Slender minarets, flat housetops, and sturdy battlements flanked it in a crescent westward. The delicate palm fringe of an oasis dimmed to the east. Green-topped minarets caught the sun’s orange-gold light in a cloudless sky. The white-walled city shimmered through the curtain of changing light.

  Captain Bruce told Major Laing he could expect a warm welcome from the British consul, Colonel Warrington, “a lovable John Bull of a man, well known to half the admirals and captains in the Royal Navy.” Indeed, Laing had already heard a great deal about Warrington in London.

  He commented to Captain Bruce on the size of the desert city; he had expected a much smaller place. Tripoli was isolated, five hundred miles from the main highways of sea travel. He saw it now as a metropolis larger than he had imagined, though certainly a city much alone—the edges of the desert plainly visible to the east and west: Tripoli, the whiteburnoused city, pulsating in its oasis on the edge of the desert.

  As the Gannet’s hands secured the vessel, the adan—the Muslim call to prayer—drifted over town and harbor. The Gannet’s first mate reported he had ordered the vessel’s longboat put alongside to take Laing ashore, but before it could be lowered, dozens of slim pirogues crowded the brig. These encircled the ship, their owners outshouting each other, naming the services and wares each was eager to hawk to the men on board—transport to shore, fresh fruit, potable water, leather goods…. Larger craft quickly followed, battling the pirogues to attach themselves to the Gannet’s hull. These were cargo lighters and flimsy dugouts manned by boatmen who wore loincloths and seemed engaged in a shrieking contest. Their job was to take cargo ashore and restock the hold. By 2 p.m., the American corvette Cyrene, under the command of Captain Grace, had arrived from Tunis and anchored next to the Gannet. By late afternoon, the bashaw himself sent a third vessel, a large flat galley manned by oarsmen, to collect Laing and his baggage and bring them to shore.

  “Shaking hands with Captain Bruce and his officers,” Laing confided to his diary, “I disembarked amidst the cheers of the crews of both Gannet and Cyrene, who manned the rigging on the occasion.” His send-off was heady stuff for a junior officer; Laing felt he was accorded the treatment of a visiting head of state.

  A plan of Tripoli, city and bay, as it looked in the nineteenth century. With its magnificent oval harbor, protected from storms by natural outcrops of rock, Tripoli was considered one of the safest p
orts in the Mediterranean. The heavily fortified “Old City,” completely enclosed by walls, is on the peninsula at right, protected on three sides by water. Hanmer Warrington built his estate, “The English Garden,” near the country palace of Tripoli’s bashaw, or pasha, in the menshia, or garden district, shown in the upper center of the map (marked “4”)

  The port founded by the Phoenicians and later fortified by the Romans was now governed by a bashaw (or pasha), agent of the Sublime Porte in Constantinople.

  The Regency of Tripoli was the most important of the three kingdoms on the southern Mediterranean coast (Algiers and Tunis being the two others) which owed their nominal independence to the Turkish sultan. Tripoli’s bashaw was preceded by a functionary carrying his staff of “Three Horse Tails,”* a rank equivalent to the governors of the three most important provinces in the Ottoman Empire: those of Cairo, Budapest, and Baghdad. The royal yacht carrying Laing was festooned with the bashaw’s flags and other symbols of office. It twisted its way through the fleet of Mediterranean sailing vessels that crammed the ancient harbor.

  The distance from shore was less than fifteen hundred yards, but the bashaw’s leaking vessel had nearly swamped when Laing jumped onto a flight of slime-coated stone steps leading to the wharf at the center of the mole. Here, a small mob of ragged Africans began to grapple for Laing’s luggage. One man tried to make off with a sailor’s duffel bag but was stopped when another man kneed him in the groin and demanded a coin for apprehending the thief. The less athletic contenders for porter were chased away and the Scotsman followed a procession of luggage bearers to the foot of the quay.

  “On placing my foot on terra firma,” Laing recalled, “(which was not until a very late hour, our progress being impeded by the freshening breeze which blew direct from the harbor) I was received by Hanmer Warrington, Esq., His Majesty’s consul general, and treated with that friendly hospitality which all preceding travelers from this quarter have experienced in common with myself.”