Timbuktu, 1953
By THOMAS HODGKIN IT was late at night and bitterly cold when I arrived at Timbuktu, It was also bright moonlight and the Prophet's birthday. So the town .was-full of the noise of drumming; the Imams read the Koran outside the mosques, and nobody went to bed. I was welcomed at the campement by a large French civil engineer from Douala, who fed me on rod wine and sausage sandwiches. He was entirely disillusioned about Timbuktu, having left his boat and his wife at Abidjan and travelled overland to see the town. Now he found he had to wait a week for a boat to take him down the Niger to Gao. " Timbuktu is not worth wasting five minutes on— and here am I for eight days. And I might have been drinking cold beer in Nice." Most of the eight days he spent in. bed.
Public opinion, in the Quartier Latin where I lived, was kindlier disposed to Timbuktu. But all agreed that it was ., pas grande chose." For my meals I enjoyed the lavish hospitality of the Popote Sous-0 fficiers of the IIP Compagnie Saharienne Motorisee. Here conversation never stopped before midnight and sometimes continued till four in the morning—led by an argumentative wireless operator who had studied for the priesthood : he had not lost 'the faith, he explained, but he preferred the theories of Voltaire and Jean- Jacques Rousseau to those of Maritain. The Sous-officiers, too, regarded Timbuktu as something of a backwater. Wives, they thought, were expensive. What you think of Timbuktu depends, of course, on what you are looking for. If you hope to find there the flourish- ing centre of commerce and university city that existed from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, where men of learning like Ahmad Baba and Muhammad Baghoyogho lectured and wrote their books, you will be disappointed. The international trade and traffic in ideas which once flowed across the Sahara, and made Timbuktu great, now flow through Dakar and Abidjan, Takoradi and Lagos. Timbuktu is no longer the centre where the caravans from the South, carrying gold and slaves, ostrich-feathers and ivory, hand over .to the caravans from North Africa, bringing copper and salt, Venetian stuffs and Barbary horses. Modern Timbuktu is a town with less than eight thousand inhabitants, a market for the peasants and nomads of the region, with two French firms, and a few Lebanese and African traders, selling tea and sugar, tinned food and enamel basins, cotton goods and haberdashery. These shops lie round the central square, where men sit all day with sewing-machines, making white boubous.
In the sandy streets which lead from the square are the houses of the merchants and men of substance—built in the traditional Timbuktu style, of dried mud, with four engaged columns, two on either side of a central doorway. The door itself is of wood, covered with iron knockers and bosses, elegantly carved, in the better. houses. In what are called the houses of deuxieme qualite bits of petrol tins take the place of iron, and the bosses are smaller and fewer, with less design. The door-posts are decorated with a kind of vine pattern, usually two or three rows of it, painted red, blue or yelloW. These, houses are of two storeys, with elegantly carved wooden casements on the second storey, reminding one of Aleppo or Damascus.
A little further from the centre of the town are the three great ,mosques: Djinguerdber, built on the orders of the Emperor Mansa Musa, on his return from Mecca, the largest and most impressive of the three; Sankord, also fourteenth century in origin, founded by " a great lady, very rich and very anxious to do good works," the centre of the mediaeval university; and Sidi Yahia, the smallest and least beautiful, which has suffered from a disastrous restoration, carried out in 1939 by a Commandant du Cercle with a passion for improvement. These mosques, too, are of dried mud, basilicas in form, with many aisles, divided by parallel rows of square columns. As you go towards the outskirts of the town, the houses become smaller and poorer, till you reach a slum area of round straw huts, grouped together in compounds of mud and thorn, where women cook and grind millet, and a few hens run about. This is where the Bella live—formerly serfs, now (like everyone else) citizens of the French Union, but preserving still in practice something of their traditional servile status. Beyond the slums is the desert.
Like its commerce, the intellectual life of Timbuktu is not what it was. When Leo Africanus visited the town in 1513, he was struck not only by the, wealth of its merchants, but also by the prestige enjoyed by its theologians and professors. " The dons," he says, receive a very reasonable stipend from the Government." He also says that bigger profits were made on the sale of books than on any other commodity. Though no longer a university town, modern Timbuktu is a centre of French education, with its ecole regionale, ecoM nomade and medersa. The headmaster of the medersa is an extremely intelligent and scholarly Algerian Arab. Originally, he explained, the school was planned to provide education, based partly on French and partly on Arabic, for the sons of chiefs and notables. Now, like other institutions, it has been " democratised," and caters for town and nomad children, irrespective of social class. (This is necessary, too, because chiefs and notables will sometimes pay as much as f20 not to have a child educated.) There are also several independent Koranic schools,..kept by elderly marabouts. And one learned old man is writing the lives of the great scholars and teachers of the Tekrur. Here, as elsewhere in West Africa, western education is break- ing up the old social system—with its five fairly sharply differentiated classes, warriors, preachers, craftsmen, bards and serfs—and producing a new elite, of Government officials, teachers and traders, who have been to school, speak good French, and are interested in ,democratic ideas. In Timbuktu, as in the Welsh valleys before the war, there is a tendency for the educated and ambitious young to move out and find jobs in Segou, Kayes, Bamako or Dakar, where openings are better.
I sat in the shop of Khalil Baba, an elderly merchant and a local leader .of the radical party, Rassemblement Demo- cratique Africain, and talked with such a young man, just returned to Timbuktu, after nine years' absence, to marry and settle down. (Among other jobs he had walked from Tim- buktu to the Gold Coast to sell a herd of cattle. " A risky business, since, if you don't sell the cattle within three days of your arrival, they are liable to die.") He thought Timbuktu needed " modernisation." By " modernisation " he meant, among other things, an improvement in communications. " Timbuktu has no airport in regular use, •and road and river communications are usable for only part of the year. This prevents the development of trade." He also wanted, electrifi- cation. There was talk of establishing a generating station, but it seemed unlikely that this would serve the African quarters. He wanted a big modern hospital, in place of the present small maternity hospital and dispensary. And he thought that there, should be a development of local industries • 4building, weaving, metal-work—with an " artisanat " where craftsmen could be trained in modern-techniques.
But even if Timbuktu were " modernised " in all these, plainly desirable, ways, it would still be far from recovering its ancient wealth and greatness, based 'as these were on a large volume of trade along the Niger and across the Sahara. That evening the camels began to come in from Taodeni, twenty-seven days' journey to the North, bringing great blocks of salt, for sale in the markets of Timbuktu. These twice- . yearly salt caravans are almost all that remain of Timbuktu's Saharan traffic. The Trans-Saharan railway, which would link Timbuktu and the western Sudan directly with North Africa and Europe, is still one of the great unbuilt railways of the world.
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