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Five
Hundred Years of Instability: From Invasion to Independence
The wealth and power of Songhay had been the envy of neighboring
Morocco for some time. In 1590, El
Mansur, the powerful and ambitious sultan of Morocco,
decided that he wanted control of the West African gold trade
badly enough to send his army all the way across the Sahara to
attack the Songhay Empire. The spears and swords of the Songhay
warriors were no match for the cannons and muskets of the Moroccan
army. The Moroccan invasion destroyed the Songhay Empire. It contributed,
along with such other phenomenon as the growing Atlantic trade,
to the decline of the trade routes that had brought prosperity
to the region for hundreds of years.
Continuous Moroccan raids emptied the schools at Timbuktu of teachers
and students. Trade routes fell under local control and deteriorated
beyond recovery. The Moroccans took Timbuktu in 1591 and ruled
over the city until about 1780, supervising its ultimate decline.
During the early nineteenth century, Timbuktu passed into the
hands of a variety West African groups, including the Tuaregs
and the Bamabra who founded the Bamabra Kingdom of Ségou
farther to the south. In the late nineteenth century, as European
powers invaded parts of Africa, French colonizers took over the
city. |
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Before
European explorers reached Timbuktu, the city was known mainly
through a myth that beyond the vast and inhospitable Sahara stood
a great city covered in gold. It was a place, people said, where
gold was as common as sand and where wealth, beauty, and culture
combined to create a great civilization. European rulers spread
this myth to encourage explorers to fulfill Europe's economic
ambitions for West Africa, which was producing two-thirds of the
world's gold supply. The fact that before the nineteenth century
no European had survived the journey to Timbuktu only helped secure
its reputation as a legendary place of wonder and wealth. By the
sixteenth century, Timbuktu had become legendary in the European
imagination, representing all the wealth of Africa.
Many European explorers had been trying to reach the fabled city
of Timbuktu since the sixteenth century, most of them dying along
the way. Getting to Timbuktu alive was nearly an impossible feat
that involved crossing the brutal Sahara twice and putting one's
life in continual danger from heat, disease, thirst, and hostile
desert nomads. By 1824, however, a race to reach Timbuktu, fueled
by growing interest in colonizing Africa, had begun. |
Photo
Credits:
(top to bottom)
1. Wolfgang Kaehler/CORBIS
2. Wolfgang Kaehler/CORBIS
3. UNESCO |
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The
Geographical Society of Paris had offered a prize of 10,000 francs
to the first explorer who could bring back accurate information
about the fabled city. Despite the dangers, many adventurous and
ambitious young men jumped at the opportunity to influence world
geography and win the big reward. Réné Caillié,
a French wine clerk by trade, was the first to reach Timbuktu
alive. Disguised as an Arab he arrived on April 19, 1828 only
to be disappointed by the fallen city he discovered.
Rather than finding golden palaces and markets overflowing with
treasure, Caillié found a desolate town on the edge of
the desert, without a trace of visible wealth. "I had a totally
different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo," he wrote.
"The city presented, at first site, nothing but a mass of ill-looking
houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions,
but immense quicksands of yellowish white colour…the most
profound silence prevailed."3
By the eighteenth century, the once flourishing trans-Saharan
trade was greatly diminished, due in part to a shift of the gold
and slave trade to the new European trading stations established
on the West African coast. Despite Timbuktu's economic decline,
the intellectual and spiritual life of the city continued to thrive.
When the French colonized the region over fifty years after Caillié's
arrival, two dozen scholastic centers still flourished in Timbuktu.
It was not until more than seventy years later that West Africans
gained their emancipation from colonial control. Since 1960, Timbuktu
has been part of the independent Republic of Mali, its landscape
and monuments still standing in affirmation of the city's golden
age and powerful cultural heritage.
3Caillié, Réné.
Travels through Central Africa to Timbuctoo. (London: H.
Colburn & R. Bentley, 1830), vol. II, p. 49. |
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