TIMBUKTU! Separating the western legend from the humble reality
From the Mayans or Incas to the Maasai or Bantu — the more remote the people and their homes, the better.
By college, I was disappointed. Serious literature suggested that the legends I so dearly enjoyed once were nothing but a condescending western (and Christian) lens of viewing the rest of the world. Hollywood made things worse.
That was deflating. It’s like finding out that Santa isn’t real all over again.
Luckily something else caught on right about then. Revisionist history repackaged as “popular” history started selling like hot cakes. Almost weekly you could find them in the New York Times bestseller list.
This was a perverted eureka moment. If I can’t enjoy my myths, I will read about the fools and racists who created the myths in the first place. God damn them!
“The Storied City” by Charlie English is a book that decidedly falls within that second wave. It de-mystifies Timbuktu in Mali, the center of uncountable legends — from one-eyed monsters, to villages with golden roofs.
By the 19th century, English and French explorers, in an attempt to enhance colonial prestige, raced against time to reach Timbuktu. For the sake of adventure, sure. But also for ulterior motives, like wealth, more slaves, or extracting further raw materials and minerals. But they quickly found out that Timbuktu was nothing but a dusty outpost shimmering in the scorching Sahel desert, clinging on to life because of the Niger river, whose source and course (like the Niles and Congo) was another great source of mystery.
In an ironic twist, the western travelers — out to discover mythial
lands — become mythical figures themselves, doomed to failure for following chasing their own lies and wild imaginations. Shocked by the climate, rocked by the long inhabited roads, and robbed and beaten by Tuareg bandits, they paid for their mistakes with their careers and lives.
Since the first unflattering reports of Timbuktu’s uselessness, however, the city has made a decided comeback. What it lacked in scenery and wealth, it made up for in ancient manuscripts — on science, religion, philosophy, geography and just about everything else — the upshot of a sort of “golden age” of African civilization (another western verdict) — the Songhay empire.
Those manuscripts became the focus of the world when Al Qaeda backed rebels took control of the city by force, hell bent on erasing any traces of physical evidence that did not conform to the strict tenets of austere Wahhabism.
Paralleling the efforts to save European art from the Nazis, a huge secretive and dangerous operation took place once again (no doubt centered on a few heroic characters) in Mali to save the manuscripts from the destructive hands of the rebels.
But are the manuscripts as plentiful as vaunted? Are they as revealing as claimed?
Mr. English, who gave up his job as a reporter of the Guardian to write this book, questions even the sacred of assumptions by the modern revisionist historians. Does that make his story post-revisionist?
Perhaps that’s beside the point for the fascinating story that unfolds within the pages should be more than engaging. It is a great read, but not without flaws.
Which is always the best kind of book, because you’ll have plenty to debate about later on!
