Timbuktu

Timbuktu began, by tradition, as a seasonal camp of Maghsharan Tuareg herders at a well a few kilometres north of the Niger, at the point where the river runs closest to the desert. That position made it: goods coming up the river by boat could be transferred to camel caravans for the Sahara crossing, and salt, cloth and books came the other way. Under the Mali Empire it grew into a town, and Mansa Musa, returning from his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325, is credited with commissioning the Djinguereber mosque, built in 1327.

Its great age came under the Songhai Empire, ruled from Gao, when Timbuktu became a city of scholars. Teaching centred on the mosques — Sankore above all, where students gathered around individual masters — and on a trade in books that produced the libraries the town is still known for. A Moroccan army crossed the desert with firearms in 1591, defeated Songhai and sent Timbuktu's leading scholar, Ahmed Baba, into exile; the Arma, descendants of those soldiers, ruled the town for generations while Tuareg confederations held the desert around it.

By then Timbuktu had become a byword in Europe for remoteness. Alexander Gordon Laing reached it in 1826 and was killed on the way out; René Caillié came back alive in 1828. The French occupied the town in the 1890s. In 2012 jihadist groups took Timbuktu, destroyed Sufi shrines and mausoleums and damaged manuscripts, and the monuments were returned to UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger, until a French-led intervention in 2013; the destruction led to the first International Criminal Court conviction for attacks on cultural heritage, and UNESCO set up a fund to rebuild the shrines. Work on the 14 destroyed mausoleums began in 2015, and their rebuilding by the town's masons was celebrated in February 2016.

The town's identity is built on learning and on Sufi Islam. It is called the City of 333 Saints, and the mausoleums of those scholars and holy men, scattered through the old town and its cemeteries, are visited and maintained by families who consider themselves their keepers. The mosques are not monuments but working places of prayer, re-plastered with mud and rice husk by masons and volunteers, a job passed down in particular families.

Manuscripts are the other inheritance. Private libraries, held by families for centuries, contain texts on Islamic law, theology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, music and poetry, many copied locally and many bought from across the Muslim world. When the town was occupied in 2012, large numbers were packed into trunks and moved south to Bamako, an operation that became well known outside Mali.

Timbuktu is also a meeting of peoples: Songhai townspeople and farmers along the river, Tuareg from the desert with their indigo veils and silver work, Arab and Moorish traders in salt and cloth, and Fula and Bozo communities. Songhai is the language of the streets, with Tamasheq and Arabic alongside it. Tea is served in three small glasses, hospitality to a traveller is a point of honour, and Tuareg music — the tende drum, the imzad fiddle, and since the 1980s the electric guitar — carries the culture of the desert around it.

Timbuktu is a town of a few tens of thousands, and smaller than it was: fighting, occupation and blockade have pushed families south and into Mauritania, and some 33,000 people left the city and its surroundings after the blockade began in August 2023. Houses are mud-brick and stone, single storey, built around courtyards, and sand blows constantly through the streets; holding it back from the buildings has been part of the town's work for centuries.

The economy is small and squeezed. Trade is the old business — salt from the desert mines, dates, livestock, grain and dried fish moving between the river and the Sahara — alongside market gardening, government jobs, aid work and, until 2012, a visitor trade of guides, hotels and craft shops that has gone. Rice and millet come from the floodplain, and much else has to be brought in.

The blockade dominates daily life. Fuel and goods are hard to get and prices are high, road and river routes are dangerous, schooling and health services are disrupted, and aid arrives irregularly. For many families the connection to relatives in Bamako or abroad is what keeps the household going.

Timbuktu eats between the river and the desert. Rice, grown in the Niger floodplain and brought up from the south, is the staple of the town, commonly served with fakoye, a sauce of dried, pounded jute leaves, or in a tomato and oil sauce with meat. Fish from the river — the Nile perch known as capitaine, catfish and tilapia — comes smoked or dried as often as fresh, since it travels that way. Dishes of rice or couscous with mutton are the town's festive food.

From the desert side come taguella, the Tuareg flatbread baked in hot sand beneath the embers of a fire and broken into a sauce; milk from camels and goats, drunk fresh or soured; dried cheese carried on journeys; and grilled goat and mutton. Dates from the oases and the Algerian trade are everyday food, and slabs of rock salt cut at Taoudénit and carried south by camel caravan still season cooking across the region.

Tea is the ritual that frames everything. Gunpowder green tea is boiled with a great deal of sugar, sometimes with mint, poured from a height into small glasses to raise a froth and served in three rounds, each weaker and sweeter than the last. Hibiscus, tamarind and baobab juices are made at home in the hot months, and alcohol has no public place in the town.