Digging Into the Myth of Nigger Capital Timbuktu
After making his way through the dusty Sahelian streets of the port city and traveling north, he became the first European to see West Africa’s Timbuktu and live to recount his tale.
Numerous thrill seekers, colonial agents, and missionaries had all taken their shot at the fabled city, which was glorified at the time for its political and scholarly achievements, as well as the caravans of gold that passed through its gates. The fascination with Timbuktu, which is in present-day Mali, was such that both the French Société de Géographie and the British Royal African Society sponsored expeditions into the heart of the Sahara, with the former even announcing a prize of 10,000 francs in 1824 to anyone who returned with a firsthand account of Timbuktu. Caillié eventually claimed this prize.
But Caillié reported that Timbuktu was a small, provincial town with “nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth”—an observation that may have contributed to a shift in European perspectives on sub-Saharan Africa toward a more paternalistic and elitist stance. During the latter part of the 19th century, sub-Saharan Africa came to be seen as a region that lacked a history worth knowing—for its people were viewed as having made no significant social, political, or technological advancements. This, despite the fact that Caillié had stepped off the slave ship and walked to a city that we now know had seen more than 2,500 years of human settlement and was a center of both learning and commerce from the mid-14th century through the beginning of the 17th century.
When Caillié wandered through the streets of Timbuktu, he did not see a city in which the rooftops were lined with gold—as was the popular European image at the time. But he walked through a city that had a remarkable history of houses made from cow dung. His humble description of Timbuktu may have disappointed some in the learned societies of 19th-century Paris and London, but modern archaeological research throughout West Africa is uncovering evidence of large urban centers, unique social and political institutions, long-distance trade networks, and powerful empires.
Cities such as Timbuktu had a uniquely West African flavor—and they developed without the external influences of “more advanced” societies, in contradiction to what many Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries believed.