Dan Snow's History Hit - Why is Timbuktu Famous?

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Synonymous for somewhere far away, Timbuktu has been mythologised by the stories of old European explorers. But in fact, for centuries it was in fact a key trading post on the edge of the Sahara and the centre of the Islamic Golden Age- home to some of the most important manuscripts in African history. Dan is joined by Kai Mora, an author and historian in African and African American Studies as she takes Dan on a tour of its history and explains how this city of gold, an ancient centre of learning, is slowly turning to dust.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Tim Arstall.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. When we landed we saw instantly that the airport had been blown apart by a bomb. We crunched across broken glass to pass through the arrivals lounge. I always remember the ceiling panels hanging down, the sort of walls and partitions usually so strict at an airport. They were all rent-a-sunder, we just walked wherever we wanted. There's something very jarring about seeing the familiar signs that govern our modern world utterly disrupted.

We live and die by the exit sign, the arrivals arrow, to do this, do that, stop the car here. Public signage, it almost feels like the kind of hallmark of modern complex industrial living. So when you see those kind of signs defiled and upside down and broken on the floor, it makes you question the whole basis of how we live and organise ourselves. It makes you realise how artificial everything is. And one of those smashed signs had, well, one of the world's most famous place names. Timbuktu.

We hurtled into town down a back road. The main road was prone to ambushes, I was told. Our landcruiser crashed up and down on the divots and the potholes. But as we neared the centre, we felt like we were thrust back centuries. Narrow streets, buildings rising up to the honey-coloured, smooth walls of ancient buildings. Like the Jangre-rae Mosque, one of the great buildings of Timbuktu, one of the great buildings of the world. The sun's rays are so punishing, they baked the outside of that building. Inside, the corridors were dark and cool.

The city had just been recaptured from militants and I was there to look at the really astonishing process that was underway. Timbuktu had been a centre of learning and culture and art, more on that in a second, and as a result thousands of manuscripts had been produced over the centuries and they were there in libraries. Those libraries, those manuscripts, had been threatened by the militants and a huge number had been hidden by ordinary people, buried in yards and stuck in cupboards in their houses. But now they were back and there were dark, quiet labs full of people hunched over, patiently digitising every page. What I was seeing was part of a process, I suppose, that had begun centuries before. If we scoot all the way back to the early 14th century and place ourselves just on the edge of the Sahara Desert, north of the Niger River,

we'd have been looking out over a vast ocean of sand, big wide blue skies. But what's so strange, perhaps a bit like the Nile in Egypt, what's so strange is you see the lush banks of a river in the distance. The Niger brought with it life and greenery along its banks, but it also brought trade and luxury goods. And where that river met that desert? Well, you get one of the commercial intellectual centres of the Islamic world. It was called Timbuktu. And in the 14th century, it was the heart of a mighty Malian empire. You'll have heard of the Malian empire because on this podcast, we talked about Mansa Musa. He was its wealthiest ruler. He was the man who caused a bout of hyperinflation in

Egypt when he went to visit because he brought so much gold, so much coinage with him. He was the man that's often said to be the richest man in history. Whether Elon Musk competes, we do not know. Timbuktu in that period became rich. Camel caravans, thirsting for rest, thirsty for water and food after their journey across the Sahara, made their way through the hustle and bustle of the markets and the town squares. The call to prayer echoed across the city and in those squares traders exchanged gold from further south for huge blocks of salt from north africa and as so often if there's wealth and trade well there's learning there's art there's culture as well beautifully decorated scrolls began to be produced manuscripts written on italian paper and goat skins scholars and

academic institutions studied the writings of the Prophet Muhammad, the translated works of Greek philosophers. And for centuries, the city would play a crucial role in trade, but also the spread of Islam across West Africa. It also was the conduit for much of their West African gold to the rest of the world. That gold of West Africa fuelled the wealth of Islamic empires like Al-Andalus, in what is now Iberia, in Spain largely. And the scholars of Timbuktu pushed ahead.

They made discoveries in the fields of medicine, astronomy and maths that the Islamic world would become so renowned for in the medieval period. That was the patrimony. That was the legacy that was saved by the brave people of Timbuktu when extremist Islamic militants seized the city in 2012 and may well have destroyed that priceless cultural collection. I want to find out more about Timbuktu, so joining me on this podcast to talk about the magnificent West African city is Kai Mora. She's a writer, historian, a PhD student in African and African American studies at Harvard University,

and she specialises in the music and religion of the Western Sahel. So here she is to talk all about Timbuktu. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Kye, can you try and explain for me and for the audience the kind of geographical position of Timbuktu? Let's start with that geography. What's so important about its placement? Yeah, so Timbuktu, of course, is in West Africa. It's in present day Mali, the nation of Mali, which gained independence in 1960. But geographically, it is on sort of the left side of what you would call the Niger River bend, which is where the Niger River, it goes all the way up. And then it meets where the sort of the desert begins, the Sahara Desert begins, and then it comes back down. So Timbuktu is right where it sort of like bends into the desert. And this is why it becomes so important, especially around 5000 before our common era where the desert starts advancing further south. And so the river, people around the river start to sort of coagulate around the river as a refuge from this sort of like dry weather in the desert. So this is where it becomes like this first sort of like urban area where people are gathering around and building sorts of communities. So you're saying it's where the vast of the Sahara meets the beginning of those kind of rich, lush West African river systems.

Exactly, exactly. And does that mean it's always been on the edge of something or is it the heart of things? Timbuktu is in what you would call the Sahel, which is Arabic, it means shore. And so you have where the desert and the sort of forest area meets, but in between you have kind of like this coast of people who are constantly moving in or out. So at one point, it is sort of a place where a lot of people are gathering and meeting. In another sense, because the desert is nearby, this is sort of sporadic geography. So I think it depends on, again, things like rainfall is not always consistent in the area. And that's why the river systems become so important. But also then you have to think

about how the river systems sort of meet with like what they call the ship of the desert, which is the camel and how the camels meet the river. So I think it's interesting. It's not necessarily a place where it's totally unoccupied, but it's a space where people are constantly moving in and out. It's what they told me when I landed there, where the camel meets the canoe. Yes, exactly. So it's founded, we think, what, 5,000 years before present? So I would say not necessarily that it was founded as what we would know as Timbuktu today, the sort of city that sort of begins in our common era around the 12th century, which is the 1100s. But I think around that 5,000 mark,

where the desert starts to advance further south and people start to coagulate around the river, that's when you start to see more of this sort of urban settler sort of migration pattern. But how we know Timbuktu today as like the place of scholarship and learning and trade, a lot of that really begins in the 1100s. Okay, so what's going on in the 1100s? Why do they start building this extraordinary place? Yeah, so I think that it has to be put in context in what's going on in North Africa, which is the founding of the Almoravid dynasty in Morocco, and what is today Morocco. And these were essentially Islamized Amazigh, which the former terminology uses Berber, but we like to use the word Amazigh today. The indigenous people of North Africa, they sort of adopted Islam and created this dynasty, which sort of catalyzed the need for trade coming from south of the Sahara. That's where you have more of the sort of Tuareg nomads coming down into Timbuktu and into the Sahelian region, into West Africa, to then trade with the West African

kingdoms that we see starting to arise in the 12th and 13th centuries. Is there a sort of urban, particularly urban or scholarly culture in that group? With the Almoravids, again, it's sort of a dynasty that is an amalgamation of scholars, of warriors, of hunters, and they again adopt Islam and they become sort of this like dynasty and then those get succeeded. But again, their sort of imperial space or geography then triggers more people to go down into the Sahelian region to trade. Again, the Tuareg are known as sort of the middlemen of the desert of the Sahelian region. So it's not, Timbuktu at this moment isn't necessarily, again, a bustling city where you would see scholarship and all the things that we see in like later centuries.

But this is where the trade is starting to begin, if that makes sense. And is this also where we get the beginnings in Western European culture of Timbuktu emerging as a sort of mythical place? Because a lot of the West African gold, a lot of these products would be coming up through. Would Europeans have vaguely heard of it at this point or is that still too early? I think it might be a little bit too early, but I will say that what was emerging in Europe at the time, and it had a lot of different dimensions to it, was this legend of Prester John, maybe you've heard of. And it's basically,

yeah, this Christianized king or this Christian king who was very wealthy and was sort of ruling in this faraway place. And there was mention of it being possibly an Ethiopian king and currently Ethiopia. And definitely Mansa Musa was one of the people who was thought of to fulfill this legend or this so-called prophecy. But I definitely think that doesn't come until later on when there's more sort of like exploration i think this is still early the 11th the 12th 13th century is still very very early for tampa too and you really don't start to see like true european engagement until the shanghai empire rises in the 14th and 15th centuries okay well let's just talk about um mansa musa and the malian empire we We've covered him on this podcast before, but just to remind

people, fabulously wealthy, possibly the most wealthy man who ever lived. That's what they say. Tell me about the Malian Empire and it comes to absorb Timbuktu. Yeah. So actually I know Mansa Musa is one of the most famous people, probably one of the most famous West African Kings, but he actually doesn't start the Malian Empire. The founder of the Malian Empire is one known as Sandiata Kira. And he is part of this very vast oral tradition about how he defeats the nearby king and conquers and then starts the Malian Empire. And then Mansa Musa comes about 80 to 100 years later around. He starts to rule around 1312. The founding of the Malian Empire is 1235.

he starts to rule around 1312. The founding of the Mali empire is 1235. Mansa Musa, however, he is the one who, again, like you said, was known for being very wealthy, very rich. Interestingly, he doesn't actually absorb Timbuktu until after his pilgrimage, his hajj, which he takes to Mecca. So he arises to power in 1312. 1325, he takes his hajj. And when he comes back on the trip back, he absorbs two key places, which is Gao, and then to the west of Gao is Timbuktu. And this is when he also brings a architect from Mecca, Al-Sahili, who comes and builds the famous Jinjibur Mosque. And then also there is another mosque that may not have been built under Mansa Musa, but shortly thereafter called the Sankori Mosque. And these are sort of built under the sort of imperial reign of Mali and Mansa Musa until Shanghai comes later. But definitely under Mansa Musa, Timbuktu, it thrives. It begins to have this really large legacy of Islamic scholarship.

People start to come visit. Trade is obviously increased. large legacy of Islamic scholarship. People start to come visit. Trade is obviously increased. One thing I will mention though is that even though gold was a very big northward trading commodity, Mansa Musa did not have control over the gold fields, which were to Timbuktu's west, to the Mali Empire's west. That was actually controlled by local people who were essentially the middlemen. And Mansa Musa actually makes a comment that whenever he tries to conquer the gold fields, the production stops and there's no more gold that gets produced. But when he lets the people do their thing, then the gold starts to come through. So he actually never conquers that place, even though he's known for this vast amounts of wealth of gold, right? So yes, definitely under Mansamosa, Timbuktu becomes

what we know of today, what we dream of and envision today. And what about the center of learning? Where does that spring from? So yeah, when Mansa Musa builds these first mosques, or Mansa Musa and his successors build this first mosque, there is an increase in the amount of people that come to visit. You have one famous scholar by the name of Ibn Battuta, who we know a lot from. He was from Morocco, I believe, but he came and visited Mali, and he was the one who tells us about how Timbuktu is one of the places specifically of scholars, it was reserved for scholars. And they have there what they called a qadi, which is a judge.

This is not just a judge of Islamic law, but also helps with contracts and negotiations and all kinds of financial things. So this is where trade and scholarship really meets, meet each other under Mansa Musa. However, though, again, a lot of the scholarship really, really wouldn't take off as we know today. And then also this is some part of it is because this is so far back in time that maybe something's just didn't survive. But you really don't see the scholarship truly, truly take off until under Askiya Muhammad in the Shanghai. But under Mansa Musa, you do have an increase of people coming to visit, scholars coming to visit, scholars actually going out towards Arabia, going out towards present-day Algeria to engage in scholarship. So it's the start of it, but it's

not sort of the apex, if that makes sense. Why do they choose Timbuktu? Is it because of its placement on this route up towards the centers of learning in the Middle East at the time, this kind of incredibly intellectually, culturally vibrant civilization? Or is it just like Cambridge in little old England, the king and the church that would be an interesting place to have a university too? Well, Timbuktu was actually in a vortex of a bunch of different cities that were super important to west africa so you have jenne again i've mentioned gow already there was one called walata so it's kind of ebbed and flowed over time and timbuktu uh eventually became one of those things again under mansamosa a big part of it was the sort of battle for it

between the nomads of the desert, the Tuarg nomads of the desert and sort of the African south of the Sahara. So it becomes a point of trade, but where you have trade and you have multiple people meeting, you also have a lot of sort of contention and conflict. So I think one, it was its geographical position, which is to its west, it has nearby the gold fields. And then it also has up north the salt mines of Tagaza in the desert. And then again, also, it also shifted around this vortex of different major cities around the Niger River. And it just shifted over time. Why Timbuktu was specifically designated for scholars? That's honestly an interesting question. I don't know if I have a perfect answer for it, but I think a lot of it has to do with the

geography. And so they've got access to these cities of West Africa, as you say, but also up in towards North Africa and what we now call the Middle East. Tell me about the manuscripts, because this is just the most astonishing thing. I guess the manuscripts from that time are the physical legacy of that entrepot of learning and scholarship. Yeah. So the manuscripts are a wonderful thing because Africa is a continent that is embedded in oral history and oral history is very important. And I don't want us to get confused about the value of oral versus written traditions, because both of them in Africa are very, very rich, and especially in West Africa, where I specialize. But with the Arab scholars, or the not just Arab scholars, but Islamic scholars of all sorts of ethnicities,

they brought writing, they brought the written form to it. And in West Africa, it's actually called, and elsewhere, it's called Ajami, where local languages are written in Arabic script. So a lot of it isn't actually even in Arabic, the language, it's just an Arabic script, but in local languages like Wolof, like Mandinka, like Shanghai. So it's very interesting that even though it's in the Arabic script, they might also be, they very much are also in the local indigenous languages. All kinds of things were in these manuscripts. Definitely things about religion and Islam and Hadiths and Sira and Quran and everything like that. But there's also things about geography, mathematics, science, literature, also things about geography, mathematics, science, literature, poetry. Again, I said that Africa is a very oral continent. Poetry was a huge thing in Africa and oral tradition is a huge thing in

Africa. So you had a lot of poetry and religious poetry at that. So a lot of these things were just full of information. And still today, there's finding more and more manuscripts because the way that they were passed down was from teacher to student or from family member to family member. So a lot of people still have these very old manuscripts in their personal possession. But in the sort of archives and libraries that we enjoy today, there are thousands, like 20,000, 30,000 manuscripts all over. And this is just in certain strategic areas in and outside of Timbuktu. So these manuscripts are really rich in covering the history of this period. But again, I also want to emphasize that a lot of these manuscripts that have histories in it or oral traditions were recorded from oral traditions. So they are written down oral traditions, which I think is

important to, again, to understand the balance between the importance of oral tradition and written tradition. I think people will just be astonished to learn about this seat of learning with these vast amounts of manuscripts and how we're still discovering them today. So some of them have not been looked at by scholars, haven't been digitized, haven't been published. So we're still exploring astronomy, history, poetry, but even in Mali itself, despite the sort of political turmoil that, that, you know, erupts from time to time, there are also huge efforts by scholars and authorities and politicians in the country itself do digitizing and also just manuscript conservation, because I do think that I think digitization is very important, especially for access for not just scholars, but people who just are interested and want to see it. But I think there's also something about preserving these

documents, these physical things, especially in West Africa, the idea of objects. Objects are animate. These are real living things. The things that you see in museums, that these have really, these have special powers, they have real power to it, and books are included in that worldview. So also just having the preservation of the manuscripts themselves is also very important. I guess let's just say here, when Europeans arrived in West and then eventually Southern Eastern Africa during the great spasm of imperialism that came after Portugal's maritime journeys in the 15th and the 16th centuries. They assumed that they were dealing with a continent with no tradition of tertiary education or archives or things like this.

To discover that Africa boasted a university town pretty much as old as, say, Cambridge in Northern Europe. When did that discovery occur? You know, I think these days, especially in recent scholarship, there's sort of been a pushback in the narrative of Europeans, even themselves knowing that they were stumbling upon a sort of continent with no history behind it. I think that beginning in the 15th century and even beyond, there was many, you see explorers accounts of the kings that they were in the presence of,

of the people that they were in the presence of, the type of societies that they were in the presence of. The whole reason why they even sailed around the African coast is because they knew that Islam was such a huge thing in the area and they were looking for elsewhere to get around. So I think that there's been this slow debunking of this myth that the early Europeans thought that they had stumbled across what they called the dark continent, right? I think there are obviously caveats and qualifiers to that. Case in point, and this is not West Africa, but this is Central Africa. And a little bit later with the Congo Empire, the Manny Congo, he was sending envoys to Portugal. And he was writing letters to Portugal and he was receiving letters and envoys from Portugal.

And there was, you know, a back and forth. So I don't think that Europeans arrived on the continent and thought that they were just going to stumble across like a no man's land. stumble across like a no man's land. I think that actually doesn't come until much later when they're trying to sort of fill this propaganda of having stumbled across a dark continent. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. It gets better. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. To be continued... So the early explorers that arrived in West Africa say they found literate, sophisticated empires that clearly had enormous sophistication. In fact, that's one of the reasons they found them exciting as trading partners. And it was only subsequently that the Europeans kind of unlearned those lessons that perhaps the early ones would have known and started to assume that Africa was just a place that lacked some of that intellectual history that did in fact exist.

Exactly. Yeah, I think that's a good summary of it. There are some qualifies to it. I think that even some of the earlier Europeans, any sort of exploration where people are different from you, you're always going to have certain biases and certain opinions of them. So I don't think that every European came in and was like, wow, civilization. I think some of them definitely did have their, you know, what is this moments. But I do think the early accounts, the written accounts of travelers from Portugal, from France, Germany, other places like that have definitely shown the extent of, and that's where we learn not only from Arab scholars, but also from these early European travelers. This is what we learn a lot of African history from, from these accounts. Tell me just before we move on from

these documents for the, for the time being, tell me what, there's some seriously eccentric stuff in there to share with some of the more surprising documents that are in there. Well, I think one of my favorite, and he's a very famous name and he has an institute actually named after him in Mali, Ahmed Baba. One of the interesting things is that he actually issued a declaration of tobacco being permissible in Islam, which is a very interesting thing, because not everybody would agree with that. Not all sections of Islam would agree with that. But he was one who set that precedent out. And obviously that's changed over time, but he was one of the early scholars who gave a ruling on tobacco being legal in Islam. Nice. They cover everything. They cover all of human life.

Basically. So we associate the Malian Empire, interestingly, with gold. Although, as you've pointed out, which is so fascinating, they never actually directly controlled these gold fields, which is so interesting. as you've pointed out, which is so fascinating, they never actually directly controlled these gold fields, which is so interesting. But then that gold, that's how the Europeans,

Western Europeans would come to hear of the wealth of this part of the world, particularly as the force of Islam conquered Al-Andalus, modern Iberia, and there's this transmission of learning and gold and objects, I guess, up into Northwest Europe. Is this where we get the period where Timbuktu starts to be whispered as a sort of exotic, extraordinary location that the legend really begins? Yeah. So I think the legend definitely begins with 1325 and the Hajj of Mansa Musa. I mean, because this sort of myth or this idea of Timbuktu being this mysterious, vast, rich place, that starts with him in Cairo and all

the scholars, the Islamic scholars and Arab scholars who are documenting his story. Also under Mansa Musa, the theory that Africans first sailed off the West African coast and into the Americas also comes from. Mansa Musa said that his predecessor went and sailed to the Atlantic Coast. So I think that around 1325, and Michael Gomez, historian Michael Gomez, who's at NYU right now, he has a really fascinating book about it. And he talks about Mansa Musa representing this sort of imperialist vision that looked both towards the West, looked towards the East, towards Mecca. And then also it was expanding, ever expanding. And this was reflected in what was recorded when he took his sojourn to Cairo. And obviously, Europe and the so-called Orient have a lot of relationships. So I think that's where it really

started from. And so through the late 15th and early 16th centuries, you've got Timbuktu as a node of trade, but also astonishing intellectual, heart of intellectual study and endeavor. What goes wrong for Timbuktu? So there's a couple of things. After the Mali Empire sort of wanes off and then Shanghai opens up, you have a ruler by the name of Sunny Ali. And Sunny Ali gets a bad rap in two manuscripts that arise somewhere around the 17th century, but he gets a bad rap as a sort of, for lack of a better term, pagan king who's un-Islamic, who is sacking Timbuktu. He's sending all the scholars away and he's antagonizing them. And then he finally gets deposed and a ruler named Askiya Muhammad comes and he reestablishes Timbuktu, give the scholars their place back in Timbuktu. And, you know, you have even more scholarship and it becomes amazing. After Askiya Muhammad passes away, he's succeeded by Dawud, Askiya Dawud.

And Dawud also sort of continues the tradition. But then after Dawud dies, there's succession disputes. Who gets to rule Shanghai next? And with this sort of weakening of Shanghai, who now is ruling from Gao, but also from Timbuktu, which are very near each other, you sort of have this vacuum of power that the nomadic Tuaregs from the Sahara sort of come to fill in. They come to fill in this sort of gap. And so now the Tuaregs and the North Africans are further more and more increasing in power in the area until finally you have the Moroccan Saidi dynasty and they take over control of the salt mines, which was kind of under Shanghai's control in Tagaza, which is just above Timbuktu. And so after they take Tagaza, they're like, well, why don't we

just take everything? Why don't we just take all the gold? Why don't we just take over the whole trade route? So they come down and they invade in what's called the Arma. The Arma are a mix of indigenous Amazigh, Arab, and other sort of North African ethnicities. And they come and they take over Timbuktu in 1591. It only lasts for 10 years, though. They have what you called a Pheric defeat or a Pheric win, which is, you know, they won. They took over. You know, Shanghai reels back into Gao, into other places along the Niger River. But the war costs more money to

sustain than it does actually get them money into the dynasty. So the Armas, they end up sort of like America, right? They are sent by the colonial power, and then they get independence from the colonial power. And now, you know, Mali or Timbuktu is sort of its own little nation state. But unfortunately, as we were talking about before, the Europeans had already arrived. So a lot of the trade that was first going through the Trans-Saharan trade is now going to the Atlantic world. So Timbuktu starts to wane for its sort of hub as trade. It's obviously been through a lot of war and there's still a lot of contention going on in the region during the time.

So it's not necessarily as stable for scholarship anymore until finally the Europeans, they come and take over the city around 1880, 1890. Well, thank you so much for giving us such a tour through centuries of Timbuktu's history. I guess people have been asking me, as I've been looking forward to this podcast, why the name Timbuktu? Why does it have such a, is it just Orientalism? Is it just Europeans sort of imagining a place so apparently different to where they come from? Why does it come to occupy such a prominent place in people's

popular geography of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries? I think there's a couple of reasons for why Zimbabwe becomes such a world site. I think, one, because it's truly deserving of it because it was a hub of trade, a hub of knowledge, a hub of scholarship. Same thing with the city of Alexandria, for example, right? So I think it truly is deserving of it for its actual history. Again, I think the gold and the sort of things that came out of it, Mansa Musa and his illustrious pilgrimage, where he basically deflated all of Egypt's currency for 10 years, also gives to a lot of those imaginings. And then I also think during the 20th

century, and this is a really important point, that when Africans and Africans in the diaspora were sort of looking to repair the history that was distorted from them, you know, in a post colonial world, these sorts of moments in history were key into unfolding the true essence of being an African or being a Black person. And it obviously wasn't only Timbuktu. There are places in Nigeria that were very important. The Swahili coast was very important to Black culture and Black history during the 20th century.

But I also think if it wasn't for all the sort of African and Black historians who were trying to go actively trying to uncover this history in order to sort of, again, do some reparation to what had happened to them, we wouldn't actually know as much about Timbuktu and as vividly as we do without that. That makes so much sense. Thank you very much for coming on and telling us all about it. Thank you so much for having me. you