Timbuktu Today

A Photo Essay by photojournalist Brent Stirton.

This is a modern essay on a legendary city, historically one of the wealthiest in Africa and for centuries strictly forbidden to non-Muslims. Strategically situated at the northern apex of the Niger River and the southern shore of the Sahara Desert, for hundreds of years Timbuktu dominated the trade for gold, ivory, and slaves from the African interior as well as spices, cloth, and books brought by caravan from the Mediterranean coast. It was a city of considerable scholarly endeavor. In the tenth century Timbuktu contained one of the greatest universities in the world. It was home to hundreds of learned tutors, who maintained extensive libraries of manuscripts concerning history, science, religion, literature and the study of the Koran. As its wealth grew, the city erected grand mosques, attracting scholars who, in turn, formed academies and imported books from throughout the Islamic world. As a result, fragments of the Arabian Nights, Moorish love poetry, and Koranic commentaries from Mecca mingled with narratives of court intrigues and military adventures of mighty African kingdoms.

Today’s Timbuktu is a very different place, a dusty footnote in northern Mali, the last major settlement on the edge of a vast Saharan wasteland. But amid the ramshackle mud-brick buildings, Timbuktu scholars are once again piecing together the African history that once filled vast libraries in the city’s heyday.

Photographer Brent Stirton and journalist Peter Gwin spent a month total in 2009 and 2010 documenting life in Timbuktu for National Geographic magazine, the story was published in January 2011 and is available through writer Peter Gwin.

 

 

 

Published on Jun 16, 2011