When and how did Timbuktu become shorthand for “somewhere very far away”?

For centuries, Timbuktu was known as a famous city of Islamic scholarship, and it boasted impressive global connections. Its Djinguereber mosque was designed in part by an architect from Granada in Spain, Al-Sahili – and, from the 14th century onwards, annual caravans of pilgrims from the surrounding Mali empire set out from Timbuktu and travelled via Cairo to Mecca.

In Europe, knowledge of Timbuktu spread from this time. It was included in the 1375 Catalan Atlas, and Genoese travellers in the Sahara in the 1460s mentioned its importance. The Andalusian Muslim known as Leo Africanus visited the city in 1510 and described it in a book of his travels, which circulated widely in Europe.

In the early 19th century, two Scottish explorers ventured to the Sahel and the region around Timbuktu. First came Mungo Park, who did not go into the city but instead sailed past it en route to his death in Bussa, Nigeria. Then, in 1826, Alexander Gordon Laing entered the city. By this time, however, Timbuktu had fallen into a severe decline.

For the British public, Timbuktu was characterised by this 19th-century mystery – and the imperial competition between British and French explorers to get there first. It represented the faraway locus of imperial dreams, competition and power. The city was something “savage” and yet conquered (or at least uncovered) in the exoticism of travel books, distant in its decline.

Toby Green, author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Penguin, 2020)

The exterior of Timbuktu’s imposing Djinguereber mosque. In the 19th century, the city was seen by the British public as a mysterious, exotic locale A portrait of the Scottish explorer Alexander Gordon Laing, who entered Timbuktu in 1826. When he visited the city, it was a shadow of its former self