Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/363

 Songhai of Timbuktu, is still widely diffused, although largely affected by Arabic elements. The Songhais are of nearly black complexion, with delicately chiselled features enframed in long kinky hair. Some tribes are distinguished by special tattoo marks, and in the eastern districts the women wear a metal ornament passed through the cartilage of the nose. In their present degraded state the Songhais are a dull, sullen, unfriendly people, described by Barth as the least hospitable of all the Negroes he came in contact with during all his long wanderings. On various grounds this writer argues that they at one time had relations with the Egyptians, a theory which receives some support from their practice of embalming and from their domestic architecture.

Timbuktu (Tombuktu), the most famous city not only in the Songhai country but in all central Africa, is known only to Europeans by this name, the true Songhai form of which appears to be Tumbutu. It is said to have been founded in the fifth century of the Hegira by the Tuaregs, who more probably captured it at that period. Mention is made of it at the time of the Ghana empire, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and later under the dominion of the Su-Sus. But such is its position, at the sharp angle formed by the Niger at the converging point of so many side branches, that here or hereabouts a market-place must always have existed.

Under the Mandingan kings of Mali (Mellé) in the fourteenth century, Timbuktu was a rich and flourishing place, whose fame was spread far and wide, thanks to its great trade in gold and salt. The name of Timbuch occurs for the first time on a Catalonian map of 1373. But a city containing so much treasure could not long escape pillage. It was plundered in the fifteenth century by the Tuaregs and Songhais, and a hundred years later by Jodar's Andalusian fusiliers, after which time it was frequently contested by Tuaregs, Fulahs, and Toucouleurs.

After the Toucouleur occupation of 1863, no further attempt has been made to resist the attacks of the surrounding peoples, the municipal authorities paying tribute now to one, now to another, and indemnifying themselves by the profits of the local trade in peaceful times.

The population, estimated by Barth at thirteen thousand in 1858, and at twenty thousand by Lenz in 1880, consists chiefly of Arabs from Marocco, of Berabish Arabs, of Songhais, Tuaregs, Mandingans, Bambaras, and Fulahs, besides a few Jews, tolerated since the middle of the present century. Apart from Portuguese envoys in the fifteenth century, and European captives in later times, Timbuktu has been visited in the present century only by Laing in 1826, by Caillié in 1828, by Barth in 1853, and by Lenz in 1880. But although Krause failed to reach it in 1887, it seems probable that the relations opened with France, by the despatch of an envoy to Paris in 1884, will be increased with the growth of trade between Bamaku and the riverain ports lower down. The