Jody Victor : Even the well-known children's author, Dr. Seus, knew and wrote about Timbuktu - an exotic, distant land full of mystery and riches. Timbuktu is a city in Tombouctou Region, in the West African nation of Mali. It is home to the prestigious Sankore University and other madrasas, and was an intellictual and spiritual capital and centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahya, recall Timbuktu's golden age. Although continuously restored, these monuments are today under threat from desertification. Timbuktu is primarily made of mud.
Timbuktu was established by the nomadic Tuareg as early as the 10th century. According to popular etymology its name is made up of : tin which means "place" and buktu, the name of an old Malian woman known for her honesty and who once upon a time lived in the region. Tuareg and other travelers would entust this woman with any belongings for which they had no use on their return trip to the north. Thus, when a Tuareg, upon returning to his home, was asked where he had left his belongings, he would answer: "I left them at Tin Buktu," meaning the place where dame Buktu lived. The two terms ended up fusing into one word, this giving the city the name of Tinbuktu which later became Timbuktu. However, the French orientalist Rene Basset forwarded a more plausible translation: in the Berber languages "buqt" means "far away," so "Tin-Buqt(u)" means a place almost at the other end of the world, resp. the Sahara.
Its geopraphical setting made it a natural meeting point for nearby African populations and nomadic Berber and Arab peoples from the north. Its long history as a trading outpost that linked west Africa with Berber, Arab, and Jewish traders throughout north Africa, and thereby indirectly with traders from Europe, has given it a fabled status, and in the West it was long known as a metaphor for exotic, distant lands: "from here to Timbuktu."
Although Tuaregs founded Timbuktu, it was merchants (mostly from Djenne) who set up the various markets and built permanent dwellings in the town, establishing the site as a meeting place for people traveling by camel. Like its predecessor, Tiraqqa, a neighboring trading city of the Wangara, Timbuktu grew to great wealth because of its key role in trans-Saharan trade in gold, ivory, slaves, salt and other goods by the Tuareg, Mande and Fulani merchants, transferring goods from caravans coming from the Islamic north to boats on the Niger. So if the Sahara functioned as a sea, Timbuktu was a major port. It became a key city in several successive empires: the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire from 1324, and the Songhai empire from 1468, the second occupations beginning when the empires overthrew Tuareg leaders who had regained control It reached its peak in the early 16th century, but its capture in 1591 by a band of Moroccan adventurers was not the start so much as a symptom of the crumbling of the ancient economy with Portuguese goods that came instead from the river's mouth
The most outstanding treasure at Timbuktu are the 100,000 manuscripts kept by the great families from the town. The collection of ancient manuscripts at the University of Sankore and other sites around Timbuktu document the magnificence of the institution, as well as the city itself, while enabling scholars to reconstruct the past in fairly intimate detail. Dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries, these manuscripts cover every aspect of human endeavor and are indicative of the high level of civilization attained by West Africans at the time.
Today, Timbuktu is an impoverished town, although its reputation makes it a tourist attraction to the point where it even has an international airport (Timbuktu Airport). It is one of the eight regions of Mali, and is home to the region's local governor.
Timbuktu is a UNESCO Worl Heritage Site, listed since 1988. In 1990, it was added to the list of World Heritage Sites in danger due to the threat of desert sands. A progam was set up to preserve the site and, in 2005, it was taken off the list of endangered sites.