Petit texte :
"Gone to Timbuctoo
Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu,
Tumbuktu or Tembuch ? It doesn’t matter how you
spell it. The word is a slogan, a ritual formula,
once heard never forgotten. At eleven I knew of
Timbuctoo as a mysterious city in the heart of
Africa where they ate mice – and served them to
visitors. A blurred photograph, in a
traveller’account of Timbuctoo, of a bowl of muddy
broth with little pink feet rising to the surface
excited me greatly. Naturally, I wrote an
unprintable limerick about it. The word ‘mice in the
stew ‘ rhymed with Timbuctoo and for me both are
still inextrcably associated.
There are two Timbuctoos. One is the administrative
centre of the Sixth Region of the Republic of Mali,
once French Sudan – the tired caravan city where the
Niger bends into the Sahara, ‘the meeting place of
all who travel by camel or canoe’, though the
meeting was rarely amicable ; the shadeless
Timbuctoo that blisters in the sun, cut off by
grey-green waterways for much of the year, and
accessible by river, desert caravan or the Russian
airplane that comes three times a week from Bamako.
And then there is the Timbuctoo of the mind – a
mythical city in a Never-Never Land, an antipodean
mirage, a symbol for the back of beyond or a flat
joke. ‘He has gone to Timbuctoo’, they say, meaning
‘He is out of his mind’ (or drugged) ; ‘He has left
his wife’ (or his creditors) ; ‘He has gone away
indefinitely and will probably not return’ ; or ‘He
can’t think of anywhere better to go than Timbuctoo.
I thought only American tourists went there.’
‘Was it lovely ?’ asked a friend on my return. No.
It is far from lovely ; unless you find mud walls
crumbling to dust lovely – walls of a spectral grey,
as if all the colour has been sucked out by the sun.
To the passing visitor there are only two questions.
‘Where is my next drink coming from ?’ and ‘Why am I
there at all ?’ And yet, as I write, I remember the
desert wind whippind up the green waters ; the thin
hard blue of the sky ; enormous women rolling round
the town in pale indigo cotton boubous ; the
shutters on the houses the same hard blue against
mud-grey walls ; orange bowerbirds that weave their
basket nests in feathery acacias ; gleaming black
gardeners sluicing water from leather skins,
lovingly, on rows of blue-green onions ; lean
aristocratic Touaregs, of super-natural appearence,
with coloured leather shields and shining spears,
their faces encased in indigo veils, which, like
carbon paper, dye their skin a thunder-cloud blue ;
wild Moors with corkscrew curls ; firm-breasted Bela
girls of the old slave caste, stripped to the waist,
pounding at their mortars and keeping time with
monotonous tunes ; and monumental Songhai ladies
with great basketshaped earrings like those worm by
the Queen of Ur over four thousand years ago.
And at night the half-calabash moon reflected in the
river of oxidised silver, rippled with the activity
of insects ; white egrets roosting in the acacias ;
the thumping of a tam-tam in town ; the sound of
spontaneous laughter welling up like clear water ;
the bull frogs, whining mosquitoes that prevented
sleep, and on the desert side the far-off bowls of
jackals or the guard-dogs of nomad camps. Perhaps
the Timbuctoo of the mind is more potent than one
suspects."
Anatomy of Restlessness – Bruce Chatwin.
