Mission Timbuktu

In August 1826, an eccentric Scot, Major Alexander Gordon Laing, staggered
into then mythical Timbuktu, in today’s Mali. Assured the journey from
Tripoli would take ten weeks, and ‘could be travelled by a child’, Laing
instead endured thirteen months of drama and horror. Britain and France were
racing to rediscover the city of gold and learning, unheard about for centuries,
and to chart Timbuktu’s oddly unmapped hinterlands, including the equally
elusive River Niger. Immeasurable riches awaited, they thought. Numerous
explorers failed; many simply met death. Yet the victorious major also never
came home, nor felt the fame he craved, nor, after a whirlwind romance, saw
his distraught bride again. But as Laing often proclaimed he would, he
achieved the goal, writing from Timbuktu just before leaving. A Fulani jihad
raged outside: with a price on his head, Laing was inevitably killed. Tripoli’s
famous British consul—also the bride’s father—noted the letter was ‘the first
ever written from that place by any Christian’. But Laing’s journals, revealing
Timbuktu’s secrets, vanished: their loss became ‘a state affair’. Then a French
cobbler returned from Timbuktu. Had the French really stolen the
journals? What happened to the bride? Why has Laing been largely forgotten, or derided?

Henrietta is a former Guardian photographer (1992-2002), specialising in Arts
and reportage (www.henriettabutler.com), and has travelled widely.  She first
went to the Sahara in 2001 for Guardian Travel (unexpectedly meeting
Michael Palin deep in the bush filming ‘Sahara’). In 2015 she authored The
Tuareg or Kel Tamasheq and a history of the Sahara for an exhibition at the
Royal Geographical Society (www.tuaregtime.co.uk).  It incorporated the
work of specialists of Tuareg history and culture, and their photography, with
her research and photographs, and she discovered Major Laing. Henrietta took
an MA in History at UCL (2019), notably assessing Tuareg poetry. She lives in
Dorset and France