Historical Miniature

Great little piece about Timbuktu, the white man's greed and the swarthy man's duplicity. WaPo Link. Excerpt:

Timbuktu . . . was and is a real place, as Frank T. Kryza writes, "easily located on any modern map of Mali, near the center of the country, on the southern edge of the Sahara, about eight miles north of the river Niger." It is "an insignificant place, a village that festers, foul-smelling and intractable," with "a population of less than 19,000." Two centuries ago, though, "no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers -- and fortune hunters." It was believed to be "a city paved with gold," an "opulent city boasting real infrastructure -- markets, mosques, and important Islamic libraries and schools." Finding it, and laying claim to its vast wealth, became an obsession in Europe and, in particular, in England, where, in 1788, a small group of influential men, led by the celebrated botanist Sir Joseph Banks, founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa, a continent almost entirely unknown to the Age of Enlightenment.