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On the Edge, Timbuktu
Project to Document Vanishing Cultures Begins
May 28, 2003 -- Should ancient human cultural practices gain the same kinds of protections that plants and animals are accorded in remote forest and jungles? Conservationists acknowledge they've made great strides in protecting the natural world -- many school children now know terms like "biosphere," and understand the concept of interconnected environments, life forms and species survival.
For National Geographic Radio Expeditions, NPR's Alex Chadwick follows Davis -- a renowned ethnobotanist who studies the use of local plants by indigenous peoples -- to Timbuktu to study the desert culture surrounding the ancient city. The expedition starts in Timbuktu, travels up through the old desert community of Araouane and on to the salt mines of Taoudenni in the middle of the Sahara. Travelers have been coming for centuries to Timbuktu, now part of the West African country of Mali. It's a resting point for those emerging from the desert, or heading into it. Wade Davis and his partner, photographer Chris Rainier, use it as a point for their departure into the desert, where they will search for fragments of the "ethnosphere." "I define the ethnosphere really as the sum total of all ideas, beliefs, institutions and myths brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness," says Davis. "It really is humanity's legacy. And just as a biosphere is being impacted by human activities, so, too, is the cultural web of life." Davis grew up in the woods in British Columbia, and then headed to Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in ethnobotany. He spent several years studying plant life in the Amazon and Andes. His work took him to Haiti; he became known for a book about voodoo, and a movie based on the book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. His career has been dedicated to studying tribal practices that are vanishing from the modern world.
His pictures are crucial to the ethnosphere project, which will use technology and powerful images to raise consciousness about places where technology hasn't changed much since the Iron Age. Working with the National Geographic Society, Davis and Rainier are seeking outside support for the project, so that over the next five years, the term "ethnosphere" becomes as commonly known as "biosphere." Mali is the starting point. Camel caravans carrying salt operate in the desert there as they have for a thousand years. Situated at the southern edge of the Sahara in Mali is the legendary city of Timbuktu. A millennium ago, caravans with gold, slaves and spices left Timbuktu to cross the desert to reach the Mediterranean. They would return with goods from Europe, and with salt from Sahara mines -- and with scholars and books. The salt mined in the Sahara and carried on the backs of camels for trade in Timbuktu helped turn the city into a medieval intellectual center. The traders need accountants, and they turned to Islamic scribes, who were known as trustworthy. But as ships displaced caravans and mechanized mining elsewhere made salt plentiful, Timbuktu became destitute. Malian historians are now trying to preserve the city's ancient libraries, which are filled with hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, covering subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, Islamic sciences and treaties. This is just one example of a vanishing cultural legacy that Davis and Rainier have come to document. "What will be lost ultimately?" Davis reflects. "Will the world stop? No. Will people in Philadelphia be poorer for it? Perhaps not. But when you take the salt caravan as one example, and all the intuitions of the spiritual world of (Timbuktu), all the notions of adaptation to the diverse habitats of the world, all the hopes and prayers of all the possibilities of all the people that have ever evolved on the face of this brilliant Earth, add those all together, and clearly we would be weaker if that was all reduced to a single modality of thought." See more about the ethnosphere project on Tuesday, May 27, and Wednesday, May 28, at 7 p.m. ET on the National Geographic Channel. Other Radio Expeditions to Africa: 
Take a Sahara Trek.
Listen to elephants in Central Africa.
Gorillas of the Congo
In search of Congo's bili ape.
Travel across Africa with conservationist Michael Fay.
Banning Eyre reviews a CD from Mali's Issa Bagayogo. Timbuktu attempts to combine traditional African roots music and modern pop sounds into songs that don't sound like throbbing dance-club tunes.
NPR's Elizabeth Blair profiles Malian musician Salif Keita, one of the master's of the 'world music' movement. Resources Find more stories from Chris Rainier and Wade Davis, along with video and photos NationalGeographic.com Timbuktu Heritage Institute Cultures on the Edge, a Web site dedicated to the world's cultural diversity. Cultural Survival, a nonprofit organization that promotes the rights of indigenous people. Learn more about National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis. Visit Davis' Web site. See more of Chris Rainier's work at his Web site. The Timbuktu Libraries Project Radio Expeditions wishes to thank TransAfrica for providing guides, translators, transportation and gear for the team's nine-day camp in the Sahara. |
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