Ripcord Adventure Journal 2.1

Mali's Lifeline: Ségou to Timbuktu
Kate Leeming
Around the time I was developing and organising this expedition, I
had acquired a taste for Ali Farka Touré’s music. He used a mix of
traditional instruments such as a single-stringed violin, the njarka,
and the ngoni, a Malian lute with more standard instruments like the
guitar. The ambience of his music fired my imagination as to what it
might be like to travel through his home territory, the realms of the
River Niger between Ségou and Timbuktu. Ali Farka Touré is
internationally known as the “King of the Saharan Blues”, a genre
from which all blues music derive their origin – via the slave trade.
The waters of the River Niger, the essence of Ali Farka Touré’s
heartland, spring from the Fouta Djallon in Guinea, the same
highlands as the Senegal and Gambia rivers originate in. West
Africa’s largest river carves a 4200km path from the tropics through
the savannah and Sahel, kissing the Sahara at Timbuktu before
arching south through Niger, forming a border with Benin and
finally through Nigeria to empty itself in the Atlantic Ocean.
The largest portion of the river, crosses Mali, including what some
cultures refer to as the Camel’s Hump. Just as the hump of a camel
provides sustenance for the animal in times of hardship, the Camel’s
Hump of the Niger River is a vital source of life for the twenty or so
cultures living in its dry hinterland. And just as the camel itself is a
mode of transport bringing trade and culture to desert regions, the
Niger does the same.
The unusual crescent shape of the river baffled European and North
African geographers for some two millennia. They could not
understand why the waters flowed north from its source, 240km
from the Atlantic Ocean, to the desert before bending east at
Timbuktu. Early explorers such as Ibn Battuta, who passed through
Oualata on the way to the region, had the Niger drawn in as the
Western Nile. The first Europeans who explored the African west
coast thought it was connected to the Senegal River. It wasn’t until
the early nineteenth century that Mungo Park solved the riddle of
the river’s course (outside of local knowledge).
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