Andy Cruz
    if you ever wanted to know about Timbuktu then Marq De Villiers and Shelia Hirtle's book called Timbuktu" is for you. Thus is a famous mud plaster city that once was supposedly so filled with gold that it made its most famous resident and ruler world known. this book is not all about Mansu Muso and instead gives the reader a fascinating synopsis of Malian history and a region that was far richer and established center of commerce than historians have acknowledged. Such strategic wealth and location made this place eventually a victim of plundering Muslims often giving to vicious raids of this city that made great wealth through trade in gold, slave, and salt. For two centuries Timbuktu boasted attractive schools and libraries and was a center of learning much like a Austin, Texas, or Madison, Wisconsin college type town. Founded by Tuareg refuges the city would become victim and decline by the constant nomadic warrior culture and toughness of future generations of tuareg rural scumbags in another of history's battles between civilization and the nomadic loser criminal rural class often jealous of the success of a settled academic society.
   The real decline of Timbuktu civilization came with the Muslim Moroccan invasion of Ahmad al-Mansur in 1591 and this battle was just one of many between Arab and Black African in North Africa through the ages that gets little press. the authors get this invasion described in excellent detail and pretty much reveal that the long decline of the defeated Songhai empire of Mali as the beginning of Africa's strong empires in West Africa. the book describes the tolerance of tuareg Islamic beliefs compared to the evil we see today and the brutality showed by Muslims in Mali and the  borderlands of Black Africa and North Africa never get the same scrutiny by PC historians as often as they bash the Spanish incursions and empire on the natives in the Americas. The following three centuries are also described by de Villiers and Hirtle in depth and rich research that this entire book looks at the past of this once great city and modern problems and history up to and following French colonial rule which had little impact. They conclude with modern Timbuktu which is a shell of its former self and the fame and wealth this fabled city had gained through the caravans that braved and made treacherous journies for trade are long vanished in the sand.