Old and half-forgotten records[1] picture the coming of strangers to the city, with its mud-built walls, the mingled magnificence and squalor of its life, the trade of its merchants, the learning in its libraries, the worship in its mosques. Then the Moors, expelled from Spain in 1502, degenerated to the mere pursuit of war and swept like a curtain of mist across the scene, obliterating the kingdoms which were acting and reacting on one another, and veiling the Sudan for centuries from the rest of the world. Travelers in later years, when the glory of the city had departed, tried to repeople the past, writing of "Timbuktu the Mysterious," and in its ruins and half-ruins have found remnants of former prosperity.
In this city of Timbuktu, with this background of history, is set the figure of the first son of Africa whom we select for study, Mohammed Abu Bekr Et-Tourti, the founder of the Askia dynasty, and the builder of the greatest days of the Songhay empire. He was born, as already stated, on an island in the Niger. He was a full-blooded black of well known family. His father was widely re-
- ↑ Lady Lugard has gathered from all available sources material for her delightful book, A Tropical Dependency (1905), on which this chapter is largely based. The book is, unfortunately, out of print.
