Popular images of African exploration come mostly from the east of the continent, which was scoured by young buccaneers for the source of the Nile and where, in 1871, Henry Morton Stanley, an American, presumed to find Dr David Livingstone. Yet for a wave of explorers who braved Muslim fanatics and malarial mosquitoes almost a century before, west Africa was the great enthusiasm. Timbuktu, which stood at the centre of this fantasy of discovery, had been imagined, and coveted, by Europeans for 500 years—ever since its ruler Mansa Musa visited Cairo on his way to Mecca in 1324 with a retinue of 60,000 men and 80 camel-loads of gold.
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