I have come back to my land for the year 2000. Once I went to the people around the world. How many people will trek to Timbuktu to see him or the narrow sandy streets of the city built 1,000 years ago, which reached its apogee as a centre of world learning and religion before the British empire was even conceived, remains unclear. So far from anywhere, so beautiful, but so unappreciated. Last year fewer than 50,000 tourists came, and the landlocked country remains one of the three poorest in the world.
Most people earn less than a dollar a day.
The mayor, who likes to personally stamp the passports of every visitor, had given up and closed shop. Tourism may be the only way to survive,' said Jiddou ag Almoustapha, president of the the town's Tuareg association. Many of these nomads still refuse to settle or to do manual work, but hiring out camels, selling cheap knives and singing for tourists is one of the few options they now have for survival. They recognise that there is good money to be mined from the whites just as salt has for centuries been mined from the desert. For the vast majority of Timbuktu's citizens, millennium night was as any other, with no clocks sounding, bells or fireworks at midnight.