Going To Timbuktu

CCVIII

Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan arrived in Dakar, French West Africa (now Senegal) on June 8, 1937. Their arrival marked the beginning of the third stage of the Worldflight, the journey across Africa. It also marked the first time that they would be leaving Pan American Airways’ international airspace. 

Dakar, French West Africa, in 1937

Having left what might be considered familiar territory, Earhart decided to become cautious. She chose to lay over at Senegal for nearly a full two days of time. A broken fuel gauge was replaced and the fuel lines flushed. The Radio Direction Finder, which had been giving Fred and Amelia some intermittent trouble, was fixed. The engines received a thorough 40-hour overhaul even though their last overhaul had been in Fortaleza, and she’d flown only about half those hours since. But French West Africa was literally a terra incognita within which a forced landing could be deadly even under the best of conditions.

The Sahel in 1937. Today, due to climate change and the expansion of the Sahara, the Sahel is even more uninviting than this photograph promises

 

The region over which the Lockheed Electra was due to fly was known, then and now, as the Sahel, a long narrow band of semi-arid brush country that stretches across the width of north central Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of the Nile. Lying just south of the vast Sahara Desert, The Sahel is a climatological transition zone between the barrens of the Sahara and the savanna country of the Sudan region. 

 

Historically, the Sahel was the home of the great, decentralized Empire of Ghana and the vast Empire of Mali, both of which existed before the year 1500, and throve before the Sahara encroached upon them. They survived on trade, particularly the slave trade between the Berbers and Moors in the north and the Guineans in the south, or the Arabs and West Africans, east to west.  

Djinguereber Mosque, built in 1327 in the legendary but real metropolis of Timbuktu, Mali, was once one of the greatest universities in the world. Timbuktu was renowned for its library which held otherwise-nonexistent texts in Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and other languages. Muslim extremists have tried to destroy the building recently due to its cosmopolitan and multiculturally diverse history

The indigenous people of the region have always been semi-nomadic herders and horsemen, largely intolerant of strangers. By the 19^th Century, the French had colonized the whole of western and central Africa, but French colonial power was mostly centered in the few towns like Gao and Timbuktu, which had long ago been the great cities of the Sahel’s empires. Many of the natives had never seen a European, much less an aircraft. When Earhart and Noonan traversed this airspace, there was little to see, even in the towns.  The bush was desolate, any given point deserted for years. Even the French military maps of the region were exercises in creative guesswork over cartography.

Amelia dressed in native garb in Senegal

Fred Noonan, who was used to overflying the trackless and ever-changing Pacific found the Sahel to be “the hardest navigating I had ever done.”

Engine maintenance in French West Africa, 1937

Existing annotations to the charts like, “Two trees spaced 400 yards apart mark the intersect of the 24^th Meridian” were more challenging than useful, especially when the two trees in question were passed by overhead at 200 miles per hour, could be lost in glare, or be rendered indistinguishable from the dun-colored earth during a noontime sun. 

The Sahel in the dry season