In 1815, a man named Robert Adams declared to Britain's African Company that he was the first white man ever to have been to Timbuktu. Neither part of that claim was true. But a story about something that did not happen and the person who did not do it might be the best way to talk about a city that is so persistently unreal to most people. Timbuktu has, for centuries now, been simultaneously the mythical city of wealth and learning, and a primitive town at the edge of the earth; in both cases, Timbuktu is wholly inscribed in a Western perspective that deems it, whether real or imaginary, a destination.

In the late eighteenth century, Timbuktu – and the interior of Africa more generally – was a destination still tantalisingly out of reach; maps of the region were a mixture of errors and empty space. As Henry Beaufoy described in 1790, ‘the map of its Interior is still but a wide extended blank, on which the Geographer … has traced, with a hesitating hand, a few names of unexplored rivers and of uncertain nations.’ Explorations to the interior were rare, in part because of their difficulty. Prominent African geographer James Rennell lamented:

But it was in fact the hope of ‘rivers running from the centre to the extremities’ that drove Europeans towards Africa's interior.