Already twelve albums had been released since 1984 of European famous JASPER VAN'T HOF'S PILI-PILI. The 2002 release is dedicated to the legendary city of Timbuktu in Mali. 12 ballads with modern sounds give a new picture of PILI-PILIs music.

TIMBUKTU - legendary city in the heart of West Africa

It was the dawn of the sixteenth century when Europeans first heard of Timbuktu: a city in the heart of West Africa, said to possess fabulous riches as well as universities and Koran schools rendering it a centre of Islamic scholarship. Its inhabitants thought so highly of education that manuscripts were its most valuable commodity.

The first detailed report on Timbuktu was published in 1526 in a history of North and Central Africa by Leo Africanus, an Arabic traveller who was enslaved and taken to Rome. For the Europeans just beginning to expand their mercantile activities to the coasts of Africa, the interior of that continent was unreachable. As non-Muslims they would not have been permitted to enter Timbuktu anyway, for it was a holy city of Islam. Thus for many centuries Timbuktu remained a legend in Europe, a wealthy but inaccessible place. The legend lived on when the first Europeans finally set foot in Timbuktu, for the reality of the nineteenth-century city no longer corresponded to their expectations. Nevertheless, a great number of large mosques and countless Koran schools testified to the past glory of Timbuktu.

Even today, the city is still off the beaten tourist track. Yet the sound of the word Timbuktu evokes memories of a caravan trade centre on the edge of the vast desert, and so the name has thus come to stand for West Africa’s magnificent history.

According to twelfth-century sources, Timbuktu was nothing more than a well in the Tuareg area. In the thirteenth century, under Mali rule, it began its development into what would one day be the most important commercial city in the.......
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