Retour à Tombouctou

Contributors to this work: Charles Grémont, Pierre Boilley, Dida Badi ag Khammadine, Intagrist El Ansari, Abdoulaye Mohamadou, Jacqueline Dupuis, Arnaud Contreras, Mohamed Aghali-Zakara and Dominique Casajus

Between 1998 and 2000, Titouan Lamazou paid a number of visits to Timbuktu, the “Pearl of the Desert,” the major port of the Sahara and the Niger River, in the north of Mali, and became friends with local families, especially the family of Aïcha, a young woman who became the muse of his works.

In 2012, Timbuktu was occupied by extremist groups. Titouan decided to set off in search of Aïcha and her relatives. He found them in January 2013, in a refugee camp in Burkina Faso.

Thus began a long journey which led him to meet other exiled families in Burkina, Niger, and Mauritania. Three years later, Titouan was welcomed in Timbuktu by all his friends who finally made it back home.

To better grasp this complex situation, Titouan rallied together journalists and researchers: historians, anthropologists, linguists, geographers, whose knowledge sheds light on the destiny of these populations today.