The articles in this collection were drawn from a symposium on the German geographer and historian Heinrich Barth held at Timbuktu in December 2004. As a member (and later on, leader) of the British Central African Mission, Barth travelled through large parts of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa from 1849 to 1855. This excellent, multidisciplinary collection of papers casts new light on Barth's travelogue and its value as a source for Africanists, ethnologists, historians of science and many more. Apart from that, Barth left his traces in the mostly Francophonic countries he visited and remains a subject of interest there. This is also mirrored in the fact that most papers are written in French (10 out of 14) while all have either English or French abstracts.

The volume comprises four sections. In the first, two articles by Richard Kuba and Gerd Spittler give biographical background information and analyse Barth's scholarly attitude and cultural imprint. The second part is concerned with the main text produced by Barth in its German, English and French versions. In comparing the abridged French edition with the German original, Alain Ricard, Gerd Spittler and Johanna Holst detect several flaws and mistranslations which partly explain the lack of interest in Barth in African studies in contemporary France. In her article ‘Entre description et inscription’, Véronique Porra analyses the poetic elements of travel writing in the accounts by René Caillié (1830), Barth (1857) and Gerhard Rohlfs (1868). Porra pleads for a literary analysis of travel tales as a necessary counterpart to the readings of the texts from the viewpoints of history and social science. Further insights into aesthetic constructions of reality are provided by Achim von Oppen, who illuminates the sometimes astonishing contrasts between Barth's text and illustrations by the German painter J. M. Bernatz. Von Oppen concludes that the paintings reveal the orientalist and romanticist preconceptions of the painter more than they represent Barth's descriptions and notions of African reality. Referring to North American debates about ethnographic methods and textual representations, Maria Grosz-Ngaté shows how a rediscovery of Barth and a consideration of travelogues in general could prove to be fruitful for contemporary debates on the understanding and construction of anthropological knowledge.

In the third part, ‘Heinrich Barth et le quotidien en Afrique’, Mamadou Diawara is also concerned with Barth as an early ethnographer and anthropologist. While Diawara analyses Barth's contacts with his travelling companions in the microcosm of caravans, Georg Klute is interested in collected information about African knowledge of Europe and the Europeans. The following two articles do not focus on anthropological issues but on Barth's construction of nature (Robert Harms) and on his observations (and omissions) concerning African craft industry and technology (Bernhard Gardi).

The fourth and last part comprises articles on the historical dimension of Barth's work. Muhammad S. Umar reflects those passages concerned with Islamic themes ‘through the lens of Edward Said’ (p. 201) and thereby demonstrates impressively the possibilities as well as limitations of Said's critique of orientalism. Barth has repeatedly been praised for his appreciation of African history and for his evaluation of both oral history and written documents. Paulo Fernando de Moreas Farias shows how Barth's reading of the Timbuktu Chronicles, the Ta'rīkh as-Sūdān, constituted a problematic tradition of a restricted reading of these chronicles while stressing that this reading nevertheless derived from Barth's profound interest in African history.

In the nineteenth century, Timbuktu represented a place ‘strategic in the symbolic control of African space’ (p. 225) for Europeans. Isabelle Surun shows how travelogues contributed to a changing image of Timbuktu from mystification to scientific representation. Last but not least, Adam Jones takes Barth's multi-disciplinary background as a starting point for critical reflections about the development of African studies in Germany and on the existing gaps between disciplines and their associations. All in all, this multidisciplinary collection is well suited to inspire not only those interested in a critical history of travel and exploration but also those concerned with West African history in general.