Timbuktu increased competition from newly available trans-Atlantic sailing routes caused the city to decline. The first European to reach Timbuktu, Alexander Gordon Laing, did not arrive until 1826, and it was not until the 1890s that Timbuktu was formally incorporated into the French colony of Mali. Today, the city is still inhabited; however, the city is not as geopolitically relevant as it once was. Timbuktu is located on the southern edge of the Sahara north of the main channel of the River Niger. The town is surrounded by sand dunes and the streets are covered in sand. The port of Kabara
Timbuktu to Timbuktu. Shabeni stayed in Timbuktu for three years before moving to a major city called Housa several days journey to the southeast. Two years later, he returned to Timbuktu to live there for another seven years – one of a population that was even centuries after its peak and excluding slaves, double the size of the 21st-century town. By the time Shabeni was 27, he was an established merchant in his hometown of Tetuan. He made a two-year pilgrimage to Mecca and thus became a hajji, Asseed El Hage Abd Salam Shabeeny. Returning from a trading voyage to Hamburg,