Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  18 • Varieties of affliction

  A thorn is removed with a thorn. Sudanese proverb

  The Nile appears as a river of life, wending its way through the dead zone of the Sahara Desert, bringing life-giving moisture to humans, plants and animals. Yet, in the nineteenth century, the Nile was synonymous with disease – the cankers of Flaubert’s STDs, the agues and fevers of the explorer, malaria, plague, death. Then there were the bugs and biting insects. Speke went deaf when a beetle crawled into his ear, gnawed at his eardrum, curled up and died.

  Sir Richard Francis Burton was critically ill at the moment that Speke first set eyes on Lake Victoria and pronounced it the source of the Nile. Burton probably already had syphilis, contracted in Somalia, and was always mindful of his health. For long periods in his expedition to the Nile’s source he was carried on a stretcher suspended from a pole. Burton certainly knew about illness.

  He is the explorer’s explorer, in as much as he returned with more news of strange places than any other man, and visited more strange places than any other – from Arabia to east and west Africa, South America and India. Arguably very few men of the nineteenth century had as much experience backed by as much learning, both of language and literature, as Richard Burton. His faults included an overweening zeal and a desire to shock, which to the modern sensibility is even more offensive than it was to the more hardened Victorian. To read Burton out of context is to feel oneself on occasion among the worst kind of ranting Boer farmer, yet a paragraph later all will be reversed: ‘the social position of the women is the unerring test of progress towards civilisation’ is not a sentence uttered by an unthinking reactionary. Neither was he a cruel man. Despite the rumours (put about by himself), there is no evidence that Burton ever killed anyone. The poet Algernon Swinburne wrote of him, ‘You cannot think how kind and careful of me he was . . . I know for the first time what it was to have an elder brother. He is the most cordial, sympathetic friend to me . . . and it is a treat at last to have him to myself . . . I rather grudge Mrs Burton’s arrival here on Monday . . . in our ascent of Puy de Dôme [a volcano in the Massif Central in France] he began at once gathering flowers to press for her.’

  Burton was complicated. Much of his writing was intended to jolt people out of their complacency. When he was required to be accurate, he was; and the omnivorous curiosity he displayed in The Lake Regions of Central Africa provided every subsequent explorer with a veritable textbook for Nile exploration. Stanley was one of the few to admit his debt to Burton’s book; Speke, of course, could rarely admit he had learnt anything from Burton.

  Visiting the source regions of the Nile was, a priori, an unhealthy business, partly because of the novelty of the possible illnesses on offer. At one point in Lake Regions Burton observed: ‘the vast variety of diseases which afflict more civilised races, who are collected in narrow spaces, are unknown in East Africa even by name’. But there were plenty of others. He remarked that fever was the main disease, and that smallpox was the most feared and the most dangerous. He told of seeing caravans of porters with over twenty sufferers of smallpox stumbling along ‘blinded and almost insensible’, and ‘mothers carrying babes, both parent and progeny in the virulent stage of the fell disease’.

  He added that both the Arabs and the Turks practised smallpox inoculation, which was also anciently known in South Africa: ‘the pus is introduced into an incision in the forehead between the eyebrows’. (The breakthrough of Sir Edward Jenner, the eighteenth-century scientist, was to use cowpox rather than smallpox itself as the vaccine.) There was also a milder form, more like chickenpox, which was cured by bathing in cold water and smearing the body with red earth.

  Burton recorded the prevalence of dysentery among visitors to the lake regions of central Africa and noted that ‘as in Egypt, few are free from haemorrhoids’. He reported that scurvy was encountered in the upper Nile despite there being fresh meat and vegetables available, and that the Portuguese suffered tortures from the complaint. Though Burton knew that poor diet was the primary cause he also wrongly imagined that damp and cold played some part in the disease. Almost certainly explorers heading into the interior neglected to eat enough local food, possibly from fear of being poisoned.

  Epilepsy is said to be cured by the marrow of a rhinoceros’ leg bone, and an umbilical hernia by an application of powdered marijuana and melted butter. In many cases the cure is the same for driving out the evil spirits that possess and cause disease, the usual cathartic being the bark of the kalákalá tree, often boiled in porridge. For other diseases the local people resort to cautery; ‘they bleed each other frequently . . . a favourite place is the crown of the head’. Burton notes that ‘they cannot reduce dislocations, and they never attempt to set or splint a broken bone’.

  Diseases were divided into those of unknown cause and those caused by uchawi, black magic. Detecting uchawi was the job of the mganga or witchdoctor, his or her waist all hung around with shrivelled gourds containing potions and cures. The people of Usumbara thrust a red-hot hatchet into the mouth of the accused; depending on the nature and extent of the burns, your innocence or guilt was decided. Among tribes from near Lake Tanganyika a heated iron spike was driven into some tender part of the body and twice struck with a log of wood; others dipped a hand in boiling water or seething oil; the Wazegura, in times past, pricked the ear with the stiffest bristles of a gnu’s tail. An allied tribe had an ordeal by meat that choked the innocent. Others infused water with a poisonous bark and used a fat hen as a proxy. If it survived, an appeal could be made and a stronger decoction forced down the throat of the accused. In these trials of black-magicking, to survive the test could (though not always) mean you were guilty; and to ‘fail’ the test, though it meant innocence, incurred along the way death or great injury. It seems, once suspected, you couldn’t win.

  The mganga was also the chief prophet of rain. As Burton lacon ically remarks, ‘he is a weatherwise man, and rains in tropical lands are easily foreseen. Not infrequently, however, he proves himself a false prophet; and when all resources of cunning fail he must fly for dear life from the victims of the delusion.’

  19 • At Burton’s grave

  Because they feared the donkey they beat the load. Arab proverb

  The more you read, the more ways you discover that Burton is connected with the Nile. He is Speke’s, the source discoverer’s, handmaiden, and his book opened up the Nile to English-speaking explorers. Lake Regions was the key text for African explorers. Without Burton, Livingstone would have stayed south and Stanley would have stayed home.

  Burton was friends with that other Nile traveller Monckton Milnes, who shared his taste in dubious literature. We have met Milnes before when he was turned down by Florence Nightingale. Milnes must have influenced Burton’s decision to set up a publishing business based in Benares (actually it was in Stoke Newington, but promoted as Benares to avoid prosecution) in order to print obscene books, most notably a no-holds-barred version of The Thousand and One Nights. For people brought up on Sinbad and Aladdin it comes as quite a shock that 10 per cent of the stories in the Nights are very unsuitable bedtime reading even a thousand years after they were first collected on the banks of the Nile in Cairo. Cairo is a city of stories and courtesans – as it always was – and the Nile seems to reflect this. A river, red with the blood of the flood, must be a source of passion, or succour – stories and sex offer both. It is no accident that the beautiful and no doubt sexy storyteller Scheherazade trades stories for her life. It is this Nile that gives life to Cairo. The Thousand and One Nights becomes the informal bible of the Nile, providing a narrative map of desire and inner seeking, just as the real Bible provides the framework for believers along the river bank. These books, Bible and Nights, by a not uneasy happenstance accompany many Nilotic travellers – such as Florence Nightingale, who read both, equally avidly, as they travelled upriver.

  But Burton’s affair with the East and Eastern stories went deeper. He had im
mersed himself in Sufi poetry and all evidence suggests he was initiated into Sufi circles. The conclusive evidence is missed by his best biographers when they dismiss his best work – the long poem entitled The Kasidah – as an attempt to cash in on the success of Edward Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam. The Kasidah features such lines as:

  Be stout in woe, be stark in weal,

  Do good for Good is good to do,

  Spurn bribe of Heav’n and threat of Hell

  and:

  From none but self expect applause,

  He noblest lives and noblest dies,

  Who makes and keeps his self-made laws

  and:

  And this is all, for this we’re born to weep a little and to die!

  So sings the shallow bard whose life still labours at the letter ‘I’.

  The Kasidah, with its Sufi psychology, goes a very long way to explaining the contradictions in Richard Burton’s public behaviour – not the least of which was that he followed ‘the path of blame’, a well-known Sufi practice where opprobrium is courted in order to discern real friends and avoid the growth of debilitating self-importance.

  Knowing the central importance of The Kasidah to Burton, I – along with Johnny West (a fellow Nile swimmer who appears later in this book) and travel writers Christopher Ross and Matthew Leeming – decided to hold a midnight vigil in Mortlake Cemetery where the explorer’s Arab-tent tomb is to be found, complete with rusty solenoid-operated camel bells (paid for by his wife using the proceeds of her biography of her husband). This was in 1990 – exactly a hundred years since the death of Sir Richard Francis in Trieste.

  Mortlake is a long way from the Nile, but it’s quite close to the Thames. We climbed over the church wall and headed for the tomb (which has a glass panel in the roof so you can view Richard and his wife Isabel lying like a couple of crusader knights). We set out four candles and began reading through The Kasidah. It’s a long poem. By two o’clock we agreed that we had read enough. The candles doused, the book quietly closed, we returned over the river to our lives, having gleaned something from the key text, the main clue to the extraordinary life of Nile pioneer Sir Richard Burton, the main tenet of which is, in short, be extraordinary; at least don’t be afraid to try.

  Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy the shining hour of sun; We dance along Death’s icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?

  20 • At the court of the cannibal King

  Although the stomach is sick, one eats. Although the eye is sick, one weeps. Ugandan proverb

  We’ve mentioned it before, but where exactly is Bongoland? Look at a map of central Africa from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. You’ll find it in that intense spot where the Congo, the Sudan and Uganda rub shoulders and share the upper reaches of the Nile. Bongoland and its cannibals have entered the joke mythology of the twenty-first century, but they arrived in the West through the discoveries of men like Petherick and, later, Schweinfurth, both of whom, it must be said, were reluctant to attribute cannibalism to African tribes unless the evidence was incontrovertible. The theory that cannibalism among some members of the Azande – whom earlier explorers called by their Dinka name the Niam Niam – was the result of disruption by slave and ivory traders is unlikely. Petherick was there well in advance of the Arab slavers and ivory merchants; indeed, as we have seen, he arrived when the concept of trade was unknown in this region. The key point is that not every tribe in this area ate people: the Shooli, later the Acholi – the tribe of Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony – were not historically cannibals (though some claim they are now).

  Schweinfurth comes across a scene in Azande country very similar to that witnessed by Cape-to-Cairo traveller Ewart Grogan, thirty years later. He describes each residence as having a post designed for displaying the owner’s skill at hunting and war: ‘skulls of little monkeys and of great baboons, skulls of wild boars and of chimpanzees, and I must not hesitate to add, skulls of men! They were fastened to the erections like the presents on a Christmas tree, but instead of being gifts for children, they were treasures for the comparative anatomist.’ Close to the huts he discovers piles of human bones which bore the marks of hatchet and knife, ‘and all around upon the branches of the neighbouring trees were hanging human feet and hands more than half shrivelled into a skeleton condition . . . they polluted the atmosphere with a revolting and intolerable stench’.

  But it was to the south of the Niam Niam, among the Monbuttoo, or Mengbutu, that the greatest cannibals were to be found. The Monbuttoo were a highly advanced tribe, master metalworkers, expert at music and making musical instruments, the women highly independent – typically, when asked how much a curio might be a Monbuttoo man would reply, ‘Ask my wife – it is hers.’ They were expert cooks, fond of using palm oil when they couldn’t find their preferred source: human fat. Despite their advanced culture, and according to Schweinfurth, ‘the cannibalism of the Monbuttoo is the most pronounced in all Africa’.

  The carcasses of those who fell in battle were divided among the greedy victors, the bodies dried first before transport. The King at the court of Munza preferred to eat a child every day. Schweinfurth regularly came across people engaged in preparing human meat for consumption. In one case several young women were interrupted in the task of scalding the hair off the lower half of a human body. ‘The operation, as far as it was effected, had changed the black skin into a fawny grey, and the disgusting sight could not fail to make me think of the soddening and scouring of our fatted swine.’ In another hut he sees a human arm dangling over a fire – ‘obviously with the design of being at once dried and smoked’. When, during a meal, Schweinfurth asked the King why at that precise time they weren’t eating human flesh, the King replied that it was out of respect for his guests because he was aware of their aversion to the practice. But it was being carried on in secret, he assured them. You can tell Schweinfurth has conflicting feelings about what he’s seeing:

  It is needless for me to . . . describe how these people obtain their human fat, or again, to detail the processes of cutting the flesh into long strips and drying it over a fire in its preparation for consumption. The numerous skulls now in the Anatomical Museum in Berlin are simply the remains of their repasts which I purchased one after another for bits of copper, and go far to prove that the cannibalism of the Monbuttoo is unsurpassed by any nation in the world. But with it all, the Monbuttoo are a noble race of men . . .

  21 • Murder caused by the source of the Nile

  When one looks at a fool with hatred the fool thinks it is love.

  Arab proverb

  All the good and the great were there. The instigator, Sir Roderick Murchison, Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society; the legendary Dr David Livingstone; Sir Henry Rawlinson, Sir Charles Lyell and Lord Milton; Francis Galton, who had penned a handbook for explorers; and Clements Markham, who years later would send Robert Falcon Scott to the Pole.

  We are very far from the Nile, yet we are at its source. We are in Bath, a source in its own right – of mineral waters, oddly appropriate for Burton, the great explorer who abhorred his parents’ habit of flitting from fashionable spa to fashionable spa across Europe when he was young, and yet when older he was to do just the same thing. When older and still tarnished by what had been said and not said at Bath. For here he was to debate, under the auspices of the RGS, with his old friend and now enemy Lieutenant Speke. The subject: where exactly the Nile did rise.

  It was this question, the supreme question of exploration, that had dogged or worried every ruler who had dealings with the Nile since the beginning of time. That is an exaggeration perhaps, but not much. We are far from the Nile, but it is fitting we are in Britain, because this was the moment when Britain began to tighten its inexorable grip on the river, a grip that would lead to war at Omdurman, the colonisation of Uganda and giant dams at the Owen Falls and at Aswan. By debating the source of a river in another country you are announcing, and adva
ncing, one form of ownership.

  Speke confided to a friend that if he had to share a debating platform with Burton he would kick him. ‘By God he shall kick me!’ insisted Burton on hearing this. Neither talked to the other, nor had done for some years. Yet Burton did not look away when Speke entered the debating hall at the old Mineral Water Hospital; instead he directed his famously intense stare at the apparently shaken Speke. The following day Speke seemed even more agitated. He left (it was assumed for a short break) saying, ‘Oh I cannot stand this any longer.’ ‘Shall you want your chair again?’ a man asked Speke. ‘I hope not,’ he said, an odd reply for a man who was due to return later in the day to debate with Burton.

  In the meantime worthy men spoke lengthily on exploration. The hour was nearing for the duel. Then the report came in. Ashen faced, the Secretary read out the news: Speke was dead, killed while out shooting during the break in proceedings. Burton crumpled. The whole façade of his antagonism was revealed. It had been a game to him. He wished no real ill will on Speke. The reverse may also have been true, but now Speke was dead.

  The cause of death: shotgun wound to the chest. In the nineteenth century, deaths from gunshot wounds that were accidental – about a hundred a year – were less likely than a suicide. In fact, a self-inflicted gunshot wound was twice as likely to be an attempt to end one’s own life as a mere accident.

  As William Guy wrote in his 1844 book The Principles of Forensic Medicine: ‘Suicidal wounds have a character which accidental wounds often, and homicidal wounds sometimes, lack of being inflicted in front on the head or region of the heart.’ Speke’s wound was in the upper left side of his chest. Burton had noted, years earlier, on a hippopotamus hunt in east Africa that even when the boat was charged and almost sunk, ‘[Speke] never allowed his gun to look at himself or at others.’