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

by Twigger, Robert

  None came. The British had other concerns. It was the time of the American Civil War and cotton prices had quadrupled. Instead of receiving an answer by return of diplomatic bag (a process that could admittedly take months), Cameron was asked to head into Sudan to find out if it were suitable for cotton farming.

  Sudan was the sworn enemy of Ethiopia. Over a year had passed and still no reply came. Not only had no reply come, but now HM Consul was slipping off to the enemy. Theodore fell into one of his increasingly common rages (his first wife, a steadying influence, had died – now he drank heavily and was more prone to anger). He turned his attention to the fifty or so Europeans, mainly missionaries and their children, who were living at that time in Ethiopia – all in Gondar. He clapped the lot in prison, and when Cameron returned all unsuspecting from his cotton excursion, he too was chained up and tortured with the skill and malice only someone as well practised in that dark art as Mad King Theodore could properly muster.

  Injured but still alive, poor old Cameron managed to smuggle a message out of gaol. It was necessarily short. Probably there was little paper and less space to hide it: ‘There is no hope of my release unless a letter is sent in answer to His Majesty.’ This crumpled, prison-stained message found its way to Britain, to the highest ranks this time (it is thought the first missive got lost somewhere in the Foreign Office). A suitably friendly and fawning note was got up and signed by Victoria R. in Balmoral on 26 May 1864.

  But who should deliver it? Given how he had behaved, it would be a brave man who ventured into the court of angry King T. Masters of delegation, the British sent Hormuzd Rassam, an Iraqi Christian who had been educated at Oxford and had assumed British nationality. It looked like a good plan and Rassam seemed keen to show he was made of stern stuff.

  He travelled to the Red Sea coast of Ethiopia where he was warned he could not move inland without the Emperor’s permission. So he waited. For six months. Then he decided he needed more, and more enticing, booty to win over Theodore. No pistols this time. Rassam took ship to Cairo and bought fancy glass chandeliers (Theodore lived in a tent), mirrors, the finest crystal glassware, a mass of general stores and, mindful of Theodore’s thirst, two cases of Curaçao. All this was taken by ship and then packed on protesting camels as Rassam wasted no time waiting for permission and headed for Theodore’s base at the source of the Nile – on the western shores of Lake Tana.

  Finally in 1866 they reached it – the Little Abay or Little Blue Nile – dominated by Theodore’s huge white tent surrounded by thousands of smaller ones. The question now was: would the cracked mirrors and chipped chandeliers cut it? Sadly Rassam did not know at this stage that Theodore valued only weapons as gifts.

  The Emperor sent message that he was happy to receive Rassam and his party. The gifts were presented, as was the letter from Queen Victoria. Theodore waved the letter aside – of course he would – and ranted for a while about his problems with turbulent tribes and the insults he had received from missionaries. But he accepted the gifts and sent for the hostages to be released. He displayed the double-barrelled pistols that his friend Plowden had given him and said with pride that they were a gift of the English Empress herself. Rassam’s hopes rose. It was to become a familiar feeling.

  Just when it seemed things might be solved Theodore announced that his capital needed to be moved. Twenty thousand tents set out across the country, sometimes covering an incredible thirty miles a day. Each day supplies for the vast royal entourage were pillaged from unlucky villages along the way.

  The small British party were given pride of place in the van of the expedition and Theodore was vastly attentive, sending gifts every day: plucked partridges, an antelope, firearms, plus reassuring messages that even their expenses would be reimbursed by the Ethiopian treasury. Finally a letter came stating that a relieving escort had been sent to Magdala, where the captives were being held. The letter came with a new gift – two male lion cubs.

  The captives were a ragtag group of about thirty European adults and twenty-three children – British, French, Swiss and German, some of them with Ethiopian wives. Not all were missionaries; seven of the Germans were skilled artisans who had enlisted in Theodore’s service to build him clever mechanical things. One is reminded somehow of the imprisoned inventors in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. But even these artisans, though they had more freedom in their prison camp than the missionaries, were not destined to be set free. Yet.

  Theodore had changed his mind. He had decided that Rassam should hold a trial examining the misdeeds of Cameron, who, despite having already been punished, looked set to be punished some more. Rassam visited the King at his new royal enclosure on Lake Tana at Zage, a place still famous for its coffee and its pythons. Indeed Rassam was presented with two pythons as he landed. (It’s hard to work out what he was doing with all these gifts. Did the lion cubs attack the pythons while he was out negotiating?) In any case he had bigger problems to worry about: another meddling Brit called Beke.

  Charles Beke was a self-proclaimed expert on Ethiopia who had claimed to the captives’ relatives that he was a far better bet as hostage negotiator than the seemingly slow Rassam. He gathered letters from the relatives and landed in Ethiopia on the Red Sea coast. He sent a message to Theodore demanding an audience to obtain the release of the prisoners.

  So just as Rassam had inched his way to a probable conclusion Beke had arrived to cock it all up. To a paranoid like Theodore it looked like bait and switch. Perhaps Beke was the forefront of a planned invasion and Rassam a Trojan horse? It was all a bit much, so Theodore did his usual thing and went on a three-day bender while ordering Rassam and the others to be arrested and chained up. Days later, the king, red eyed and drunk, began to read out a list of incredible charges against Rassam, but then, halfway through, apologised, gave up his tirade and allowed the prisoners to be led away to sleep in a tent.

  The captives were taken to a fortress where Theodore himself laid out the carpets, an act of obeisance typical of the man. A day later he had all the hostages thrown into the dungeons. He went down and apologised to them, saying that he hadn’t believed before that he was mad but the evidence before his eyes told him otherwise. He still didn’t unlock them.

  Bound in fetters and sometimes chained, Rassam and the others were sent back to the mountain-top eyrie of Magdala, 8,000 feet up and 1,000 feet above the surrounding plain. It was considered impregnable – accessible only by a narrow winding path. Rassam’s hopes of escape were nil.

  Meanwhile, the German technocrats were charged with making a super-weapon – a vast mortar made out of a solid block of metal weighing seventy tons. It was Theodore’s idea. ‘You Europeans are very clever,’ he said. ‘Make me a gun that can fire a 1,000-pound weight.’ The country was scoured for metal. Fifty large copper vessels were melted down. It was not enough. Pots, pans, old spears and copper nails were added. Finally, to make up the shortfall Theodore melted down 490 silver thalers he had found while sacking the town of Gondar. All this scrap was heated up and poured into a giant mould – the barrel of the super-mortar nearly two feet across. Three days of nervous waiting followed and the mould was cracked open. The gun looked perfect. Somewhat like Saddam and his super-gun, Theodore put all his faith in this weapon.

  The British tried one last time, sending an envoy of gifts and skilled workmen (to rival the German experts) to the Red Sea coast. The deal on offer was simple: you release the hostages, and you get the workmen and the gifts and no more will be said of the matter. But Theodore wanted both. And just who were these willing skilled artisans? What words of honey were used to get them willingly to swap places with people who had been held hostage for years? Luckily they were not to be tested. In the ensuing stalemate the workmen were sent home, the gifts returned to England.

  In Magdala a year and a half went by. Seeds of English vegetables smuggled from the coast brought joy to Rassam. Truly he had embraced the English way of life. He planted and tended them with great care.
‘Life wasn’t too bad,’ he wrote, ‘apart from the fetters.’ In the high damp altitude, near to the Equator, the vegetables grew to huge proportions. Pea plants were five feet high, potatoes monstrously large, the size of footballs, tomatoes flowered year round. One is reminded of that other source of the Nile, the Ruwenzori Mountains, where giant plants also flourish – two Gardens of Eden, of a sort. The hostages ate well; dinner might consist of soup, fish, several entrées, a joint of lamb or antelope, pudding, ending with anchovy toast or cream cheese. Arak, mead and coffee were freely available. They played whist, endlessly, and Rassam enticed hundreds of Ethiopian songbirds to a bird table in his garden.

  Finally the British prepared for war. It was 1867 and the Blue Nile, thanks to the work of James Bruce and the Bakers, was confirmed as the source of the flood. It was down to control again. As early as 1093, when there had been a particularly low flood, a deputation of Egyptians had been sent to the Emperor of Ethiopia asking him to release more water (strangely, a thousand years later, when the new Tana dam is completed on the Blue Nile, Egyptians will again seek for more water to be released). In 1093 they knew that Ethiopia controlled the Nile’s bounty. In 1867 they knew it too. The British needed to assert their prestige in Africa and the Red Sea. What better way than to control the whole Nile? There was also the small matter of racial pride. Were they going to let a daft foreigner like Theodore mock them from his mountain fastness? So the British assembled an army of 32,000 men, with forty-four war elephants and 55,000 pack and other animals. They wanted to make their mark, rather like the Americans and their allies when they invaded Iraq nearly 140 years later.

  The explorer Baker was consulted on the currency matter. Just how would the army buy food in Ethiopia when it landed? With Marie-Thérèse dollars, but only the 1780 minting, Baker explained: ‘the effigy of the Empress, with a very low dress and a profusion of bust, is, I believe, the charm that suits the Arab taste’. And, presumably, the Ethiopian. The counting houses of Europe had not enough, so by special dispensation the Imperial Mint in Vienna turned out an edition of 500,000 to be used for the expedition expenses.

  The elephants came from Bombay in two newly constructed ships, with modified holds the better to deal with the awful prospect of elephant seasickness. A secret group of engineers landed unopposed at Zula on the Red Sea coast and quickly constructed a pier. The invasion army docked and Robert Napier, the commanding general, disem-barked using the strengthened gangway, riding on the first in a line of nineteen war elephants (the rest were in the other boat). His salary was £580 a month. The mahout controlling Napier’s elephant, and perched up behind the beast’s ears, was paid £1 a month. It was quite probably the first time since Alexander the Great that Indian elephants had been seen in Africa.

  Their role was partly to inspire fear, but also to carry the heavy artillery over the rugged and roadless terrain of Ethiopia. Accompanying the army came an intelligence corps containing Major Grant, Speke’s amiable companion a few years earlier in the discovery of the White Nile’s source. Indeed Grant was the first man to visit both sources – the second being Stanley, who before his incarnation as an explorer was foreign correspondent for the New York Herald. He was here to cover the war with Theodore and had taken the trouble to bribe the telegraph operator at Aden to hold up all the newspaper correspondents’ messages (such as those of the boys’ writer G. A. Henty, who was there with the London Standard), except of course his own. The resulting coup so raised Stanley’s stock with his newspaper bosses that they agreed to sponsor his search for Livingstone. So, in a way, Stanley’s career was launched by the madness of Theodore.

  Meanwhile the Emperor was getting nervous. It took 500 men to haul the giant German mortar up the mountain of Magdala. It was the cornerstone of his defences, a kind of V-2 rocket for the beleaguered Ethiopians.

  As Napier’s army plodded across Ethiopia, side-detachments were sent, with an elephant to inspire awe, into the villages along the way. Tribes united quickly under the invaders against their mad oppressor. At long last the British drew themselves up at the foot of the Magdala escarpment. Ranged in front of them were a wildly dressed army of 5,000 or more Ethiopian warriors backed by the awesome presence of the giant Teutonic mortar.

  Napier loosed off some rockets. The mortar was lit – and exploded into pieces. So much for German workmanship. With skilled musketry from the British soldiers (who were armed with the .577 Snider-Enfield, which had a 600-yard effective range, four times that of the Ethiopian muzzle-loaders) it was a rout. One thousand Ethiopians were killed and only twenty-seven British wounded. It was all over for the mad King.

  Theodore argued long into the night with his captains, swigging at a bottle of arak. Some counselled that the hostages should all be killed, but Theodore would have none of it. They must be released. Otherwise, he said, we will all be killed. In the midst of this swaying, hot-headed debate Theodore snatched up his precious double-barrelled revolver, gift of Victoria R., cocked the hammer and, ramming the barrel end into his mouth, fired.

  Nothing happened. He’d cocked the wrong hammer, or pulled the wrong trigger. Immediately his captains were upon him, wrestling the firearm from their King. The pistol went off and the bullet scorched past Theodore’s ear. The shock seemed to calm him. In the morning he sent for Rassam and asked his advice.

  Theodore said, ‘I thought your people were women but I find too late they are men. Men who fought bravely. I cannot withstand them so I must ask you to reconcile me to them.’

  Rassam knew that, if he played this deadly endgame wrongly, four years of effort would be wasted, not to mention the time in fetters and leaky dungeons. He told the Emperor to send an envoy to Napier’s army. He was sorely tempted to suggest himself, but he knew that wouldn’t wash. Two other captives were despatched.

  Napier sent a message back asking for Theodore’s surrender and promising safe passage.

  Rassam was told to gather the hostages. He went to bid Theodore goodbye. ‘It is so late,’ said Theodore. ‘Let them go on but stay a last night with me.’

  ‘Whatever your majesty desires,’ said Rassam.

  He had passed the test. Theodore acknowledged this by seeming to change his mind.

  ‘Very well, go on, but always remain my friend or I will become a monk or kill myself,’ said Theodore with a twisted-up smile on his face.

  Rassam faced a supreme dilemma. Every nerve in his body was taut, his mind urging him to get the hell out of there. And hadn’t Theodore himself told him to go? But, if he moved off now, then there was every chance that the rest of the captives, who were standing some way behind him (including the despised Cameron), would be held back by the capricious Emperor. Rassam spoke in a quiet voice:

  ‘I thank your majesty but my companions are behind.’ And waited.

  But Theodore waved him on. Rassam hesitated. It was another fiendish test. If Rassam continued to wait it showed he didn’t trust Theodore any more. He had to trust. Theodore would react badly if he wasn’t trusted at this late stage.

  Rassam walked on and miraculously the captives walked free some way behind him.

  Theodore sent a thousand cows and 500 sheep as another peace-offering reply, though Napier turned them away and sent them back, since he had been informed that acceptance meant he had forgiven Theodore and would leave his fort alone.

  The British hadn’t landed forty-four war elephants to walk away now. Napier heard that Theodore might try to escape down a secret goat path at the back of Magdala. The fifty-seven-year-old general had given him enough chances to surrender. It was time to bring in the elephant-borne big guns.

  Theodore, in an admirable last-ditch act of bravado, rode out in front of the massed British troops and challenged Napier to a one-on-one combat. Britain had long ago given up this chivalric ideal (though it was certainly a lot less wasteful than modern warfare – imagine if we’d sent George W. to bash up Saddam with only Tony Blair holding his jacket?). Not surprisingly Napier turned t
he duel down. Begged by his captains to return, Theodore wheeled his horse and disappeared up the mountain.

  The end, when it came, was all too sudden. After a pounding bombardment and a half-hearted defence, the British rushed the gates of Magdala. The fortress was taken with only fifteen British wounded, two dying of wounds later.

  Unnoticed at first, a bedraggled corpse missing half his head lay where he had fallen, defending the gate to the last. In his hand was a double-barrelled pistol that he had fired correctly this time, ending his own life before he could be captured. Rassam identified him as the Emperor Theodore. Souvenir hunters fell upon his corpse, but Rassam beat them back. The next day he supervised Theodore’s burial in Magdala church.

  Stanley wrote that the looting was frenzied and terrible. The worst offenders were the former hostages, not excluding the missionaries among them, making off with jewelled golden goblets and plate, mitres and crowns, Sèvres china, cases of Moët champagne (now why hadn’t the hostages been offered that instead of mead?), ermine and bear furs, leopard- and lionskin capes, ornate saddles and highly decorated state umbrellas, tents, carpets and chests full of emeralds, sapphires and silver-set diamonds – all the treasure of Prester John.

  28 • Battling slavery on the White Nile

  When the river flows the wrong way make sure you are standing where you think you are before you hail a miracle. Sudanese proverb

  The transformation of the upper Nile regions started with the very best of intentions: end the diabolical practice of slavery. In 1869 Samuel Baker and Florence returned to the Nile to try and improve the conditions they had found on their first journey. Appointed a major general by the Khedive (the ruler under the aegis of the Ottoman Sultan, an upgrade from the earlier title of Wali) of Egypt’s army on £10,000 a year, Baker marched with 1,700 troops, a number that dwindled greatly as he proceeded past Khartoum and into the interior of Africa. He took not only his wife, the redoubtable Florence, but his nephew, Lieutenant Baker. They found the advancing front of the slave trade in the land just below the Murchison Falls on the upper White Nile. The very waterfall he had discovered five years earlier had now been subjected to the attentions of the Khartoum slavers.