A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  He did persuade Annur to sign the commercial treaty by tempting him with a sword, gaudy with polished brass and gilding. Annur asked Richardson to read the treaty in English, to hear the sound of the language. Richardson celebrated this first diplomatic success by raising the Union Jack and firing off 100 musket caps. Soon afterward a Tuareg arrived from Ghat and told Richardson that the treaty left there had been read aloud, including the alarming news that the Queen of England was in Tripoli, with plans to buy half of Ghat and settle there. “Such is the nature of Saharan reports,” wrote Richardson.

  There was music and dancing almost every night in Tintellust. The din irritated Richardson and disturbed his sleep. He detested “the usual singing business, with Moorish hammering on tambourines.” The dancing he deplored: “of the usual inelegant and indelicate description,” with “gross imitations of natural acts.” He mused that such suggestive gyrations must be an ancient human instinct. “The performances at European Operas,” he noted, “are often nearly as indelicate.”

  Richardson had a wide streak of prudery befitting a Victorian evangelical. He reported, in a prim tone, his dragoman’s comment that none of the cultures they were traveling through had a word for chaste, since “all the women are alike, and equally accessible when danger is absent.” Richardson censured the traders’ practice of having a “wife” in every town along their route, and referred reflexively to “African lewdness.”

  Yet he could also be good-humored on the subject of women. He observed that all of them, from shepherdesses to princesses, “are as fond of the bustle as European dames; but the important difference is, it is the natural bustle which they here delight to exhibit to the admiring male population. If a woman be called to, going off to the well for water, she does not turn round to see who is calling, but immediately draws her frock tight round her form, and imparts to it a most agitated and unnatural swinging motion, to the great satisfaction of the admiring lookers-on. Thus we see how the coquettes of London and Paris meet at opposite poles with these of the Sahara and Central Africa.”

  He also noted, half-insulted, that in contrast to Barth and Overweg, no women had offered themselves to him. He observed that the natives were baffled that these white men who could afford concubines were traveling alone. “The people begin to pester me to marry another wife in Soudan,” wrote Richardson, amused, “—one very young and with large breasts is the kind of article they recommend.”

  He showed strong sympathy for women treated poorly, especially slaves, though his pity was often marbled with condescension and sentimentality. It also tended to disappear if the woman tried to escape victimhood in ways he didn’t approve. A woman whose husband divorced her during the caravan had Richardson’s sympathy until her desire to survive led her to hop from tent to tent. Worse, she was cheerful about it. When she eventually married one of Richardson’s servants, Richardson was disgusted, and was scandalized that Overweg accepted some food from the wedding supper. Similarly, when a young woman traveled from a distant village to ask Overweg for medicine to induce an abortion because she was afraid her mother would beat her for getting pregnant, Richardson commented, “Young ladies often think of their mothers a little too late under these circumstances,” without seeing any contradiction in his attitudes.

  All of his contradictions were visible after Annur grabbed a burning stick from the fire and severely beat his wife with it, splitting open the space between her nose and upper lip. Annur immediately repented and sent for Overweg, known as Tabib, or Doctor, to tend to her for several days. The old man’s brutality appalled Richardson. “Beating a wife is so common in these countries,” he wrote, “that, only when the fact is attended with features of unusual ferocity, as in this case of [Annur], does it excite any attention.” Rumor said the beating was caused by the wife’s “eternal loquacity,” but Richardson suspected infidelity. The assumption revealed more about him than about Annur’s wife, and led him to ruminate on “what can reasonably be expected from these African women”:

  They are not allowed scarcely to believe themselves to possess souls; they have no moral motives to be chaste, and certainly none of family and honour, being mostly slaves. Then the greater part of the young girls of consequence are married to old men, who are worn out by their sensual habits and indulgence with innumerable concubines. These young women are thus left, though married, like so many widows, and with all their passions alive, to the first opportunity which presents itself. We know what they do, and we cannot expect anything else from them.

  This muddle of attitudes reflects his reactions to Africa: sympathy, moral outrage, condescension, misinterpretation, and prudery. He eventually learned the real cause of the beating. Against Annur’s orders, his wife had been sneaking out at night to watch “the beastly dances of the north coast … these filthy exhibitions.” “Many Europeans, it must be confessed,” concluded Richardson, “would beat their wives for less cause.”

  OCTOBER IN TINTELLUST had its attractions. Birds were plentiful—linnets, woodpeckers, beautiful doves. There were also gazelles, ostriches, boars, jackals, wolves, hyenas, and lions. The temperatures were pleasant. The night sky glittered with thick constellations and the Milky Way, which the Fezzanees called “the road of the dates” because it appeared at harvest time. Autumn was also the season of meteors—they flamed across the sky at the rate of one per minute. One night the entire camp watched breathlessly as a huge blue-headed meteor burned for two minutes from east to west.

  Such phenomena stirred up the superstitious. The village’s charm-writer stayed busy, jotting verses of the Qur’an on tiny slips of paper, which people bought and carried in amulets to ward off swords, the evil eye, and other maladies. Sometimes the charm-writer dissolved the words with water so his customer could drink the verse.

  On October 24, Annur’s massive gong notified the village’s men to prepare for departure to the salt fields of Bilma. This arduous trip into the middle of the Sahara took about two weeks each way, plus time spent there to recuperate and trade for the salt. To Richardson the gong signaled the expedition’s eventual release from Tintellust, because Annur had promised to accompany the expedition to Zinder once the caravan returned. Richardson celebrated by cracking open one of his two bottles of champagne, pouring it around for Overweg and the servants. He saved the second bottle for the launching of the boat on Lake Chad.

  The salt caravan left Tintellust on October 28. For safety it would merge with caravans from throughout Aïr, because other Tuaregs were sure to stalk the group in hopes of pillage. In some years the caravan swelled to 20,000 camels. (The largest ever reported claimed 30,000.) Barth later estimated that this year’s caravan numbered about 4,000 camels, low because of political unrest in the region. The route to Bilma was bleak, so the camels carried their own forage, as well as bundles to be left behind for the return trip.

  At Bilma the Tebus were waiting. The short rainy season had turned Bilma’s salt flats into shallow ponds. The Tebus scooped out salty slurry and poured it into wooden molds in the shape of cakes or cones, which dried in the desert air. These coarse brownish loaves contained as much sand and dirt as salt, and tasted bitter. But some of the salt was of finer quality, pinkish and loose-grained. This was highly desired and brought three times the normal price.

  It was said that the Tebus knew two days in advance when a caravan was coming, because a nearby peak would begin “singing.” It was also said—“It is a notorious fact,” stated Richardson—that when the caravans arrived, the Tebu men vanished into the nearby hills, leaving their women to trade the salt and, in Richardson’s words, to “make a good mercantile speculation with their charms.”

  For the Tebus and the Tuaregs of Aïr, the salt caravan was the central economic event of the year. Salt was money. The Tuaregs carried it to the principal cities of central Sudan—Kano, Katsina, Zinder, and Sokoto—and used it to buy cloth, swords, and other essential supplies. Salt was one of the few things that could unite the fractious Tua
regs of Aïr. In early 1850, as Barth’s expedition prepared to leave Tripoli, an army of 7,000 Tuareg warriors joined together to hunt down and massacre the Welad Sliman, a rapacious Arabic tribe that had been attacking the salt caravans heading to Bilma. (Barth and Overweg would later travel with the Welad Sliman.)

  Salt was the lifeblood of Aïr. Annur, the region’s principal chief, couldn’t turn his attention to the infidels until the caravan came home safely from Bilma. Five days after it departed, the rest of the village—women, children, the aged, the livestock, the Europeans and their servants—left Tintellust, led by Annur. They bivouacked about fifteen miles southeast to await the salt caravan’s return.

  Richardson was in good spirits. “Never was there a more picturesque caravan,” he wrote. “Ladies on bullocks, children and women on donkeys, warriors on maharees, merchants on camels, the Sultan’s horse harnessed going alone, and following steadily; goats and their kids, sheep, foals of camels, &c. running or straggling along!” The next day, November 3, was his birthday, which passed “almost unthought of.” He was forty-one.

  Barth, as usual, was still off on his own and would have to catch up to them when he could.

  10

  Desert Port

  BARTH’S GUIDE TO AGADEZ WAS ANNUR’S SON-IN-LAW. THEY TRAVELED with 2 servants, 6 camels, 35 asses, and 2 bullocks. To avoid attracting attention, they took no tents. Barth always felt rejuvenated when embarking for an unknown place. Escaping Richardson’s restrictive eye probably added to his elation. So did the landscape of jagged mountains and grassy valleys densely shaded by tall trees. “This delicious spectacle filled my heart with delight,” he wrote, “and having sat down a little while quietly to enjoy it, I made a sketch of the beautiful forms of the mountain peaks.”

  They came across “two droll and jovial-looking musicians.” Each carried a large drum and wore short blue shirts and small straw hats. They had been playing at a wedding and were en route to another. On a narrow path through thick vegetation Barth’s group passed a caravan of 40 camels and 60 slaves, the slaves singing as they walked. Barth recognized one of the slavers, a camel driver who had worked for the expedition. Barth grimly noted that the man had evidently used his wages from the antislavery trade mission to enter the slave trade.

  The country changed again, turning gloomy in the Valley of Taghist, where the ground was littered “with basaltic stones mostly of the size of a child’s head.” The place was considered holy because Muhammed al-Maghili, an Islamic scholar and fundamentalist, had stopped here to pray while en route to Katsina and Kano. Barth found a spot where stones formed a narrow rectangle, a traveler’s mosque where every passing Muslim stopped to pray.

  Al-Maghili was venerated, wrote Barth, for bringing Islam to Central Negroland. He had ventured into the south around 1490 after being pushed out of North Africa for instigating a massacre of the Jews in Tuat in central Algeria. Al-Maghili preached a harsh version of Islam—he called it a purer version—that endorsed the killing of male Jews and the enslavement of their women and children. According to al-Maghili, all infidels were enemies of God and subject to jihad, and any Muslim who helped an infidel was himself an infidel. But al-Maghili also denounced Muslim rulers who levied unfair taxes or confiscated property. He condemned Muslims who practiced Islam with half-measures, including mallams (teachers) with a shallow knowledge of Islamic law. He became an important advisor to the emir of Kano and then to Askia, king of Songhai (1493–1529), rulers of the era’s two greatest kingdoms in central Sudan. Eventually neither ruler could stomach al-Maghili’s extremism. Nevertheless his writings, which Barth knew, remained deeply influential within Islam.

  Near this shrine Barth saw three slaves yoked to a plow and “driven like oxen by their master.” Ever the scientist, he noted that this was “probably the most southern place in Central Africa where the plow is used; for all over Sudan the hoe, or fertaña, is the only instrument used for preparing the ground.” He saw many lion tracks and heard the call of the guinea fowl for the first time.

  On the morning of October 10, Barth’s group shared the road with more and more travelers. And then his companions pointed proudly to the horizon, where a tall tapering minaret with four sides rose from the plain. It belonged to Agadez’s great mosque, built in 1844, and was nearly ninety feet tall. To Barth’s surprise, instead of proceeding, they made camp. His companions explained that it would be safer for him to enter the town at night in native dress. (From this point on, Barth wore native clothing, consisting of a black Sudan tobe over a white one, with a white burnoose). He was about to become the first European to see the famous desert entrepôt of Agadez.

  In the fourteenth century the restless Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta called Agadez “the largest, handsomest, and strongest of all the cities in Negroland.” In Battuta’s day 30,000 people lived there. It flourished as a caravan crossroads, where the Sahara met the Sahel, a band of semiarid land 300 to 600 miles wide that stretches for 2,600 miles along the Sahara’s southern edge and buffers the desert from green Africa. “Sahel” came from an Arabic word for shore or coastline. The sea was the Sahara. When travelers from the north reached the Sahel after crossing the desert, they felt the relief of stepping ashore after a long sea passage. Travelers heading north from the Sahel felt that they were casting off. Agadez, like Timbuktu, was a desert port town.

  By the time Barth got there, the population had shrunk to about 7,000, but Agadez still fascinated him. The new sultan, who was about to be officially installed, received him hospitably. They conversed in Hausa, which Barth had learned during the traverse of Aïr. The sultan had never heard of the English nation, but was pleased to learn how the famous “English” gunpowder had gotten its name. That evening, he sent Barth a dish called finkaso, a thick pancake made of wheat flour, covered with butter. After the deprivations of Aïr, it tasted like “the greatest luxury in the world.” Thanks to the sultan, who sent Barth two meals every day, the explorer ate very well during his three-week stay—lamb, dates, melons, cucumbers, grains. The sultan sidestepped Barth’s invitation to sign a commercial treaty with Britain, but did write letters of passage for him to the governors of Kano and Katsina, “in rather incorrect Arabic,” sniffed the German pedant.

  Barth saw slave caravans, and a salt caravan headed east to Bilma that was said to have 10,000 camels. The men of Agadez carried bows and arrows instead of spears, and rode horses instead of camels—signs of the Sahel. The busy market offered further signs: meat, millet, wheat, dates, wine, melons, and other vegetables. Women sold beads, necklaces, and finely-worked leather boxes for tobacco and perfume.

  Like most port towns, Agadez had a mongrel population that reflected all the peoples who passed through it, beginning with the Berber tribes that had founded it. There were Tuaregs, Hausas, Fulanis, Tebus, Kanuris, and Arabs. And also, Barth was puzzled to find, Songhais, a black ethnic group based 600 harsh miles to the west. All this diversity made Agadez a polyglot town where interpreters did good business.

  But Agadez also had its own unique language, Emgedesi, spoken nowhere else in the region. To a linguist such as Barth, this was a mystery to pursue. He detected the influences of Hausa, Tamasheq, and Songhai in Emgedesi, but remained puzzled about the dialect’s origins and exclusivity to Agadez. Then came the clue that connected the dots: several Tuaregs who had been to Timbuktu told him that Emgedesi was also spoken there, 800 miles west. Barth was surprised, then thrilled as he realized the implications.

  Songhai had been the most extensive empire in Central Africa’s history, greater than Mali or Ghana. It had covered portions of present-day Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Senegal, and Niger. Songhai had conquered Timbuktu, another Sahelian port city of Tuaregs and Arabs. The language of the conquerors mixed with Timbuktu’s other tongues, creating a distinctive language unique to the town.

  Then early in the sixteenth century, Askia, Songhai’s king, decided to extend his realm to the east, into central Sudan and Hausaland, and to curb the
pesky Tuaregs to the north. He conquered Agadez in 1515 and left an occupying force there before proceeding on a haj through Egypt to Mecca, scattering legendary amounts of gold in his wake.

  By the end of the sixteenth century the empire of Songhai had disintegrated. But in Agadez the descendants of the occupying army had melded with the local population. So had their language, and the resulting hybrid dialect evolved along similar linguistic lines as the hybrid language of Timbuktu, like related bird species on separate islands. This link, wrote Barth, “throws a new light over the history and ethnography of this part of the world,” and is “of the highest importance for the whole ethnography of North Africa.” It also gave him his first whiff of the fabled city of Timbuktu, a place he never expected to see.

  BARTH’S CURIOSITY took him all over Agadez. He visited the Sharia court to observe Islamic justice and found it just as tedious as courts everywhere. He connived to get inside the mosque, and took its measurements. He noticed that the finest house in Agadez was ornamented with ostrich eggs, perhaps a talisman of fertility. (Nachtigal noticed the same thing in Kukawa twenty years later). Walking the streets, Barth heard the high voices of young boys reciting verses from the Qur’an, written in chalk on wooden tablets. By the end of his stay Barth had established that 250 to 300 boys were enrolled in five or six religious schools in Agadez.

  He watched the formal extravaganza of the sultan’s inauguration, and noted with satisfaction that the sultan was wearing the fine blue burnoose presented by himself—a sign of open-mindedness toward Christians that would be broadcast throughout the Sudan. Hamma, Annur’s son-in-law, took him to visit his Agadez mistress, whom Barth described as “very comely,” with a fair Arabic complexion. She was married‚ but her husband lived 300 miles away in Katsina, “and she did not seem to await his return in the Penelopean style.”