A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Many of Barth’s visitors were traders who had traveled throughout the Sudan. He questioned them closely. “All these I found to be intelligent men,” he wrote, “having been brought up in the centre of intercourse between a variety of tribes and nations of the most different organization, and, through the web of routes which join here, receiving information of distant regions.”

  Another frequent visitor was a learned mallam. After several conversations about religion with the infidel Barth, the mallam wondered why Christians and Muslims were such enemies, since their essential beliefs were so similar. Because, answered Barth, most people in both religions paid less attention to beliefs than to matters unrelated to religion. Both Christianity and Islam, he added, had lost their purity. The mallam asked for a copy of the Gospels in Arabic. “Mutually pleased with our conversation,” wrote Barth, “we parted from each other with regret.”

  Barth was always willing to engage Africans about anything, including the volatile subject of religion. His learning and familiarity with the Qur’an earned him respect and friends throughout his journey, and probably saved his life more than once. He also had studied African historians. He knew the names of famous African places, kings, and kingdoms. Unlike most African explorers, who couldn’t speak to the people they met and hence learned little about the cultures they were passing through, Barth was a gifted linguist who got his information firsthand. He spoke seven African languages and compiled vocabularies for twenty-four, which allowed him to talk to everyone from kings and viziers to merchants, imams, thieves, and slaves.

  No other African explorer collected the voices of so many African individuals from so many walks of life, including their names, histories, and personal details. He did not assume that Africans were barbarians or primitives, nor did he judge them strictly by appearances. A raggedy camel driver or an itinerant mallam could be sources of information, even scholarship. He questioned, listened, tried to understand. In his chapters on Agadez, he pointed out that someone who can talk to the local people and knows something about their culture can ask the right questions and get far better information than “that which is picked up incidentally by one who scarcely knows what he asks.” Without his combination of curiosity and linguistic skills, he wouldn’t have discovered the link between Agadez and Timbuktu, wouldn’t have been able to find common ground with the mallam, wouldn’t have understood what he was seeing and hearing in Agadez.

  IN THE EVENINGS, as he lay on his mat, Barth often listened to music and singing that filled the night. In addition to many kinds of drums and tambourines, he most likely heard the imzad, a one-stringed fiddle played by Tuareg women, and the molo, a three-stringed lute with a calabash body, favored by the Hausa, Fulani, and Songhai peoples. One evening he traded a piece of lamb’s meat for an extemporaneous song on his favorite instrument, the molo.

  Barth heard music almost everywhere he went, despite Islam’s divided attitude toward it. Musicians had low status yet were treasured. All Muslims acknowledged music’s power. Some condemned it as pagan, sensual, and apt to be accompanied by alcohol—instruments of the devil and distractions from the teachings of the Prophet. Others, especially Sufis, believed that music, especially chanting, could connect people to God. Most simply enjoyed it as pleasurable entertainment.

  One night Barth’s interest in these subjects turned dangerous. At the suggestion of a mischievous servant, he went alone to see a crowded dance celebration. His curiosity pushed him closer and closer until he scared himself and backed out. Too late. Someone shouted the war cry of Islam. The men drew their swords and chased him through the dark streets. He reached his house but the servant, laughing, chained the door. Barth turned to face the mob with his cutlass. Luckily they settled for insults instead of blood.

  The authorities heard about this and asked Barth the next day whether he had a complaint against the townspeople. No, he said, the fault was his own imprudence. “In fact, the people behaved remarkably well,” he wrote, “considering that I was the first Christian that ever visited the town; and the little explosions of fanaticism into which the women and children sometimes broke out when they saw me on our terrace, rather amused me.”

  Barth’s comprehensive curiosity was sometimes comical. He noticed that the houses of Agadez lacked indoor privies and that the natives relieved themselves outdoors. “As in many Italian towns,” he wrote, “the principle of the ‘da per tutto’ [everywhere], which astonished Goethe so much at Rivoli on the Lago di Garda, is in full force, being greatly assisted by the many ruined houses which are to be found in every quarter of the town.”

  Not content to rest on these investigative laurels, he further noticed that the Tuaregs disliked this custom, preferring the open desert. But since the countryside was so dangerous, security obliged them to go en masse. “When they reach some conspicuous tree,” wrote Barth, “the spears are all stuck into the ground, and the party separates behind the bushes; after which they again meet together under the tree, and return in solemn procession into the town.”

  (Barth is often accused of having no sense of humor, but that’s not quite true. He doesn’t rollick or crack jokes, he’s never whimsical, and no one reads him for his wit. But he does see the comical side of things and responds to it with understated humor, usually as dry as chalk and sometimes dusted with scholarship. It’s easy to miss amid the general earnestness. Examples: the wife who did not wait for her husband’s return “in the Penelopean style”; his description of certain reactions to him in Agadez as “little explosions of fanaticism”; the reference to Goethe in the context above; the description of dignified Tuaregs returning “in solemn procession” from their collaborative defecation. Not hilarious, not humorless.)

  Barth paid close attention to the females in Agadez, and they returned his interest. The day after the sultan left town, five or six young women visited, “and with much simplicity invited me to make merry with them, there being now, as they said, no longer reason for reserve, ‘as the sultan was gone.’ ” Two of them, he observed, were “tolerably pretty and well formed.” But he declined a dalliance with “these wantons” as a bad idea for a European traveling through a Muslim country, because it was “best to maintain the greatest austerity of manners with regard to the other sex, though he may thereby expose himself to a good deal of derision from some of the lighter-hearted natives.”

  Barth was often mocked for being a bachelor who turned down female offers and traveled without a concubine. With African women he was direct and unblinking as an observer, but resolutely prim as a man. He considered it his anthropological duty to record frank physical descriptions of the tribes and peoples he met. But unlike his fellow explorer and friend Richard Burton, he evidently didn’t do hands-on research into the natives’ sexual practices, despite frequent offers and temptations. Still, he was a young man, and his eye for women wasn’t strictly scientific. It became less so as his celibacy lengthened into years and his primness softened enough that he felt comfortable flirting.

  AGADEZ THRILLED BARTH. To someone of his cast of mind, constantly searching for connections—historical, linguistic, geographic—the city was a gold mine. It linked the old Berber tribes of North Africa, the Songhai empire of West Africa, and the Hausa empire of central Sudan. As an entrepôt, it connected much of the geography of north-central Africa. Pull a thread in Agadez and the map of Africa puckered from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to Lake Chad.

  Agadez was a turning point for Barth. He was on his own and free to go wherever his curiosity took him. He seemed to expand and to relax into his powers, and also into his personality, which becomes more apparent in his journal from Agadez onward.

  After three weeks in the city it was time to end his sabbatical. On October 30 he left for Tintellust. He arrived on the evening of November 5 to find the village empty. Exhausted, his party rode through the night and reached the caravan that morning.

  Richardson and Overweg gave Barth a cool reception. His companions “a
pparently felt some jealousy,” wrote Barth, “on account of the success which had attended my proceedings.” Richardson was also peeved that Barth hadn’t persuaded the sultan to sign the treaty.

  Barth shrugged and began his extensive report about Agadez. He felt he was writing to save the expedition. If his discoveries could spark enthusiasm within Europe’s scientific community, the British government might approve more funding. Otherwise, he noted, “after our heavy losses, we should be obliged to return directly, leaving the chief objects of the expedition unattained.”

  Seven months after leaving Tripoli, those objects were almost within reach. And just ahead lay Kano, the greatest city in central Sudan.

  11

  Separate Ways

  THE EXPEDITION WAS STALLED, AWAITING THE RETURN OF THE SALT caravan. After sending off his long report about Agadez on November 14, Barth filled the time by intensifying his study of Emgedesi, the town’s distinctive language. His tutor was Zummuzuk, “a reprobate of the worst description.” A servant of Annur’s, Zummuzuk had been severely beaten in Agadez by Barth’s guide, first for using the guide’s name to buy goods, and again for selling the caravan’s donkeys without permission. Barth hired the scoundrel under strict conditions: “… during his presence in my tent, he was not to move from the place assigned him, the limits of which were very accurately defined—of course, at a respectable distance from my luggage; and if he touched any thing, I was officially permitted by A’nnur to shoot him on the spot.” Barth progressed quickly. When he was visited by Amagay, “the chief eunuch and confidential servant of the Sultan of A’gades,” the two conversed in Emgedesi. (Zummuzuk later fled the caravan after filching a caftan from Richardson.)

  Richardson’s reaction to Barth’s report about Agadez illustrates their different personalities and focuses. “The worthy Doctor,” Richardson wrote in his journal, “seems to have been too much occupied in collecting geographical data to preserve many picturesque facts by the way.” This criticism did not, however, keep Richardson from cribbing large chunks of the report for his own journal.

  Richardson had adopted a new tactic to avoid the constant requests for gifts: he rarely spoke to anyone in the caravan. But he couldn’t avoid Annur, who continued to expect daily infusions of tea and coffee. In exchange, the old chief began sending milk to Richardson every morning. The Englishman used it in his tea and coffee in place of precious sugar. Annur seemed to develop a genuine liking for Richardson, visiting often and sometimes napping in his tent. Richardson didn’t return the warmth. He resented Annur for his parsimony and for the high fee he was charging to escort the expedition to Zinder.

  Annur also liked to visit Barth. The explorer’s avid interest in Aïr delighted the chief, and he enjoyed studying Barth’s sketches. This set Annur apart from many of the people along the route. Islam frowned upon two-dimensional images, including drawings. Some Africans, principally those with too little education and too much religion, were also deeply suspicious of Barth’s constant notetaking. They called these activities “writing down the country” and, in the enduring alliance of ignorance and paranoia, assumed these pursuits were Christian espionage done in preparation for an invasion.

  Many Africans were understandably wary of European travelers, who were alien, white, Christian, and well armed. These strangers obviously had money but evidently wanted something more. Why else would they come all the way to Africa? Yet when asked why they were there, they answered with absurdities about wanting to see plants, animals, rivers, peoples. To leave one’s family and country, to endure hardships and risk death for the sole purpose of seeing new places, struck many Africans as preposterous. People who said otherwise were either lying or mad and couldn’t be trusted.

  “The notion of traveling for curiosity was new to him,” wrote Mungo Park about a wary ruler. “He thought it impossible, he said, that any man in his senses would undertake so dangerous a journey merely to look at the country and its inhabitants… . it was evident that his suspicion had arisen from a belief that every white man must of necessity be a trader.”

  Yet other Africans were fascinated by these white men who had traveled so far. Denham once told a chief near Lake Chad that he and his companions had come to see the country and its people, and had been traveling for a long time. The chief said, “Are not your eyes dimmed with straining to the north, where all your thoughts must ever be? Oh! you are men, men, indeed! Why, if my eyes do not see the wife and children of my heart for ten days, when they should be closed in sleep they are flowing with tears… . My heart says you are my friend. May you die at your own tents, in the arms of your wives and family.”

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed a regional governor of Sudan in 1824 when Clapperton refused his gifts and explained why he had come. “You do not want slaves, you do not want horses, you do not want money, but wish only to see the world? You must go to Sultan Bello [ruler of the empire of Sokoto], who is a learned and pious man, and will be glad to see men who have seen so much.”

  “Everything is wonderful,” Bello said after accepting Clapperton’s gifts, “but you are the greatest curiosity of all!” Bello was a warrior-king, an Islamic fundamentalist, the skillful governor of a turbulent empire, and a scholar who had read widely and written a number of books. He questioned Clapperton closely about Britain, Greece, India, and the Moorish kingdom of Spain. Clapperton was embarrassed that Bello knew more about the distinctions between various Christian sects than did the visiting Christian. The explorer brought home a copy of Bello’s history of the Sokoto regime, the first such document to reach Europe. In his account of the expedition to Bornu and Sokoto, Clapperton wrote that the people of England “erroneously regarded the inhabitants [of Africa] as naked savages, devoid of religion, and not far removed from the condition of wild beasts: whereas I found them, from my personal observation, to be civilized, learned, humane, and pious.”

  On the other hand, Clapperton also reported that four years earlier Bello had ordered the mass beheadings of 2,000 Tuaregs captured during war. “I may here add,” the explorer continued, “that the capital punishments inflicted in Soudan are beheading, impaling, and crucifixion; the first being reserved for Mahometans, and the other two practised on Pagans. I was told, as a matter of curiosity, that wretches on the cross generally linger three days, before death puts an end to their suffering.” The executioner of Sokoto, who visited Clapperton to ask for a gift, said that he had auditioned for the job by cutting off the head of his brother.

  European history was filled with the same vicious punishments meted out by equally merciless kings and clerics. But Europeans found it nearly impossible to overcome their preconceptions about Africa and see such parallels—to see Bello’s scholarly curiosity as well as his brutality, his cosmopolitan interests as well as his religious severity. It was far simpler to focus on Africa’s exoticism, fanaticism, and barbarism, all of which were easily found but only part of the story. It was also simpler to ignore Islam’s centuries-long respect for education and learning, and to reduce it to a religion of violent polygamous slaveholding fanatics.

  Early African explorers often found the tables turned: they were the ones considered ugly, barbaric, pitiable. People stared at them as if they were circus freaks because of their whiteness. African women were especially curious. Mungo Park was compelled to display his pale skin several times for inquisitive women. (A group of them also requested visual proof of his circumcision.) Clapperton mentioned a governor’s three wives “who, after examining my skin with much attention, remarked, compassionately, it was a thousand pities I was not black, for I had then been tolerably good-looking.” Clapperton, sometimes a mischievous flirt, asked one of them if she would marry him. “She immediately began to whimper; and on urging her to explain the cause, she frankly avowed she did not know how to dispose of my white legs.” Annur urged Richardson to spend more time in the sun so his skin would get darker, like Barth’s and Overweg’s, instead of being so disgustingly white. He also
shook his head at the barbarity of European warfare, in which big guns slaughtered multitudes, as opposed to civilized Tuareg warfare with spears and swords.

  ON DECEMBER 5 the first camels from the returning salt caravan wobbled into camp. The rest trickled in over the next few days and bivouacked throughout the area. On December 14 all the groups began moving south to converge into one big caravan. They traveled together so that no one got the advantage of reaching the markets first.

  Everyone felt rich and ready for a binge in Sudan’s big markets. That night, and every night as the caravan moved south, the camp pulsed with music and dancing, propelled by the throbbing rhythms of competing drummers. Each morning, to hurry everyone along, drummers pounded while the camels were loaded. The caravan traveled all day to the monotonous beating of drums, punctuated by the jingling bells on the Tuaregs’ horses.

  Barth celebrated, too, by climbing a mountain. But months of inactivity and poor diet had weakened him, and the steep descent on crumbling rock exhausted him. For the next four-and-a-half years he never again felt strong enough to climb a moderate peak. The mountain goat who had bounded up every elevation in the expedition’s first months had been chastened by Africa.

  They ran into a caravan that had left Tripoli three months earlier. “Without bringing us a single line, or even as much as a greeting,” complained Barth. On Christmas Eve the Europeans ate a dismal supper of the “eternal bitter ‘tuwo,’ ” a coarse paste made of millet. On Christmas morning they were cheered when a drummer and a flutist came to their tent and played, not for the holiday but for a gift. Richardson gave them three cheap rings and some sugar. Each of the expedition’s seven servants received a cotton handkerchief and a ring. Richardson prayed to see another Christmas Day.

  Though they were moving south, the nighttime temperatures were dropping, from the fifties in November to near-freezing. The Tuaregs hated the cold. So did the Christians, after acclimatizing for months in the desert. The idea of ice in such latitudes had seemed preposterous to Europeans until Denham sent a dispatch dated late December that described waterskins “frozen as hard as a board.”