A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  The cold killed off the butterflies but didn’t reduce the mobs of flies that always followed the caravan. The terrain became more verdant, dominated by the slender doum palm and the ubiquitous thorny acacia, whose amber sap (gum Arabic) provided a sweetish treat. They passed patches of wild melons, eaten by the natives but too bitter for the Europeans. Everyone was made miserable by “karengia,” a prickly burr whose myriad tiny barbs infiltrated clothing and stung like packs of hornets. Every native carried pincers to remove the barbs immediately. And yet karengia was also useful; people collected and pounded its seeds to make a nutritious drink.

  They saw tracks of antelopes, gazelles, warthogs, wild oxen, and lions. By late December they often glimpsed giraffes and ostriches. Someone ran down a newly hatched ostrich to keep as a pet. On the last day of 1850, Annur sent the Europeans two ostrich eggs, a luscious treat. Meat also reentered their diet. Barth bought a hunk of wild ox. Richardson sampled giraffe, which he likened to beef. It came from the Tagama people, who hunted giraffe from horseback with spears.

  The Tagama women offered themselves to the explorers, with the encouragement of their brothers and husbands. Barth, appalled, noted that the women were pretty and fair, though some were “immensely fat, particularly in the hinder regions,” another illustration, he pointed out, of tebulloden. The next day one of these bulgy women rode up on a tottering white bullock and asked for medicine from Overweg, whose reputation for doctoring always preceded him. Barth dryly noted that Overweg’s doctoring “was rather of a remarkable kind.” Since Overweg usually didn’t have the time or knowledge to make a diagnosis, he didn’t treat his patients according to their complaints, but according to the day of the week. One day everybody got Epsom salts, the next day Dover’s powder, and so on. No one complained. To the Africans it was all white man’s magic.

  AS THEY PENETRATED farther into Sudan, the landscape and architecture changed. The huts were made of hides, branches, and the stalks of Indian corn, exactly as described by Leo Africanus two centuries earlier.

  A week into January 1851 they began traveling past extensive cornfields, the first they had seen. They were in Damergu, which Barth called “the granary of Aïr.” The neat landscape reminded Richardson of the undulating fields of Essex. They also saw many herds of cattle and horses. Overweg hunted ducks in a lagoon, a sign that the desert was behind them. Food was plentiful. The population mixed Kel Owi Tuaregs, Hausas, Fulanis, and Kanuris from Bornu. There were slaves, runaway slaves, and free people, both Muslim and pagan. These settled folks were more cheerful than the desert nomads, less hostile and suspicious. Damergu impressed Barth as orderly, peaceful, and prosperous, a welcome change.

  Richardson had estimated that the expedition would get from Tripoli to Damergu in less than four months. It had taken nine. Gifts, extortions, and depredations had eaten up more than half of the expedition’s goods, and the budget was long since blown.

  This was their situation when they stopped in early January at a village called Tagalel, about seventy-five miles northwest of Zinder. For reasons left vague by both Barth and Richardson, the three Europeans decided to split up here. They planned to reunite two months later in Kukawa, the capital of Bornu near Lake Chad, where they hoped to be resupplied. Barth explained that by traveling alone they could cover more ground, and do it more cheaply and inconspicuously. This was no doubt true for him, and also preferable to being under Richardson’s clumsy authority.

  Richardson gave no reason for splitting up his command and didn’t take responsibility for it. “It has been agreed,” he wrote in the passive voice, “that I and my colleagues should here part for a time.” Perhaps he was weary of Barth or yielded to pressure from him. Neither man acknowledged that separating also increased the risks to themselves and hence to the expedition.

  In any case, on January 10, 1851, Barth and Overweg departed with the salt caravan headed to Kano. Three days later Overweg would break off westward toward Tessaoua and Maradi. Richardson, traveling with Annur, continued toward Zinder. Richardson expected to be the first to reach Kukawa, but Barth had a foreboding. At the last moment he decided not to give Richardson an important package of documents to send to Europe from Kukawa.

  “We took leave one of the other with some emotion,” wrote Richardson, “for in Central Africa, those travellers who part and take divergent routes can scarcely count on all meeting together again.”

  12

  “The Celebrated Emporium

  of Negroland”

  THE TWO GERMANS PARTED ON JANUARY 13, 1851. THAT LEFT Barth in his favorite circumstance—independent and self-reliant. “I now went on alone,” he wrote, “but felt not at all depressed by solitude, as I had been accustomed from my youth to wander about by myself among strange people.”

  The pastoral landscape added to his expansive mood. He passed comfortable villages where cattle grazed alongside fields of corn and millet. Women sold delicacies—sour milk (thin yogurt), butter, sweet potatoes, roasted peanuts, savory fried cakes made from the bean pods of the dorowa tree, a paste of pounded guinea corn and pepper, sweetmeats made of pounded rice, butter, and honey. On his second evening without European company, he feasted on chicken while a musician played the three-stringed molo and sang an extemporaneous song in his honor. “I might have fancied myself a prince,” wrote Barth. After the austerities of the desert, this was literally the land of milk and honey.

  Threats had diminished. Nighttime sneak thieves, though plentiful, were mere pests compared to marauders, highwaymen, and religious fanatics. Barth usually fired several shots after camping, to warn potential thieves that he was armed.

  Tessaoua, the first large town he had seen in Sudan, with about 15,000 inhabitants, exemplified this brief interlude between troubles: “… it made the most cheerful impression upon me,” wrote Barth, “as manifesting every where the unmistakable marks of the comfortable, pleasant sort of life led by the natives.” Their airy houses made of clay, wicker, and reeds offered both privacy and shade. In contrast to the severe Tuaregs, Tessaoua’s people were sunny and easygoing, “bent upon enjoying life, rather given to women, dance, and song, but without any disgusting excess… . Drinking fermented liquor can not be strictly reckoned a sin in a place where a great many of the inhabitants are pagans; but a drunken person, nevertheless, is scarcely seen… .”

  In the market he ate small kebabs of meat roasted over open fires, the kebabs leaning against each other vertically so that the fat from the top pieces basted the lower ones. He was amused to see some red cloth for sale that had been stolen from him in Aïr. There were also calabashes filled with roasted locusts. Barth called their flavor “agreeable,” partly because revenge against these ravagers tasted so sweet. Hornemann had been more enthusiastic, likening roasted locusts to “red herrings, but more delicious.” Livingstone found them distasteful when boiled, but when roasted preferred them to shrimp, “though I would avoid both if possible.” Nachtigal relished them roasted, but made distinctions: the tastiest were the voracious light brown ones, followed by the green ones, then the speckled green-and-white ones. The type called “princess’s finger,” slender with white cross stripes on its throat, was avoided as bitter. He mentioned nine others.

  Tessaoua’s systems of government and justice were as well organized as the surrounding fields. Each village had a mayor who decided minor matters and collected taxes and fees payable to the king in Tessaoua. Every household in the territory paid a poll tax. Tessaoua, in turn, paid tribute to the pagan Hausa king of Maradi, seventy miles to the west. Fines were levied for offenses such as assault or illicit paternity. A murderer forfeited all his property to the government, and perhaps his life, depending on the king’s ruling. The king decided all matters of consequence, after first consulting with his privy council and vizier, or prime minister. All of this contradicted the common European assumption that Africans were unable to organize and govern themselves.

  The unit of currency had changed to the cowrie shell.
Cowries had reached Africa through Persia and the Maldives. Though heavy and inconvenient to lug around, the shells had been used as money for centuries throughout Central Africa, as far west as Timbuktu. They were also worn as ornamentation, like expensive jewelry. Small purchases—a needle, an onion, the small kebab that Barth enjoyed—cost a cowrie or two. Barth noted that a poor man could eat for five days on twenty-five or thirty shells, and a family could live for a year on 50,000 to 60,000, the equivalent of about £5. Larger items, such as a sword, cost 1,000 shells. A bull could run 7,000, a healthy young slave more than 30,000. In Tessaoua, Barth witnessed a major transaction in which half a dozen people did “the really heroic work of counting 500,000 shells.” He estimated that the current year’s rather scanty salt caravan from Aïr, consisting of 4,000 camel loads, would bring about 100 million cowries, or £8,000.

  BARTH AND THE CARAVAN continued south toward Katsina. The idyll of Tessaoua soon faded. The fifty-mile stretch between Gazaoua and Katsina was turbulent with overlapping hostile factions—Hausas, Fulanis, Tuaregs. Troops of horsemen and archers kicked up dust as they hurried by. Barth also saw the tracks of elephants for the first time, and surmised that this must be their northernmost range.

  On January 21 the caravan came to a wide ditch dug across the path. It was the first fortification protecting Katsina. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the city had been the greatest in Central Africa, with about 100,000 inhabitants. But forty-five years before Barth’s visit it was ravaged by the jihadi armies of the fanatical Fulani reformer Usman dan Fodio. The city’s population had plunged to between 7,000 and 8,000.

  In the early nineteenth century several reformist movements detonated in Central Africa. The most important ignited in Hausaland from a fuse lit by Usman dan Fodio. Islam had reached the Sudan in the 1500s, but for centuries afterward it coexisted alongside paganism. The region’s rulers often converted to Islam for reasons of politics or profit. They built mosques and Islamic schools as emblems of prestige as much as faith. Most rulers were casual at best about the religion and did little to hinder pagan practices, not to mention other behavior that appalled strict Muslims. The ruling class naturally preferred the status quo to radical change.

  For these reasons devout Muslims sometimes chose to live in rural areas apart from the sinful towns. Dan Fodio was one of these. In some ways he fit the familiar mold of a religious fanatic. He had visions and believed that the Prophet had commanded him to wield the Sword of Truth against unbelievers. Yet he also came from a family of scholars. He was a learned man and a poet who wrote many works in Arabic on law, theology, and government.

  Nor was he a fiery young revolutionary. He spent nearly twenty years urging the leaders of Hausaland to reform, though with increasing fervor. He accused them of corruption and tyranny, and deplored their semipagan ways. He chided them for injustices, including onerous taxes on rural people, most of whom were Fulanis like himself. He attacked the poorly educated mallams who debased Islam with their pretensions and misinterpretations of the Qur’an. Dan Fodio preached for a return to a purer form of Islam, with strict adherence to Sharia—laws derived from the Qur’an. The Hausa nobles tolerated dan Fodio until his followers, many of whom were Fulani herdsmen and peasants, grew dangerously numerous. By the time the nobles decided to exterminate him, it was too late.

  Pushed to act, dan Fodio called for a jihad in 1804. Thousands responded. His revolutionary armies eventually overran Hausaland, including the major towns of Katsina and Kano. The Hausa nobles fled and established strongholds in their old domain of Gober. While dan Fodio’s son Muhammed Bello and his brother Abdullahi conquered territories throughout Central Africa, dan Fodio focused on governance. A fundamentalist but also a reformer, he moderated taxes and established a coherent system of justice based on Islamic law. He wrote about his reforms in classical Arabic, the traditional language of Islamic scholarship, but also in the vernacular languages of Hausa and Fulfulde (the Fulani language). In this way his writings were recited, circulated, and absorbed by the masses throughout Central Africa.

  Dan Fodio established his empire’s new capital at Sokoto, 160 miles west of Katsina, and divided his kingdom into thirty emirates. After he died in 1817, his son Muhammed Bello, who so impressed Clapperton, succeeded him as sultan of the Sokoto Caliphate, the larger eastern portion of the new Fulani empire. Dan Fodio’s brother Abdullahi was given the smaller western emirates, and the title emir of Gwandu.

  (Most of the current emirs are direct descendants of dan Fodio’s original appointees. Likewise, the current sultan of Sokoto, who is still considered the spiritual leader of Islamic northern Nigeria, is a direct descendant of dan Fodio.)

  Dan Fodio’s revolution transformed Central Africa, but like all revolutions, it fell far short of its ideals and had unintended consequences. For instance, in keeping with the Qur’an, dan Fodio outlawed the killing and enslavement of Muslims, as well as the theft or destruction of their property. But most of dan Fodio’s soldiers were angry peasants, not Islamic scholars. They slaughtered and pillaged their way across the region.

  Nor could the population of pagans supply all the slaves needed for agricultural labor and for export to pay the costs of running a vast kingdom. Dan Fodio’s successors and the Fulani emirs soon began justifying their razzias, or slave raids, on the grounds that even if their victims were Muslims, they weren’t devout enough, and hence could be enslaved in the name of the Prophet. When Clapperton visited Kano in the early 1820s, the emir told him that the city contained thirty slaves for every free man. In the next decades things worsened. The incessant razzias kept the Sudan in fear and chaos. Since the raids usually crossed territorial boundaries, the entire region stayed in a constant state of warfare—Muslims against pagans, emirates against emirates, the empire of Sokoto against the Hausa states of Gober and Maradi, Sokoto against the empire of Bornu, Tuaregs against whoever happened along.

  WHEN BARTH REACHED Katsina, it was greatly reduced from its former glory. The jihadists had sacked the city and destroyed most of its books in an attempt to erase the former regime from history.

  (Muhammed al-Kanemi, the ruler of Bornu, chided Muhammed Bello for the way the jihadists destroyed Islamic books: “We see among you a thing which every Malam rejects. You are destroying books; you are scattering them in the roads; you are throwing them in the dirt. But the name of God is on these books and you know that he who throws the name of God in the dirt is heathen.” This insulted Bello as both a Muslim and a lover of learning. He replied:

  … let me inform you, el-Kanemi, I went out on an expedition and captured one of the Katsina towns… . I saw papers being blown about by wind. They were falling into the dirt. I endeavoured to pick them up, till I was weary for they were so many… . Then I gathered the people together … they said the cause of what had been done was a quarrel that arose over the spoils of war. They further said that if anyone had intentionally thrown these papers away, he could only be one of the lowest of our people and if we had seen him we would have … punished him severely.

  Many of Katsina’s inhabitants had fled to Kano, 65 miles to the southeast, which soon supplanted Katsina as the most populous and commercially important city in Central Africa, a position it retains.

  Barth camped outside of town. To honor the visiting Christian, the emir sent a ram and two large calabashes of honey. The gifts consternated Barth. He couldn’t reciprocate with anything of value because his luggage had gone ahead to Kano. He was so destitute that when some royal musicians performed for him that day on drums, flutes, horns, and tambourine, he had little to offer them except a few cloves. He had learned that in Africa gifts were crucial to progress. He suspected that his lack of merchandise might stall him in Katsina.

  THE NEXT DAY he was summoned to an audience outside the town walls with the emir, Muhammed Bello Yerima. Wearing a simple white shirt and a black shawl, the emir sat beneath a magnificent tamarind tree, one of the botanical glories in that part of the
world. Barth immediately pegged him for a ham who lived for the grand gesture. Barth explained that he and his companions had lost most of their goods to robbers in Aïr. The rest were en route to Kano. Therefore he could offer only a modest gift, which he then produced: two red caps, a piece of printed calico, an English razor and scissors, a pound each of cloves and frankincense, a piece of soap, and some English needles.

  As Barth feared, it wasn’t enough. But instead of showing irritation, the emir dramatically welcomed Barth under his protection, the way a kidnapper offers protection to a hostage. Barth overheard him add, to the people sitting nearby, that since his enemies in Maradi possessed one of Barth’s companions (Overweg), and the ruler of Bornu had the other in Zinder (Richardson), he would be a fool to let this one pass out of his hands.

  Meanwhile horsemen from Bornu had arrived with orders from Sheikh Umar to take the Christian directly to Zinder. Barth had other plans and told them to go away. The protective emir also had other plans for the explorer. Barth, having no choice, resigned himself “to wait patiently for the end of the comedy.”

  The next day he was summoned into town. The clay walls were thirty feet high and many feet thick. Once inside, he passed through stubble fields and outlying houses for a mile and a half before reaching the town center. The emir was receiving people under the shade of a towering fig tree. Barth expressed his wish to leave quickly for Kano. The emir, however, insisted that he move into a nearby house as his guest. Barth had barely settled in when the emir sent another ram and two oxloads of corn. The gifts horrified Barth. They put him even more deeply into the emir’s debt and clutches.

  The next day the emir made his opening move: he would be pleased to accept Barth’s pistols. Barth refused: “I was convinced that the whole success of further proceedings depended on our firearms.” The emir’s next move: he would settle for 100,000 cowries. “A sum certainly small, according to European modes of thinking, barely exceeding £8,” wrote Barth, “but which I was quite unable to raise at the time.”