A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  As he moved east, the language and culture changed from Hausa/Fulani to Kanuri. “It is remarkable what a difference there is between the character of the ba-Haushe and the Kanuri,” wrote Barth, “the former lively, spirited, and cheerful, the latter melancholic, dejected, and brutal; and the same difference is visible in their physiognomies—the former having in general very pleasant and regular features and more graceful forms, while the Kanuri, with his broad face, his wide nostrils, and his large bones, makes a far less agreeable impression, especially the women, who are very plain, and certainly among the ugliest in all Negroland, notwithstanding their coquetry, in which they do not yield at all to the Hausa women.”

  The day after leaving Gumel he heard distant drums of war. They belonged to Buhari, the former emir of nearby Hadejia. Buhari had been deposed by the sultan of Sokoto in favor of Buhari’s brother. Now the ex-emir had turned rebel to recover his throne. The vizier of Bornu, who seized every opportunity to torment Sokoto’s ruler, was secretly supporting Buhari with arms and men. The region’s people suffered the consequences.

  Barth witnessed the revolt’s first spasms. He began passing empty devastated villages. When he returned this way a year and a half later, en route to Timbuktu, many more villages and towns had disappeared, wiped from the landscape by war, their inhabitants killed or seized as slaves. Rapacity typified the region’s rulers, noted Barth. Whenever they needed money, they descended on nearby districts to take slaves, sometimes even snatching their own subjects.

  The region also swarmed with thieves. On most evenings Barth fired his gun to warn them away.

  Wars, thieves, and razzias kept the area between Kano and Kukawa in upheaval. Traffic on the road dwindled because people were afraid of being robbed or captured and sold as slaves. The roadside markets where lively women sold their goods disappeared. The landscape changed as well, turning monotonous—flat, sandy, uncultivated, with little vegetation except occasional doum palms and baobabs (also called kuka trees and monkey-bread trees). The road splintered into many tracks, which also splintered.

  Barth needed a guide through this maze, but finding one was nearly impossible. Everyone was scared of being seized as a slave. He did manage to hire several guides, but they all deserted within a day or two. He had higher hopes for two short muscular Manga warriors who seemed tough enough for the perils of the road, with their leather aprons, bows and arrows, small battle axes, leather provision bags, and small water gourds. But they quickly developed jitters and quit before the end of their first day.

  Disgusted, Barth plowed ahead with his young servants. “I could only rely upon Providence and my own courage.”

  WHILE BARTH WAS trapped in Katsina, Richardson was in Zinder, a city of 20,000. He reached its outskirts on January 14 with Annur, and was so eager to ditch the old chief that he galloped into town ahead of his party and immediately placed himself under the hospitality of Zinder’s sultan. When Annur chastised him for this, Richardson exulted at being released from Annur’s custody, thus adding insult to bad manners. But Richardson was fed up with larcenous, wheedling Tuaregs, and he still carried a grudge against Annur for the steep price of his protection. When Barth learned of Richardson’s conduct, he called it “not only impolitic, but unfair,” since the old chief, though pricey and stingy, had at least kept his word, unlike almost everyone else in Aïr.

  Richardson’s delight at escaping the Tuaregs gave Zinder a rosy hue, at first. The sultan and his chief advisor, a Moroccan sherif, plied Richardson with so much food that he nearly took ill. “Really the world seems turned upside down when the conduct of the people here is compared with the hospitality which we received from [Annur],” wrote Richardson. He praised the sultan, Ibrahim, as an intelligent fifty-year-old with a sparkling sense of humor. Ibrahim also had 300 concubines, 100 sons, and 50 daughters. The concubines weren’t shut in, but were free to roam the streets and even to take other lovers.

  In partial return for the sultan’s generosity, Richardson satisfied his host’s “ardent desire” to become acquainted with the strong spirits of Christians—alcoholic, not religious. Richardson gave the sultan half a bottle of mastic, an anise-flavored liqueur. The sultan, accompanied by his son-in-law, retired to his inner chambers and “made himself very merry.” The next day he didn’t appear in public.

  Richardson sometimes spent evenings in the garden of the urbane sherif. They talked about political developments in Algeria, which France had invaded in 1830. The sherif had fought the French for fourteen years and been their prisoner for seven months. Now 2,000 miles from Algiers, he was the sheikh of Bornu’s eyes and ears in Zinder, as well as the sultan’s advisor. All this easy living and political sophistication impressed Richardson.

  He was less pleased to see Zinder’s lower classes greet grandees by kneeling and tossing dust onto their heads. The greater the discrepancy in rank, the bigger the cloud of dust. Social equals greeted each other with a gesture that would become familiar in the New World: they slapped hands with open vertical palms. Zinder’s fashionable women stained their teeth yellow and their skins indigo, and wore their hair in large knots, one hanging above each ear, one in back. Above the waist they were bare. Every night there was dancing to drums.

  The sultan lost some of his sparkle when Richardson learned about his methods of capital punishment. In some cases the offender’s chest was sliced open and his heart torn out. For a slower doom, the offender was hung by the heels. Richardson visited the place of executions and its Tree of Death, a vestige of paganism. Fifty vultures killed time in the branches. The ground was a horror show of bones and hyena feces. “Never in my life did I feel so sick at heart—so revolted at man’s crimes and cruelties.”

  He noticed that every household in Zinder chained its slaves tightly at the ankles so that they couldn’t run away, forcing them to move “in little jumps.” He was shocked when his cultured friend the sherif casually gave away a freshly caught slave—a frightened little boy, scarred on only one cheek, a sign that his mother had lost all her children before him. Such were the scenes of everyday life in Zinder.

  Then Richardson heard the royal drum call together the sultan’s forces to “eat up the country” in a razzia, or slave raid. Whenever the sultan needed money, whether small change for kola nuts or large sums to settle heavy debts, he paid in human flesh. He raised this capital through razzias. “As the largest fish eat the little fish,” Richardson was told, “so the great people eat the small people.” (In a few years, Europe’s rulers would justify the same practice in Africa under the fancier aegis of social Darwinism.)

  The Qur’an prohibited the enslavement of Muslims. For that reason, said the imam of Zinder to Richardson, it was not in the economic interest of the sultan or the merchants to convert pagans. But in practice it mattered little to the sultan and his fellow lords whether the seized flesh was Muslim or pagan, because it all could be sold. For Africa’s rulers, greed and power trumped religion, as they soon would for Europe’s Christian rulers. Richardson astutely remarked that these indiscriminate raids would hinder the progress of Islam in Africa as the blacks realized that conversion did not protect them.

  (Power operates similarly in every age, on every continent. Shortly after dan Fodio was succeeded by his son, Muhammed Bello, Bello invaded Bornu. Bornu’s ruler, al-Kanemi, wrote to him, “We profess the same religion, and it is not fitting that our subjects should make war on each other. Between our two kingdoms are the pagan Bedde tribes, on whom it is permissible to levy contribution: let us respect this limit: what lies to the east of their country shall be ours: what lies to the west shall be yours.” This finds its European echo in the Berlin Conference of 1884, where the European powers began the partition of Africa among themselves.)

  Nor did it matter if vassal lords stole subjects from provinces belonging to their liege, the sheikh of Bornu. The sheikh looked the other way as long as he got 20 percent of the take. “Really it is difficult to compare the condition of this e
xtraordinary region to anything but a forest,” wrote Richardson, “through which lions and tigers range to devour the weaker and more timid beasts—to which they grant intervals of repose during the digestion of their meals.”

  Richardson described the razzia and its effects unflinchingly. His convictions burn on the page, in emotional but controlled prose that Barth was incapable of, as in this description of the return from the razzia:

  There cannot be in the world—there cannot be in the whole world—a more appalling spectacle than this. My head swam as I gazed. A single horseman rode first, showing the way, and the wretched captives followed him as if they had been used to this condition all their lives. Here were naked little boys running alone, perhaps thinking themselves upon a holiday; near at hand dragged mothers with babes at their breasts; girls of various ages, some almost ripened into womanhood, others still infantine in form and appearance; old men bent two-double with age, their trembling chins verging towards the ground, their poor old heads covered with white wool; aged women tottering along, leaning upon long staffs, mere living skeletons;—such was the miscellaneous crowd that came first; and then followed the stout young men, ironed neck to neck! This was the first installment of the black bullion of Central Africa; and as the wretched procession huddled through the gateways into the town the creditors of the [sultan] looked gloatingly on through their lazy eyes, and calculated on speedy payment… . It was exceedingly horrifying to hear the people of Zinder salute the troops of the razzia on their return with the beautiful Arabic word, Alberka, ‘blessing!’ Thus is it that human beings sometimes ask God for a blessing on transactions which must ever be stamped with his curse.

  Richardson’s close look at the ugliness of the razzia altered some of his views. He abandoned the idea that slavery would disappear if white people—Arab slavers and their customers outside of Africa—abandoned it. “The blacks are, in truth, the real active men-stealers,” he wrote. “It must be confessed, that if there were no white men from the north or south to purchase the supply of slaves required out of Africa, slavery would still flourish… . Africa is bled from all pores by her own children, seconded by the cupidity of strangers.” The rich black men of Central Africa, he noted, owned thousands of slaves who worked their plantations.

  This led him to another change. He had begun the expedition with the firm belief that strong commercial relations between Europe and Africa would lead to the end of slavery. The brutalities he witnessed in Zinder smashed that idea. Near the end of his stay there he recorded several variations of his new conviction: “only foreign conquest by a power like Great Britain or France can really extirpate slavery from Africa.”

  By the time Richardson said goodbye to the sultan on February 8, Ibrahim had lost his sparkle. Richardson seemed psychologically exhausted. “His highness had nothing to say, and we as little to him,” he wrote. “We just shook hands, and that was all.”

  ZINDER MARKED a turning point for Richardson. Ever since Aïr he had been slowly distancing himself from all but a few Africans. In the salt caravan he stopped speaking to people to avoid beggars. For the same reason, he left Zinder’s market after a quick visit. After leaving the city he traveled a route parallel to Barth’s, but recorded markedly different reactions to what he saw: “I am afraid I shall soon get tired of this negro population and these towns, all built and all peopled in the same manner,” he wrote. “They seem remarkably curious at first, but curiosity soon palls.” It’s impossible to imagine Barth writing such a sentence.

  Several factors cooled Richardson’s interest in Africa. The heat of the Sudan sapped his energy and slowly undermined his health. As those things waned, so did his intellectual curiosity. Zinder also forced him to acknowledge that his life’s goal of contributing to the end of slavery was a pipe dream. The psychological shock seemed to rock him.

  These losses of energy and purpose fed his growing impatience with, and despair about, black-on-black violence. All this perhaps contributed to his more frequent refuge in racial clichés and stereotypes. In Zinder, for instance, he bemoaned Central Africa’s lack of any written history. This was a standard European trope, and an ignorant one. Richardson compounded this arrogant assumption by adding that even if there were written histories, posterity would ignore them as accounts of nothing more than “barbarism and slave-hunting.”

  In another sign of Richardson’s fading interest in actual Africans, he resorted to generalities about “the negro character.” When his kaleidoscope and peep shows delighted the sultan of Zinder, he wrote, “These barbarians are nothing but great willful children.” His visit to the Tree of Death inspired more racial boilerplate: “Here, then, we have a specimen of the negro character, with all its contradictions; soft and effeminate in its ordinary moods; cheerful, and pleasant, and simple, to appearance; but capable of acting, as it were without transition, the most terrible deeds of atrocity.” Was this intended to contrast, one wonders, with specimens of white character displayed throughout European and American history?

  Richardson’s mental and imaginative exhaustion was especially apparent during his stay in Gouré, a town of 7,000 about 100 miles east of Zinder. Gouré’s ruler, Koso, was handsome, educated, affable, and full of questions. He quizzed Richardson about his health, his European clothes, his impressions of the Tuaregs. He wanted to know if any wars roiled Europe at present, and asked for details about Britain’s political relations with the Ottoman Empire. He was politely but intensely curious about his visitor and the world he came from.

  “It was really a scene of African state, but without deformities,” wrote Richardson. “There was no blood, no slaying of victims, no abject ceremonies; nothing,” he added in a telling phrase, “to offend the eye of the European.” That had become his measure.

  That evening Richardson trotted out all the marvels he used to amuse African rulers—compass, telescope, kaleidoscope, peep shows. He expected the usual “childish” response. Naturally these wonders did entertain Koso, but during the entire time he was examining them, he was also questioning Richardson about his life, his country, his beliefs. Was it true that the ruler of England was a woman? Would Richardson read something in English? Richardson obliged with a passage from Milton’s Comus. The questions turned to religion. Did Richardson pray? Did he know the Gospels and the Psalms? Richardson showed Koso a copy of these in Arabic, to demonstrate that the English were not pagans. But Richardson was careful not to let the conversation go any further, since that might lead to religious debate, which “a prudent man … will evade.” The next day Koso, ever inquisitive, “began by asking me all manner of questions, the subjects ranging from the affairs of kings and princes down to the handkerchief round my neck.”

  Richardson didn’t try to square his racial stereotyping with his own description of Koso; he simply made Koso an exception who was tolerable to Europeans. (Barth later wrote that Koso “by his personal dignity had more the appearance of a prince than almost any other chief whom I saw in Negroland.”)

  In Gouré’s court, when Richardson took off his boot to show it to Koso, the people “burst out into an involuntary exclamation of astonishment” at the whiteness of his leg. As he traveled into remoter regions east of Gouré, hundreds of people sometimes followed him or came to his tent, eager to glimpse this pale Christian freak of nature, and perhaps to cadge some of his white medicine.

  Richardson disliked being treated as an ugly oddity. He also bitterly resented the offensive label of kaffir (unbeliever). Yet his sense of superiority kept him from noticing his similar derogatory assumptions about Africans. This condescension also added distance between him and the people around him.

  In essential ways Richardson was Barth’s opposite. Africa seemed to wear Richardson out, psychologically as well as physically. By contrast, the deeper Barth immersed himself in Africa, the more fascinating, not frightening, he found it. Avoiding Africans was against his nature. Rather, he sought them out, because they had what he wanted—information,
knowledge, understanding. When he talked to Africans, he didn’t strive for prudence, but for frank engagement, whether the subject was women, politics, or religion.

  Though Barth shared some of the racial assumptions of his era, the Africans in his writings were distinct people with idiosyncratic qualities, not stereotypes. He granted them their individuality by taking them seriously—he was sincerely interested in them, their lives, their cultures. Barth engaged with them as individuals and hunted for whatever nuggets of information they could provide. He explored Africans as well as Africa. Consequently his account contains more individually limned Africans than that of any other African explorer. And unlike Richardson’s journal, Barth’s was full of warm feelings about many of the people he met. The simple truth was that he liked Africans and considered many of them friends, and they reciprocated.

  RICHARDSON LEFT GOURÉ on February 19. That evening he drank the last half of a bottle of port wine and wished he had a bottle to drink every day for his health. On February 21 he complained about the ferocity of the sun. After setting up camp he was bothered, as usual, by people wanting to see him and to beg medicine for various ailments. “I had numbers of other patients all day; my Epsom is fast going,” he wrote. “Thermometer at sunset, 82°; weather very troublesome to-day, blowing hot and cold with the same breath.”

  Those were his last lines. Eleven days later he was dead, in a decaying village called Ngurutuwa. Whatever happened in between remained a mystery. He left no instructions about the mission, no orders transferring authority, no letters to the sheikh of Bornu about his European companions. Perhaps he died too suddenly to do so, though that doesn’t explain the eleven-day gap. Or perhaps he did leave instructions and his servants destroyed them, thinking to improve their chances of profit by leaving matters in confusion. What’s certain is that Richardson faded away, overwhelmed by Africa.