A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  BARTH WAS LOST in one of his esoteric daydreams, wondering how a small grove of out-of-place date trees had reached this region. “I was leaning carelessly on my little nag,” he wrote on March 24, “musing on the original homes of all the plants which now adorn different countries.” His reverie was broken by four armed men riding toward him. Barth spurred his horse to meet them. Their leader, a regal and richly dressed Moroccan, stared at Barth, then asked if he was the Christian traveling from Kano. Yes, said the explorer. The rider bluntly told him that his fellow Christian had died before reaching Kukawa. His property had been seized and taken to the city.

  The news stunned Barth. The expedition’s leader, his companion, was dead. The mission’s future was thrown into confusion.

  Barth hurried east toward the place where Richardson had died. Swarms of hawks began shadowing his small group. The birds were preying on clouds of locusts, disturbed from the trees by the passing caravan. The hawks swooped down on Barth’s group, beating each other with their wings and agitating the caravan’s animals.

  After three days Barth reached Ngurutuwa. A spreading fig tree sheltered Richardson’s grave. Thorn bushes protected it from hyenas and other scavengers. Barth was relieved to see that it hadn’t been molested. The villagers told him that the white man had arrived one evening looking ill, and died quietly the next morning. Barth gave a small present to a man who promised to care for the grave. Later, in Kukawa, he convinced the vizier to protect it with a stronger fence.

  “My way of looking at things was not quite the same as that of my late companion,” wrote Barth, “and we had therefore often had little differences; but I esteemed him highly for the deep sympathy he felt for the sufferings of the native African, and deeply lamented his death.”

  Yet he began the next sentence, “Full of confidence, I stretched myself upon my mat, and indulged in my simple supper… .”

  Barth had rushed to Richardson’s grave, paid for its maintenance, and praised his companion’s virtues. His conduct was honorable. Yet in the next moment he was savoring his self-confidence and enjoying a meal.

  Perhaps some part of him was pleased that Richardson was out of the way. Barth had always been a loner. He had long ago devoted himself to science and learning with the expectation of making a contribution to knowledge. Such a person was not cut out to play second fiddle behind a man of limited intellect and ability such as Richardson. Yet Barth’s egotism was kept in check by his stern sense of duty and honor. Though he sometimes complained bitterly about his treatment by the British government, his loyalty to the expedition and its goals never wavered.

  Perhaps his reaction to Richardson’s death also reflected a distrust of emotion. Emotion could impede progress and interfere with the work at hand. Barth’s intense focus and indestructible will sometimes made him rather chilly.

  Richardson was dead. Nothing would change that. Barth’s business was with the present and the future. How would the British government react? Would it continue to support the expedition? Would it allow a German to be in charge, or send a British replacement? Had Her Majesty’s Government sent supplies to Kukawa, as promised, or would he and Overweg be stuck there without means to continue? And where was Overweg? There had been no word from him or about him for nearly two months. Was he healthy and safe, or buried in some forsaken place like Richardson?

  Barth hoped to find some answers in Kukawa.

  14

  The Kingdom of Bornu

  AS BARTH CONTINUED THROUGH BORNU TOWARD ITS CAPITAL, Kukawa, he passed dozens of villages abandoned because of pillage and fear. This farmland, the finest in Bornu, was being reclaimed by forest and scrub, elephant and lion. Barth called the waste and devastation disgraceful. He blamed the greed and apathy of Bornu’s leaders. “Even the best of these mighty men,” he wrote, “cares more for the silver ornaments of his numerous wives than for the welfare of his people.”

  On April 2, 1851, he reached the white clay walls of Kukawa—the mission’s objective. It was a year to the day since the expedition’s real start. Barth had ridden ahead of his servants, and he hesitated outside the massive wood-and-metal gate. His situation was unpromising. His director was dead, his remaining colleague unaccounted for. He was entering Kukawa alone, with no resources and no standing. Yet the mission’s fate depended heavily on his reception here.

  He rode through the gate and asked some surprised people for directions to the sheikh’s palace. Barth was surprised as well. Kukawa was actually two towns separated by an open area about half a mile long. “I was equally astonished,” he added, “at the number of gorgeously-dressed horsemen whom I met on the way.”

  He came first to the house of the vizier, Haj Beshir ben Ahmed Tirab. The vizier was about to leave with 200 horsemen for his daily visit to Sheikh Umar, Bornu’s ruler. Haj Beshir greeted Barth with delight. He told a servant to show the Christian to his quarters, a spacious two-story house.

  Barth had barely crossed the threshold before creditors besieged him. First came two Arab ship’s carpenters from Tripoli. Richardson had requested them to replace his naval nephew, who had come unglued in Murzuk and been invalided home. These replacements had been idling in Kukawa for months, waiting for the boat. Now they demanded five months’ salary—110 Spanish dollars. Weary of Kukawa, they intended to leave as soon as they were paid.

  Next came, in Barth’s description, the thirstiest bloodsucker of them all—Richardson’s arrogant sot of a dragoman, Yusuf Moknee. Richardson had fired him in Zinder but owed him wages. Nor had Richardson paid Moknee’s replacement or any of his other servants. Most of them had given up hope and left town a day earlier, but would return when they heard about Barth’s arrival. These wages came to another 300 dollars.

  Richardson owed most to an agent of Gagliuffi’s, a merchant named Sfaski who had accompanied the mission into Aïr from Murzuk and was now in Kukawa. Richardson evidently had agreed to pay 100 percent interest on a debt of 636 dollars, plus other onerous terms that brought the bill to nearly 3,000 dollars. Sfaksi presented an invoice for 1,270 dollars. Richardson had expected to be resupplied here with money and goods from the British government. Nothing had arrived.

  Barth, freshly aghast at Richardson’s mismanagement and ashamed of the mission’s debts, promised to pay everyone. He gave his word, since that’s all he had. “I did not possess a single dollar, a single bernus, nor any thing of value.” The mission’s few remaining goods had been confiscated by the vizier upon Richardson’s death.

  Barth’s anxiety and his resentment of Richardson and the British government boiled over in a letter he wrote a few days later to Charles Beke, an English geographer and African traveler:

  … we poor Germans, who, in order to go on with the scanty means … with which we have been supplied by government—sacrifice our own property (not to mention our lives), have not been regarded as members of the mission or as gentlemen, but almost as servants. The consequence is that Mr. Richardson’s death has not only stopped the proceedings of the expedition for a short time, but has threatened even to put an end to it altogether… . Instead of finding preparations made for our journey around Lake Tshad, I found the whole expedition in despair and everybody about to return… . Instead of meeting with fresh supplies for myself, I found debts of over 300 dollars; and in order to maintain the honour of the government in whose service we are traveling, I have felt it my duty to exhaust my own private credit to pay off a part of the debts incurred by the mission, from which I myself have to demand 91 dollars.

  He also wrote to the Foreign Office, informing them of Richardson’s death and requesting funds and instructions. A month would pass before a caravan left Kukawa with the letters.

  Meanwhile the sheikh and the vizier were expecting rich presents. On his second morning in Kukawa, Barth visited Sheikh Umar, who received him with cheerful warmth. Umar wore a simple tobe and a burnoose around his shoulders. His skin was a deep glossy black, inherited from his mother, a Bagirmi princess cap
tured in war who became a concubine of Umar’s father, Muhammed al-Kanemi, the architect of modern Bornu.

  Barth reminded Umar of the old friendship between the English and his father, begun in the 1820s by the expedition of Denham, Clapperton, and Oudney. The members of the new mission, added Barth, “had come without reserve, to live a while among them, and under their protection, and with their assistance, to obtain an insight into this part of the world, which appeared so strange in our eyes.” After explaining his inability to offer anything worthy, Barth gave Umar his personal Qur’an, purchased in Egypt during his trip around the Mediterranean. Barth noted that some English readers would disapprove, but that Umar was open-minded enough to accept it from the hands of an infidel.

  (Oudney made a similar, though grammatically deformed, comparison between the British and the Bornuese: “I have nothing to complain of all classes of people have been amazingly kind, and not viewed us with that horror which Mohametans in some places view Christians, we have had, indeed, a toleration shewn us much greater than is to be found among a great many of our Sectarians.” Nevertheless al-Kanemi drew gasps from his court when he touched the British infidels by shaking their hands.)

  Barth was determined to reclaim Richardson’s possessions. It was a matter of both honor and financial necessity. He requested an inventory of the seized property and was relieved to see Richardson’s journals on it. But when he asked for everything to be returned, he was instead shown several boxes and told to choose a few things. He refused. The vizier and the sheikh, he said, had been generous and hospitable, but if their habit was to confiscate other people’s property, he was leaving. This was pure brass, but for Barth it was simply the honorable course.

  The vizier sent for him that evening to discuss the issue. Barth said that once the goods were returned, he would give most of them as presents to the vizier and the sheikh, as Richardson intended. He also emphasized the urgency of getting letters to Tripoli about Richardson’s death and his own safe arrival. And he shrewdly asked for help in starting his scientific work right away, because the resulting dispatches could help persuade the British government to continue funding the mission, which would include more gifts. The amiable vizier, who soon became Barth’s close though not completely trustworthy friend, agreed to everything. Barth left after midnight, encouraged about the future.

  “Having in this way vindicated the honorable character of the mission and my own,” he wrote, “I applied myself with more cheerfulness to my studies and inquiries, for which I found ample opportunities; for many distinguished personages from distant countries were staying here at the time, partly on their journey to and from Mekka, partly only attracted by the fame of the vizier’s hospitable and bounteous character.”

  BORNU HAD BEEN a magnet for travelers, scholars, and merchants for many centuries. Barth was shown documents about its history dating to the first half of the sixteenth century. Using various histories and accounts, including oral ones, he traced the origins of Bornu’s Saifawa dynasty to “a little before the year 900.” The historical record became more clear from the twelfth century onward.

  (Barth saw an extract of a long written history of Bornu, but the main volumes were kept hidden because some members of the current regime were intent on destroying documents from the previous dynasty. The vizier showed Barth the extract but wouldn’t let him touch it, and required him to read it from over his shoulder. Entitled The Kanem War of Idris Alooma, the chronicle dated to the late 1500s. Barth made a copy and sent it to Europe.)

  By the sixteenth century Bornu’s immense territory encompassed Tibesti and Bilma to the north, Kanem and Bagirmi to the east, and most of Aïr and Hausaland to the west. Its kings made the haj to Mecca. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Bornu became a center of Islamic learning, attracting scholars from throughout North Africa and even the Middle East. Educated men and their families established “mallam villages” where they farmed and studied together, exempt from taxes because of their religious scholarship.

  Barth noticed that the kings of Bornu took their mother’s name, and that the royal mother retained considerable influence. He surmised that this represented an ancient peacemaking gesture between Berber invaders and the local tribes they blended into—an arrangement similar to that between the Kel Owis and the Goberawas, commemorated by the strange dancers Barth had seen in Aïr. He added, in one of his wide-ranging connections, that such arrangements recalled the one made between ancient Greek conquerors and the people of Lycia.

  By 1800 the Saifawa dynasty had been in place for 1,000 years, but Bornu’s power and territory had diminished. In 1808 dan Fodio’s army of Fulanis destroyed the kingdom’s capital, Ngazargamu. Bornu’s beleaguered king, called the mai, asked an obscure mallam-turned-soldier living in Ngala, south of Lake Chad, to take command of the army. His name was Muhammed al-Kanemi.

  As a boy, al-Kanemi had gone to religious school in Murzuk, then moved to Tripoli to study under its scholars. After making the haj he stayed in the Middle East for about a decade to study. He returned to Africa and settled in Ngala, where he earned a reputation as a holy man. When the jihad began, this reputation helped him rally the local forces to repel the Fulani invaders. Word of this had reached the mai.

  Under al-Kanemi the Bornu army recaptured the capital and drove back the Fulanis. Al-Kanemi became Bornu’s de facto ruler, though he neither deposed the mai nor called himself king. Instead he took the title of sheikh, or shehu. The mai, angry at being turned into a puppet, invited the kingdom of Bagirmi to invade and oust al-Kanemi. In the war that followed, Bagirmi forces overran Bornu, but Bagirmi soldiers accidentally killed the mai. Al-Kanemi soon pushed out the invaders. He later attacked Bagirmi and sacked its capital, where he captured the princess who would become Umar’s mother.

  In 1814 al-Kanemi built a new capital about 15 miles west of Lake Chad. He called it Kukawa because of the neighborhood’s many kuka trees (baobabs). When the first British expedition arrived a decade later, the city was thriving. After al-Kanemi died in 1835, he was succeeded by Umar, one of his forty-three sons. Umar, like his father, alternately fought and appeased his neighbors, which kept the region volatile.

  Umar hosted not only Barth but also the explorers Vogel (1854), Rohlfs (1864), and Nachtigal (1870). Their impressions of the sheikh and his nobles are consistent with Barth’s. They described a kingdom in decay, rotted by sloth, waste, avarice, and devotion to pleasure. Much of this stemmed from Umar’s lax rule. Generous and affable but also reclusive and weak-willed, he preferred religious scholarship to politics. This left a power vacuum that others rushed to fill. At the time of Barth’s visit, the man filling most of it was the vizier, Haj Beshir. Naturally this created enmity among some courtiers—worsened, noted Barth, by the vizier’s greedy demands of them. Just before Barth arrived, someone had tried to kill Haj Beshir with an arrow as he sat in his courtyard. He kept pistols and carbines near him, and slept with guns. His foremost enemy, ‘Abd erRahman, was Umar’s brother, a tough soldier and schemer who immediately asked Barth if he had any poison.

  This was the nest of intrigue that Barth found in Bornu’s court.

  Nachtigal left a colorful account of the daily meeting of Bornu’s Council of State, which Barth also witnessed:

  All appear in the morning at the royal palace, setting aside at the entrance their shoes, headdress and burnus. They then squat about everywhere in the anterooms and courtyards, alongside the walls and on the ground, chattering and joking, gossiping and hatching plots, until a musical pandemonium of drums, pipes, trumpets and horns galvanizes them and summons them into the reception room and council chamber. On this signal the ruler leaves his private apartments, and enters the extension of the reception … ; he is accompanied by some of his brothers and sons and by corpulent eunuchs, who all utter brief, abrupt cries in his praise, for example, “Sagacious! the lion! the victorious!” While he is settling himself on the divan, each of those present hastens to crouch down
… and to throw dust of the floor on his head, or at least to go through the pantomime of this token of subservience, for on the carefully polished floor it would be difficult to scrape together the necessary quantity of earth.

  Unlike the mai, Umar did not hold state while sitting inside a wooden cage. The seating reflected a radiating hierarchy, with the most important and favored courtiers sitting nearest to the ruler. This applied even to people approaching the palace—the lower your status, the farther from the palace you dismounted from your horse.

  The sheikh and nobles were supported by a vast, sophisticated bureaucracy of petty officials, all with titles. Among the most important was the hierarchy of chimas, or tax-collectors. Every region, territory, and fief had a chima who reported to the bigger chima above him. Chimas collected a general tax and an alms tax (the Qur’an mandates almsgiving). Each village paid a set amount, collected by the village head, who also determined each inhabitant’s portion. There were often additional taxes on huts, hoes, and other property. People who lived in more fertile areas paid a special tax. If a murder occurred in a community, it paid a murder tax. Payments were made in cattle, cloth, goods, crops, money, and slaves. The entire structure was also constantly greased by gifts.

  Smart chimas tried to protect their constituents from slave raiders and from exorbitant demands by the nobles, since the more people who moved into a chima’s district, the more he collected. Greedy chimas soon drove off their sources of income. Peasants, often slaves, were permitted to farm all the land they could till, and to pass it on. But they couldn’t sell it—it belonged to the sheikh. Communities often were forced to feed the sheikh’s armies as they passed through on a razzia.

  A FEW YEARS before Barth arrived, the kingdom of Wadai, northeast of Bornu, had invaded and destroyed Kukawa. When the Bornuese recaptured it, Umar rebuilt it as two towns, both walled, separated by a long broad avenue that was always lively with traffic. “Rides along this main thoroughfare were always of novel and enthralling interest for me,” wrote Nachtigal, “revealing a life of such variety and even splendor as a European can scarcely associate with the idea of a Negro town.” The sheikh, nobles, and their slaves lived in eastern Kukawa, the regular citizens in the western town. The western town was about one-and-a-half miles square, the eastern one longer and narrower. The clay walls were 30 to 40 feet high and 20 feet thick. Two or three horsemen could ride side by side through the main gates, made of wooden beams reinforced by iron.