A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Ten days after arriving, Barth and his two servants moved to the western town, into a comfortable clay house with many rooms connected by small courtyards, plus a large adjoining enclosure for their animals. It became known as “the English house.” The best way to discourage Kukawa’s countless fleas, Barth learned, was “a frequent besmearing of the walls and the floor with cow-dung,” though that did nothing to thwart the voracious white ants.

  In the next few days Barth got relief in a couple of ways. On April 13 he heard that Overweg was alive, in Zinder, and probably would reach Kukawa in a month. He also found temporary financial relief by borrowing 100 dollars from the vizier, which he used to pay off some of the mission’s debts at discounted rates.

  He began exploring the twin towns. Kukawa bustled with about 30,000 people. “In this labyrinth of dwellings,” wrote Barth, “a man, interested in the many forms which human life presents, may rove about at any time of the day with the certainty of never-failing amusement.”

  The town’s wealthy men advertised their importance by wearing many layers of fine clothing, gaudy with silk and gold stitching. Thus swollen, they waddled with a stately, labored gait. To mount a horse required a boost from several heaving slaves, who then trotted behind their master, holding his sword, gun, and other sundries. The horses, too, were overdressed, burdened with colorful silk and woolen tassels, embroidered cloth and leather, decorative saddles, collars, and pads, jangling brass ornaments, and hanging leather amulets containing Qur’anic verses.

  After the lovely Hausa and Fulani women of Kano and Katsina, Barth complained that the Kanuri women were “much more ugly, with square, short figures, large heads, and broad noses with immense nostrils, disfigured still more by the enormity of a red bead or coral worn in the nostril.” But they were second to none in coquetry, sashaying through the streets with trailing skirts and flirtatious glances, one breast casually covered by a printed cloth from England, the other left bare. They wore necklaces of amber and agate, silver bracelets on their arms and ankles, silver ornaments in their baroque hairdos. They smiled with teeth stained fashionably brown with a powder made from kola nuts and tobacco.

  Kukawa still attracted religious pilgrims from throughout the Islamic world—Morocco, Egypt, Senegal, Timbuktu, and the Middle East as well as Central Africa. The route from the Sudan to Mecca passed through Kukawa, which accounted for some of the pilgrims. So did the sheikh’s reputation as a soft touch for religious travelers. Many of them stayed for years, collecting religious welfare by claiming their right to alms. Bornu was also a trade hub, drawing merchants from all four directions.

  The city was so crowded with travelers, from such far-flung places, that Barth postponed his study of the Kanuri language to glean geographical information from them. He called them his instructors, and plied them with coffee to keep them talking. They included a remarkable traveler who had roamed from western Mali to Khorasan (northeastern Iran), and from Morocco to Fertit (in today’s Central African Republic). This man usually traveled as a dervish.

  Another useful informant came from Sennar in Ethiopia. He had deserted the Turkish army after embezzling funds. He fled to Wadai, where he gave military training to the sultan’s slaves. He was about to return there, this time as a spy for Sheikh Umar. Another learned man named Ibrahim had crossed the entire continent from west to east, then continued to Mecca. He had spent two years as a hostage in St. Louis on the Senegal coast, and remarked that the English were enthusiastic about distributing Bibles, the French about enjoying the native women. Tales of pilgrims from Mali awakened a desire in Barth to visit Timbuktu.

  Barth estimated that Kukawa’s main weekly market drew between 12,000 and 15,000 people. The principal currency had changed to cotton strips called gabaga, but any cloth could be used as money. Barth noted that no man who owned a cotton shirt would ever starve. The quality of the cotton strips varied considerably, and they were even less convenient than cowries. This led the vizier, after his haj to Mecca, to begin converting Bornu to the cowrie standard. In the process he made quick kills in the local currency exchanges by alternately hoarding shells or flooding the market.

  Goods were far cheaper in Kukawa than in Kano or Katsina, and were sold with less clamor—the Kanuris, less vivacious than the Hausas, were less apt to shout out their wares. Barth was no longer surprised to find, amid the snake-charmers, storytellers, and barbers, merchandise from all over Europe as well as Africa. The most valuable items were ivory, ostrich feathers, livestock, and, at the top, slaves, sometimes thousands for sale at a time.

  Slaves were classified according to Muslim law, commercial value, and social status. Those born in captivity, for instance, couldn’t be sold, but could be given as gifts. Their masters often educated them, arranged their marriages, and gave them wide responsibilities. Many male slaves rose to important positions as military leaders, court officials, or managers of farm villages. Slaves also managed the royal correspondence, the royal stables and stores (grain, meat, rice, butter, wood, etc.), the royal purse, and the royal household. Slaves that served wealthy men often owned land and had their own slaves, and enjoyed more status than poor free men. Such slaves sometimes married free women, even noble women, and their children were born free.

  Since these slaves couldn’t be sold, kingdoms such as Bornu looked elsewhere for fresh supplies of profitable pagan bodies—hence the razzia. Slaves captured in slave raids or in war could be sold, given away, or retained for use on farms or in households.

  These slaves were sorted into commercial categories. Value decreased with age. Old males were the cheapest, followed by old females. Richardson recorded the system of age classifications used in Bornu. For males: children, grown children, those without a beard, those with a beard beginning, those with a beard. For females: children, those with little breasts, those with plump breasts, those with breasts hanging down, old women.

  Males were purchased for farm labor, and less frequently for domestic work, which was handled mostly by females. A smaller group of more costly females were sold as singers, dancers, and musicians. The smallest and most expensive category of females was pretty young women, suitable as concubines.

  Concubines were not looked down upon. They had privilege, influence, and responsibility. The Qur’an encouraged men to marry their concubines and free them. To Nachtigal concubines seemed “the happiest among the slaves.” Those who bore children could not be sold or given away, which made their position even more secure than that of wives, who could be divorced. The children of concubines were born free and inherited equally with the children of wives. Many African rulers, including Umar, were children of concubines. (Richard Burton reported that the Wanyamwezi people of Africa’s lake regions left all their property to their concubines’ children, on the theory that they needed more help.)

  The Qur’an limited men to four wives, but the number of concubines was constrained only by a man’s wealth and appetites. Some men took full advantage. The vizier’s harem, for instance, contained between 300 and 400 women, a rough estimate both dumbfounding and hilarious. “In assembling this immense number of female companions for the entertainment of his leisure hours,” wrote Barth, “he adopted a scientific principle,” collecting “a sort of ethnological museum” of women. He wanted concubines from all the tribes of the Sudan and beyond. Among his collection was a Circassian.

  “I have often observed that, in speaking with him of the different tribes of Negroland,” continued Barth, “he was at times struck by the novelty of a name, lamenting that he had not yet had a specimen of that tribe in his harim, and giving orders at once to his servants to endeavor to procure a perfect sample of the missing kind.” Barth remarked that the vizier took “a hearty interest in each of them,” and grieved when one died in 1851.

  (When the vizier expressed shock that Europeans drank alcohol, Barth dryly responded that Europeans also liked women, but “did not indulge in this luxury on so large a scale as he did, and that theref
ore he ought to allow them some other little pleasure.”)

  Unhappy concubines posed some dangers. Clapperton described a jittery merchant from Tripoli who slept with a dagger and a loaded gun, fearful of being strangled by his harem. The sheer number of heirs produced by large seraglios—the vizier had seventy-three sons—led to internecine intrigues and even murders. Barth attributed the decline of the Songhai empire to the abundant scheming offspring of royal concubines.

  But the main worry of a man with a harem was the difficulty of controlling the sexual impulses of a throng of attractive young women. Lyon mentioned a sultan with fifty concubines who, if he suspected their babies’ paternity, routinely ordered the newborns strangled.

  Such paranoia created a market for the most rare and expensive of all slaves: eunuchs. Only castrated males could be entrusted to spend their days surrounded by another man’s precious harem. Eunuchs were despots, watchdogs, and tattletales. They oversaw the harem’s meals, baths, walks, and visits. The concubines often hated them.

  Eunuchs, like harems, were signs of conspicuous consumption. Sheikh al-Kanemi kept 200 castratos. Every year, his son Umar received a tribute of dozens of eunuchs from the pagan kingdoms of Bagirmi and Mandara, southeast of Lake Chad.

  The Qur’an forbade castration, so wealthy Muslims either got their eunuchs from pagans or sent intact young male slaves off to be castrated by non-Muslims, including Christians—the Coptic monks of Egypt, for instance, ran castration centers for the Muslim market.

  The procedure was brutal. The genitalia were entirely cut away. To stop the bleeding, the wound was packed with ashes or doused with boiling oil or butter. Sometimes the healed wound resembled female genitals; such eunuchs were especially valuable. Barth wrote that only one in ten survived the operation. The practice so appalled him that he urged Christian governments to give its abolishment precedence even over slavery.

  As recompense for their mutilation and the acrid fate of living among temptations they could never enjoy, eunuchs received power, status, and occasionally wealth. They were also showered with compensatory luxuries. When Denham could not hide his distress at the pitiful sight of some freshly disfigured young males, Sheikh al-Kanemi’s chief eunuch scoffed, “Why, Christian, what signifies all this? they are only [Bagirmis]! dogs! kaffirs! enemies!—they ought to have been cut in four quarters alive, and now they will drink coffee, eat sugar, and live in a palace all their lives.”

  AFTER THREE WEEKS in Kukawa, Barth took a field trip to Lake Chad. He rode east with two companions, a Bornu military commander and a member of the sheikh’s horse guard. As they approached the lake, the grass grew more lush. Barth expected to see open water but instead was confronted by a wall of tall papyrus and reeds, with marshy openings choked by water lilies and other vegetation. The water often came to the riders’ knees. It was sweet and fresh. Islands rose above the shallow bottom.

  The mission was supposed to map the lake’s borders, but Barth soon realized the task was impossible, since the lake’s indistinct outline constantly changed. The surface teemed with waterfowl, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses. In the evenings, clouds of mosquitoes tormented Barth’s party and their horses.

  Several times they glimpsed the mysterious people who lived on the lake’s islands. The Kanuris called them Budduma, “people of the grass,” but they called themselves Yedina. They spoke their own language and followed their own customs. The young males collected as many beads and ornaments as possible, and wore all of them around their necks as a marriage gift for their future wives. They poled themselves around the lake in small reed boats and wooden boats up to 50 feet long, with low gunwales and high pointed prows. The Yedinas fished, raised cattle on their islands, and traded with certain mainland villages. They were also notorious pirates who raided the shoreline and vanished back into the lake’s wilderness of reeds and channels.

  “No sultan has any power over these islanders,” wrote Denham. “They will pay no tribute to any one, nor submit to any prescribed government… . The Bornou people say, ‘the waters are theirs; what can we do?’ ”

  This remained true when Barth visited. On his second day at the lake he met some Yedinas at a shoreline village. They wore only a leather apron and a necklace of white beads. He questioned them closely about the Chad and collected a short vocabulary of their ancient language. He described them as “handsome, slender, and intelligent.” Barth’s companions were amused by his habit of writing everything down.

  When he got back to Kukawa, a caravan was about to leave for Murzuk. This was his first chance to send word about Richardson’s death and the expedition’s precarious state. His packet included letters, dispatches, vocabularies, itineraries, pleas for instructions and funding, and Richardson’s eight precious journals. “We had no means whatever, but considerable debts,” mused Barth, “and, without immediate aid by fresh supplies, the surviving members could do no better than to return home as soon as possible.”

  The trip to Lake Chad had whetted his enthusiasm for another journey. He wanted to see the remote kingdom of Adamawa, 450 miles to the south, never visited by a European. He believed that Adamawa held the answer to several essential geographical questions: Were the Niger River and Lake Chad connected by a web of tributaries, as some geographers believed? Was the large tributary that earlier explorers of the Niger had called the Tchadda the same river called the Benue in Adamawa?

  He needed to leave soon, before the rainy season turned the roads into quagmires. Two things held him back. He wanted to talk to Overweg about the expedition’s future, and he was broke. On May 5, thunderclaps announced rain, jolting him into action. He borrowed more money to buy provisions and a horse, and prepared to depart.

  But the next day he heard that a European was approaching Kukawa, and on May 7 learned that Overweg was camped a few miles outside of town. The news so excited him that he immediately saddled up and galloped off to meet his colleague, forgetting to cover his head and almost suffering sunstroke.

  Overweg looked tired and sickly. He had nearly died in Zinder. His luggage hadn’t caught up with him and he was penniless, so he had no clothes except the rags he wore. Despite his fragile health and Richardson’s death, Overweg had no desire to go home. He remained enthusiastic about exploring Lake Chad and the surrounding regions.

  That was what Barth had hoped to hear. Invigorated once again, he left two weeks later for the kingdom of Adamawa. The rains had begun.

  15

  A Mystery Solved

  ADAMAWA WAS A YOUNG KINGDOM. AN EMIRATE IN THE LARGER empire of Sokoto, it had been founded by a Fulani scholar and warrior named Modibbo Adama. He had joined dan Fodio’s jihad and conquered the pagan region called Fombina, in present-day Cameroon and Nigeria, for Islam. Adama named the new emirate after himself, and in 1841 built a new capital, Yola. After his death in 1847, his son Muhammed Lawal became emir.

  Muhammed Lawal and his vassal lords devoted themselves to conflicts with each other and to razzias. These raids sometimes crossed into the territory of Bornu, a provocation reciprocated into Adamawa by slave-hunters from Bornu. Because these borderlands were remote and lawless, bandits preyed on villagers and travelers. The region oscillated between tension and terror. Yet the two kingdoms maintained a thorny détente that echoed the one between Bornu and Sokoto. In fact, as Barth prepared to leave for Adamawa, messengers from there arrived in Kukawa to protest a recent razzia into their territory by a Bornu commander.

  Barth made it a point to meet these messengers and question them about their country. He also enlisted one of them as his tutor in the Fulani language, Fulfulde. He even arranged to travel with them back to Adamawa. On the eve of their departure Sheikh Umar insisted on sending along a Bornu officer named Billama. Given the strained relations between the two kingdoms, Barth had misgivings that Billama could taint him in the eyes of Adamawa’s emir. But he had no choice, and besides, he was elated to be heading into the mysterious realms watered by the Niger’s tributaries.


  South of Kukawa they passed ancient villages of the Shuwas, native Arabs. The Shuwas maintained the distinct culture of their ancestors, who had migrated from the Middle East centuries earlier. South of Maiduguri, a large town of about 10,000, fields of young corn stretched for miles, “an uninterrupted scene of agriculture and dense population.” Sometimes the group was joined by pilgrims coming from Mecca. One man was returning to Hamdallahi, southwest of Timbuktu, with a highly profitable cargo from the East—books in Arabic.

  A week out of Kukawa, the blue-green mountains of Mandara broke the monotonous plain. They reminded Barth of the Tyrolean Alps. He had been trying to learn whether these southern peaks held snow, as had been reported of Mount Kilimanjaro. The question puzzled his instructors from Adamawa. Fulfulde had no word for snow. But Barth’s informants excited him by declaring that the peaks were sometimes white. This was true, Barth soon learned—white with clouds.

  They entered the lawless country of the Marghis. Farmland appeared less frequently and was replaced by dense forests and bogs where tall grass hid treacherous craters, including the deep tracks of elephants. Nearly every afternoon brought torrential rains.