A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

The natives were pagan farmers who tried to live amid their fields, but marauders and slave-raiders often destroyed everything. Barth’s group passed many abandoned villages and neglected farms. “It is really lamentable,” wrote Barth, “to see the national well-being and humble happiness of these pagan communities trodden down so mercilessly by their Mohammedan neighbors.”

  One village fortified itself against cavalry attacks by digging deep pits into the path. Sometimes as Barth’s group rode by, desperate people came to the road in hopes of hearing news about their stolen relatives. “These unfortunate and distracted lands,” wrote Barth, “where the traveler has every day to observe domestic happiness trodden under foot, children torn from the breasts of their mothers, and wives from the embraces of their husbands.”

  The pagan Marghi people (also called Mandara and Wandala) wore nothing but a thin leather thong. “I was struck by the beauty and symmetry of their forms,” wrote Barth. He particularly admired one woman: “a really beautiful female in the prime of womanhood, who, with her son, a boy of about eight or nine years of age, formed a most charming group, well worthy of the hand of an accomplished artist. The boy’s form did not yield in any respect to the beautiful symmetry of the most celebrated Grecian statues.” What other explorer thought to compare black Africans to icons of Western art? Africa was expanding Barth’s concept of beauty. The lower lip of this lovely young mother was pierced by a thin metal plate about an inch long, shaped like an arrowhead. Barth now considered this adornment a minor blemish that left her only “a little disfigured.” (Denham also commented on the Mandara women’s “celebrity of form: they are certainly singularly gifted with the Hottentot protuberance.”)

  Barth questioned the villagers in his usual thorough way. “Seeing that I was a good-natured sort of man who took great interest in them,” they sent him a pot of corn beer. But it was “bad muddy beer,” so instead of getting tipsy he wrote down 200 words of their language, a distinct dialect that he later connected to the language of pagan Musgu, southeast of Lake Chad.

  They came to the border of Adamawa. The next segment was one of the journey’s most dangerous. The group had grown to five horsemen, twenty-five armed footmen, several slaves, three camels, six pack-oxen, and three asses. But their real strength lay in Barth’s four muskets and four pairs of pistols. At some villages armed men forced them to go around fields of corn. Other men tried to seize two of the slaves traveling with them.

  A passing traveler told Barth that two women in Yola were as white as he was. “This was not saying much,” wrote Barth, “for my arms and face at that time were certainly some shades darker than the darkest Spaniard or Italian.” But the news intrigued him. Explorers often heard rumors about white tribes living in deepest Africa, wayward descendants from Phoenicia or Atlantis. Barth began asking every traveler he met about these white beauties. His fellow travelers teased him, interpreting his interest as romantic longing.

  In the village of Mubi, Barth thrilled the chief, “a learned man in a retired spot,” with a gift of ten sheets of paper, more than he had ever seen at once. The explorer dazzled and entertained people along the route with his watch, compass, telescope, and chronometer. (His compass and chronometer, he wrote, “were now the most precious things which I had on earth.”) Also popular were his music box and map of Africa, since the villagers were surprised to see that their continent stretched so far south.

  These marvels led to the assumption that he had magical powers, so he was in demand for medical services. One woman said she had been pregnant for two years and asked for something to help her finally eject a child. Others wanted Barth to write charms—to catch a new husband, drive out devils, cure impotence. He refused. This irritated his fellow travelers, since with the payments “we might all have lived in the greatest luxury and abundance.”

  Barth himself was viewed as a marvel. Most people in this remote area had never seen a white man, much less a European. The observer became the observed. They followed him or crowded into his tent, laughing and staring. One Fulani girl, about fifteen, proposed marriage. Barth chivalrously replied that if he were staying, he would gladly accept. When he dragged himself up a hill to get a bearing with his sextant—his strength was sapped by the constant wetness and the beginnings of fever—people trailed him, the Muslims dressed in simple shirts, the pagans in leather thongs with large leaves attached behind. Afterward he sat on the rocks and “wrote from their dictation a short vocabulary of their language,” Zani. He delighted them by repeating their words.

  Barth had been devoting much time to his lessons in Fulfulde, since “nothing but the knowledge of this very language could enable me, to make full use of the opportunity to me.” By this point he could understand “a great deal of the household talk of the people, and could keep up a short conversation.”

  “These tribes,” wrote Barth in the preface to the German edition of Travels and Discoveries, “cannot but look upon the white stranger, who suddenly appears before them as if he were fallen from the sky, and regard him with the most profound suspicion, before they become convinced that this wonderful being has the same human feeling as themselves and similar, if not the same, principles of action, notwithstanding the total difference of his color, his appearance, his manner of living, and his unintelligible and apparently absurd and foolish activity.”

  Unlike other contemporary explorers, Barth imagined himself into the natives’ perspective. Most explorers were satisfied to present Africans from the outside, as exotic, strange, baffling, savage. By contrast, Barth learned their languages in order to question, probe, investigate. He was interested in Africans as people, not simply as curios. This intimacy allowed him to put himself empathetically into their place. In the passage above, written as the shadow of imperialism was about to touch Africa, he portrayed himself as the strange, baffling creature, and gave Africans the powerful insight that the freak with white skin was simply a human like themselves.

  In some villages the novelty that drew crowds wasn’t Barth but his camels—almost as rare in these tropical regions as white people, and even funnier-looking. At one hamlet where the group rode by without stopping, the women “managed to pass under the bellies of these tall creatures, in the hope of obtaining their blessing, as they thought them sacred animals.”

  Barth couldn’t resist making multiple sketches of the striking Mandara Mountains, which resembled broken cuspids. The group passed slave villages, where laborers lived and worked fields for their absent masters in Yola.

  Barth’s party had been living on various porridges and batter cakes made from guinea corn, supplemented by wild fruit. But deep in Adamawa the corn crop had failed because the men had all gone off to war. The group’s diet, and the horses’, changed almost exclusively to the only food the natives could offer—peanuts. Barth liked them roasted, but they typically came boiled into a disagreeable pap. The occasional alterative was a cold paste of red sorghum that nauseated him. The group got so weary of peanuts that at a fork in the road they chose the longer route, in hopes of finding better fare that evening in a Muslim village. But the villagers refused to provide any food at all, and the men went to bed hungry.

  THE NEXT MORNING, June 18, 1851, his companions were surly, but Barth felt “cheerful in the extreme … for to-day I was to see the river.” He meant the Benue. This river, an unsolved mystery, was his main reason for venturing into Adamawa.

  Twenty years earlier, the Lander brothers, Richard and John, had descended the Niger River to the Gulf of Guinea in a small boat. That finally settled questions about the river’s direction and delta. During the trip the Landers also probed the mouth of what seemed to be the Niger’s largest tributary, a river they called the Shary or the Tchadda. It spilled into the Niger from the east, about 250 miles upstream from the sea.

  A British shipbuilder named MacGregor Laird surmised that a trading post at this confluence could harvest the riches of Africa’s interior. He founded a venture called the African Inland
Commercial Company and hired Richard Lander as a guide. In 1832 and 1833, Laird’s two iron steamers chugged up the Niger to the confluence, proving that larger ships could do it. But forty of the forty-nine Europeans died, including Lander. Laird was ruined and the dream of a trading post was scrapped.

  In 1841–42 another British expedition took this dream back upriver. It was organized by an evangelical abolitionist and member of Parliament named T. Fowell Buxton. The African people, he wrote, needed “to be awakened to a proper sense of their own degradation.” He proposed to rouse them through a string of trading posts, treaties that banned slavery, and clear Christian principles. He also wanted to build a model farm at the confluence of the Niger and the Tchadda, to be managed by Africans trained in European agriculture. Pagan Africa would be redeemed, he said, by “Bible and plough.”

  Buxton persuaded the English public to donate £4,000 toward this project. The government provided the ships. Of the 159 Europeans who went, 55 perished. The sailors nicknamed the river “the Gate of the Cemetery.” The scheme collapsed.

  Appalled by the human cost of these missions, the public and the government lost interest in West Africa. Charles Dickens spoke for many in his scathing essay about the Buxton expedition: “Such means are useless, futile, and we will venture to add … wicked. No amount of philanthropy has a right to waste such valuable life as was squandered here, in the teeth of all experience and feasible pretence of hope. Between the civilized European and the barbarous African there is a great gulf set. The air that brings life to the latter brings death to the former.”

  Meanwhile the Tchadda’s source remained unknown. Was it Lake Chad, as its name, reported by the Landers, suggested? Did the Tchadda connect to the great river far to the east, the Benue? Could the two rivers be one and the same?

  Barth thought so, based on his informants. Today he expected to discover the truth. As he neared the river, he passed parallel rows of tall anthills. Next came marsh with deep pits and tall grasses. And then he stood on the bank of the Benue.

  “It happens but rarely,” he wrote, “that a traveler does not feel disappointment when he first actually beholds the principal features of a new country, of which his imagination has composed a picture.” But the Benue, he added, “far exceeded my most lively expectations.”

  By luck he had struck the Benue at its junction with another big river, the Faro, falling into the Benue from the south. The rivers ran through a desolate plain against the backdrop of the Alantika Mountains. Their riverbanks were 25 to 30 feet high. Based on signs in the landscape, Barth estimated the Benue could rise 60 feet during the seasonal inundation, an awesome volume of water.

  Tremendously excited, he was moved to write the most heartfelt passage in Travels and Discoveries:

  I looked long and silently upon the stream; it was one of the happiest moments of my life. Born on the bank of a large navigable river, in a commercial place of great energy and life, I had from my childhood a great predilection for river scenery; and although plunged for many years in the too exclusive study of antiquity, I never lost this native instinct. As soon as I left home, and became the independent master of my actions, I began to combine travel with study, and to study while traveling, it being my greatest delight to trace running waters from their sources, and to see them grow into brooks, to follow the brooks and see them become rivers, till they at last disappeared in the all-devouring ocean. I had wandered all around the Mediterranean, with its many gulfs, its beautiful peninsulas, its fertile islands—not hurried along by steam, but slowly wandering from place to place, following the traces of the settlements of the Greeks and Romans around this beautiful basin, once their terra incognita. And thus, when entering upon the adventurous career in which I subsequently engaged, it had been the object of my most lively desire to throw light upon the natural arteries and hydrographical network of the unknown regions of Central Africa. The great eastern branch of the Niger was the foremost to occupy my attention… .

  Bursting with exuberance, he jumped into the river, despite the many crocodiles. Illness had weakened him and he couldn’t fight the current, so he went with it, playfully dipping under the water. Each time he surfaced, the people shouted that he was looking for gold, and when he emerged, they were certain he had become a rich man.

  His practicality recovered, Barth faced the tricky task of getting all the goods and animals across the river, 800 yards wide. He nervously examined the ferries—two crude dugout canoes, 25 to 30 feet long, but just 18 inches deep and 16 inches wide. Many damp trips later, everything and everyone was across. The horses swam. So did the camels, eventually, after much roaring and beating. The group also crossed the Faro, 600 yards wide but only 2 feet deep.

  As a cap on this triumphant day, the first village they came to helped them to break their peanut diet, providing not only guinea corn but meat.

  Barth went to bed elated. The mystery of the Benue was solved. Though the Niger was nearly 700 miles to the west, he had no doubt that the Benue was same river called Tchadda. He noted that only Europeans used that name for the Benue, an error that stemmed from wishful thinking about the river’s connection to Lake Chad. He predicted that the Benue would become a highway into the heart of Africa for European commerce and antislavery principles. He was half-right. Thirty years later the Royal Niger Company penetrated to Yola and began its long exploitation of Adamawa.

  BARTH ENTERED YOLA at noon on June 20, twenty-two days after leaving Kukawa. The town had no walls, and consisted of conical huts with spacious courtyards, except for the clay houses of the emir and his brothers.

  It was a hot, humid Friday, the Muslim holy day, and the town looked deserted. The emir, Muhammed Lawal, was praying and refused to see them. The townspeople, however, were eager to see Yola’s first European visitor. Hundreds collected to salute Barth and shake his hand, fatiguing him. No white beauties appeared.

  The next day Barth assembled a generous gift and went to the emir’s palace. After sitting for more than an hour on the damp ground in the sun, which aggravated his fever, he was dismissed. He consoled himself by conversing with another of the astonishing travelers that he found all over Africa—this one an Arab who had wandered throughout eastern Africa, and even to Bombay and Madras. He gave Barth an eyewitness account of Lake Nyassa, later made famous by Livingstone.

  On Barth’s third day in Yola the emir finally received him and the Bornu officer, Billama. Barth presented his letter of introduction from Sheikh Umar, which described the explorer as a learned Christian from a great nation who was curious about Adamawa.

  Then Billama startled Barth by presenting more letters. The emir read them with growing anger. They claimed the rights to a piece of Adamawa’s territory on Bornu’s border, the very territory recently violated by a razzia from Bornu and the reason that messengers had been sent to Sheikh Umar. After raging at Billama, the emir turned his fury on Barth, accusing him of visiting under false pretenses, with an enemy of Adamawa, to spy for a European power. He kicked them out. Barth realized that Sheikh Umar and Haj Beshir had used him in a plot to scare the emir. He suspected that the ploy had ruined his chances to explore Adamawa.

  The people of Yola continued to besiege Barth with requests for charms, medicines, and handshakes. It was hot, with smothering humidity. His fever worsened. When two young Fulanis asked him to recite the Qur’an’s introductory prayer with them, he irritably refused. “I have always regretted my refusal,” he wrote, “as it estranged from me a great many people; and although many Christians will object to repeat the prayer of another creed, yet the use of a prayer of so general import … ought to be permitted to every solitary traveler in these regions, in order to form a sort of conciliatory link between him and the natives.”

  On June 24 the emir’s foreign secretary visited Barth to deliver his ruler’s message: Barth represented a great nation, and the emir was but the slave of the sultan of Sokoto; so if Barth wanted to explore Adamawa, he would have to come back
with a letter from the sultan. To soften this diplomatic brush-off he sent Barth a horse and two slaves, with a note that he was now ready to accept Barth’s gift.

  Barth, offended in several ways, curtly replied that under the circumstances he could neither accept the gift nor send anything to the emir. He had not come to Adamawa as a bartering merchant, he added, but as the representative of a sovereign power who expected friendly treatment. The volatile emir reacted immediately: Get out of my town this instant.

  Barth and his party hastily packed. He was so weak with fever that he had to grip the pommel to stay mounted. On the way through Yola he fainted twice. Over the next several days, as the fever surged and ebbed, he dosed himself with quinine.

  He wasn’t the only one sick. The rains always brought on the fever season. Illness joined the region’s usual threats and dangers. Armed men lurked in the trees, waiting a chance to attack. Barth also had personnel problems. At a village en route, a servant bought three slaves and some ivory to sell in Kukawa, and tried to slip the heavy tusks onto Barth’s already weak and overloaded camels. Even when Barth was feverish, not much escaped his notice. He fired the servant. This same man had told the Bornu officer Billama, as they left Yola in haste, that if the angry emir pursued them to kill Barth, the Muslims should leave the infidel to his fate. Billima angrily rejected the idea.

  Barth’s other servants fell severely ill. He treated them with emetics and laudanum. Midway through the journey, fever hit him so hard that he took the unprecedented step of resting for three days. He swallowed more quinine and slathered his chest with blistering paste.

  Sickness and fatigue didn’t keep him from observing, questioning, and notetaking. He listened to boys recite verses of the Qur’an phonetically, “with utter disregard of the sense,” and noted that these children were often treated like slaves by their teachers. He recorded that when two Marghis were in litigation, they settled it with fighting cocks on “the holy granite rock of Kobshi.” The loser not only conceded the case but returned to find his hut in flames. These same pagan Marghis also practiced inoculation against smallpox.