A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Back in camp, the main loss aside from four horses was the Germans’ luggage and Barth’s tent. The Arabs pursued the natives and recovered most of it, but not the Germans’ cooking utensils or provisions.

  The dead included four Arabs and thirty-four Wodghas. Overweg tended to the wounded. The Welad Sliman were incensed by the natives’ insolent attempt to recover their property, but they were too fearful of ambush to decamp in the dark. They left the horses saddled all night. ‘Abd-Allah, the renegade Jew-turned-Muslim, thought he was about to die and frantically sought a razor to shave his head in repentance for sin, in keeping with Jewish tradition. Early the next morning the raiders began a hurried retreat toward their home camp. At night the women wailed for the dead.

  Barth and Overweg continued to Kukawa, arriving on November 14. The excursion had been an expensive, appalling failure. Neither of Barth’s reasons for going had been fulfilled: he had not reached the Bahr el Ghazal, and his poor health had deteriorated further. Because of his sickness, the Kanem section of his journal “always remained in a very rough state,” an added disappointment. More pressing at the moment, he and Overweg had lost their remaining provisions, which represented all their worldly wealth. After two months with the horde of the Welad Sliman they had little to show except the taint of bad company.

  In Kukawa the sheikh and the vizier were about to leave for war with Mandara, south of Bornu in what is now Cameroon. “And, being desirous of employing every means of becoming acquainted with new regions of this continent,” wrote Barth, “we could not but avail ourselves of this opportunity, however difficult it was for us, owing to our entire want of means, to make the necessary preparations for another campaign, and although the destination of the expedition was not quite certain.”

  On November 25, 1851, ten days after returning to Kukawa, Barth and Overweg passed through the city gates with the army of Bornu.

  17

  Razzia

  THE OFFICIAL REASON FOR THE MILITARY EXPEDITION WAS TO PUNISH the vassal state of Mandara for disobedience. The real reason was that the “coffers and slave-rooms of the great men” of Bornu were empty. The lawless Welad Sliman and the legitimate government of Bornu were both motivated by greed, but the mercenary Arabs didn’t bother to disguise or rationalize their conduct.

  A Bornu military campaign moved with ponderous, gaudy pomp. The boom of a great drum signaled the break of camp. Twenty thousand men set off to the drum’s deep cadence, along with 10,000 horses and 10,000 beasts of burden. Barth described the scene:

  … the heavy cavalry, clad in thick wadded clothing, others in their coats of mail, with their tin helmets glittering in the sun, and mounted on heavy chargers … the light Shuwa horsemen, clad only in a loose shirt and mounted upon their weak, unseemly nags; the self-conceited slaves, decked out gaudily in red bernuses or silken dresses of various colors; the Kanembu spearmen, almost naked, with their large wooden shields, their half-torn aprons round their loins, their barbarous headdresses, and their bundles of spears; then, in the distance behind, the continuous train of camels and pack-oxen… .

  The pack animals were burdened with “tents, furniture, and provisions and mounted by the wives and concubines of the different chiefs, well dressed and veiled.” The vizier and the sheikh each brought “a moderate number” of concubines—eight for Haj Beshir, twelve for Umar, all dressed in white burnooses. Four fan-bearers in multicolored attire followed the sheikh, as did shrill musicians. Everyone, wrote Barth, was “full of spirits, and in the expectation of rich booty, pressing onward to the unknown regions toward the southeast.”

  The army moved over the countryside like locusts. The courtiers brought their own provisions, but the soldiers were expected to supply themselves and their horses from the fields and livestock they passed. “To the ruin of the country,” noted Barth. Cornfields were stripped, livestock seized.

  He and Overweg had neither provisions nor money to buy any, but the sheikh and the vizier kept them well fed, at first: rice boiled with milk, bread and honey, sheep and sorghum. The Germans spent most evenings in intellectual tête-à-tête with the vizier, whose curiosity matched theirs. Haj Beshir’s travels to Egypt and Mecca had enlarged his perspective and excited his interest in foreign matters. “Our conversation at some of these African soirées with the vizier,” wrote Barth, “became sometimes so learned that even Ptolemy with his ‘Mandros oros’ was quoted.” On another evening, “a disputation arose of so scientific a character that it might have silenced all those who scoff at the uncivilized state of the population of these regions.”

  They often discussed slavery. Barth urged Haj Beshir to abolish it in favor of agriculture, industry, and trade. The vizier agreed that slave-hunting was a sordid business, but no other commodity paid as well, and Bornu needed the money for European firearms to protect itself against enemies—firearms that were also used, noted Barth, to hunt down and enslave or massacre yet more people. The high profits from slavery also led to a taste for luxuries that could only be sustained by capturing and selling more slaves. “Such is the history of civilization!” wrote Barth acerbically. He concluded that European nations were hypocritical for condemning the slave trade while profiting from the gun trade that fueled it. The vizier offered to end slave-trading in Bornu—though not domestic slavery—if the British government would send Bornu 1,000 muskets and four cannons.

  Haj Beshir was one of the two great friends Barth made on his journey (the other was Sidi Ahmed al-Bakkay, the sheikh of Timbuktu). “I repeat that, altogether, he was a most excellent, kind, liberal, and just man,” wrote Barth of Haj Beshir, “and might have done much good to the country if he had been less selfish and more active.”

  These African soirées were often lighthearted. One evening the conversation turned to Major Dixon Denham, who had accompanied a razzia into Mandara down this same road twenty-five years earlier. Led by Arabs, supported by troops from Bornu and Mandara, the razzia had ended in disaster. When the raiders attacked a Fulani village protected by a palisade fence, the villagers rained down arrows and spears, some of them poisoned. An arrow grazed Denham’s face. Two found his horse.

  Then the Fulani horsemen attacked. In retreat, Denham’s wounded horse stumbled and threw him. Fulani spearmen surrounded him. He expected to die. He later realized that they didn’t slice him up because that would damage his valuable clothing. They stripped him naked, cutting his hands and puncturing his side. As they argued over the spoils, Denham darted into some woods. Several Fulanis pursed him. He escaped by tumbling down a ravine into a river. A mounted slave from the razzia scooped him up. He rode naked and bareback behind the slave for hours to the camp of the defeated. Someone took pity on the peeled Christian and gave him a tobe; it was crawling with vermin. Oudney, whose intense dislike for Denham was reciprocated, informed Her Majesty’s Government about this episode in one laconic sentence: “The Major … lost everything & got stript to the Skin & has several arrow wounds but none of any consequence.”

  Barth related Denham’s story at the soirée. An old mallam who had participated in the battle mordantly remarked that the naked Denham had revealed “all the insignia which mark the difference between the faithful and unfaithful”—that is, the circumcised and the uncircumcised. Other explorers were better prepared. Before his trip in disguise to Mecca, Burton underwent circumcision and often insisted on its absolute necessity for European travelers in Muslim lands. Rohlfs was saved more than once because he had the foresight to leave his foreskin in Europe before traveling through North Africa in the guise of a Moorish doctor.

  Barth used the time on the road to deepen his study of the Kanuri language. Since he had no money, he offered his tutors “a needle pension, the needles being very useful in the encampment for buying provisions.” Three needles bought enough food to feed a horse for one day; six bought meat. He also began compiling a vocabulary of Mandara by spending time with two slaves from there, questioning them in Kanuri.

  It was D
ecember, but the heat remained oppressive. In midafternoon the thermometer in Barth’s tent registered in the mid-nineties. Since he had no means, he had packed light. He left his heavy tent in Kukawa and brought the flimsy one issued by Richardson, now so threadbare that everything inside it cast a shadow. At night temperatures dropped into the fifties, frigid for Central Africans. Barth and Overweg loaned their long johns, in an unspecified state of ripeness, to the grateful sheikh and vizier. In one of his few attempts to think like a businessman, Barth surmised that a European merchant could make a handsome profit by shipping warm clothes to the Sudan in winter.

  By mid-December they were in Mandara. Its sultan had retreated into the country’s steep rocky mountains, nullifying Bornu’s military strengths—cavalry and spearmen. The vizier didn’t really want to fight anyway, and had been hoping for instant surrender. When the sultan sent a present of ten comely female slaves, suddenly the crisis was over. Sheikh Umar turned back toward Kukawa. Haj Beshir, with most of the army, decided to continue south for a razzia into the pagan kingdom of Musgu. Barth and Overweg, he added, would keep him company.

  The Germans hesitated, as morality and politics required. After all, they represented the abolitionist British government. Barth no doubt remembered the government’s rebuke of Denham for accompanying a razzia. But the two explorers quickly persuaded themselves to join the expedition. Though they couldn’t stop the slavers, they “might prevent a deal of mischief,” wrote Barth, “and might likewise have a fair opportunity of convincing ourselves whether what was related of the cruelty of the Mohammedans in these expeditions was true or exaggerated.”

  Missing from these naïve, high-minded sentiments was Barth’s constant core motivation: his irrepressible scientific curiosity about a new place. The eager first sentence of his next entry exposed his true rationale: “At length we proceeded onward, entering new regions never trodden by European foot.” Denham had been more honest. He dismissed the moral judgment of politicians far away: “Such events … must sometimes be the consequence of exploring countries like these. The places I had visited were full of interest, and could never have been seen, except by means of a military expedition, without still greater risk.”

  THE FIRST THINGS Barth noticed about the changing country were the animals, starting with a scorpion that stung his shoulder and paralyzed his right arm for two days. The vizier gave a lion cub to Overweg, who was also traveling with a small ferocious cat with upright pointed ears, perhaps a caracal. These young predators ate boiled milk and rode atop camels. The swinging motion and intense heat soon killed them. Barth marveled at nests, probably weaver birds’, that hung from branches like purses. Elephants were numerous. Their deep tracks turned some areas into dangerous moonscapes that lamed several horses and led to broken human bones. Barth likened elephant meat to pork, though it played havoc with his bowels. He preferred giraffe, “the greatest of our African luxuries.”

  Barth condemned the expedition’s purpose but also criticized its execution. The vizier’s army made short marches, camped sloppily in indefensible places, and often rested for days—all, in Barth’s opinion, “unmistakable proof of an effeminate court.”

  He knew something about the people of Musgu from Denham’s account. Denham described a delegation of thirty Musgu chiefs who rode unruly horses into Mandara to beg the sultan not to desolate their country with a razzia. As a bribe, they offered 50 horses and 200 of their own people as slaves. Their appearance, wrote Denham, was extraordinary. They

  were covered only by the skin of a goat or leopard, so contrived as to hang over the left shoulder, with the head of the animal on the breast; and being confined round the middle, was made to reach nearly half way down the thigh, the skin of the tail and legs being also preserved. On their heads, … coming quite over their eyes, they wore a cap of the skin of the goat, or some fox-like animal; round their arms, and in their ears, were rings of what to me appeared to be bone; and round the necks of each were from one to six strings of what I was assured were the teeth of the enemies they had slain in battle: teeth and pieces of bone were also pendant from the clotted locks of their hair, and with the red patches with which their body was marked in different places, and of which colour also their own teeth were stained, they really had a most strikingly wild, and truly savage appearance.

  Denham’s Arab companions insisted to him that the Musgu were Christians. He didn’t get the joke.

  The Musgu women were equally striking. They removed several lower front teeth to make room for a silver lip disk that dragged the lower lip down onto the chin. Large silver studs pierced their noses. Natchtigal mentioned that when Musgu women talked, their silver clattered. There was no demand for Musgu concubines.

  Barth heard rumors about the current Musgu ruler, Prince Adishen. He had 200 wives and sometimes performed sex in public with them. He also offered his wives to guests. Barth, always fair-minded, cautioned that it would be unjust to draw conclusions about an entire tribe from the behavior of one lunatic. He added, with comical condescension, “although, of course, they regard the relation of the sexes in a simpler point of view than we do.”

  These were the impressions of Musgu barbarity that Barth carried with him into their territory. The Bornuese also considered the Musgus contemptible uncivilized pagans. So Barth was surprised by the first village they reached, abandoned by its fleeing inhabitants. The fields of grain were orderly. The comfortable houses were made of clay rather than grass, with meticulously thatched roofs. Each tidy courtyard contained a clay granary 12 to 15 feet high, with an arched clay roof. Bundled hay was wedged 15 feet up in the trees to protect it from grazing animals. Pleasing order and architecture. Pastoral, not barbaric.

  A stand of locust trees, the most magnificent Barth had yet seen, and obviously prized by the villagers, rose 80 feet, with a similar horizontal spread. To Barth’s dismay the vizier chose that spot for his camp and lopped off large branches to make temporary fences. The soldiers busily pillaged the fields and houses. The line between civilized and barbaric began to blur.

  A product of his era, Barth assumed that certain attributes and practices, including clothing and dwellings, divided the civilized from the barbaric. When the elements got mixed—nakedness with skilled architecture—it upset his categories of thinking. This was frequently the dilemma of a European in Africa: how to reconcile African refinement with African barbarity? Most explorers didn’t try, choosing certainty over nuance and ambiguity. Barth was open-minded enough to widen his thinking.

  A day later Prince Adishen and his retinue came to greet the vizier. At first sight they lived up to their wild reputation. They were nearly naked and rode bareback. To glue themselves on, they cut a wide wound on their horses’ backs. When galloping, riders slashed their own legs and pressed them to the horses’ flanks.

  The Bornu courtiers and even their slaves saluted the pagan chief “with scoffs and importunities.” Adishen ignored them, sprinkling sand onto his head in subservience, yet somehow retaining his dignity. He made a deal with the vizier: free rein to harvest slaves in Musgu in exchange for retaining his position and exempting his immediate lands from pillage. He complained to the vizier that the Fulanis were stealing cattle and people from his western territory. The vizier assured him, without discernible irony, that he was now under the protection of Bornu. Haj Beshir sealed the deal with a gift of nice clothing. The entire time, wrote Barth, “the self-conceited courtiers, in their proud consciousness of a higher state of civilization, treated [Adishen] with contempt and scorn.”

  The courtiers disgusted Barth, but so did Adishen, another African leader who sold out his people for his own benefit. The vizier, devotee of realpolitik, shrugged that Adishen was useful as a buffer between Bornu and the aggressive Fulani tribes to the west.

  CHRISTMAS DAY 1851 was cheerless for Barth and Overweg. They had hoped for a special holiday dinner of giraffe, but provisions were scarce because of the vizier’s promise not to pillage Adishen’
s neighborhood. They settled for a meal of coffee with milk.

  Three days later they reached a big village called Kakala. “The country was pleasant in the extreme,” wrote Barth. Extensive fields, luxuriant trees. Kakala’s artificial ponds reminded him of home. Unlike every other African place he had visited, the Musgus here didn’t leave their dead out for the hyenas, but buried them in rounded vaults, sometimes adorned with urns. “I nowhere more regretted having no one at hand,” wrote Barth, “to explain to me the customs of these people than I did on this occasion.”

  “This occasion”—a disquieting euphemism. For as he studied the cemetery, “absorbed in contemplating this interesting scene,” hell began to engulf the villagers of Kakala. Everything became chaos and screams. Bands of horseman galloped in all directions, chasing villagers fleeing “in wild despair.” Barth, flustered and probably panicked, joined a passing group of horsemen. He was desperate to find the vizier. He eventually followed the deep boom of the drum to the main force.

  Some villagers had resisted. Three Bornu horsemen were dead. Between 500 and 1,000 Musgus had been captured for slavery. “To our utmost horror,” wrote Barth, “not less than one hundred and seventy full-grown men were mercilessly slaughtered in cold blood, the greater part of them being allowed to bleed to death, a leg having been severed from the body.”

  In the next sentence he began a detailed physiognomy of Musgu males, evidently based on the dead and dying before him—protuberant foreheads, thick lips and eyelashes, wide nostrils and high cheekbones, knock-knees and short beards, copper earrings and necklaces made of twisted rope.

  It’s an eerie moment. Perhaps it was just his scientific habit to observe and record. Perhaps it was a psychological reflex to preserve his humanity while witnessing such a profound desecration of humanity all around him.