A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  TWO DAYS LATER the army reached the village of Demmo, on the edge of wide, shallow water. Small rivers and sheets of water saturated Musgu. Studying the panorama, Barth mulled over European misimpressions about the equatorial landscape. Expecting a dry barren plateau, Barth and Overweg had found fertile plains, broad watercourses, variegated forests, and rippling hills. This would be startling geographic news in London and Berlin.

  The landscape around Demmo interested Barth’s companions for a different reason—the water prevented them from pursuing the village’s men, many of whom were escaping across it in canoes. But they had left behind women, children, horses, and cattle. The army fell upon them.

  “The whole village,” wrote Barth, “which only a few moments before had been the abode of comfort and happiness, was destroyed by fire and made desolate. Slaughtered men, with their limbs severed from their bodies, were lying in all directions, and made the passer-by shudder with horror.”

  How should a man dedicated to science and knowledge treat such scenes? How should he react to them? Barth didn’t allow himself to be paralyzed. He chose not to avoid or omit them—though he never mentioned rape, which almost certainly occurred—nor did he sensationalize them. That would have distorted and falsified reality. For the same reason, perhaps, he didn’t wallow in moral outrage. He observed intently, described what he saw in detail, condemned it, and then determinedly looked away for something else to examine.

  The day after Demmo he wrote, “I deeply regretted that the circumstances under which we visited this region did not allow me to collect all the information I wished; but, roving about the encampment, I endeavored to pick up what I could.” He proceeded to give a thorough description of Musgu architecture, noting that the thickness of the houses’ clay walls had resisted the fires, but the charred roof timbers and reeds, now rubble inside the walls, had not. It sometimes seems as if Barth’s main objection to the razzia was its interference with the scientific endeavor:

  … nothing can be more disheartening to the feelings of a traveler who is desirous of knowledge than to visit these beautiful countries under such circumstances, when the original inhabitants are either exterminated, or obliged to seek their safety in flight; when all traces of their cheerful life are destroyed, and the abodes of human happiness converted into desolation; when no one is left to acquaint him with all the significant names which the various characteristic features of the country must necessarily bear, especially those numberless creeks, swamps, and rivers which intersect this country in all directions.

  Barth’s intellectual willpower could be peculiar and chilly. Despite nightmare scenes, he kept his focus firmly on his scientific mission. He continued to count, measure, and describe. What sort of psychological contortions were required?

  IN DEMMO, amid carnage and frustration, the new year of 1852 arrived. Barth’s thoughts drifted to the future. He hoped to be home by the end of the year. Instead, he later wrote, “I was to remain three years more in these barbarous countries, amid constantly varying impressions of discovery, of disappointment, of friendly and hostile treatment, and under all sorts of affliction, distress, and sickness.”

  The next day the chief of Demmo, who had escaped, was persuaded to return and swear subservience to Bornu, the destroyer of his village. Were the chief’s wives and children now among the razzia’s spoils? Were his brothers and sons lying dead on the village paths? For once Barth didn’t get the details. The nearly naked chief put on a black tobe as a reward for his new allegiance, as the courtiers mocked him. In a horrifying entertainment to amuse the jeering nobles, the chief pulled up the tobe to expose his privates. His audience laughed. And then, for a finale, he blew a tuneless ditty on a little bugle. He completed his degradation by offering to lead the vizier’s army to a large neighboring town full of booty.

  The next day the army moved on, led by the chief in his new black tobe. They rode through a landscape “exceedingly beautiful, richly irrigated and finely wooded.” The fields around the villages were fertilized with manure, an advanced practice Barth had seen nowhere else in Central Africa. All the villages they passed were newly deserted. The inhabitants were fleeing toward the safety of the Logone River. The army set fire to the villages and hurried onward.

  At the Logone, several Shuwa horsemen plunged in, intending to cross and reach the villagers on the other side. But predators became prey when the deep river swept the horsemen into the grasp of a dozen Musgus in canoes. The army turned around, sullen at being deprived of human spoil. Barth and Overweg, by contrast, were “greatly satisfied with our day’s work,” having reached this major river, which Barth estimated at 400 yards wide.

  On the way back to Demmo, at another channel, four Musgus swam in the deepest water, evidently scouts. Musketeers began shooting at them, without effect. The vizier, angry at the day’s lack of plunder, ordered some Kanembu spearmen into the water. “A very singular form of combat arose,” wrote Barth, “… which required an immense deal of energy.” The combatants kept themselves above water with churning legs while thrusting and parrying with spears. The outnumbered Musgus killed two Kanembus, but soon three Musgu corpses floated downstream. The fourth man escaped.

  Over the next two days the army divided the booty collected so far. This was “accompanied by the most heartrending scenes,” wrote Barth, “caused by the number of young children, and even infants, who were to be distributed, many of these poor creatures being mercilessly torn away from their mothers, never to see them again. There were scarcely any full-grown men.” The men, too troublesome to take along, had been slaughtered.

  The civilized Bornuese turned the pagan Musgus into subhuman barbarians, a psychological rationalization necessary to justify horrible acts committed for economic and geographic gain. The imperial powers of Europe would soon apply the same rationale to the entire continent.

  ON JANUARY 5 part of the army left for an excursion into a new area. Overweg had seen enough and stayed in camp, but Barth saddled up, “determined not to let any opportunity pass by of extending my geographical knowledge.”

  They crossed several bogs and water-fields, often getting stuck. The delays pleased Barth because they gave the Musgus time to escape. All the villages were empty. All were burned. Barth noted that the misery of the razzia didn’t end when the raiders left. Since granaries as well as houses were torched, the survivors faced famine. This scorched-earth policy was deliberate, the vizier told Barth. Famine was the only way to crush the pagans’ love of independence. The tactic would have been familiar to generals in Europe and the United States.

  The army now came to a stream, narrow but deep, with an island in it. A dozen Musgus stood on the island, mocking the invaders. Enraged, the soldiers fired several volleys from their muskets. None of the Musgus were scratched. Barth explained this grim farce by noting that the muskets were inaccurate, the powder low-grade, and the balls made of such lightweight pewter that they couldn’t penetrate the mockers’ wicker shields—which, he characteristically added, he later found to be 40 inches long, 16 inches wide at the top, 22 at the bottom.

  The angry musketeers commanded Barth to turn his superior weapons on the mockers. When he refused, they called him Useless One. This was one of his Bornu nicknames, given because he seemed to have few skills except asking questions and taking notes, and even declined to make himself useful by writing talismans. Barth acknowledged that he was less popular than Overweg, whose nickname was Tabib, or Doctor, because he spent much time providing medical help and also repairing the natives’ watches or other mechanical devices. Barth sniffed that Overweg would do better to spend such time on his notes and journals.

  On January 7 the vizier commanded the army to turn toward home. The lush countryside of Musgu continued to fascinate Barth. One morning, lolling in the shade of a tall locust tree on the grassy bank of a clear stream, he gave himself to “the recollections caused by the ever-varying impressions of such a wandering life, which repays the traveler full
y for all the hardships and privations which he has to endure, and endows him with renewed energy to encounter fresh dangers.”

  This seems willed, considering that at present his wandering life was attached to a murderous army still pillaging its way through Musgu. The raids and atrocities had not stopped, but Barth had gotten his fill of viciousness. He began avoiding some opportunities for information. “The distance of the field of battle,” he wrote, “spared us the sight of the slaughter of the full-grown men.” He noted that the feuds between neighboring Musgu villages kept them from communicating danger to each other. The clay houses, on the other hand, conical and beautifully ornamented, “bore testimony to a degree of order, and even of art, which I had not expected to find among these tribes.”

  On the morning of January 11, as the vizier’s arsonists torched another village, they nearly toasted the resting army, which had to flee the flames. That afternoon, camped beneath some towering locust trees, the army was routed by swarms of bees that emerged from Musgu hives. Barth took bleak satisfaction in such misadventures. He constantly mocked the army as inept, referring sardonically to “this vain and cowardly host,” “these great deeds,” “this inglorious victory.”

  On the border with Bornu the army stopped to divide the newest loot. A Musgu leader there—“this despicable chief,” in Barth’s words—added to the plunder by helping a raiding party capture 800 of his own people. In two months of terror the razzia had captured 10,000 cows and more than 3,000 slaves, a haul the vizier considered mediocre. Most of the captives were women and children.

  Barth called Musgu “the African Netherlands” because of its natural defenses of swamps, dense forests, and countless waterways. He believed its people were doomed. Hostile factions split it internally, and it was besieged on all sides—by Bornu from the north, Fulani raiders from the west and southwest, Logone peoples from the northeast, Bagirmis from the east. “All these people hunting them down from every quarter,” wrote Barth, “and carrying away yearly hundreds, nay, even thousands of slaves, must, in the course of time, exterminate this unfortunate tribe.”

  They reentered Kukawa on February 1, 1852. Barth tried to put the best face on the excursion. “We had certainly not entered those regions under such circumstances as were most desirable to us,” he admitted, “but, on the contrary, we had been obliged to associate ourselves with an army whose only purpose was to spread devastation and misery over them. Nevertheless, situated as we were, while we could not prevent this mischief, we were glad that we had been enabled to see so much.”

  Barth had disproved some assumptions about equatorial Africa: that it was barely habitable or was cut off from the Sudan by high mountains. He had disproved the idea that the tribes there were nearly “wild beasts.” He had seen fertile lands and thriving crops, and he was convinced that European commerce could tap this region from the west by water.

  NEITHER SUPPLIES NOR instructions had arrived in Kukawa from the British government. The expedition remained broke, its future in limbo. There was a strong possibility that it had been canceled because of Richardson’s death. To raise money Barth sold his heavy Tripolitan tent and bought cloth to line his small tent, which no longer kept out rain or sun. He decided that if new supplies didn’t arrive soon, he would take the direct route back to Tripoli. But first, he wrote, he wanted “to try my fortune once more in another direction … I resolved to make a last desperate attempt to accomplish something before I finally left the country.”

  He turned his thoughts southeast, toward the pagan kingdom of Bagirmi.

  18

  Captive in Bagirmi

  ON MARCH 4, 1852, HIS SPIRITS BOOSTED BY GIFTS OF COFFEE FROM the vizier and sugar from a mallam, Barth rode off toward Bagirmi. He was accompanied by two young servants and one pack-camel, sparsely loaded. Overweg stayed behind to continue exploring Lake Chad.

  Barth kept his plans flexible, since there was a strong chance that none of them would work out. Most ambitiously he dreamed of penetrating east beyond Darfur to the upper course of the Nile. Failing that, he would try to go north to the bellicose kingdom of Wadai, east of Lake Chad. At the least, he intended to spend time in Bagirmi’s capital of Massenya, in present-day Chad. But even this was doubtful. The sultan of Bagirmi’s unofficial consul in Kukawa was a haughty eunuch who also oversaw Sheikh Umar’s harem. He had not been encouraging.

  Bornu and Bagirmi had a volatile history. Bagirmi had invaded Bornu in 1819. Later that year al-Kanemi, Umar’s father, retaliated by invading Bagirmi. “Then we entered their land and destroyed their towns and burnt their food and their houses,” he wrote in a letter to his sisters and daughters. The next year Bagirmi attacked again. Again al-Kanemi retaliated, with even greater devastation. The haughty eunuch was stolen from Bagirmi during these wars, as was a Bagirmi princess who became al-Kanemi’s concubine and Sheikh Umar’s mother.

  In 1824, Bagirmi once more invaded Bornu. This time Bornu met the attackers with two cannons, recently delivered by Oudney, Denham, and Clapperton as gifts from the British government. The cannons cut the Bagirmis to pieces. Hostilities flared for the next eleven years, until Sheikh Umar forged a peace in 1835, perhaps influenced by his mother. Bagirmi began paying Bornu a yearly tribute of slaves and eunuchs, its famous specialty. At the time of Barth’s visit, Bagirmi was subservient but hardly friendly, and its leaders no doubt remembered the British cannons of 1824. Barth, Britain’s new representative, couldn’t count on a warm welcome.

  HE FOLLOWED THE marshy southern contour of Lake Chad until he hit “the great road” heading south. Passing armies had ravaged the region for decades. To thwart intruders, the gates of the villages were often so narrow that Barth’s camel had to be unloaded to pass through.

  Nine days after leaving Kukawa, he reached the small vassal province of Logone and its capital, Logone-Birni. As etiquette demanded, Barth waited on his horse while the sultan’s people prepared quarters for him. Logone-Birni was a tumble-down place, reflecting its embattled position between bigger powers. Logone paid an annual tribute of 100 slaves and 100 tobes to both Bornu and Bagirmi. It was also pressured from the southwest by the ever-expansive Fulanis.

  Its forty-year-old sultan, Yusuf, greeted Barth from behind a curtain of matting. After satisfying himself that Barth “was something like a human being,” he summoned the stranger behind the curtain and shook his hand. Barth attributed the sultan’s melancholy countenance to being the ruler of a country incessantly harassed by bigger neighbors. The explorer presented his gifts. “Poor as I was at the time,” he wrote, “… I had determined to give away my Turkish trowsers, of very fine brown cloth, which I had scarcely ever worn.”

  That evening the sultan sent Barth four enormous bowls of sorghum pudding with meat and broth, followed the next morning by bowls of gruel sweetened with honey, and then more bowls of hasty pudding. Barth estimated it was enough to feed 200 people. He gave most of it to some travelers going home to Bagirmi, in hopes they would become his advance publicists there.

  He took a short cruise down the Logone River. The water was so inviting that he surrendered to the temptation for a bath and jumped overboard. As in Adamawa, the agitated spectators assumed he was diving for gold. By the time he emerged, a large shouting crowd had gathered. They were disappointed to see him merely wet, not aglitter. Unbeknown to Barth, the travelers from Bagirmi witnessed this alarming uproar, and instead of becoming Barth’s publicists, they later spread warnings about his disruptive presence.

  Denham had visited Logone-Birni, the farthest any European had advanced into this region. “I was firm in my purpose,” wrote Barth, “of extending my discoveries beyond my predecessors.” He began by chiding Denham for careless errors. Denham had miscalculated Logone-Birni’s position, misidentified the Logone River as the Chari, and mistook the town’s language (they used Bagirmi only with outsiders and spoke their own language, related to Musgu).

  On March 16, despite the sultan’s pleas to stay, Barth moved on.
He was eager, in one of his favorite phrases, “to penetrate into unknown regions, never before trodden by European foot.” He was moving east now, in the marshy land between the Logone and Chari rivers. He passed fields of corn, onions, and cotton. Warthogs became plentiful, as well as crocodiles and hippos, and for the first time he saw tracks of the rhinoceros, greatly feared by the natives.

  At the Chari, much bigger than the Logone, Barth relaxed in the shade while the ferrymen sought permission to take him to the other side, into Bagirmi. But the answer was no. The Bagirmi travelers whom Barth had fed in Logone-Birni had recently crossed, and they warned the village chief of Asu not to admit the dangerous white stranger. They added that the vizier of Bornu himself had warned them that this stranger might overthrow the sultan’s kingdom.

  Stymied, Barth tried to untangle who was behind this refusal. Haj Beshir, the vizier of Bornu, was certainly a schemer. Perhaps he didn’t want Barth to visit Wadai, Bornu’s sworn enemy. Or maybe the sultan of Logone wanted to force Barth back to Logone-Birni, where he could extract more gifts. The Bagirmi travelers who bad-mouthed him had bought goods in Kukawa to sell in Massenya; maybe they thought Barth was a competing merchant. Any or all of these intrigues were possible. Meanwhile, Barth was stuck on the western side of the Chari.

  He retraced his steps for two miles, feinting a retreat, then walked north to another village. The next day before dawn his small group walked to the ferryboat landing across the river from the Bagirmi village of Mele. A boat appeared and took them across. Barth immediately appreciated “the fine figures of the females, their comely appearance and very becoming headdress.” About a mile down the road, while congratulating himself on outflanking his subverters, he saw a horseman approaching—a servant of the chief of Asu, en route to warn Mele not to admit the white stranger. Barth and his party turned off into the stubble fields, toward the river. The intense heat and the futility of escape persuaded Barth to rest in the shade and await his fate. Cattle grazed on the luxuriant marsh grass. Beautiful birds—ducks, ibises, pelicans, snakebirds, marabou storks—fished the wide water.