A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  The chief of Mele appeared with a troupe of armed men. Barth could not proceed, said the chief, without permission from the capital. Fine, Barth agreed, as long as he was given decent quarters and provisions while waiting. Everyone returned to Mele while a man galloped off to Massenya to seek permission.

  Thus began a farce of African bureaucracy.

  Mele bored Barth. The food was mediocre, the mosquitoes vicious. He passed the time sitting riverside in the shade, watching the birds, crocodiles, and manatees. After six days of this, the messenger returned from Massenya. The sultan was away at war. The lieutenant governor commanded Barth to move to a larger village upriver, which would furnish him with milk and fish until the sultan sent a decision.

  After a four-day march Barth and his escort reached the appointed village, but the chief refused to obey the lieutenant-governor’s order and turned them away. In temperatures that reached 110 degrees, they retraced their steps to another village. Barth asked if he could await the sultan’s verdict in Logone-Birni, but the Bagirmis said no, once he entered the country, he couldn’t leave without the sultan’s permission. They decided to move slowly toward Massenya and await instructions.

  Two days later they stalled in a dreary village called Bakada. A messenger left for Massenya, ten miles away, promising to return the next day with an answer for Barth. In an otherwise cheerless place, wrote Barth, “it was my good luck to obtain quarters in the house of a man who forms one of the most pleasing recollections of my journey.” His name was Haj Bu-Bakr Sadik, “a spare old man, of very amiable temperament, to whom I became indebted for a great deal of kindness and valuable information.”

  Bu-Bakr had visited Mecca three times and fought many battles throughout Central Africa. He lamented his country’s destruction by war and slavery. Barth was tremendously relieved to find such intelligent company to help him pass the time. With Bu-Bakr’s help he gathered the region’s history as well as vocabularies of the Bagirmi and Maba languages. In conversation Bu-Bakr was never idle, always sewing, or scraping roots for medicine, or selecting indigo to dye his tobe. To avoid the sin of waste, he would pluck single grains of corn from the ground.

  Barth and Bu-Bakr had ample time to converse. The rider to Massenya didn’t return from Massenya for a week, and then brought the frustrating command to keep waiting.

  Barth also passed the hours by questioning pilgrims who came through the village. He investigated the large black worms that swarmed by the millions in Bagirmi, devouring crops. He did battle with white ants, which ate his couch poles and sleeping mats, and “finished a large piece of my Stambuli carpet.” He noticed that the women in particular suffered from a larval worm that ate away the little toe.

  He often visited Bakada’s dismal market, hoping in vain for something decent to eat. “The only luxury offered for sale … was a miserable lean sheep; and, as a representative of foreign civilization, there was half a sheet of common paper.” He didn’t have much purchasing power anyway. His wealth consisted of 3,000 cowries, worth about 1 Spanish dollar, plus some beads, cheap mirrors, and lots of needles. He paid for most things with needles, and was grateful to the geographer and explorer Charles Beke for suggesting that he bring them. The people nicknamed him the Needle Prince. They also called him Father of the Three, because he wore stockings inside thin leather slippers inside heavy shoes.

  To keep from going mad with boredom he explored Bakada’s crops, soils, livestock, water, landscape, and miscellaneous other areas. But after two weeks he had squeezed every drop of information from Bakada, and the place was closing in on him. The breaking point came when Bu-Bakr, his main diversion and consolation, left on April 13 to see his wife in Massenya. The old man promised to visit the lieutenant governor on Barth’s behalf and to send an answer within two days.

  Those two days were slow torture. Because he owned only one weak camel, he wrote, “I had taken scarcely any books with me, … and the little information which I had been able to gather was not sufficient to give my restless spirit its proper nourishment, and I felt, therefore, mentally depressed.”

  When he hadn’t heard from Bu-Bakr by the end of the second day, his patience snapped. At dawn, his eighteenth in Bakada, he and his servants loaded his camel and started back north. He asked no one’s permission.

  AT THE FIRST VILLAGE they reached, Barth eagerly bartered some beads and needles for butter, milk, and a fowl, his first decent food in weeks. The familiar villages along the route looked different now, because of new thatching done to prepare for the imminent rains. Reports about his movements preceded him, and people began seeking him out for medicine. As usual he refused payment, but one group of villagers offered it in a way “so delicate and becoming” that he accepted—without a word, they tied a fat sheep to the branches of the tree shading him. That night two hyenas rushed into camp to snatch the sheep. Barth shot one. Firebrands kept the other at bay until sunrise.

  After four days he was near Mele, his entry point into Bagirmi thirty-two days earlier. He had a premonition that his exodus was about to end, so he decided “to put a bold face upon matters.” He ordered the sheep slaughtered, unrolled his ant-eaten Stambuli carpet, and relaxed upon it like a lord, awaiting his dinner and his fate. But for once his information was incomplete, and his pose was undermined by its offensiveness: “At that time I was not aware that in this country none but the sultan and a few high dignitaries were allowed to sit on a carpet.”

  The next day at Mele he gave the chief a present and asked to be ferried across the river. The chief, still a good bureaucrat, said the trip had to be cleared with the “officer of the river,” currently unavailable but expected soon, so please take a seat. Barth settled in his tent to wait.

  Eventually the chief entered with several people. Messengers from the lieutenant governor had arrived with the order to stop Barth from leaving. As the explorer began “quietly expostulating,” more people crowded into the tent, a common occurrence. But this time they jumped Barth and clamped irons on his ankles.

  Luckily, he wrote later, the ambush was so quick and unexpected that it prevented him from drawing his guns and perhaps shooting someone, which would have been a fatal mistake. They took his luggage, firearms, “and, what grieved me most, they seized my chronometer, compass, and journal.” A slave grabbed one of Barth’s pistols, mounted Barth’s horse, and rode off to get instructions in Massenya.

  Barth spent the next four days in his tent, “fettered like a slave, resigned to my fate.” He calmed himself by reading Mungo Park’s first journey, one of exploration’s most entertaining but appalling narratives. “I could never have enjoyed the account of his sufferings better than I did in such a situation,” wrote Barth, “and did not fail to derive from his example a great share of patience.”

  On the fourth day Bu-Bakr arrived on Barth’s horse and angrily ordered Barth’s fetters removed. He was taking the explorer to Massenya. Barth had already compartmentalized the episode as “a useful lesson for future occasions.” His property was returned except for the missing pistol. Despite his poor treatment in Bagirmi so far, he added, “I was prepared to endure every thing rather than to forego seeing the capital.” But he understood why his weary servants felt differently, “for, having no mental interest, they felt the material privations more heavily.”

  Not that he wasn’t frustrated and fed up. The bad food, the interminable delays, the exhausting bureaucratic hithering and thithering, all of it worsened by searing heat and maddening insects—Bagirmi had drained his patience, and it provoked an outburst atypical in both its self-pity and condescension: “People in Europe have no idea of the situation of a solitary traveler in these regions… . a traveler in these countries is no better than a slave, dependent on the caprice of people without intelligence and full of suspicion.”

  He thought he deserved better treatment. But why? Because he was a visitor? But he was uninvited and allied with Bornu. Because he was pursuing knowledge, not riches? But why should the
Bagirmis take his word for that? Because he represented a powerful government? But that distant government had nothing to do with Bagirmi, and its motives were unknown. Because he was white and educated? That probably comes closest to his sense of entitlement.

  Barth was usually astute enough to realize that no explorer in Africa had a right to a friendly reception. He knew this even in Bagirmi. Later in his detention there he noted, “a traveler in a new country can not expect to be well treated.” He was also far more patient and empathetic than most explorers of Africa. But Bagirmi drove him around the bend. His pique there is understandable. It is also, in several ways, a low point in Travels and Discoveries.

  THEY REACHED MASSENYA on April 27. Barth was kept waiting outside the gate in the intense afternoon sun for an hour and a half. He couldn’t resist sarcasm: “I was not allowed to enter the holy precinct of this ruined capital,” he wrote, “without further annoyance.” He didn’t consider the possibility that he was being put in his place for running off.

  The lieutenant governor received him cordially. Barth told him that he represented a government that wanted only to be friends with all the world’s princes, but poor treatment and poor food had convinced him he wasn’t welcome in Bagirmi, so he had tried to leave. The lieutenant governor handed over Barth’s missing pistol and told him he had to wait for the sultan’s return. He was quartered in an airy house visible from everywhere in town, so he couldn’t step outside without being observed.

  In this new place he began his usual investigations. The town was seven miles in circumference but was only half-inhabited, and was half-ruined by wars and deprivations. Bagirmi squeezed Logone and several other small provinces for tribute, but was itself squeezed by the larger kingdoms of Bornu and, to the north, Wadai. Bagirmi’s great geographical disadvantage, noted Barth, was its isolation. No caravan route to the north passed through its territory. Consequently, Islam had reached Bagirmi late, and the country remained durably pagan and poorly educated.

  In such a place Barth seemed especially suspicious. Many Bagirmis assumed he was a Turkish spy. A pilgrim convinced some townsfolk that the explorer was a dangerous creature called an “Arnaut,” “the only people in the world that wore stockings.”

  He was accused of witchcraft because of his habit of popping outside to check the weather’s direction whenever storm clouds gathered. The clouds usually broke up; it wasn’t quite rainy season. The people of Massenya became convinced that he was depriving them of rain by making the clouds disappear with his gaze. This accusation by the lieutenant governor made Barth the Rain King laugh out loud. But he shrewdly added that he would be glad to soothe the lieutenant governor’s worries by leaving the country. And if such permission were given, he added, he would pray for rain—but at the moment he was praying for the opposite, since swollen rivers would cut him off from Bornu. This answer did not dispel the Bagirmis’ suspicions.

  Even this remote place offered stimulating company and friendship. A man named Haj Ahmed had worked in the famous goldfields of Bambuk in western Mali and had traveled the caravan routes between Timbuktu, Kano, Agadez, and Tuat. He had made the haj to Mecca, fought battles and traveled all over the Middle East, and finally settled in Medina, Islam’s second holy city, where he became a servant in the Great Mosque. He had been sent to Massenya to ask the sultan to contribute some of Bagirmi’s famous eunuchs to the mosque. A year-and-a-half later he was still waiting for an answer. He was essentially under house arrest, perhaps suspected as another Turkish spy.

  Barth’s favorite companion in Massenya was a thin old Fulani named Faki Sambo, “who alone contributed to make my stay in the place endurable… . I shall never forget the hours I passed in cheerful and instructive conversation with this man.” Faki Sambo had studied in Egypt and traveled observantly throughout eastern Africa and the Middle East. He knew “all the branches of Arabic literature” and had read Aristotle and Plato in Arabic. He was now blind but his mind remained vigorous, and he loved to discuss the splendors of Islamic history, especially in Moorish Spain, and the distinctions between the religion’s many sects. Barth never forgot the day he found him “sitting in his courtyard, in the midst of a heap of manuscripts which he could then only enjoy by touching them with his hands.”

  Barth admired Faki Sambo more than anyone else he met on his journey except Sheikh al-Bakkay of Timbuktu, perhaps because the old scholar reminded him of his own best self—erudite, curious, passionate about learning, broad-minded, a seeker and traveler governed by rigorous principle. Their admiration was mutual. Barth called him an enlightened person, “in his inmost soul a Wahabi”—a devotee of one of Islam’s strictest sects—“and he gave me the same name, on account of my principles.”

  WEEKS PASSED. Barth welcomed almost any diversion. One day Bagirmi’s large black ants forced themselves on his attention, “attacking my residence with a stubborn pertinacity which would have been extremely amusing if it had not too intimately affected my whole existence.” The raiders struck after dawn, marching into his house in an endless line 1 inch wide. Their target: the corn in Barth’s storeroom. He was lying on a couch in their path, and their fierce attack “soon obliged me to decamp.” He mustered reinforcements and counterattacked with clubs and fire. “But fresh legions came up, and it took us at least two hours before we could fairly break the lines and put the remainder of the hostile army to flight.” Such mock heroics passed the time. These ants stole so much corn, noted Barth, that hungry natives sometimes followed them home and stole it back.

  He got sick and cured himself by living for five days on “an infusion of the fruit of the tamarind-tree and onions, seasoned with some honey and a strong dose of black pepper—a sort of drink which must appear abominable to a European, but which is a delightful treat to the feverish traveler in those hot regions.”

  People pestered him constantly for medicine. The patients who interested him most were the young females, “among the finest women in Negroland.” Some of Bagirmi’s princesses enjoyed visiting the white oddity, ostensibly for medicine. One of these, “a buxom young maiden, of very graceful but rather coquettish demeanor,” complained about a sore eye and asked Barth to examine it. He approached her “very gravely” and inspected her eyes intently and protractedly before declaring them “sound and beautiful.” The young woman pealed with laughter and flirtatiously repeated, “beautiful eyes, beautiful eyes.” Barth’s conduct with attractive young African women was always partly proper and prudish, partly charmed and amused.

  Another pretty young woman fetched him to see her sick mother. The patient evidently required follow-up visits, because Barth remarked that the daughter was always delighted to see him and asked “some very pertinent questions” about why he was living without a woman. “She was a very handsome person,” he wrote, “and would even have been regarded so in Europe, with the exception of her skin, the glossy black of which I thought very becoming at the time, and almost essential to female beauty.” A remarkable, complicated statement whose depths and implications Barth seemed unwilling to explore, physically or psychologically.

  Unlike his contemporary explorers, Barth mentioned hundreds of Africans by name and often provided a few sentences of biography. But nearly all of the many young women he described, and whose company clearly delighted him, remain nameless. With Barth, the reason can never be imprecision or lack of interest. Victorian stuffiness? Chivalry? Sexual awkwardness? Perhaps a bit of each. Evidence is sparse, and all is speculation.

  WEEKS TURNED into months. He had set foot in Bagirmi on March 18 and reached Massenya on April 27. May and June dragged by. On July 3, after an absence of six months, Sultan ‘Abd el Kader finally returned to Massenya, “displaying a great deal of gorgeous pomp and barbaric magnificence.” The sultan, mounted on a gray charger, rode with his nobles and officers amid 700 or so horsemen in full array. He wore a yellow burnoose. On either side, a slave shaded him with an umbrella, one red, one green. Six more slaves, their right arms sheat
hed in iron, fanned him with ostrich feathers on long poles. A rider on the war camel beat the kettledrums hanging on each side of the hump. Musicians blew horns and pounded smaller drums.

  Next came the cavalcade of royal concubines, 45 of them (a fraction of the sultan’s harem of 300 to 400). Black cloth covered them head to toe. Alongside each walked a slave. The baggage camels were followed by seven captured pagan chiefs. The fate of these men was execution or emasculation, after “allowing the wives and female slaves of the sultan to indulge their capricious and wanton dispositions in all sorts of fun with them.” For six months of war, the sultan’s share of the booty came to only 400 slaves.

  ‘Abd el Kader’s return sharpened Barth’s desire to leave, but the sultan put off seeing him. Three days passed. On July 6, 1852, a thick packet of correspondence arrived for Barth from Kukawa. It was, he wrote, “one of the most lucky days of my life.”

  19

  Letters from Home

  IN MAY 1851 AS BARTH TRAVELED TO ADAMAWA, THE GREAT EXHIBITION of the Works of Industry of All Nations—better known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition—opened in Hyde Park, London. Europe had never seen anything like this extravagant display, which epitomized the pride and self-confidence—critics said the arrogance—of Victorian Britain.

  As the first crowds were gaping at the Crystal Palace, the Foreign Office was wondering what had become of the African expedition. Lord Palmerston didn’t know that Richardson had died months before, that the money had run out, that Barth and Overweg were desperate for instructions about the expedition’s future. He didn’t even know where the explorers were.

  Barth’s letters about all these matters, along with Richardson’s trunk and journals, left Kukawa with a caravan at about the same time the opening crowds were marveling at the Koh-i-Noor, the world’s largest diamond, recently seized in India for the British Empire. Barth’s letters took three-and-a-half months to reach the British consulate in Tripoli. By the time they reached Palmerston, it was mid-September and the two Germans were riding with the Welad Sliman.