A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  If Barth survived the journey and Timbuktu, he still had to get home. He could go north to Morocco like Caillié, or continue west to the Atlantic, or descend the Niger to the Gulf of Guinea. Any of these routes would be far shorter than retracing his steps. Everything about the future and the territory ahead was murky and fraught. But Barth, as always when undertaking a new journey, was upbeat.

  “I felt unbounded delight,” he wrote, “in finding myself once more in the open country, after a residence of a couple of months in the town, where I had but little bodily exercise.”

  His troop numbered ten. In addition to several tagalong travelers, there were Dorugu and Abbega, the boys whom Overweg had bought and set free and who were now under Barth’s care, plus a payroll of four. After many bad experiences with workers who quit, Barth had devised a new strategy: no one got paid until they returned with him to Hausaland. Mejebri Ali el Ageren, an Arab from an oasis in eastern Libya, had a salary of 9 Spanish dollars per month—a princely amount—plus two horses and permission to trade on his own. Barth hired him as a troubleshooter to overcome problems with the natives of the many lands they would pass through.

  Next down the pay chain was Barth’s main servant, Muhammed el Gatroni. He received a horse and 4 Spanish dollars per month, with a bonus of 50 dollars if the mission succeeded (that is, if Barth lived). This remarkable man deserves an aside for his unsung career in the exploration of Africa. He served not only Barth but several subsequent travelers whom Barth inspired. A Tebu from the desert village of Gatron (or Gatrun) in southern Fezzan, el Gatroni was about eighteen when the Richardson expedition began. Barth called him “the most useful attendant I ever had; and, though young, he had roamed about a great deal over the whole eastern half of the desert and shared in many adventures of the most serious kind. He possessed, too, a strong sense of honor, and was perfectly to be relied upon.” He was the only person who stayed with Barth throughout the expedition’s five-and-a-half years, except for a short break when Barth entrusted him to take Richardson’s journals and effects to Murzuk.

  Years later, when Barth was writing Travels and Discoveries in London, he met a French teenager named Henri Duveyrier who dreamed of exploring the Sahara. Barth advised him to learn Arabic and, if he ever went to Central Africa, to hire el Gatroni. Duveyrier took this advice, and el Gatroni accompanied the Frenchman on some of the travels that made him famous. In Germany, Barth’s example inspired Karl Moritz von Beurmann to undertake an expedition into Bornu in the early 1860s. Barth recommended el Gatroni, who guided von Beurmann to Kukawa but not onward to Wadai, where von Beurmann was murdered. Barth also inspired his countryman Friedrich Gerhard Rohlfs, who followed Barth’s suggestion and hired el Gatroni for his journey to Bornu in the mid-1860s. A few years later Rohlfs arranged for el Gatroni to lead Gustav Nachtigal on part of that explorer’s five-year odyssey through Central Africa.

  Nachtigal described his “respectful awe” upon first meeting the famous guide in 1869. He wrote that el Gatroni “was not a man of many words. A quiet friendly old man, he was by no means indifferent to the joys of life; he seldom, however, allowed the equanimity which was the result of his temperament and his rich experiences to be disturbed.” Nachtigal often called el Gatroni old, but he was only a year or so older than the thirty-five-year-old Nachtigal. His life of rough travels was carved on his face.

  When el Gatroni strongly advised Nachtigal against a dangerous trip to Tibesti, the explorer asked him to recommend someone else as a guide. “The worthy man, however, rejected this proposal with some indignation,” wrote Nachtigal. “ ‘I have promised your friends in Tripoli,’ he added, ‘to bring you safe and sound to Bornu, just as I also guided thither your brothers, ‘Abd el-Kerim (Barth) and Mustafa Bey (Rohlfs). With God’s help we shall achieve this purpose together. Until then I shall not leave you, and should misfortune befall you among the treacherous [Tebu], I want to share it with you.’ ”

  WHEN THEY RESTED in the afternoon heat, Barth’s lion’s skin kept him “delightfully cool,” and warmed him during the cold nights, when temperatures dropped into the low 40s. His legs now hurt constantly from rheumatism, which periodically lamed him. He treated it with shea butter. He also had a foot disease, probably a fungus from being constantly wet on the trip back from Bagirmi. But in general his mood was cheerful because of the prospects ahead.

  They passed the old Bornu capital of Ngazargamu, built near the end of the fifteenth century and sacked by dan Fodio’s jihadists in the first decade of the nineteenth century. It had been a grand place, with high walls six miles in circumference. Judging by the outlines still visible on the ground, the royal palace had been extensive and made of baked brick, a craft forgotten in Kukawa. By contrast, the dimensions of the ruined mosque were small, which led Barth to conclude that only the courtiers practiced Islam, as in Kukawa.

  He found no signs of a madrasah, or college, attached to the mosque, as was the custom in centers of Islamic learning. This led him to a broader speculation that scholarship in Bornu “has always been a private affair among a few individuals, encouraged by some distinguished men who had visited Egypt and Arabia… . it cannot be doubted that this capital contained a great deal of barbaric magnificence, and even a certain degree of civilization, much more so than is at present found in this country; and it is certainly a speculation not devoid of interest to imagine, in this town of Negroland, a splendid court, with a considerable number of learned and intelligent men gathering round their sovereign, and a priest writing down the glorious achievements of his master, and thus securing them from oblivion.” But that vision was hard to conjure among these ruins, where the forest now grew right up to the crumbling walls and the only inhabitants were two ostriches.

  As they moved west, flat plains filled with corn and millet gave way to rolling forested hills and then to undulating red sands and fields of peanuts and beans. Baobab trees yielded to tamarinds and doum palms. Farther west they came to mountains, lakes, and ravines, and the fields changed to cotton, wheat, and onions. Guinea fowl proliferated and joined the menu. Elephants, warthogs, monkeys, and splendidly horned oryxes and addaxes all appeared by sign or sight. The architecture, the crops, and the natives’ physiognomies and personalities all changed along with the landscape, reflecting Carl Ritter’s theories about the environment’s influence on humans.

  Barth wrote it all down with his customary specificity. At a tiny Fulani village named Yamiya, he recorded that 120 fine cattle were getting watered from the well, which “measured two fathoms in depth; and the temperature of the water was 80° at 1.20 P.M., while that of the air was 84°.” Accuracy, he noted, was easily sabotaged. Even vigilant travelers could pass along misinformation. At one place, for instance, he asked a man for the village’s name but didn’t quite hear it, so he asked another man, who replied, “Mannawaji.” Barth wrote it down but soon realized that the word meant “he doesn’t want to answer.” A traveler who didn’t understand Kanuri would have invented a phantom village, whose real name was Gremari.

  He also criticized the assumption of some geographers that recording a village’s name and geographical position was enough. “But to me the general character of a country, the way in which the population is settled, and the nature and character of those settlements themselves, seem to form some of the chief and most useful objects of a journey through a new and unknown country.”

  The roads were rivers of trade, busy with merchants carrying cotton, natron, earthenware. The people of Gashua lived up to their reputation for thievery by carrying off the Arab troubleshooter’s blanket one night, while the sleeping troubleshooter was wrapped in it. When he woke up and resisted, they threatened him with spears until he let go. To discourage further depredations Barth fired some shots “and with a large accordion, upon which I played the rest of the night, I frightened the people to such a degree that they thought every moment we were about to ransack the town.”

  They reached Zinder on Christmas, but Barth didn
’t even mention the holiday. He was more concerned about how long he would have to wait for the supplies needed to continue his journey. Zinder was on Bornu’s western edge. “No place in the whole of Sudan being so ill famed,” wrote Barth, “on account of the numerous conflagrations to which it is subjected.” Tuaregs harassed it from the north, Fulanis from the south, pagan Hausas from the west. The people of Zinder spoke Hausa, which would be Barth’s primary language for the next six months and 600 miles.

  He settled in to wait for provisions. He spent most of his time working on his journals and reports. Before venturing into the dangerous territories to the west he wanted “to send home as much of my journal as possible, in order not to expose it to any risk.” Additional risk, that is, since his papers still had to cross about 1,400 turbulent miles to reach Tripoli.

  The year’s salt caravan had arrived from Bilma. The Tuareg traders danced and played music all day and night. Annur, the old chief of Tintellust, was in town, but treated Barth coolly because of Richardson’s insulting behavior.

  Some years earlier, Dorugu, the young servant whom Barth had inherited from Overweg, had been stolen and sold into slavery from a village about fifty miles southwest of Zinder. Barth had told the boy, who was twelve or thirteen, that if the opportunity arose, he could rejoin his father. On their first day in Zinder, Dorugu heard that his father, a drummer, had passed through town the day before. Some Hausa men offered to take Dorugu to him, but he was afraid they would sell him instead. Barth didn’t mention any of this and evidently didn’t make much effort to reunite the boy with his father. On the other hand, Dorugu didn’t make much effort, either, judging from his own account, and didn’t ask Barth for help. Perhaps he wasn’t keen about leaving his adventurous life with the explorer for life in a small farm village.

  On January 20, 1853, four weeks after Barth reached Zinder, his parcel arrived. Two packages disguised as loaves of sugar held 1,000 dollars in cash, mostly Spanish dollars. But there were no new scientific instruments and, dishearteningly, no letters. He bought two sturdy baggage camels and spent 300 dollars on trade goods for the journey, including “red common burnooses, white turbans, looking-glasses, cloves, razors, chaplets.”

  Ten days after the money arrived, he left Zinder feeling flush and healthy. His foot disease was gone and he had 2,000 dollars’ worth of money and merchandise. But his wealth increased the dangers of the road in the borderlands between the pagan kingdoms and the Fulani kingdom of Sokoto, “the scene of uninterrupted warfare and violence.” As he left Zinder, the pagan Goberawa were massing for war against the Fulani town of Katsina, his next destination.

  Instead of roving ahead of his baggage camels as he preferred, Barth stuck with the group for safety. For the same reason, they sometimes joined bands of salt traders. The principal crop had changed to rice. At wells, following the custom of the country, the horses of travelers drank before any waiting natives.

  AROUND THE SAME TIME that Barth was unwrapping those sweet loaves of cash, the envoy from Bornu reached Tripoli. He delivered Barth’s letters informing the Foreign Office of Overweg’s death and the new plans about Timbuktu. Herman forwarded the news to England, where it wouldn’t arrive until late February. Herman, who always looked for the dark cloud, wrote to the foreign secretary, “From the information I have obtained from several Arabs here who have long resided at Timbuctoo—so great are the obstacles both moral and physical which our enterprising traveler will have to encounter that I entertain the most serious apprehensions for his safety.”

  His opinion of the envoy from Bornu, Ali ibn Abdullah, was equally bleak. He asked Lord Russell, the foreign secretary, to reconsider transporting him to England. “He is simply a black slave of the Sultan’s,” wrote Herman, “—so illiterate that he is utterly incapable of furnishing the slightest information of interest even on the primitive state of his own country, much less of comprehending for any useful purposes the more complicated civilization of Europe.”

  This opinion would have surprised Barth, who elicited intriguing information from all manner of people and did not consider Kukawa primitive. Herman wrote that the envoy would be housed and fed at the consulate while awaiting Lord Russell’s further orders. Then Herman left for a brief sabbatical. His letter evidently got lost in the transition from Lord Russell to the new foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon.

  In Herman’s absence, his vice-consul, R. Reade, wrote to the FO that the envoy spoke only the language of Bornu and would need an interpreter in England. Reade recommended himself. Clarendon approved the trip for both of them, but they didn’t get out of Tripoli fast enough. When Herman returned, he angrily delayed Reade’s plans. He re-sent his letter about the envoy to Clarendon, using exactly the same description. He added that Reade would be useless as an interpreter since he didn’t speak the envoy’s language. Reade must have been crestfallen when his expense-paid trip to London was snatched from him. Herman added that sending the envoy to England was presently unwise because of his poor health. Ali ibn Abdullah had blood in his urine, an enlarged prostate, and pain in his groin, abdomen, and back—chronic gonorrhea.

  After reading this dispatch, Clarendon wrote to Chevalier Bunsen for his opinion about the envoy question, and included Herman’s description. Bunsen smoothly demolished the consul’s condescension. He began by referring to the envoy as “the Black Diplomatist,” then continued, “He cannot help being black, because black is the normal colour of all the Bornuese: as to the distinction between Slave and Servant, I do not suppose it to be very strict in the Interior of Africa. However I must observe that if Mr. H. calls the country a primitive one, this is rather a severe or hasty expression: because not only are they Mohammedans, but are, comparatively speaking, of a superior African civilization… . I daresay the ‘useless Black’ speaks his Bornoo language in perfection… . In short, perhaps, he turns out to be the best man they could send—and what more could they do?” Bunsen also pointed out that if Britain offended the envoy and thus Bornu, the new treaty could be put into doubt.

  Meanwhile other possible complications arose. The undersecretary of the Foreign Office, Addington, sent a memo to Clarendon about the sticky consequences of bringing the envoy to England if the man was indeed a slave. The abolitionists would raise a ruckus and insist that he be freed, as British law demanded. That could cause a diplomatic breech with Bornu. Better to treat the envoy well in Tripoli and send him home, advised Addington. Clarendon ordered it done. He also ordered the FO’s actual interpreter in Tripoli, Frederick Warrington, son of former consul Hanmer Warrington, “to extract all the information he can from the Sheikh’s Envoy.”

  Herman showed some finesse by telling the envoy that the British government was unwilling to risk his precarious health by requiring him to make an arduous trip into the severe northern climate of England. The envoy, already homesick and shivering in the relatively cool temperatures of Tripoli, jumped at this reprieve and bolted for Bornu. Herman itemized the consulate’s expenditures for hosting the envoy: travel expenses, medicines, gifts (“two complete dresses”), fees for baths, and so on. The cost for the envoy’s six-month stay came to about £20.

  In his description of the sheikh’s gifts for the queen, Herman reverted to form. Ethnologically, he wrote, the items might shine “a faint gleam of light” on the people of Bornu and “may possibly prove of interest, but in other respects, with the exception of an elephant’s tusk, they are intrinsically of no value.” Another opinion that would have shocked Barth.

  In London the Foreign Office catalogued the gifts and forwarded them to Buckingham Palace, with a chart that listed their names in Kanuri and Arabic. In a column labeled “Remarks,” the chart described or explained each item. The gifts included samples of men’s and women’s clothing (such as “kajee anagoodoo,” a man’s pantaloons); a wide array of agricultural products (corn, millet, indigo, gum Arabic, dried fruit, dates, beeswax, and a vegetable called “wabooloobull”); medicines (for instance, a concoctio
n for colds made from a thorn tree and a medicine for weak eyes called “feedery chumlumleny”); utensils (water basket, wooden soup tureens, baskets with silk and cotton, dishes with grass covers); rhino horn and animal skins (lion, leopard, gazelle). There were spears, shields, war bells, and daggers with fish-skin covers. There was a horse whip made from a giraffe’s tail and a slave whip made from a hippopotamus tail.

  Queen Victoria’s reaction to this fascinating collection is unrecorded, but she did send a thank-you note.

  AT THE END of January 1853, at about the same time that Barth was unwrapping the loaves of cash in Zinder and the envoy from Bornu was entering Tripoli, Chevalier Bunsen sent a memo to Lord Russell, then foreign secretary. He noted that the African mission’s thermometers, barometers, and astrological instruments all seemed to be damaged or broken. Barth and Overweg were unable to measure many things accurately—a lost opportunity. Bunsen suggested that the mission be resupplied with instruments. He also recommended sending a third scientist skilled in astronomy and botany, which weren’t Barth and Overweg’s strengths. Naturally, he knew just the German for the job, a young man named Eduard Vogel. He would not expect a salary, just expenses for travel and instruments.

  Russell immediately agreed. Britain, he wrote, might never again have such an opportunity to scientifically explore Central Africa. “And I consider the enterprise so hazardous,” he continued, “that in my opinion we would do well to add a third to the adventurous pair already employed by us.”