A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Bunsen and Russell didn’t know that Overweg had been dead for four months. Russell wanted two British sappers to accompany Vogel as assistants, which led to a stream of letters between the Foreign Office and the Board of Ordnance about pay rates and employment conditions. Less than a week after Bunsen recommended Vogel, the deal was done. Russell wrote Herman in Tripoli that the German and two sappers would be starting for Tripoli by the end of February.

  Two weeks later, on February 19, the Foreign Office in London received Barth’s letters about the death of Overweg and other matters. Sending Vogel took on a new urgency. Russell wrote Barth to tell him that he would be getting an assistant. (Barth would not get this news until May 1854, when it was fifteen months old.) Two days later Russell was replaced by Lord Clarendon, who also wrote Barth a letter, approving his plan to try for Timbuktu. A bit redundant—Barth had been en route for three months.

  At almost the same time, Herman got a letter from Gagliuffi. No caravans had dared to leave Murzuk for two months because of massive unrest throughout Central Africa. Sending anything to Barth was impossible. No one would risk their lives to do it. “If our intrepid traveler proceeds as far as Sokoto,” wrote Herman to Clarendon, “… it will be wonderful if he is not murdered by the natives, and if he should go on to Timbuctoo the risk will be a hundredfold greater.”

  22

  The Prospect of the Niger

  BARTH’S PARTY COVERED THE 140 MILES BETWEEN ZINDER AND Katsina in five days, without problems. Katsina’s market surpassed Zinder’s, and Barth made “considerable purchases,” mostly cottons and silks from Kano and Nupe that were coveted farther west. He listed them with his usual precision: 75 “woman-cloths”; 35 black tobes from Kano and 20 from Nupe; 20 varieties of silks; 232 black face shawls for Tuaregs; 4 fine burnooses; half a dozen “sword-hangings” of red silk; and a large supply of tobacco, which was esteemed in Timbuktu. All together he spent 1,308,000 shells, or about 525 Spanish dollars (£105). He complained that the exchange rate in Katsina was 2,300 shells per dollar instead of the standard 2,500.

  On his first visit to Katsina he had been held hostage for ten days by the greedy emir, Muhammed Bello Yerima, who hoped to squeeze some riches from the penniless white stranger. This time Barth got stuck here by politics. Because of the war brewing between the Goberawa and the Fulani, Barth’s party couldn’t leave until they knew where the warfront would be. Barth’s guide told him to be ready to move with an hour’s notice, which kept him on stressful alert.

  So did the ants in his quarters. One day after sitting on a clay bench there, he got up and found a big hole in the back of his tobe. The ants, whom Barth couldn’t help admiring as “these clever and industrious miners,” had eaten through the clay wall of his house and chewed into his clothing, all in the space of an hour.

  Other creatures in Katsina also besieged him. He gave the avaricious emir a generous gift—a superior blue burnoose, a red caftan, two turbans, a red cap, two loaves of sugar, and, the emir’s favorite, a pocket pistol. But the man wanted more, and schemed to keep Barth and his rich baggage in Katsina. He was thwarted by Barth’s new friendship with the vizier of Sokoto, visiting to collect Katsina’s annual tribute to the sultan. (That year it came to 800,000 cowries plus a superb horse worth almost as much. Barth estimated the sultan’s income from tributes at more than 100 million cowries, or about £10,000, plus the equivalent amount in slaves and cloth.) This vizier protected Barth from the emir’s intrigues but not from his greed. Eventually the emir cadged another pocket pistol from the explorer. “He had a cover made for the pair,” wrote Barth, “and used to carry them constantly about his person, frightening every body by firing off caps into their faces.”

  Barth also felt under siege from people seeking medical treatment. Every morning when he woke up, his courtyard was crowded with 100 to 200 patients, once including a blind horse whose owner asked Barth for a cure.

  A caravan of 500 camels arrived from the north, “but without bringing me even a single line, either from my friends in Europe or even from those in Africa.” This was doubly disappointing since the chances of getting correspondence after leaving Katsina were almost nil.

  February turned into March. Barth felt more and more restless. War was approaching but so was the rainy season. He had decided it would be wise to travel to Sokoto with the vizier and his troop of fifty horsemen. On March 21 they finally left Katsina for Sokoto, 170 miles due west.

  Barth enjoyed the beautiful landscape of deleb palms, shea-butter trees, and massive kapok trees, interspersed with fields of tobacco and yams. Wherever they stopped in the evenings, the vizier urged Barth to come inside the village’s walls for safety, but he preferred his tent and the open air. He relied on the protection of his guns. The thatch huts in villages were often stiflingly hot and sometimes infested with vermin. They were also highly flammable, and Barth worried that if his stock went up in flames, so would the mission.

  The signs of war were everywhere—abandoned villages, destroyed villages, villages barricaded with heavy timbers or intricate moats and earthworks. To escape detection the group sometimes traveled after dark. The vast wilderness of Gundumi, about 50 miles from Sokoto, was ideal for ambushes, and had to be crossed in a thirty-hour forced march. Even the energetic Clapperton, noted Barth, called this trek “the most wearisome journey he had ever performed in his life.” Partway through, Barth noticed that the boy Dorugu was exhausted and told him to climb onto a camel. The grueling slog killed several camels and one woman.

  The group collapsed into sleep on the far side of Gundumi. The sultan of Sokoto, Aliyu, was at a war camp nearby. Barth felt that his mission couldn’t succeed without Aliyu’s blessing. The sultan sent for him that evening. Barth passed through the campfires of the sultan’s army and found the ruler seated beneath a tree on a platform of clay. He motioned for the Christian to sit on the ground before him.

  Aliyu, the son of Muhammed Bello and a Hausa slave, was about forty-five, stout, and moon-faced. He received Barth “with the utmost kindness and good-humor.” The sultan had followed Barth’s movements with the greatest interest, including his trip to Adamawa. Barth made his diplomatic pitch for a commercial treaty with Britain, and also asked for a carnet to help ease his way toward Timbuktu. Aliyu immediately agreed to both requests, saying “it would be his greatest pleasure to assist me in my enterprise to the utmost of his power, as it had only humane objects in view, and could not but tend to draw nations together that were widely separated from each other.”

  The sultan’s cheerful goodwill lifted Barth. Perhaps it would be possible to reach Timbuktu. The next morning he put together a package of fine gifts, including a pair of silver-ornamented pistols in velvet holsters, a burnoose of red satin with a yellow satin lining, and many other items of clothing and luxury. The presents delighted Aliyu, especially the pistols. He again agreed to Barth’s two requests but insisted that the explorer delay his journey until the military campaign ended. Barth nodded, having no other choice. But he had little faith in Aliyu’s success. The sultan struck him as weak and indolent.

  That evening Aliyu sent Barth 100,000 shells to defray his household expenses during the delay. That same night, hyenas entered camp and tried to carry off a boy, mauling him badly. The camp’s desolate location and atmosphere disturbed Barth. The next day, as soon as Aliyu took his army to war, Barth gathered his group and departed for Wurno, where Aliyu kept a residence, to await the sultan’s return. It was April 3, 1853.

  WHENEVER BARTH SPENT more than a few days in a large African town, he always distributed alms to the poor. In Wurno he bought an ox to feed them. But Wurno dispirited him. It was expensive and even filthier, he wrote, than the worst places in Italy. Its leading citizens mirrored their ruler, Sultan Aliyu, in their lack of energy and courage. They shrank from engagement with the belligerent pagans threatening them from several directions. Wurno’s merchants warned Barth that travel to the west was impossible because of roving war par
ties. He began to doubt whether he would be able to proceed. Still, he spent his days collecting information about the western country, and he took long daily rides to stay in shape.

  After two-and-a-half weeks in Wurno, he needed a respite. On April 20 he left for the capital, Sokoto, twenty-five miles to the southwest. En route he passed the tiny village of Degel, where Usman dan Fodio had hatched the jihad that transformed Central Africa. In keeping with Barth’s frequent theme that the present leaders of Africa’s empires paled next to their great forebears, he commented, “But such is the degraded state of these conquerors at the present time, that even this village, which, if they had the slightest ambition or feeling of national honor, ought to be a memorable and venerable place to them for all ages, has been ransacked by the Goberawa, and lies almost deserted.”

  After pausing for a good lunch of boiled onions seasoned with butter and tamarinds, he reached Sokoto. He remembered Clapperton’s first impressions of it as brimming with energy and prosperity, but Barth saw mostly poverty and misery, the result of depredations from all sides. The roads were so dangerous that not a single Arab merchant now visited. Bello’s former palace was badly decayed.

  In the market Barth spent another 70,000 shells on supplies. The town was famous for leather goods, and he filled a leather bag with dates for the journey ahead, in hopes that he would be able to take it.

  He also visited the house just outside of town where Clapperton, during his second trip into Central Africa, had died of dysentery twenty-six years earlier. Clapperton had returned from his first expedition with high praise for Muhammed Bello’s generosity and intelligence. He also brought back a commercial treaty signed by Bello, in which the sultan agreed to give access to British merchants and to give up slavery in exchange for a couple of cannons and some firearms.

  But Clapperton’s return trip didn’t go well. Sokoto and Bornu were at war, and Bello wouldn’t let Clapperton proceed to visit al-Kanemi in Kukawa. Stalled in Sokoto, Clapperton sickened and died. When his servant, Richard Lander, returned to Europe with this news, Bello’s reputation plummeted. Barth defended Bello, pointing out that he had been harassed by native revolts as well as war, and had been pressured by Arab traders who felt threatened by Clapperton’s commercial proposals. Barth also suggested that Clapperton might have insisted too adamantly on visiting Bornu. These views probably didn’t endear the German to Clapperton’s many British admirers.

  In a passage that sounds self-descriptive, Barth dismissed the common European suspicion that Bello had poisoned Clapperton: “The amount of fatigue, privations, and sickness to which this most eminent of African explorers was exposed on his circuitous journey, by way of Nupe and Kano, from the coast as far as this place, explains fully how he was unable to withstand the effects of the shock which mental disappointment exercised upon him; nay, it is wonderful how he bore up so long, if his own hints with regard to the state of his health are taken into account.”

  Barth greatly admired Clapperton’s energy and accuracy, which he contrasted several times with Denham’s sloppiness. He probably also admired Clapperton’s openness to Africa and Africans. Clapperton described the vizier of Sokoto as “my good old friend … for whom I felt the same regard as if he had been one of my oldest friends in England, and I am sure it was equally sincere on his side.” During Clapperton’s first visit, when the vizier’s favorite son died of smallpox, the explorer went to console him. They sat together silently for an hour. “Unable to alleviate his grief,” wrote Clapperton, “I took him by the hand; he pressed mine in return; and I left this disconsolate father with heaviness of heart.”

  AFTER FOUR DAYS in Sokoto, Barth rode back to Wurno and continued to await the sultan’s return. He found relief from Wurno’s shortcomings in the company of a scholar named ‘Abd el Kader dan Taffa, a rich repository of knowledge about the kingdom of Songhai, once the region’s greatest power. He also spent much time reading a manuscript entitled Tazyın al-Waraqat by Usman dan Fodio’s younger brother, Abdullahi, about the history of the western part of the Fulani kingdom. Abdullahi was a warrior who conquered many places during the jihad. Even more learned than dan Fodio, he wrote at least seventy-five works on Islamic law, religion, and science. After the jihad, dan Fodio awarded him a large kingdom in the western lands, called Gwandu, unknown in Europe before Barth visited. Dan Fodio’s son, Bello, was given the larger eastern portion, the Caliphate of Sokoto.

  Tazyıˉn al-Waraqaˉt was a strange document that mixed history, poetry, theology, eulogy, and literary theory. Two samples of its poetry and themes:

  They cut off at a blow the heads of the unbelievers

  With swords the blades of which are bright.

  Whetted arrows, transfixing, assist them,

  While under them are fine horses.

  Turn aside towards the winding streams of the loved ones of Maji

  And drink from the streams the water of the white cloud.

  Let tears flow on their dwellings there

  And cure the heart of the sorrows which have entered it.

  Such pleasures aside, Barth urgently wanted to leave. The rainy season was pending, and reports said the roads were getting more dangerous. He also felt “sorely pestered by begging parties, the inhabitants of Wurno and Sokoto being the most troublesome beggars in the world”—quite a superlative, given Barth’s experience.

  When Aliyu returned, Barth immediately sought his blessing and a letter of transit. On May 8 he left Wurno and set his course southwest. Once past Sokoto, he would enter regions, in his beloved phrase, “never trodden by European foot.” The gateway to these regions was the Fulani kingdom of Gwandu.

  TO CROSS THE 150 miles between the capital town of Gwandu and the Niger River, Barth needed the good will of the kingdom’s ruler, Khalilu. This son of Abdullahi lived like a monk. His own subjects rarely glimpsed him except on Fridays when he went to the mosque. To a European and a Christian he was “most inaccessible.”

  Barth, quartered in the house of Gwandu’s chief eunuch, tried to get an audience with the sultan by insisting on presenting his gifts in person. He was told to forget it. During his three weeks in Gwandu, Barth never saw Khalilu or even heard his voice from behind a screen. The sultan surrounded himself with a small mafia of handlers who controlled him and ran the kingdom. Paranoia, seclusion, and avarice made Gwandu a nasty kleptocracy.

  Barth tried to outflank the mafia by hiring one of its members as his intermediary. Instead the man used his position to worsen Barth’s standing with the sultan, then demanded extravagant gifts to fix what he had broken. He also insisted on gifts for the rest of the cabal.

  Barth sent Khalilu the same generous packet of goods given to the sultan of Sokoto, minus the fancy pistols. But the mafia had heard about the pistols and told Barth he couldn’t leave Gwandu until their sultan got equal treatment. After many futile attempts at negotiation, Barth handed over the guns.

  In the midst of these shakedowns Barth met a learned man who showed him an ancient manuscript. As he began reading, he became tremendously excited. The quarto volume in his hands was a history of one of Africa’s great kingdoms, Songhai, “from the very dawn of historical records down to the year 1640 of our era.” It was more proof—scarcely believed when Barth reported it in Europe—that Central Africa had an old written tradition. The manuscript, entitled Tarikh al-Sudan, was written by Abderrahman es-Sa’di (Barth incorrectly ascribed the work to Ahmed Baba, a famous scholar of Timbuktu and the teacher of es-Sa’di). It provided an eyewitness account of the horrible consequences of the invasion of Timbuktu by a mercenary Moroccan army in the 1590s.

  “I saw the ruin of learning and its utter collapse,” wrote es-Sa’di, a man after Barth’s own heart, “and because learning is rich in beauty and fertile in its teaching, since it tells men of their fatherland, their ancestors, their annals, the names of their heroes and what lives these led, I asked divine help and decided to record all that I myself could gather on the subject of the S
onghay princes of the Sudan, their adventures, their achievements, their history and their wars. Then I added the history of Timbuktu from the foundation of that city, of the princes who ruled there and the scholars and saints who lived there, and of other things besides… .” Barth spent several days reading it and copying passages.

  The rainy season roared into the area as well, bringing heat, bugs, fevers, rheumatism. Militarily the district was “plunged into an abyss of anarchy.” Barth didn’t dare venture many yards from the town’s walls, much less make his usual excursions into the countryside. His doubts about reaching the Niger grew again.

  But even the dangers of the road seemed better than the draining corruption of Gwandu. After more gifts to his extortionate intermediary, Barth managed to extract a letter of transit from Khalilu. He was allowed to leave on June 4. He proceeded west toward “that great African river which has been the object of so much discussion and individual ambition for so long a period”—the Niger.

  IN THE SWAMPY valleys of the province called Kebbi, Barth worried most about war parties, but the worst bloodthirsty attackers were mosquitoes. As a refuge from these maddening pests, every villager built an elevated hut, 8 to 10 feet off the ground, entered by a ladder—“the most essential part of even the poorest dwelling in the province of Kebbi.”

  He passed familiar scenes: fields of corn and rice, beautiful landscapes, devastation. In one fertile valley he rode by “an uninterrupted line of large walled towns. But most of them are now deserted and destroyed.” Thousands of people had been uprooted or turned into slaves. “Life and death in these regions are closely allied,” he wrote.

  In these volatile conditions, any traveler caused alarm. When Barth’s small group came across a wayfarer sitting beneath a palm tree and enjoying its fruit, “we could not help greatly suspecting this man to be a spy, posted here by the enemy in order to give them information of the passers-by.” Barth had to restrain his Arab troubleshooter from killing the man. The next day they came across a solitary pilgrim, a Jolof from the Atlantic coast heading to Mecca. He was walking with a small bundle on his head, a double-barreled gun on his shoulder, and a sword hanging at his side. Barth, perhaps feeling abashed by yesterday’s overreaction, was buoyed by “this enterprising native traveler” and gave him a small present to help him along.