A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Barth was more pleased than alarmed. The sheikh was still protecting him. And after being cooped up for a month, he would finally be outside and on horseback, on the move. The future looked threatening, but at least he would meet it in the open air.

  THE SHEIKH’S CAVALCADE left the next morning. People lined the narrow streets to get a look at Barth, an invisible scandal for the past month. They rode seven miles into the desert. Barth was lodged in a tent made of camel’s hair. Other tents were bright white cotton. Despite the threats hanging over him, Barth felt elated as he took in fresh air and fresh scenes. Camels, cattle, and goats grazed the sandy hills. White pigeons massed in the trees. Donkeys led by slaves carried water from a well. The sheikh’s young sons, aged four and five, scampered around camp. In the evenings there was melodious chanting of verses by al-Bakkay’s students and animated conversations by the cook fires.

  Al-Bakkay’s resistance to Hamdallahi pleased Barth, but his strategy troubled him. The sheikh wanted to send for reinforcements from his allies among the Tuaregs, especially a great chief named Alkutabbu who could protect Barth on his getaway. But Alkutabbu was several hundred miles away, which meant that Barth wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.

  After two days the sheikh and the explorer returned to town to test the political temperature. The Fulani governor, who struck Barth as a man of good sense, was in a bad position. He was holding off the city’s judge, who was insisting that the governor obey Ahmadu’s order. But the governor also tried to discourage the sheikh from summoning Alkuttabu, because he didn’t want trouble between the Fulanis and the Tuaregs.

  The sheikh sent the summons anyway. To demonstrate resolve to their enemies, al-Bakkay asked Barth to fully arm himself whenever he crossed the street for a visit. Barth objected that he wanted peace, with no violence, but the sheikh insisted. He also asked Barth to rapidly fire his six-shooter in front of his house to exhibit that weapon’s frightening potency.

  El Walati continued his weasel ways. He gave a pistol to al-Bakkay’s nephew and enemy, Hammadi, and told the sheikh that the gift had come from Barth, insinuating that the explorer was arming the sheikh’s foes. But al-Bakkay was waking up to the scoundrel’s true nature, and to Barth’s integrity; he dismissed the story. Then Barth let El Walati ensnare himself with his own cleverness. The explorer had left some camels and other goods in a village outside the city, intending to collect them on his return trip. El Walati, figuring that Barth would never survive Timbuktu, had sold the camels before the explorer ever left the village. Barth had learned of it, so he offered the missing camels to the sheikh as a gift and told El Walati to deliver them. The snake couldn’t squirm out of that trap, and the sheikh cut him off. Immune to shame, El Walati was later offended when Barth refused to hire him for the return journey from Timbuktu.

  Throughout October, al-Bakkay moved Barth in and out of town like a chess master, responding to moves by the opposition that Barth sometimes grasped, sometimes didn’t. Barth certainly felt like a pawn. In mid-October he wrote to Vice-Consul Dickson in Ghadames that al-Bakkay intended to use him as an instrument “to overturn the whole empire of Hamdallahi and found a new empire in its stead, under his own auspices.” Barth added that he hoped to stay out of trouble and to leave in early November.

  Barth called the trips into the desert “going to the tents.” The schedule was irregular—a couple of days at the tents, then several days in Timbuktu, then overnight at the tents. The bucolic charm of tent life began to fade. He missed his books and writing table. Sleeping in the cold damp air aggravated his rheumatism.

  Near the end of October, in a show of defiance, the sheikh took Barth on an excursion. They went first to the port of Kabara, a Fulani stronghold. Despite the danger, Barth was eager to go. He wanted to collect information about the river in flood and the changes it caused in the countryside. They drew a crowd, and Timbuktu’s governor rode out to keep an eye on them. After a leisurely lunch the sheikh took Barth to see the Djingereber, or “Great Mosque,” built by Mansa Musa. Barth wasn’t allowed inside, but “its stately appearance made a deep impression upon my mind.” The mosque was in the Fulani section of town. As Barth was measuring it, a throng gathered and followed them. But the people were more curious than hostile, and several offered Barth their hands. The emir’s dictum hadn’t yet poisoned everyone against the infidel.

  He gathered information about every aspect of Timbuktu, from any available source. He estimated the town’s settled population at 13,000, swelled by 5,000 to 10,000 during the heavy trading season from November to January. Few goods were made in Timbuktu. The city’s economy relied solely on foreign commercial traffic. He confirmed Caillié’s accuracy on most counts and commiserated with “the very unfavorable circumstances in which he was placed.”

  He apologized that his own circumstances made a thorough investigation of the market impossible. Then he wrote thirteen pages about it, detailing everything from the products offered to their prices and origins. The main trade goods were gold, salt, and kola nuts. Most of the salt came from the isolated mines of Taoudenni, a hellhole worked by slaves since 1596, about 450 miles due north into the Sahara. European goods reached the market from Morocco—tea and cutlery from England, cotton cloth from Manchester. The city’s business, as in Agadez, was conducted in an idiosyncratic idiom that patched together Songhai, Hausa, Tamasheq, Fulfulde, Arabic, and tribal dialects, reflecting the city’s history of scholarship, violent occupation, and cosmopolitan trade.

  Timbuktu was both less and more than Barth had expected. Europe had overrated its political and commercial importance, he wrote. Its real treasure lay in being “the seat of Mohammedan learning and Mohammedan worship,” epitomized by its three great mosques. He heard rumors about large libraries of ancient books, some destroyed by the Fulanis, but others hidden away.

  THE SHEIKH MOVED Barth in and out of town throughout early November. The tedium of life at the tents grated. “I was deeply afflicted by the immense delay and loss of time,” he wrote, “and did not allow an opportunity to pass by of urging my protector to hasten our departure.” He tried to fill the days by studying Songhai, which he disliked “on account of its deficiency in forms and words.” He also studied the local dialect of Tamasheq, the Tuareg language, whose wit and subtleties delighted him.

  Sometimes the stints at the tents were lightened by diverting visitors whom he questioned closely. He welcomed even hostile guests since they relieved his boredom. One day a relative of the sheikh’s accused Barth of visiting Timbuktu to scout it for conquest. Such suspicions would be justified in the near future, but Barth’s motives had so little connection to imperial ambitions that he treated the charge as an absurd joke. He had made the difficult trip to Timbuktu, he told his accuser, because the British government had heard that the natives “fed on sand and clay,” so his government sent him to learn how it was done “in order to provide in a similar way for the poor in our own country.” As the accuser looked bewildered, the sheikh roared with laughter.

  Barth’s favorite times at the tents were spent talking to al-Bakkay about the Qur’an, Christianity, the Paraclete, the coming of the Messiah, and other bottomless theological subjects. Their talks deepened their respect for each and for their different religions. (Barth noted, however, that al-Bakkay’s open-mindedness did not extend to Jews—a result, he wrote, of the still-influential jihad against Jews preached in this region at the end of the fifteenth century by al-Maghili. Barth himself makes several anti-Semitic remarks in Travels and Discoveries.)

  Al-Bakkay even began defending Barth’s faith against irate Muslims—not that the explorer shrank from self-defense. Barth, who could quote portions of the Qur’an in Arabic, regretted that he didn’t have more time to study and discuss the fine details of Islam. He loved to see the young students writing verses of the Qur’an on their wooden tablets, and to hear them reciting. “There was nothing more charming to me,” he wrote, “than to hear these beautiful verses chanted by son
orous voices in this open desert country, round the evening fire, with nothing to disturb the sound, which softly reverberated from the slope of the sandy downs opposite. A Christian must have been a witness to such scenes in order to treat with justice the Mohammedans and their creed.”

  Though Barth enjoyed the sheikh’s invigorating intellectual company, al-Bakkay was often unavailable, either plotting strategies or enmeshed in family life. He had only one wife and no concubines. “I can scarcely imagine that there is in Europe a person more sincerely attached to his wife and children than my host was,” wrote Barth, undermining the European stereotype of the lascivious African Arab.

  In mid-November events accelerated. Another messenger arrived from Hamdallahi with a direct order for the sheikh: Hand over the Christian. Al-Bakkay ignored it. On November 17 more messengers from Hamdallahi entered the city carrying the same message. The Berabish tribe that had murdered Laing also took an oath to kill Barth. On the last day of November, while Barth was at the tents, news arrived that a troop from Hamdallahi had come to Timbuktu with orders to take Barth dead or alive. He slept that night with his pistols tucked into his sash.

  The next afternoon at two o’clock thirteen armed men rode toward the tents. Barth gathered his weapons—a double-barreled rifle, three pistols, and a sword—and went outside. There he met the sheikh, holding his new Colt six-shooter. Barth kneeled and aimed his rifle. The horsemen pulled up. Their leader shouted that he had a letter from the emir for the sheikh. Al-Bakkay shouted that he would receive it in town and warned them not to come any closer. After conferring, they wheeled back toward Timbuktu.

  Later that day the sheikh and Barth returned to town. The next morning a messenger delivered the emir’s latest unvarying order: Give up the Christian and all his property. Al-Bakkay was as irritated by the messenger’s low birth as by the letter’s high-handed tone. A similar letter went to the Fulani governor. Another, addressed to the people of Timbuktu, was read aloud at the Great Mosque of Djingereber. It threatened to punish them if they didn’t seize Barth or allowed him to escape.

  The townspeople now expected violence. Barth could hear gunfire all over the city as people tested their weapons. The Moroccan merchants sensed an opportunity to look altruistic while protecting their self-interest. They had been scheming against Barth since his arrival. They didn’t want British merchants cutting into their business. They now advised the sheikh to abandon the Christian for the sake of the city.

  The crisis distressed Barth—not for himself but because of the turmoil he was causing. He had hoped to visit and investigate Hamdallahi, and to befriend the emir for Britain. He regretted that Timbuktu and his friend al-Bakkay were now threatened because of his presence.

  The sheikh reacted differently. Timbuktu was his city and Barth was his guest—a sacred responsibility. He had been sidestepping the emir for two months, but the despotic letter stung him into boldness, perhaps boosted by his expectation that the great Tuareg chief would soon arrive with reinforcements. Al-Bakkay replied to the emir with a long defiant poem that alternately defended Barth and chided Ahmadu Ahmadu, sometimes cuttingly.

  “Tell the host of the Fulan,” it began, “—I say, shameful! I am attacked in a great and weighty matter. Ye have sought my guest … the free guest of a free man… . My guest is my honor.” He rebuked the emir for being ignorant of the laws of Islam, unlike the very man he wanted to fetter and plunder. He mocked the emir, in meter, for acting as if this solitary stranger far from home posed a threat: “Really, my astonishment is unlimited.” He continued, with the cultural disdain of “white” Arab-Africans for black Africans, “No daughter nor son of Ham was my parent, nor will I obey the sons of the lazy Ham.” Barth had come from a country at peace with Muslim nations, noted the sheikh, and he had already traveled unharmed through many Islamic lands. So how dare Ahmadu Ahmadu declare war on this man and his nation when the emir was nothing but “a simple chief, a ruler of huts at the extremity of West Africa.”

  This letter bomb left for Hamdallahi on December 2.

  THE FOREIGN OFFICE had completely lost touch with its solitary explorer. The plans hatched for Barth in London and Tripoli seemed rational but were utterly unconnected to his reality. For instance, Britain’s plans to explore the Benue River. Barth’s letters about reaching the Benue in mid-1851 got to London in early 1853. In them Barth strongly recommended that Britain mount an expedition up the Niger River and the Benue, to open the heart of Africa to British trade.

  This started a flurry of letters between the Foreign Office and the Admiralty. Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary, wanted an expedition to leave as soon as possible. The Admiralty, still stinging from criticism of the deadly Niger excursion of 1841, agreed to an expedition but insisted on thorough preparation. In June 1853, Clarendon dispatched the news to Barth that a steamer would be leaving for the Benue in a year’s time. Clarendon asked Barth to find a native who knew the river, and to have this guide meet the boat at the confluence of the Niger and the Benue. And, he added, please try to induce the regional chiefs to leave stacks of wood for fuel at intervals along the riverbank.

  These absurd requests demonstrate how ignorant the Foreign Office was not only about Barth’s location, but about African realities and geography, and about what was feasible for a solitary European traveling in unknown Islamic Africa. When Clarendon wrote these instructions, Barth had almost reached the Niger at Say. By the time the explorer received them in December 1854, the boat had already steamed from Britain to the Niger and up the Benue, and was almost back to England.

  Similarly, in late August 1853, Consul Herman in Tripoli got a letter from Barth written in Katsina nearly six months earlier. Herman informed Clarendon of this message and wrote that he hoped Barth would get the dispatch about the approach of his new assistant, Vogel, and would turn back to Kukawa to meet him. In fact, Barth was about to enter Timbuktu. “He has not given me the slightest insight into his movements or plans,” complained Herman to Clarendon.

  In November 1853, Herman was still in the dark. “I regret that I am unable to convey to your Lordship any positive intelligence of Dr. Barth,” he wrote to Clarendon. Herman was reduced to reporting guesses and rumors. He noted that a caravan that might have carried dispatches from Barth had been plundered by Tuaregs. The native grapevine put Barth in Sokoto in July. (He had been there in April, and by July was beyond the Niger.) Herman hoped that his letters would reach Barth before he got too far west. But he was already there.

  AT ABOUT THE same time that Herman was writing to Clarendon, Barth started a letter to Chevalier Bunsen about his situation in Timbuktu. After mentioning the various death threats (“I hope they will not succeed”), he added that he had nevertheless been working hard. He enclosed a long dissertation about towns and villages along his route, with the etymologies of their names. He included a list of tribes and their subdivisions. He wrote about the principal places of an ancient people called the Tombo. He added extracts, copied from the old manuscript in Gwandu, about the history of the Songhai kingdom. He sent precise routes and a detailed map.

  After pages and pages of this he turned to new developments in his own situation, including the standoff with the thirteen riders at the tents and the recent ultimatum from Ahmadu. He noted that this ultimatum included an escape clause: if Barth could prove that he was protected by the sultan of Istanbul, Ahmadu would let him go, but if he was “merely the envoy of a Christian prince,” he must die. Barth complained bitterly, again, that a simple letter of transit from Istanbul, which he had often requested from the Foreign Office, could save his life but had never arrived.

  Before leaving Kukawa, Barth had written the Foreign Office and the British vice-consul at Ghadames, Dickson, asking for letters of credit and support to be sent ahead along his planned route to Timbuktu. Now he informed Bunsen that he had recently gotten a few lines from Dickson (written in mid-June, delivered in early December). But “it is very much to be regretted,” wrote Barth
, “that W. Dickson has sent me here but a very insufficient credit, upon which I have hardly got the value of ten dollars. Like men in a leaking ship, I rather throw over board [i. e., sell] every thing not absolutely indispensable, scientific and unscientific, to get away from these raging waves… .”

  He added that because violence and mayhem were seething in every quarter outside Timbuktu, his possible routes home had been whittled down to one: “I must go back by the long road which brought me”—roughly 2,700 miles. He hoped that when the new year of 1854 dawned in less than a month, he would be gone from Timbuktu. “And may the end of next year bring me once more to Europe,” he wrote in closing. “Here nothing is to be depended on. Merciful God protect me.”

  26

  Stuck

  WHEN BARTH WAS PREPARING TO LEAVE KUKAWA, HE DIDN’T know which route he might take home from the Niger. His main options: 1,400 miles north through the Sahara to Morocco, 1,200 miles west to the Atlantic, 1,000 miles south to the Gulf of Guinea. He tried to prepare for each possibility by writing letters to Britain’s African consulates for any help they could provide. To cover the Moroccan route, for instance, he wrote to the consul in Tangier, Drummond Hay. He asked Hay to solicit letters of recommendation and safe passage from the sultan of Morocco, and perhaps from important merchants, and to forward them to Timbuktu. Barth’s letter from Kukawa, dated October 16, 1852, reached Tangier on April 21, 1853.

  Hay immediately wrote to Lord Clarendon in London and to Consul Herman in Tripoli that he would not write to the sultan on Barth’s behalf. “For by doing so,” he explained, “I should probably seal the hard fate of the poor wanderer.” Hay reminded them that the last European who attempted the route between Morocco and Timbuktu, the British doctor John Davidson in 1836, had carried a protective letter from the sultan. Yet Davidson had been murdered in southern Morocco, almost certainly on the sultan’s orders, and probably at the insistence of Tangier’s merchants. The Moorish powers, wrote Hay, would take any measure to protect their lucrative trade with Timbuktu in gold and ivory.