A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  But Barth socialized little, isolating himself in his study to write Travels and Discoveries. “My main flaw is this propensity towards loneliness,” he wrote to his friend von Schubert, “and that I withdraw from whatever social circle too easily. I have to get myself some more ‘cheerful society.’ ”

  “The idea of having to spend time on diversions,” wrote von Schubert, “or on social pleasantries or obligations, was completely foreign to him.”

  He was also yearning for more than male companionship. After he returned from Africa, according to von Schubert, “Barth’s deepest longing was to find a life partner.” Barth wrote to him, “If I chose well, a life companion would bring my entire life into bloom. I yearn for communion of hearts and snug companionship.” But he was unwilling to pause his writing long enough to meet women, much less court one. “I just need my first volumes to come out,” he wrote von Schubert, “and then I will find an opportunity to meet a like-minded soul.” Von Schubert’s wry comment: “This perspective would hardly help him find the woman he longed for to fill the emptiness in his heart.”

  Barth had hoped to finish the first three volumes by the end of 1856, absurdly optimistic even without all the year’s distractions. In November 1856, Barth learned that his father, whom he called his best friend and greatest supporter, had died. He buried his grief by working even harder. The long motionless hours at his desk aggravated his rheumatism and his restless nature.

  “How I long for the freedom of a bivouac in the desert,” he wrote to von Schubert, “in that unfathomable expanse where, free of ambitions, free from the thousands of little things that torture people here, I would savor my freedom as I rolled out my bed at the end of a long day’s march, my possessions, my camels, and my horse around me. I almost regret having put myself in these chains.”

  IN THE FIRST HALF of 1857 more distractions pulled at him. The Foreign Office hadn’t heard from Vogel since May 1855. In February 1857 a rumor reached London that the young German had been murdered in Wadai, evidently for naïvely climbing a sacred mountain. Barth thought highly of Vogel’s energy, dedication, and astronomical skills. The news upset him. This was soon followed by a report that Corporal Macguire, while en route to Tripoli and home, had been killed six days north of Kukawa. All of Vogel’s papers were missing—another blow.

  Barth had been urging the FO to send another expedition up the Niger and Benue to fortify Britain’s relations in the region, especially with Timbuktu and Sheikh al-Bakkay. The FO finally approved the mission in November 1856, again under the leadership of Dr. Baikie, who had become Barth’s good friend. The FO asked Barth to help Baikie plan the trip, and he was pleased to oblige. Yet when the mission’s new ship was launched in a public ceremony in March 1857, the FO somehow failed to inform or invite Barth. He took it as another insult.

  But most of his attention was elsewhere. He was about to place the first three volumes of Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa before the public.

  31

  Last Journeys

  THE ENGLISH EDITION OF TRAVELS AND DISCOVERIES IN NORTH AND Central Africa, Being a Journal of an Expedition Undertaken under the Auspices of H. B. M.’s Government, in the Years 1849–1855 was published in April 1857. Longmans, Green & Company printed 2,250 copies, priced at about £1 per volume. The three volumes covered Barth’s journey up to his departure for Timbuktu. The books were beautifully done. There were several dozen pastel lithographs of African scenes by painter J. M. Bernatz, based on sketches by Barth, and many dozen woodcuts and drawings, plus superbly detailed maps by Petermann.

  Barth admired the illustrations but wished Bernatz had followed the text’s example and included more “enlivening circumstances”—more scenes of Africans busily living their daily lives, instead of so many landscapes, as if humans and human culture were scarce.

  Barth had written the book in both English and German, for simultaneous publication. (Eventually there were editions in Dutch, Danish, and French, as well as a U.S. edition.) Considering that English was his second language, the task verged on the heroic. The Germanisms and malapropisms in the English edition were surprisingly few. Water was occasionally “the aqueous element.” Adamawa was “the country after which I had been panting so long.” He referred to the Bahr el Ghazal, “which it was not our destiny to become acquainted with by ocular inspection,” and to messengers who delivered their bad news after “having moistened their organs with a cup of coffee.” But in general the writing was plain and clear.

  In both languages the reviews were mixed. Reviewers admired Barth’s learning, precision, thoroughness, breadth, and endurance. They pronounced him one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of African travelers. Many called the book the most useful and indispensible yet published about the continent. But they also complained that it was clotted with excessive detail, as if Barth had dumped his journal onto the page instead of transforming it into a narrative with general themes. Every reviewer grumbled about the length, grumbles that grew louder with the publication of volumes four and five the following summer, which brought the page count to nearly 3,500, including hundreds of pages of scholarly appendices. “Their great length,” commented the Guardian about these hefty volumes, “will be an obstacle not easily overcome in the way of their general popularity.”

  Correct. The first three volumes sold poorly, so the publisher printed only 1,000 copies of the last two. By contrast, David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, published a few months after Barth’s first volumes, quickly sold more than 30,000 copies, and kept selling. Livingstone was wildly popular, mobbed in public, and in great demand as a speaker.

  Barth had met Livingstone in late 1856, just a few days after the missionary returned from his two-year transcontinental journey across Africa, the basis for Missionary Travels. The two men remained cordial ever after. Barth admired Livingstone’s toughness, integrity, and clear, if unscientific, observations. He may also have recognized a kindred solitary nature. They sent each other their newly published books, appeared together at several talks, and occasionally corresponded.

  Barth didn’t resent Livingstone’s success, but he was baffled by their contrasting receptions. He had spent nearly nine years on this project—traveling, documenting, and writing. He had made discoveries, brought back reams of new information, opened Central Africa for British trade, reached Timbuktu. He had hoped to be rewarded with renown, both scientific and popular. He did earn the admiration of his peers—gold medals from the Royal Geographical Society and the Paris Geographical Society, honorary memberships from Oxford University, the Royal Asiatic Society of London, and several groups in Germany.

  But it puzzled him when the public balked at reading thousands of pages of meticulous scholarship and preferred Livingstone’s entertaining yet scientifically lightweight chronicle. For Barth, pleasurable reading meant scholarly treatises and histories. High drama meant new scientific findings. He didn’t understand that although the public valued scientific discoveries, it craved entertainment. He had smothered his incredible adventures beneath thick layers of information. Livingstone’s book was nearly 700 pages long, but compared to Barth’s 3,500 it seemed terse. (Barth’s tome, in turn, was succinct compared to his mentor von Humboldt’s twenty-three volume Personal Narrative of a Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.)

  Other factors also were at play. Livingstone had the advantage of being British rather than Prussian, and the British liked their heroes homegrown. After Henry Morton Stanley tracked down the beloved Livingstone in 1871, the British treated Stanley coolly, as an American interloper working for an American newspaper. Sir Henry Rawlinson, president of the RGS, scoffed that it was “not true that Stanley had discovered Livingstone, as it was Livingstone who had discovered Stanley.” The irony was that Stanley was Welsh but had changed his name and nationality after moving to the United States.

  In Travels and Discoveries, Barth often praised his British pr
edecessors in Africa, but he just as often criticized them for sloppiness or inaccuracy. That probably rankled people. So did remarks such as “it seems that the English are more apt to perform a great deed than to follow up its consequences.” Nor did he hesitate to scold the government for various shortcomings, from doing too little about slavery to ignoring the rich possibilities of the Sudan.

  At several points in the book he also complained bitterly, and unfairly, about the government’s lack of financial support for the mission. He sprinkled the book’s concluding paragraph with self-congratulation and cranky grievances: “I had embarked on this undertaking as a volunteer, under the most unfavorable circumstances… . The scale and the means of the mission seemed to be extremely limited… . I had continued in my career amid great embarrassment, carrying on the exploration of extensive regions almost without any means… . I resolved upon undertaking, with a very limited supply of means, a journey to the far west… .” Such stuff must have been hard for the British to swallow.

  His book was also a tougher sell than Livingstone’s because he didn’t return with a momentous discovery or accomplishment—a transcontinental trek, the source of a great river. He brought home a mass of detail that was far more durably valuable than any one discovery, but the public wanted thrilling headlines, not small print.

  Barth was also the victim of bad timing. During his absence Britain had begun shifting its African focus, for strategic and commercial reasons, from the Sahara and the west coast to the continent’s east and south. A new wave of explorers ventured into these regions, capturing the popular imagination and deflecting attention from Barth’s achievements. Livingstone was lionized after returning from fifteen years in eastern and southern Africa. Burton and Speke excited the popular imagination with their first trip to Somalia in 1854, and brought it to a boil with their great trek of 1856 to 1859 to find the source of the Nile. Francis Galton’s popular books about southern Africa contributed to the trend. By the time Barth returned to Britain, his epic journey was geographically out of style.

  So was his tone and perspective. The public loved Livingstone’s book partly because it was more personal and sensational than Barth’s. As noted by the delightfully named periodical The Ladies’ Repository, these qualities gave Livingstone’s book a certain “romantic attraction” that Barth’s lacked. The British public did prize books about scientific exploration, such as the journals of Captain Cook or Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, but readers were always more enthusiastic about books such as Mungo Park’s that were heavy on alien curiosities, exciting escapes, lurid anecdotes, and extreme trials. Even Burton, a rough scholar, larded his books with personal drama.

  The trend toward autobiographical books that emphasized the writer’s experiences and Africa’s strangeness would accelerate throughout the nineteenth century, epitomized by Stanley’s self-dramatizing style (“the roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom”) and his egocentric melodramatic titles: How I Found Livingstone, In Darkest Africa, Through the Dark Continent, My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories.

  Not coincidentally, as Africa and Africans became the exotic background for a traveler’s heroic adventures, imperialism was devouring the continent and its people. Both developments could be justified only by making Africa and Africans less real and less important than European perceptions and ambitions. Barth, by contrast, tended to downplay his personal experiences, and to put Africa and Africans at the forefront. For him Africa wasn’t an empty canvas to be filled by his own perceptions, but a vibrant multidimensional place with a long and complex cultural history worth studying.

  This suggests another reason that Barth failed to find popularity: his news from Africa was unwelcome. Europe was on the cusp of the imperial age. Curiosity about Africa was hardening into certitude that the continent would benefit from European civilization and religion, by force if necessary. Islam was considered a dangerous and evil opponent of Christian values. Racialist theories were winning adherents, prompted partly by racial unrest in the West Indian colonies. In 1852, for instance, Disraeli argued that, for their own good, the West Indian slaves shouldn’t have been freed. British commentators had started proposing that blacks were helpless without white supervision, and that foreign lands populated by dark-skinned people were created by Providence as raw materials to be shaped by white civilization.

  “Decidedly, you have to be servants to those that are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, addressing blacks in his 1849 essay, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” a polemic against white liberal attitudes about race. “That, you may depend on it, my obscure Black friends, is and was always the Law of the World, for you and for all men.”

  As Barth was traveling in Africa, Dr. Robert Knox came to prominence as a popular lecturer in Britain, following the publication of his book The Races of Man (1850). Knox’s theme was “transcendental anatomy”—the superiority of the white race, especially its highest flowering, the Anglo-Saxon. “Race,” he said, “is everything: literature, science, art—in a word, civilization depends on it.” (Knox took up lecturing after his medical career ended in disgrace when two men were arrested for murdering people to supply corpses for his school of anatomy.) Evidence of culture among Africans was attributed to colonization by Semitic, i.e. light-skinned, people from Egypt, North Africa, and the Middle East.

  When Barth’s book appeared, the age of imperialism hadn’t begun, but the assumptions that later grew like tumors were all in place—that Africa was uncivilized, that it was inhabited by people who were both childlike and savage, people who had no discernible history or culture, no ability to govern themselves, who lived in a state of barbaric chaos. It was a short step from these assumptions to the certainty that Africa could only be saved by imposing European civilization, religion, governance, and commerce. These racial certitudes bred righteousness, which shaped foreign policy. Information that contradicted the going assumptions was ignored or dismissed as naïve.

  Barth’s open-minded observations challenged these assumptions. He saw—was willing to see—that Africans had their own story. Though he carried some of the age’s racial preconceptions, he was willing to go where the evidence took him. He did find ignorance and savagery in Africa, but he also found scholars and sophisticated systems of government and commerce. He called Islam a great religion filled with learned men, though it was often used as excuse for fanaticism and violence. “I have not given up my belief,” he wrote, “that there is a vital principle in Islam, which has only to be brought out by a reformer in order to accomplish great things.” He pointed out that acts done in the name of Muhammed could be as great, or as evil, as acts done in the name of Jesus Christ.

  Barth also brought home proof of Africa’s long, rich history and cultural traditions, including a literary tradition. He had the gall to assert that one of his literary discoveries, the Tarik al-Sudan, “will be one of the most important additions which the present age has made to the history of mankind, in a branch which was formerly almost unknown.”

  In his work, Barth tried to cross the barriers between white and black, Christian and Muslim, Europe and Africa. He went to Africa to learn and communicate, not to dictate and control. He wrote about Africans as individuals who belonged to diverse cultures often connected by history and language. In his work Africans are real people with distinct stories, not a dark mass waiting to be molded. He met Africa and Africans on their own terms, and usually in their own languages.

  The result was the most extensive trove of knowledge collected about Africa in the nineteenth century. Barth brought back findings that he believed would create a new, richer, more accurate idea of not only African history but world history—volumes of new information on a vast region of distinct cultures, hitherto unknown to Europeans, that had been in constant trade and conflict for ten centuries.

  He believed in the enterprise of science: an incremental accumulation of data,
an open-minded search for truth, in order to replace ignorance with knowledge. Von Schubert noted “the priest-like seriousness with which he subordinated everything else to this goal.”

  In addition to scientific knowledge, he brought back psychological understanding. He made clear that Africans could be as intolerant and racist as any Londoner, as certain of their cultural superiority as any Englishman, as politically devious and subtle as any Prussian. They could be loving, cruel, shortsighted, open-minded, scholarly. They would take any measure necessary to protect their business, land, children, or social position. They could be as shrewd, brave, dishonest, trustworthy, and chauvinistic as any European. All these human qualities, in addition to history, also connected Europeans and Africans. As he told a Tuareg chief who accused him of being an infidel, “we were nearer to each other than he thought, and might well be friends, offering to each other those advantages which each of us commanded.”

  Barth’s evidence and attitudes were inconvenient. To see Africans as individuals, to recognize the common humanity beneath the cultural differences, to acknowledge the continent’s complex history, cultures, and social organization, would make colonization and rapacious exploitation morally indefensible. Better to substitute expedient assumptions for knowledge. Better to choose an African story that made occupation morally imperative. Better to put Barth’s work high on a shelf and forget about it.

  THROUGHOUT THE REST of 1857, Barth’s relationship with the Foreign Office continued to deteriorate. Before leaving Timbuktu, he had urged al-Bakkay to send emissaries to England to strengthen commercial relations. Soon after his return to London he began pushing the Foreign Office to invite representatives from Timbuktu, Sokoto, and Bornu to England. The Foreign Office hesitated. Such an offer might offend Britain’s new ally, France, whose ambitions in Central Africa were clear. Nevertheless in April 1857, Clarendon sent invitations to the African leaders.