A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  By then a delegation from al-Bakkay was already en route to Tripoli. The group included al-Bakkay’s son-in-law, nephew, and cousin. They reached Tripoli in June and asked for permission to continue to London. Clarendon sent his approval, and Barth began looking for lodgings. But then Consul Herman realized that the emissaries seemed less interested in trade than in politics. They wanted to lobby the British government to stop France from advancing into the Sahara. Herman also gathered that “something must have passed on this subject between the Sheikh and Dr. Barth.”

  Clarendon, worried that the delegation could become politically embarrassing, instructed Hammond to see if Barth had told al-Bakkay that Britain would support Timbuktu against France. Hammond asked Barth and reported that the explorer probably had given al-Bakkay that impression, and also had signed a letter forbidding France from penetrating toward Tuat.

  Britain couldn’t risk the perception that it was plotting against French expansion in Africa. Once again the Foreign Office used the weather gambit. Herman told the Timbuktu delegation that Britain was too cold for them at the moment, but they would be welcome in spring. The emissaries saw through the brush-off and left Tripoli in October. Sheikh al-Bakkay wrote to Queen Victoria to protest this shabby treatment of his ambassadors. He also wrote a gracious letter to Barth, assuring him that he knew the explorer had nothing to do with the government’s behavior.

  Barth was appalled. He regarded this conduct as an insult to his friends and a repudiation of his diplomacy on Britain’s behalf. “Mr. H. [Hammond] had the audacity to tell me to my face,” he wrote to Chevalier Bunsen, “that he wished these people were at the bottom of the Red Sea; right after that I was shown a letter sent to the Foreign Office which said that my friend el-Bakay had murdered Laing and that I had his papers.”

  He was referring to a message sent by the Foreign Office at the end of 1857. It contained two letters from the British vice-consul in Oran, Algeria, stating that Major Laing’s murderer had been found, and that a French officer had learned that Barth now possessed Laing’s missing papers. The FO asked Barth to comment. The question was routine but arrived without buffering apologies, and the insult wounded Barth anew. “I have had to hack my way through another net of the most disgusting intrigues,” he wrote to Bunsen, “… how could I possibly consider taking part in any future endeavors in service to this government?”

  He was also embittered because he still hadn’t received the Companionship of the Bath, promised by the government more than two years earlier. Nor had the Foreign Office bothered to unpack the samples of African manufactures that he had laboriously collected and shipped to England to help stimulate trade relations. Following Bunsen’s advice, he had once hoped to be rewarded with a position at a major British university, but no offers came.

  These slights, in addition to all the others, convinced Barth that he and his work were being shunted aside. By May 1858, when he completed the last two volumes, he no longer expected or wanted a future in Britain. He was eager to put the place behind him.

  First, as promised, he addressed the Royal Geographical Society, where he now felt like a valued member. His topic was the history, geography, and politics of Central Africa, which he said were connected to each other and to world history by language: “Only the most accurate study of the idioms of all these tribes can furnish us with a thread which may lead us with some degree of security through this ethnographic labyrinth.”

  The moment his final volumes were printed in August, he left for Germany. “With uncertain future,” he wrote ebulliently to von Schubert, “and without any great shining prospects, but free.” Within weeks he was refreshing himself in his favorite way—by traveling, this time through Asia Minor.

  IN JANUARY 1859 he was back in Berlin and eager to leap into the future. He found an apartment and felt excited about rejoining the city’s scientific circles. Von Schubert wasn’t optimistic. “I had very little hope that things would turn out well for him, and wrote in my journal: ‘Heinrich is always too gruff and unyielding, and yet too modest and too imprudent. His pride doesn’t permit him to give in at the right moments. In the river of life he is a bold and persevering swimmer, but not a very agile one.’ And I wasn’t wrong.”

  Barth had several influential allies in Berlin. His old mentor von Humboldt wrote to him: “In the last few days I have discussed your wishes very seriously with Ritter and the Regent, and I hope that everything can be arranged according to your desires. I can attest that the ailing King considers it of the utmost importance to get you, the man admired everywhere, a position.”

  A consulship in Constantinople interested Barth, until he heard the salary. Von Humboldt also tried to secure him the consulship in Damascus, but the Prussian government decided not to refill the position. Barth lobbied for the same post in Siam, unsuccessfully. Then in May, von Humboldt died, ending that vein of possibility.

  Barth also explored academic opportunities. Von Schubert noted that the explorer would have had many offers if he had stayed in Germany, but by taking Bunsen’s advice and going to England he had lost his moment and also estranged some German scholars. Ritter tried to find him a professorship, but in September he followed von Humboldt to the grave. Ritter had recommended Barth as his replacement, but the government seemed in no hurry to fulfill its promise to give Barth an academic position after his journey. (His other main sponsor, Bunsen, died in 1860.)

  Barth himself was part of the problem. His restlessness and adamant autonomy made him leery of any permanent position. “When he was sitting at a desk, he longed to be atop a horse or a camel,” wrote von Schubert, “when he was travelling, he missed the appealing stillness of his study. Thus he pursued a fixed, lasting relationship with the university on the one hand, and worked to secure himself a certain amount of independence on the other. It was difficult to bring the two things together.”

  Nor did his brusque, thorny personality help his job search. “He preferred not to talk about his own deeds at all,” noted von Schubert, “and, if they came up in conversation, he spoke of them very modestly. Due to his closed-off nature, he was no great judge of character, which meant he often placed an undeserved degree of importance on the opinions of unimportant people and their press products.”

  As he cast about for the right position, he stayed busy. He worked on his volumes about the languages of Central Africa. He also helped to establish and raise money for an institute named after Ritter. Its purpose was to fund geographic exploration in unknown regions, especially in Africa. Its first projects, with Barth as director, were expeditions to search for Vogel’s papers and to complete Vogel’s explorations of the area between Lake Chad and the Nile.

  Barth asked the British government to contribute to the institute. He explained why in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society’s Murchison: “For the gentlemen of the Foreign Office are well aware, that I have still a just claim upon them.” He wanted “a kind of testimonial” from the British about the services rendered by Germans to the Central African Expedition—not only himself, Overweg, and Vogel, but also Ritter, who had recommended Barth; Bunsen, who had secured him the position; and Petermann, who had drawn the invaluable maps. What would this British expedition have been without Germans? But perhaps that was the underlying issue. “May the English learn justly to appreciate the German character,” wrote Barth, “and I have no doubt, that the English and Germans will achieve many grand things together, bound in friendly companionship, in time of peace and in scientific pursuits, or in time of war and on the battlefield.”

  The British government declined to contribute to the institute, another sign of its waning interest in the Sahara and Central Africa, and another affront to Barth. He shouldn’t have been too surprised. The Foreign Office had closed the vice-consulate in Ghadames in early 1861 and later that year shuttered the one in Murzuk after Gagliuffi resigned the post.

  The Foreign Office further indicated its indifference to Central Africa by its handli
ng of Sheikh al-Bakkay’s second attempt to strengthen relations, in late 1860. Al-Bakkay sent a courier to Tripoli with letters to the queen and the FO, again asking them to persuade France to halt its expansion south. And he still wanted to send a delegation to England. To discourage this the new Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell, directed Consul Herman to trot out the well-worn excuse of England’s cold weather. But if the sheikh wanted to send a delegation anyway, instructed Russell, tell him that he will have to pay for the delegation’s travel costs and expenses in England. This slap in the face not only reneged on the government’s earlier invitation, but disregarded the sheikh’s gracious hospitality and protection of Barth for so many months in Timbuktu. As intended, the insult destroyed the relationship cultivated so carefully by Barth on Britain’s behalf.

  When he learned of it, Barth wrote to von Schubert, “I know that the English are ashamed to the depths of their souls.” This was apparent only to Barth. A few months later he was still angry, writing to von Schubert, “The English … took what I offered them with open arms and threw it into the mud. The men on the Niger and on the Chad should at least know that I did not lie to them.”

  In 1861, Barth got the chance to repay part of his debt to al-Bakkay. One of the sheikh’s sons was captured by the French in Senegal and accused of being a spy. Barth wrote to the governor there and asked him to spare the man’s life in return for the Kunta tribe’s many kindnesses to him. Out of respect for Barth, the governor freed the man, who wrote Barth a gallant thank-you in Arabic.

  Barth’s relations with the British government improved somewhat in 1862 after he finally received the Companionship of the Bath, seven years late—a delay, he told von Schubert, caused “by a clique of jealous officers” in the Ministry of War.

  That same year he was nominated for full membership in Berlin’s Royal Academy of Sciences, the highest academic honor in Germany. But his own colleagues voted to reject him. According to von Schubert, the rebuff “plagued him bitterly.” Again, he smelled personal intrigues.

  He was probably right. Few professionals guard their fiefs more viciously than academics, and Barth’s news from Africa trespassed on several. Among Germany’s intelligentsia, the dominant views about Africa came from Hegel and Schiller, and were epitomized by Hegel’s remark that Africa “is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” Barth’s work should have demolished the notion that Africa had no history; instead, self-interested parties tried to demolish Barth. Hence, Leopold von Ranke, Germany’s most famous living historian and a follower of Hegel and Schiller, voted against Barth, dismissing him as an adventurer, not a scientist, an opinion that suggested total unfamiliarity with Travels and Discoveries. It was convenient for other luminaries from the Royal Academy to agree with von Ranke. In the same year that he was rejected as a mere adventurer, Barth published the first volume of his groundbreaking work on African languages.

  Since his return from Africa, Barth had been corresponding energetically with a long list of people throughout Europe. His French correspondents alone numbered at least two dozen and included geographers, diplomats, editors, linguists, Arabists, and archeologists. The volume increased when he assumed the presidency of the Berlin Geographical Society in 1863. He followed any news coming out of Africa and wrote excitedly to foreign correspondents about the expeditions of Speke, Burton, and Baker. He relayed updates about German expeditions, and made sure that any new findings were presented to the Geographical Society.

  He was particularly generous toward other explorers, regardless of nationality. The list was long: Livingstone, Burton, du Chaillu, Rebmann, Krapf, Baikie, von Beurmann. He advised the young Frenchman Henri Duveyrier, who became famous for his travels among the Tuaregs, and Gerhard Rohlfs, who would follow Barth to Bornu. He inspired Germany’s second-greatest African explorer, Gustav Nachtigal, who also made an epic journey of five years. “Barth, who had to contend with much the same internal and external difficulties,” wrote Nachtigal, “I took as my constant example.”

  Barth was dismayed when politics interfered with the progress of science or put nationality above the free flow of knowledge. He felt his own work had been pushed aside because of politics. The newest friction between politics and science was caused by the “January Uprising” in Poland against Russia in 1863. France and Britain supported the revolutionaries with sympathetic rhetoric. Prussia signed a military agreement to help Russia smash the revolt.

  “May the Germans, and the Prussians in particular, succeed in fostering that friendly feeling between the English and the German Nation which the shortsighted policy of their Governments has nearly destroyed,” Barth wrote to the RGS’s Murchison in May. “Would not my own position in England have been a different one, if I had been backed by those men to whom I had trusted. At all events I promise you for my own part to forward the interests of geography and Geographical Research and Discovery to the best of my ability.”

  But May also brought good personal news: the government finally gave him an at-large appointment at the University of Berlin, at the modest salary of 1,500 thaler (about £200). “Barth saw the offer as his personal salvation,” wrote von Schubert. Elated, the explorer wrote his brother-in-law: “Everyone has to go through some dark times and accepts this calmly, but swimming completely against the current exhausts even the strongest person. Instead of finding accommodation and help, I have fought my way through nothing but resistance whenever I want to do anything at all.”

  His two courses that fall attracted many students, and this time he was happy in the classroom. “What is more instructive to the youth than geography and sociology, with all their stimulating and inspiring facets?” he wrote to von Schubert. “For me, this area of science is the epitome of all the others, the band connecting all the other disciplines, and as the different branches of science become more aware of the roots that anchor them in life, this science will become more and more important.”

  Since his return to Berlin he had traveled for several months each year: to Spain in 1861, the Balkans in 1862, the Alps in 1863. He relished his new position partly because it left him free to write and travel. He published two more volumes of his work on African languages, and books about his newest travels. In 1864 he climbed in Italy’s Apennines.

  “Travelling was Barth’s real element,” wrote von Schubert. “Following his own instincts, not subject to others’ will, able to give his research ideas complete freedom, he always came back from these trips and resumed his day-to-day work refreshed, full of strength and vitality.”

  In 1865 he spent nearly three months exploring Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro. He took the highest path through every mountain range, and zigzagged his way through the valleys between them. His health seemed fully recovered. When he returned to Berlin in October he learned that his old friend, Sheikh al-Bakkay, had died in battle, fighting for his beloved Timbuktu.

  On November 23, Barth collapsed with tremendous pain in his abdomen. After two days of agony he fell unconscious and died on November 25. He was forty-four.

  A few newspapers speculated that his traveler’s habit of self-medication had led to accidental poisoning. His relatives requested an autopsy to end the rumor. The doctor found that Barth’s stomach had burst from an infection, the result of chronic intestinal disease, probably caused by years of poor diet in Africa. The doctor also found a bullet in Barth’s thigh, left there by Egyptian Bedouins in 1846.

  His funeral on November 29 drew Berlin’s scientific elite. The Times of London, which had ignored his return from Africa, reported his death. Murchison wrote an appreciative obit for the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. It ended, “A more intelligent, indefatigable, trustworthy, and resolute traveller than Dr. Barth can rarely be found, and we all deplore his untimely end at the early age of forty-four.”

  Epilogue

  THE TALL MARBLE HEADSTONE THAT MARKED BARTH’S GRAVE WAS destroyed in World War II during the Battle of Berlin. By
then his name and his epic journey were nearly forgotten, except by scholars. The length, breadth, and scope of his travels and findings place him among the greatest of African explorers. Some Africanists consider him without peer. Yet his name means nothing to the general public.

  Some of the reasons for Barth’s obscurity have been mentioned. Another might be that he didn’t fit the image of the explorer created by books and art, later amplified by movies. He made his great journey as the age of exploration and discovery was giving way to the age of imperialism. His heroics differed from those of the new model. The imperial heroes weren’t self-effacing scientists but self-promoting media personalities like Stanley. Barth emphasized his accuracy and comprehensiveness more so than his courageous adventures, and when he bragged, it was about his scientific discoveries. He didn’t fight a lion, or quell rebellious porters with a whip, or shoot his way out of a ring of hostile natives. He didn’t act as if Africa and Africans were brutes to be tamed. Though tough and well armed, he never shot or beat a native, unlike nearly every other African explorer. His goal was information, not submission. His method was sociability, not intimidation. “I have never proceeded onward without leaving a sincere friend behind me,” he wrote, hardly the creed of a steely-eyed conqueror.

  The names of the kingdoms Barth visited are mostly forgotten as well. He was among the last Europeans to witness them before the onslaught of colonialism. Within fifty years the empires he visited and wrote about—Bornu, Sokoto, Gwandu, Adamawa, Bagirmi, Wadai, Hamdallahi—were gone. They survive, as he does, in Travels and Discoveries. His work is considered indispensable by modern scholars partly because much of what he recorded was lost or destroyed.

  Many of his findings still pertain today: the friction between Islam and other beliefs in northern Africa, and the friction within Islam itself between scholars and anti-intellectual zealots. Few of us know much about Islam or northern Africa’s history of Islamic learning and the extensive interactions between cultures there. Barth still has much to tell us.