A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  His news of Islamic Africa’s long tradition of literate and learned cultures, and of its ancient manuscripts, has been largely ignored for generations. That is finally changing. Backed by the Ford Foundation and other funders, there is an ongoing effort to find and restore these manuscripts. Timbuktu is the main locus. In the last decade a few scholars there have recovered 700,000 manuscripts, most of which have been kept for hundreds of years by poor desert families as part of their patrimony. Acquired in trade for cows and money, these works are finally going into collections for research and preservation in Timbuktu.

  The manuscripts verify Barth’s findings. They demonstrate not only a brisk exchange of ideas, but also extensive commercial and personal interactions between cultures in northern Africa. All this has surprised even scholars of Islam, who have typically discounted Islamic learning and its influence in northern Africa. John Hunwick is a historian of precolonial Africa and founder of Northwestern University’s Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, which is leading the effort to train young African scholars who will translate and interpret the manuscripts in Timbuktu. He has said, sounding like Barth, “We hope, too, to enlighten the general public as to the role that Islam has played in African societies, and to the fact that much of Africa has long enjoyed literacy and an intellectual life—matters that may help to erase some of the unfortunate stereotypes about Africa… . [Then] Timbuktu will cease to be seen just as a legendary fantasy, and will be recognized for what it really was—a spiritual and intellectual jewel inspired by the Islamic faith.”

  ONE OF BARTH’S FAVORITE words was “labyrinth.” As a scholar of the classics, he would have known the myth well. The cunning architect Daedalus built an elaborate maze to imprison the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull that had to be fed human sacrifices. Theseus traveled into the labyrinth to kill the monster, unwinding Ariadne’s ball of thread as he went so that he could find his way back out.

  “We here trace a historical thread,” wrote Barth in the preface to Travels and Discoveries, “which guides us through this labyrinth of tribes and overthrown kingdoms.” Barth couldn’t fail to see himself as Theseus. His Ariadne, the supplier of his thread, was knowledge—history, languages, geography. He used them to find his way into the heart of Africa and to emerge with riches, and he made maps so that others could follow him. Too few know he was there.

  Acknowledgments

  In Nigeria: Abdalla Uba Adamu, professor at Bayero University in Kano, recommended Nasiru Wada Khalil as a perfect guide to Islamic northern Nigeria; he was right. Nasiru, who works in the Sharia court of Kano, wisely persuaded me to hire Nasiru Datti Ahmed, a secondary school teacher in Kano, as our driver. These two learned, curious men provided guidance of many kinds, as well as amiable company and friendship.

  In Timbuktu: Shindouk Mohamed Lamine, chief of the Berabish Oulad Najim, and his wife Miranda Dodd offered valuable help and information while providing hospitality at their home and hotel, Sahara Passion, on the edge of the desert.

  The libraries and librarians of the British National Archives, the Royal Geographical Society, Yale University, Trinity College, Wesleyan College, and Central Connecticut State University were indispensable to this book. I am especially grateful to Susan Applegate at the Boston Public Library, who offered to digitize one of the rare copies of Gustav von Schubert’s biography of Barth, making possible the fluid translation by Jaime McGill, who was both quick and conscientious.

  The Notes make clear my gratitude to many scholars and writers, especially the British authors who tended Barth’s low flame for many years: Benton, Bovill, Prothero, Rodd, and, above all, Anthony Kirk-Greene.

  I am indebted to Ryszard Kapus´cin´ksi, whose brief comments about Barth in his book The Shadow of the Sun first drew my attention to the explorer.

  During a conversation about another book subject, my agent, Deborah Grosvenor, jumped on my casual mention of Barth and persuaded me to drop the planned project and pursue the obscure German traveler. She was right, too.

  Star Lawrence, my editor at W. W. Norton, saw the subject’s potential and gave me the space (and the advance) to explore it. Melody Conroy smoothed countless bumps during the editorial process. Copy editor Fred Wiemer saved me from several embarrassments.

  As always, my wife Judith Kaufman has been an endless source of encouragement and balm.

  Notes

  All quotations from Barth’s Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa are taken from the three-volume edition published by Frank Cass & Co. in 1965, a facsimile reprint of the edition published in the United States by Harper & Brothers from 1857 to 1859. This edition is available digitally.

  Chapter 1: Preparations

  I took much of the biographical information about Barth’s life before the African expedition from Gustav von Schubert’s Heinrich Barth, der Bahnbrecher der deutschen Afrikaforschung; ein Lebens-und Charakterbild auf Grund ungedruckter Quellen entworfen (Heinrich Barth, Trailblazer in German Research of Africa: A Portrait of His Life and Character Based on Unpublished Sources), published in 1897. Von Schubert was Barth’s brother-in-law and one of his few close friends. His book is still considered the best biography, but it is rare and exists only in German. It has now been digitized, thanks to Susan Applegate at the Boston Public Library. The translation used here is by Jaime McGill and was commissioned by me.

  Biographical materials about Barth in English are scarce and scanty. The exception is A. H. M. Kirk-Greene’s 70-page biographical introduction in Barth’s Travels in Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 1962), a book of edited extracts from Barth’s account. Kirk-Greene, who served as a British district officer in Nigeria (Adamawa and Bornu) before his eminent academic career at Oxford, has been Barth’s main champion in English. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s he wrote half a dozen essays about the explorer. His frequent appearance in these endnotes indicates my debt to him.

  For a discussion of nineteenth-century science education in the universities of Britain and Germany, see Paul Kennedy’s The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (Humanity Books, 1988), pp. 116–118.

  Chapter 2: Invitation to Africa

  For background on Britain in the Sahara, see especially Britain, the Sahara, and the Western Sudan, 1788–1861 (Oxford University Press, 1964), by A. Adu Boahen; Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to Central African Society, 1840–1890, by H. Alan C. Cairns (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965); and The Image of Africa, by Philip D. Curtin (University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). Boahen also writes about Richardson’s antislavery missions in the 1840s. For Palmerston’s views on commerce, see Kenneth Bourne’s Palmerston: The Early Years, 1784–1841 (Free Press, 1982).

  Richardson’s two-volume account of his first trip to the Sahara is Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846, published in 1848.

  Quotations from Foreign Office correspondence throughout the book come from the massive bound volumes about the Central African Expedition in the British National Archives: FO 101/23, FO 101/26, FO 101/30, FO 101/34, FO 101/36, and FO 101/45. Quotations from other correspondence related to the expedition were taken from many different files in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in London.

  Chapter 3: At the Edge of the Desert

  For the brutality of the Saharan slave trade, the dispatches from Murzuk, and the friction between Richardson and Crowe, see Boahen, pp. 127–31, 151, 166–75.

  For Muslim treatment of slaves, see Ronald Segal, Islam’s Black Slaves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), especially pp. 36–39.

  For Lyon on Tripoli, see his A Narrative of Travels in Northern Africa (London, 1821), p. 10. For Nachtigal on Tripoli, see his Sahara and Sudan: Tripoli and Fezzan, Tibesti or Tu, vol. 1, trans. by Allan G. B. Fisher and Humphrey J. Fisher (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 137. For Richardson on Tripoli, see his Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, vol. 1 (London, 1848), p. 93.

  All quotations from Richardson about the Central Af
rican Expedition come from his journal, sent home after his death by Barth and published as Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa, 2 vols. (London, 1853).

  Crowe’s comments appear in letters in the FO volumes.

  The hadith attributed to Al-Suyuti can be found in, among other sources, Literaturgeschichte der Araber: Von ihrem Beginne bis zu Ende des zwölften Jahrhunderts der Hidschret (Literary History of the Arabs from Their Beginning to the End of the Twelfth Century), by Joseph Baron von Hammer-Purgstall (1850), vol. 1, p. xli. A similar saying, “The ink of the scholar is more precious than the blood of the martyr,” can be found in Tuhfat al-Fudala by the renowned Timbuktu scholar, Ahmed Baba (1556–1627), who was probably quoting Al-Suyuti. Baba is quoted by Souleymane Bachir Diagne in “Toward an Intellectual History of West Africa: the Meaning of Timbuktu,” in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (HSRC Press, 2008), p. 27.

  Chapter 4: First Steps

  Spellings of African places and names are notoriously various, the result of phonetic guessing. For instance, Richardson’s interpreter is referred to variously as Yusuf, Yusef, Yousef, and Youseff, with a last name of Moknee, Mukni, Muckeni, and Mokumee. Murzuk has also been spelled Murzuq, Mourzuk, Morzouk, and Murzuch. There’s Timbuktu, Timbuctoo, Tombouctou, and so on. Barth further complicates things by his excessive use of diacritics, most of which I have dropped. I also use the typical North African spelling for the name of Islam’s founder—Muhammed—rather than Mohammed, as used by Barth.

  For the Sahara, see especially Sahara: The Great Desert, by E. F. Gautier (first published in 1928), and The Golden Trade of the Moors, E. W. Bovill (Oxford University Press, 1968, reprint of 1958 edition).

  For Lyon on the south wind, see his Narrative, p. 133.

  The quotation from Hershel comes from Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder (Pantheon, 2008), p. 443, a study of what Holmes calls the era of “Romantic science.”

  For a stimulating discussion of caravan travel, see Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (University of California Press, 2000).

  Chapter 5: Stalled in Murzuk

  Income for the pasha of Murzuk, see Hornemann, The Journal of Frederick Hornemann’s Travels, from Cairo to Mourzouk, the Capital of the Kingdom of Fezzan, in Africa, in the Years 1797–98 (W. Bulmer & Co., 1802), p. 68.

  The men and women of Murzuk, see Hornemann, pp. 72–73, and Lyon, p. 336. For red pepper, see Hornemann, p. 73.

  Boahen includes much useful information about Gagliuffi.

  About the amounts paid to Ghat Tuaregs and others in later chapters: in mid-nineteenth-century Africa, the terminology of currency and the exchange rates can be confusing. For hard currency, Spanish dollars and Maria Theresa dollars from Austria were widespread, equivalent, and standard. Five Spanish dollars equaled one British pound sterling. There was also something called the Fezzan riyal (Barth) or real (Richardson) or rial, based on the Spanish dollar and Spanish reales (eight reales equaled one dollar, hence the famous “pieces of eight”). Based on the figures given in Barth’s and Richardson’s journals, a Spanish dollar was worth about 1.25 riyals and a British pound was worth 7.25 riyals. As Barth moved through Africa, the types of currency changed, for instance to cowries or strips of cotton cloth, as did the exchange rates.

  Chapter 8: Plundered

  For the Kel Fadey and the “eyrie of vultures,” see “Lords of the Waste: Predation, Pastoral Production, and the Process of Stratification Among the Eastern Tuaregs,” by Candelario Sáenz in Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology, ed. Timothy Earle (Cambridge University Press, 1991, reprinted 1997), pp. 100–18.

  When I asked my host in Timbuktu, a Berabish chief named Shindouk Mohamed Lamine ould Najim, about various Tuareg words mentioned by Barth, to see whether they are still in use, “tebulloden” elicited a chuckle and a nod. In some Tuareg tribes, girls once were compelled to overindulge in milk and meat to increase their girth and desirability. Yet the Tuareg had nothing on the Karagwe in eastern Africa. According to James Bruce, the wives of their king, Rumanika, were forced by a man with a whip to drink milk incessantly, and were so obese they couldn’t stand up, wriggling to move across the floor. See Alan Moorehead, The White Nile (Harper, 1960), p. 47.

  The origin and meaning of the word “Tuareg” is unsettled. In addition to the historical meaning cited, Tuareg has been attributed to an old Arabic word meaning “inhabitant of Targa,” perhaps once a Tuareg name for the Fezzan in southern Libya.

  “Tuareg” comes in many alternate spellings: Tawarek (Barth), Tuarick (Richardson), Touareg (French), and Twareg, among others. The same is true for the Tuaregs’ name for themselves: Imoshagh (Barth), Imohag, Imohagh, Imashaghen, Imuhagh, Imajaghan, Imajughen, and Imazaghan are a few of the variations. The Tuaregs’ language is usually but not always spelled Tamasheq, Tamashek, or Tamajaq.

  The section on the Tuaregs draws especially from The Pastoral Tuareg: Ecology, Culture, and Society (2 vols.), by Johannes Nicolaisen and Ida Nicolaisen (Thames & Hudson, 1997); People of the Veil, by Francis Rennell Rodd (Lord Rennell of Rodd) (Anthropological Publications, 1970, first printed in 1926); The Conquest of the Sahara, by Douglas Porch (Knopf, 1984); and Tribes of the Sahara, by Lloyd Cabot Briggs (Harvard University Press, 1967). Also helpful were Bovill’s The Golden Trade of the Moors; The Last Caravan, by Thurston Clarke (Putnam, 1978); and Azalaï, by John Skolle (Harper’s, 1956). The anthropologist quoted is Henri Schirmer, taken from Porch, p. 65.

  A sample of Tuareg poetry and its three main themes, translated by Charles de Foucauld and quoted in The Pastoral Tuareg, p. 161:

  My white camel, O woman with white teeth

  I swear by God, it shall not go raiding, shall not leave you

  It shall not go away from you to another country

  I lead it to the pastures only to visit you with love again

  Neither in dreams nor in thought

  Shall it go away from you to another country.

  Barth predicted that their camp on the outskirts of Tintellust would henceforth be called the “English Hill” or the “Hill of the Christians.” Francis Rennell Rodd, a British explorer who traveled in Aïr in the 1920s, wanted to visit Tintellust to look for traces of Barth, whom he called “perhaps the greatest traveler there has ever been in Africa.” Tintellust wasn’t on any map, but Rodd’s guide knew the village and took him there. As they reached the outskirts, the guide pointed out a place called “the House of the Christians.” When Rodd asked why, the guide said that in the olden days three white Christians, not French, had come to Tintellust—not as conquerors, but as friends of Chief Annur—so the thatch huts where they camped had never been inhabited or pulled down. All that remained of the camp, noted Rodd, were “the traces of two straw huts and a shelter, a wooden water trough, and some broken pots.” And, of course, the name. People of the Veil, pp. 308–13, and also Rodd’s reminiscence in the Geographical Journal, vol. 124, no. 3, (September 1958), pp. 330–31.

  In 2005, Julia Winckler, a British photographer fascinated by Barth, traveled to Tintellust. She, too, was shown Barth’s old encampment. A story persists there, says Winckler, that Barth buried treasure nearby, and the villagers still occasionally dig for it. Winckler documented her visit to Agadez and Tintellust with photographs and videos: www.retracingheinrichbarth.co.uk.

  Chapter 10: Desert Port

  Rodd’s People of the Veil has a helpful discussion of Agadez and other Sahelian entrepôts.

  Kirk-Greene points out that Barth collected so much information not only because of his linguistic skills and omnivorous curiosity, but because he didn’t neglect anyone as a source of information. Kirk-Greene adds that the list of people mentioned by Barth as informants is exceptionally long, and that “even trivial acquaintances are described with sensitivity.” The reason, he says, is that Barth had little of the “stereotyped Western impatience with the African’s ‘lack of intelligence’ and ‘unreliability.�
� Instead many references and anecdotes imply an understanding of and affection for the people among whom he lived.” From “Heinrich Barth: An Exercise in Empathy,” in Africa and Its Explorers, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Harvard University Press, 1970). Also helpful on this subject is “Dr. Heinrich Barth as a Diplomatist and Philanthropist,” by E. A. Ayandele, in his African Historical Studies (Frank Cass, 1979).

  For music in Islam, see The Garland Handbook of African Music, ed. Ruth M. Stone (Garland, 2000) and “Music and Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa,” by Eric Charry, in The History of Islam in Africa, eds. Nehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (Ohio University Press, 2000).

  In Out of Our Minds, Johannes Fabian notes that for African explorers, the sense of hearing was the one most likely to be assaulted, because they had no control over the noise around them, especially from drums and other instruments. He also points out that most explorers and early ethnographers rejected African music and dance as immoral, and therefore ignored them as unworthy of consideration.

  Rodd comments that Barth’s description of Tuareg men leaving the town to defecate is an example of how his “capacity for meticulous observation depended on never missing an opportunity, however strange, of acquiring information.”

  Emgedesi or Emghedeshie, the distinctive dialect of Agadez, was extinct by the early twentieth century.

  In addition to Barth’s and Richardson’s descriptions of the salt caravan to Bilma, see Bovill and Nicolaisen. Bovill mentions Bilma’s singing peak and relates it to the well-known phenomenon of the desert’s famous “singing sands.”