A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Tebu is also sometimes spelled Toubou, Tibbu, Tibu, Tubu, Tebou, and Tibboo (Richardson).

  A sidelight: Beau Geste, P. C. Wren’s popular 1924 novel about a troop of French Foreign Legionnaires besieged by Tuaregs in a desert town, is set in Agadez.

  Chapter 11: Separate Ways

  Clapperton’s observations can be found in vol. 2 of Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa: In the years 1822, 1823, and 1824, by Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton, and Walter Oudney (John Murray, 1826).

  Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa, two volumes (Cassell & Co., 1893, reprint edition).

  “The absence of news from the outside world seems to have afflicted the explorers almost more than any other hardship,” writes Alan Moorehead. “In the hope of finding mail at some outlandish spot they would rouse themselves from their illnesses and march for weeks or even months on end… .” The White Nile, p. 107.

  The burr that Barth called karengia has other names in different parts of Africa, including kram-kram, uzak, and niti. By any name, it’s a torment.

  Denham noted that people in Bornu sometimes ran down young ostriches and made them pets. He also described how ostriches were hunted. The hunter looked for eggs and then buried himself nearby. When the ostrich returned and settled on the eggs, the hunter jumped up and shot it with an arrow, preferably in the head to keep from damaging the valuable feathers. “Ostriches have a most extraordinary aversion, from nature, to a pregnant woman,” continued Denham, “and a sensibility to discovering when such a person is near them, quite astonishing: they will make directly toward her, and, with lifted feet and menaces, oblige her to withdraw. I have even known them single out a woman so situated in the street, and following her to her own door, beat her with their long beaks, and the whole time hissing with the greatest agitation and anger.”

  Chapter 12: “The Celebrated Emporium of Negroland”

  Locusts: Nachtigal, vol. 2, pp. 195–96; Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, chap. 2; Hornemann, p. 59.

  Cowries: some of the prices for goods are taken from West African Travels and Adventures: Two Autobiographical Narratives from Northern Nigeria, translated and annotated by Anthony Kirk-Greene and Paul Newman (Yale University Press, 1971), p. 106.

  Usman dan Fodio and the nineteenth-century jihads: “The Fulani Jihad: a Reassessment,” by Marilyn Robinson Waldman, Journal of African History, 3, 1965, pp. 333–55; A History of Islam in West Africa, by J. Spencer Trimingham (Oxford University Press, 1962); Rural and Urban Islam in West Africa, ed. Nehemia Levtzion and Humphrey J. Fisher (Lynne Rienner, 1987); West Africa and Islam, by Peter B. Clarke (Edward Arnold, 1982); Boahen, Britain, the Sahara, and the Western Sudan; Islam in Africa, ed. James Kritzeck and William H. Lewis (Van Nostrand–Reinhold, 1969). Cambridge History of Africa, c.1790–c.1870, vol. 5, ed. John E. Flint (1976).

  The exchange between al-Kanemi and Bello about books is quoted by S. A. Albasu in “Islamic Learning and Intellectualism in Katsina Outside the Birni: The Yandoto Experience,” Islam and the History of Learning in Katsina, ed. Ismail Abubakar Tsiga and Abdalla Uba Adamu (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1997).

  Barth mentions Kano’s dye-pits and tandem cloth-beaters, both of which still operate. Today’s residents of Kano take their cotton robes to the beaters the way Westerners take shirts to the cleaners. The beaters pound the cloth with wooden mallets whose heads are as big as a gallon of paint. Central Africans believe that beating the cloth in this way preserves the cotton fibers and gives the cloth a silken glitter, in contrast to ironing, which injures and dulls the fibers.

  Kano’s market: the only description that rivals Barth’s is Clapperton’s in his Narrative. Another noteworthy description of Kano is Paul Staudinger’s in his In the Heart of the Hausa States, 2 vols. (Ohio University for International Studies, 1990, reprinted from 1889). The 500-year-old Kurmi market remains as crowded and fascinating as in Barth’s day, with many of the same goods on display alongside newer items such as steel pipes, auto and machine parts of every type, old cell phones, wrecked motherboards, and other digital debris. Herbalists now use a bullhorn to sell their folk remedies for stomach troubles and private rashes. Stinking sludge still chokes the Jakara, with the contemporary additions of engine oil and plastic bottles.

  Paper: see “Paper in Sudanic Africa,” by Jonathan M. Bloom, in The Meanings of Timbuktu, ed. Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne (HSRC Press, 2008).

  The current emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, lives in the palace, where he maintains a large household that includes sixty concubines and many royal slaves.

  In northern Nigeria, as in Barth’s day, Sokoto is the locus of religious power, Kano of commercial power. The sultan of Sokoto is still the head of Islam in the region.

  Chapter 13: An Ending

  The letter from al-Kanemi to Bello is quoted by Trimingham in A History of Islam in West Africa, p. 209.

  Chapter 14: The Kingdom of Bornu

  The introductory audience of Denham, Clapperton, and Oudney—the first Europeans to visit Bornu—with Umar’s father, Sheikh al-Kanemi, differed from Barth’s. The wide street leading to the palace was lined with spearmen on foot, and cavalrymen stood three-deep at the door. The visitors were kept waiting on their horses in the sun for some time. When allowed to enter, they were stopped by men holding crossed spears, who put a hand on their chests. They finally reached the sheikh’s inner chamber. He was sitting in a dark room on a carpet. Two men on each side of him were armed with pistols. Another brace of pistols lay in front of the sheikh. About forty-five at the time, al-Kanemi was dressed simply. With “a benevolent smile” he bid the strangers welcome and asked their purpose. All of the British explorers ended up highly impressed by al-Kanemi’s intelligence and hospitality, but occasionally appalled by his harsh justice, especially toward women. The explorers were in Bornu from February 1823 to August 1824.

  For the history of Bornu, I consulted Trimingham; The Shehus of Kukawa: A History of the Al-Kanemi Dynasty of Bornu, by Louis Brenner (Oxford University Press, 1973); The Kanuri of Borno, by Ronald Cohen (Waveland, 1967); The Sultanate of Bornu, by Dr. A. Schultze, trans. by P. A. Benton (Frank Cass, 1968, reprint of 1913 edition); and vol. 2 of Nachtigal. Natchigal was also helpful on Bornu’s court and public life.

  Barth spends twenty arcane pages working out the dates and dynasties of ancient Bornu. It’s the sort of tedious scholarship that bored reviewers but shows Barth’s astonishing breadth of knowledge about African and Arabic sources.

  Brenner notes that the constant gift-giving expected in Africa was often called graft by the British. But he adds: “Gift exchange, however, was not bribery as it is understood in the western context; it was not an extra-official or extra-legal activity. Rather, it was an integral part of the system and was considered not only proper but mandatory for all. No one in Bornu would visit, much less make a request of, his superior, without offering him a gift. Conversely, no man of status would long remain respected if he did not constantly reward his subordinates for their loyalty and services.”

  For slaves, concubines, and eunuchs, I consulted, among others: Segal; Skolle; Bovill; Three Nigerian Emirates: A Study in Oral History, by Victor N. Low (Northwestern University Press, 1972); The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam, by John O. Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell (Markus Wiener, 2002), chap. 8; Concubines and Power: Five Hundred Years in a Northern Nigerian Palace, by Heidi J. Nast (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Bovill notes that eunuchs existed in Europe for centuries, and adds, “The Soprani of the Sistine Chapel, ‘the musical glory and moral shame’ of the papal choir, were not abolished until late in the nineteenth century, but the gelding of boys continued in Italy for some time after that.” The tradition of harems continues. For instance, in addition to his allotment of four wives, the current emir of Kano has about sixty concubines. Nast notes that business relationships in Kano are sometimes still cemented by the gift of a concubine.
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br />   For the slave market and categories, see Richardson, Narrative, vol. 2, pp. 202ff., and Nachtigal, vol. 2, pp. 215ff.

  Burton: Lake Regions of Central Africa (Horizon, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 23–24.

  When Umar’s father, al-Kanemi, returned from his victorious invasion of Bagirmi (with Umar’s future mother in tow), he wrote a passionate song to the concubine he recovered there, who had been taken in Bagirmi’s earlier invasion of Bornu. The song runs for hundreds of words in a high romantic style worthy of the troubadors: “… the joy, oh, how exquisite! the recovery of my lost love! a part of myself! … Her arched eyebrows reaching to her temples, overhanging eyes than which the moon is less bright, as it shines through darkness! large piercing eyes, whose looks could never be mistaken … lips sweeter than honey and colder than the purest water! … Who shall now tell of my joy? From her shoulder to her waist, how fair is her proportion! When she moves, she is like branches waved by a gentle breeze! Silks from India are less soft than her skin; and her form, though noble, is timid as the fawn! Let this my joy be proclaimed to all my people!” Translated by Denham and included in his account, vol. 2, app. XIV, pp. 409–10.

  The Yedina/Budduma: Denham and Schultze were helpful.

  In 1893 the renegade warlord Rabeh sacked and burned Kukawa. Seven years later the French explorer Ferdinand Foureau reached the site and wrote, “The present appearance of [Kukawa] is one of infinite sadness… . the crumbling walls, already covered with creepers, the broken huts, and the human skulls which strew the earth amongst broken pottery and gaping, dried-up walls.” Quoted in Brenner.

  Today, Kukawa is a small dusty place. White visitors are still rare and, based on my experience, not especially welcome. The aged governor declined to answer questions, denied a request to walk around town, and essentially told me to keep moving. Nevertheless, two helpful residents showed me the former location of the sheikh’s palace. The once-towering clay walls are now modest cinder block. The walls surround mostly sand, but there’s also a cinderblock building, not much bigger than a large garage, with a tin roof. Inside are two crumbling mud-brick mounds with squat wooden doors—the graves of al-Kanemi and Umar. In the sandy wastes west of town is a forlorn memorial: a kuka, supposedly the capital’s namesake tree, enclosed by a low broken wall. Barth wrote that al-Kanemi chose the spot for his new capital because of a young baobab tree there. I heard a refinement of this local legend: the tree now inside the broken wall was a sapling when the adolescent al-Kanemi used to lean against it and dream of glory, which is why he later chose this spot for the new capital of Bornu. It’s a pleasing story flawed only by impossibility; the sheikh spent his boyhood far from Kukawa.

  After the allied European forces defeated Rabeh, the British assumed control of Bornu. The regional capital was moved to Maiduguri, 80 miles south, where the sheikh built a handsome new palace. According to a story that echoes the one about al-Kanemi’s founding of Kukawa, the sheikh proclaimed that he would walk around Maiduguri reciting the Qur’an, and would build his new palace wherever he finished. The moment occurred beneath a tamarind tree that still grows in one of the palace’s courtyards. The current sheikh of Bornu continues the unbroken line of direct descent from al-Kanemi and Umar.

  Chapter 15: A Mystery Solved

  Helpful on Adamawa: Hunwick, Boahen, Trimingham, and especially Kirk-Greene’s “Barth’s Journey to Adamawa,” in Heinrich Barth: Ein Forscher in Afrika, Leben-Werk-Leistung, ed. Heinrich Schiffers (Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1967). Kirk-Greene ends his essay, “In original discovery, geographical, historical, and linguistic, Barth has no peer in the annals of Fulani history.”

  Barth’s quote about learning Fulfulde comes from the “Introductory Remarks” to his Collection of Vocabularies of Central-African Languages (Justus Perthes, 1862). Barth considered his trip to Yola disappointing in some respects, but linguistically it was rich. For instance, he noticed that the Batta language was related to the Marghi and Zani languages, and also sometimes resembled the Musgu language, “which itself is related to the various dialects of Kotoko. All these languages have some general points of affinity to the South African languages.”

  The passage from Barth’s Preface to the German edition is quoted by Kirk-Greene in his article on Barth’s empathy.

  For earlier river expeditions up the Niger, Curtin and Boahen were helpful. Dickens’s essay, “The Niger Expedition,” appeared in The Examiner on August 19, 1848, and was reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers.

  The many spellings and names of the Niger and Benue rivers suggest the unsettled state of geographic knowledge about these river systems. The Niger was also called the Isa, Quorra, Kworra, and Kwara. The Benue was called the Shary, Shari, Tchadda, and Chadda. Lake Chad was also spelled Tschad and Tchad.

  Kirk-Greene comments that Barth’s description of the Benue “stands in the annals of West African exploration alongside Mungo Park’s classic account of his first glimpse of the Niger.”

  Gold in the Benue: after Barth’s dispatch about Adamawa reached England, John Hogg, a British naturalist and member of the Royal Society, wrote, “the country of Adamawa may hereafter become as celebrated for this precious metal as California and parts of Australia are in this new golden age.” “Notice of Recent Discoveries in Central Africa by Drs. Barth and Overweg … ,” from Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, vol. IV, new series (November 19, 1851), p. 4.

  For a fuller account of the Lord Palmerston, see “What Became of the Boat?” by Kirk-Greene, West Africa, May 23, 1959, pp. 489–90. Nobody knows the answer to his question.

  My description of Eid al-Fitr also draws upon Nachtigal’s report, which is much fuller than Barth’s: vol. 2, pp. 279–84. See Denham as well for several wonderful descriptions of Bornu’s cavalry and army.

  For a fuller account of the treaty signed by Bornu and Britain, see “The British Consulate at Lake Chad,” by Kirk-Greene, African Affairs, October 1959, pp. 334–39.

  The long-standing enmity between Bornu and Wadai included heavy condescension. Islam and its tradition of scholarship reached Bornu 500 years before penetrating Wadai. Consequently the Bornuese, wrote Nachtigal, “were imbued with the arrogance of a civilised people towards barbarians; the latter, on the other hand, … despised the decadent conditions and the cowardly camarilla of the neighbouring kingdom.” This sounds much like Europe’s arrogance toward Africa. Nachtigal illustrates Bornu’s attitude toward Wadai with a story then making the rounds in Kukawa: Wadai’s king, Ali, during a détente between the kingdoms, requested a fine horse from the stable of Aba Bu Bekr, Sheikh Umar’s oldest son. Aba Bu Bekr allegedly replied to Ali that “if he needed an animal to ride, to climb on the back of his mother.”

  On the other hand, when Bornuese traveled to the Mediterranean or did the haj, it was their turn to endure arrogance. Haj Beshir, the vizier, went to Mecca in 1843, where “he had an opportunity both of showing the Arabs near the coast that the inhabitants of the interior of the continent are superior to the beasts,” wrote Barth, “and of getting a glimpse of a higher state of civilization than he had been able to observe in his own country.”

  Chapter 16: “The Horde of the Welad Sliman”

  The modern spelling for the nineteenth-century tribe of mercenary Arabs is variously Walid, Ouled, Oulad, or Uelad, sometimes followed by Soliman or Suliman.

  Rodd’s comment about waterskins: People of the Veil, p. 232.

  The Kanuri and some Fulani peoples clean their milk bowls with cow urine, imparting a tang to the milk. They believe this practice keeps the milk from going sour for several days without affecting the taste. Barth disagreed. So do Tuaregs. “The taste of urine is detested by the Tuareg,” writes Nicolaisen, “who know this taste all too well as the water drawn from pools and wells is frequently flavored with urine and the excrement of domestic animals.”

  For the section on the raiding party, I have also drawn on the more melodramatic account given from memory by the youth named Dorugu, at that time a
servant of Overweg (and later of Barth). It can be found in West African Travels and Adventures, cited in the notes for chap. 12.

  Chapter 17: Razzia

  I have been unable to locate Ptolemy’s “Mandros oros,” which seems so familiar to Barth and Haj Beshir.

  Denham’s account of the razzia parallels Barth’s—the capture of women and children, the massacre of the mature males, the burning of villages. Eduard Vogel, who followed Barth into Central Africa, accompanied Sheikh Umar on a slave raid to Musgu in spring of 1854, and sent an account to the Foreign Office in which he says he saw “much useless cruelty towards the prisoners, 36 of whom were on one occasion cut to pieces alive. Of the 4000 slaves carried off, all women and children under twelfe [sic] years of age, I regret to state that 3500 died of dysentery and smallpox before the army reached Kouka. The army consisted of about 20,000 horsemen with 10,000 camp-followers, accompanied by about 5000 camels and as many bullocks.”

  Barth’s prediction that the Musgu would be exterminated was wrong. They survive, principally in Cameroon.

  Chapter 18: Captive in Bagirmi

  For the history of Bagirmi, Denham, Brenner, and Trimingham were helpful additions to Barth.

  Barth’s close observations of ants may remind some readers of Thoreau’s similar inclination. Another link: when Barth’s Travels was published in the United States in 1859, Thoreau read it carefully, according to Thoreau as World Traveler, by John Aldrich Christie (Columbia University Press, 1965).

  Chapter 19: Letters From Home

  For Palmerston’s relationship with Queen Victoria, see Lord Palmerston, by Herbert C. F. Bell, 2 vols. (Longmans, Green, 1936). The information about the donations raised by Bunsen comes from von Schubert.