A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Chapter 20: Resurrection and Death

  The vocabularies of twenty-four dialects that Barth collected were enclosed with a letter to William Desborough Cooley from Kukawa in 1852 but were lost for sixty years. They were found in a Foreign Office file in 1910 by a British district officer named P. A. Benton who served in northern Nigeria. Benton became fascinated with Barth and turned into a productive part-time scholar. See The Languages and Peoples of Bornu: Being a Collection of the Writings of P. A. Benton (Frank Cass, 1968), with a valuable introduction by Kirk-Greene.

  The correspondence between Barth and Cooley is collected in the British Library, “Letters of Barth to William Desborough Cooley,” ADD. MSS 32117E. More information about Cooley can be found in Curtin, but the preeminent source is The Negroland Revisited: Discovery and Invention of the Sudanese Middle Ages, by Pekka Masonen (Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2000). Masonen writes that Cooley and Barth represent a brief “golden age in the [European] historiography of Western Africa,” before “the ideological turning point” of the 1860s, when the attitudes of colonial imperialism began distorting accounts of Africa and Africans.

  Barth sent many examples of African craftsmanship back to Britain, but I could find no trace of them at the British Museum or the British Library.

  The section on Overweg’s death also draws on the account of his servant Dorugu in West African Travels and Adventures (which also appears in von Schubert), and on Kirk-Greene’s “The Death and Burial of Adolf Overweg,” West African Review, no. 378 (March 1959), pp. 227–28. Years after Overweg died, a chief named Maimana, the grandson of Overweg’s servant Abbega, was asked by the British to recover the explorer’s remains. He went to Maduwari and found an eighty-year-old woman who knew about the gravesite. The British dug, found Overweg’s bones, and took them to Maiduguri, the new regional capital of Bornu, where they were reburied in the small European cemetery.

  Chapters 21: Westward

  Helpful for these chapters: The Sokoto Caliphate, by Murray Last (Humanities Press, 1967); Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, by Elias N. Saad (Cambridge University Press, 1983); The Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu: Rediscovering Africa’s Literary Culture, ed. John O. Hunwick and Alida Jay Boye (Thames & Hudson, 2008); and Albasu.

  Dorugu’s accounts about his father and the trek through the wilderness of Gundumi can be found in West African Travels and Adventures.

  Chapter 22: The Prospect of the Niger

  Tazyıˉn al-Waraqaˉt, edited and translated by M. Hiskett (Ibadan University Press, 1963).

  Tarikh al-Sudan is sometimes spelled Tarikh es Sudani. The passage quoted from the work is taken from African Civilization Revisited, by Basil Davidson (Africa World Press, 1991).

  Chapter 23: “Obstructed by Nature and Infested by Man”

  The anecdote about Clapperton’s couriers comes from Wellard’s The Great Sahara.

  The proverb about hyenas comes from Hausa Ba Dabo Ba Ne: A Collection of 500 Proverbs, trans. by A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (Oxford, 1966).

  Caillié’s book is Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo (1830, 2 vols.). A few of the many books that treat him: The Quest for Timbuctoo, by Brian Gardner (Harcourt, 1968); Africa Explored: Europeans in the Dark Continent, 1769–1889, by Christopher Hibbert (Norton, 1982); The Slaves of Timbuktu, by Robin Maugham (Harper & Brothers, 1961); The Race for Timbuktu, by Frank T. Kryza (HarperCollins, 2006); Hearts of Darkness, by Frank McLynn (Carroll & Graf, 1992).

  Chapter 24: Golden City

  In addition to the books cited above for Caillié, see also Bovill; Briggs; Saad; Hunwick and Boye; The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu, by Anthony Sattin (St. Martin’s Press, 2005); The Primitive City of Timbuktu, by Horace Miner (Oxford University Press, 1953); and Imperial Eyes, by Mary Louise Pratt (Routledge, 1992). The quote from Barrow appears in Sattin. The poem from Baba appears in Hunwick and Boye.

  Chapter 25: In Timbuktu

  The house where Barth stayed is now marked by a bronze plaque. It is privately owned, but one room is a museum with some posters about Barth’s route and accomplishments. The house has been extensively remodeled since Barth’s stay and doesn’t conform to the floor plan printed in Travels and Discoveries, but the Sankore mosque remains visible from the terrace. The sheikh’s house, unmarked and shaded by two acacia trees, is still catercornered across a tiny square. Plaques also mark the houses where Laing and Caillié stayed.

  Barth’s remark that it was better not to know how much time separated him from home was echoed by Nachtigal, who also didn’t expect to spend five years wandering Africa:

  If I had known then that my fate would keep me back for more than five years in the unknown regions of the mysterious continent, would I perhaps have had the courage to go forward with my plan? To endure complete intellectual isolation for more than five years in the midst of severe privations, oppressive austerity, pitiless disease and threatening dangers is more than even the most ardent enthusiasm cares to bring upon itself. Later, indeed, far from the feverish haste of European life and its manifold pleasures, one learns to judge time and space differently, and becomes less demanding in one’s purposes, more tenacious in carrying out one’s plans, more patient in endurance and in suffering.

  Bodily resilience, the strength to withstand disease and fatigue, the natural gift for mixing with men of all types in the midst of that strange world, are the indispensible conditions with which the exploring traveler must be endowed. Patience, however, is the virtue which holds the secret of success. To practice it is often not easy and I had to fight my way through many a hard struggle before, to some extent purified in this respect, I was able to find my way through men’s folly and untrustworthiness.

  Kunta is sometimes spelled Kounta, and Bakkay is also spelled Bakkai. Helpful sources about this interesting clan: Saad; Boahen; Hunwick and Boye; “The Economics of Islam in the Southern Sahara: The Rise of the Kunta Clan,” by E. Ann McDougall, in Levtzion and Fisher; “The Nineteenth-Century Jihads in West Africa,” by M. Hiskett in Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 5, ed. John E. Flint (1976); and “The Expansion of Islam,” by J. Spencer Trimingham in Kritzeck and Lewis.

  The quotations from al-Bakkay’s reply to Ahmadu Ahmadu are taken from translations in Travels and Discoveries (vol. 3, app. VIII), and Boahen.

  Attitudes about skin color in Africa go back at least 2,500 years, when lighter-skinned Egyptians reviled darker-skinned Nubians as uncultured savages. Gradations of skin color are part of cultural and racial identity. Northern Africans—Arabs, Berbers, Tuaregs, Moroccans—often have dark skin but call themselves white and may assume themselves racially superior to black Africans. Similarly, black Africans from the Sudan don’t consider themselves truly black. My guide in northern Nigeria, a Fulani, remarked that in contrast to the Fulanis and Hausas, the Kanuris were black. In Timbuktu my dark-skinned Songhai guide, while describing the city’s many ethnic groups and tribes, said that the Buzus—blacks descended from slaves—“aren’t white like me.” The Janjaweed, today’s murderous raiders in southern Sudan, have black skin but are descended from Islamic Arab tribes, so their war cry as they attack black tribes (now Christian rather than pagan) is “Kill the slaves!” Similarly, the Janjaweed’s tactics resemble the vizier’s of Bornu during a razzia—shoot, kill, rape, loot, and then burn everything to debilitate survivors.

  Chapter 26: Stuck

  For Davidson, James Wellard, The Great Sahara.

  For tobacco, Saad.

  Chapter 27: Released, More or Less

  The excerpted letters about Vogel appear in Benton.

  Hourst’s sprightly account was published in English as French Enterprise in Africa, trans. by Mrs. Arthur Bell (Dutton, 1899).

  Chapter 28: Rumors and Consequences

  For the overthrow and restoration of Umar, and the assassination of Haj Beshir, I have drawn on Nachtigal, Brenner, Schultze, and the letters of Vogel in Benton.

  Po
pular accounts of African exploration sometimes get untethered from the facts. In the sparse literature about Barth, one of the most amusing examples occurs in René Lecler’s chapter on the explorer in World Without Mercy (Werner Laurie, 1954). Once a popular author of books about the Sahara, Lecler inflates the meeting of Barth and Vogel to the level of Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone. For his next exaggeration he says Barth sat on the ground and wept when the two met. After Barth dried his eyes, continues Lecler, Vogel treated him to “the best dinner he had eaten in years” (the two men shared Barth’s coffee) and then they “sang old German lieder together” (not a chance). And finally, concludes Lecler, they spent a week enjoying each other’s company in a Chadian village (they parted after two hours and were nowhere near Chad). Lecler’s exaggerations stem from admiration: “In terms of exploration no single man ever equaled Henry Barth’s magnificent journey.”

  Sometime after Barth met Vogel, the village of Bundi evidently migrated to a new location, not unusual in Africa. In December 1854, Bundi was about 15 miles northwest of the town of Nguru in Nigeria. Nowadays, Bundi is about 185 miles east of there and 70 miles southwest of Kukawa.

  The quote from the German edition of Travels and Discoveries comes from The Great Age of Discovery, by Paul Herrmann (translated from German by Arnold J. Pomerans; Harper, 1958). Herrmann is often interesting on the methods and motives of explorers but is prone to overstatement. He writes that Barth was “enticed back to Africa time after time,” which is true only if that phrase means “twice.” To increase drama he says that Richardson died “some days earlier” than Overweg—yes, some 570 days. He describes the ambassador sent from Bornu to Tripoli as a “naked black minister,” which is both inaccurate and condescending, and puts this man in Tripoli in 1849, before Barth even arrived there. But then Herrmann also has the expedition leaving Tripoli on March 24, 1848, two years too soon. He also says Barth was probably the first white man to reach Kano, though Clapperton left a famously detailed account of his visit. And he writes that the teenaged servants of Overweg and Barth, Dorugu and Abbega, “settled down in the small Thuringian capital of Gotha,” an exaggeration that verges on fabrication—Barth briefly hosted the youths in Germany.

  Chapter 29: Getting Out

  This account of the bad feelings between Vogel and Church draws on a series of letters in the British National Archives.

  The doggerel about the marriage of Victoria and Albert was quoted by Martin Filler in his essay about them, “The Most Happy Couple,” in The New York Review of Books, August 19, 2010, p. 67. The attitude survives. Princess Diana, notes Filler, “privately referred to her royal in-laws as ‘the Germans.’ ”

  Chapter 30: Problems at Home

  Shaw’s remarks about English geographers and German cheese, and Barth’s heated remarks before the Geographical Society of Berlin, appear in Kirk-Greene’s biographical essay about Barth. Shaw’s dislike of Germans and of Barth in particular must have been well known. Someone named Charles Lewell wrote two letters to Shaw from Berlin in 1859. “I saw Dr. Barth several times,” said the first, “he looks more dirty than ever entre nous soit dit .” The second letter noted, “I never met with a more disagreeable fellow as that D. Barth. He looks dirtier than ever.” Lewell obviously knew that Shaw would enjoy such malicious comments. From the archives of the Royal Geographical Society.

  As late as 1930 the Royal Geographical Society was claiming, incorrectly, that it supported Barth financially in Africa. See The Record of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830–1930, by Hugh Robert Mill (Royal Geographical Society, 1930).

  That other candidates for the RGS Gold Medal felt Barth was most deserving appears in a letter written by Lieutenant General Charles R. Fox, “on the claims of Dr. Barth for a Gold Medal,” written May 7, 1856, and found in the RGS archives.

  Chapter 31: Last Journeys

  For an interesting discussion of the book’s illustrations, as well as some biographical tidbits about Barth, see “The Painting and the Pen: Approaches to Heinrich Barth and His African Heritage,” by Achim von Oppen, in Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique, ed. Mamadou Diawara et al. (Cologne: Köppe, 2006), pp. 105–41. “There is virtually no trace of a cultural landscape,” writes von Oppen of Bernatz’s illustrations. “This squarely contradicts Barth’s account… .” Barth was von Oppen’s great-great-granduncle. Von Oppen is a professor of African history in Germany.

  The section on Livingstone and Missionary Travels draws mostly upon Hibbert and upon Louise Henderson’s “ ‘Everyone Will Die Laughing’: John Murray and the Publication of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels,” published by Livingstone Online: http://www.livingstoneonline.ucl.ac.uk/companion.php?id=HIST2. I am indebted to Henderson for The Ladies’ Repository.

  Rawlinson’s comment about Stanley and Livingstone is found in Cairns.

  On the racialist theories of Barth’s time, Curtin and Masonen are helpful. Curtin is especially cogent on Dr. Robert Knox and his influence, and on the racial underpinnings of British imperialism. Curtin calls Barth “the least prejudiced, least culture bound of all the travelers to Africa.”

  Masonen suggests that Barth has been marginalized for two main reasons. First, the tendency of British and American scholars to ignore continental Europe as irrelevant (Masonen is Finnish). Second, the difficulty of fitting Barth and his openness to African cultures into the postcolonial theories that have dominated academia since Edward Said’s Orientalism. See Masonen’s review of Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique in Africa, vol. 81, no. 2 (2011), pp. 342–44.

  The section on the delegation from Timbuktu relies on von Schubert, Boahen, and Kirk-Greene in addition to letters from the archives of the Foreign Office.

  Hegel’s remarks on Africa and history appeared in The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Jibree (Dover, 1956), p. 93. More than a century later the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper repeated Hegel’s sentiment: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none; there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, and darkness is not the subject of history.” Rise of Christian Europe (Thames & Hudson, 1964), p. 9.

  The account of Barth’s death relies primarily on von Schubert and Kirk-Greene. Kirk-Greene, contradicting von Schubert and other sources, says Barth died on November 26.

  Epilogue

  The quote from Hunwick comes from “Secrets of the Sahara,” by Christopher Reardon, Ford Foundation Report, Summer 2003.

  Selected Bibliography

  Ayandele, E. A. African Historical Studies (Frank Cass, 1979).

  Barth, Heinrich. Collection of Vocabularies of Central-African Languages (Justus Perthes, 1862).

  —. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. 3 vols. (Frank Cass & Co., 1965, facsimile reprint of the edition published in the United States by Harper & Brothers, 1857 to 1859).

  Bell, Herbert C. F. Lord Palmerston (Longmans, Green, 1936).

  Benton, P. A. The Languages and Peoples of Bornu (Frank Cass, 1968).

  Boahen, A. Adu. Britain, the Sahara, and the Western Sudan, 1788–1861 (Oxford University Press, 1964).

  Bourne, Kenneth. Palmerston: The Early Years, 1784–1841 (Free Press, 1982).

  Bovill, E. W. The Golden Trade of the Moors (Oxford, 1968, reprint of 1958 edition).

  —. “Henry Barth.” Journal of the African Society. Vol. XXV (July 1926), pp. 311–20.

  —, ed. Missions to the Niger. 4 vols. (Hakluyt Society, 1965).

  Brenner, Louis. The Shehus of Kukawa: A History of the Al-Kanemi Dynasty of Bornu (Oxford University Press, 1973).

  Briggs, Lloyd Cabot. Tribes of the Sahara (Harvard University Press, 1967).

  British National Archives, Central African Expedition: FO 101/23, FO 101/26, FO 101/30, FO 101/34, FO 101/36, and FO 101/45.

  Burton, Richard Francis. Lake Regions of Central Africa (Horizon, 1961).

  Cairns, H. Alan C. Prelude to Imperialism: British Reactions to Central African Soci
ety, 1840–1890 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).

  Caillié, René. Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo. 2 vols. (London, 1830).

  Carlyle, Thomas. “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” (T. Bosworth, 1853).

  Christie, John Aldrich. Thoreau as World Traveler (Columbia University Press, 1965).

  Clarke, Peter B. West Africa and Islam (Edward Arnold, 1982).

  Clarke, Thurston. The Last Caravan (Putnam, 1978).

  Cohen, Ronald. The Kanuri of Borno (Waveland, 1967).

  Cooley, Desborough. The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained (London, 1841).

  Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).

  Davidson, Basil. African Civilization Revisited (Africa World Press, 1991).

  Denham, Dixon, Hugh Clapperton, and Walter Oudney. Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa: In the Years 1822, 1823, and 1824. 2 vols. (John Murray, 1826).

  Diawara, Mamadou, et al., eds. Heinrich Barth et l’Afrique (Cologne: Köppe, 2006).

  Dickens, Charles. “The Niger Expedition.” The Examiner, August 19, 1848, reprinted in Miscellaneous Papers.

  Earle, Timothy, ed. Chiefdoms: Power, Economy, and Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 1991, reprinted 1997).

  Fabian, Johannes. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (University of California Press, 2000).

  Filler, Martin. “The Most Happy Couple.” New York Review of Books, August 19, 2010.

  Flint, John E., ed. Cambridge History of Africa, c. 1790–c. 1870, vol. 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1976).