The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  As well as the Sierra Leone colony, a second attempt was made to settle ex-slaves on the west African coast. In 1820, the American Colonization Society, a private organisation that favoured colonisation for blacks rather than emancipation, dispatched eighty-six volunteers to set up a settlement on marshy terrain on Sherbro Island, a notorious slavers’ rendezvous sixty miles south of Freetown. The settlement lasted for less than two months. Twenty-five of the new immigrants died of fever and the rest sought refuge in Sierra Leone. Undaunted, the American Colonization Society started another settlement in 1822 at Cape Mesurado, a peninsula on the Grain Coast, 225 miles south-east of Freetown. The settlement was named Monrovia in honour of James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States, and the colony was called Liberia. In addition to Monrovia, a handful of other settlements sprang up on the same coastline. After two decades, the number of immigrants to Liberia reached about 5,000. The colonists, though, remained largely aloof from the indigenous population. In 1847, with the encouragement of the American Colonization Society, they chose to establish an independent state, with their own president and legislature. From the start, immigrant settlers and their descendants dominated the territory as a ruling class.

  International efforts to stamp out the west-coast traffic in slaves only finally succeeded in the 1860s. By then, the total volume of slaves leaving African shores during the four hundred years the Atlantic trade lasted had reached 12.8 million.

  European explorers had meanwhile been filling in gaps on the map of west Africa. In 1821, the British government sponsored an expedition that set off to reach the interior of west Africa via a route from the north, accompanying caravans from Tripoli crossing the Sahara to the empire of Bornu, west of Lake Chad. The expedition was led by a British army officer, Major Dixon Denham, and included a Royal Navy lieutenant, Hugh Clapperton. As they approached Kukawa, the Bornu capital, its shaykh, Muhammad al-Kanemi, sent out a welcoming troop of cavalry, several thousand strong, dressed in chainmail. Denham explained that their purpose was ‘to see the country merely, and to give an account of its inhabitants, produce and appearance’. They discussed the possibility of opening trade relations with Bornu. The shaykh made clear his response in a letter to King George IV:

  [Major Denham] desired of us permission, that merchants seeking for elephant-teeth, ostrich feathers, and other such things, that are not to be found in the country of the English, might come among us. We told him that our country, as he himself has known and seen its state, does not suit any heavy [rich] traveller, who may possess great wealth. But if a few light persons [small merchants], as four or five only, with little merchandize, would come, there will be no harm. This is the most that we can give permission for; and more than that number must not come.

  While Denham went off to explore Lake Chad, Clapperton travelled westwards to Kano, a town hitherto known to Europeans only by name, and then continued to Sokoto, seat of the Fulani sultan, Muhammad Bello. Invited to the palace, Clapperton was impressed by his audience with the sultan: ‘a noble-looking man, forty-four years of age, although much younger in appearance, five feet ten inches high, portly in person, with a short curling black beard, a small mouth, a fine forehead, a Grecian nose, and large black eyes.’ In their discussions, the sultan proved knowledgeable about European affairs and expressed an interest in establishing trade relations with Britain. On matters of theology, Clapperton soon found himself out of his depth. ‘I was obliged to confess myself not sufficiently versed in religious subtleties to resolve these knotty points,’ he wrote. He returned to England in January 1825 full of admiration for Sokoto and its ruler.

  In July 1825, a British army officer, Gordon Laing, set out from Tripoli hoping to be the first European to reach Timbuktu. Crossing the desert, he was attacked in his tent by a party of Tuareg and severely injured, laid low by the plague and robbed of most of his possessions, but he nevertheless managed to stagger into Timbuktu in August 1826. His arrival, however, aroused hostility. Worried about his safety, the sultan of Timbuktu urged him to move on. ‘I fear I shall be involved in much trouble after leaving Timbuktu,’ Laing wrote in a last letter to the British consul in Tripoli. After six weeks in the city, he joined a caravan heading for Senegal but was murdered two days later. News of his death took two years to reach Tripoli.

  Another British expedition left for Sokoto in 1825, aiming to find a route inland from the west coast rather than across the desert from north Africa. It was led by Hugh Clapperton, who was instructed by the government, following his previous successful encounter, to establish firm relations with Muhammad Bello and seek his help in suppressing the slave trade and supporting ‘legitimate’ commerce instead. Clapperton was also asked, as a secondary objective, to ascertain more about the course of the Niger. Setting out from Badagry, a port on the Slave Coast, Clapperton’s expedition travelled northwards through Yorubaland, crossed the Niger at Bussa, where Mungo Park had perished twenty years before, and reached Sokoto in August 1826. But Clapperton found the sultan less well disposed towards him than before, and, racked by ill-health, he died in Sokoto the following year with little accomplished.

  One week after Clapperton’s death in April 1827, an enterprising young Frenchman, René Caillié, set out from the slave harbour at the mouth of the Núñez River, just north of Sierra Leone, determined to fulfil an intense ambition to travel to Timbuktu. ‘The city of Timbuctoo,’ he wrote, ‘became the continual object of all my thoughts, the aim of all my efforts, and I formed a resolution to reach it or perish.’ Born in 1799 into an impoverished family in Poitou, Caillié had been inspired to undertake an African journey by the exploits of Park and other travellers. Unable to secure government support, he saved money from his job as manager of an indigo factory in Sierra Leone to finance his own private expedition. Disguised as a Muslim, he joined a small group of Mande merchants preparing to leave for Timbuktu, using a cover story that he was an Egyptian exile captured at an early age by Christians and now travelling as a pilgrim to Mecca. After recuperating along the way from an attack of scurvy and other maladies, he reached Timbuktu in April 1828, but was disappointed to find neither the grandeur nor the gold of legend. ‘The city presented, at first view, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth,’ he wrote. ‘Nothing was to be seen in all directions but immense plains of quicksand of a yellowish white colour . . . all nature wore a dreary aspect, and the most profound silence prevailed; not even the warbling of a bird was to be heard.’ Once one of the most renowned cities of the medieval world, Timbuktu had long since lost its lustre.

  The riddle of the Niger still remained to be solved. In 1830, two brothers, Richard and John Lander, set out from Badagry with instructions to travel inland to Bussa and there to embark on canoes and follow the river to its termination. Richard Lander had previously served as a member of Clapperton’s 1826 expedition to Sokoto and was familiar with the first part of the route. Heading south from Bussa, they managed to reach the Delta region, where the Niger loses itself in a morass of streams and swamps, but were captured by Igbo river pirates. They were eventually extricated by a friendly chief who hoped to make a profit by taking them down the Nun River, one of the many outlets of the Niger, to the delta port of Brass. On their return to London, the discovery that the Niger River entered the Atlantic in the Bight of Benin was hailed as opening ‘a great highway into the heart of Africa’.

  19

  THE PASHA

  In July 1798, a French armada of four hundred ships sailed into Abukir Bay near Alexandria. On board was an army of 36,000 men under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte, a 28-year-old general who had become the idol of revolutionary France. Driven by visions of imperial glory, Bonaparte intended to establish Egypt as a French colony and to turn it into the base of a French empire in the Middle East that would rival Britain’s empire in India and North America. He was contemptuous of the Mamluk oligarchy that ruled Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman state and believed that the Egyptian population wo
uld welcome French forces as liberators.

  Bonaparte’s ambition was not confined to military conquest. He wanted to bring to Egypt the ideas of the European enlightenment and the French Revolution. Among the troops on board was a contingent of 151 French savants – mathematicians, geologists, engineers, chemists and astronomers – recruited by Napoleon to carry out the most exhaustive study of Egypt ever undertaken. Also included was a party of surveyors whose main task was to determine the feasibility of cutting a ship canal through the isthmus of Suez to link the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean – a project that would enable Bonaparte to dominate world trade and undermine British control of India.

  Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt had survived for 281 years, with mixed fortunes. Though nominally loyal to the Ottoman state, Mamluk beys during the eighteenth century gained increasing domination over the administration and tended to act independently, exploiting the country in their own interests. The Mamluk population had steadily grown, reinforced each year by legions of male slaves imported from Georgia and the Caucasus and trained as horsemen and warriors to keep the military caste intact. By 1798, Mamluks and their dependants numbered nearly 100,000. On the streets of Cairo they paraded in colourful costumes: each man wore a green cap wreathed with a yellow turban; a coat of chainmail beneath a long robe bound at the waist by an embroidered shawl; voluminous red pantaloons; leather gauntlets; and red, pointed slippers. They were armed with of a brace of pistols, a long curved sword, a mace and an English carbine, all with handles and blades chased in silver and copper designs and sometimes studded with precious stones.

  Under Mamluk rule, Cairo had remained a hub of international trade and scholarship, the terminus of caravan routes that spread out across northern Africa, the Levant and Arabia. Its population had risen to 260,000. The wealth of the city was enjoyed not just by the Mamluks but by a burgeoning middle class of merchants and financiers, benefiting from a monopoly over the trade in coffee between the Yemen and the coffee houses of Europe. Religious communities thrived too, providing schools that were renowned throughout the Muslim world. The skyline was dominated by the domes and minarets of three hundred mosques. Adding to the vibrancy of life in Cairo were sizeable groups of foreign residents: Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians. Outside Cairo, however, the vast bulk of the population – fellahin – continued to labour in the fields, bearing the brunt of harsh taxes and the vagaries of the annual flood, as they had always done. Mamluk landlords enforced a punitive system of ‘tax-farming’ – Iltizam – squeezing the livelihood of peasants ever tighter.

  The Mamluk army proved no match for Bonaparte. The French possessed more advanced weaponry and employed better battle tactics. Alexandria, now a rundown town with no more than 6,000 residents, fell within hours. One of the French savants recorded: ‘We were looking for the city of the Ptolemys, the library, the seat of human knowledge. And we found instead ruins, barbarism, poverty and degradation.’ Marching up the western branch of the Nile, Bonaparte’s invasion force, equipped with modern artillery, made short work of Mamluk cavalry drawn up on the approach to Cairo. Mamluk generals retreated into Upper Egypt, leaving Cairo’s religious leaders to negotiate the city’s submission to French rule.

  Three weeks after landing on the beaches of Abukir Bay, Bonaparte entered Cairo in triumph to the sound of drums and trumpets and set up headquarters in a Mamluk palace in Esbekiah Square. He issued orders that citizens should wear tricolour cockades in their turbans, but otherwise endeavoured to assure them of France’s good intentions. Leaflets written in Arabic stressed that the French came as friends and liberators, not as the foes of Islam. At a council of Egyptian elders set up to replace the Mamluk beys, Bonaparte appeared in Egyptian costume and spoke of the equality and fraternity of mankind. ‘When I am in France,’ he declared, ‘I am a Christian, when in Egypt a Muhammadan.’

  Bonaparte’s triumph, however, was short-lived. In August 1798, a British naval squadron under the command of Horatio Nelson destroyed the French fleet lying at anchor in Abukir Bay, leaving Bonaparte, his soldiers and his savants trapped in Egypt with no means of escape.

  The mood in Egypt soon became hostile. Many Egyptians regarded the French as yet another occupying force, living in luxury in sumptuous residences and enjoying the proceeds of heavy taxation. There was particular resentment about the presence of French troops on the streets consorting with Egyptian women. The historian Abd al Rahman al-Jabarti, an eyewitness to French occupation, wrote:

  Muslims died of shame when they saw their wives and daughters walking the streets unveiled, and appearing to be the property of the French . . . It was bad enough for them to see the taverns that had been established in all the bazaars and even in several mosques . . . The scum of the population was doing well, because it benefited from new freedom. But the elite and the middle class experienced all sorts of vexation.

  In October, groups of Cairo’s residents rose in revolt against French rule, urged on by Muslim leaders calling for a jihad. Bonaparte responded to the revolt with brutal repression, using cannon fire against residential quarters. The university mosque of al-Azhar, revered throughout the Islamic world, became a particular target. Al-Jabarti recorded his disgust at the conduct of French troops:

  The French trod in the Mosque of al-Azhar with their shoes, carrying swords and rifles . . . They ravaged the students’ quarters and ponds, smashing the lamps and chandeliers and breaking up the bookcases of the students . . . and scribes . . . They treated the books and the Koranic volumes as trash, throwing them on the ground, stamping on them with their feet and shoes. Furthermore, they soiled the mosque, blowing their spit in it, pissing and defecating in it. They guzzled wine and smashed the bottles in the central court and other parts. And whoever they happened to meet in the mosque they stripped.

  Within a few months of landing in Egypt, French forces thus managed to alienate the entire population. A further disaster occurred when Bonaparte attempted to invade Syria but was beaten back by an Ottoman army. In August 1799, he stole away from Cairo with a few trusted advisers, slipping through British naval patrols to return to France, leaving behind dispirited troops facing seething resentment. The end of France’s grand adventure was ignominious. Soon after a mixed force of British and Turkish battalions landed in Alexandria in March 1801 to restore Ottoman authority, French officers agreed to surrender and evacuate the remnants of their army.

  The three years of French occupation nevertheless had a lasting impact. Bonaparte’s team of savants set up an Institut d’Égypte, modelled on the Institut de France, and compiled a vast amount of information about both modern and ancient Egypt. Their work formed the basis of the new field of Egyptology and culminated in the publication between 1809 and 1828 of twenty-two volumes of Description de l’Égypte, the most comprehensive survey of any country outside Europe and North America. It was a French team which in 1799 discovered the stone tablet at Rosetta containing a text in three languages – Greek, demotic Egyptian and hieroglyphs – that enabled scholars eventually to unlock the secrets of ancient Egyptian history and to read the words of pharaohs from the distant past.

  Following the departure of the French, a protracted struggle for power broke out between three rival factions: Ottoman officials in Cairo trying to maintain the authority of the empire; Mamluk beys based mainly in the provinces eager to regain their hold over the government; and an ambitious military leader, Muhammad Ali, who had arrived in Egypt in 1801 as an officer in an Albanian contingent of Ottoman troops as part of the campaign to oust the French invaders.

  The upper hand was gained by Muhammad Ali. An ethnic Albanian, born in 1769 in the Macedonian port of Kavala, he spoke Ottoman Turkish and his outlook was shaped largely by his Ottoman roots, but with adroit manoeuvring, he cultivated the support of Cairo’s merchants, clerics and religious scholars, representing himself as the champion of Egyptian interests standing against the alien authority of both the Ottomans and the Mamluks. He was also ruthle
ss in dealing with adversaries. In 1805, with the backing of the Egyptian elite, he besieged the Turkish governor in the Citadel, seeking to oust him. The Ottoman sultan was subsequently obliged to recognise Muhammad Ali as governor of Egypt. In 1811, he disposed of his Mamluk opponents by inviting several hundred of them to a banquet in the Citadel and arranging to have them massacred afterwards as they made their way back to the city along a narrow lane.

  Muhammad Ali Pasha ruled in much the same manner as the Mamluks before him, concentrating all power in his own hands and relying on a loyal household of family members, slaves and friends, many of whom came from his home region of Kavala, to do his bidding. But he also saw the need to adopt more effective methods of government to ensure his control and readily turned to Europeans for advice and technology.

  His priority, above all, was to modernise and strengthen his army. It consisted of a motley collection of Turks, Albanians, North Africans and Bedouin, none of them reliable. Impressed by the skills and discipline shown by Bonaparte’s troops, Muhammad Ali recruited French military instructors to build a new army, modelled on European lines, trained in modern weapons and tactics and capable of turning Egypt into a regional power.

  The results were soon evident. In 1812, at the behest of the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, he sent a military expedition into Arabia to put down a rebellion by Wahhabi fundamentalists, gaining control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Next, needing more manpower, he planned an invasion of Nubia and the lands of the Nilotic Sudan to capture slaves on a massive scale, intending to set up a slave army.