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

by Martin Meredith

  Many of London’s ‘armchair geographers’ dismissed the idea that snow-covered mountains could exist so close to the equator. But a further impetus for exploring the African interior came in 1855 when James Erhardt, one of Krapf’s missionary colleagues, drew up a map based on the testimony of Arab-Swahili traders showing the outline of a giant slug-shaped lake in central Africa. The map was sent to the Church Missionary Society and then forwarded to the Royal Geographical Society.

  Flying the plain blood-red flag of a Zanzibari expedition, the heavily laden caravan assembled by Burton and Speke covered the 600 miles to Kazeh in 134 days. Their baggage included not only food supplies and scientific instruments but a range of other goods such as cloth, beads and brass wire required to meet demands for hongo, the toll exacted by chiefs throughout the interior from passing caravans. Burton started off by riding one of the expedition’s thirty mules, but most soon succumbed to the tsetse fly; not one reached Ujiji.

  Their route was well trodden. Along the way, they encountered other caravans making similar journeys, winding their way over the plains, as Burton noted, ‘like a monstrous land-serpent’. Each was led by a guide, a kirongozi, dressed in a bright red gown and wearing a headdress of a black and white colobus monkey skin. Behind the kirongozi came the ivory porters, ‘their shoulders often raw with the weight’. Two men were needed to carry the heavier tusks, which were tied to a pole, with cowbells attached to their points sounding out as the caravan moved on. The ivory porters were followed by cloth-bearers. ‘Behind the cloth-bearers struggles a long line of porters and slaves, laden with the lighter stuff, rhinoceros teeth, hides, tobacco, brass wire . . . In separate parties march the armed slaves . . . the women, and the little toddling children, who rarely fail to carry something, be it only a pound weight.’

  Burton and Speke were accorded a warm welcome in Kazeh and provided with comfortable accommodation in their own tembe. Both had suffered from severe bouts of malaria along the way. Burton’s health continued to decline and for the next eleven months he had to be carried on a litter. During their month-long stay in Kazeh, they learned from their Arab hosts that instead of one huge lake in central Africa, there were three. To the south lay Nyasa; to the west lay the Ujiji lake; and to the north lay a lake that the Arabs called the ‘Sea of Ukerewe’ but that was known locally as the Nyanza, a name, like Nyasa, denoting a large body of water. Speke was in favour of investigating the Ukerewe lake. He had heard that a range of mountains was to be found west of the lake, making it a likely candidate as the source of the White Nile. But Burton insisted on heading westwards to Ujiji.

  Their journey to Ujiji took sixty days. Burton was so ill that he spent most of his stay there lying prostrate, steadily losing interest in the venture. Speke too suffered from an eye affliction and partial deafness. After several excursions on the lake they returned to Kazeh in June 1858, unable to offer any evidence as to whether it was linked to the Nile.

  While Burton decided to remain in Kazeh, working on an account of his travels, Speke assembled his own caravan for an expedition to the ‘Sea of Ukerewe’. On 30 July, after a journey lasting nearly four weeks, he caught his first glimpse of a creek near Mwanza at the southern end of the Nyanza. By calculating the temperature at which water boiled, he estimated the lake to be about 4,000 feet above sea level, twice the height of measurements he had taken to record the altitude of Lake Tanganyika. Convinced he had found ‘the fountain of the Nile’, he returned to Kazeh. Burton, however, remained sceptical.

  When Speke arrived back in London in May 1859, the Royal Geographical Society was so impressed with his feat of reaching the Nyanza that he was given a commission of his own to make a further investigation of the lake to determine whether it was, in fact, the source of the White Nile. Before leaving for Zanzibar in April 1860, Speke wrote to Queen Victoria, suggesting he should name the lake the Victoria Nyanza. Accompanied by a fellow army officer, Captain James Grant, Speke followed ‘the ivory road’ to Kazeh, arriving there in January 1861. He planned to travel around the western side of the lake, hoping to find the Nile’s outlet on its northern shore. But his progress was hampered by rapacious chiefs, spasms of warfare, deserting porters and severe attacks of fever. It took him eight months to cover 300 miles to the kingdom of Karagwe. Grant collapsed there, crippled by abscesses on his right leg which left him unable to stand on his own feet for five months. Speke travelled on without him, passing through a landscape of green grassy hills, reaching Mengo, the capital of Buganda, in February 1862.

  He was only fifty miles from his goal, but he did not gain permission from Buganda’s ruler, Mutesa I, to leave Mengo until July. Provided with a Baganda escort, he reached the banks of the Nile at Urondogani on 21 July, then travelled upriver for a few miles towards the Nyanza to a falls no more than twelve feet deep, which marks the beginning of the White Nile’s 4,100-mile journey to the Mediterranean coast. Local inhabitants called the place ‘The Stones’ but Speke named it the Ripon Falls, after a former president of the Royal Geographical Society.

  He dallied there for three days, then set off downstream, heading for Bunyoro to link up with James Grant. Travelling northwards they reached Gondokoro, a trading post in southern Sudan, in January 1863 and Khartoum in March. In a message sent from the British Consulate there, Speke informed the Royal Geographical Society: ‘The Nile is settled.’

  Despite the public acclaim that Speke and Grant received on their return to London, a number of armchair geographers disputed their claim to have proved that the Nyanza was the true source of the Nile. Critics pointed out that they had failed to make a circumnavigation of the lake and therefore could not be sure whether there was a single lake or more than one. Moreover, it was argued, on their journey from the Nyanza to Gondokoro, they had followed the course of the Nile only part of the way, leaving gaps to shorten their route, and therefore could not know for certain that it was the main river and not a tributary. Speke railed against ‘geographers who sip port, sit in carpet slippers and criticise those who labour in the field’. But to his dismay, Burton joined in the fray, seeking to discredit Speke’s achievement and insisting that Lake Tanganyika offered a more plausible alternative. It was possible, Burton argued, that a river at the north end of Lake Tanganyika, the Rusizi, flowed northwards, providing a link to the Nile; hitherto he had accepted that the Rusizi flowed southwards into the lake. In the middle of the controversy, Speke met his death in 1864 in a bizarre shooting accident in England, using the stock of a double-barrelled shotgun as an aid to help him clamber over a low stone wall.

  Hoping to solve the riddle of the source of the Nile once and for all, the president of the Royal Geographical Society asked David Livingstone to return to Africa.

  Zanzibar’s commercial empire in the interior, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly engulfed in bouts of warfare and banditry as rival warlords and groups of traders competed for control over the traffic in ivory and slaves. Some chiefs traded their own subjects into slavery; others raided their neighbours. Over a vast swathe of eastern Africa, normal agricultural and village life was severely disrupted. The violence was made worse by incursions of bands of Ngoni warriors from southern Africa who wreaked havoc in the Lake Nyasa region and raided as far north as the Nyanza. Some served as mercenaries to local chiefs and traders wanting to augment their fighting strength.

  In Nyamweziland, a prolonged war broke out between Arab traders in Kazeh (Tabora) and a young Nyamwezi chief, Msabila, when he tried to impose a tax on Arab caravans. Another Nyamwezi chief, Mytela Kasanda, sought to challenge the Arab monopoly on trade from a powerful base he built at Urambo in western Unyamwezi. Adopting the nom de guerre Mirambo, meaning ‘Corpses’, he assembled an army of followers which included fearsome groups known as ruga-ruga. Among the ranks of Mirambo’s ruga-ruga were Ngoni recruits, war captives, escaped slaves, deserters, runaways and other rootless youths. Their tactic was to strike terror. They sometimes draped strips of bright red cloth from their shoulde
rs, shouting to their opponents: ‘This is your blood!’ Their ornaments included caps made of human scalps, belts of entrails and necklaces of teeth.

  Although trade with the coast was periodically held up, sometimes for several months, the supply of slaves and ivory kept coming. During the 1860s, some 20,000 slaves were shipped to Zanzibar each year. A large proportion were captured by Yao traders in the Lake Nyasa region and shipped to Zanzibar through the coastal port of Kilwa Kivinje. On average, about 12,000 were retained on the island to work on plantations; 6,000 were passed on to plantations in Mombasa and Lamu; and the rest were sent to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Zanzibar’s haul of ivory amounted to about 250 tons a year.

  Britain, the dominant power in the Indian Ocean since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, made several attempts to curb the slave trade. In 1845, it obliged Seyyid Said to sign a treaty banning the export of slaves from his domain in eastern Africa, but made no serious effort to prevent slave dhows from reaching Arabia. Despite Zanzibar’s pivotal role in the slave trade, British officials regarded it as a promising entrepôt, a base from which civilisation might be spread into the African interior through legitimate commerce. ‘It bids fair to become the chief emporium of trade on the east coast,’ wrote Christopher Rigby, the British consul, in 1859. ‘Its population possesses valuable elements for commerce in the wealthy and numerous settlers from India, and the enterprising Arabs and Swahili who travel over Central Africa.’

  On the last journey he was to undertake, Livingstone arrived in Zanzibar in January 1866. His mission, as he saw it, was not merely to solve the mystery of the Nile’s sources but to expose the true scale of slavery in the interior – ‘this open sore of the world’, as he described it. He wanted acclaim not just as an explorer but as a crusader who helped bring an end to the scourge of slavery. ‘The Nile sources,’ he told a friend, ‘are valuable only as a means of enabling me to open my mouth with power among men. It is this power which I hope to apply to remedy an enormous evil. Men may think I covet fame, but I make it a rule not to read aught written in my praise.’

  Livingstone had also developed a theory that the true source of the Nile was to be found to the south of Lake Tanganyika. Instead of taking the obvious route to Ujiji along the ivory road, he travelled southwards down the coast, landing at Mikindani Bay and heading into the interior along the Rovuma River, an area plagued by slave traders. His aim was to travel to the west of Lake Nyasa and locate a lake called Bangweulu that he believed would prove to be the true source of the Nile.

  Livingstone spent eight years wandering in the interior, searching for the source of a river where it did not exist. Lake Bangweulu was linked not to the Nile but to the Lualaba River, a tributary of the Upper Congo. During his travels, he railed against the depredations of the slave trade, yet lived most of the time in the company of Arab traders who profited from it, depending on them for food, shelter and medicine and for nursing him through illness. In 1869, after recovering in Ujiji from a severe bout of pneumonia, he decided to accompany an Arab trader who was leading an ivory expedition to Manyema, an area west of Lake Tanganyika, hoping to reach the Lualaba River, convinced that it flowed northwards towards the Nile. He expected the journey to last for no more than a few months. But he did not return for two years.

  Manyema was in the middle of an ivory boom. The area was swarming with Arab-Swahili traders plundering at will. They employed armed bands not only to hunt elephants but to extract ivory from the local population. At any sign of resistance, villagers were murdered, their houses looted and burned.

  It was not until March 1871 that Livingstone, delayed time and again by ill-health, managed to reach the Lualaba at a town called Nyangwe. While making one of his regular visits to the market in Nyangwe in July, he witnessed a massacre of African residents intended to terrify the local population into submission. Horrified by what he had seen, he abandoned plans to explore further westwards and returned to Ujiji sick, exhausted and destitute.

  Two days after his arrival, he was told of reports that a white man had left Kazeh heading for Ujiji.

  Henry Morton Stanley was an adventurous thirty-year-old Welsh journalist, masquerading as an American, commissioned by the New York Herald to mount an expedition into the African interior to find Livingstone. Crossing to the mainland from Zanzibar in March 1871, Stanley rode inland on a thoroughbred stallion at the head of a column which included porters, armed guards, cooks, a guide, an interpreter, two British sailors and a dog named Omar. His horse and many of his donkeys soon fell victim to the tsetse fly; one of the sailors died. Stanley himself suffered repeatedly from bouts of fever. But despite the setbacks he arrived in Kazeh after only eighty-four days. His way forward to Ujiji was then blocked by a war which broke out between Arab-Swahili traders in Kazeh and the Nyamwezi chief Mirambo and his ruga-ruga mercenaries. It was not until September that he was able to resume his search. He arrived in Ujiji on 10 November, two weeks after Livingstone had returned there. According to Stanley’s version of their encounter, he greeted him with the words: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’

  Livingstone was rejuvenated by Stanley’s arrival. ‘You have brought me new life,’ he told Stanley. Though Livingstone was recuperating from tropical ulcers and dysentery, within days he urged Stanley to join him on a return journey to the Lualaba. Stanley proposed instead a shorter trip to the north end of Lake Tanganyika to ascertain whether the Rusizi River flowed northwards out of the lake or southwards into it. Only six days after Stanley arrived in Ujiji, they set out by canoe for the Rusizi and after a two-week journey established that it flowed into it.

  Stanley tried to persuade Livingstone to return with him to Europe, but Livingstone was determined to continue his quest. They agreed to travel together to Kazeh so Livingstone could pick up supplies sent from the coast and parted company in March 1872.

  Livingstone died thirteen months later on 30 April 1873 in marshlands to the south of Lake Bangweulu, worn out by illness in his forlorn pursuit of the Nile’s sources, unaware that as a result of Stanley’s newspaper articles he had achieved worldwide fame or that his own endeavours had helped hasten the end of the slave trade in eastern Africa. When parting company from Stanley, Livingstone had handed him his journals and dispatches, including his account of the massacre at Nyangwe. Stanley took them to England, arriving in London in August 1872 just as the British government was considering what action to take over the slave trade. Livingstone’s evidence and the public outcry that ensued had a direct impact. In September 1872, the British government decided to enforce the abolition of the sale of all slaves, whether for domestic use in Zanzibar’s domains or for export. After months of procrastination, faced with the threat of a naval blockade, Sultan Barghash signed a treaty on 5 June 1873, agreeing to shut down all slave markets and to prohibit seaborne traffic in slaves. Zanzibar’s market was closed that day.

  According to the British consul in Zanzibar, John Kirk, the outlawing of the slave trade was ‘the most unpopular step’ a sultan had ever taken. ‘His people to a man [were] against him,’ wrote Kirk, for there was ‘not a house that [was] not more or less affected.’ Barghash’s authority was largely destroyed as a result. The Royal Navy had to be used to put down slavers’ rebellions at Mombasa and Kilwa in 1875 and 1876 and to force Barghash’s writ on other recalcitrant ports. British officers were placed in charge of recruiting and training a small army. In effect, in seeking to suppress the slave trade, the British had been impelled to establish a ‘new Sultanate’.

  The east coast trade in slaves had lasted for more than a thousand years. Until the nineteenth century, it remained at a relatively low level: modern estimates suggest that over a period of ten centuries in all 1.3 million slaves were shipped from the east coast. The increase that occurred in the nineteenth century was dramatic. The ‘northern’ trade with Arabia, Persia and India accounted for 347,000 slaves; the ‘southern’ trade from south-east Africa to the Americas via the Atlantic accounted for 440,000;
the Mascarenes took 95,000; the largest proportion, however – 769,000 – went to plantations on Zanzibar, Pemba and locations on the mainland. In sum, the nineteenth-century figure of 1.6 million surpassed the total amount of traffic in the previous thousand years.

  Even though the sultan’s ban curtailed much of the trade, it did not end it. Plantation work was still carried out by slave labour. And the numbers brought from the interior towards the coast continued unabated. Indeed, as a result of the ban, the value of slaves increased.

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  UNLOCKING THE CONGO

  With funds provided by the Daily Telegraph and the New York Herald, Henry Stanley returned to Zanzibar in September 1874, embarking on an epic journey that would have a lasting impact on the fortunes of Africa. He planned first to circumnavigate the Victoria Nyanza in a portable boat to ascertain that it was a single lake and the principal source of the river that flowed out at the Ripon Falls. Next, he intended to sail around Lake Tanganyika to find its outlet. Then he proposed to travel northwards down the Lualaba River, which Livingstone had reached in 1871, to establish whether it was linked to the Nile as Livingstone had insisted or whether it flowed into the Atlantic.

  Heading into the interior from the coastal town of Bagamoyo in November 1874, Stanley’s expedition included three European assistants and an African contingent consisting of some 200 porters, guards, guides and servants, sixteen of their wives and mistresses and ten children. Among the baggage they carried were separate sections of a twenty-four-foot boat that Stanley named Lady Alice in honour of a seventeen-year-old American heiress with whom he had fallen in love.

  Stanley reached the Victoria Nyanza in February 1875 and completed a circumnavigation of the lake in May. Along the way, he was given a cordial welcome by Buganda’s ruler, Mutesa. En route to Lake Tanganyika, he encountered the Nyamwezi warlord Mirambo with an army of 15,000 followers. Stanley was well aware of Mirambo’s bloodthirsty reputation and noted that ‘skulls lined the road to his gate’. But after their first handshake, Stanley felt himself ‘quite captivated’ with this ‘thorough African gentleman’. In his diary, he described Mirambo’s demeanour as ‘mild, soft-spoken and meek’, indicating ‘nothing of the Napoleonic genius which he has for 5 years displayed in the heart of Africa.’ At a ceremony at Mirambo’s tent, the two men became blood brothers, mingling the blood from cuts made in their legs.