Part IV
The standard work on Egypt’s history through thirteen centuries from the Arab conquest to the twentieth century is the two-volume Cambridge History of Egypt: Volume 1 (2008), edited by Carl Petry, covers the Islamic period from 640 to the Ottoman conquest in 1517; Volume 2 (2008), edited by Martin Daly, covers the period from the Ottoman conquest to the twentieth century.
Hizir Barbarossa (a name meaning ‘Redbeard’ in Italian) was so successful in his maritime jihad against European Christians that in 1533 he was summoned to Istanbul, appointed admiral of the Ottoman fleet and chief governor of North Africa, and given the honorary title of Khair ad-Din – ‘Goodness of the Faith’, the name by which he is best known today.
Using historical records, Robert Davis of Ohio State University has compiled a detailed account of European slave populations of the Barbary Coast. In Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (2004) he calculates that during the boom years of the white slave trade – the century from 1580 to 1680 – a ‘workable total’ for the number of white slaves held there ‘averaged out’ at about 35,000: 27,000 in Algiers and its dependencies; 6,000 in Tunis; and 2,000 in Tripoli and other smaller centres. With an annual attrition rate of about 25 per cent from death and redemption, this meant that some 8,500 new captives were needed each year to sustain a slave population of 35,000.
Taking the 250-year period during which corsair slaving was a significant factor in the Mediterranean, Davis estimates that the total number of slaves exceeded one million. ‘Between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.’ He comments:
The estimates arrived at here make it clear that for most of the first two centuries of the modern era, nearly as many Europeans were taken forcibly to Barbary and worked or sold as slaves as were West Africans hauled off to labour in plantations in the Americas. In the sixteenth century especially, during which time the Atlantic slave runners still averaged only around 3,200 annually, the corsairs of Algiers – and later Tunis and Tripoli – were regularly snatching that many or more white captives on a single raid to Sicily, the Balearics, or Valencia. Hardest hit in these escalating raids were the sailors, merchants and coastal villagers of Italy and Greece and of Mediterranean Spain and France.
For a general account, see Adrian Tinniswood’s Pirates of Barbary (2010). John Ward was perhaps the most notorious Barbary Coast renegade of his time. Born in Kent in about 1563, after serving in the English navy, he arrived in Tunis in 1605, ‘turned Turk’ in 1610, lived in a ruined castle and died of the plague in 1622. Giles Milton (2004) writes vividly about the exploits of Salé’s corsairs and the tyranny of Moulay Ismail.
A copy of Abdurrahman as-Sadi’s Tarikh es-Sudan was handed to the German traveller Heinrich Barth during his travels across western Sudan in the 1850s, providing Europeans for the first time with a glimpse of the region’s rich history. Barth was employed by the British government to gather intelligence and seek out commercial opportunities in the western Sudan. He landed in Tunis in December 1849 and spent nearly six years travelling, sending back dispatches to London and making detailed observations of the lands and peoples he encountered. His monumental five-volume Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, published in 1857–8, is regarded as a masterpiece of travel-writing. His journeys are examined by Steve Kemper (2012).
Mervyn Hiskett (1973) explores the life and times of Shehu Usuman dan Fodio. David Robinson examines Muslim societies in African history (2004) and covers Umar Tal’s Holy War (1985).
Advances in the study of Abyssinia were first made in the seventeenth century by Job Ludolf, a talented German linguist. Although he never visited the country, Ludolf formed a close working relationship with an Ethiopian monk named Gregorius during a visit to Rome in the 1650s. The results included grammars and dictionaries in Amharic and Ge’ez and a lengthy history, Historia Aethiopia, published first in Latin in 1681 and in English in 1682, with two English reprintings in 1684. Pedro Paez’s account Historia da Etiopia, though completed in 1620, was not published until 1946 (Livraria Civilização, Oporto, 3 vols). A Portuguese Jesuit missionary, Jerónimo Lobo, spent ten years in Abyssinia (1625–34) and wrote about his experiences in Itinerário which was translated into English by Samuel Johnson in 1735. An English translation from the Portuguese text was published in 1984. Paez reached the source of the Little Abbai in 1613, Lobo in 1629. A first edition of James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile was published in 1790. Miles Bredin (2000) examines Bruce’s life and travels.
Kaffa, the native region of coffee, is often assumed to be the origin of the name. However, the plant, the bean and the beverage are all known throughout Ethiopia as buna, from which the Arabic word bunn for the bean seems to have been derived. The Arabic term for the beverage is qahwa and the Turkish, kahve, and it is from this name that the word coffee was adopted by various European languages. Introduced into Europe from Arabia by the Ottoman Turks, it acquired the scientific name Coffea arabica.
Part V
Portuguese sailors in the fifteenth century gave the peninsula where the Bulom lived the name ‘Serra Lyoa’ or lion mountain, a name that changed over time to Sierra Leone. In his account of the Guinea coastline, titled Esmeraldo de situ orbis, written in about 1505, Duarte Pacheco Pereira explains how it came about:
Many people think that the name was given to this country because there are lions here, but this is not true. It was Pero de Sintra, a knight of Prince Henry of Portugal, who first came to this mountain. And when he saw a country so steep and wild he named it the land of the lion, and not for any other reason. There is no reason to doubt this, for he told me so himself. (Taken from the translation by G.H.T. Kimble, 1937)
Stephen Braidwood (1994) writes about London’s black poor, white philanthropists and the founding of Sierra Leone.
One of the difficulties that European geographers faced in identifying the course of the Niger was that not only did the river flow in different directions – north, east and south – over a distance of 2,600 miles, but various stretches were known locally by different names. Its upper reaches were called Joliba; its lower reaches Quorra; the Tuareg knew it as egerew n-igerewen. Nineteenth-century geographers listed twenty-nine names for the main river and nineteen for the Benue, its chief tributary. The twenty rivers of the Niger delta were thought to be no more than coastal wetlands. Anthony Sattin (2003) gives a vivid account of the endeavours of European explorers, including Daniel Houghton, Mungo Park, Gordon Laing and Hugh Clapperton.
Napoleon’s venture into Egypt is covered by Paul Strathern (2008). The account of the French occupation by Abd al Rahman al-Jabarti was republished in English in 2005. Khaled Fahmy deals with Muhammad Ali’s rise to power (2009) and the making of his army (1997).
France’s occupation of Algeria from 1830 is covered in English editions by Charles-Robert Ageron (1991) and Benjamin Stora (2001). John Kiser deals with the life and times of Emir Abd el-Kader (2008). There are several explanations for the origin of the name Pieds Noirs. Some say it may have been invented by Arabs describing the black boots that French soldiers wore. Others suggest that it was the colour of the feet of French wine growers in Algeria, trampling grapes to make wine. The term kouloughli comes from a Turkish word meaning literally ‘sons of slaves’. It was used to distinguish the half-caste offspring of Turks and Algerian women from janissaries who were slaves of Ottoman sultans.
The high mortality rate from malaria led the west coast of Africa to be known as the ‘white man’s grave’. Long before the Baikie expedition of 1854, quinine, an extract taken from the bark of a cinchona tree native to Peru, was used for medical purposes, but as a curative rather than as a prophylactic. Baikie proved that by taking quinine as a prophylactic, it could help overcome malaria. By the 1860s and 1870s quinine was in regular use by European missionaries, merchants and soldiers, opening the way for
the deeper penetration of Africa.
Part VI
The exodus of Boer communities from the Cape Colony in the 1830s into the interior of southern Africa, usually known as the Great Trek, gave rise to a powerful mythology about the Afrikaner people that was built up later in the nineteenth century to counter the menace of British imperialism. The mythology is unravelled expertly by Leonard Thompson (1985). Zulu history is covered by Donald Morris (1966) and by John Laband (1998). Xhosa history and the disaster of the cattle-killing of 1856–7 are tackled by J.B. Peires (1981, 1989). David Livingstone’s career as a missionary and as a traveller is explored by Tim Jeal (1973).
Part VII
A number of scholarly accounts examine Zanzibar’s role in the nineteenth century at the centre of the ivory, slave and spice trade: Edward Alpers (1975); Frederick Cooper (1977); and Abdul Sheriff (1987). Following in the wake of Alan Moorehead’s two-volume classic, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962), Tim Jeal (2011) writes vividly about the exploits of European adventurers searching for the source of the Nile, including Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Grant, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and Samuel Baker. Alfred Swann’s account of Fighting the Slave-Hunters in Central Africa was published in 1910.
In a diary entry that Stanley made on 8 April 1875, he described the kabaka’s capital at Nabulagala, now part of modern Kampala, as he approached it from Usavara (modern Entebbe):
It is sited on the summit of a hill overlooking a great and beautiful district. Great wide roads lead to it from all directions. The widest and principal road is that overlooked from the Durbar [council chamber] of the King’s Capital. It is about 400 feet wide and nearly 10 miles long . . . Either side is flanked by the houses and gardens of the principal men.
The Royal Quarters, Stanley wrote, were a vast collection crowning the eminence, ‘around which ran several palisades and circular courts, between which and the city was a circular road . . . from which radiated six or seven magnificent avenues’.
The flow of ivory from Africa in the nineteenth century reached around the world, to Europe, North America, India, China and Japan. African ivory was prized more than any other. It was finer-grained, richer in tone and larger than Indian ivory. East Africa on its own ranked as the world’s largest source of ivory throughout the century. It produced what was known as ‘soft’ ivory that was white, opaque, smooth, gently curved and easily worked. West Africa tended to produce ‘hard’ ivory that was less intensely white, but glossy and more translucent.
In the industrial era of the nineteenth century, the uses to which ivory could be put seemed unlimited. No other material responded so well to the cutting tools and polishing wheels of the Victorian age. It could be cut, sawed, carved, etched, ground or worked on a lathe. It could be stained or painted. It was so flexible that it could be turned into riding whips, cut from the length of whole tusks. It could be sliced into paper-thin sheets so transparent that standard print could be read through it. An ivory sheet displayed at the Great Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851 was fourteen inches wide and fifty-two feet long.
Ivory was in many ways the plastic of the era. Ivory workshops turned out a vast range of products: buttons, bracelets, beads, napkin rings, knitting needles, door-knobs, snuff-boxes, fans, shaving-brush handles, picture frames, paper-cutters, hairpins and hatpins, and jewellery of all kinds. Ivory handles were fitted to canes and umbrellas, to hairbrushes and teapots. Ivory inlay work embellished mirrors, furnishings and furniture. Above all, ivory became the ideal material for piano keys and billiard balls.
Mordechai Abir (1968) covers the era of Abyssinia’s Zamana Masafent. Sven Rubenson (1966) is the pioneer of scholarship on Tewodros. Philip Marsden provides a gripping account in The Barefoot Emperor (2007). One of the hostages, Henry Blanc (1868), wrote after his release:
In 1866 when I first saw him he was about 48 years old. His complexion was darker compared to the majority of his fellow Ethiopians. His nose is aquiline; his mouth is broad, but his lips are very small; his physique was medium but well built. No one was compared to him in his ability of mounted horse spear hurling; even the strongest ones, if they follow in the footsteps of Tewodros, they get tired. His eyes are slightly bulging in, smooth and flickering; when he is in a good mood, people were forced to like him, but when he is angry those eyes suddenly become blood-stained and seem to erupt fire. When the king is angry his overall condition is frightening; his black face turns ashy; his tight soft lips resemble to hold some white lining; his hair stands straight up. His overall behaviour is a good example of a loose and dangerous person. Nevertheless, despite his moody personality, no one was comparable to him in his canny ability of communication and reconciling differences. Even after I met him a few days before his death, he still acquired a king’s grace and charisma . . .
General Napier’s army took away a huge amount of booty including more than 1,000 Ge’ez and Amharic manuscripts which Tewodros had assembled. The expedition’s archaeologist selected 350 items judged to be the most valuable for the British Museum’s collection, which served as the basis of valuable scholarship on Ethiopia.
Part VIII
Peter Holt and Martin Daly (2011) provide an authoritative general history of Sudan. Holt’s work also includes a study of the Mahdist state (2nd edn, 1970). Daly’s work includes two volumes on the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1986, 1991). Richard Gray (1961) covers the history of southern Sudan between 1839 and 1889. Fergus Nicoll (2004) provides a detailed biography of the Mahdi. Michael Asher (2005) gives a colourful account of the Nile campaigns between 1883 and 1898, including the disaster that overtook General Hicks, General Gordon’s last stand in Khartoum and the battle of Omdurman. Father Joseph Ohrwalder’s account Ten Years’ Captivity in the Mahdi’s Camp was published in 1892.
Wilfrid Blunt was an Arabic-speaking traveller who had served in the diplomatic service for ten years. He arrived in Cairo in September 1881 assigned by the British government to assess Egyptian public opinion. He admired Colonel Urabi, looked on the Urabists as a source of optimism and held Islam in high regard. Blunt went to great lengths to arrange a defence at Urabi’s trial and corresponded with him frequently. In 1903, after Urabi had returned to Egypt, he recounted to Blunt his version of the events of 1878–82 which Blunt then incorporated into his Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, published in 1907.
Part IX
In his Economic History of South Africa (2005), Charles Feinstein provides a masterly account of the transformation that occurred in southern Africa as a result of the discovery of diamonds and gold in the nineteenth century. Rob Turrell (1987) and William Worger (1987) deal with the development of the diamond industry at Kimberley. Martin Meredith (2007) follows the careers of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger and covers the forty-year period from the discovery of diamonds through to the Anglo-Boer war and independence in 1910. Richard Cope (1999) explores the origins of the Anglo-Zulu war; Saul David (2004) gives a compelling account of the course of the war; and Jeff Guy (1979) describes the aftermath. In her novel The Story of an African Farm (1863), Olive Schreiner brilliantly evokes the semi-desert landscape of the Karoo.
Part X
Thomas Pakenham (1991) provides an outstanding narrative about Europe’s scramble for African territory. Neal Ascherson (1963) and Barbara Emerson (1979) tackle Leopold’s involvement. Among the many biographies of Henry Morton Stanley, Tim Jeal’s account (2007) deserves special mention. Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny (1965) deal expertly with Britain’s role in Africa in the nineteenth century, including the machinations of British politicians over Egypt, Uganda, west Africa and southern Africa.
In The Lunatic Express (1972), Charles Miller describes the hazards involved in the construction of the Uganda railway and the exploits of early white pioneers and politicians. An army engineer, Lt. Col. John Patterson (1907), wrote a best-selling book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, about his experiences in charge of const
ructing a bridge over the Tsavo River and the marauding lions with which he had to contend. Winston Churchill visited Uganda in 1907 and took tea with eleven-year-old Daudi Chwa in the kabaka’s palace, beneath portraits of Queen Victoria and King Edward: ‘a graceful, distinguished-looking little boy’ who, after overcoming his initial shyness, confessed to a passion for football.
Africa’s Great Rift Valley is the greatest rupture on the earth’s land surface. It was given the name by the English explorer John Gregory (1896) in his account of his journey in east Africa in 1893. He first caught sight of the Rift Valley at the Kikuyu Escarpment, just north-west of modern Nairobi. ‘We stopped there, lost in admiration of the beauty and in wonder at the character of this valley until the donkeys threw their loads and bolted down the path.’ Part of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya and northern Tanzania is still known as the Gregory Rift Valley. Several accounts by early white settlers in Kenya deserve mention. In The Flame Trees of Thika (1959) and The Mottled Lizard (1962), Elizabeth Huxley recounts in vivid colour the years of her childhood, growing up in a pioneer family at the beginning of the colonial era. In Out of Africa (1937) Karen Blixen describes her endeavours to establish a coffee farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills; a suburb of modern Nairobi is named after her.
Michael Crowder (1968) gives a masterly survey of west Africa facing European encroachment. Accounts by two European visitors to the Asante kingdom, Thomas Freeman (1843) and Thomas Bowdich (1819), provide vivid detail. Ivor Wilks (2nd edn, 1989) covers the rise of the Asante kingdom; Robert Edgerton (1995) deals with the fall.
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