Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

by Frank T. Kryza

  By this time, Oudney had chest pains and a bad cough, and Hillman was ill with fever. But sickness and quarrels were momentarily forgotten at the sight of the water.

  “By sunrise I was on the border of the lake,” wrote Denham, “and very quietly sat down to observe the scene before me. Pelicans, cranes four and five feet in height were scarcely so many yards from my side; immense spoonbills of a snowy whiteness, widgeon, teal, yellow-legged plover, and a hundred species of (to me at least) unknown water fowl.”

  At the time of the explorers’ arrival, the kingdom of Bornu was the most powerful state between the Niger and the Nile. It controlled Lake Chad and one of the main caravan routes to Tripoli, as well as major cities and the royal capital, Kukawa, less than fifteen miles southwest of the lake. To the west, between Bornu and the Niger, lay the Sokoto caliphate, ruled by a Muslim reformer, Sultan Mohammed Bello, “the Beloved of God.”

  Bornu’s despotic but much-loved ruler, the great warrior and military genius Sheikh Alameen Ben Mohammed El Kanemi, receiving Denham, Clapperton, and Oudney at his palace at Kukawa, February 17, 1823, from a sketch Dixon Denham made of him on that day

  On February 16, 1823 the caravan reached Kukawa. The next day, the English mission was formally received by Sheikh Alameen Ben Mohammed El Kanemi, Bornu’s ruler, who had spread Islam throughout his realm. The scene marked the passing of an age. It was the first meeting between the white men who would colonize Africa and a ruler deep in the impenetrable hinterland no European had previously been able to reach.

  Now the soldier, the sailor, the surgeon, and the shipwright, in English uniforms set off by turbans and Turkish boots, stood in a darkened room before an African sheikh in a rich blue robe with a gold fringe, who sat cross-legged on a rug flanked by armed guards. The Englishmen were the official emissaries of a European government, the first of an endless line of civil servants who would be sent on African duty for the next 150 years.

  On that day and at that moment, the last barrier to the inaccessible African heartland was crossed forever.

  *This could be translated many ways, of which this is the least offensive.

  Chapter Nine

  UNDISCOVERED EMPIRES

  BEFORE SUNRISE the desert sky turned a leathery brown and then slowly darkened, releasing the outlines of cloud, palates of ocher that massed up from Lake Chad like the veil of ashes on the slopes of a volcano. The city of Kukawa shuttered itself tightly, as if against a gale. Gusts of air and a thin, sour rain were the only forerunners of the darkness that blotted out the day.

  Unseen in the gloom of shuttered rooms, sand invaded everything—clothes, papers, teaspoons, in locks, beneath fingernails, a nasty grit on the tongue…. Harsh, wailing air dried throats and noses and made eyes raw. Sand settled into the lake like black choking dust into the lungs of a chimney sweep.

  Along the margins of wooden doors, thin white drifts appeared, as of young snow. The reeds along the water’s edge swayed like ghosts. From time to time a cracked blast of lightning swept down from the heavens and shook the whole city so that one had the illusion that everything—trees, minarets, monuments, people—had been caught up in the eddy of a whirlpool that would gently suck the whole city into the bowels of the earth.

  The British explorers told Sheikh Mohammed El Kanemi that they had come “to see the country merely, and to give an account of its inhabitants, produce, and appearance; as our king was desirous of knowing every part of the globe.” They made Kukawa their base for nearly a year, weathering the frequent sandstorms and setting out on exploratory excursions when they could. They exchanged presents with the sheikh, giving him a double-barreled shotgun and a pair of pistols. Clapperton amazed the local population by firing three Congreve rockets* tied to the tips of spears. El Kanemi delighted in their company and insisted on keeping them close by. He warned that leaving Bornu was dangerous, claiming that if anything happened to them the bashaw would invade his country. “The bashaw’s letter,” El Kanemi said, “orders me to protect you. Once over my borders, in the land of the treacherous Hausas and Fulanis, I can do nothing. You cannot go.” He considered the territory south especially hazardous.

  The explorers complied. Denham gave the sheikh a music box, which intrigued him. Sensing an opening, Denham asked for permission to explore Lake Chad. To clinch matters, El Kanemi asked for, and received, six of the Congreve rockets, with which he planned to scare the daylights out of his enemies.

  Denham went off early one morning to explore the lake. At the town of Bree (Bre) he persuaded the alkaid, the chief of the town, to act as his guide. At the lakeshore the cool, clear morning turned swiftly to blazing heat. The shifting inland sea was a swampy world of papyrus and water and countless islands. High grass, tamarind, and locust trees shaded its banks. The shores were teeming with wild animals, a bounty of birdlife, and an orchestra of flying bugs, especially mosquitoes. The first night out, Denham recorded, was purgatory, but on the second, acting on the advice of the alkaid, Denham slept inside a ring of cattle and not a single mosquito bit him. It was a trick he never forgot.

  Denham spooked three elephants, a male with two females, at close range. The females wandered off but the male turned, and for a moment Denham thought he was in real danger. The expected charge never came. Instead, the lumbering bull inhaled a trunkful of sand and, with deliberate and accurate aim, showered it on the explorer. It was an effective defense—by the time Denham cleared his eyes of the stinging bath, the elephants were gone. Later that trip, he came downwind of a herd of 150 elephants and studied them at his leisure, sketching many of them; this time they ignored him.

  Lake Chad, about twice the size of Massachusetts at the time Denham and Clapperton discovered it, exercised a weird, hypnotic fascination on Denham.* It was surveyed for the first time early in the twentieth century but remains something of a mystery in the twenty-first, a colossal puddle on the earth’s surface which may, at one time, have been part of an inland sea stretching far into what is now Nigeria. Despite its lack of depth (or because of it), the lake is capable of producing ferocious storms that rip across it without warning, much feared by the local fishermen. Such storms can capsize pirogues, the fishing and transport craft made of papyrus reed by the locals. Charts of the lake are useless. The islands of the archipelago on its eastern shore have never been counted, for many appear and disappear overnight. Denham traveled around most of the perimeter of the giant body of water, taking bearings. One of El Kanemi’s warriors had told him that circumnavigating the lake on foot would take five months.

  Only one river, the Shari (Chari-Logone), fed the lake, and none left it. Yet it remains a freshwater lake. The Yobe made periodic contributions during the rainy season, but most of the time the Yobe was only a patchwork of puddles. Narrow channels wove intricate patterns through the forests of reeds. In Denham’s time, the men of the islands, the Boudoumi (“men of the grass”), were hairy, physically powerful, and lived apart from their neighbors. They were also piratical, and much feared by El Kanemi’s subjects. Denham recorded that they were among the minority of peoples he had heard of who practiced castration to control population. They paid no homage to El Kanemi or the four main tribes surrounding the lake, and they would fight anyone at the drop of a hat. Denham wisely left them alone.

  Back at camp, Oudney and Clapperton were so sick they rarely left their cots. Denham was bursting with good health and enjoyed the blandishments of pretty black women who gave him what he called “shampoos”—body massages with oil. These “shampoos” were thorough enough to make him write after one session: “Verily I began to think that I not only deserved to be a Sultan, but that I had already Commenced my Reign.”

  Denham’s romps with local women left him time to magnify his quarrel with Clapperton. Relations between the two men reached the breaking point on April 11, when, in a letter to Clapperton, Denham made an insinuation that permanently poisoned the atmosphere of the mission and forever ruined any hope that the two would g
et along.

  I should neglect my duty [he wrote], were I any longer to delay setting before you in the strongest light I am able the continued extreme impropriety of your conduct both public and private…. [W]hen the line of conduct you pursue had the effect of injuring our respectability and National Character in the eyes of those people on whom we are but too dependent for aid in prosecuting the orders of the British government, it becomes necessary to obviate the consequences…. [T]he servant of the mess has now complained to me of your having beaten him here, of your having drawn a pistol on him while on the road, threatening to shoot him…. [T]he expression I myself heard you use toward this unfortunate person was “You B——r [bugger, i.e., a homosexual], I’ll pick your teeth for rings in my ears.” I have thought it right to state the foregoing facts for your serious consideration and as far as I know myself without the slightest feeling of ill will.

  Denham went on to make other accusations, alleging Clapperton to have been “rude and violent,” using “offensive abuse and degrading epithets,” and to have “in my presence insulted and abused” Bhu Khallum and his officers. Clapperton, an ex-sailor, inured to the hard discipline and violent language of seamen, swore and cursed, especially when under strain, and he candidly admitted it. But he was puzzled by the opening paragraph of Denham’s complaint—that curious sentence, referring to Clapperton’s “impropriety of … conduct both public and private.” Clapperton showed the letter to Dr. Oudney, asking him to support a protest to the Colonial Office. Oudney, who had often been the butt of Denham’s high-handed malice, happily complied.

  You have requested my opinion on a letter from Major Denham, containing accusations highly prejudicial to your character. I feel glad I have witnessed most of them and can place them in a light totally different from him. How your conduct, public or private, has or will tend to injure the interests of the Mission, I am at a loss to conceive.… In concluding, I cannot but express my indignation at the vileness of the letter.… It indicates a mind void of every drop of the milk of human kindness, a mind that hordes [sic] its venom to sting when it may find an opportunity—a man that takes memoranda on the conduct of others is one that ought to be expelled from society, he is a nuisance, he is a curse.

  On April 16, 1823, Clapperton and Oudney confronted Denham, asking that he clarify what he had said about Clapperton’s conduct “both public and private.” Denham replied: “Oh you must have heard it surely…. [I]t was the conversation of everyone, our own servants were talking about it every night over the fire.” Oudney said he knew nothing about it. Denham then dropped his bombshell. He announced that it was common knowledge among the Arabs of the caravan that Clapperton had had a homosexual relationship with one of his Arab servants.

  Clapperton was aghast. To make such a charge in pre-Victorian England, in front of a witness, was more than enough to ruin a man’s career, and if proved, to send him to prison.* If untrue, it was the worst possible slander, particularly since Denham must have realized it would reach the Colonial Office, where malicious rumors bred like flies on a carcass. Clapperton asked Oudney to make an immediate investigation, while Denham, having planted his accusation, made plans to go on a slaving expedition with Abu Bakr Bhu Khallum.

  Clapperton wrote to Warrington about the incident Denham had apparently been referring to: “When we were encamped at Achenouma [about thirty-three miles due north of Bilma], an Arab … came into his [Denham’s] tent and told him that I had wanted to commit the foulest crime in nature with an Arab named Abdullahi who was in my service and that the Arab had gone to complain of me.”

  When Clapperton asked that the Arab be questioned, he could not be found; he had fled the caravan. Clapperton asked Warrington for a full investigation “to clear my name from the most horrid stigma.”

  Meanwhile, the result of Oudney’s probe, in which he was helped by Hillman, surprised no one. The evidence of all who were questioned was that a rumor about “buggery” had been floated by an Arab servant Clapperton had dismissed. Most of the camp servants, including Hillman, had heard the tale and given it no credence. The shower of letters to Warrington continued:

  No one [wrote Oudney] that knows Clapperton, will ever listen to such a charge against him…. [T]he whole has so much improbability that the most disinterested would pronounce it a vile, malicious report…. Your judgement will direct what is necessary to be done, whether to investigate more into the business, or let the matter rest.

  Though Dixon Denham would accuse him of sexual improprieties with a man, Hugh Clapperton’s journals are filled with elaborate drawings of the women ’but few of the men) he encountered on the long journey to Lake Chad, including this beauty who posed for him at Sockna, in what is today central Libya.

  Regrettably, Oudney added that “Abdullahi is a man above forty and very ugly.” Oudney only wanted to show the implausibility of Denham’s accusation, but in doing so he implied that had the Arab been younger and less ugly, it would have been harder to disprove. Abdullahi had been hired by Clapperton but let go after the carcass of a young camel disappeared in the night, apparently stolen.

  Warrington, more straitlaced in matters of sexual propriety than in his other vices, was as appalled as Oudney and Clapperton and felt it incumbent on him not to let the matter fester. He forwarded copies of the letters to the Colonial Office, with a cover letter, written on November 4, 1823, in his accustomed florid style:

  It is indeed painful to be under the necessity of referring to a subject which must be as disgusting to you to read, as it is to me to write.… A more infamous, vile, diabolical insinuation to blast the reputation of a man was never before resorted to, and I have not the smallest hesitation, in the presence of my God, to say that it is false, malicious, and conspiring against the future happiness of an individual…. Lieutenant Clapperton, I know little of, but in that little, I would with my life answer for him that he would never disgrace human nature by such Foul and Damnable Conduct. Dr. Oudney acquits him, the examination acquits, and Mr. Hillman acquits … as to any attempt to reconcile, it would now indeed be fruitless.

  The Colonial Office was quick to reply that after a careful study of the documents, no suspicion whatever attached to Clapperton’s character. On the other hand, if Denham had other evidence, it was his duty to produce it immediately. If Denham disassociated himself from the charges, “Lord Bathurst has only to express his hope that the discussion may be buried in oblivion.” Bathurst wrote personally to Denham that he must either substantiate the charges or return at once to England (a care er-ending move).

  Denham, realizing his tale-telling had backfired, wrote back immediately that he had always been sure of Clapperton’s innocence. In a letter to Warrington of May 10, 1824, he wrote that he himself had “ever believed the report to be a very wicked and malicious falsehood.” Characteristically, he could not help adding that the report arose from Clapperton’s “constantly associating with the lowest Arabs.” Denham concealed from Oudney and Clapperton the fact that he had made this official disavowal, thus leaving Clapperton unaware that he had been cleared. He refused to apologize to Clapperton and the mission proceeded with its members hopelessly at each other’s throats. Warrington eventually discovered Denham’s omission, rebuking him for it in a letter of August 18: “You Acquit him, and being persuaded of his innocence, it is to be lamented that you did not communicate that Opinion to Dr. Oudney and Lieut. Clapperton. It would have saved them much unhappiness….”

  But Clapperton’s unhappiness was Denham’s joy, and even after receiving this reprimand from Warrington, he did not apologize.

  Without excusing Denham’s conduct, it should be said that there was probably some truth in his description of Clapperton’s short-tempered treatment of the expedition’s servants. Clapperton daily lost his temper and often became loudly angry, swearing like the sailor that he was. As Warrington once wrote of him: “I never sat down to table with Mr. Clapperton without feeling a dread that something disagreeable woul
d happen before we separated.” It is likely that Denham received more than his share of Clapperton’s ill-tempered harangues, peppered with foul language.

  To escape the growing controversy over his accusation, Denham decided in May to accompany a large slave razzia* heading two hundred miles southeast into Mandara country, near the town of Bagarmi. The English government was by now squarely abolitionist and Denham had been expressly forbidden to take part in or otherwise sanction slave raids. But he could not resist the call to action.

  Under the guise of a pacification mission to help the sultan of Mandara put down invading Fulani tribesmen, two thousand horsemen left Kukawa under the command of Sheikh El Kanemi’s top general, a Hausa warrior named Barca Gana. Denham rode in the front ranks with Abu Bakr Bhu Khallum and his troops of Meghara Arabs, who hoped to kidnap hundreds of new slaves for the ghastly march back to Tripoli.

  One of the soldiers asked Bhu Khallum whether Denham was a Muslim. “No,” said Bhu Khallum, “he is a miskin [wretched being]; they do not believe in the book; they do not pray five times a day; they are not circumcised … but they will see their errors and die Muslim, for they are beautiful people and will not perish as the devil’s children.”

  Denham’s thermometer showed 113 degrees in the shade. The army of 2,000 marched blindly in the dust which rose in choking clouds from horses’ hooves. Among the fierce Meghara there was none of the hypocrisy that cloaked slaving expeditions. They were aggressors, and they gloried in it—bandits out for easy pickings, loot, women, and slaves, with enthusiasm as high as discipline was low. They were sure nothing could withstand their firearms, those wonderful English guns. Backed by the thousands of Bornu soldiers, they clearly were irresistible. All along the route, tribesmen thought so too, and recruits poured in to take their share of the anticipated spoils.