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

by Frank T. Kryza

  The warlord Barca Gana, on horseback as sketched by Denham, was Sheikh El Kanemi’s top military commander. He led a troop of Meghara Arabs, accompanied by Denham, on an 800-mile slaving expedition from Kukawa southwest, deep into the territory of the Fulanis, who were subjects of El Kanemi’s principal rival, Sultan Mohammed Bello.

  It was typical of the soldier in Denham that he went off, ahead of the column, with six handpicked men, to reconnoiter the “battlefield.” It was beautiful verdant country even in the paralyzing heat; villages on their ridges of strategic high ground looked tranquil in the blazing light. Through his spyglass, Denham watched these farmers and herdsmen flee into the mountains as the column approached. Those too slow to run brought gifts of leopard skins and honey, prostrated themselves before Barca Gana, and threw sand over their heads in a gesture of obeisance.

  When the alarm sounded, two thousand Mandara horsemen, led by their sultan, joined the Bornu and Arab cavalry. The first resistance was swept aside and a town, with its surrounding villages burned and looted. The stronger young men and women were taken as slaves, but all the rest—men, women, and children—were speared without mercy and flung onto the burning ruins of their homes to die in agony.

  The column proceeded to a town where Fulani were entrenched on high ground behind a stream that could only be approached through a narrow pass between two hills, across which they had arrayed a barrier of pointed stakes. As the Arab horsemen rode into the pass, the Fulani launched a volley of arrows, some of them poisoned. Barca Gana lost two horses, shot from under him. Bhu Khallum took a poisoned arrow in the foot. A thick burnous protected Denham, but his horse was wounded.

  When the Bornu and Mandara troops saw the Arab horsemen stalled before the shower of arrows and spears, they fell back. The slave raid soon became a rout. With Fulani horsemen in pursuit, Denham followed the others into a wood to take cover. His wounded horse buckled and three angry Fulani caught him and hurled him to the ground. They were about to make a pincushion of him with their spears when a tiny accident saved him. His assailants realized that their victim was unlike anyone else—in fact, he was different from anyone they had ever seen, and so were his clothes. Were they to skewer him as he lay on the ground at their mercy, they would ruin that wonderful suit. So they decided to strip him first, then kill him. In the struggle to remove his clothes, they wounded his hands as he tried to hang on to his trousers. Then his attackers became so absorbed in arguing about who should get which article of clothing that Denham, naked, managed to scuttle away. He slipped under the belly of the nearest horse and ran into the forest.

  Denham and Clapperton were astonished by the prowess, ferocity, and sophisticated materiel of the troops of Sheikh El Kanemi and his neighboring rulers, with whom he was constantly at war. This heavily armed Fulani lancer, loyal to a vassal of Sultan Mohammed Bello, is covered with protective gear. He unhorsed Denham and nearly made a pincushion of him, reminding the Englishman of nothing so much as a European knight of medieval times. Note the lethal two-pronged spear

  He came to a stream at the bottom of a deep ravine. As he clutched a branch to let himself down, the branch gave way, dropping him twenty feet over a bank into the rushing water. Half drowned, he managed to crawl out on the far side, and there met Barca Gana and Bhu Khallum with six of their followers, still fighting. One of the two men appointed by El Kanemi to guard Denham, a man named Maraymy, saved his life. He dismounted and threw the exhausted and completely naked explorer across his horse, where Bhu Khallum covered him with a rough burnous. It was the merchant prince’s last action. The poisoned arrow that had pierced his foot earlier in the raid now took effect, and he fell from his horse, dead.

  Denham, exhausted and only half-conscious, heard Barca Gana shout, “Believers enough have died today; why bother about a kafir?” It was a fair question, but Maraymy would not listen. Without his aid, it is likely that no more would ever have been heard of Dixon Denham.

  In rags, his flesh wounds irritated by the coarse burnous and the bony horse on which he rode bareback, his skin crawling with lice, his wounds teeming with the fat larva of flies, Denham rode 180 miles back to Kukawa. “I suffered much,” he wrote, “both in mind and body, but complained not.” In spite of his pain, he was apparently alert enough to record that Mandara women were “singularly gifted with the Hottentot protuberance.”*

  WHILE FULANI TRIBESMEN were chasing Denham, Clapperton and Oudney, on their good days, were exploring the southern end of Lake Chad to see whether any of the rivers running out of it could be the Niger. The thin streams they found did not qualify, and they came to the conclusion that the Niger terminated in some other lake far south of Lake Chad. Mohammed El Kanemi was still adamant about not letting them travel south. He did give reluctant permission to Oudney to follow the ancient 500-mile road to Sokoto.

  In June the wet season began and the mission to Kukawa was stranded. Travel would be impractical until October. With the rains came fever. Malaria sent Clapperton and Hillman to their cots, and Oudney vomited incessantly, able to hold down nothing but sour milk three times a day. Only Denham, again, withstood the debilitating climate, and, as he said, “ate with cheerfulness.” The rains stopped, but it took Clapperton and Oudney months to recover.

  Dr. Oudney would never see Kano. In his last letter to Lord Bathurst, dated December 10, 1823, he announced that he and Clapperton would set out the next day on their search for the Niger and that “I am a great invalid and hope the present journey will recruit me a little. I am perfectly convinced the prospect of it is what alone has kept me up.” On December 14 Oudney and Clapperton left Kukawa. From Kano, 400 miles away, they intended to reach the capital of the Sokoto caliphate and meet its ruler, Sultan Mohammed Bello, for whom they had a letter of introduction from the sheikh of Bornu, El Kanemi, his quondam archenemy.

  The two leaders, usually at war, happened to be (briefly) on friendly terms. Since the expedition had no armed escort (the remaining Meghara Arabs, decimated in the slave raid, their leader Bhu Khallum dead, had long since slunk away to Tripoli), they depended on the friendship of the sheikhs whose territories they traversed. A caravan of merchants went with them, the only safe way to travel. There were twenty-seven Arabs and about fifty citizens of Bornu. The Arabs each led a horse as well as rode one, and were prepared to sell either or both.

  One absentee was Hillman, who was neither with Denham nor with Oudney. He stayed at El Kanemi’s court, where he had become hugely popular. Ever the resourceful sailor and carpenter, he rejuvenated two broken-down brass cannons he found in one of the sheikh’s warehouses, built wood gun carriages for them, cleaned them, made ammunition for them, and taught El Kanemi’s troops how to fire them. Their projectiles killed no one, but the terror they aroused through noise and smoke made them the “Star Wars” weapons of their day. In one skirmish, El Kanemi’s foes had no stomach to face such appalling armaments and surrendered on the spot after the first blast. Hillman then had the idea of making El Kanemi’s wives a sedan chair in which they could be carried around town in style by their slaves. This became the ne flus ultra status symbol in the kingdom, the equivalent of a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley a century later. Hillman, not much interested in exploration, was nonetheless a deeply resourceful man.

  Oudney’s caravan to Kano traveled along the pleasant banks of a river in full spate. Tracks of lion and hippo were everywhere, although the travelers rarely saw the animals themselves. Red and white antelopes would barely bother to move out of their path. Clapperton observed that most African game seemed wary of man, but not frightened of him. Flocks of ostriches were abundant, and incalculable numbers of waterbirds circled and called above the lakes.

  Roads were flooded and temporary rivers seemed to flow everywhere. The group managed to cross these streams on rafts made of papyrus reeds (of which Chad canoes are still made). It was a precarious and risky business, for all the camels and horses had to go across the same way. Of the company only Clapperton could swim
(in fact, the others had never seen a human swim and were amazed by his demonstration). The women of the caravan enlivened the crossings by raising a chorus of shrill screaming and whooping every time a body of water was spanned.

  Towns and villages along this immemorial route—for Clapperton soon realized that this had been a commercial highway for centuries—were at close intervals. Many inhabitants joined the campaign at the sight of the caravan, which swelled in numbers with every mile; it grew to more than five hundred strong—women, children, whole households making the journey.

  Beyond the Shua territory was a flat country of mimosa bushes. It was while crossing this flat, high plateau that Clapperton made the strange statement—contradicted by later travelers—that the temperature at night was so low in the mornings that ice appeared on the drinking water.

  Clapperton, astonished that it could freeze so near the equator, wrote to Warrington on December 27 that “we had such an intense cold that the water was frozen and the dishes and the water skins as hard as boards.” Lord Bathurst was incredulous when this news reached England. Word leaked out, and British newspapers opined that it was well known that in the desert in winter the raw mornings were intense, the sun provided no warmth, and the penetrating chill was not driven off by the sun until late morning, and so this revelation was accepted as true.

  Clapperton, the red-bearded athletic ex-naval officer who had made his reputation in the snows of the Pacific Northwest, was unperturbed, but the cold weakened the already sick Dr. Oudney The doctor was terminally ill. He rallied as the caravan reached the borders of the Hausa country, and Clapperton thought he might survive if he could get him to their destination quickly. Unfortunately, at this moment Duncara, an envoy from Sultan Bello, met the caravan. Thinking Dr. Oudney would be honored, he sent out word to surrounding villages that a white doctor with magic powers had come to heal them. Sick people in droves flocked to Dr. Oudney’s tent, and the enervated physician, who daily felt worse, was compelled to spend his time treating incurable diseases, from leprosy to sleeping sickness.

  The strain was too much for the ailing doctor. He told his friend, “I fear it is all over with me.” They left Duncara and reached the village of Murmur on January 11. There, in a weak, consumptive state, he collapsed and coughed out his lungs. On January 12, 1824, Clapperton helped Oudney to dress.

  He [Oudney] ordered the camels to be loaded at daylight and drank a cup of coffee…. When the camels were loaded, with the assistance of his servant and I, he came out of his tent. I saw then that the hand of death was upon him and that he had not an hour to live. I begged him to return to his tent and lay down, which he did and I sat down beside him. I observed the ghastliness of death in his countenance, and with unspeakable grief, witnessed his last breath, which was without a struggle or groan.

  Clapperton buried his friend at the foot of a mimosa tree, protecting the grave with a clay wall to keep off hyenas. He performed the burial service himself “with all the solemnity I could give.” Clapperton left instructions and money with the local headman for Oudney’s grave to be tended.

  Though he looked like a man of fifty, Oudney died at thirty-two after two years in Africa, victim of the tuberculosis he had contracted before he left Scotland. The Colonial Office, always miserly, outdid itself in Oudney’s case. His mother and sister, entirely dependent on him, received a single payment of 100 pounds sterling in remembrance of a man who had given his life in the service of his country.

  *A powerful rocket of the period used in war, either in the field or for bombardment. In the former case it was armed with a shell or shrapnel; in the latter, with an inextinguishable explosive material enclosed in a metallic case to set fire to buildings, tents, etc., under attack. It was guided by a long wooden stick. Clapperton brought a case of them as part of the expedition’s defenses.

  *The lake is still regarded as one of the oddest geographical phenomena on earth. There are in fact two lakes, but they are so close together that even from the air the division is impossible to make out. Lake Chad has always been regarded as a single body of water, about 150 miles long with a width that varies from 60 miles at the narrowest to 130 miles at its widest point. In Clapperton’s day, its area varied from 10,000 square miles in the dry season to more than twice that size in the wet. Today, it is a smaller body of water, with the surface averaging about 6,875 square miles (somewhat smaller than New Jersey). The greatest variabilities charted in recent times occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, with the area dropping to about 10,500 square miles in the mid-1980s, a change apparently related to the desertification of the surrounding region. The shoreline is ever shifting and in places it has been known to move as much as five miles in a single night. It is often impossible to see any water at all owing to the growth of papyrus reeds that clog much of the surface. The lake is so shallow that canoes can punt across it anywhere. It is possible to wade across, although there are occasional depths of as much as fifteen feet. Although the water is shallow, fish of all kinds abound, some said to be as large as sharks.

  *Or worse—sodomy was then a capital crime in the British armed forces, and sailors convicted of “buggery” were routinely hanged.

  *A plundering and destructive raid to capture slaves, from the Arabic.

  *Denham was probably referring to attractive breasts, but he could also have meant development of the labia minora, or of the buttocks. Whatever his focus, it is apparent that his near-death experience had done nothing to inhibit his always keen interest in the women of Africa.

  Chapter Ten

  THE RACE BEGINS

  DISHEARTENED, Clapperton pushed on to Kano, the great trading city of the central Sudan whose goods were sold as far away as the markets of the Mediterranean. At the city gates, he spent all night brushing his faded but still imposing naval uniform, polishing its brass buttons, trying to put a sharp crease in his trousers, for no white man had ever set foot in Kano.

  He entered the city on Tuesday, January 20, 1824, resplendent in his dress blues, but noted that “I might have spared myself the pains I had taken with my toilet, for not one individual turned his head to gaze at me, but all, intent on their own business, allowed me to pass by without notice or remark.” It was a frigid reception. The urbane citizens of Kano (no less than modern city dwellers) were hard to impress. Nor did Kano overwhelm Clapperton.

  “I had no sooner passed the Gates,” he wrote, “than I felt grievously disappointed, for from the flourishing description of it given by Arabs, I expected to see a city of surprising Grandeur: I found, on the contrary, the houses nearly a quarter of a mile from the walls, and in many parts scattered into detached groups, between large stagnant pools of water.”

  The great walled city of Kano, the largest commercial center in West Africa, at the time of Clapperton’s visit there in 1824. Its heavily fortified perimeter measured twelve miles, enclosing a population of about forty thousand.

  Clapperton spent a month inspecting the city, whose population he estimated at between thirty and forty thousand. Kano, a major slave trade center, was surrounded by a thirty-foot-high clay wall with fifteen wood gates reinforced with iron plates. The gates were closed at sunset. Vast though it was—the city walls were twelve miles in circumference—the city itself was a huge collection of damp huts, honeycombed by twisting, rat-infested lanes. There were large basins of stagnant wetlands into which the city’s garbage was piled. These fetid middens held the bodies of animals as well as those of unburied cadavers. Fevers, dysentery, and other diseases were rife. It was a dismal place, foul, with unbreathable air.

  In spite of these drawbacks, Clapperton was impressed by Kano’s size and its obvious importance as a central market for people who came there to trade from as far away as 500 miles in all directions. Never a prolific writer, he devoted pages of his diary to descriptions of this huge “souk,” the incredible variety of trade goods, produce, and manufactured goods he saw.

  He took several days to examine the slave mark
et. The stench from pools of sewage and open gutters was overpowering. Clapperton visited the sheds where slaves were kept before shipment north, watching buyers perform their inspection “somewhat in the same manner as a Voluntary Seaman is examined by a surgeon on entering the Navy: he looks at the tongue, eyes, and limbs, and endeavors to detect rupture [hernia] by a forced cough.”

  Clapperton concluded that “slavery is here so common, or the minds of the slaves are so constituted, that they appeared much happier than their masters; the women, especially, singing with the greatest glee all the time they are at work.” Clapperton was not as emotionally ravaged by the horrors he saw as Lyon.

  Clapperton observed that Kano had been a busy cosmopolitan center when London was still a village. The city had been attacked so often in its thousand-year history that the surrounding villagers had a long tradition of knowing precisely what to do when war drums sounded. At the first hint of danger they brought their families and possessions into the shelter of the city walls, which had deep pits dug at their outer perimeter, like a moat. In the bottom of this moat were razor-sharp stakes, embedded at such an angle so as to impale anyone who tried to scale the barricades. The fifteen city gates were enclosed within towers, heavily defended. Inside the city, springs provided a renewable supply of fresh water. Cultivated land was set aside to grow food, so that the besieged could not be starved.

  Clapperton paid an official call on Hajji Hat Salah, Sultan Bello’s vizier in Kano, governor of the city, where he was received courteously enough but without much special treatment. White men, although a new species to the hajji,* were all more or less in a day’s work. The visit couldn’t compare in importance to the vizier’s immediate job, which was to organize a skirmish. Apparently, a local chief had stepped out of line and needed discipline. Hat Salah promised Clapperton the punitive expedition would be over in a week, and that he would be free to take him to Sokoto to present him to the sultan. Clapperton gave the vizier a thermometer, delighting the hajji, who called it, not inappropriately, a “watch of heat.” In return the explorer got the use of a guest hut next to the vizier’s, unfortunately surrounded by a noisome swamp.