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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Clapperton became ill as the drawn-out days of worried waiting for the return of Hat Salah dragged on. He passed the time eavesdropping in the market. He was particularly interested in a conversation he overheard between two Arab travelers detailing the course of the Niger. They spoke of its great length, strange changes in direction, and its mysterious metamorphosis into an immense delta swamp through which it entered the Atlantic as a number of separate rivers. Mungo Park had already proved two-thirds of this summary of the Niger’s course, but over the remaining third a veil of mystery still hung. Nobody in Europe knew where the river found the sea. Here was a simple and obvious explanation (and the correct one!), but Clapperton, though he recorded it faithfully, did not assign it much importance. He wrote: “I place little dependence on such accounts.” Although the extensive, swampy territory known as the Oil Rivers was well known to English sailors, nobody guessed it was the delta of the Niger.

  Hajji Hat Salah returned in two weeks a chastened man. The upstart prince he had gone out to thrash had turned the tables on him; Kano’s army was vanquished. The hajji was in no mood to face Sultan Bello, and so let his white visitor leave town alone.

  Before setting off, Clapperton received news of the lost explorer Friedrich Hornemann, the German sent out by the African Association in 1798 and the first man to cross the Sahara from Egypt by the Fezzan and the Aïr Mountains. Accounts of the crossing had come back to Europe through Arab traders and Hornemann was thought to have reached the Niger River. He disappeared, presumably killed by disease or treacherous guides. An account of his travels as far as Murzuk had been published in London in 1802, but his later journals were never recovered. Clapperton heard from traders in Kano that the facts as known were all true, but the missing journals never turned up.

  Weak, gaunt, and light-headed from bouts of malaria, Clapperton pushed on to Sokoto, 250 miles northwest of Kano. He got there thanks to an escort Sultan Bello sent out to meet him, crossing a Hausa state still hostile to the caliphate. Clapperton, trying to look his best when representing his king, entered Sokoto on March 16, 1824, wearing “my lieutenant’s coat, trimmed with gold lace, white trousers, and silk stockings, and to complete my finery, I wore Turkish slippers and a turban.”

  Sokoto was a walled city with two mosques and flat-roofed houses whose waterspouts of baked clay, projecting from the eaves, resembled tiers of guns. It was a smaller, cleaner, more comfortable place than Kano, though also populated by traders and merchants.

  Clapperton found Sultan Mohammed Bello sitting on a carpet in a thatch-roofed cottage dressed in a blue cotton robe with a white muslin turban worn like a Tuareg, concealing the lower part of his face. He was reading, alone. The sultan, a youthful forty-four, looking “noble,” just under six feet tall, with “a short curling black beard, a small mouth, a Grecian nose, and large black eyes,” had a wide reputation as a man of learning. He began a theological discussion with Clapperton, who demurred, saying that he was “a Protestant … who having protested more than two centuries ago against the suggestions, absurdities and abuses practiced in those days, had ever since professed to follow simply what was written in the book of Our Lord Jesus.”

  The sultan returned books belonging to Denham that his agents had retrieved in Mandara during the failed slave raid, including a copy of Sir Francis Bacon’s essays and Denham’s journal. Bello ingenuously wondered aloud why his old friend the sheikh of Bornu had sent an army into his territory, and why an English explorer (Denham) had joined it. Clapperton replied lamely (and untruthfully) that Denham had merely been touring the country. Dropping this awkward subject, the sultan asked what each book contained. He wanted Clapperton to read aloud to him, saying that he found the spoken sound of English quite beautiful.

  Although Clapperton was the first European to come to his court, Sultan Bello was well informed about the civilizations north of the Mediterranean. Clapperton, for his part, had to admit that Europeans knew nothing about the kingdoms of Africa. He stated that “my people had hitherto supposed yours devoid of all religion and not far removed from the condition of wild beasts, whereas I now find them to be civilized, learned, humane, and pious.”

  That afternoon, at a second audience, Clapperton presented the sultan with presents from George IV, including ornamented pistols, razors, gunpowder, a spyglass, a silver tea tray, a sextant, and a compass. He showed Bello a planisphere of the heavenly bodies, discovering that the sultan knew the signs of the zodiac, some of the constellations, and many of the stars. He was also interested in the sextant, the “looking glass of the sun.” Clapperton explained that with the compass the sultan could find the direction of Mecca to pray.

  “Everything is wonderful,” the sultan said, “but you are the greatest curiosity of all.” Then he asked: “What can I give that is most acceptable to the King of England?”

  “The most acceptable service you can render to the King of England,” replied Clapperton, “is to co-operate with His Majesty in putting a stop to the slave trade.”

  “What?” asked the sultan. “Have you no slaves in England?”

  “No. Whenever a slave sets foot in England, he is from that moment free.”

  “What do you do then for servants?”

  “We hire them for a stated period, and give them regular wages.”

  “God is great!” exclaimed the ruler. “You are a beautiful people.”

  Hugh Clapperton was an eager, honest, but naive ambassador for his country, and he faithfully presented England’s position on slavery, though he knew this might offend Bello. His arguments seemed outwardly to impress the sultan, who promised his support. Bello agreed, too, that trade between the two nations was desirable.

  The African king had a detailed grasp of international affairs. He knew that the English navy had sunk the Algerian fleet in 1816 and that England had begun to colonize India.

  “You were at war with Algiers,” he told Clapperton, “and you killed a number of the Algerines.”

  Clapperton replied that they were “a ferocious race,” who made slaves of Europeans.

  “You are the strongest of Christian nations,” the sultan said, “you have subjugated all of India.”

  Clapperton replied that England had simply given India “good laws and protection.”

  Though Clapperton was a man of the world and Bello had never traveled far from his borders, it is likely that Bello could see at a glance that his visitor was a man of little finesse or subtlety, but one of integrity. The sultan himself, as a cultured African who ruled a vast kingdom, was master of the two qualities Clapperton most lacked. But in a world where everyone was subtle and finesse was the order of the day, Clapperton’s simplicity must have made a startling and positive impression. Bello clearly liked Clapperton.

  It was no accident that Bello raised the concern, shared by Arabs, of England’s intentions in India, as well as the British attack on Algiers. In the case of India, Bello’s advisers believed that England had sent smooth-talking emissaries first, followed by hard-hitting merchants, completing the job of annexation with an armed force. This was the model they feared the English would now use in Africa. (They were right.) To Bello, England had conquered India by trickery. Though he knew the English were empire builders and that he ran risks by establishing ties with them, the sultan was probably tempted by the prospect of trade with what he recognized to be the wealthiest nation on earth. In particular, he seemed willing to run the risk of an English presence in his dominion for the sake of the firearms that would give him military superiority over his neighbors.

  He asked Clapperton specifically whether “the King of England would give him a couple of guns, with ammunition and some rockets.” Clapperton assured Bello of “His Majesty’s compliance with his wishes, if he would consent to put down the slave trade on the coast.”

  Clapperton, a natural salesman, promoted trade with England as an irresistible opportunity. The sultan, with England’s help, would become the greatest prince in Africa
. If he built a trade port on the coast, he would have his own navy. The English would show him how to build ships, and with ships he would be able to trade with the rest of the world, send pilgrims to Mecca by the safer sea route, and appoint ambassadors to the capitals of Europe.

  The sultan promised to let the English build a town on the coast (an easy commitment for the landlocked ruler to make—his borders did not extend to the ocean). While Clapperton and Bello were talking, it dawned on powerful Arab merchant groups in Sokoto that the British proposals would destroy their caravan trade. Slaves were their main “product,” along with gold and ivory, and the trans-Saharan route would remain profitable only if no direct competition from the sea threatened it. Now here was a white man asking for the abolition of slavery and the establishment of a river trade route to the Great Ocean. Clapperton’s proposals must have horrified the sultan’s Arab advisers and their influential trader friends, and the navy lieutenant was not enough of a diplomat to quell the widespread (and perspicacious) suspicion of Britain’s aims.

  Sultan Bello’s final position was ambiguous. He told Clapperton that he welcomed trade with England, but pressured him to interrupt his trip and return at once to Bornu, warning him of the great danger attendant on continuing south to find the Niger.

  “Think of it with prudence,” Bello told him.

  Bello’s men cautioned Clapperton’s servants not to risk their lives trying to traverse lands rife with warring tribes. Clapperton discovered that no guide was willing to take him.

  The dilemma posed by Sultan Bello’s conflicting interests is wonderfully illustrated by his discussion of the Niger. The sultan “drew on the sand the course of the River Quorra [the Niger] which he also informed me entered the sea at Fundah [250 miles north of the Niger-Benue confluence]. By his account, the river ran parallel to the coast for several days’ journey, being in some places only a few hours, in others a day’s journey from it. Two or three years ago, the Sea, he said, closed up the mouth of the river and its mouth was at present a day or two further south; but during the rains, when the river was high, it still ran into the Sea by the old channel.”

  This information, more or less accurate, shook Clapperton’s belief that the river terminated in a lake, and he asked Bello to have the map drawn on paper so that he could take it back to England. But the map, when he got it, contradicted what Bello had drawn in the sand. It showed the Niger flowing east, toward the Nile, confirming the erroneous ideas of England’s leading geographers. Somewhere along the chain of command, from sultan to mapmaker, the river’s direction had been diverted, very likely to mislead the British. That could be why Bello refused to let Clapperton proceed; he didn’t want further reconnaissance to provide the English with more accurate geographical information.

  The sultan brought up the subject of Mungo Park, the only other white man in history to have penetrated his kingdom. In 1805, after following the Niger for nearly two thousand miles (from Bamako to Bussa), the famous Scotsman had disappeared. He was thought to have been killed by tribesmen at Bussa Falls. At the time of Clapperton’s meetings with Bello, Park’s death was still a mystery. He was supposed to have been killed by arrows from tribesmen as his canoe got wedged between rocks at the head of the falls, but Bello said of this hypothesis that “it was the wet season and a canoe could not have got caught in the rocks.” Park’s missing journal, he added, was safe with the sultan of Yauri.

  Yauri was only a five-day journey from Sokoto, but the sultan would not allow Clapperton to go there to retrieve the papers. The whole country, he said, was in a state of upheaval. This was certainly true, but it was unfortunate, for the last part of the Scot’s famous journal has never been found. Clapperton believed that the suppression of Park’s notes was the deliberate policy of Bello. He wrote that “the Arabs conspired to prevent me finding [Park’s diary], which might lead to England stepping in and stealing the Soudan trade.” No doubt it was possible, but if so, why would Sultan Bello have mentioned Mungo Park at all? It is likely that Bello, with an exaggerated opinion of the powers of the British, thought they knew far more about Park’s fate and Bello’s domains than they did. His initial candor about the Niger’s course is another indication of this. Certainly, Park’s arrival in the area had been a momentous event, akin to the landing of extraterrestrials. Bello would have found it virtually impossible not to mention it.

  To proceed in defiance of the sultan’s wishes into hostile territory while he was ill and weary and encumbered by mutinous servants was more than Clapperton could manage. After two months in Sokoto, he started back on the road to Bornu on May 4, 1824. The sultan asked him to return, and promised to send an escort to meet him at any point along the coast. He gave Clapperton a letter for George IV and accorded him an affectionate farewell. Bello’s letter agreed to put a stop to the slave trade “on account of the Good which will result from it, both to You and to Us,” in exchange for English weapons. Justifiably elated over the success of his diplomatic mission, Clapperton headed for Kano, traveling mostly by night because he feared thieves.

  The trip was a nightmare: he lost his way; horses and camels died under him; food and clean water gave out; fever increasingly sapped his remaining strength. At one town, nine men and six camels died of exhaustion, yet Clapperton did not fail to record every incident of the wearisome trek. A friendly chief offered him the pick of his seraglio. Clapperton, unable to refuse but not wishing to get embroiled in a relationship from which he might not easily extricate himself, chose the oldest woman offered to him. When she arrived at his tent, she brought two younger women. One of these nursed the ailing white man “with such devotion and skill” that he got well.

  Back in Kano, he was received a second time by the ill-tempered Hajji Hat Salah, who organized a formal luncheon for him. It was a strange meal; as it was Ramadan and still daylight, only the white guest could eat. Clapperton was urged to enjoy the meal by his fasting host, who said, “Rais Abdullah,* eat, for you are a hungry kafir!” The vizier was likely smarting from reports that Clapperton had become Bello’s confidant while he, ruler of Kano, was in eclipse. A kafir, while it only means a nonbeliever to a Muslim, is by no means a polite way of describing one.

  The road from Kano to Bornu was choked with traffic, ponderous caravans of Tuareg and merchants from Senegal, Tripoli, and Ghadames, all trying to reach safe harbor before the rainy season, heralded by terrific displays of thunder and lightning. Arriving at Murmur, Clapperton visited Oudney’s grave and was outraged to discover it desecrated. Clapperton, who could become explosively angry when crossed, turned momentarily into a madman. He tracked down the village elder, whom he had paid to care for the grave, and thrashed him with a whip, realizing only later how foolhardy this had been.

  Ten weeks after leaving Sultan Bello, Clapperton reached Kukawa, depleted and sick. Denham had preceded his arrival at camp, back from a second disastrous slaving expedition.

  DENHAM HAD HAD his own share of disappointments in the period he was alone. When Clapperton and Oudney left for Kano in December 1823, Denham was still lost on his expedition with Barca Gana, but on his return to Kukawa he tried to determine whether the Niger ran into or out of Lake Chad. A caravan from Tripoli arrived, bringing him an assistant—a twenty-two-year-old ensign from Malta, Ernest Toole. The young man had made his crossing of the Sahara in an astonishing fifteen weeks and was still suffering from the strain. Denham and Toole left to explore Lake Chad anyway. Toole was so sick that he had to be strapped to his camel. Ill though he was, he seemed determined to continue with Denham, who was so consumed by the novelties of the lake that it did not occur to him that Toole was unfit for travel.

  A palpable excitement fills his notes as he records that the Shari River, after the rains, was in spate, the trees green and full-foliaged, drooping down to the sparkling sheet of the lake, its surface broken by the snouts of crocodiles slithering quietly away, and the snuffling heads of herds of hippos so numerous they covered acres of open water.
Denham could rejoice, for the first time, as the undisputed leader of his own expedition. He writes of the millions of wildfowl darkening the evening sky in their flight, the vast size of the lake, the Chadian desert stretching left and right to the far horizon unbroken by sight of land across the water. The lake, he realized at last, was oceanic in its extent. Denham took his fleet of pirogues across the hot, sweet-smelling muddy waters and through forests of tall papyrus, bamboos, and giant grasses.

  The canoes were cramped, and they leaked. By day, the sun glared down in the torrid, humid heat. At night, mosquitoes from stagnant pools pinged in roving billions. Toole was getting worse, and “Columbus” (who suddenly appears again in the journal) became sick himself, but never stopped trying to nurse the young newcomer back to health.

  Toole was destined to become one of those young and eager volunteers whose sole achievement was to join the growing list of British casualties in the cause of African exploration. He died at Ngala, off the southern tip of the lake. “A cold shivering had seized him,” Denham wrote, “and his extremities were like ice. I gave him both tea and rice-water; and there was but little alteration in him until just before noon, when, without a struggle, he expired, completely worn out and exhausted.”

  Realizing too late and not for the first time that he should have used better judgment, Denham returned to Kukawa alone. In May another young assistant arrived, none other than Warrington’s protégé, John Tyrwhitt, the profligate romancer of Italian beauties they had left behind at Murzuk. Though he, too, was exhausted by his travels, Tyrwhitt was still a hail-fellow-well-met who looked like he would be more at home at a London embassy than in the wilds of Africa. He entertained the camp by playing the flute every evening. His instructions were to remain at Kukawa as British vice-consul at a salary of 300 pounds a year (what he would spend it on was another matter).