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

by Frank T. Kryza

  Within a week they reached what is today the northern boundary of western Nigeria, the end of the country of the Yoruba. It was then (and today) intensely cultivated and densely populated. “There are large towns every four miles,” wrote Clapperton, who was delighted to find the local people “as industrious and law-abiding as those of England.” It was well-intended chauvinism. He was now stronger and riding on horseback. His two white companions (Houtson had returned to them after Morison died on the route to Badagri) were healthy once more, the country exceeded his expectations in its beauty and security, and the whole adventure seemed to have turned into something akin to a jaunt through Switzerland in the summertime.

  Bucolic villages and fat cattle abounded. This was Clapperton’s vision of what a great pastoral people in Africa should be like. Even his sense of humor, so rarely evident, came to the fore. At Toko, the explorers visited a minor king with no less than two thousand wives—“a true mountain king,” was Clapperton’s comment.*

  The sense of pastoral security vanished with the arrival of a rowdy escort from the sultan of Katunga: robust warriors armed with spears, bows, and arrows, who shattered the peace with dissonant singing and shouting. Behind them, Clapperton recorded, exhausted but doggedly persistent, came an orchestra of (to his Western ears) unbelievably bad musicians, unable to keep pace with the soldiers but raising a cacophonous racket.

  At the end of this leg of their trek, the explorers broke away from their escort momentarily and, from the top of a ridge, looked down upon Katunga, the capital of Yorubaland. They were the first white men ever to do so.

  They reached Katunga on January 23, 1826 (less than two weeks after Laing had departed In Salah). They stayed six weeks, recovering, with the exception of Houtson. He got as far as Katunga, as promised, only to inform Clapperton that he would have to go home—he was a businessman, after all, with a trading post on the coast to manage, and he feared too long an absence from his untended wares. He got back to Badagri safely but, with grim irony, immediately contracted a coastal fever and died from it. “Like the characters in Mozart’s Farewell,”* wrote Lander of the party’s original number, “they have dropped off one by one.”

  The king of Yorubaland, one Mansoleh, gave his visitors an audience seated in state on the veranda of his “palace,” which looked much like all the other huts to the white men, surrounded by his four hundred wives. Red and blue umbrellas on long poles protected the sovereign from the rays of the sun, while musicians wailed “earsplitting discords.” The most impressive thing about Mansoleh was his crown, a wonderful headdress which, on close inspection, turned out to be made of cardboard—a white swindler on the coast was doing a flourishing business selling cardboard crowns, “exactly the same as worn by King George IV of England,” to local chiefs.

  Mansoleh’s subjects brashly crowded the newcomers. Clapperton, taking his role as George IV’s emissary seriously, refused to kneel before the ruler, and while this breech of etiquette astonished the king, it did not appear to annoy him. As soon as his white guests were comfortably settled in their huts, the king returned their visit accompanied by the court musicians and about half the population of the town. Clapperton paid tribute to the people of Yorubaland, saying how kind they had been to him and his men during their journey, and how helpful he had found the headmen of the villages to be.

  King Mansoleh was delighted—too delighted. He developed so great an interest in his English guests that he concocted every excuse for delaying their departure. The roads were dangerous, he said; there were too many war parties at large; the tributaries of the Quorra River (the local name for the Niger) were in flood; there were impassable swamps—and so on. Meanwhile, slave caravans came and went, noisily, and without trouble or delay.

  Clapperton used the enforced idleness to keep up his journal. He wrote of “the malpractices of a sly, lubberly, fat and monstrous eunuch—Ebo,” the king’s principal counselor. Mansoleh himself was impulsively generous and hospitable, and heaped presents on his guests. The gifts were mostly in the form of food, but little of it got past the watchful guard of the “despicable eunuch.” The caravan had not seen the last of Ebo, who would cause great trouble on the return journey.

  Clapperton and Lander provided the first detailed information about the trade, industry, and government of the country, as well as the music, entertainment, court etiquette, marriages, and funerals as practiced by the Yoruba. One particular art form was enormously popular at every level of society: pantomime theater, which went on for hours and which the white visitors found both ingenious and funny. They soon became characters in the daily dramas, like celebrity drop-ins in a modern soap opera on television.

  In time Mansoleh relented and gave the explorers his laissez-passer to continue their journey. They moved on astride lean, bony horses, crossing the Moussa River on March 11, the frontier between the Yoruba and Borgu (today found in northern Benin and northwestern Nigeria). Clapperton had to swim across, towing Lander (who could not swim). In Borgu villages, they noticed that crocodile eggs were impaled on the pointed tops of beehive huts. These were considered strong ju-ju against the predations of crocodiles. The two white men realized belatedly that they had nearly become lunch for famished river reptiles.

  As they approached Kaiama, the capital of Borgu, Lander again came down with dysentery. He was barely able to walk when an escort arrived from the chief of Kaiama, a wild troop of warriors mounted on magnificent horses. They made Clapperton nervous, for Mansoleh had warned him that the people of Borgu were “the craziest and most untrustworthy gang of cutthroats in all Africa.” Despite their recklessness, the escort appeared good-humored. They sang, shouted, and charged their horses, Arab style, the whole way, but did not fail to conduct the white visitors to their city in safety.

  Yarro, the king of Kaiama, had a hut ready for them and visited immediately. To Clapperton’s embarrassment, the king entered with his six youngest wives, all of them naked. Female beauty, Yarro proclaimed, had no right to hide itself behind clothing; as soon as it became necessary for a woman to clothe herself, he said, you knew that she was past her prime. The women themselves were nubile, exquisitely attractive, and appeared ingenuously unconscious of being unclothed.

  When the chief offered Clapperton his daughter, he accepted her. He stayed with her six days, noting that, aged twenty-five, “she was much past the meridian in this country.… I went to the house of the daughter, which consists of several coozies [thatched huts] separate from those of the father, and I was shown into a very clean one; a mat was spread; I sat down; and the lady coming in and kneeling down, I asked her if she would live in my house, or I should come and live with her: she said, whatever way I wished; very well, I said, I would come and live with her, as she had the best house.” The citizens of Borgu expressed surprise that the explorers traveled without women.

  Kaiama was a joyful place. Games, racing, celebrations, and an uninhibited mixing of the sexes seemed to go on from dawn until dark (and, surmised Clapperton, probably long after dark). Clapperton was perplexed by the wide range of European goods evident all over town, although nobody in Kaiama had ever before seen a white man. The arrival of a Hausa slave caravan, en route from Dahomey to Kano, provided the explanation. The caravan leader, a wily Arab of obviously wide experience in Africa—imperturbable, impressive, and dignified—claimed to have met Clapperton in Kano on his first visit. Clapperton neither remembered nor trusted this man, declining his offer to take the explorers’ baggage on to Kano. The Arab’s deputies traded pots and pans and other manufactured goods with the locals.

  Clapperton and Lander left Kaiama with regret. By British morals of that era, it was a sinful city, but the Kaiamians themselves hardly seemed to appreciate the fact, and it was apparent to the visitors that a more cheery people would have been hard to find on any continent.

  The explorers were approaching the kingdom of Wawa. They crossed the river Oli, rocky and turbulent, to be met by yet another band of r
iders, this one sent by Mohammed, the sultan of Wawa. The town of Wawa, surrounded by a high mud wall and deep trench, was the capital of the kingdom. The roads were wide, straight, and clean and the buildings, all on the beehive principle, made it “the neatest and best-regulated city in the interior,” according to Clapperton. It was an important intersection in the system of highways linking Ashanti, Dahomey, Badagri, and Jannah to the west of the Niger, with Nyffee, Hausaland, and Bornu to the east.

  Clapperton and Lander met the most interesting character of their journey in Wawa, a rich widow named Zuma (the Arab word for honey). It soon transpired that she was determined to marry one or the other of them. The story of Zuma can only be understood in the frame of the local male ideal of feminine beauty, which was bulk. The ultimate compliment that could be paid a Borgu woman of the era was that she would make “a good load for a camel.”* By that yardstick Zuma had no rivals. Clapperton described her as “a walking water-butt.” She pursued both men relentlessly, seriatim.

  Zuma’s father had been an itinerant Arab. Though her skin color was not appreciably lighter than that of any other inhabitant of Wawa, she considered herself white, and as a member of the white race, she was determined to marry a white man. A politically ambitious woman, she had been left wealthy by the death of her first husband, and therefore powerful. She spent her time scheming to depose her sultan, who retaliated periodically by throwing her in jail.

  She initially tried her charms on Clapperton, but all he would do was sing Lander’s praises, which had the desired effect of diverting her to the Cornishman. Clapperton wrote of her: “The lady was dressed in a white, coarse muslin turban, her neck decorated with necklaces of coral and gold chain; the one with rubies, the other with gold beads. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were blackened, her hair dyed with indigo. Her hands and feet were also dyed with henna, and her breasts were tremendous. She was as fat as a barrel of lard and she was as black as charcoal.”

  Zuma then devoted her attentions to the cherubic, fresh-faced Lander, appearing daily in his hut in her finery, all henna and coral and indigo and gold beads. The effect was lost on the young man, who saw her as “a moving world of flesh, puffing and blowing like a blacksmith’s bellows.”

  When Lander refused to visit her hut, her passion shifted again to Clapperton, who finally accepted her invitation because, he claimed, he wanted to see the inside of her house. He found her comfortably installed amid pillows and carpets, wielding a grass fan in one hand and a whip in the other, attended by a hunchbacked female dwarf, daintily picking kola nuts from an English pewter mug. Zuma declared her love and proposed marriage. When she saw the consternation on Clapperton’s face, she reassured him that the difference in their ages was no obstacle.

  “This was too much for me,” recorded Clapperton, “and I made my retreat as soon as I could, determined never to come to such close quarters with her again.” But the widow kept hounding him, and “I could only get rid of her by telling her that I prayed and looked at the stars all night…. She departed in a flood of tears.”

  With the failure of her frontal attacks, Zuma turned to stealth. She presented one of Clapperton’s porters, who collected new women wherever he went, with a pretty young slave selected from her household. This gift gave her a claim on the young man, whom she planted as a spy in the explorers’ camp. Sultan Mohammed, who was keeping a careful eye on his difficult subject, was incensed when he learned of this. Zuma, he warned Clapperton, with her great wealth (she had 2,000 slaves) and her irresistible allure, would inevitably try to marry Lander now that Clapperton had refused her, and Lander, if she succeeded, might be declared king by the local inhabitants. He, the sultan, would then be banished or executed. In the event, Mohammed’s anxiety was unnecessary. Lander, realizing that Zuma was serious in her pursuit of him, rebuffed her. “Poor widow Zuma,” he wrote, “I almost fancy I see her now, waddling … the very pink and essence of African fashion.”

  Clapperton tried to take off alone for the Niger, leaving Lander to bring on the baggage later. He was eager to verify the information given to him by Bello about Mungo Park’s death, and made straight for Bussa Falls. Unfortunately, as soon as he left Wawa he was followed by Zuma. This again inflamed Sultan Mohammed, this time to such a degree that he impounded the white men’s baggage. Lander was forced to stay behind to keep an eye on things. When Clapperton heard this, he had no choice but to return to the capital. He arrived with the tireless Zuma dogging his heels.

  The widow’s entrance was overpowering. Upon a fine horse, gorgeously dressed in a red silk mantle, red trousers, Morocco boots, and festooned with charms hung about her body, she was preceded by drummers decked out in ostrich feathers and followed by a large train of armed guards. This time, she was no longer an object of mirth to the two white men. She was both impressive and formidable, and the sultan’s fear of her became, for the first time, fully comprehensible to Clapperton.

  He realized belatedly that she had to be taken seriously, and ordered his servant to return the young woman Zuma had given him as a present, an affront so boorish that even the resilient Zuma understood that he meant to insult her. Indignantly, she let the white men go, and as Lander put it: “We saw no more of the generous, the kind-hearted, the affectionate, the ambitious, but above all the enormous widow Zuma.”

  Disgusted with the white men, Zuma apologized to her sultan for her behavior, and he gave the explorers their baggage and his teskera—written permission for them to go on their way. In the end, Clapperton must have been flattered by Zuma’s attention, because when the expedition finally left Wawa in April, he no longer ridiculed her. He wrote of her with the admiration and the respect her intelligence and persistence deserved. He said that “had she been somewhat younger and less corpulent, there might have been great temptation to head her [political] party, for she has certainly been a very handsome woman, and such as would have been thought a beauty in any country in Europe.”

  Lander wrote of the inhabitants of Wawa that “the whole place appeared to be [populated by] the most roaring, drunken set of any town I have ever seen. Chastity is non-existent and sobriety is not considered a virtue; yet the people are merry and behave well. All night, until morning, nothing is heard but fiddles, Arab guitars, castanets and singing.” Yet, despite their sometimes critical remarks (likely for the consumption solely of prudish English readers), it is clear Clapperton and Lander were very comfortable in Wawa, perhaps proving again that British explorers of the period were almost never as straitlaced as their hagiographies portrayed them to be. And if Hugh Clapperton had a homosexual bent, as Denham had alleged, it was certainly not evident on this trip.

  The country between Wawa and Bussa,* which was only twenty miles away, was hilly and wooded—a land of scarlet birds, of monkeys screaming at each other from every bough, of vibrantly colored butterflies, of snakes and turtles, and of trees with trunks the size of buildings. The view was dominated by a lone mountain Clapperton christened Mount George after his king (forgetting, of course, that the mountain had carried a local name for thousands of years). The explorers headed for Yauri, the village on the Niger where Mungo Park had gone ashore to give presents to the king before he was ambushed and killed. Along the way, Clapperton stopped at Bussa, where Park had died, and it was there, on March 31, 1826, that he saw the Niger for the first time. Oddly, the object of his long quest neither inspired nor exhilarated him; he wrote in his journal simply: “At 3:30 arrived at a branch of the Quorra.”

  Clapperton interrogated the natives in Bussa about Park’s death and met with an evasiveness he considered evidence they were trying to conceal something. He and Lander visited the rapids where Park’s “schooner” had foundered. The deluge of water foaming over rock outcroppings sounded like a forest of tall trees shaken by a mighty wind. According to the account of a local headman, Park’s vessel, the Jolibar,† had become impaled on a rock at the head of the falls. The two white men aboard (only two of the original party of fifty that
set out from the Gambia had survived this far) threw themselves into the water and drowned. The people of Bussa, lining the bank, could render no aid (this had a ring of truth, for as Clapperton well knew, it was the rare African of that era who could swim). According to the headman, nobody fired a musket or pulled a bowstring. On the contrary, the people had been sad, “keeping up their lamentations all through the night.”

  There was a piece of information at the end of this man’s story that raised the hairs on the back of Clapperton’s neck: the sultan of Bussa, said the headman, had salvaged the canoe the next day, and in it were found some papers and a quantity of meat. The villagers, not wanting to waste this meat, had a feast, and all of them died. White men, as everybody knew, were cannibals, and the meat must have been human flesh.

  Clapperton inspected the place where the Jolibar had reached the end of its incredible 2,000-mile journey. “We visited the far-famed Niger or Quorra,” Clapperton wrote, “which flows by the city, and were greatly disappointed at the appearance of this celebrated river. The Niger here, in its widest part, is not more than a stone’s throw across at present. The rock on which we sat overlooks the spot where Mr. Park and his associates met their unhappy fate.”

  The people of Bussa obviously regarded this place, at least in Clapperton’s presence, with reverent wonder and a touch of fear. One of them confided that the headman’s account to Clapperton was just a cover story—there really had been a fight, just as Clapperton suspected. Mungo Park had opened fire with his muskets and the men of Bussa replied with arrows.

  Still not satisfied and seeking more detail, Clapperton called on the sultan of Bussa and requested the full story of the Scottish explorer’s death. The sultan seemed uneasy at this question, so plainly put. He himself, he explained, had been a boy at the time, and the man who knew the history of the episode was the sultan of Yauri, who, incidentally, had sent canoes for Clapperton. They were waiting now, and the sultan would be delighted if he would go back with them to Yauri. Before leaving, Clapperton asked the king whether he had any of Park’s books, papers, or belongings. The king replied that he did not.