That elephants from Africa get called Jumbo or Dumbo is not surprising – their name in Swahili is tembu, quite unlike the Arabic which is fil. However, tembu when I heard it first used made absolute sense: the ancient Egyptian word for elephant is yebu, which also happens to be the name of a village on Elephantine Island in the Nile at Aswan.
16 • The island of elephants
Time is what finishes an elephant and makes its ivory expensive.
Nubian proverb
At Elephantine Island, the African Nile gives way to the Egyptian; the people are Nubian and their ancient trade was ivory. In fact the word ‘ivory’ is one of the few English words of ancient Egyptian origin. Abuw or yebu, just mentioned, means ‘elephant’ in ancient Egyptian; when the Romans arrived in Egypt this became their word for ‘elephant tusk’ – ebor – which, with the usual b/v equivalence, became ‘ivory’ in English.
Yet the multiple twistings of elephant lore don’t stop there. By a kind of doctrine of signatures, Elephantine was destined to be: the island itself is curved and tusk-like. The ‘new’ name of Elephantine (the old one is Yebu, still reserved for the main village on the island, as we have just seen) comes from the Greek word for ‘tusk’ – eliphas. Along the shore the giant grey, rounded granite boulders look exactly like bathing elephants – so much so that a guide will tell you that this is why it is really called Elephantine Island. Add to all this that Elephantine is the last, or first, trading post before the impassable (to trading boats) cataracts and Africa – source of all ivory – and you can see why it just had to be.
It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites along the Nile, and 6,000 years ago would have been surrounded by elephants – specifically the now extinct, but intriguingly named, north African flaccid elephant. Perhaps it was an elephant island even before ivory started coming downriver. I had seen for myself on boulders in the desert, hundreds of miles inland from Aswan, engravings of elephants.
Elephantine is just across from Aswan; indeed Yebu used to be more important than Aswan in ancient times. Aswan is, as Eratosthenes proved, directly below the Tropic of Cancer in midsummer, which again seems mysteriously to make it the centre of something important. You begin to see why the priests told Herodotus that this was where the Nile originated. There always have been temples on Elephantine – the one to the ram-headed flood god Khnum is beautifully exact – the tawdry Mövenpick Hotel on the island has tried to emulate its design in its monstrous tower: it is a failed architectural tribute, which, as I said earlier, looks more like a giant air vent, or perhaps a theme-park garbage bin just waiting to be stuffed to its gills with burger boxes and Coke bottles.
I sat in Aswan in the Yebu Café, one of the cheapest eateries, marred only by its direct view of the Mövenpick tower. A fellow diner interested me when he tried to haggle the exceedingly low price for dinner even lower. He was a backpacker – not surprisingly – and he was French, but what his artful blond dreadlocks did not give away was that he was also an ivory trader.
The idea that a world ban on elephant-tusk trading would make it go away – after 6,000 years – was admirable but somewhat hopeful. Of course it has made a big dent, though some would argue it is habitat destruction that will end the elephant’s wild tenure, not the pursuit of its tusks. No doubt they go hand in hand. It is certain, however, that once guns started to be used the elephant’s days were numbered. As far back as 1831 over 4,000 elephants a year were being killed for their tusks. The craze for the pianoforte drove the need for ivory ever higher. It is thought that the utter collapse of the huge Kenyan herds in the twentieth century was caused by American keyboard demand. Despite the similarly high demand in China for pianos, the keyboards are plastic; now the Chinese want ivory for luxury items, carvings, inlays, chess sets.
My French-hippy ivory trader acquaintance told me of worse atrocities: the recent slaughter uncovered in Chad, the fact that in 2011 over thirty tons of illegal ivory were seized (requiring the deaths of 4,000 elephants). But Fabrice was unmoved by pleas of ecology or even anticruelty. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it will always happen. The Chinese make it happen. I don’t make it happen. All I do is find people who love ivory and make the connection to poor Africans who bring ivory to sell.’ He told me that several trucks a week crossed the Egyptian border from Sudan loaded with refugees. Some brought ivory with them to pay their way to Europe – in Aswan they could find buyers, like Fabrice. I did not ask how he smuggled it out. Well, I did – and I received an incredulous look of Gallic scorn. But he did tell me he always flew on Eastern European cheap flights to Luxor, and I imagined the Moldovan or Bulgarian customs were less interested in ‘camel bone’ artefacts than the staff at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Fabrice spoke longingly of the so-called Schreger lines in pure ivory, which enable you to tell its provenance and worth. Camel bone – which is often passed off as ivory – has no such markings. Tusks from extinct mammoths – which, in the slowly unfreezing permafrost of Siberia, is a major source of ivory – have tightly curved Schreger lines, while those from African elephants are more rounded. ‘More beautiful,’ whispered Fabrice.
17 • Slavery
My slavery forbade me to speak; the truth forbade me to keep silent.
Sudanese proverb
A hundred and fifty years ago at Elephantine there would have been mountains of ivory, not the handfuls that Fabrice dealt in. And instead of tourists being herded around and sized up for their worth to the nearest penny, there would have been a sorrier human cargo: slaves.
Aswan and Elephantine are at the end of the Forty Days Road, the desert route through Sudan used to avoid the impassable cataracts on the Nile. Along the Forty Days Road were brought slaves from the regions of the upper Nile, bound for Cairo and the Ottoman Empire.
It was while walking with camels along the upper section of this route that I came across grinding-stone stations – large bowl-shaped murhaga stones seemingly discarded, always with a few rounded granite pebbles near by. These were for grinding corn. Very sensibly, instead of carrying such heavy items, or such messy stuff as flour, desert travellers, from ancient times until recently, have camped at such stations to grind corn for the bread they need to eat. Which would not have been much when the travellers were hunters or nomads. But when people settled, then their bread requirements increased. (The Bedouin I travelled with sometimes took the stones home to serve as knife sharpeners.)
Georg August Schweinfurth, an explorer we have met already and will meet a few times more, makes an interesting point about the proliferation of slavery in the Nile regions of Africa. The murhaga method of grinding corn, whereby a large flat stone works as the mortar and a smaller hand-sized stone as the pestle, can, after a day’s hard labour, produce only enough meal for five or six men. When the economy moved from one based more on hunting to one based on agriculture, with the migration of Arab Sudanese to the south of Khartoum into the seriba territory (a seriba is simply the thorn fence surrounding a village, but it came to mean the settlements established by the northern migrants), the need for people to spend all day grinding corn increased. Who would do such a loathsome job? A slave. According to Schweinfurth every Nubian settler possessed around three slaves. The migrations of the nineteenth century provided reason enough to perpetuate slavery within the Sudan; it was also an entrepôt for the export of slaves to the world outside, to the Middle East and beyond.
Slavery may have increased with the settlement of the Sudan by the Arabs of the north, but it was not invented by them. Slavery in the regions of the upper White Nile is mentioned in the Greek Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century AD account of trade in the Red Sea complete with sailing directions. Burton speculates that African slavery in this region was the result of ancient trade with southern Arabia. Its origin, though, is ‘veiled in the glooms of the past’. But by the nineteenth century slavery was almost universal in the country between the Nile and the Indian Ocean. Not all tribes exported slaves from the in
terior to Arab lands; many were importers and users of slaves themselves.
Arab traders initially relied on African tribes to get goods from the interior. The first travellers to these places, men like Petherick, showed them a more direct route was possible – if you were armed. Arab traders and explorers went deeper and deeper into Africa. And these traders were not only after ivory, they wanted slaves. There had been slavery since the beginning of recorded history. Slaves in ancient Egypt, though they did not build the Pyramids, were used for domestic duties and acted as concubines. Unlike the position under later Islamic rulings, the child of a slave remained a slave even if one parent was a free man. Only the child of two free people could be considered free persons in ancient Egypt. Where did the slaves come from? Since we now know that the desert was less of a barrier, certainly in the Old Kingdom, many slaves may have come directly from central Africa across the desert. The other source would have been along the Nile or possibly up the east African coast to the Red Sea ports.
During the Ptolemaic period, there was already a long-standing slave trade serving the Indian Ocean. The seaport Berbera in Somalia, known as Malao in ancient times, is reported in the Periplus as exporting ‘myrrh, a little frankincense, the harder cinnamon, duaca, Indian copal and macir; and slaves’. Zanzibar, further down the coast, was another entrepôt of slavery, which made inroads into east Africa but left the Equatorial regions unaffected until the results were felt of the Turkish Egyptian invasion of 1820. In the northern parts of Sudan, as far as Khartoum and Obeid, slavery was controlled, after the 1820s, by the invading army of Muhammad Ali. In 1840, an English visitor to Cairo could write of the city’s slave market:
The slaves, all young women and girls, were confined in a suite of wretched cells, closed in front with mats, which were thrown aside, like a curtain, when any customer presented himself . . . Supposing that we were desirous of becoming purchasers, the jellabis [slave merchants] commanded the young women, who were all squatting on the ground when we arrived, to get up and exhibit themselves; which they did, without manifesting the slightest indication of disgust or unwillingness, though they were as nearly as might be in a state of nature. Not one was pretty, but there were several whose forms were rich and graceful . . . the oldest appeared to be about sixteen, the youngest not more than eight. The highest price demanded was sixty-two dollars.
Further south, slavery was much more haphazard and, according to Petherick, endemic:
Cultivation [of crops] was well attended to, the labour being performed by slaves, of which the members of the tribe owned considerable numbers – some individuals owning them by hundreds; and in case of emergency they accompanied their masters to battle. As everywhere else in the interior of Africa [before the arrival of commercial slavers], within my knowledge, they were treated affectionately, and, generally speaking, both master and slave were proud of each other: in negro families I have often observed more attention paid to the slave than to their child. But I was assured by both free and slave negroes that a runaway slave belonging to the Niam Niam, if captured, was made an example of, by being slain and devoured. I was also informed by the Niam Niam, who seem to glory in their reputation for cannibalism, that their aged, and indeed all when supposed to be on the point of death, were given up to be murdered and eaten.
The Niam Niam recognise no superior chief; but, like the Dor, the tribe is divided into numerous chieftainships. They are all large slave-owners, and the respectability and importance of the chiefs depend on the number of slaves in their possession. These are held to add importance as retainers and labourers; and being kidnapped from their neighbours for their own especial use, are not bartered either amongst themselves or adjoining tribes. A slave merchant, therefore, is not known in the country.
Baker, coming later, wrote about the prices for slaves among the Bunyoro in western Uganda. A healthy young girl was worth a single elephant’s tusk ‘of the first class’ or a new shirt. In other areas ‘where the natives are exceedingly clever as tailors and furriers’, a girl could be bought for thirteen needles. But this ‘innocent traffic’ was soon disrupted by such traders as Abou Saoud, who found it ‘more convenient to kidnap young girls, which saved much trouble in bargaining for needles and shirts’.
After giving a ‘sermon’ on the evils of the slave trade, Baker tells a chief of the Sheir tribe that, sadly, his own sons are dead. The chief tells him, ‘I have a son, an only son. He is a nice boy – a very good boy. I should like you to see my boy – he is very thin now; but if he should remain with you he would soon get fat. He’s a really nice boy and always hungry . . . You’ll like him amazingly; he’ll give you no trouble as long as you give him plenty to eat . . . he’s a good boy, my only son. I’ll sell him to you for a molote! [a native iron spade].’ Baker concludes: ‘I simply give this anecdote as it occurred without asserting that such conduct is the rule. At the same time, there can be no doubt that among the White Nile tribes any number of male children might be purchased from their parents – especially in seasons of scarcity.’
Baker makes the distinction between the practice of slavery, which, as in Egypt and ancient Rome – where slaves could reach positions of high regard and be well rewarded – was not an unmitigated evil, and the practices of slave hunters and traders, who, from all accounts, were entirely evil. The armies of the slave hunters roamed the countryside better armed than the people they preyed upon and stealing everything they might need to survive. ‘When the slave hunters sought for corn,’ explained Baker, ‘they were in the habit of catching the villagers and roasting their posteriors by holding them down on the mouth of a large earthen water-jar filled with glowing embers. If this torture of roasting alive did not extract the secret, they generally cut the sufferer’s throat to terrify his companions, who would then divulge the position of the hidden stores to avoid a similar fate.’
Schweinfurth, travelling at the same time as Baker, in the late 1860s, bore witness to the awful depredations of the slave trade. No European traveller (apart from traders such as the Maltese Andrea De Bono) ever condoned the slave trade run by the Turks and Arabs of Khartoum, though Schweinfurth was less proactive than Sam Baker. He watches a dying slave being lashed to ‘prove whether life was yet extinct’. The slavers then proceed to ‘play at football with the writhing body of the still gasping victim . . . He was finally dragged off into the woods where a few weeks later I found his skull, which I deposited with those of many others of his fellow sufferers in the Museum of Berlin.’
Not all slaves were equal. Those from Bongoland (the Sudd region of southern Sudan) were much prized ‘as they are easily taught and are docile and faithful, and are, besides, good looking and industrious’. Female slaves from the Azande, or Niam Niam, were much sought after, ‘much dearer than the best Bongo slaves, but they are so extremely rare as hardly to admit of having a price quoted’. The Babuckur were considered difficult: ‘no amount of good living or kind treatment can overcome their love of freedom’.
Slaves kept for private use by the Nubian invaders were divided into four groups, according to Schweinfurth:
1
Boys from seven to ten years of age who served as gun and ammunition carriers for their masters. When they grow up they join the second class.
2
Native fighting soldiers who served alongside their Arab masters. ‘In every action the hardest work is put upon their shoulders.’ These slaves have wives and children and, the richer ones, even slave boys of their own to carry their weapons. After a raid on the Niam Niam their ranks were always increased as, delighted with getting a cotton shirt and a gun of their own, young Niam Niam would gladly sell themselves into service ‘attracted by the hope of finding better food in the Seribas than their own native wilderness can produce’.
3
Women slaves who were kept in the houses. ‘These women are passed like dollars from hand to hand, a proceeding which is a prolific source of the rapid spread of those loathsome disorders by wh
ich the lands within the jurisdiction of the Seribas have been infested ever since their subjugation by the Khartoumers.’ However, the child of any slave, according to Muslim law, is raised as a legitimate offspring and the mother receives the title of wife. To a force of 200 Nubian soldiers were attached as many as 300 women and boys, ‘a party which, as well as immoderately increasing the length of the procession, by the clatter of their cooking utensils and their everlasting wrangling, kept up a perpetual turmoil which at times threatened a hopeless confusion’.
4
Slaves of any sex who were employed exclusively in husbandry. Only superior slaves – the clerks and dragomen – actually tilled the soil and owned cattle. Soldier slaves might be drafted in at harvest time to help, and old women, who were too weak for anything else, were employed to weed the fields.
Schweinfurth reported the price of slaves in the seribas in 1871: eighteen pounds of copper would obtain a sittahsi – literally a child six spans high, that is eight to ten years old. Women slaves called nadeef, meaning ‘pure’, were in great demand among the settlers and fetched thirty pounds of copper or fifteen Marie-Thérèse dollars. Strong adult women who were ugly were cheaper, and old women ‘can be bought for a mere bagatelle’. Women or children were preferred, male slaves were considered too troublesome for trading (as opposed to keeping for oneself).
Burton wrote, ‘Justice requires the confession that the horrors of slave-driving rarely meet the eye in East Africa . . . in fact the essence of slavery, compulsory unpaid labour, is perhaps more prevalent in independent India than in east Africa . . . to this general rule there are ter rible exceptions . . . the guide, attached to the expedition on return from Ujiji, had loitered behind for some days because his slave girl was too footsore to walk. When tired of waiting he cut off her head, for fear lest she should become gratis another man’s property.’
Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River Page 34