Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River

by Twigger, Robert

  The Dinka extract the four lower front teeth for aesthetic purposes. They tend to be stark naked, their bodies ghostly with ash, the facial lines looking like black cracks in the grey mask. They will sleep in ash and wear ash to keep away mosquitoes, and they burn cattle-dung fires all night for the same reason. In the morning, after the cattle have been released, fresh cattle dung will be scooped up to dry in the sun, shaped into pats the better to burn. The cattle are staked all night, each cow tethered to its own stake – you cannot stampede such an arrangement. The stakes are all in among the huts, which makes it hard to carry out a raid.

  A Dinka village at dawn looks a little like a blown-up wood in the First World War, ghostly shades of destruction on the dry plains bordering the Sudd swamp with dry tree limbs poking from the ground, the remnants of old hut circles. They look random, but they work. When the huts are completed they have a grass igloo-type covering over the rough wooden structure. The top tapers to a point like the top tassel on a Nepalese woollen cap.

  Dinka men are uncircumcised mainly, and they wear a circular necklace, ivory elbow bracelets, a single decorative wire around the waist, brass wire anklets. They sleep either naked or with a cloth the size of a small towel over their lower body. Sometimes a bead corset is worn around the waist, nothing above or below. Sometimes a woolly hat may be worn. The Dinka mark their faces with cicatrices like most of the southern Sudanese tribes. Unlike the Shilluk, who incise their eyebrow line with bead-like cicatrices, the Dinka have three or four V-shaped scars high on the forehead.

  Devotion to their cattle is shown by polishing the horns. These cattle have horns of great size, like the cattle depicted on ancient Egyptian friezes, horns up to three feet in length. When they are not tending to their cattle the young may relax by dancing. Or they may smoke, or weave cattle ropes from elephant grass. An old man might while away time having his hair groomed with an acacia thorn. The dedicated busy themselves filling a goat’s scrotum with ash, to be later used as part of a religious offering.

  Because of the scarcity of water a Dinka boy will wash his hair clean of ash and earth in the early-morning stream of urine from a convenient cow. Cattle are rarely eaten. They are bled and the blood cooked or drunk fresh; they are milked and the milk drunk or turned into yoghurt and cheese. Again, in a culture with a minimum of division between man and beast, a boy will suckle direct from the cow’s teat, and this might be his only source of food for the morning. If the milk is to be stored, a hollow calabash serves as a pail.

  The river Dinka live in the myriad waterways of the Sudd Nile on floating islands; from above, the cloth sun-protecting tents look like something by Christo, the avant-garde sculptor. The river-dwelling Dinka are fishermen, their musculature more developed than the elon-gated limbs of the plains Dinka. Some of the islands are made by constructing huge piles of papyrus; others are natural formations of foliage and reeds.

  The Dinka way of life survived the ravages of slavery and colonialism, but will it survive the modern world – with its automatic weapons and global culture?

  24 • Travel tips for the Nile explorer

  For a poor person snot is salt. Ethiopian proverb

  Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Darwin and inventor of both the finger-print system and the IQ test, was a great eugenics enthusiast. Unlike Speke he saw in such tribes as the Dinka supporting evidence for his own sinister racism, his belief that the African had, through generations, arrived at physical excellence but not intellectual supremacy. Galton himself was not a very attractive man, though he was bright – it was he who coined the weather term ‘anti-cyclone’ and invented, ironically for an ugly man, the ‘statistical beauty map of Britain’ (the most beautiful lived in London, the least beautiful in Aberdeen).

  He was also an early African explorer. His expedition to Lake Ngami was the start of a lifelong interest in African, and especially Nile, exploration. He chaired the controversial meeting in Brighton where Stanley tried to defend Livingstone’s belief that the Lualaba was the Nile. Galton asked Stanley if the waters of Lake Tanganyika were sweet or brackish. ‘There is no sweeter water for making a cup of tea,’ replied Stanley, thinking he had been mocked. He then went on the attack, calling Galton an ‘easy-chair geographer’, ‘Mr Francis Galton FRGS, FRSXYZ and I do not know how many other letters’. Stanley was being a little unfair. Galton may have been an unvarnished bigot, but he was also a genuine explorer and his book The Art of Travel (1872) is the distillation of much real experience. It belongs, along with Burton’s The Lake Regions of Central Africa, on the bookshelf of any self-respecting Red Nile explorer.

  On the subject of donkeys – Petherick and Stanley always rode the beasts if they could – Galton wrote that asses can be taught not to kick. ‘Mungo Park says that negroes, where he travelled, taught their asses as follows: they cut a forked stick, and put the forked part into the ass’s mouth, like the bit of a bridle.’ The forked ends were tied together behind the donkey’s head while the longer piece protruded forward and struck the ground if the donkey put his head down. ‘It always proved effectual.’

  To stop a donkey braying, a heavy stone should be lashed to its tail. When a donkey brays it habitually raises its tail; with it weighted down ‘he has not the heart to bray. In hostile neighbourhoods, where silence and concealment are sought, it might be well to adopt this rather absurd treatment.’

  Crossing a river may be effected using the ‘African swimming ferry’. Two large calabashes are used as a float by cutting off their small ends and joining them to make a single lightweight container. The passenger places his luggage on top of this float and then clings to it. The ferryman then balances this unstable set-up by holding on to the other side of the float and swimming, pushing the entire load across the river.

  Illness, of course, was the main threat to early Nile explorers. Galton, who was trained as a physician in the early 1840s, advises that ‘powerful emetics, purgatives, and eyewashes are the most popular physickings’. He advises that explorers should keep in mind the old adage, ‘Though there is a great difference between a good physician and a bad one, there is very little difference between a good one and none at all.’

  For a powerful emetic he suggests, ‘drink a charge of gunpowder in a tumblerful of warm water or soap-suds, and tickle the throat’. For fevers he suggests prophylactic use of quinine but points out that this did not help Dr Livingstone. In the end he concludes that the banks of a river are often less affected than the low hills that overlook them. He advises never to camp downwind of a marsh, sleep between two large fires and avoid starting too early in the morning.

  For the common companion of diarrhoea he suggests nothing but broth or rice water. ‘The least piece of bread or meat causes an immediate relapse.’ The scourge of the Nile, especially in Egypt and Sudan, however, was always considered to be ophthalmia. He recommends sulphate of zinc as an eyewash. It should be properly astringent, which you can test by tasting it. Toothache could ruin an expedition too. Galton remarked, ‘An unskilled traveller is very likely to make a bad job of a first attempt at tooth-drawing. By constantly pushing and pulling an aching tooth, it will in time loosen, and perhaps, after some weeks, come out.’ For thirst he recommended: ‘drink water with a tea-spoon; it will satisfy a parched palate as much as if you gulped it down in tumblerfuls, and will disorder the digestion very considerably less’. For hunger, ‘Give two or three mouthfuls [of food, preferably broth] every quarter of an hour to a man reduced to the last extremity by hunger.’

  As for fleas, ‘Italian flea-powder . . . is really efficacious.’ He reports a fellow explorer’s experience: ‘I have often found a light cotton or linen bag a great safeguard against the attacks of fleas. I used to creep into it, draw the loop tight round my neck and was thus able to set legions of them at defiance.’ For ‘Vermin on the Person’, or lice, ‘You take half an ounce of mercury, which you mix with old tea leaves previously reduced to a paste by mastication. To render this softer you generally add
saliva; water could not have the same effect . . . You infuse this composition into a string of cotton, loosely twisted, which you hang around the neck; the lice are sure to bite at the bait, and they thereupon as surely swell, become red, and die forthwith . . . renew this salutary necklace once a month.’

  Snakebites: ‘Tie a string tight above the part, suck the wound, and caustic it as soon as you can. Or, for want of caustic, explode gunpowder in the wound.’ Scorpion sting: ‘the oil scraped out of a tobacco-pipe is a good application’.

  To carry an ill man Galton advises making a litter. Two lengthy poles with cross-pieces are laid on top of the sick man, who in turn is lying on a blanket. The ends and sides of the blanket are knotted to the carrying poles, which are kept from moving in and out by the cross-pieces.

  Of course all the above is not much use if you cannot manage the men under your command. For this he instructs would-be explorers in the ‘Management of Savages’. First, Galton counsels that:

  A frank, joking, but determined manner, joined with an air of showing more confidence in the good faith of the natives than you really feel, is the best. It is observed that a sea-captain generally succeeds in making an excellent impression on savages: they thoroughly appreciate common sense, truth, uprightness; and are not half such fools as strangers usually account them. If a savage does mischief, look on him as you would on a kicking mule, or a wild animal, whose nature is to be unruly and vicious, and keep your temper quite unruffled.

  He advises that on arrival at a native encampment the occupants often run away in fright. He suggests you ‘go boldly into their huts, take just what you want, and leave fully adequate payment. It is absurd to be over-scrupulous in these cases.’

  Galton recognises the importance of keeping morale high with feast days and holidays. ‘Recollect that a savage cannot endure the steady labour that we Anglo-Saxons have been bred to support. His nature is adapted to alternations of laziness and severe exertion. Promote merriment, singing, fiddling and so forth, with all your power.’

  On flogging he is circumspect. Most of the African explorers resorted to flogging porters who stole or tried to desert. Stanley recommended a light switch, others favoured the hippo-hide whip which would raise a cut on the first lash. Galton writes, ‘Different tribes have very different customs in the matter of corporal punishment: there are some who fancy it a disgrace and serious insult. A young traveller must therefore be discriminating and cautious in the licence he allows to his stick, or he may fall into sad trouble.’

  On counting: ‘When you wish a savage to keep count, give him a string of beads.’ As each item to be counted is passed, the man counting jerks a bead from the forepart of the cord hanging in front to the rear part over his shoulder.

  Of course, when managing savages goes wrong it is time to resort to coping with hostilities. Galton makes a long list of weapons suitable for resisting a native attack: for close-quarter attacks ‘Buck-shot and slugs are better than bullets’, but for a really good frightening effect he recommends rockets:

  Of all the European inventions, nothing so impresses and terrifies savages as fireworks, especially rockets. I cannot account for the remarkable effect they produce, but in every land it appears to be the same. A rocket, judiciously sent up, is very likely to frighten off an intended attack and save bloodshed. If a traveller is supplied with any of these, he should never make playthings of them, but keep them for great emergencies.

  For keeping watch he recommends opera glasses, and ‘I should be glad to hear that a fair trial had been also given by a traveller to an ear-trumpet.’

  As a clever trick when being robbed he suggests the following: when approached by an armed robber and told to lie on the floor while the robber divests you of your goods, take out your revolver and, cursing, say, ‘If this were loaded you should not treat me thus!’ Then throw yourself on the ground as the robber in his triumph approaches. When he is in range shoot him with the ‘unloaded’ gun, which of course was loaded all the time. Another ruse is to keep a small pistol cocked and loaded in your wallet pocket. When asked for money reach into the pocket and fire through the fabric at your assailant.

  If one is forced to take a prisoner, perhaps to act as a guide as Nile explorers sometimes did, secure him with the least amount of string by tying his thumbs together behind his back.

  25 • Buying a white slave

  The man who kills a lion does not pick his nose like a child.

  Nubian proverb

  In the nineteenth century, as we have seen, there were two approaches to discovering the Nile’s source – travelling inland through Africa or attempting to ascend the river from Cairo. No one had ever managed the full ascent, not Alexander the Great’s envoy, nor Nero’s legionaries, nor Napoleon, nor Capitan Selim, nor the admirable Petherick. Not until the Victorian explorer Samuel Baker and his wife – who travelled everywhere with him – did the ascent of the Nile occur. And Baker’s wife, to whom he was devoted, was certainly unusual – he bought her at a Circassian slave auction.

  The going rate for a white slave in the Balkans in 1859 was about £10 for a virgin aged between twelve and eighteen, though in a glut the price could go as low as £5, perhaps the equivalent of £300 now. There were many sources: Georgia, Circassia, the edges of Greece and the wilder parts of Albania and Serbia. Turkey’s vassal states in Europe were particularly vulnerable. In some Bulgarian districts each family had to give up one child as a kind of blood tax.

  It was into this world that Samuel Baker, easily the most likeable of the great African explorers, burst on to the scene with a desire to be amused by the slave market in Widdin in what is now north-west Bulgaria. Baker was thirty-eight years old, already a widower and the father of four daughters in the care of his sister (two sons and another daughter having already died).

  In one version of the story, the Pasha of Widdin outbid Baker for the eighteen-year-old Hungarian Florenz Sass, originally from a German-speaking part of Transylvania. Baker was so entranced by the girl that he refused to let her become the slave of the elderly Turkish governor. The same night he managed to arrange her escape and together they fled down the Danube to freedom – an implausible story at best, as Baker was on a hunting holiday at the time with an Indian maharaja called Dulep Singh. It is almost certainly the case that Florenz caught his romantic eye at the slave auction and he simply bought her.

  From these extraordinary beginnings began the greatest husband-and-wife exploring team the world has ever seen, or is likely to see. It would be two years before he could set in motion his plan to reach the source of the Nile by ascending the river, attempting what every expedition since ancient times had failed to achieve. Speke may have claimed to have found the Nile’s source, but somehow cutting in from Zanzibar wasn’t quite as impressive as travelling the full length of the river, especially if you do so with your woman (he had yet to marry Florenz). Baker spurned the usual source of patronage, the Royal Geographical Society. Instead he sought support from a former rear admiral, Henry Murray, a bachelor who lived in Albany off Piccadilly and kept the company of explorers and big-game hunters. No women, not even slaves, were allowed in his apartments; in his bedroom were a set of parallel bars that male guests could work out on when the conversation flagged. From Murray, Baker received all important contacts, especially in Egypt. Murray, known as ‘the skipper’, was an enthusiastic supporter of flogging as a way of maintaining discipline, though according to Baker he exuded ‘an almost womanly gentleness and courtesy’. Another contact was a former aide to Livingstone, the admired big-game hunter William Oswell. Oswell lent Baker his most prized weapon: a massive 10-gauge double-barrelled rifle and shotgun combination. The skipper, meanwhile, presented him with a naval telescope. Baker was set.

  In 1861 he sent home from Alexandria for rifles, 250 pounds of gunpowder, a large box of tools and a medical chest well stocked with quinine. Unlike most of the nineteenth-century explorers Baker was independently wealthy. He asked the family
company that looked after his inheritance to make unlimited funds available for his assault on the Nile. He set out on 15 April 1861: ‘Left Cairo at 6am with a spanking breeze.’ His notebook was not a new one, but already contained notes made during his eight years as a planter in Ceylon and during the Danube journey during which he had bought Florence (as she was now known). His handwriting had changed since then: it was smaller, less jerky, more controlled.

  At Aswan, a party of Nubians came aboard to beg for baksheesh. They were all entirely naked. Baker remarked in his diary, ‘I could not help thinking how much ladies must learn by a journey up the Nile which affords such opportunities for the study of human nature.’ They then travelled overland past the cataracts on sixteen camels until rejoining the Nile at Berber. Florence (the second Florence of the Nile, we might note) did not like the climate at all. ‘F. very ill with fatigue and heat,’ wrote Baker. But they battled on, reaching the borders of Abyssinia, where they then spent months becoming acclimatised to travel in remote places.

  Eventually they returned to the Nile and journeyed on to Khartoum. Here they met Arab slavers and made plans to penetrate further up the Nile. Reaching Gondokoro, they believed Speke, on his expedition, to be dead. But after a short stay he arrived with his fellow explorer James Grant. Baker had been hoping that it would be he, Sam, who would rescue Speke from trouble near the source of the Nile. But Speke, though tired and anxious, told him, ‘The Nile is settled.’ Baker asked him if there was anything left to do on the river. The reply was ‘Find Lake Nzige.’ Speke in his desire to escape the rapacious King of the Bunyoro, who had taken virtually all his belongings, had left the Nile shortly after seeing it exit Lake Victoria and journeyed overland to Gondokoro. He had thus missed out a huge loop of the White Nile that native information suggested passed through an enormous lake, the Luta Nzige. Baker decided to find this lake.