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

by Twigger, Robert

  New and important countries had been investigated not by explorers but by the brigands of Abou Saood, whose first introduction was to carry off slaves and cattle. Such conduct could only terminate in an extension of the ruin which a similar course had determined in every country that had been occupied by the traders of the White Nile. I trusted that my arrival would create a great reform, and restore confidence throughout the country . . . Abou Saood had sworn fidelity. Of course I did not believe him . . .

  Baker was also looking at ways of exploiting the resources of the country that did not involve slavery. ‘It appears that at Langgo the demand for beads is very great as the natives work them into patterns upon their matted hair. Ivory has little or no value, and exists in large quantities. The natives refuse to carry loads and transport an elephant’s tusk by boring a hole in the hollow end, through which they attach a rope; it is then dragged along the ground by a donkey. The ivory is thus seriously damaged . . .’

  At one point Baker had an opportunity to arrest the notorious slaver Abou Saoud, who was recruiting local chiefs to fight and enslave their neighbours in the southern parts of the country. ‘It may seem to the public that having “absolute and supreme power” I was absurdly lenient towards Abou Saood who I knew to be so great a villain . . . but had I adopted severe or extreme measures against Abou Saood, I might have ruined the expedition at the commencement.’

  Baker had only 212 men and was trying to get to the Equator. He was now about 165 miles away. He contemplated releasing slaves at Abou Saoud’s slaving stations but realised the problems. ‘Abou Saood’s Fatiko station was crowded with slaves. His people were all paid in slaves. The stations of Fabbo, Faloro and Farragenia were a mass of slaves . . . Had I attempted to release some thousand slaves from the different stations, I should have required a large military force to have occupied those stations, and to have driven the whole of the slave hunters bodily.’ He realised that the slaves could not have been returned home easily as they were collected from a huge area. Nor could he feed them from his own rations. He had no choice but to ignore the ravaging slave trade and move on, for the time being.

  A party of native hunters was surprised by Baker’s small army and fled, leaving behind its elephant spears. Baker’s men returned the dropped spears to the frightened natives when they encountered them later. This caused much astonishment as the people were used to invaders taking everything from them.

  In order to placate Kabba Rega, a local chief, and win him over from supporting the Arab slave traders from the north, Baker reports giving him as a present:

  One piece entire of Turkey red cloth, one piece grey calico, twelve pounds of beads of the finest varieties, three zinc mirrors, two razors, one long butcher’s knife, two pair scissors, one brass bugle, one German horn, two pieces of red and yellow handkerchiefs, one piece of yellow ditto, one peacock Indian scarf, one blue blanket, six German silver spoons, sixteen pairs of various ear-rings, twelve finger rings, two dozen mule harness bells, six elastic heavy brass spring wires, one pound long white horsehair, three combs, one papiermâché tray, one boxwood fife, one kaleidoscope.

  After handing these over, Baker ‘proclaimed upon all sides that the reign of terror was ended’.

  But it was not.

  There was a brief interlude when envoys from the Ugandan King M’tese, who had known Speke, came to visit. As credentials they brought with them gifts they had been given by Speke and Grant many years earlier: a printed book, several watercolour drawings including one of a guineafowl, and a little folding book with sketches of British soldiers of various regiments. Baker impressed the native mission with the great luxury of his travelling tent, large mirrors and other curios: ‘a good shock with the magnetic battery wound up the entertainment, and provided them with much material for a report to their royal master upon their return to Uganda’. Before they left, Baker told them of Speke’s death back in England. ‘They had appeared much concerned at hearing of poor Speke’s death; and continued to exclaim for some minutes, “Wah! Wah! Speekee! Speekee! Wah! Speekee!”’

  But Baker had more important concerns. Kabba Rega had proved deeply unreliable, favouring the Arab slavers even though they were ravaging his country. Baker and his retinue drew up their battle lines at Masindi and waited.

  Kabba Rega sent over food and drink to try and appease Baker. Seven jars of plantain cider were accepted and distributed to Baker’s men. Shortly after dinner Baker was told by an overwrought aide, ‘many of the troops appeared to be dying, and they had evidently been poisoned by the plantain cider!’

  Never one to panic, Baker recounted:

  I at once flew to my medicinal arms . . . this little chest had been my companion for twenty-five years. I begged my wife to get as much mustard and strong salt ready as she could mix in a hurry . . . I found the men in a terrible state. Several lay insensible, while about thirty were suffering from a violent constriction of the throat, which almost prevented them from breathing. This was accompanied by spasms and burning pain in the stomach, with delirium, a partial palsy of the lower extremities, and in the worst cases, total loss of consciousness. I opened the jaws of the insensible, and poured down a dessertspoonful of water, containing three grains of emetic tartar.

  He also dosed everyone with as much mustard and salt as they could manage until ‘the patients began to feel the symptoms of a rough passage across the Bristol Channel’.

  By the next morning the troops, ‘although weakly, were quite out of danger’. At that point Kabba Rega’s men attacked. ‘Suddenly we were startled by the savage yells of some thousand voices, which burst unexpectedly upon us!’ Baker, who was wearing white cotton clothes, was an easy target. As he walked towards his divan or hut the sergeant walking beside him was shot dead. ‘Thousands of armed natives now rushed from all directions upon the station.’

  With his ‘beautifully made’ Holland breech-loading double rifle, Baker started firing into the attacking horde. He ordered his men to set fire to Kabba Rega’s ‘enormous straw buildings’ which were near by. His men began to gain the upper hand using their Snider rifles against the inferior lances and rifles of Kabba Rega’s band. Kabba Rega, ‘the young coward, had fled with all his women before the action commenced, together with his magic bamba or throne and sacred drum’.

  The battle of Masindi had been won, but Baker’s ever faithful officer Mansoor was killed, receiving thirty-two lance wounds – ‘treacherously murdered instead of dying on a fair battlefield’, as Baker put it.

  Interestingly, Idi Amin sought to return Kabarega, as he became known, to more honourable and, he felt, deserving status. Amin insisted that Kabarega was really a hero, an anti-colonial fighter. With his own unpredictable sense of humour he ordered the Murchison Falls, named after Baker’s great friend and ally at the RGS, to be renamed after Baker’s great enemy in Bunyoro – Kabarega.

  29 • Gordon goes because Florence says so

  Though the mosquito sleeps inside the house, the bee sleeps outside.

  Ethiopian proverb

  The Bakers retired to Devon, where Sam became an eccentric local worthy. Blacksmiths, tinkers, road menders and gypsies encountered while he was out striding the lanes would be asked back for tea in the billiard room at his estate in Sandford Orleigh. He was elected president of the Devonshire Association, and town councillor for Newton Abbot. But the old Baker, who could bring down a stag with his bare hands and a hunting knife, was never far from the surface. When a travelling strongman invited the audience to imitate his feat of snapping a chain wound around his bicep, Sam Baker, seated in the front row with Florence, took on the challenge. Still with the massive arms that had cowed the natives of the upper Nile, Baker, with a blood-vessel-bursting grimace, huffed and puffed and broke the chain in two.

  Florence kept an orderly house just as she had kept an orderly camp in the Sudan. Here there was far more luxury apparent. She liked to wear diamond tiaras. They had an Abyssinian servant, and when a footman spilled
some soup on a guest she remarked in a thoughtful way, ‘You should be whipped.’ Perhaps in Gondokoro, but not in Devon; the remark was an observation but not an order. In fact the Bakers were very even handed. When a small boy, the son of a visitor, kicked the butler, he was imprisoned in his room on bread and water for a day. The former slave declared, ‘Servants are our friends. We do not kick our friends.’ Sam was equally tough on spoiled guests. When two young urchins – the future King George V and his brother – arrived for a weekend Sam Baker thrashed them for breaking the branches of a tropical tree he had earlier forbidden them to climb. Their father, the Prince of Wales, must have agreed, as he maintained his fond regard for the Bakers despite his mother’s opposition to Florence on account of her journeys, while unmarried, with Sam.

  Sam Baker’s replacement as head of Equatoria was General Gordon (as well as exploring the region Baker had been appointed, by the Egyptian government, Equatoria’s first ruler). He had pursued Baker’s aim at stamping out slavery with great vigour and made enemies in the process. Now it was mooted that Gordon should take over and rule the whole of the Sudan. In an article for The Times Baker had written, ‘Why should not General Gordon Pasha be invited to assist the government? There is no man living who would be more capable or so well fitted to represent the justice which Great Britain should establish in the Soudan.’ Gordon knew better. He did not want the job, but he knew he had to find a replacement. If he managed to avoid the Khartoum assignment he had an offer to go with Stanley into the Congo, which was more attractive than being stuck in the dusty capital of the Sudan. So Gordon suggested to Baker that he and his brother Valentine, a high-ranking army officer, should take over in Khartoum as administrative head and commander in chief respectively. Gordon – who really did not want the job – travelled down to Devon and drove through the lanes with Baker, to try and persuade the older man to take this job. When they arrived for tea at Baker’s estate it was all settled. Gordon was off the hook and the Baker brothers would go to Khartoum. The sixty-two-year-old former explorer was very excited – though he had reckoned without Florence. She put down her bone-china cup carefully with both hands and said with that trace of a German accent, ‘You promised me that you would never go back to the Sudan without me. I do not go. So you do not go.’

  One gets a rare glimpse of the contribution Florence made to Baker’s success. She provided, one suspects, the judgement that he lacked. If Baker had gone he might well have ended the way Gordon did. And Gordon, incidentally, was not at all pleased that anyone, and a man’s wife no less, should block him. Baker led him from the drawing room with a doleful air. ‘My dear Gordon,’ he said, ‘you see how I am placed – how can I leave all this?’ Florence later remarked that Gordon had hypnotically powerful blue eyes that were very hard to resist – she did not condemn her husband for falling prey to them, though she never forgave Gordon for trying to pass on a deadly mission to a man past retirement age.

  Gordon was duly sent to the Sudan with the object of staging a withdrawal there in the face of the Mahdi’s forces. And he was really the wrong man, given all the years he had spent building up the British presence there and subduing the Arab slave trade. He had too much invested and this led to the dithering that brought about his downfall. But it seems that, had a certain telegraph not been sent, the whole Gordon fiasco might have been avoided. Lord Cromer related in his memoirs that when he discovered Gordon was proceeding to Khartoum via the Red Sea port of Suakin he immediately telegraphed that this was inadvisable, the reason being the open rebellion of the tribes that lay between Suakin and Khartoum. If Gordon had continued via Suakin he would have been held up and eventually turned back – by which time the need for him in Khartoum would have evaporated. But Gordon changed his route and went to his eventual doom via Cairo instead. Cromer wrote, ‘If I had not interfered as regards General Gordon’s route, a point which seemed at the time to be one of detail, the course of history in the Soudan would have been changed and many valuable lives, including probably that of General Gordon himself, would have been saved.’ And there might, ten years later, have been no battle of Omdurman in which so many died and a certain English subaltern called Winston Churchill rose to prominence.

  In 1893 the Bakers, Florence and Sam, planned to spend the following year in Somaliland, hunting lions. Sam was now immensely fat and suffering from intermittent gout. He died of a heart attack before he could leave. Somewhat ahead of his time, he had asked to be cremated in the newly built crematorium in Woking, the first to be built in Britain.

  Florence lived on in Devon for another twenty-three years. Whenever guests arrived she wore her finery, everything she had been denied during her travels in Africa. And all visitors were forced to eat the immense cream teas her husband had so loved.

  30 • A strange occurrence

  The Nile is great, greater still is a man who sincerely notes his own faults. Egyptian proverb

  The story, however, does not stop there. Often, when writing a book such as this, which requires the sourcing of hundreds of volumes of old and often hard-to-find books, one is struck, forcibly, how much coincidence, or serendipity, plays a part in the finished work. I started writing this book in Egypt, within sight of the Nile. The Arab Spring revolution of 2011 made me reconsider what was the best place to carry on the uninterrupted work necessary for such a large project. I ended up living in Dorset, not so far from a friend who lived in Dowlish Wake in Somerset, which turned out to be the ancestral home of the Speke family. I then travelled up north and gave a talk at a school in Dumfriesshire. It was here, in Thornhill, that I discovered that Joseph Thomson had been born (well, two miles from Thornhill), the African explorer who first named the Thomson’s gazelle (and about whom I had been reading in my research on Nile exploration). I started to obtain books – some second-hand, some new, many through the marvellous interlibrary loan service. In a bookshop about a mile and a half from my house I found a reprinted edition of Ismailia, Samuel Baker’s account of his attempt to subdue the slave trade in southern Sudan. The book was missing a map and was only £10 – a bargain. When I got it home I found inside it a letter typed on thin blue paper dated 20 July 1963 – in good condition and almost the same age as myself. The letter was from the great-grandson of Sam Baker, Valentine E. Baker, presumably named after Sam’s brother, though an internet search found nothing beyond references to Chet Baker singing ‘My Funny Valentine’. The letter itself concerned a visit the great-grandson Valentine had made to Gulu in Uganda, home to the Samuel Baker School. He had visited in the 1960s to donate some books by Baker as well as a handwritten letter from Baker to Abou Saoud, (or Aboo Sood as he sometimes spelled it), the double-dealing Arab slaver whom he defeated in his attempt to stamp out slavery.

  But this upper Nile story twists and turns like the Nile itself because the Samuel Baker School is only about an hour from where Joseph Kony, founder of the Lord’s Resistance Army, was born. Kony staged raids on its dormitories and kidnapped children for his army. One of the ex-Sam Baker schoolboys, Moses, who would rise to become a trusted lieutenant before defecting back to normal life to resume his studies, was interviewed by Matthew Green, author of a book about Kony called The Wizard of the Nile. I got in touch with Matthew. In a further twist I found we had been to the same college and had even shared the same teachers.

  The letter to the slaver appears on page 138 of Ismailia. So the great-grandson of the writer had copied the original letter and then sent it to someone (‘Mr Hudson’ is all it is addressed to) who had put it in a book containing the same letter, which some fifty years later I bought in a second-hand bookshop in Dorset which I visited only because it was within walking distance of my house. Here’s the letter:

  Aboo Sood, Sir,

  You arrived here on the 10th inst with a large quantity of cattle stolen by you and your people.

  You, knowing that the Bari natives were at war with the government, have nevertheless been in daily and friendly communication with
them.

  The Baris of this country are rendered hostile to all honest Government by the conduct of your people, who, by stealing cattle and slaves from the exterior and delivering them here, have utterly destroyed all hope of improvement in a people naturally savage but now rendered by your acts thieves of the worst description.

  It is thus impossible that I can permit the continuance of such acts. I therefore give you due notice that at the expiration of your contract [he nominally worked for Baker] you will withdraw all your people from the district under my command.

  At the same time I declare the forfeiture to the Government of the cattle you have forcibly captured under the eyes of my authority.

  Signed

  Sam W. Baker

  Governor General

  The original letter, still at the Samuel Baker School, was handwritten. I fold up my version, from Baker’s great-grandson, and return it to the safety of his great-grandfather’s book. I am sure Kony’s lieutenant Moses must have seen the letter, the original, while he was at school. I’ll surely tell Matthew Green, maybe at my next college reunion. I am beginning to realise why the Nile has such a hold on people. It connects up all stories.

  31 • Mountains of the Moon no. 2

  The word of God is like a grinding stone. Sudanese proverb

  The Red Nile connects up all stories – maybe – but it certainly keeps returning us to the old stories. Millennia after Aristotle wrote of the strange Mountains of the Moon, they appeared again in all their ghostly significance in the accounts of the new European explorers.