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

by Twigger, Robert

  These primitive people were not pygmies – their height ruled that out – so who were they? Grogan could, of course, be telling a whopper. Yet earlier, when shown the carcass of what is obviously a giant mountain gorilla, he doesn’t embellish it by saying he has seen a living one. Grogan does, however, report the local rumour that these gorillas carry off local maidens from time to time. King Kong must be a hard-wired myth.

  Of course people lie all the time just to tell a good story – and what could be a better yarn than a personal meeting with the missing link? And by showing the modern African’s dominance over the primitive hominid – from which he evolved – the account supports similar European notions of superiority over the African, notions which Grogan definitely subscribed to.

  Yet it is important to note that Grogan came from a different age and, it is obvious from his writing, was far from enlightened about the abilities of people very different to himself. I don’t think he ever questioned for one moment his assumed superiority over the native African. Nor do I think that the character he displays, which is bluff and rather open, is congruent with the sly insertion of a bit of racial propaganda. He’s a racist, but an unthinking and undogmatic one, the kind who ‘loves’ (and patronises) Africans rather than hates and despises them, and he sees as a ‘threat’ not the Africans themselves but other Europeans who would colonise the continent if the British weren’t smart about it.

  Liars aren’t parsimonious with lies. They tell them in bunches. If you read an account by a liar such as Colonel Fawcett (who disappeared in the Brazilian jungle in the 1920s), you find every page has vagaries and amazements such as sixty-foot anacondas (there has never been a captured and recorded anaconda exceeding twenty-two feet in length), lost jungle cities and a paste used by Indians to dissolve stone. Liars don’t hold back and tell just one pointless fib in a book of 378 pages.

  If Grogan is to be believed, and the matter-of-fact way he presents his story, with no hint of drama, suggests he should, then it is quite possible that he encountered a last surviving group of a hominid such as Homo ergaster/erectus (ergaster is usually considered to have preceded erectus, but sometimes the names are used interchangeably). We know from hearth evidence that Homo ergaster could use fire and we know he was a tool user. The fact that Grogan’s creatures have wiry body hair is also suggestive of what we know of Homo ergaster and earlier pre-Homo sapiens hominids. That such a group could have survived so long in isolation is remarkable, but far from impossible. Homo erectus, we know for sure, survived in Asia until less than 10,000 years ago. In the rest of the world he died out 200,000 years ago – or so we believe. Recently it has come to be accepted that Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens may well have interbred. Some even consider that later Homo ergaster/erectus may also have interbred with Homo sapiens. Could Grogan’s ‘missing link’ have been a group of such hominids? We know from fossil evidence that Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived alongside each other for thousands of years. Perhaps, too, this happened for far longer than imagined between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens sapiens.

  But it was not this information that interested the British authorities in Cairo, to whom Grogan reported (breathlessly perhaps?) at the completion of his stupendous hike. Ernst the Norwegian runner would have been proud of him. No, the information the British coveted was about the Atem river. Grogan suggested that this river could be used as an alternative channel to the Nile, which was so thoroughly blocked by the papyrus and elephant grass of the Sudd. It was the Atem which would later feature in the plans for the Jonglei Canal. The Nile was slowly succumbing to man’s control, or so it seemed.

  41 • Connection and control

  The water that was helpful in the dry season they curse in the rainy season. Central African proverb

  Is this the right moment to bring it up? I’m not sure. But it has to be said, at some point in our lengthy Nile journey, that the river was losing its mystique, its magic; it was being sized up. Mapped, measured, dredged, dammed. In 1904 the first current meters were installed. From now on the speed of the Nile could be known with accuracy throughout the year. Previously spot-checks on its speed had been made by measuring the time a dropped float sped along a measured section of the river. Kitchener had reinstalled the Nilometer at Khartoum; indeed one of the first acts of the British as they entered the Sudan was to establish measuring gauges in Dongola. The Egyptian High Commissioner Lord Cromer told the British government that the importance of such measures to Egypt could not be ‘overrated’.

  Measurement. The nineteenth century saw the standardisation of measures and the triumph of measurement . . . and of standardisation. If it moved, it was measured. If it didn’t, it was also measured. If it had to be stopped from moving to be measured, then so be it. After measurement came standardisation. It was easier that way. It’s a childish thing, this desire to measure. Children love measuring, counting paving stones, listing numbers. But its results are very useful, to those who seek control.

  Another sort of measurement had been initiated by General Gordon during his years as Governor of Equatorial Egypt – now South Sudan. He had been the first to organise scientific map-making of the upper Nile and its tributaries through the Sudd. Eventually the whole Nile would be mapped – more thoroughly than many rivers in Europe. Certainly far far better than the Amazon, the Mekong or the mighty Oxus.

  The Nile attracted stories. It was the river of stories in the age of stories and mythology. Then as man moved into the scientific age it became the river to be measured and mapped. But whereas stories lead men to the source, maps and measurement make him bolder. They tempt him with the promise of control. Stories connect, that’s what they do. Stories demand only to be told and retold. Measurement is only useful (except to the Aspergerish part of us) in as much as it promises control over something valuable. Control is very tempting, since it confers power.

  Seeking the source of the Nile was a search for information that led to maps that led to control that led to dams that led to the river being broken up. Strangely, the Nile started life as many small rivers all connecting up. Then it became, through the abstraction of the hydrographers, a single entity – the Nile basin, draining a tenth of all Africa. Now, as dams proceed in Ethiopia and Uganda, one can see it becoming broken up again, into local streams, no longer a unified whole.

  If the effect of the Nile on human history can be unearthed, or unsubmerged, then it must be a form of psychohistoriography – the play of place and time on the way men think. The object of war, the world’s first tank general J. F. C. Fuller wrote, ‘is to change the enemy’s mind’. The Nile changed men’s minds. It still does. But, whereas before it changed minds through stories, it now changed them through the promise, the lure, of control.

  Of course, even in the past the Nile had been controlled. Didn’t Menes change its course? Wasn’t Lake Moeris an early version of Lake Nasser? Kind of – but this control, limited by limited technology, did not replace the power of Nile stories. Stories lead to greater understanding. Measurement aims too at greater understanding, but that measurement must also become part of a story, albeit a scientific one, if we are to consider things ‘understood’. Control cuts off understanding prematurely because it is action before we have full understanding.

  The more we understand, the greater our paralysis. And this is a good thing. Willcocks, the designer of the Aswan dam, learnt late in life that perennial irrigation, which replaced the old flood-based basin irrigation, had allowed the bilharzia worm to multiply and virtually destroy the strength of the Egyptian fellahin. Even today it is said that the Upper Egyptians are fatally weakened by the effects of bilharzia and the smoking of bango (cannabis) to relieve its symptoms. For what? For more cotton exports? That was always the justification for the earlier dams on the Nile.

  Understanding leads to paralysis – of that which is destructive. The Nuer people who would lose their livelihood if the Jonglei Canal were completed call the Sudd ‘Toich’, which means ‘Gif
t from the Mother’. They live in alignment with the Sudd and use its suction-pump swamplike attributes as a benefit – a store for water in the dry season. To the Arab slavers and the explorers who followed, the Sudd was simply a barrier, something to be burned and hacked away – so that we could better control the river. Ignorance of the Nuer might lead us to do this. But the more we understand them the less likely we are to interfere.

  Stories connect. Stories lead to understanding. Measurement can lead to better stories of a scientific kind, but usually it tends to fuel fantasies of control. Control is acting before you have full understanding. Surfing is not about control of waves, it is about riding them, it is about alignment with the giant forces of nature, not attempting to deadlock them and wrestle them to the ground. Control leads to a backlash, unforeseen circumstances, unsustainability. Can you surf the Nile? In a few places – just below the Owen Falls, maybe a few stretches of the Blue Nile. But not many. Perhaps that gives an indication of why attempts to control the Nile are always a step forward and a step back. It’s not easy to be in alignment with nature. But we need to be. When our control fantasies have all faded, become stories of disaster instead of inspiration, our children will turn to other stories that promise a more positive return. The only ‘everyone wins’ stories out there will be those where surfing will be the paradigm, not a fistfight with mother nature.

  And yet for all the common-sense appeal of a sustainability imperative – that every development be subjected to the simple test: is it globally sustainable? – there remains a sneaking suspicion that we are looking at the wrong thing. To clarify: the population of Egypt since the first barrage was built has increased tenfold. The population since the second dam, the high dam, was constructed in 1970 has increased from thirty-four million to eighty-two million in 2012. That huge increase is, in biological terms, a great success. Since Malthus made his gloomy predictions between 1798 and 1826, a sudden increase in population has always been seen as presaging a collapse. My wife’s uncle told me he remembered seeing rabbits colonise an island in the River Nile (I did not even know there were rabbits in Egypt, but there are) when he was a boy; they ate everything and then he watched them starve, get thinner and thinner and die off since none could escape (now they would probably be eaten first, owing to the increase in human competition for land in Egypt). Yet humans at every turn manage to defeat this depressing prophecy. In fact the human race just keeps getting bigger and bigger. What we can be sure of is that it is at the expense of other creatures – maybe even rabbits. Wild animals, great herds of buffalo and elephant moving between the bends of the upper Nile – these have all disappeared, or are fast disappearing. Poaching for ivory and bushmeat intensifies, especially with the very real Chinese demand for ivory increasing with that country’s prosperity.

  Or take the 100,000 Nubians who were instantly deprived of an ancestral homeland as Lake Nasser flooded. Can their loss be balanced against electric power for poor farmers? Increased irrigation, leading to increased food production leading to increased population? That increased population starts building on the farmland – shades of the rabbit population – but in this case they are saved by cheap wheat imports from Russia and the US.

  Attempts to control the Nile either to increase the economic wealth of Egypt or to benefit from its strategic guardianship of the Red Sea/Mediterranean corridor usually result, as we have seen, in the Nile turning red with blood. No gain, no pain, it seems. Increasingly, almost no change is painless.

  Technological improvements that lead to population growth lead to war, wars that are often fought using the fruits of the same technological improvements. When all-out war is too costly, as it is now, proxy wars, internal wars, crime wars, ideological wars become the new form that conflict takes. Terrorism – though ghastly and disruptive – kills far fewer people than traffic accidents. In a global sense it is a non-event, yet we shower it with attention because our need for conflict, driven by population pressure, requires some kind of outlet. Sport appears to serve a similar purpose, a release from the cabin-fever of modern existence, but with beneficial rather than harmful results.

  The secret of storytelling is not control. You cannot ‘plan’ a good story. Instead you have to set off, as if on a wide river, and see where you end up. The best advice is to reincorporate what has already happened but in a new way. Joke tellers do this all the time, using something that was mentioned ten minutes ago in a new and witty context. As Hitchcock said, ‘If you show a gun in the first few minutes then you have to show it being used, the audience demand it.’ So, though stories move forward in time, they actually look backwards, weaving what has happened, what was implied, into a more interesting pattern. Compare this to a desire to control the future. Here you are looking ahead, hoping that you have taken every contingency into account. There is no room for improvisation. Everything must be strictly thought out in advance. You can’t improvise a giant dam.

  The problem with big things like dams is that people get very attached to the idea of them. They then refuse to look at all the evidence dispassionately. They have too much emotional capital invested in their pet project. Then there is the money aspect – the contracts, the employment. Those that make the future are almost uniquely unsuited to predict it, which is a pity. This is left to storytellers, who by delineating our very human follies give us insight, great insight if we care to look carefully, into what is likely to happen in the future.

  We have strayed a long way in our look at control and understanding. If we are truly interested in looking ahead I have only one question relevant here: what will happen to the Aswan dam when it starts to crumble? Will it be rebuilt every few decades, like those Japanese temples – different wood but identical design for 750 years? In Japan they still train craftsmen to work as they did 750 years ago. Maybe we don’t need to do that with the Aswan dam; it was pretty rough and ready in its time. But are we really looking at a river dammed for as long as humans run this planet? Something in me rebels at this idea. I am not sure why, but one day I suspect the River Nile will run unhindered all the way to the sea from its source. (In this fantasy I see people waving the river on its way rather as they wave the Olympic torch through distant villages.) Maybe we just need to learn to let go. The desire to control is human, the ability to forgo it truly superhuman.

  42 • More cannibals at the source of the Nile

  After the war has passed: ‘I will buy a spear,’ says the fool.

  Sudanese proverb

  But back in 1898 fantasies of control were at their height. It was easier, too, to fantasise about controlling the Nile when its people were seen as either missing links or bloodthirsty cannibals. If they should suffer when we dam rivers and build canals, who cares? They aren’t even properly human, are they?

  Cannibals. You can’t have the Nile without cannibals. Grogan, when he wasn’t meeting the missing link, spent some of his time hunting big game and some of it wading through swamps and hacking through the jungles of central Africa. He also encountered cannibals in the Kagera river region.

  We have already made the acquaintance of the Kagera river: it flows into Lake Victoria and constitutes the Nile’s furthest source. For a river and not a lake to be considered a source the river should have sufficient current for its contents provably to cross the lake and arrive at the outflow. In 1994 this was attested to in horrific fashion when the bodies of butchered Tutsi floated out and across the lake propelled towards the Ripon Falls exit. A hundred years earlier similar remains had been discovered by Ewart Grogan.

  Grogan embarked on his journey because, he said, Rhodes had inspired him with the idea of a railway running from Cairo to South Africa. In the late 1890s the route had not even been walked, let alone surveyed. Twenty years earlier, Stanley had fought countless battles with angry natives in his river journey across central Africa, and this put off all but the most courageous or foolhardy. Grogan was of a different generation when he set off in 1898. He was imbued with the
South African familiarity with the continent. He did not fear Africans, and he saw Africa as a potential home, not a version of hell there to be conquered and then left alone. He also had the immeasurable advantage of starting from a familiar base with people he knew and trusted; whatever horrors emerged, he would have that connection to draw on. And finally, though the territory might be difficult, the people intractable, the provisioning inadequate, he had the supreme psychological benefit of knowing that explorers, men like him, had already been there. Though no one had made the journey he planned, every section of it had been completed by an illustrious forebear in the previous twenty or thirty years. Grogan would simply be joining up the dots. Simply. The journey would take two years and make Grogan a famous man. He would go on to be one of the founding forces in Kenya, building the first sawmill, brickworks, and Nairobi’s biggest and most expensively appointed hotel.

  Simply. Not really. The journey was still tough and dangerous. In Rwanda, in the forests where the Nile rises, he came across scenes reminiscent of the later massacre of Tutsis. He wrote of seeing ‘dried pools of blood, gaunt skeletons, grinning skulls, and trampled grass [that] told a truly African tale . . . the diabolical noise made by the onrushing natives decided me that the matter was serious. I questioned my guide as to their intentions, and was scarcely reassured by his naive remark: “They are coming to eat us.”’ Grogan fired his rifle at the attackers and they disappeared. Exploring the cannibals’ huts so recently vacated, he continued:

  Loathsome, revolting, a hideous nightmare of horrors; and yet I must tell briefly what I saw.

  Item. – A bunch of human entrails drying on a stick.

  Item. – A pot of soup with bright yellow fat.