The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  One of the first to describe the trans-Saharan trade was the Sunni Moroccan, Ibn Battuta (full version: Hajji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta—“Hajji” meaning that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and “Tanji” that he had been born in Tangiers). A scholar and a jurist, Ibn Battuta was also a great traveler, who ventured as far north as Siberia, as far east as China and as far south as the Niger River. On his final return to Morocco he set down the story of his travels in a book called A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travel, more generally known as the Rihla, or Journey.

  Battuta’s journey to the south was undertaken at the behest of the Sultan of Morocco (“May God support him!”), and began at the capital city of Fez (“May God protect it!”). From Fez he went to the inland city of Sijilmassa, on one of the principal north-south caravan routes, “and one of the finest cities, where there is an abundance of excellent dates.” Here he stayed with a faqih, or theologian, “whose brother I had met at Qan-janfu in China. How far apart from one another they are! He treated me with great hospitality. Here I bought camels and fed them for four months and then, at the beginning of God’s month of Muharram in the year 753 [February, 1352], I set off with a caravan of merchants whose leader was Abu Muhammad Yandakan al-Masufi, may God have mercy on him!

  “After twenty-five days we arrived at Taghaza, a miserable village whose houses and mosque are made of rock salt with camel skins for roofs. It has no trees, and is nothing but sand and a salt mine. No one lives there except the slaves who mine the salt, digging it from the earth where it lies in great slabs, one on top of the other. A camel can carry two of these slabs. This salt can sometimes sell for eight to ten mithqals in Iwalatan, and for twenty to thirty, and sometimes even forty mithqals in the city of Mali.” (A mithqal was one-eighth of an ounce of gold.)

  After stopping and resting three days at Taghaza the caravans prepared to enter the great desert, “in which there is neither water, bird nor tree; but only sand and hills of sand, which are so blown about by the wind that no vestige of a track remains among them.” According to an earlier traveler, Abu Hamid al-Gharnati, another obstacle in crossing the desert was the Wadi al-Sabt, the River of the Sabbath, “which is a river of sand that flows like water. No one may enter it and survive”—except on the Sabbath, when the sand stopped flowing and the river could be safely crossed. “This is what is said,” added Abu Hamid al-Gharnati, “but God knows best.” He also mentioned the race of “people who have no heads. Their eyes are in the shoulders, and their mouths in their chests. They are harmless, and have no intelligence.”

  On arrival at Mali, Ibn Battuta went to live in the White Quarter, that part of the town where, when compared with the Negroes, the relatively white Moors and Arabs resided. He was gratified to receive from local notables several “reception gifts, including a cow and a bullock” and from the sultan, Mansa Sulayman, a gift of thirty-three and a third mithqals of gold. Soon after, he was present when the sultan sat in council.

  “A dais with three steps, called a banbi, is set up under a tree; it is richly upholstered in silk and cushions are spread about. Above it there is a dome-shaped canopy of silk surmounted by a golden bird the size of a falcon. The sultan comes out of his palace with a bow in his hand and a quiver of arrows on his back. On his head he wears a shashiyya [skull-cap] made of gold and tied with golden straps. His clothes are made of soft red cloth brought from Europe.

  “He is preceded by singers carrying gold and silver instruments and followed by three hundred armed slaves. He walks slowly, with great deliberation, occasionally pausing. When he reaches the dais he stands looking at the people and then mounts it slowly, much as a khatib [priest] mounts his pulpit. As he sits drums are beaten and trumpets sounded. His deputy and the military commanders are summoned by three slaves. They enter and take their seats; at the same time two horses are brought in, as well as two goats as protection against the evil eye.

  “The sultan’s bodyguard is armed with quivers made of gold and silver, swords and scabbards also of gold and silver, and clubs of crystal. Next to him stand four emirs whisking away the flies, their hands decorated with silver ornaments. The military commanders and the priests sit according to custom. Then Dugha, the interpreter, comes in with the sultan’s four wives and his slave girls. There are about four hundred of these, all wearing fine clothes, and on their heads bands of gold and silver adorned with gold and silver balls. Dugha then takes his places on a special seat and plays an instrument made of reed with little gourds underneath, and sings poetry in praise of the sultan, recalling his campaigns and heroic deeds; the women and slave girls also play stringed instruments and join in the singing.”

  On the whole, Ibn Battuta found much to approve in Mali: “the lack of oppression … the security that prevails throughout the country so that a traveler has nothing to fear … their honesty when dealing with the property of a white man [i.e. an Arab] … their assiduity in prayer … their dressing in fine white clothes on Fridays … their eagerness to learn the great Koran and their practice of punishing their children by putting them in chains if they fail to memorize it.” On the other hand he disapproved of the way “their female servants and slave girls appear before men completely naked.” He also didn’t like the way people “sprinkled dust and ashes on their heads as a sign of good manners” and their habit of “eating carrion, dogs and donkeys.”

  After spending eight months there, Ibn Battuta left Mali for Timbuktu. On his way he saw some hippopotami in the Niger River “swimming in the water, raising their heads and snorting.” After traveling “in a small boat carved out of a single piece of wood” down the Niger, which like many other travelers of the time he thought was a branch of the Nile, he eventually reached Timbuktu, still prosperous as a center of trade but, following an invasion by Moors from the north, no longer the great city it had once been. He also visited a town he calls Kawkaw, “a great town on the Niger River, one of the largest, finest and most fertile cities of the Sudan, where there is much rice, chickens, milk and fish and incomparable cucumbers. Its people use cowrie shells when buying and selling, just like the people of Mali.” From there he headed north for Takkada, traveling with a big caravan and passing through “the country of the Bardama, a tribe of Berber nomads. Their women are most beautiful and most pleasing to the eye, being very white and plump. I never saw in any country women as plump as they are.”

  On reaching Takkada he was invited to stay in the Moroccan quarter. “The people of the town have no occupation other than trade. They travel each year to Egypt and import all kinds of goods, including cloth of a very fine quality. The people are well off and are proud of the number of male and female slaves they have.” He also visited the nearby copper mines, which were worked by male and female slaves and whose product was exported to Mali, where it sold for two thirds of its weight in gold. The copper was also sold to “the land of Burnu, which is a distance of forty days from Takkada. The people of Burnu are Muslims. They have a king called Idris, who never appears before the people and addresses them only from behind a curtain. In exchange for the copper the traders receive good-looking slave girls as well young male slaves, and cloth dyed with saffron.”

  These adventures all came to an end when, while still at Takkada, he received a message “from our Lord, the Commander of the Faithful, the Champion of Religion, the One who Trusts in the Lord of the Worlds, [i.e. the Sultan of Morocco] commanding me to appear before his lofty seat. I obeyed at once, buying two camels for thirty-seven and a half mithqals and, since no wheat is to be found between Takkada and Tuwat, provisions for seventy days. I departed from Takkada on Thursday 11 Shaban 754 [September 11, 1353,] in a very large caravan that included about six hundred slave girls.”

  Those slave girls who accompanied Ibn Battuta on his journey back north, which he made on the back of a camel and they on foot, almost certainly outnumbered the male slaves, for whom there was less demand.
So far from having any color prejudice, Europeans of that time greatly appreciated what the Andalusian-Arab geographer, Al-Bakri, described as “good-looking young women with sleek, elegant figures, whose breasts are firm, whose waists are slender, and whose backsides are well-rounded.” Another Arab chronicler, Al-Sharishi, wrote that “God has endowed the slave girls of Ghana with laudable characteristics, both physical and moral, more than can be desired. Their bodies are smooth, their black skins are lustrous, their eyes are beautiful, their noses well shaped, their teeth are white, and their smell is fragrant.”

  And it was not just their good looks. According to Al-Bakri, in the town of Aoudaghast, in Ghana, “where the market is so thronged and the hubbub so loud that you can hardly hear what the person sitting next to you is saying, some of the Negresses are sold for over a hundred gold pieces. This is because of their great skill as cooks. Among the appetizing dishes they know how to prepare are djouzincat, a kind of nut cake, cataif, which is macaroni and honey, and all kinds of sweetmeats.”

  To be sure, not all the people of Ghana were so desirable, particularly the Ququ, who, according to Al-Gharnati, “have short necks, flattened noses, and red eyes. Their hair is like peppercorns and their smell is abominable, like that of burnt horn. They shoot arrows poisoned with the blood of yellow snakes; within an hour of being struck with such an arrow a person’s flesh begins to fall off his bones. They eat vipers and other kinds of snakes, except the yellow snake, and serpents. Their arrows are short and have points made of tree thorns that are as strong as iron; when shooting they can hit the pupil of an eye. They are the worst kind of Sudanese. The others are useful as slaves and laborers but not the Ququ, who have no good qualities, except in war.”

  Sixty-two years after Ibn Battuta arrived back in Fez, a Portuguese army captured the Moroccan port of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar. This victory was part of the campaign that had been going for hundreds of years to drive the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula, back across the Mediterranean and eventually out of the so-called Holy Places in Palestine. According to The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea by Gomes Eannes de Azurara, Keeper of the Royal Archives at Lisbon and Chief Chronicler, it was while he was in Ceuta that the Portuguese commander, Prince Henry, first heard of the trans-Saharan trade; this is not very likely, but it is certainly true that Henry, who was generally known as Henry the Navigator—Henrique o Navegador—was a major promoter of Portuguese exploration along the west coast of Africa.

  According to Keeper of the Archives Azurara, Henry had several motives: First was “the noble spirit of this Prince, which was ever urging him to carry out great deeds.” Second was the calculation that the trans-Saharan trade could be carried on at much lower cost if the goods were transported by ship rather than on foot—“a trade which would bring us great profit.” Third, “the power of the Moors in that part of Africa was thought to be great, and it was natural prudence to know the power of the enemy and the extent of their territory. Fourth, during the one and thirty years he had been fighting the Moors, not a single Christian king had for the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ come to his aid. But perhaps there were Christian princes in those lands who from charity and the love of Christ would join him in the fight against those enemies of the faith.”

  This was a reference to the enduring legend of the powerful and fabulously rich Christian ruler called Prester, or Presbyter (i.e. priest), John, whose kingdom was first thought to be located in central Asia, then in India, and then in east Africa—where there was in fact the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. According to a famous travel book of the time, the Libro del Conoscimiento, the inhabitants, who were “as black as pitch, burned the sign of the Cross on their foreheads to show that they had been baptized.” That was the kind of religious spirit Prince Henry liked to see. According to the Libro, Prester John’s kingdom could be reached quite easily via the Sinus Aethiopicus, a huge gulf that began in west Africa and stretched almost all the way across the continent. The fact that this gulf was also sometimes spoken of as the Rio del Oro—the River of Gold—made its existence all the more credible.

  “The fifth reason was the salvation of souls, his great desire to bring to Our Lord Jesus Christ all those who would be saved by understanding the mystery of his Incarnation, Death and Passion. No better offering could be made to the Lord than this, for according to God’s promise he will be rewarded in heaven a hundred times over for saving so many souls. And I, the Chronicler of this History, have seen so many men and women who came from those parts turned to the Holy Faith that even if the Prince had been a heathen, their prayers on his behalf would have been enough to obtain his salvation.”

  Prince Henry the Navigator, promoter of Portuguese exploration and raids along the west coast of Africa—an extension, in his view, of the ongoing Crusade against infidels, and a way of saving the souls of pagan Africans by bringing them to a Christian country.

  There was also a sixth reason: if Portuguese ships could eventually find their way around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean, they would be able to horn in on the immensely profitable luxury trade that now made its laborious way overland from India and East Asia along the famous Silk Road.

  But before any of those good things could happen, someone had to be bold enough to round the dreaded Cabo Bojador, the “bulging cape” on the west coast of Africa, whose Arab name was Abu Khatar, the “father of danger,” a place “of widespread and ancient rumors that had been cherished by mariners from Spain from generation to generation.” Not since the fifth century BC, when an expedition from Carthage under Hanno had reached the Senegal River, had any vessel been known to venture beyond this point. And for good reason: the sea was dangerously shallow and would sometimes seethe and throw up an alarming mist (it turned out that this was caused by huge shoals of sardines); at other times the magnetic compass needles would spin wildly (this was due to ferrous rocks on the seabed); enormous sand-storms blown from the Sahara desert would blot out the sky. Moreover, according to the “widespread and ancient rumors,” beyond Bojador lay the Green Sea of Darkness, its waters thick with scum and teeming with serpents and sea-monsters, its shores inhabited by giants who would wade out into the sea, grab hold of ships and smash them to pieces. It was a region belonging to Satan, and God would punish any Christian who ventured there by turning him black.

  “The Prince always received home again with great patience those whom he had sent out as captains of his ships in search of that land,” wrote Azurara; “never upbraiding them for their failure, but with gracious countenance listening to their stories, rewarding them as was his wont, and then either sending them back to search again or dispatching other picked men.” Among those thus dispatched was a young courtier named Gil Eannes, who in 1433 “followed the course that others had taken; but touched by the self-same terror, he went only as far as the Canary Islands, where he took some captives and returned to the Kingdom.” Next year the prince sent him out again, after first reminding him that “You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.”

  And so, in 1434, “despising all danger,” Gil Eannes doubled Cape Bojador in a small ship called a barca “and found the lands beyond quite contrary to what he had expected.” He went ashore in the ship’s boat, but “without finding people or signs of habitation.” But feeling that he should bring back “some token of the land, I gathered these herbs which I hereby present to Your Grace. They are what we call Roses of Saint Mary.”

  For his success in rounding the cape Eannes was rewarded “with honors and possessions” and then promptly sent out yet again in his barca. After going “fifty leagues beyond the Cape they found the land without dwellings, but showing footmarks of men and camels.” Other probing voyages followed, always with orders to push on a bit further and, if possible, bring back a native who could be taught Portuguese and would then serve as an interpreter. Then, in 1441, Antam Goncalvez, “a very young man,” was sent out with orders to do no more
than explore a little further and bring home a cargo of the “skins and oil of sea-wolves.” But Goncalvez was ambitious for glory, and after collecting his cargo he addressed his fellow crew members, who numbered twenty-one: “How fair a thing it would be if we, who have come to this land for a cargo of such petty merchandise, were to meet with the good fortune to bring the first captives to our prince.” Everyone agreed that this was a good idea “so long as you will introduce no other novelty that might increase the danger.”

  They landed at night and found a path leading inland, and when they had gone three leagues, “they found the footmarks of forty to fifty men and youths, but these led in the direction from which they were coming.” So they decided to turn back in pursuit of their prey, and soon came upon a naked man following a camel, with two assegais—short spears—in his hand. “Our men pursued him, but though he was only one, and saw that they were many, yet he began to defend himself boldly. But when Affonso Goterres wounded him with a javelin he threw down his weapons as if defeated.” After capturing the naked man they decided to return to their ship, “and as they were going on their way they saw a black Mooress coming along,” so they seized her too.