by Steve Kemper
They rode through the monotonous plains south of Kukawa, and entered the town on July 22, twenty-eight days after getting ejected from Yola. The vizier had missed Barth, and sent him a bounteous supper. When they met the next day, Haj Beshir, all innocence, asked how Barth had been received in Yola, then quickly changed the subject to “a long conversation with me respecting the form of the earth and the whole system of the world.”
Fever was raging in Kukawa. Nachtigal noted that in Bornu it began when the watermelons were ripe. Stagnant pools of water were fetid with dead animals and offal. People died in droves, and women could be heard wailing day and night. Charm-writers did brisk business as people draped themselves with even more amulets than usual.
Barth’s poor health worsened. Haj Beshir urged him to leave for healthier regions, perhaps an exploration of Kanem, northeast of Lake Chad. The suggestion intrigued Barth, but first he had business to sort out.
A small resupply of goods valued at £100 had finally arrived, but the merchandise was worth far less in Kukawa. Barth sold it “to keep the mission in some way or other afloat.” He paid the most pressing debts and distributed obligatory gifts to important friends, their wives, and even their chief servants. The scant remainder he saved for further explorations. “All this disagreeable business,” he wrote, “which is so killing to the best hours and destroys half the energy of the traveler.”
Three days after his return he began a long account of his trip to Adamawa for the Foreign Office—the route, people, customs, politics, vegetation. He also trumpeted his discovery of the upper Benue, and urged the Foreign Office to mount a naval expedition to explore it. This letter put into motion what became the Baikie expedition, which went up the Benue three years later, changing European views of travel in West Africa and eventually leading to the Royal Niger Company. Barth also outlined the expedition’s prospective plans: to explore the Bahr el Ghazal east of Lake Chad and the pagan kingdom of Bagirmi to the south. The mission, he added, was in dire straits.
A few days later, on August 6, Barth recorded his “inexpressible delight” at getting a packet from Europe, including many letters and several issues of the British journal Athenaeum. The letters reassured him of Europe’s interest in the mission, “although as yet only very little of our first proceedings had become known.”
Encouraged by this and eager to make the case for more funding, Barth reported to Palmerston about the mission’s other recent achievements. The Arab carpenters hired by Richardson had reassembled the boat. In mid-June, while Barth was in Adamawa, Overweg launched it at Maduwari as Sheikh Umar watched from shore. Christened the Lord Palmerston, the boat flew the Union Jack. Its fluttering white sails had frightened some swimming Yedinas and agitated a herd of hippos. Overweg had just returned from an extensive navigation of Lake Chad.
Further, Sheikh Umar and Haj Beshir had suddenly changed their minds about signing the commercial treaty with Britain. Three months earlier they had rejected the proposal, alarmed by Arab traders who told them the treaty would bring hordes of greedy Englishmen to Bornu (and incidentally cut into the Arabs’ business and end the lucrative slave trade). Umar and Haj Beshir also objected that English traders might pollute Bornu with that popular Christian duo, Bibles and liquor.
But on August 6 a courier told the sheikh that the ambitious governor of Fezzan was back from Istanbul and may have gotten permission to invade Bornu. “The effect of this news upon the disposition of the sheikh and the vizier to enter into friendly relations with the British government was remarkable,” wrote Barth. That evening they agreed to sign the treaty and begged Barth to urge Her Majesty’s Government to thwart the Turks’ plans. Barth, eager to flood Palmerston with good news from the mission, wrote on August 8 that he had concluded the treaty. He hadn’t. There would be another year of delays and evasions before the sheikh signed.
In early August, Barth also witnessed the Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that ends Ramadan, the month of fasting. A cannon shot set the festival in motion. The sheikh and his court rode through Kukawa in a magnificent cavalcade. The sheikh wore a snow-white burnoose. His nobles wore gorgeous tobes in many vivid colors and patterns of cotton and silk. The cavalrymen—Barth estimated there were at least 3,000—also wore metal helmets like those of medieval knights, “ornamented with most gaudy feathers.”
The famous prancing horses of Bornu were dazzling as well. A protective metal plate of iron, brass, or silver adorned their heads. Only their hooves showed beneath thick quilted pads or mantles of light chain mail. Marching behind came 6,000 to 7,000 foot soldiers, some with matchlocks, others with bows and arrows. Then followed musicians beating drums, kettledrums, and cymbals, and blowing trumpets, horns, and pipes. The parade proceeded through thousands of onlookers, all dressed in their holiday best, to a special tent outside of town. There the sheikh briefly prayed before leading the cavalcade back into town, where the banqueting began.
On August 21, Barth wrote Palmerston that he and Overweg were about to leave for a long journey to Kanem and perhaps the Bahr el Ghazal. If they succeeded, they would consider “the direct object of the Expedition as completely attained”—the exploration of Lake Chad—“and shall forthwith turn our eyes and our thoughts Southward … if but the means will be sufficient and if H. Br. M’s Government and Your Lordship personally will think it worth while.” They intended to search for the headwaters of the Nile and continue to the Indian Ocean.
At almost this same time, Consul Crowe was writing to Palmerston from Tripoli with news of Richardson’s death, contained in letters Barth sent from Kukawa three months earlier. The question was what to do next: recall the Germans or support them?
While their future was being decided thousands of miles away, Barth and Overweg prepared to leave for Kanem, north of Lake Chad. Barth wrote that the journey was “in the interests of science and as a medicinal course for restoring my health.” Historically the region belonged to Bornu, but was also claimed by Bornu’s enemy, Wadai, a kingdom northeast of the lake.
Consequently, Kanem was an anarchic no-man’s-land. The Germans intended to hook up with “the horde of the Welad Sliman,” a nomadic tribe of mercenary Arabs in the pay of the vizier, who supplied them arms for a share of their booty. All the tribes in Kanem considered them enemies and called them Menemene—the Eaters—because of their predatory habits. They were also, wrote Barth, “certainly the most lawless robbers in the world.”
16
“The Horde of the Welad Sliman”
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1851, AFTER FORTY DAYS IN KUKAWA, BARTH left for Kanem. Overweg would join him a week later. Barth was still feverish and weak but, as always, departure for the unknown lifted his spirits. “Nothing in the world makes me feel happier,” he wrote that day, “than a wide, open country, a commodious tent, and a fine horse.”
His mood didn’t sour even after he forgot to close his tent that night and clouds of mosquitoes tormented him. Nor did he let the next morning’s biting flies sink him. “Inconveniences,” he shrugged, and then spent the day idling in the serenity of the rolling treeless landscape, feeling “quite happy and invigorated.”
He was traveling with two Welad Sliman horsemen. They began living up to their reputations the following evening. When a villager balked at an unreasonable demand, one of the Arabs beat him. Two days later Barth’s small group came across a flock of sheep. The Welad Sliman simply grabbed the finest one, “notwithstanding the cries of the shepherd,” wrote Barth, “whom I in vain endeavored to console by offering him the price of the animal.” When Overweg arrived with forty-five more Welad Sliman, such events multiplied.
Despite fatigue from fever, Barth continued to write down everything, from descriptions of nomadic herders and fishermen to details about the lacustrine vegetation. He reported an “electric fish, about ten inches long, and very fat”—a catfish—whose charge could numb a man’s arm for minutes. Barth’s rocky health wasn’t improved by these long exploratory days in the saddle.
On September 19, in the midst of a rigorous excursion to find the mouth of a small river, he fainted as he tried to mount his horse. It was the prelude to a severe attack of fever that evening. His companions thought he was dying.
The next day the group rested at a camp on the edge of a river. “We had a good specimen to-day,” wrote Barth, “of the set of robbers and freebooters we had associated with in order to carry out the objects of the mission.” When a small caravan of Tebu people crossed the river near Barth’s group, the Welad Sliman seized their entire cargo of dates.
Barth’s troupe crossed the river the following day. The ferry consisted of six calabashes yoked together, on which the passenger sat, pushed by two swimmers. From this shaky perch Barth managed to take several measurements of the river’s depth and contours. On the other side, the Welad Sliman filched three sheep for supper. They also kindly cleared a spot for Barth’s tent. Then during the night they stole one of his valuable seasoned waterskins.
(“A new skin recently greased with goat or sheep fat is abominable,” wrote explorer Francis Rennel Rodd, “as the water becomes strongly impregnated with the reek of goat. But water from a good old skin can be almost tasteless, though such skins are hard to come by. Some of the water one has drunk from goatskins beggars description; it is nearly always grey or black, and smelly beyond belief.”)
The rulers of Bornu did nothing to protect the region’s beleaguered villagers from freebooters, yet squeezed the people for tribute. The villagers also paid off marauding Tuaregs. The Welad Sliman simply took what they wanted. Four days after stealing the dates, they plundered some cattle-herders, taking not only their milk but the containers. The herders appealed to Barth and Overweg, who recovered the vessels, empty, and apologized with some small presents. During the next day’s travel, while Barth bought milk from some cattle-herders, the Arabs stole one of the herders’ horses. Later that day the robbers snatched another cargo of dates, plus the ox carrying them. “And yet the people who were thus treated were subjects of the King of Bornu,” wrote Barth bitterly, “and the Welad Sliman were his professed friends and hirelings.”
Despite the violence and lawlessness, Barth tried to focus on his scientific mission and his faith in knowledge. “There was a feeble spark of hope in me,” he wrote, “that it would not always be so, and I flattered myself that my labors in these new regions might contribute to sow here the first germs of a new life, a new activity.”
There were compensations for his observant eye, starting with the peculiar landscape. To the north, sand hills rolled into the Sahara. To the south, marshy flats and lagoons led to the blue waters of the lake. On the grassy plain in between lived farmers and herders. The Arabs shot a beautifully patterned snake that Barth measured at 18 feet, 7 inches, with a 5-inch diameter. The natives cut it open for the fat. After noting lots of elephant tracks and dung near the shoreline, Barth finally saw “one of the most interesting scenes which these regions can possibly afford”—a herd of ninety-six elephants, “arranged in a natural array like an army of rational beings, slowly proceeding to the water.” He sketched them.
Two days later, while the group was trying to find its way out of a “labyrinth of lagoons,” Barth’s horse panicked while trying to cross a deep bog and fell on its side, with Barth underneath. As both creatures thrashed to extricate themselves, the horse kicked Barth several times in the head and shoulders, without severe damage. “I had on this occasion a good specimen of the assistance we were likely to receive from our companions in cases of difficulty,” wrote Barth, “for they were looking silently on without offering me any aid.” Like vultures watching an animal stuck in a mudhole.
On October 1 they reached the outskirts of the Welad Sliman’s main camp. About 250 horsemen formed a welcoming line and greeted them with musket fire and wild war cries. At the Arabs’ urging, Barth and Overweg responded with the traditional gesture, galloping straight up to the line of horsemen and saluting them with pistol shots. (“This is a perilous sort of salutation,” wrote Denham, who knew firsthand. As he and his Arab companions galloped to greet the sultan of Mandara, they trampled and killed a mounted onlooker and broke his horse’s leg.)
Barth and Overweg were shown a spot to pitch their tents. “We had now joined our fate,” wrote Barth, “with that of this band of robbers.”
FOR BARTH the trip’s main purpose was to solve another geographical puzzle. The Bahr el Ghazal was a sandy valley lined with vegetation that sometimes contained water. Barth’s question: was it a source for Lake Chad, or an outlet? He asked the Welad Sliman’s young leader to arrange an excursion there, about 200 miles east. No, said the man, impossibly dangerous. Then maybe they could explore the eastern side of Lake Chad? Perhaps, said the man, since they were about to go raiding in that direction. In several ways this was not what Barth had signed up for, though he shouldn’t have been surprised.
The raiders didn’t move for several days. Barth, still weak from fever, welcomed the time to recuperate. He began learning Tebu. He also developed a taste for camel’s milk, which he began to prefer. “Milk, during the whole of my journey, formed my greatest luxury,” he wrote. But the milk in Kukawa disgusted him because the Kanuris added cow’s urine to it, to keep it from going sour.
One night there was some excitement when a prize female slave, captured as booty and destined for the vizier’s harem, ran off. The next morning they found her necklace, bloody clothes, and gnawed bones.
Like any group of outlaws, the Welad Sliman attracted desperadoes and runaways. Barth was constantly pestered in camp by ‘Abd-Allah, “a renegade Jew” with a compulsive need to relate his adventures. He had fled Tripoli after committing murder. He eventually sought asylum among the Welad Sliman, who granted it upon his instantaneous conversion to Islam. He became a silversmith. After he had amassed a small fortune, the Welad Sliman stripped him of everything. He and two other “renegade Jews” left to travel through the Sudan, but ‘Abd-Allah eventually returned to the Welad Sliman and became a freebooter.
The Arabs broke camp on October 11 and rounded the northern edge of Lake Chad, heading southeast. Their camels carried empty sacks to hold plunder. They traveled in an atmosphere of threat and aggression, constantly on alert for attacks, their own or an enemy’s, since everyone in the region hated them. Scouts raced off to check every rumor about possible victims or assailants. Despite the oppressive heat, the horde camped in shadeless places to foil ambush by foes and wild beasts. It was physically and psychologically exhausting.
Barth and Overweg didn’t know the Welad Sliman’s objective or destination. On the route toward pillage Barth dutifully recorded vegetation, geography, animal sightings, names of villages, and currency (white Bornu shirts). His information often came from the native peoples they passed, since they knew the region “so much better than that band of lawless robbers who took no real interest in it except as regarded the booty which it afforded them.”
On October 17, after an early start, they reached the edge of their goal—the territory of the Woghdas, a Tebu tribe. The Welad Sliman prepared themselves for violence in time-honored ways, with fiery speeches and fierce cries. Galloping warriors waved white banners. To hide their approach, they camped without fires. “But as soon as it became dark,” wrote Barth, “very large fires were seen to the southeast, forming one magnificent line of flame”—beacons summoning the resistance. The Woghdas would be ready for them.
The order was given to remount and proceed. They rode toward the fires all night through high grass. Barth was feverish and exhausted. At dawn they entered a landscape of small valleys dotted with fields, sheep, groves of date palms, and freshly deserted villages. The corn and millet were just ripe, waving in the wind. The warriors of the Welad Sliman had ridden ahead, leaving Barth and Overweg with the young boys tending sixty camels. These youths honored their heritage by chasing down the sheep, ransacking the huts, and torching them as a few remaining villagers fled.
The juvenile horde who
oped down the valley and descended on the next village. The natives were waiting and ambushed them. Barth and Overweg spurred their horses through the trap. The group began to look for the main body of horsemen. It was noon and hot. Everyone was worn out from riding all night, but they couldn’t dismount to rest for fear of the natives.
They found the main troupe amid its plunder. The Wodghas had hidden much of their livestock as well as their wives and children, so the booty was disappointing—15 camels, 300 cattle, and 1,500 sheep and goats. The empty sacks now bulged with corn.
The raiders camped near a well, but before they drew water, the Wodghas attacked. After a furious counterattack, the Welad Sliman decided to keep moving. “I was now so totally exhausted that I was obliged to dismount at short intervals and lie down for a moment,” wrote Barth. They camped at sunset. After being in the saddle for thirty-four hours, wrote Barth, “I fell senseless to the ground, and was considered by Mr. Overweg and our people as about to breathe my last.”
A good night’s sleep partially revived him, but that afternoon he was staggered by a severe attack of fever. As he lay in his tent, he heard galloping horses and war cries, but was too torpid to move. The Wodghas were approaching. “I received this news,” wrote Barth, “with that indifference with which a sick and exhausted man regards even the most important events.”
The native army attacked at dawn. Even then Barth couldn’t summon the energy to get up until Overweg shouted that the Arabs were beaten and they needed to run for their lives. Barth dragged himself up, grabbing his firearms and a double-sack holding his most important possessions—no doubt his journals and scientific instruments. He mounted and told his servant to hold onto the horse’s tail, then fled to the west just as the native army entered the camp from the east. The Welad Sliman rallied and drove off the Wodgha, who dispersed with their spoils.