A Labyrinth of Kingdoms

by Steve Kemper

  Sidi Muhammed woke Barth before sunrise and instructed him to mount up and follow him. Barth wanted to wait for al-Bakkay, but Muhammed brusquely refused. Barth was leery but said nothing. “As a stranger,” he wrote, “I could neither expect nor desire these people to fight on my account.” He mounted his horse, fully armed.

  Muhammed said they were going to the tomb of Mukhtar, the oldest of the Kunta brothers, on the town’s outskirts. People peered at them from doorways as they passed through the brightening streets. Fulani horsemen began shadowing them but dropped off once they left town. Instead of going to the tomb, Muhammed led Barth to the tents.

  Muhammed’s attempt to avoid trouble incensed his brother. In midafternoon the sheikh sent an angry note to the tents asking Muhammed to return immediately, since the Fulanis were about to storm Barth’s house and seize his goods. Muhammed, abashed, ordered the beating of the great drum to call together the camp’s warriors. This troop, including Barth, galloped toward Timbuktu. They stopped to say the evening prayer, then approached the city in the dark. The Tuaregs beat their shields and yelled war cries. Barth fired a shot to give the sheikh their location. Al-Bakkay arrived with a large force that included Tuaregs, Arabs, Songhais, and some Fulanis. They were welcomed with a joyous song.

  “The spectacle formed by this multifarious host,” wrote Barth, “thronging among the sand-hills in the pale moonlight, was highly interesting, and would have been more so to me if I could have been a tranquil observer of the scene.” Unfortunately, he added, he was “the chief cause of this disturbance.”

  Fearing treachery within the group, his friends warned him to stay in the midst of the Kel Ullis so he couldn’t be stabbed in the dark. They edged toward the city, but war drums had also summoned the Fulani forces. The armies confronted each other across the night. Barth foresaw carnage if they tried to enter the city. “I protested repeatedly to the sheikh,” he wrote, “that nothing was more repugnant to my feelings than that blood should be shed on my account, and perhaps his own life endangered.”

  Messengers galloped back and forth. A deal was struck: if the Fulanis didn’t pillage Barth’s house, al-Bakkay would keep the Christian outside the city. Under this fragile détente, the sheikh’s forces turned back toward the tents. They got lost in a maze of creeks and didn’t arrive until three o’clock in the morning, tired, cold, and hungry. “Such was the sole result of this night’s campaign,” wrote Barth.

  THE FLOODWATERS OF the Niger had receded, leaving a patina of green vegetation near Timbuktu—and also millions of newly hatched insects. Worst were the big biting flies. They “almost drove me to despair,” wrote Barth. His horse, Blast of the Desert, suffered so badly that Barth built fires so the animal could stand in the smoke. While Barth was stuck in camp, the sheikh continued to make excuses about leaving, so Barth took grim pleasure when his host visited one day and got bitten so viciously that he bled.

  Four days after the armed standoff outside Timbuktu, the Kunta men gathered in hopes of resolving their differences. They met for lunch at the tomb of the oldest brother, Sidi Mukhtar. Sidi Muhammed, Sidi Alawate, al-Bakkay, and ‘Abidin all came, along with their nephew, Hammadi, Mukhtar’s son. Though Hammadi and ‘Abidin were his sworn enemies, Barth was struck by their graciousness toward him. After lunch the family conferred for more than an hour, but disbanded hastily, which Barth took as a bad sign.

  The next day, adding to his letter to Bunsen, Barth related all this and ended, “My thoughts are all towards home, where I must at all events stay some time to recover myself, before I can undertake any thing new. My return is long delayed.”

  Ahmadu hadn’t forgotten about Barth or the insolence of al-Bakkay and Timbuktu. Instead of punishing the city with force, he turned again to a different weapon—taxes. This time he imposed a fine of 2,000 shells on every adult in Timbuktu for not saying their Friday prayers in the mosque. His agents also raided houses and confiscated many pounds of tobacco, an illegal pleasure. (Islamic scholars had been debating tobacco since the sixteenth century. Timbuktu had always been firmly protobacco, and the city’s inhabitants enjoyed it with gusto. Tobacco became one of the town’s important trade commodities. Timbuktu’s most famous scholar, Ahmed Baba, wrote a treatise defending its use. When Hamdallahi outlawed it, al-Bakkay composed eloquent protests that irked the puritanical jihadists.)

  At the tents Barth desperately turned his restless mind to anything that would keep him from going mad with tedium and bug bites. He complained so much about boredom that al-Bakkay sent a nephew to the tents so the explorer would have someone educated to talk to. The antics of the sheikh’s young sons also entertained him. So did the Berabish tribesmen hanging about, who casually dropped the tantalizing information that there were letters for him in Azawad, about 150 miles north of Timbuktu. Aside from a brief note from the vice-consul of Ghadames in early December, he hadn’t received a single line in English or German for nearly a year. The letters in Azawad gave another spur to his desire to escape Timbuktu.

  The sheikh kept promising and delaying, partly out of concern about Ahmadu’s maneuvers. The emir sent yet another delegation from Hamdallahi with orders to impose yet another levy. The merchants of Timbuktu pleaded with al-Bakkay not to go, fearful of what Ahmadu might do in his absence. Ahmadu fed these fears by sending a bigger peacemaking gift to Hammadi, the sheikh’s enemy, than to the sheikh himself.

  Barth was sick of these petty intrigues and postponements. He was also running out of goods and had to sell a broken musket to get cowrie shells to pay for his needs. Then on March 31 the sheikh had Barth’s luggage brought to the tents. On April 3 the sheikh’s provision bags arrived, followed over the next week by his books, horses, and several people who would be going on the trip. On April 11, al-Bakkay himself appeared. Barth allowed himself to hope.

  Too soon. Another week passed before the sheikh finally gave the word. Even then, on the day of departure, al-Bakkay overslept as Barth paced. Once up, the sheikh indulged in a protracted goodbye to his beloved wife and sons. The caravan finally got underway at eleven o’clock.

  It was April 19, 1854, more than seven months since Barth had entered Timbuktu. He was exhilarated to be traveling at last in the direction of home. He expected to reach Sokoto in forty or fifty days. “But I had no idea,” he later wrote, “of the unfavorable circumstances which were gathering to frustrate my hopes.”

  27

  Released, More or Less

  EDUARD VOGEL, OVERWEG’S REPLACEMENT, REACHED TRIPOLI IN March 1853. With Consul Herman’s mother-hen help he began organizing a caravan for Kukawa. Herman had been appalled by Richardson’s poor management and preparation. He was determined to prevent a similar debacle on his watch, as far as he was able. Under Herman’s supervision, Vogel’s list of provisions and gifts grew to cover many pages.

  A promising astronomer and botanist, Vogel had trained at the University of Berlin and had been working at Bishop’s Observatory in London. He was twenty-four years old. He didn’t speak Arabic or any African languages and had never traveled outside Europe. Two soldiers from the Corps of Royal Sappers and Miners, James Church and Edward Sweeney, were assigned to him as assistants. Addington from the Foreign Office wrote to Lord Raglan, “How will English Sappers and Miners work under Germans without any Military Man to keep them straight?” The question was prescient.

  Herman wrote Lord Clarendon that this trio were “absolute tyros.” But the consul, never one to rest in optimism, quickly moved on to the gloomy downsides. He worried that Vogel was unsuited for an African expedition. “The slightest exposure to the sun so sensibly affects him,” he wrote, “that I at times question if he will ever be able to accomplish the objects of his mission.”

  A few days later, his pessimism darkening, Herman began a letter to Clarendon, “Exploratory expeditions to Central Africa appear to be pursued by an unerring fatality.” The tyro Sweeney had collapsed with fever and congestion of the lungs, liver, and spleen. Herman asked for a
replacement, since he suspected that if anything happened to Corporal Church, which in his view was likely, Vogel couldn’t reach Kukawa on his own. The German was amiable, zealous, and no doubt a superb astronomer, wrote Herman, but was also frail and “as helpless and inexperienced as a child.” Sweeney’s replacement, John Macguire, got to Tripoli in late July.

  The caravan reached Kukawa in January 1854, around the time that Barth was wondering whether he’d been poisoned in Timbuktu. The next month Vogel began a letter to the Foreign Office with his customary exuberant greeting: “Sir!” in huge script, centered on the page. He reported that Sheikh Umar had warmly welcomed them, lodging them in Barth and Overweg’s old quarters. The rest of his news was unsettling. No one in Kukawa had heard anything from Barth. Nor had the dispatches sent to Barth through Kukawa ever left the city—the vizier had not forwarded any of them to Kano or Sokoto for reasons of political intrigue. Worse, the supplies forwarded to Zinder for Barth’s return trip from Timbuktu had been lost to pillagers, who also murdered the caravaneer. If Barth survived his journey west and turned back toward home, no resources awaited him.

  Later that month Consul Herman wrote to Lord Clarendon with thrilling news: after a year of silence and mystery, dispatches had arrived from Barth. He was not only alive, he had made it to Timbuktu. But his situation was perilous. He hoped to leave soon and reach Kukawa by March—that is, next month. Herman planned to instruct Gagliuffi to send 800 Spanish dollars to Barth at the first opportunity. Once in Kukawa, continued Herman, Barth could hook up with Vogel and go south to meet the steamer on the Benue in July. (This would have surprised Barth. He knew nothing about a Benue expedition, and he had no intention of prolonging his stay in Africa.)

  Barth had included a request from al-Bakkay for “a series of Arabic books,” most on Islam, but also on history, medicine, poetry, and any other works of interest. The Foreign Office eventually approved the request and a box of books began making its way across Africa to the scholarly man who had saved Barth’s life. Al-Bakkay owned an Arabic copy of Hippocrates given to him by the sultan of Sokoto, who had gotten it from Clapperton. Such books, wrote Barth, “have had a greater effect in reconciling the men of authority in Africa to the character of Europeans than the most costly present ever made to them.”

  BARTH’S EXHILARATION at escaping from Timbuktu soon turned to frustration. The sheikh moved at a turtle’s pace, which then slowed, stalled, and stopped. Al-Bakkay was trying to mediate a dispute between two Tuareg tribes before a war erupted. The offending tribe was moving west toward Timbuktu. To preserve peace in the region, the sheikh needed to stick with the tribe. His diplomatic obligations conflicted with his pledge to Barth. Ten days after leaving Timbuktu, al-Bakkay turned the caravan back toward the city.

  The retreat depressed Barth. It piled another delay on top of all the others. “My feelings may be more easily imagined than described,” he wrote. “An immense amount of Job-like patience was required.” The delay also complicated his journey—the rainy season was beginning, and the many rivers he needed to cross were rising. But he exercised his remarkable ability to observe a situation impersonally, calling the sheikh’s decision “altogether right.”

  Al-Bakkay was also distracted by news that the French army had made a sortie to Ouargla (Wargla), about 400 miles south of Algiers. This inflamed fears that France intended to invade Tuat or even Timbuktu. Al-Bakkay was already worried about French ambitions in the western Sahara. That was partly why he wanted an alliance with Britain. Now he wondered whether he should rally the Tuaregs to attack. Barth advised against it since that would let France justify farther incursions, though he doubted that the French were interested in military ventures across the desert—another example of his naïvely unimperialistic thinking. But he did sign a letter, written by the sheikh and sent to the French consulate in Algiers, forbidding the French from penetrating any farther into the interior. When Barth left Europe, Britain and France had been rivals, almost enemies. But while he had been out of touch, the two countries had tiptoed into a delicate alliance, cemented by the Crimean War. This letter to Algiers eventually caused a small diplomatic commotion.

  For almost a week the sheikh’s small caravan crept back toward Timbuktu. Al-Bakkay mediated as they moved, but got nowhere with the Tuaregs. He didn’t want to take Barth too close to the city, where animosity toward foreigners had been freshly stoked by the French rumors. He stopped the caravan several days outside Timbuktu and told Barth to wait there for his return. Barth worried that al-Bakkay’s many distractions would keep him from coming back, but was reassured when he left behind his beloved cook.

  Barth passed the time conversing with visitors from the Songhai villages and Tuareg tribes in the vicinity. They talked beneath the trees along the river or in Barth’s tent, now four years old and so “mended and patched” that the original material had nearly disappeared. The topic was often religion. A troublesome Tuareg chief tried to incite the camp against Barth for being uncircumcised. Barth shut him down by pointing out that if circumcision was a mark of Islam, then all Jews and many pagans must be as holy as Muslims.

  He was struck anew by the regal Tuareg men and their independent women. They were monogamous but free of jealousy, “and the degree of liberty which the women enjoy is astonishing.” Barth grew fond of a young Tuareg named Kungu who expected to die young like his brothers. He mounted his horse by using his iron spear as a pole vault. One group of Tuaregs urged Barth to marry one of their daughters and join them.

  Some of the older Tuaregs had seen Mungo Park descending the Niger. One of Barth’s visitors described Park’s odd boat and his straw hat and gloves. Another old chief had been wounded in the leg by a British bullet. Park’s policy on his second expedition—when in doubt, shoot—had left corpses and bad feelings along the Niger. Laing feared for his life because of it, and may have been murdered partly in revenge for it. Barth admired Park but deplored his gun-happy policy. Because of it, some Tuaregs still considered all Europeans tawakast—wild beasts—a mirror image of European stereotypes about Africans.

  Camping next to the river, Barth’s group had to be alert for lions and especially crocodiles. Some of these monsters were 18 feet long. They ate two cattle and bit off a man’s foot while the caravan waited for the sheikh.

  Barth’s group was camped near a Tuareg tribe which, by the rules of hospitality, had to provide food for the sheikh’s students and servants—more than two dozen people. For nomads living close to the bone, these extra mouths were a hardship. After several days the hosts tried to escape early one morning, but the sheikh’s party quickly packed and followed their meal ticket. The tribe no doubt joined Barth in yearning for the sheikh’s return.

  ON MAY 17 the camp learned that al-Bakkay was back from Timbuktu and waiting nearby. Barth’s party found him sleeping under a caper bush. Their galloping horses didn’t awaken him. “Such was the mild and inoffensive character of this man,” wrote Barth, “in the midst of these warlike and lawless hordes.”

  When the sheikh woke up, he smiled at Barth and promised no more interruptions. He also handed him a packet of letters that had been sitting in Azawad for two months. “I can scarcely describe the intense delight I felt at hearing again from Europe,” wrote Barth. He tore open two letters from Foreign Secretary Lord Russell and one from his successor Lord Clarendon, all written in February 1853. He got a letter from Chevalier Bunsen and another from Consul Herman, but was extremely disappointed not to find anything from his family or friends. Yet the packet did include an Athenaeum from early 1853 and ten Gaglignani’s Messengers, an English-language newspaper printed in Paris. Sitting in his ragged tent, he devoured this old news from home, so wonderful to read in the heart of Africa.

  WITHIN A FEW DAYS they passed the place they had reached on the first aborted attempt. Barth started to believe they were truly launched. He felt released, psychologically as well as physically, and expressed his joy in the manner of a happy scientist—in a
torrent of observation, description, detail, and data. Every tree, bush, and berry got its due—figs, kapoks, broom, caper bushes, doum palms. The caravan was slogging through a network of creeks and swamps that laced the northern bank of the Niger. Some of them were choked with water lilies. The landscape gave Barth ample opportunity to use one of his favorite words: labyrinth.

  The damp triggered his rheumatism, but the trade-offs were worth it. After climbing spines of land, they could often glimpse the Niger, dotted with boats, hippos, cattle. Whenever possible Barth set up his tent to overlook the river, “which had now almost become a second home to me, and with its many backwaters, islands, and cliffs, afforded me a never-failing source of interest.”

  They passed many villages and Tuareg encampments. Barth catalogued their names, subdivisions, numbers, and livestock. He described the Songhai villages’ crops of wheat and tobacco, their dikes for irrigating rice fields, their butter and milk, the names of their wells. He marveled at Tosaye, where the broad Niger takes a sharp turn south and gets squeezed into a gorge only 150 yards wide.

  He took side trips into history and etymology. At Bourmen he ruminated on the old legend that an Egyptian Pharaoh once reached this obscure place 2,200 miles from the Nile Delta. He decided the story might hold some truth. Another spot on the river was famous as the place where Tuareg women had held out their bare breasts to beg mercy from attackers from a clan of relatives, the gesture meant to remind the raiders that these breasts had suckled their blood kin; the gesture was in vain.

  As always, the chief attractions were the people. At Bamba he met descendants of the Arma (or Ruma), the ruthless musketeers sent by the sultan of Morocco at the end of the sixteenth century to conquer and occupy the region of Timbuktu. The occupiers had intermarried with the natives and fallen from power, but their scraggly descendants still distinguished themselves by wearing a band of red cloth in their head-shawls.