It was during these travels that Paez was taken to a small spring at Gish Abbai, the start of the Little Abbai river, which Abyssinians held to be the source of the Abbai or Blue Nile. Flowing northwards, the Little Abbai is one of several streams feeding Lake Tana; and from an outlet at the southern end of the lake, the Blue Nile begins its 900-mile journey before meeting the White Nile. Paez was thrilled to reach the spot: ‘I ascended the place . . . and saw with the greatest delight what neither Cyrus, the king of the Persians, nor Cambyses, nor Alexander the Great, nor the famous Julius Caesar, could ever discover.’ Although Paez was the first European to record his arrival at Gish Abbai, his visit there in 1615 made no impact when his account was first published. In the twentieth century, engineers ascertained that it is the rivers flowing from the Ethiopian highlands, the Blue Nile and the Atbara, when filled with summer monsoon rains, which bring the annual flood to Egypt.
Returning from a campaign where he had won a decisive victory in 1622, Susenyos decided to throw his full weight behind Catholicism, making it the official religion of the state. In a proclamation stating his reasons for having become a Catholic, he said a major factor was the edifying character of the Jesuits which he compared to the depravity and corruption of the Orthodox abunas.
What followed had disastrous consequences. Rome appointed as patriarch a senior Spanish Jesuit, Afonso Mendes, who was knowledgeable in the ways of the Catholic Church but uncompromising and narrow-minded in his approach to the mission he was given. After landing in disguise at a remote harbour on the Red Sea coast, Mendes made a hazardous journey across the Danakil desert, finally arriving at Susenyos’s headquarters at Dankaz in February 1626 with an entourage of priests, servants and musicians. Susenyos sent out an escort of 15,000 armed horsemen to welcome him.
They met in a church to the accompaniment of choirs singing the Benedictus and a fusillade of cannon fire. Mendes entered the church wearing his mitre and patriarchal robes and proceeded up the chancel where Susenyos, with a gold crown on his head, rose to embrace him. Mendes swiftly launched into an oration about the primacy of Rome and the perverse conduct of the eastern churches, speaking in Latin, quoting Greek and Roman philosophers and continuing at length for most of the day. Two days later, at a mass ceremony for clergy and laity, Susenyos, holding a copy of the Gospels, knelt before Mendes and took an oath of allegiance to the Pope.
Losing no time, Mendes set out to crush centuries of religious tradition. At his behest, the emperor directed that all churches be reconsecrated, all clergy reordained, all believers rebaptised, and all festivals fixed according to the Roman calendar. He also ordered the suspension of male circumcision and the observance of the Sabbath, deriding them as outmoded Jewish customs. A new liturgy was to be written. Several important Orthodox church and monastic lands were transferred to the Jesuits. Dissenters were punished by hanging or burning at the stake.
The outcome was a series of rebellions across Abyssinia. In June 1632, Susenyos’s own brother, Malka Christos, assembled a large army in Lasta to overthrow him. Susenyos managed to defeat it but at the cost of 8,000 killed. As he walked with his son Fasilidas across the battlefield amid the dead, Fasilidas is reported to have said to him:
The men you see lying dead here were neither pagans nor Muslims over whose deaths we could rejoice, but Christians, your subjects and fellow-countrymen, and some of them were your own kin. It is not victory that we have gained, for we have driven our swords into our own bodies . . . Through carrying on this war and abandoning the Faith of our ancestors, we have become a byword among the pagans and Arabs.
Exhausted and depressed, Susenyos returned to Dankaz, issued a proclamation granting his subjects freedom of religion and abdicated in favour of Fasilidas. He died a few months later, having been given the last rite by a Portuguese priest and was buried in a church that Pedro Paez had constructed.
Fasilidas moved swiftly to rid Abyssinia of the Jesuits and their alien dogma. Mendes and his colleagues were first banished to Fremona and then expelled altogether. Five Jesuits who chose to remain were hanged on Fasilidas’s orders; two others were assassinated. Seeking to ensure that no more Europeans entered the highlands, Fasilidas signed agreements with the Muslim rulers of Massawa and other Red Sea ports to help keep them out. When a party of Franciscans sent by the Pope were discovered trying to enter Abyssinia disguised as Armenian merchants, they were killed.
For the next two centuries, Abyssinia remained largely a closed world, absorbed by its own internal struggles. In a break with past custom, instead of ruling from royal encampments, moving periodically from one part of the country to another, Abyssinia’s emperors established a permanent capital. In 1636, Fasilidas built a castle at Gondar, with crenellated walls, four round corner towers and a rooftop terrace with a distant view of Lake Tana, and during the next 150 years, his successors added their own castles and palace compounds, providing the focus for an imperial city. Sited between two rivers on a flat volcanic ridge, 7,000 feet above sea level, the area had long been settled by Christian Amhara cultivators and afforded plentiful supplies of water, wood and agricultural produce. By the time Fasilidas died in 1667, the city had gained administrative buildings, churches and a population of about 25,000. At the height of its prosperity at the turn of the eighteenth century, Gondar served as a thriving centre of commerce, crafts, education and artistic endeavour. Muslim merchants handled most domestic trade but were required to live in separate quarters. A new trade developed in coffee beans, an indigenous crop that originally grew wild in the south-west Kaffa region. Transplanted to the Yemen, coffee was introduced from Arabia to Europe by Ottoman Turks.
Yet the empire frequently became an arena for competing armies. Emperors spent much of their time on military campaigns, marching and counter-marching against adversaries. Regional leaders grew strong enough to challenge the power of the monarchy. As provinces went their own way, imperial authority often stretched little further than Gondar. Palace intrigues were common. Over a period of fifteen years, one emperor was assassinated; the next was stabbed to death; the next two were poisoned.
Apart from foreign merchants – mainly Greeks and Armenians – few outsiders made their way to Abyssinia. A French doctor, Charles-Jacques Poncet, arrived in Gondar to treat Iyasu I for ‘distemper’ and stayed for nearly a year. A Czech Franciscan, Remedius Prutky, led a three-man mission to Gondar in 1752 at the invitation of Iyasu II. The next significant European visitor arrived in Gondar uninvited.
After a hazardous three-month journey across the mountains from the port of Massawa, James Bruce, a wealthy forty-year-old Scotsman with a taste for adventure, reached Gondar in February 1770, dressed as a Muslim trader. An imposing figure, six feet four inches tall, with red hair, a loud voice and superior manner, Bruce had left England seven years before to take up an appointment as British consul in Algiers. Fluent in Arabic and several other foreign languages, he became obsessed with the idea of travelling to the main source of the Nile, believing it to be located in the mountains of Abyssinia. On leaving Algiers, accompanied by a Italian artist, Luigi Balugani, and two Irishmen, former soldiers in the Spanish army, given to him as slaves as a farewell present by the Dey of Algiers, Bruce toured the eastern Mediterranean collecting letters of introduction and recommendation from sultans and patriarchs in Istanbul, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo and eventually Mecca. Along the way, he also acquired a considerable knowledge of medicine. His baggage, carried by a team of porters, included a huge quadrant and a number of other scientific instruments.
Gondar was largely deserted when Bruce and his companions arrived. The young emperor, Tecla Haimanout II, and his court had departed on a military expedition against Oromo opponents in the south, taking much of the town’s population – soldiers, officials, porters and tradesmen – with them. While waiting for them to return, Bruce took up residence in the Muslim quarter and made himself useful by tackling an outbreak of smallpox affecting members of the royal family, earnin
g the appreciation of the queen mother, Iteghe Mentuab, and her daughter, Wozoro Aster. When Bruce explained the purpose of his visit, Mentuab, according to Bruce’s testimony, found it odd that he should undertake such a risky venture:
See! See! Says she. ‘How every day life furnishes us with proof of the perverseness and contradiction of human nature; you are come from Jerusalem, through vile Turkish governments, and hot unwholesome climates, to see a river and a bog, no part of which you can carry away were it ever so valuable, and of which you have in your country a thousand larger, better and cleaner; and you will take it ill when I discourage you from the pursuit of this fancy, in which you are likely to perish, without your friends at home ever hearing when or where the accident happened. While I, on the other hand, the mother of kings, who have sat upon the throne of this country more than thirty years, have for my only wish, night and day, that, after giving up everything in the world, I could be conveyed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after, if I could only be buried at last in the street within sight of the gate of that temple where our blessed Saviour once lay.’
In March, the young emperor returned to Gondar along with his formidable military commander, Ras Mikael Sehul, a white-haired tyrant in his seventies who was the real power behind the throne, responsible for the death of several previous incumbents. Behind them came the army with ranks of soldiers wearing shreds of scarlet cloth to mark the number of enemies they had killed on the battlefield and bearing their testicles as evidence. Bruce recorded how one of Ras Mikael’s first acts on his return was to order his men to put out the eyes of a group of Oromo prisoners.
Bruce was duly summoned to an audience with Ras Mikael in his palace adjoining the royal compound and made the customary obeisance by kissing the ground at his feet. Having just saved one of Mikael’s sons from a near-fatal bout of smallpox, he was well received. Mikael warned him of the dangers of travelling about the country alone and gave him command of a troop of the royal horse. At a meeting with the emperor, he was questioned intensely about life in England and about Jerusalem. He soon became accustomed to court life in Gondar, its intrigues and machinations. ‘The court in London and that in Abyssinia are in their principles the same,’ he wrote. He enjoyed wearing Abyssinian attire, complete with cloaks, chainmail and bright cummerbunds stuffed with pistols, and affected an Abyssinian hairstyle. ‘My hair was cut round, curled, and perfumed in the Amharic fashion, and I was thenceforward, in all outward appearance, a perfect Abyssinian.’ He impressed all and sundry not only with his medical abilities but with his riding skills and marksmanship, and readily joined in the raucous banquets laid on by the royal court where slices of raw meat were cut from live cows and couples made love with abandon. ‘There is no coyness, no delays, no need of appointments or retirement to gratify their wishes; there are no rooms but one, in which they sacrifice both to Bacchus and Venus.’
Because of renewed fighting in the highlands, Bruce was forced to delay his attempt to reach the source of the Little Abbai, but in October 1770 he finally set out with his faithful secretary, Luigi Balugani, his Irish servants and a party of porters and guards. Led by a local guide, they passed around the west side of Lake Tana, moved up the valley of the Little Abbai towards Gish mountain, about seventy miles south of the lake and arrived at a rustic church on a hillside that overlooked a small swamp. Pointing to the swamp, the guide told Bruce: ‘Look at that hillock of green and in the middle of that watery spot; it is in that the two fountains of the Nile are to be found.’ Bruce threw off his shoes, raced down the hill, twice tripping and falling headlong, until he came to ‘an island of green turf, which was in the form of an altar, apparently a work of art, and I stood in rapture over the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it’.
Bruce was well aware that Pedro Paez had reached Gish Abbai some 150 years before him, but in his account of his travels in Abyssinia, published in 1790, he chose to dispute his achievements, claiming that his version of events was based on no more than hearsay, in order to glorify his own feat of exploration. He also omitted any mention that Balugani had accompanied him on the journey to Gish Abbai, wanting it to be seen as his triumph alone.
After further adventures in Abyssinia, Bruce set out on the journey back to Cairo, taking the overland route, joining the Blue Nile at Sennar. When he reached the confluence of the Blue Nile with the White Nile, 900 miles downstream from Lake Tana, he realised that another mighty river might be the parent of the Nile rather than the Blue Nile but in his memoir he did not dwell on the possibility and remained adamant about the importance of his own exploits.
The tales that Bruce told about his travels on his return to Europe in 1773 aroused keen public interest about the interior of Africa, even though many of his anecdotes were dismissed by critics in London as fabrications. ‘Africa is indeed coming into fashion,’ Horace Walpole wrote to a friend. ‘There is just returned a Mr Bruce, who had lived three years in the Court of Abyssinia, and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen.’
Hitherto, little attention had been paid in Europe to the vast African hinterland. In 1733, when Bruce was three years old, the satirist Jonathan Swift had mocked the dearth of information on maps of Africa:
So geographers, in Africa-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps;
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Fifty years later, little had changed. In 1787, when the cartographer Samuel Boulton published a sparse four-sheet map of Africa, omitting legends and hearsay and including only established facts, he felt obliged to explain: ‘The Inland Parts of Africa being but very little known and the Names of the Regions and Countries which fill that Vast Tract of Land being for the Greatest part placed by Conjecture It may be judged how Absurd are the Divisions in some Maps and why they were not followed in this.’
Now, inspired by Bruce’s exploits, a new breed of European adventurer set out to fill in the gaps.
PART V
18
THE GATES OF AFRICA
In May 1787, three British transport ships, accompanied by a Royal Navy sloop-of-war, the Nautilus, dropped anchor in a sheltered bay in the estuary of the Sierra Leone River. On board were a group of volunteers intending to set up a new colony on a hilly peninsula overlooking the estuary. The main contingent consisted of former slaves – some 290 men and forty-one women – recruited from the streets of London. The remainder included some seventy white women, most of them wives of the black volunteers, and an assortment of white officials and artisans – an Anglican priest, four surgeons, a surveyor, a nurseryman, a bricklayer, a carpenter, smiths, armourers and husbandmen.
The expedition to Sierra Leone had been organised by a committee of London philanthropists concerned about the plight of ‘poor blacks’ living in England. Their numbers had increased substantially at the end of the War of American Independence in 1783 when thousands of blacks who had served with British forces were relocated to the British colony of Nova Scotia, to the Bahamas and to London, many ending up destitute.
The driving force behind the committee was Granville Sharp, an ardent anti-slavery activist who had fought a five-year battle in the 1770s to get the courts to declare that slaves entering Britain were to be regarded as free men. Inundated with appeals for help from ‘distressed blacks’, Sharp realised that private charity alone would not meet the scale of the problem and raised the idea of repatriation to a colony in Africa. A Danish botanist, Henry Smeathman, who had spent four years on islands in the Sierra Leone estuary, recommended the area to him. In 1786, Smeathman published a pamphlet called Plan of a Settlement to be made near Sierra Leona, on the Grain Coast of Africa, portraying Sierra Leone as a salubrious place for colonisation with ‘a most pleasant fertile climate’.
It was not an honest prospectus. British slave traders had been active on islands in the estuary of the Sierra Leone River
for more than one hundred years and were well aware of the risks to survival there. Twenty miles upstream from the Sierra Leone peninsula lay Bunce Island, which in the 1670s had served as the local headquarters of the Royal African Company. In 1747, Bunce Island had been sold to a London-based syndicate who used it as a ‘general rendezvous’ for slaving, employing up to forty white clerks and their assistants to manage the trade. The island was furnished with a luxurious central building and even provided with a golf course for the benefit of waiting captains and others. But despite its amenities, the mortality rate at Bunce, like other trading posts on the ‘fever’ coast of west Africa, remained high. Between a quarter and half of newly arrived European employees were expected to die within a year from tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, of which there was as yet little understanding. In 1785, Smeathman himself had told a parliamentary committee in London, discussing plans for a prison colony, that if two hundred convicts landed in even the healthiest part of Sierra Leone then ‘one hundred would die in less than a month and . . . there would not be two people alive in less than six months’.
Nevertheless, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was impressed by Smeathman’s Plan of a Settlement. The British government, too, favoured the idea. It was already trying to solve the problem of overcrowded jails and hulks by transporting convicts to a colony at Botany Bay. It was willing to encourage a similar method of reducing the number of ‘black poor’ and agreed to pay for the cost of transport and provisions for four months and to provide a naval escort. Granville Sharp added his own idealistic flourish by naming the new colony ‘the Province of Freedom’ and insisting that the colonists should be allowed to govern themselves, free from imperial control.
The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour Page 19