Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold

by Frank T. Kryza

  Wood, Thomas, 252-53, 261, 283-84

  Yallala Falls, 47

  Yarro, King of Kaiama, 182

  Yauri, sultan of, 129, 187-88

  Yauri (region), 153, 186-88

  Yobe River, 109

  York, Duke of, 56-57, 66

  York Light Infantry, 52

  Yoruba tribe, 162, 163, 178-81, 223

  Yusuf Karamanli (second bashaw of Tripoli), 1, 3-4, 3, 17, 24, 89, 91

  African expeditions and, 66-69

  background of, and relationship with British and French, 26, 30, 30, 68-70,80

  frees Christian slaves, 25

  Ghadames and, 150

  Jews and, 140, 200, 201, 274n

  Laing expedition allowed by, 27-33,35-36

  Denham-Oudney-Clapperton expedition and, 85-86, 89, 91-94, 107, 135

  overthow of, 274

  Ritchie-Lyon expedition and, 72, 75, 79

  search for Laing’s papers and, 258-66,269-75, 280

  Warrington’s demand for news on death of Laing and, 243-50, 252

  Zaria, emir of, 224

  Zaria (village), 213

  Zeghren (Az Zighan), 97

  Zuma (widow), 183-85

  zummita, defined, 143n

  AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK was in many ways inspired by The Strong Brown God, Pulitzer Prize—winner Sanche de Gramont’s magisterial account of the long and colorful history of the Niger River. I read The Strong Brown God when it was first published in 1979, and again in the fall of 2001 on a long train trip from Los Angeles to Dallas. The Strong Brown God is to the Niger River what Alan Moorehead’s White Nile is to the Nile—the classic and definitive account of the river’s history for the general reader. It revived my interest in Laing and Clapperton and the strange story of the race to discover Timbuktu. I have drawn on it extensively in thinking about and writing this book, and my debt to it cannot be overstated.

  When I first set foot in Africa, in March 1963 at Port Said, I was not especially glad to be there, though the tarry smells of the harbor and the promised mysteries of Egypt helped me to forget, temporarily, the smoldering resentment I felt toward my parents for dragging me so far from home. Just weeks before, they pulled me out of comfortably coed Swanson Junior High School in Arlington, Virginia, to attend a grim, all-male boarding school in Kenya. It was not lost on me, either, that while my own life was ruined, my father would be a happy man. He was leaving a routine job at the State Department for new and exciting duties at the tiny U.S. consulate general in Kenya Colony,* helping to prepare for the arrival of the first American ambassador to Kenya† later that year. I could hardly blame him—if only for the alteration in climate: any sane person would instantly exchange Nairobi for Washington. I accepted, grimly, that I would spend the next four or five years in exile in Africa, not to see my school friends again until I was ready for college—an eternity to a thirteen-year-old.‡

  I disembarked the SS La Bourdonnais, the sedate liner run by the Messageries Maritimes that had carried us from Marseilles to Alexandria, so that I could make a quick side trip to Cairo to see the Pyramids and visit the famous Museum of Antiquities. My mother had been to Cairo many times in days when it was a more insular, happier place, and was determined to stay on board. My father wanted to see the Suez Canal. When I wrangled permission to travel to Cairo on my own, a British couple, friends of my parents, promised to keep an eye on me. A day or two later, we would rejoin the La Bourdonnais (which in the meantime would negotiate the canal) in Suez Bay at the northern terminus of the Red Sea, and continue our voyage to the Indian Ocean and Africa’s eastern seaboard.

  The great Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square seemed to me to be larger than the Pentagon (it is not, though it has more than one hundred halls). Outside this edifice, in open-air bookstalls not unlike those lining the Quai de la Tournelle across the Seine from Notre Dame, were new and secondhand books on a great variety of subjects, and many were in English. I bought a half dozen for reading on board ship. One of these, with an abraided chocolate cloth cover, quite worn, was a 1926 edition of Arthur Percival Newton’s classic Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages. I paid twenty-five cents for it (a quarter, in U.S. coin, then very much in demand in Cairo, no doubt to the consternation of Gamal Abdel Nasser). Though this book did not directly introduce me to that Scot who would be the first white man to enter Timbuktu, Professor Newton’s essays on Africa seemed to me at least as gripping as any of those fictional tales of Henry Rider Haggard, who was (briefly) my favorite author. Two or three weeks later, with sweltering stops at Djibouti and Aden behind us, we had rounded the Horn of Africa and docked within sight of Fort Jesus in Mombasa, where most of the English passengers debarked. By then, I had read and reread Newton’s essays, and it was inevitable that, in time, I would read everything I could get my hands on concerning the exploration of that continent I now reluctantly called “home.”

  A year or two later, still in Nairobi, I got a copy of Bovill’s essays on Laing. By then I was roughly smitten by the romance of nineteenth-century exploration of the Sahara. With the endocrine intensity only a lonely and slightly nerdy teenager could have brought to it, I puzzled over Laing’s complex relationship with his wife, staggered that he could abandon her in Tripoli. Why didn’t he take her with him? The tales of Burton and Stanley, so much better known to me, were, by comparison, two-dimensional. Most African explorers, it seemed to me, were just aging Boy Scouts trekking leisurely across the savanna, shooting the occasional lion. Laing was different.

  I would not have attempted my own account of Laing’s travels (and travails) but for that adolescent introduction to the ineffable mysteries of the sandy wastes of North Africa, and those English men and women of a certain stripe held spellbound by them. As for Laing, I was hooked by the man, the woman, the Sahara, and the story.

  I did not realize then, but understand today, what a Herculean task E. W. Bovill set himself when he decided to catalogue Laing’s papers. Laing’s journals, after all, were lost forever, probably burned by the bloodthirsty Sheikh El Abeyd, and Bovill, an amateur historian, must have doubted at the outset whether he could re-create all the important elements of the Timbuktu Mission merely from Laing’s letters. But he did. He also saved me, in many instances, from the onerous task of deciphering Laing’s handwriting. Though copperplate when he was healthy and happy, Laing’s hand often degenerated into chickenscratch in the desert, and after his injuries in the Tanezrouft when he picked up his pen with his left hand—well! Always, I was grateful to Bovill.

  E. W. Bovill,* likely best remembered for his two classics, Caravans of the Old Sahara and The Golden Trade of the Moors, was simply a fabulous historian, a gifted raconteur, and a crisp writer. After spending a year with Laing’s papers in the early 1960s he chose to move on to matters he considered more important to the larger scheme of African history. So far as I know, he never wrote another word about Laing.

  That is the story of the germination of this book. So I begin by thanking Mr. Bovill, a man I regret never having met.

  After Bovill, I owe as much, perhaps more, to my brilliant agent, Christy Fletcher, assisted by her partner Emma Parry and their staff at Fletcher & Parry, who brought verve and grace and wit to the task of marketing the proposal for The Race for Timbuktu. In the end, she found the perfect home for it with Dan Halpern and Gheña Glijansky at Ecco, a most happy day for me.

  I am grateful to my dear friend and personal editor Kate Gerard for her help in constructing the proposal. She also proofread my manuscript meticulously during the two years I wrote it, making scores of helpful suggestions, both grammatical and structural. She often reminded me that stories are what interest readers, not concatenations of facts, and she prodded me to evoke the drama that so captured me in reading Laing as a teenager. In the end, it was not a hard thing to do; Laing and Clapperton did much of the work for me.

  My editor at Ecco, Gheña Glijansky, brought skill, tact, and enthusiasm to taming a m
anuscript that still had lumps in it. Though I was often distressed at how many little infelicities she found in sentences I had labored on for hours, she kindly fixed them, while managing to interlard her e-mailed notes to me with lots of “well done!” and “love this!” and sometimes just “Oy!” Gheña saw an early proposal for the project and speedily embraced Laing. Her affection for him, for Emma, Hugh Clapperton, and even for the odious Warrington, strongly informed her editing of my text. She also brought the patience and skill of a jeweler to her work, finding so many ways to improve words, sentences, and paragraphs. If any passages in this book now glow, that is Gheña’s work, not mine. And if there are passages that still are ponderous, they remain so in spite of her many exhortations to me to improve them.

  Very special thanks also to Amy Robbins for her meticulous copyediting, correction of grammatical faux pas, and many helpful suggestions; and to David Koral, senior production editor at HarperCollins, for his indispensable competence in preparing this book for the printer.

  I want to express my appreciation also to Dan Halpern, publisher of Ecco, who took the risk of committing to The Race for Timbuktu while it was just a woolly idea. Without publishers like Dan, most books would very likely simply die before they were written. I hope this one merits the faith he showed in it, and in me.

  I’ve been assisted in this project by librarians everywhere, especially by Joanna Corden, archivist of the Royal Society, London, for so kindly providing me with copies of index cards relating to the society’s holdings for Major Laing; to Jane Shillaker in the Research and Editorial Services Department of the Public Record Office of the National Archives at Kew; to Matthew Bailey, librarian of the Picture Library, National Portrait Gallery, London; to Dr. Marion Wallace, curator of Africa Collections at the British Library, and Hedley Sutton, also of the BL; to Professor Roy Bridges, president of the Hakluyt Society, London, and Gillian Costain Batement, also of the Hakluyt Society; to my friend and frequent lunch partner at the Dallas Committee on Foreign Relations, Professor Larry D. Sall, Ph.D., Dean of Libraries, the University of Texas at Dallas (and all his helpful staff) for making the magnificent Eugene McDermott Library at UTD available to me, as well as all the vast library resources of the University of Texas System; and to Cynthia Mayo of the Dallas Public Library, Business and Technology Division, Dallas, Texas, and all the staff at the Renner/Frankford division of the DPL (who must rue their proximity to my house, and my constant prwdations).

  I would be deeply remiss were I to fail to thank my friend, primary physician, and oncologist Charles K. Connor, M.D., whose healing gifts saw me through a long and challenging battle with Waldenström’s macroglobulenemia* while I was writing this book. I am indebted also to Howard M. Kussman, M.D., and my ophthalmic surgeon, Kimberly S. Warren, M.D., and many other wonderful physicians and nurses at the North Texas Regional Cancer Center, Plano, Baylor University Hospital, Dallas, and the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. I owe them more than I can say.

  I am also grateful to the men and women of Africa who befriended me and shared their confidences and their continent with me, as a teenager and as an adult, in many happy years of residence in Kenya, Zaire, Gabon, and Congo, and shorter stays in pre-Gaddafi Libya, Niger, Mali, Algeria, Mauritania, Spanish Sahara, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, as well as Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, São Tomé and Príncipe, Namibia, Uganda, Angola, and Zanzibar, Tanganyika, and Rhodesia (as they were then known), and the Seychelles. Africans have suffered much. The face of Africa may not improve much in a year, or in five years, but Africa and Africans will bloom once more, for I believe (with the great abolitionist Theodore Parker) that while “the moral arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice.”

  Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to Alexander Gordon Laing himself, the forgotten “African traveler.” I was often jolted by the thought that we have only a fragment of his journal, which disappeared with him when he died. Like Bovill, I have relied mainly on his letters to reconstruct his journey across the Sahara. Were it not for his prolific letter writing, we would know only the barest outline of his story. He put so much in his letters, but what marvelous treasures did he save just for those journals? What have we missed? No doubt a great deal—wonderful things, facts that are still untold, insights unshared. They will likely remain so. Sometimes I hope, against all logic, that portions of the missing journals lie hidden in some trunk, swaddled in darkness and dry air for almost two centuries now, just waiting for the lock to snap open, for the sunlight to stream in.…

  Sir Thomas More’s Dutch friend and intellectual sparring partner Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam said of More that he was omnium horarum homo,* an encomium rendered in English by Sir Robert Bolt (with more grace than accuracy) as “a man for all seasons.” It strikes me that Alexander Gordon Laing was a man for no seasons, both in the literal sense that he never seemed fully alive until the thermometer hit triple digits, and more metaphorically (and profoundly) in that he lived in the bubble of his own mental world, the foil of men like Saint Thomas, whose gift was to be so attuned politically, socially, and emotionally to everything going on around him, with almost perfect pitch. Laing, the introverted Scot, was tone-deaf in so many ways, as Emma and most everyone dear to him learned—at their cost. But only such a man as Laing would have attempted the tasks he chose for himself. And Laing most emphatically was, in a way that the sedate and deliberate knight and martyr was not, omnium horarum homo—never sleeping, burning the candle at both ends with his own peculiar manic energy, always ready to meet the next challenge, always willing to throw himself into the breach, his soul dilated and pulled forward by that astonishing, that hypnotizing rose light of the Sahara. He was drawn to the wilderness hoping to find Dieu sans les hommes,* in Balzac’s phrase—God unburdened by all those additions we humans add to him, and so often choke on—only to discover that he needed humanity after all.

  I hope I have done right by him, poor Laing, and his long-suffering wife. I do hope they are together now at last, alone and beyond reach of murderous sheikhs, lovesick Frenchmen, and that egregious old reprobate, the colonel.

  Frank Kryza

  Dallas

  May 2005

  *Kenya Colony and Protectorate became independent of Great Britain on December 12, 1963, about eight months after I arrived there, an occasion that will always be linked in my mind with the death of President Kennedy, the announcement of which devastated the tiny expatriate American community in Nairobi only three weeks before independence, on November 22.

  †The late William Atwood, the wonderfully erudite and literate editor-in-chief of Look magazine, who later wrote of his experiences in newly independent Kenya with grim humor in The Reds and the Blacks (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1967).

  ‡Those five years in Kenya, from 1963 until I came home to go to college in late 1967, turned out to be among the happiest of my life.

  *E(dward) W(illiam) Bovill (he never used his full name), born Christmas Day, 1892, was educated at Rugby School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He served in the First World War with Britain’s elite Tenth Royal Hussars and the West African Frontier Force, where he had his introduction to the continent that would hold him in thrall for the rest of his life. With the publication of Caravans of the Old Sahara in 1930, he launched a thirty-five-year career as a writer of nonfiction books about Africa as “an upholder of the ancient and honorable tradition of amateur in,” scholarship the words of Robin Hallett, perhaps the most eminent historian of Africa of the last century, who edited a posthumous edition of one of Bovill’s books. Though many of his readers assume Bovill was an academic, he was in fact a very successful City of London businessman, serving as a director of Jardine Matheson & Co. Ltd., the giant British importing and shipping conglomerate, from 1936 to 1945, and as chairman of R. C. Treat & Co. Ltd., Britain’s principal manufacturer of fragrances and flavors, from 1942
to 1961. Active in the prestigious Hakluyt Society for many years, between 1962 and 1966, the year of his death, he researched and wrote the four-volume Missions to the Niger, which includes a volume on Laing, published for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press.

  *A rare (but treatable!) blood cancer.

  *“a man for all the hours”

  *“Dans le désert, voyez-vous, il y a tout, et il n’y a rien.… Dieu sans les hommes.” (In the desert, you see, there is everything, and there is nothing.… God without men.)

  About the Author

  FRANK T. KRYZA spent eleven years in Africa and traveled much of the territory described in The Race for Timbuktu. Author of The Power of Light, he is a twenty-year veteran of the energy industry and a former newspaper reporter and editor. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IN WRITING THIS BOOK, I have often quoted firsthand sources dating from the early nineteenth century. In such quotations, the original and erratic spelling, punctuation, grammar, and typographical conventions (for example, the liberal use of uppercase initial letters for many words) have been retained, except in longer passages where I found them distracting. Similarly, abbreviations common in the era (RN—Royal Navy; HMB—His Majesty’s Brig; RAC—Royal Africa Corps), but now unfamiliar, have been spelled out to avoid confusion.

  Some proper names and names of vessels have variant spellings depending on the primary source consulted. I have employed the most commonly used form where this can be ascertained. When it was not possible to determine the most common form, I selected one and have been consistent in its use throughout the narrative.

  Geographical places are referred to by their names at the time, with the modern equivalent, if different, in parentheses at first mention. My source for the modern spelling of geographical names is Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary.