by Tim Jeal
They started out with a distressing handicap. They loathed the slave trade – indeed Florence had been a slave – and yet they were going to be entirely dependent on Ibrahim and his slowly evolving plans. When he decided to make a series of raids in a particular area, instigated over several months, Baker and Florence were obliged to await his pleasure. Naturally they made the best of it – setting up ‘home’ together in a mud hut, keeping hens, growing lettuces, onions and yams in their garden, and trying their hand at making wine and pombé. Florence adopted a monkey as a pet, and later made Robinson Crusoe-like outfits for herself and her bearded lover. But whenever Ibrahim left on one of his brutal forays, Baker and Florence were compelled to come with him, lest in his absence, their own followers were overwhelmed by angry locals. ‘The traders convert every country into a wasps’ nest,’ lamented Baker, knowing that his men would probably be killed fetching water from the river, without Ibrahim’s followers being around to defend them. So Baker and Florence were obliged to accompany Ibrahim wherever his slave and ivory trading took him. ‘I am more like a donkey than an explorer,’ groaned the would-be discoverer of the Luta N’zige. In truth he was luckier than his real donkeys, which were already being killed by the tsetse fly. So he was daily becoming more dependent on Ibrahim for porters; and there could be no knowing whether the Syrian would eventually agree to accompany him and Florence to Bunyoro. Being logical, why would any slave trader want to go to the country of a powerful king like Kamrasi, able to place ‘restrictions upon his felonious propensities’? At times Baker wondered whether he might do better to risk everything – including his life and Florence’s – on a dash for the lake with as many porters as he could manage to bribe. But for all his impetuosity and pride, Baker knew how to wait when it was absolutely necessary.14 He and Florence endured nine months of moving about within the territory of the Latuka and Obbo peoples.
They were still 200 miles from their objective, and frequently in danger, despite Ibrahim’s presence (indeed partly because of it). Over again they heard the war drums ring out and were obliged to build barricades with their baggage. On one particularly menacing occasion, Florence laid out several hundred cartridges of buckshot, powder flasks and wadding on a mat, while Baker lined up his guns and rifles. Even little Saat strapped on his belt and cartouche-box and took his stand among the men, but at two in the morning, after many anxious hours of waiting, the dense crowds of armed men began to disperse. The Latuka had recently trapped a caravan of 300 Arabs, and after chasing them to the verge of a precipice, had thrust them over it with their spears. So the dangers were real enough. Meanwhile Baker’s own men continued to alarm him, and he was fortunate to end a near mutiny by knocking out the ringleader with a lucky punch.15
Baker and Florence were in the village of the chief of the Obbo when they fell dangerously ill with malaria. Both had suffered bouts of fever before, but this time neither had the strength to help the other. They could not keep down water and were delirious. Katchiba, the old chief, was told that they were dying. On finding them lying helpless, he filled his mouth with water and squirted it about, including over the sick pair, and left confidently predicting that they would get better. Given how many European traders had died in these latitudes, his optimism was surprising. But he turned out to be right. In the travellers’ hut, which was swarming with rats and white ants, Katchiba spotted Baker’s chamber pot and decided it would make a perfect serving bowl for important occasions. So he was deeply disappointed when told it was ‘a sacred vessel’ which had to accompany Baker everywhere he went.16
With the Obbo that summer, Baker could not resist hunting elephant, although his horse was ‘utterly unfit [and] went perfectly mad at the report of a gun fired from his back’. When thrown to the ground twenty yards from a charging elephant, Baker seemed to be facing certain death, until the animal changed direction at the last moment and thundered after his departing horse. Without knowing it, Florence had narrowly missed the fate she dreaded most of all: being left alone in the heart of Africa.17
Khursid re-joined his men in June, and though soon afterwards the slave trader ordered the slaughter of sixty-six local tribesmen, Baker still had no choice but to stay with him. Acts of casual brutality continued: a father who came to the camp to try to free his daughter, who had been enslaved, was gunned down and his body left for the vultures. Baker had already observed the order in which vultures fed on carrion: eating the eyes first, then the soft inner thigh and the skin beneath the arms, before consuming the tougher parts.18 The Latukas’ eating habits also intrigued him. On one occasion, he saw the head of a wild boar (‘in a horrible state of decomposition’) being cooked over a fire, until ‘the skull became too hot for the inmates, [whereupon] crowds of maggots rushed pêle-mele from the ears and nostrils like people escaping from the doors of a theatre on fire’. Not that this stopped the cooks ‘eating the whole and sucking the bones’.19
At first Baker welcomed the rains since they brought down the temperature to below 100 °F:
How delightful to be cool in the centre of Africa! I was charmingly wet – the water was running out of the heels of my shoes … the wind howled over the hitherto dry gullies … It was no longer the tropics; the climate was that of old England restored to me.
But soon all his stores were covered in mildew and even with constant fires burning it was impossible to dry out his possessions. By July the rains had made the rivers too high for anyone to travel south, as he discovered during a week’s reconnaissance. Only when the dry season started in October would travel become possible again. By then, he and Florence had suffered many more attacks of fever and their stock of quinine had been reduced to a few grains. Their horses and donkeys were all dead and they were too weak to walk, so there was still no hope of an early departure. Even when Baker invested in three oxen, ‘Beef’, ‘Steak’ and ‘Suet’, he and Florence found they lacked the strength to mount them. But at least he managed to persuade Ibrahim to come with him to Bunyoro as soon as he and Florence were able to make a start. In part this had been achieved by repetition of his promise to obtain for Khursid and Ibrahim favourable terms for acquiring ivory from Kamrasi; and in addition, Baker offered him a good supply of beads from his substantial store, with which to make his purchases. Ibrahim had few beads of his own and was already indebted to Baker for 65 lb.20
On 4 January 1864, Florence and Baker swallowed the last grains of quinine in their medicine chest, and prepared to head south the following day. After an hour or so of travelling, Baker’s ox bolted, obliging him to walk eighteen miles on the first day, and Florence’s beast was stung by a fly and plunged so suddenly that she was thrown to the ground and badly shaken up. The next day Ibrahim sold two well-behaved oxen to the exhausted Baker and his bruised mistress, who reached the Asua river, close to modern Nimule, after only four days’ riding.
On their way there, on entering villages Ibrahim’s men had ransacked granaries for corn, dug up yams and ‘helped themselves to everything as though quite at home’. Baker made no mention in his diary of feeling any qualms about urging the agent of a notorious slave trader to enter a kingdom where the trade was not yet endemic. His hero, Speke, had not accepted help from slave traders until he had left the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro and was moving towards an area already devastated by slavers. It was true that Ibrahim had promised Baker that he would not enslave people or steal cattle while in Bunyoro; but his word would mean very little in future.21
When Baker was twelve miles south of Faloro in the land of the Madi, he could see with his own eyes that many villages had been burned to the ground and the whole country laid waste by Mohammed Wad-el-Mek, the wakil of Andrea De Bono. He even noted that: ‘It was the intention of Ibrahim … to establish himself at Shooa [south-east of Faloro] which would form an excellent point d’appui for operations to the unknown south.’ So Baker clearly realised that his current journey would encourage Khursid Agha (Ibrahim’s master) to compete with De Bono for contr
ol of the slave and ivory trade in ‘the unknown south’.22 Perhaps it eased Baker’s conscience to think that Khursid would have pressed on into Bunyoro anyway. It was a token of the intensity of Baker’s desire to achieve fame as an explorer that he was prepared to ignore his conscience so completely. In Khartoum, two years earlier, he had written angrily to The Times (25 November 1862) about the terrible evils of ‘man-hunting’ and the unimaginable suffering it caused.
While Baker was at Shooa, which was about eighty miles from Kamrasi’s capital, a boy who had formerly worked for Mohammed Wad-el-Mek was brought to the explorer. This youth told him that soon after his master had escorted Speke and Grant to Gondokoro from Faloro, he had marched south into Bunyoro, along Speke’s route at the head of a large force. De Bono, Wad-el-Mek’s master, had ordered him to support Rionga in his longstanding struggle to supplant his brother, Kamrasi, as ruler. Success would provide De Bono with a compliant monarch to do business with – or so he had hoped. Kamrasi, however, had fought back and survived, although 300 of his subjects had been killed in the fighting. It struck Baker forcibly that Kamrasi would now assume, quite wrongly, that it was no coincidence that he had been attacked by the very people who had escorted Speke to Gondokoro. Inevitably the ruler of Bunyoro would suppose that Wad-el-Mek had been sent by Speke to attack him. At Gondokoro, Speke had himself warned Baker on no account to set foot in the territory which Rionga controlled, or Kamrasi would think of him as his greatest enemy’s ally and would stop him travelling to the lake.
To the south of Shooa, Baker and Ibrahim and their followers crossed a splendid granite plateau bordering a level tableland of fine grass. But from this high ground, they could see a low and interminable prairie stretching southwards as far as the eye could see, relieved only by an occasional palm tree. Their guide now lost the path, and as they struggled through ten-foot-high grass, they found themselves stumbling into deep swamps between undulations in the land. Since these morasses were numerous, the march became exhausting for man and beast – the oxen often having to be unloaded and their burdens floated across on improvised rafts. Florence was too feverish to walk and had to be carried on her bed, which proved too cumbersome to be taken across the swamps. So Baker tried to carry her on his back. He soon regretted it. ‘In the middle, the tenacious bottom gave way, and I sank, and remained immovably fixed while she floundered frog-like in the muddy water … until she was landed by being dragged through the swamp.’23
On 22 January they reached a broad river, flowing from east to west. From Speke’s directions they assumed it must be the Nile. They were greeted by some men in a canoe, who shocked them with the news that this part of the country was Rionga’s domain. As soon as the canoeists learned that Baker’s and Ibrahim’s men had no connection with their allies Mohammed Wad-el-Mek and Andrea De Bono, they refused to sell food or to guide Baker to the lake. But it was some compensation for the visitors, as they continued southwards, to turn their back on the swamps and enter a noble forest that ran parallel with the river, as it roared beneath them to their right in a succession of falls between high cliffs. ‘These heights were thronged with natives … armed with spears and shields … shouting and gesticulating as though daring us to cross the river.’ These men were on the Bunyoro side of the river and were clearly Kamrasi’s warriors. As Baker’s party reached the Karuma Falls, close to the Bunyoro ferry, the heights were just as crowded with men, who sent across a canoe to parley. Bacheeta, Baker’s female translator, explained to them that Speke’s brother had just arrived from his country to pay Kamrasi a visit. When asked why this brother had brought so many men with him, Bacheeta replied without hesitation that the white man’s presents for Kamrasi were so numerous that they required many carriers. After this mouthwatering announcement by his interpreter, Baker dared imagine that he might soon be summoned to meet Kamrasi. Certainly he would have to look the part.
I prepared for the introduction by changing my clothes in a grove of plantains for my dressing room, and altering my costume to a tweed suit, I [then] climbed up a high and almost perpendicular rock that formed a natural pinnacle on the face of the cliff, and waving my cap to the crowd on the opposite side, I looked almost as imposing as Nelson in Trafalgar Square.
Returning to the ground, Baker ordered his and Ibrahim’s men – 112 in all – to hide themselves in the plantains, in case ‘the natives were startled by so imposing a force’. With Florence beside him, he then advanced to meet Kamrasi’s men, who had been in the canoe and were now approaching on foot through the reeds. Their greeting was both gratifying and alarming, being expressed by ‘rushing at us with the points of their lances thrust close to our faces, [while] shouting and singing in great excitement’. Baker asked Bacheeta to tell them that he hoped not to be kept waiting for weeks before meeting Kamrasi as Speke had been. They replied by recounting how Wad-el-Mek had come to Bunyoro, claiming to be Speke’s friend, and had therefore been trusted and given gifts by Kamrasi, but had then returned with Rionga’s people and with their help had killed many of the king’s subjects. So, Baker was told, it was out of the question for him to cross the river before messengers had returned from the capital with Kamrasi’s permission. After all, Baker’s party might include some of the people who had behaved so treacherously several months earlier. Forewarned about Wad-el-Mek’s attack, Baker had expected to be met with suspicion, but he was still disappointed by the extent of the hostility. After lengthy discussions, the headman of the district reluctantly agreed to let Baker and Florence cross the river. It was a mark of Baker’s almost excessive self-confidence that he was prepared to be ferried over with only two servants and with Bacheeta, despite warnings from his men that he would be murdered if separated from them.24
Baker and Florence slept on the ground on straw under a Scotch plaid, having dined on ripe plantains, washed down with plantain wine that tasted like thin cider. Next day, nobody would tell them a word about the lake, although they asked numerous people. Not that the hundreds of Nyoro flocking to look at them were hostile. Indeed, the sight of Florence combing her long blonde hair created as great a stir (in Baker’s phrase) as a gorilla would have done appearing on a London street.
At the end of a wearisome week of waiting, some men arrived from Kamrasi’s town, Shaguzi (M’ruli). After inspecting Baker closely, they declared that he was truly ‘the brother of Speke’, and agreed that he and all his men could leave for Shaguzi the following day, 30 January 1864. After this announcement Baker felt more affectionate towards his hosts, and wrote in his diary about the cleverness of their blacksmiths and potters and the beauty of their women, but this benign mood would not last. Florence fell ill on the first day of the march, and for a week Baker feared she would die. On 5 February she was so ill that even travelling on a litter was more than she could bear. Baker described the country as being ‘full of mosquitoes’ but made no connection between their presence and the fever that so many of his people were contracting. Fadeela – the servant who had appeared in Baker’s tent after being beaten – was dying and expired three days later. On that day, Baker was so weak that he had to be held upright on his ox’s back by two men, and even then he fell off and had to rest under a tree for five hours.
From the contradictory messages now being received from Kamrasi, Baker could see that the ruler was deliberately trying to delay his arrival, possibly out of fear.25 But, on 10 February, the Englishman and his party at last arrived at Shaguzi, and a man whom Baker took to be Kamrasi, accompanied by 500 warriors, came to see him. This royal visitation was due to the fact that Baker – like Florence – was too ill to walk. Later, he was carried to the royal hut where he presented the supposed omukama with some presents, including a large Persian carpet, a pair of red Turkish shoes, some necklaces and a double-barrelled gun. When he asked permission to travel to the lake, the man he thought was Kamrasi – who was actually Kamrasi’s younger brother, Mgambi, impersonating the king under orders – told Baker that the lake was a hundred miles a
way and that in his weakened condition he would certainly die on the way there. Baker brushed aside this warning, and ignoring the immense danger that he and Florence would face without quinine, renewed his pleas to be permitted to set out. Baker explained that the Nile flowed northwards for an immense distance, passing through many countries from which valuable articles could be sent to Kamrasi, if he would only allow his English visitor to travel to the Luta N’zige.
Mgambi tried to make his consent conditional upon Baker agreeing to attack Rionga, which he refused to do. Ibrahim, however, agreed to become Mgambi’s blood brother, licking blood from his punctured arm, and promising to act against his enemies. This pledge was made after he had been given twenty large tusks and promised more. Ibrahim was also happy, it turned out, to take all his men towards Karuma Falls and to leave Baker with only thirteen porters, and the interpreter, Bacheeta, whose freedom he was obliged to purchase with three double-barrelled guns. Mgambi, the impersonator, gave Baker and Florence the use of a hut, built on marshy ground in a mosquito-ridden meadow. They suffered from fever daily, and were appalled to be told by Mgambi that all the medicines in the chest left behind by Speke had been used up. It rained in torrents most days, and Baker feared that he and Florence would not survive if they were detained in this damp place much longer. They felt a little more hopeful after learning from an indiscreet headman that the journey was not as horrifying as it had been made out. In fact, salt traders usually reached the lake in ten days.26
Baker was finally given permission to leave on 23 February, but at the last moment, just as the oxen were being saddled, Mgambi, whose protuberant eyes had always disturbed Baker, said casually: ‘I will send you to the lake and to Shooa, as I’ve promised; but you must leave your wife with me.’ In his account (the only one there is), Baker thrust the muzzle of his revolver against Mgambi’s chest and said he would shoot him dead if the insult was repeated. Florence in the meantime looking ‘as amiable as the head of the Medusa’, let fly at Mgambi in Arabic, which Bacheeta bravely translated word for word. Mgambi was astonished by all the fuss. He said he would have been perfectly happy to have offered Baker one of his wives. It was the custom in Bunyoro, but if Baker did not like it he was sorry. By way of compensation, he ordered all the bystanders to act as carriers for Baker, and in addition provided an escort of 300 men.27