Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure

by Tim Jeal

  Nevertheless, in May 1871, Baker hoisted the Egyptian flag over Gondokoro, renaming it Ismailia and simultaneously proclaiming the surrounding country – as far south as Buganda and Lake Albert – to be part of a new Egyptian province which he called ‘Equatoria’. This would prove a highly significant moment in the region’s history.

  Raising the flag at Gondokoro (from Baker’s Ismailia).

  By December, Baker had violated his own principles and stolen corn and cattle from local tribesmen in order to feed his hungry soldiers. But the amount of food captured was too little and he had no alternative but to order 800 men back to Khartoum, with 300 of their ‘dependents’. After trying for nine months to impose Egyptian rule on the Bari, he was forced to move south with a mere 502 soldiers and fifty-two sailors, leaving Alloron’s people as determined in their opposition as they had been when he had first arrived.5

  But when Baker arrived at Fatiko – seventy-five miles north of Karuma Falls – his luck briefly changed. The local people, the Acholi, sided with him against the local Arab slave traders and helped him to obtain porters for the rest of the journey to Bunyoro. To reward them, he garrisoned local forts and enabled the Acholi to remain independent at a critical time. Today, Baker is revered in Acholi traditions, as is his wife Florence, who is still known as Anyadwe, or ‘Daughter of the Moon’, on account of her long blonde hair.6

  But, despite the support of the Acholi, by the end of 1871 Baker had abandoned any idea of incorporating Buganda within Equatoria. However, he still hoped to achieve this feat with Bunyoro. But given how much he had been mistrusted by Kamrasi, the previous omukama of Bunyoro, he was naive to imagine that he might somehow pull the wool over the eyes of his successor, Kabarega.

  Kabarega’s return visit to Baker (from Baker’s Ismailia).

  Baker reached Masindi, Bunyoro’s present capital, on 25 April 1872. Since he only had an escort of a hundred men, he ran the risk of being detained or even murdered should Kabarega decide that he had come to steal his country. But his first meeting with the omukama - whom he described as ‘very well clad, in beautifully made bark-cloth striped with black’ – seemed to go well. But when the twenty-year-old Kabarega returned the visit, nothing that Baker could say would persuade the young man to enter his hut. Clearly the monarch suspected possible foul play. An incensed Baker called him ‘an unmannerly cub’ and ‘a gauche, undignified lout’. The cub was in fact the twenty-third of his dynasty and had come to the throne after his father’s death, as the successful claimant after a bloody succession struggle.7 Kabarega could not reasonably be blamed for being suspicious of a man whom his father had mistrusted, and who came as the representative of a distant government. But in reality Baker was the one who had walked into danger. A crowd of 2,000 people had accompanied Kabarega, ‘making a terrific noise with whistles, horns, and drums’. The king brushed aside talk of trade and civilisation, and told Baker that all he needed was military help against his rebel uncle, Rionga.

  On 14 May, Baker, in his own words, ‘took formal possession of Unyoro in the name of the Khedive of Egypt’. This involved nothing more troublesome than putting on his governor-general’s uniform, parading his men, and then hoisting the Egyptian flag. In response to this insulting ceremony, Kabarega sanctioned the construction of huts and fences which hemmed in Baker’s campsite on both sides. He also declined to cut back the long grass which offered cover to any warrior who might wish to approach the camp without being seen.8

  On 31 May, Lieutenant Julian Baker RN, who had come to Africa as his uncle’s second-in-command, foolishly led most of the expedition’s soldiers into Kabarega’s town to drill them in an open space. Florence described the omukama ’s response to this tactless provocation: ‘In about ten minutes I should think that quite 5,000 or 6,000 men turned out with their shields and arms and not one of the spears had a sheath on.’ The massacre of Baker’s entire party seemed imminent. Somehow remaining calm, Baker waved to a senior chief whom he recognised in the armed throng, and walked towards the lowered spear tips, calling out through his translator: ‘Well done. Let’s all have a dance!’9 He then ordered his scratch band to play and told his men to dance, which they did to the bafflement of the warriors. As the dancing continued, Baker ordered some men to creep forward with fixed bayonets, covering his flanks. Then, feeling rather more secure, he demanded to see Kabarega. The young king duly appeared and called off his warriors.

  Baker knew that his quick-thinking had only gained him a little time. Kabarega believed with good reason that Baker meant ‘to eat’ his country, and not simply trade with him. So the young ruler’s next move, a week later, was to try to kill both the Bakers and their men with a gift of poisoned cider and grain. This attempt was foiled by Florence, who immediately mixed an emetic with vast quantities of mustard and salted water.10

  The ‘Battle of Masindi’ (from Baker’s Ismailia).

  The next morning Baker was shot at by men creeping up close through the long grass. His sergeant walking just behind him was hit in the chest and died on the spot. Another member of the ‘Forty Thieves’ was hit in the leg. Managing to summon sixteen of his èlite corps with a bugle call, Baker ordered them to return fire. Meanwhile other men were told to set fire to Kabarega’s town, including the omukama ’s audience hut. Monsoor, Baker’s favourite officer, was killed early in the fighting, along with three others. ‘I laid his arm gently by his side,’ wrote Baker, ‘for I loved Monsoor as a true friend.’ Throughout the fight, Baker was plied with loaded rifles by Florence, whom he called his ‘little colonel’. She also fired rockets into the town.11 Four days later, the Bakers had no choice but to evacuate Masindi, although they knew that this was an acknowledgement of total failure.

  The retreat to Fatiko (from Baker’s Ismailia).

  During the march to Fatiko, through many miles of tall grass, his column suffered numerous ambushes, leading Florence to vow that if her husband died, she would shoot herself rather than risk capture. The boy leading Baker’s horse was transfixed by a spear, and crawled up to him to ask: ‘Shall I creep into the grass, Pasha? Where shall I go?’ The next moment, he fell dead at his master’s feet. Baker’s greatest fear was that Kabarega’s army would overwhelm his men by force of numbers. Luckily for him, he managed to keep ahead of his pursuers. Even so, the losses on the retreat from Masindi were ten killed and eleven wounded -heavy casualties for a force barely a hundred strong.12

  En route to Fatiko, Baker sought out Kabarega’s rebel uncle, Rionga, on his island in the Nile, to pledge to him Egypt’s future support in his struggle to supplant his royal nephew.13

  Travelling back to Khartoum on the Nile, after defeating a determined group of slave traders who attacked his fort at Fatiko, Baker intercepted three boats containing 700 slaves -hardly confirming his later claims to have rid the river of the trade in human beings.14 In fact, the overland movement of slaves to Darfur and Kordofan – following the discovery of the Bahr el-Ghazal waterway – had for a decade dwarfed the number of slaves being transported on the Nile by a ratio of six or seven to two.15 From Ismailia, Sir Samuel wrote to his brother John, intending the letter to be released to the press:

  All obstacles have been surmounted. All enemies have been subdued -and the slavers who had the audacity to attack the troops have been crushed. The slave trade of the White Nile has been suppressed – and the country annexed, so that Egypt extends to the equator.16

  Far from being subdued, Kabarega had been left as independent and obdurate as before, and al-Aqqad and the other slavers had merely received a temporary check at Fatiko. Nor had Baker ever travelled as far south as the Equator – let alone ‘annexed’ anything there. Florence’s hyperbole exceeded her husband’s. ‘After great difficulties and trials,’ she told her sister-in-law, ‘we have conquered and established a good Government throughout the country’.17 Khedive Ismail, Baker’s employer, was not taken in by the self-promotion, declaring that ‘the success [of the expedition] has been much exaggera
ted’ and that Baker, though ‘brave’ had been ‘too prone to fighting … giving rise to a general feeling of hostility towards Europeans and my government in Upper Egypt’.18

  Nevertheless, on returning to Britain, Baker’s optimistic letters were read aloud in both Houses of Parliament, and caused The Times to gush: ‘The undertaking stands out in the tame history of our times as a bold and romantic episode … Nothing recorded of the Spaniards in Mexico exceeds in stirring interest the story of the retreat from Bunyoro.’19 The adventurous aspects of Sir Samuel’s enterprise even dazzled the Liberal Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, who wrote praising him for ‘having extended British influence in Egypt’ and for accelerating ‘the rapid progress which we are making in opening-up Africa’. It was almost as if, in 1874, Derby foresaw that within a decade Britain would dismiss the bankrupt khedive and become the new ruler of Egypt and its territories on the Nile.20 But while this Liberal statesman succeeded in sensing the direction in which the winds of history were starting to blow, he failed to recognise that Baker’s recipe for creating new colonies, with a few steamers and a regiment or two, had little to do with adventure and a lot to do with brushing aside legitimate African rulers, whose only crime was to have indicated that they wished to remain independent in the face of superior might. In reality, Baker’s ‘adventurous’ retreat from Bunyoro had been a victory for Kabarega, the ‘unmannerly cub’. While Baker could justifiably claim to have been attempting to liberate the Upper Nile from the slave trade, he could not claim to have been similarly motivated in his invasion of Bunyoro, which had never been devastated and turned into an anarchic killing field by the slavers.

  To many people in public life in Europe, Baker’s expedition was the first to reveal the strategic and economic possibilities of alien rule in tropical Africa. It therefore brought closer the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Baker claimed that by creating peaceful conditions on the Upper Nile, he had opened the way for immense crops of cotton, flax and corn to be grown in future, guaranteeing lasting prosperity to the region’s inhabitants and profit to those who came to trade with them.21 He had certainly focussed attention on Africa just when the Kimberley diamond fields were providing would-be colonists with another tempting reason to give it their attention. On 9 December 1874, the editor of The Times gave voice to sentiments which would have enraged Kabarega and Mutesa had they ever heard about them:

  It is not long since central Africa was regarded as nothing better than a region of torrid deserts or pestiferous swamps … there now seems reason to believe that one of the finest parts of the world’s surface is lying waste under the barbarous anarchy with which it is cursed.

  Sadly, Baker’s unsuccessful efforts to make Equatoria a reality and to extend Egypt’s borders – and thus Sudan’s – as far south as Bunyoro would be taken up by others with greater success and would prove utterly disastrous to the wider region in the long term.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  An Unheard of Deed of Blood

  Henry M. Stanley had visited Mutesa, the kabaka of Buganda, in April 1875, while trying to determine whether Livingstone and Burton had been right to dismiss Speke’s claim to have located the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria. So the Nile search was responsible for this nation-changing meeting between the kabaka and the explorer. Although Stanley would not say so, his success in persuading the king to invite Christian missionaries to come to Buganda owed less to Mutesa’s interest in Christ’s teaching, than to the monarch’s expectation that he would be able to buy breech-loading rifles from any Europeans who might choose to come to his country as a result of his invitation. Mutesa had long feared that without such weapons to help him, the Egyptians would ‘eat’ his country.

  Stanley had been shocked to find that Arab slave traders at Mutesa’s court were buying enough slaves from the kabaka to make Uganda, in his words, ‘the northern source of the [East African] slave trade’. So his purpose in asking Mutesa to summon Christian evangelists had been to counter the influence of slave-trading Muslims at court.1

  The arrival in Buganda of the white-suited, Tyrolean hat-wearing, Alexander Mackay of the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) in November 1878 opened a new chapter in the history of that country and its neighbouring kingdoms. Seven missionaries had been sent a year earlier but only one survivor had been there to greet Mackay. Two had been killed near the lakeside by fishermen, one had died of fever and three had retreated to Zanzibar to recuperate from fever.2 Mackay was small, dapper, resourceful, and very courageous. As a former engineer, he was well placed to teach boat-building and carpentry and to set up a printing press. He was also a knowledgeable horticulturalist. In 1879, he started to translate St Matthew’s Gospel into Luganda, along with short texts and prayers. In the same year, a group of French ‘White Fathers’ arrived under their leader Father Simeon Lourdel.

  Alexander Mackay.

  During the early 1880s the British and French missionaries made their first converts, mainly among the young pages sent to court by their families to learn leadership. These boys and other youngsters serving the missionaries made it fashionable to learn to read. They would become known collectively as ‘readers’. A number of chiefs also became converts and formed a distinct group at court. By 1884, there would be roughly a hundred Baganda Christians, with four times that number being converted in the next two years.3 Throughout this extraordinary process, which was almost without parallel in Africa, Mutesa remained ominously aloof and expressed anger that the missionaries only taught his people about God, although Stanley had led him to believe that they would teach the Baganda ‘how to make powder and guns’. His people needed this knowledge, he explained to Mackay, because the Egyptians were ‘gnawing at [his] country like rats’.4

  The Arabs already resident at court had everything to lose if the missionaries established themselves, since they would dissuade Mutesa from continuing the slave raids outside his borders, which enabled him to pay the slave traders with slaves for their cloth and other goods. Naturally they did their best to poison Mutesa’s mind against the new arrivals, saying that the white men were only interested in ‘eating up the country’ and were fugitives from justice in their own lands.5

  By 1884, Mutesa was dying of an incurable disease, and on the advice of his ngangas he sacrificed thousands of people to appease the ancestral spirits. As many as 2,000 were executed in a single day. Mackay called him ‘this monster’ and declared: ‘All is self, self, self. Uganda exists for him alone.’6 The kabaka was succeeded by his headstrong, nineteen-year-old son, Mwanga, who under Mackay’s restraining influence decided not to murder his brothers, as his predecessors had traditionally done. But Mwanga remained deeply suspicious of the missionaries. He had heard that white men were moving inland from the East African coast, making treaties as they went. These were Germans led by the imperialist Dr Karl Peters. Mwanga had also heard that the British had taken power in Egypt after a big battle there. Since he was unsure of the differences between European nations, he gained the impression that these white men had put their heads together to steal his country. It was a natural conclusion to have drawn.

  General Gordon, the Governor-General of the Sudan, had sent a small party of soldiers to Uganda in 1876, and now there was news of another Briton unexpectedly arriving at the north-east corner of Lake Victoria. Joseph Thomson had just pioneered a route through Masailand, and as ill-chance would have it, his arrival convinced Mwanga that his country was being overwhelmed from all directions. When the missionaries said they only wanted to teach his people their religion, he did not believe them and still suspected that they wanted their countrymen to come and take away his kingdom.7 Mackay learned that several chiefs who had become Muslims were urging Mutesa to kill the Christian converts and drive the missionaries out of the country. The slave traders – named by Mackay as Kambi Mbaya (Rashir bin Shrul) and Ahmed Lemi – were apparently foremost in urging the kabaka to kill the missionaries.8

  In January 1885, Mwanga arrested Mackay wit
h three of his young readers. He was placed under guard, but his protégés were dragged off to a swamp outside the royal town of Mengo. Mackay hurried to the court and protested that they were guilty of no crime, but on Mwanga’s orders the boys’ arms were hacked off by his chief executioner, and then they were slowly roasted on a spit. After being released, Mackay bravely upbraided Mwanga for this appalling act.9 The whole mission was now in acute danger.

  It was at this disastrously inauspicious moment that the jovial Bishop James Hannington arrived with fifty followers at the north-eastern corner of the lake having travelled through Masai country on Mwanga’s forbidden route. The adventurous and optimistic Oxford-educated cleric had been sent to Buganda by the CMS to take up residence as the first Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa. He would never reach his destination. On 21 October 1885, he was arrested in Busoga, with his fifty Wang-wana porters. A shocked Mackay went to the court on three consecutive days to petition Mwanga for the bishop’s life. His French rival, Father Lourdel also pleaded for mercy to be shown. None would be. After eight days of incarceration in a dark and verminous hut, Bishop Hannington was taken out into a forest clearing, stripped naked and stabbed to death along with all his porters, except for four who managed to escape. One of them reported Hannington’s last words as having been: ‘Tell the king that I am about to die for his people, that I have bought the road to Buganda with my life.’10 For several months, Mackay came close to leaving Buganda, but the situation gradually calmed down and he resumed his secret conversions.

  Then, on 30 June 1886, Mwanga struck in earnest, arresting and executing forty-five Protestant and Catholic converts in almost equal proportions. Several he strangled with his own hands. Others were castrated, before being burned alive. The chief executioner reported to the king that ‘he had never killed such brave people before, and that they had died calling on God’. Mutesa’s response was to say with a laugh: ‘But God did not deliver them from the fire.’11 Mackay wrote in his journal: ‘O night of sorrow! What an unheard of deed of blood! Surely if they fear invasion, they must see that by such an act they give the imaginary invaders a capital excuse for coming in force … ?’12