A Labyrinth of Kingdoms Read online

  Courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

  A

  Labyrinth

  of

  Kingdoms

  10,000 Miles

  through

  Islamic Africa

  STEVE KEMPER

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY | New York London

  For Ben and Alex, heading out

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  MAP OF THE EXPEDITION’S ROUTES, 1850–55

  1. Preparations

  2. Invitation to Africa

  3. At the Edge of the Desert

  4. First Steps

  5. Stalled in Murzuk

  6. The Palace of the Demons

  7. To Aïr

  8. Plundered

  9. Days and Nights in Tintellust

  10. Desert Port

  11. Separate Ways

  12. “The Celebrated Emporium of Negroland”

  13. An Ending

  14. The Kingdom of Bornu

  15. A Mystery Solved

  16. “The Horde of the Welad Sliman”

  17. Razzia

  18. Captive in Bagirmi

  19. Letters from Home

  20. Resurrection and Death

  21. Westward

  22. The Prospect of the Niger

  23. “Obstructed by Nature and Infested by Man”

  24. Golden City

  25. In Timbuktu

  26. Stuck

  27. Released, More or Less

  28. Rumors and Consequences

  29. Getting Out

  30. Problems at Home

  31. Last Journeys

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PHOTO INSERT

  Prologue

  THE YOUNG SCIENTIST KNEW HE WOULD SOON DIE OF THIRST. LAST night, far across the desert plain, he had seen bonfires built by his companions to guide him back to the caravan. But he was too weak and feverish to move, with no strength to gather wood for an answering fire. He shot his pistol twice, but the Saharan night absorbed the sound. No reply came.

  Behind him rose the peak called the Palace of the Demons. His Tuareg guides had warned him not to antagonize the powerful desert spirits by trespassing on their sacred mountain. He scoffed at their superstitions. He was a scientist, trained by the greatest scholars in Europe, and he was fit and strong. He suspected that this verboten home of demons might be some ancient place of worship where he might find inscriptions or carvings that added to the world’s store of knowledge. Nothing could keep him from exploring such a place. “At any cost,” he said, a phrase he didn’t yet fully understand. The expedition’s leader asked him not to go alone. The young scientist shrugged him off as overcautious, but persuaded a younger colleague to come along. He agreed to meet the expedition at the next well, as he often did, impatient with the caravan’s slow pace.

  Now his self-confidence looked like fatal arrogance. First he underestimated the distance to the mountain. He also hadn’t expected the extensive plain of black pebbles, so tiring to traverse, and scorching from the radiant heat. Nor had he foreseen the deep ravine that protected the mountain like a moat, adding more distance. His companion, exhausted, had turned back there, but he refused to retreat.

  When he finally reached the mountaintop, he found nothing but wild jumbled boulders, as if titans had been at war. He began the descent. By noon he was out of water. His exertions under the summer Saharan sun drained him. He kept moving, though he now had no idea where the caravan was, or his position in relationship to it. In midafternoon he saw some huts and hobbled toward them, desperate for water. They were abandoned. He dragged himself beneath a slender leafless tree that stood alone on the arid plain. He watched for rescuers. Near sunset a string of camels in the distance sparked some hope, but it dissolved, a mirage.

  Fever kept him from sleeping that night. Dawn cheered him until he realized that this day’s sun would finish him. He changed position as it rose, crawling after the shadow cast by the tree’s slim trunk. As he began dying, his body pulled moisture from wherever it could find any, to keep his heart pumping. His joints stiffened, his lips cracked, his tongue swelled from lack of saliva. Around noon, when there was only enough shade for his head, thirst drove him mad. He cut his arm and sucked blood from the wound. The effort threw him into delirium.

  As the sun set, he flickered in and out of consciousness, his mind drifting. His dreams and ambitions had burned to cinders on this flat wasteland. He would not make spectacular scholarly discoveries that changed Europe’s perception of Africa. He would not visit the ancient kingdom of Bornu on Lake Chad or the Fulani empire of Sokoto. He would not explore the mysteries of Timbuktu. His contract with the British Foreign Office would die with him. Instead of fame, his reward would be a footnote in the history of African exploration, another futile death among so many others. He would not end his days among the scholars of Europe, but here, a husk in the shadow of a gaunt tree. He commended himself to God and closed his eyes.

  After a time, from a distance, he heard the bawl of a camel. “It was the most delightful music I ever heard in my life,” he later wrote. Like Lazarus, he had been given a second chance, and he promised himself to make the most of it.

  HIS NAME was Heinrich Barth. In 1849 he joined a small British expedition to Islamic North and Central Africa. His five-and-a-half-year, 10,000-mile adventure ranks among the greatest journeys in the annals of exploration. His feats rival, if not surpass, those of the most famous names in nineteenth-century African travel: Park, Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley, Baker, Cameron. In terms of knowledge collected and ongoing relevance, none of these famous men compare with Barth, whose discoveries and written work are considered indispensable by modern historians, geographers, linguists, and ethnographers.

  Yet because of shifting politics, European preconceptions about Africa, and his own thorny personality, Barth has been almost forgotten. The general public has never heard of him or his epic journey or his still-pertinent observations about Africa and Islam. His monumental five-volume Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, written first in English, is rare even in libraries. Though he made his journey for the British government, he has never had a biography in English. Barth fell through a crack in history.

  This is a forgotten story of survival, adventure, and scientific discovery by a remarkable man.

  Map of the Expedition’s Routes, 1850–55

  (from Travels and Discoveries, drawn by August Petermann)

  1

  Preparations

  THE AUGURIES FOR AFRICAN EXPLORATION MUST HAVE BEEN STRONG in 1821. Both Richard Burton and Samuel Baker, famous for their discoveries in East Africa, were born that year, and the British explorers Walter Oudney, Hugh Clapperton, and Dixon Denham left for their pioneering journey to Lake Chad and the kingdom of Bornu. Heinrich Barth, the next European to see Bornu, was born February 16, 1821 in Hamburg, Germany.

  He was the third of four children born to Johann and Charlotte Barth. Johann came from austere beginnings. His parents, Thuringian peasants, both died when he was a boy. This calamity had a silver lining, since the orphan was taken in by a relative in Hamburg, a cosmopolitan port in northern Germany. The city offered ample opportunities to the sharp and energetic. At first Johann worked as a butcher, but he soon found his way into Hamburg’s mercantile class, and married into a respectable Hamburg family. By the time Heinrich was born, Johann was a trader doing thriving business with Hanseatic cities along the coast of northern Europe. He and Charlotte were strict Lutherans, and they raised their children according to exacting notions of morality, duty, industry, and discipline.
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  Though uneducated, Johann respected learning and gave his children the best possible schooling. In Hamburg that meant the Johanneum, the city’s oldest and most rigorous academy, founded in 1529. Barth was accepted in 1832 at age eleven. From his first days there he was a misfit. He was already exhibiting many of his marked characteristics: a gift for art and languages, severe self-discipline, omnivorous intellectual energy, and a devotion to scholarship that sometimes looked like conceit. All these set him far apart from his classmates, socially as well as academically.

  “It is true that Barth was no ordinary schoolboy,” recalled one of his schoolmates from those years. “He interacted very little with the majority of the class… . During the breaks he mostly stood alone at the end of the bench, displaying an aristocratic aloofness towards his classmates and only exchanging a few words with his closer acquaintances. He rarely smiled and I never heard him laugh heartily… . He also studied things that were not even part of the curriculum. People said that he was teaching himself Arabic, which to us brainless schoolboys certainly seemed the pinnacle of insanity.”

  The Arabic rumor was true. Barth was also teaching himself English, which he could read and speak fluently by age thirteen, a crucial skill in coming years. Despite the Johanneum’s reputation for academic rigor, Barth later wrote that he felt understimulated there. In addition to his independent language studies, he set himself the extracurricular task of absorbing the classic histories, geographies, and scientific works of the Greeks and Romans, in the original languages. An avid book collector, he amassed a large library—another hobby that baffled his classmates.

  He was weak and sickly in his early teens, until he focused his considerable self-discipline on his body. During recesses at school, instead of playing or lounging with the other boys, he did gymnastics and arm exercises. To toughen himself he took cold baths, even in winter. His classmates noted that he did these things with grim intensity rather than gusto. By his late teens Barth was a strapping young man well over 6 feet tall.

  It’s tempting to see his mental and physical regimens as signs of an explorer-in-training, to imagine him daydreaming about distant lands while gazing over the masts hung with foreign flags in Hamburg’s crowded harbor. More likely he was in thrall to his beloved Greeks and their ideal of physical and intellectual excellence.

  His quirks amused and mystified his schoolmates and ensured that he had few friends. No doubt he endured the mockery of conventional teenaged boys for eccentric, introverted bookworms. He must have been lonely and felt his oddity keenly. He longed for release from the stifling atmosphere of the Johanneum into the wider horizons of university and adulthood.

  “Mostly left to his own devices, the boy early on developed a strong will and a large ego,” wrote Gustav von Schubert, Barth’s brother-in-law, close friend, and biographer. “He occasionally seemed to believe that he was unique and deserved special treatment. This characteristic helped him a great deal on his later expeditions, which covered great distances and were usually undertaken alone. In day-to-day life, however, it made him come across as gruff and awkward. On top of this his strict, acerbic character was attuned only to a sense of duty. Neither humor nor happy enjoyment of life made any impression on him.”

  IN OCTOBER 1839, two weeks after graduating from the Johanneum, Barth enrolled in the University of Berlin. This was arguably the most dynamic university in Europe, especially in the sciences. It was the world’s first research-intensive institution, a groundbreaking model of higher education that came to dominate Western universities. Berlin’s brilliant professors were revolutionizing the fields of history, geography, and philology, and were leading the way in the evolving fields of archeology, biology, botany, geology, and ethnology. The intellectual foment there attracted exceptional students, including, during Barth’s years, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Mikhail Bakunin, Jacob Burckhardt, and Søren Kierkegaard.

  Though the University of Berlin was the pinnacle of higher education in Germany, colleges throughout the country were offering progressive instruction in the sciences, with facilities that included well-equipped research laboratories. By contrast, Oxford and Cambridge were snubbing science at the time, and research labs were almost unheard of in British schools. Science was considered the province of enthusiastic amateurs (Charles Darwin comes to mind).

  Consequently, by the mid nineteenth century German universities were graduating thousands of students in scientific disciplines every year, while Britain turned out only a handful. When the British government decided to mount an expedition to the Sudan in 1849, it looked to Germany for scientists to accompany it. (By the end of the century British universities had started to catch up, but even then the science faculties tended to be German or to have doctorates from German universities, and the students learned from textbooks written in German or translated from it. This eventually led to xenophobic fears that Oxford and Cambridge were being “Prussianized”—a backlash whose early phase would sting Barth.)

  At the University of Berlin, Barth met three dazzling professors who shaped his intellectual development and professional future: Alexander von Humboldt, the great botanist who pioneered the field of biogeography after spending five years exploring South America; Carl Ritter, who with von Humboldt is credited with transforming geographical study to include what are now commonly called “earth sciences”—geology, geophysics, soil science, geodesy, and comparative geography; and Philipp August Böckh, who expanded the field of philology beyond linguistics and literary arts to encompass all the cultural expressions of the ancient world—history, philosophy, science, religion, law and government, and daily life.

  For Barth the university offered almost too much stimulation, too many choices. He was unsure where to concentrate his energies. This unfamiliar problem made him unhappy and restless. During his second semester he decided to drop academics for action—a trip to Italy to study ruins and perhaps to clarify his life’s direction. The trip was no lark. He prepared for it thoroughly, first by learning Italian. With his father’s blessing and funding, he spent nearly a year traveling alone to classical sites throughout Italy—Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Sicily. He was nineteen.

  The trip exhilarated him, though not because of Italian cuisine, women, or other delights of la dolce vita that might distract a young man far from home. Fun was never among Barth’s goals. No, the trip elated him because he felt independent and self-confident, intellectually stimulated and physically robust. Traveling alone, he immersed himself in the solitary world of scholarship. He took copious detailed notes, a lifelong habit. “I am working terribly hard,” he wrote home from Rome in November 1840. “I go everywhere on foot. It has become no problem for me to walk around for nine hours without eating anything apart from a few chestnuts or some grapes.”

  The trip confirmed his fascination with ancient Mediterranean cultures and activated his lifelong wanderlust. But it didn’t clarify his educational path. Back in Berlin he bounced between classes in archeology, law, geography, and philology. His lack of a firm direction frustrated him. He considered the academic year almost wasted, despite spending all his time studying. Socially he remained inept and aloof. “His disciplined personality meant that true enjoyment of the Berlin social scene was out of the question for him,” noted his brother-in-law von Schubert. “He was only interested in his academic pursuits.”

  In May 1842, Hamburg’s “Great Fire” destroyed nearly a quarter of the inner city, including half of Johann Barth’s business and Heinrich’s entire precious library. Barth’s letter to his father about these losses was characteristically mature and dispassionate: “One’s only secure possessions are those which he carries within him. Wealth? Can be gone in a second. Outward joy? Breaks as easily as glass. But inner strength and refinement can never be taken away—they only disappear when one ceases to exist, making them superfluous.” He was twenty-one.

  Despite the financial blow, Johann funded another trip for Barth during that year’s
summer break, along the Rhine to Switzerland. Over the next two semesters Barth took classes from some of the university’s most renowned professors: classical antiquity with Böckh, geography with Ritter, philosophy with Friedrich Schelling, and history with Leopold von Ranke.

  Several letters written home during this period provide glimpses of Barth’s ambitions, idealism, and loneliness, his gravity and devotion to learning. “My only interest,” he wrote, “is my own education, my own intellectual competence, so that I may be as useful to humanity as possible—for which I would gladly earn recognition and possibly even a bit of fame.” On March 20, 1843, he wrote:

  To see how, from hour to hour, day to day, one delves into science more deeply, more vividly, and more precisely—how one works ever more thoroughly as part of a small, specialized field and sees more clearly the relationship between this one small part and all of science, to all of mankind’s intellectual progression—is an endless, deep, quiet joy. Of course this can result in monstrous egotism—that one cares about nothing but one’s own work. When one finds complete satisfaction in one’s own thoughts, one learns to do without, or even scorn, other people. But the more one’s inner spirit is filled with scientific thought, the more it drives outward as well—it drives one to share this intellectual life with other people and thus give them strength to keep fighting against their other, sensual sides. This is the victory of true science.

  Perhaps most revealing in its psychological nakedness is this letter:

  I have a great drive, an absolutely selfless drive, to find the great, the true, and the beautiful. To be useful to humanity, to encourage them towards common enlightenment, to feed their spirits and give them strength—this is my only goal. And I see that very few people really know me, that most people misunderstand me, and others slander me terribly. But I am too proud to defend myself before these often pathetic people, to share thoughts and feelings with them that they would only laugh at anyway. I’m not so full of myself that I believe I have found the truth, but I do think that I am not a pathetic person and that I can be useful in the grand scheme of things.