The Gates of Africa: Death, Discovery and the Search for Timbuktu

DEATH, DISCOVERY

AND THE SEARCH FOR TIMBUKTU

Anthony Sattin

DEDICATION

For Sylvie, ever my inspiration,

and for Johnny and Felix, our young adventurers

EPIGRAPH

‘TO LOVERS OF ADVENTURE AND NOVELTY,

AFRICA DISPLAYS A MOST AMPLE FIELD.’

James Rennell

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

MAPS

PREFACE: TALKING TIMBUKTU

1. Exploration’s Godfather

2. The Charge of Ignorance

3. A Friend to Mankind

4. The Oriental Interpreter

5. The Moors’ Tales

6. The Gambia Route

7. The Political Player

8. No Mean Talents

9. Pity the White Man

10. The Golden Harvest

11. The Göttingen Connection

12. Juset ben Abdallah

13. Many Deaths

14. The Swiss Gentleman

15. Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah

16. A New World Order

17. The Fountains of the Sun

18. The Spirit of Discovery

EPILOGUE

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROFILE OF ANTHONY SATTIN

LIFE AT A GLANCE

Q&A

ABOUT THE BOOK

A CRITICAL EYE

THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE

READ ON

HAVE YOU READ?

IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU’LL LIKE …

USEFUL WEBSITES

CHRONOLOGY

A NOTE ON SPELLING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

MAPS

Rennell’s map showing Herodotus’ knowledge of Africa

Ledyard in Cairo on his way to Suakin, Lucas in Tripoli: a grand plan to bisect the northern half of Africa in 1788

Rennell’s map of Africa, 1790

Major Houghton’s progress in west Africa, 1790–91

Rennell’s 1793 map showing Houghton’s route to Bambuk

Mungo Park’s first journey in west Africa, 1795–97

Hornemann’s route from Cairo to Murzuq, 1799

Detail from Rennell’s 1802 map of Hornemann’s journey

Key locations for Park’s journey to Bussa and Hornemann’s to Bokani

Burckhardt’s route to Cairo, 1809–12

Burckhardt’s travels in Africa and Arabia, 1812–17

Missions to the Niger: Clapperton, Denham and Oudney’s route, 1822–25

Laing’s route to Timbuktu, 1825–26

PREFACE

Talking Timbuktu

‘To EXPLORE, v.a. [exploro, Latin]

To try; to search into; to examine by trial.’

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1785)

Beyond the crenellated towers of Cairo’s thousand-year-old Bab an-Nasr, Gate of Victory, stands a cemetery. Known as the City of the Dead, this swathe of tombs has become part of the city of the living, as its large tomb chambers look increasingly desirable in a city filled to bursting. There are always people milling around the main road into the cemetery, flower-sellers with wreaths and bouquets wrapped in palm fronds, chanters ready to recite suras from the Koran for a few notes, muscled grave-diggers, black-robed women ready to mourn on demand and a few guardians, keys hanging from their robes like jailers. Behind them, the cemetery is a maze of small tombs, shacks, graves, huts, cafés, storerooms and the occasional grand mausoleum. Once off the main street and into this confusion, it is easy to lose yourself, as I did, wanting to pay my respects to a man known both as Jean Louis Burckhardt and as Shaykh Ibrahim ibn Abdallah.

There are no written records of who is buried where in Bab an-Nasr. Instead the guardians store the knowledge and then pass it like an heirloom from father to son. Burckhardt, Shaykh Ibrahim, died almost two hundred years ago. According to the guidebook I had consulted, his tomb was lost. It seemed unlikely that a foreigner would ever find it, but Cairo is a city of wonders and one Eid, the feast at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, I went to look. There is a tradition of visiting the cemetery during the Eid, so the place was crowded and people had better things to do than to guide a foreigner around the tombs. But passed from one guardian to the next, I did eventually find a small nineteenth-century mausoleum containing a low white marble grave inscribed with Burckhardt’s titles as a hajj (one who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca), as a shaykh and as al Lausani, the man from Lausanne. To this the guardian added the title of al Muslimayn, the two Muslims, which he meant as an indication of Burckhardt’s sanctity.

Let’s now jump back to the mid-nineteenth century, to 1853, when a thirty-two-year-old Anglo-Irishman disguised as an Afghani Muslim passed through that same massive gate. Then as now, the cemetery was ‘a favourite resort’ during the Eid. The man was Richard Burton. Fluent in Arabic, easy in his disguise, Burton found himself in a crowd of ‘jugglers, buffoons, snake-charmers, dervishes, ape-leaders, and dancing boys habited in women’s attire’.1 Expelled from Oxford University, and then disgraced as an officer in the East India Company’s army, Burton was passing through Cairo on his way to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. Burton knew that Burckhardt had made the pilgrimage some forty years earlier, and it seems there was an element of homage in his mention of the Swiss traveller’s ‘humble grave’. Burton reported that some £20 had been raised among the city’s foreign community to cover the grave with what he called a fitting monument. ‘Some objection, however, was started, because Moslems are supposed to claim Burckhardt as one of their own saints.’2 *

Who was this Lausani shaykh, this Swiss traveller still revered in Cairo more than two hundred years after his death? Jean Louis Burckhardt came from a wealthy Swiss family whose business and domestic harmony was destroyed in the 1790s when they fell foul of an occupying French revolutionary army. The young Burckhardt grew up longing for a place where life and liberty were respected; as more of Europe fell to Napoleon Bonaparte, only England seemed to offer what he wanted. Burckhardt arrived in London in the summer of 1806 and, strange as it may sound, was introduced to a man who suggested he might like to become an explorer and who offered to send him into Africa to search for answers to questions about the rise of rivers, the extent of deserts, the state of empires and the whereabouts of goldfields. Burckhardt accepted. On his way there, he became the first European since the Crusaders to set eyes on the ancient Nabataean city of Petra and the first since antiquity to see the magnificent pharaonic temples at Abu Simbel. He also travelled further up the Nile than any recorded European before him. These were all remarkable achievements, but the object of his journey, the reason he had been sent, lay across the burning Sahara in Timbuktu.

Burton, who acknowledged Burckhardt as his favourite travel writer, certainly knew all about these achievements, as he did about Burckhardt’s groundbreaking pilgrimage to Mecca. That year of 1853, Burton travelled east from Cairo and made his own pilgrimage to Mecca. The following year he was in Abyssinia’s holy city of Harar, officially closed to non-Muslims, and five years later, with the backing of the Royal Geographical Society, he and his partner John Hanning Speke cut inland from the malarial Swahili coast in search of the source of the Nile and ensured their names would live on by becoming the first recorded Europeans to reach lakes Tanganyika and Victoria.

Books on the history of African geography are dominated by the stories of Burton and Speke and their contemporaries, particularly Livingstone and Stanley, Grant, and Samuel and Florence Baker. The names that stand out are almost exclusively Victorian. If an earlier African traveller is mentioned, it is likely to be James Bruce, a resourceful Scottish laird who travelled through the Ethiopian highlands in the 1760s in search of the source of the Nile. But Bruce is a man with an unfortunate reputation. In his own time he was accused of having made up the entire story of his travels: his critics suggested that instead of risking his life in Africa he had spent years in happy, peaceful seclusion somewhere around the Mediterranean before returning to Britain. An extended vacation in the south might have seemed tempting to his tormentors, but not, one suspects, to the irascible Bruce. Later critics dismissed Bruce for believing that the source he had reached was that of the White Nile, when in reality it was the Blue. Nevertheless his journey was one of the turning points in European involvement in Africa, for it demonstrated that one man could go a long way inland and live to tell the tale. In Brace’s case, home proved to be more dangerous than the wilds of Africa, for in 1794 he slipped on the stairs of his country house, struck his head and died, four years after the publication of his Travels. But what happened between Bruce and Burton, between the 1770s and 1850s? Burckhardt’s adventures provided a clue.

For years I collected information and anecdotes about him, talked about him in libraries in London and cafés in the Middle East, followed him on some of his journeys and kept an eye out for new sources of information. But the closer I came to Burckhardt, the more curious I became about the men who set him on his way. Who were they? Why were they prepared to spend time and money to solve the mysteries of the African interior? And how far did they succeed? My initial curiosity about Burckhardt eventually led me to the fantastic, improbable, tragic story that follows.

* The marble cladding was added in the 1880s, apparently paid for by Europeans in Cairo. The small house that now covers the tomb was added in the 1920s or 1930s by the Burckhardt family in Switzerland, who continue to look after its upkeep. All very touching, though there is some doubt as to whether the great traveller’s bones lie beneath the cenotaph, or somewhere else in the cemetery.

1

Exploration’s Godfather

‘Wide as the world is, traces of you are to be found

in every corner of it.’

Lord Hobart to Joseph Banks. 18 October 17931

London, 9 June 1788

WHAT ADVENTURES these hands have had. They bear witness to the day he shimmied down a rope to escape a Portuguese blockade in the bay at Rio and another when he stroked the shapely curves of a girl on Tahiti – she had fire in her eyes, he later wrote, and he incurred the anger of a queen to enjoy her favours. They are plump, white, well-attended gentleman’s hands, protruding from a frilled cuff, and yet they have wielded knives to cut plant specimens around the world, held pencils to sketch, brushes to colour, positioned instruments to observe the transit of Venus and worked a pump to save Captain Cook’s ship from sinking. More recently – the previous year – they began to swell and ache with the onset of gout. Now, as he sits for the artist and Royal Academician John Russell, these hands are holding a sheet of paper on which is drawn an image of the moon.

The man is Sir Joseph Banks, the year 1788, and the irony of the situation is not lost on him. There is no chance that he will ever set foot on the moon and yet, thanks to the telescope created by his friend William Herschel (who has recently discovered the planet Uranus), he is able to observe its surface in some detail. On the other hand, he has set foot in Africa. He has walked through the lushness of old fruit trees, enjoyed the generosity of palms and discovered the necessity of shade trees. He has also seen some of its murderous stretches of treeless desert. Geographers and earlier travellers have pointed to a great desert, stretching across the northern half of the continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, pierced from south to north by the Nile. And below that, it was rumoured that there was a great river, the Niger, running across the latitudes. He can imagine the extremes, the withering sands, the vertiginous rocks, the torrential rivers, the vast scrublands scattered with shade trees, the lush tropical pastures and forests, the dusty villages, petty kingdoms, seasonal trading posts and, it is rumoured, the great empires … and yet neither Herschel with his telescope nor any other Fellow of the Royal Society can devise a way for him to know for sure what lies in the interior of Africa.

The lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson, another of Sir Joseph Banks’ good friends, has recently defined a map as ‘a geographical picture on which lands and seas are delineated according to the longitude and latitude’.2 Yet this does not describe the pages being sold in London, Paris or anywhere else on earth in 1788. In this, the twenty-seventh year of the glorious reign of the soon-to-be-mad King George III, a map of Africa still owes more to the hopeful imaginings of ancient and medieval geographers than to the lie of the land as it exists in this, the Age of Enlightenment.

In the middle of the map, the interior of the continent, some lines trace the course of rivers; several curves represent mountains. Near the edge of the outline, the names of many towns and a few great cities are written, among them Cairo and Morocco (Marrakesh). At the heart of the continent lies Timbuktu, legendary city of gold, capital of a mighty empire. But history, legend, rumour and deduction all suggest that there is much else beside. The seventeenth-century anthologist Samuel Purchas spelled it out when he wrote that ‘the richest Mynes of Gold in the World are in Africa … and I cannot but wonder, that so many have sent so many, and spent so much in remoter voyages to the East and West and neglected Africa in the midst’.3

There are several reasons for this sorry state of affairs. To Banks and his contemporaries Africa appears to be geographically hostile. In South America, they can sail up the Amazon, as the Spaniards have done. They can cut deep into North America along the Mississippi with the same ease, and cross much of Europe on the Rhône and the Rhine. But although ancient geographers have written of the Niger and the Nile, no European in the Age of Enlightenment has managed to get very far into Africa without running into trouble with the continent’s geography. Green, precipitous mountains, withering desert sands, blasting hot in summer, freezing in winter, torn apart by winds and sandstorms at other times of the year, mangrove swamps, tropical forests, rivers blocked by rapids, seasonal floods … And to add to this geographical hostility, in many places they have also had to deal with the hostility of Africans, often caused by a mistrust of Christians by Muslims or by a well-founded suspicion that white-skinned foreigners bring trouble and steal trade.

There is more: even if the landscape or natives don’t hold them up, the rains do, and with the rains come deadly diseases.* It is possible that some outsiders have made it deep into the continent – the sixteenth-century Portuguese certainly had a go, and two Italian priests were rumoured to have crossed from Tripoli to Katsina in modern-day Nigeria in 1711. But it is safe to say that most foreigners who have attempted to travel to the interior have died along the way, while the few survivors have left no detailed descriptions of where they have been or of what they found there. Or if they have, their descriptions are lost, misfiled, hidden, untranslated or otherwise not yet come into the hands of Sir Joseph Banks and his Enlightened friends.

This dearth of information might have halted the movement of Europeans into the interior of Africa, but it has not stopped geographers from pontificating on its secrets. Almost unanimously, they have drawn two great river systems that bisect the continent like clock hands pointing to nine o’clock. Wisdom – very ancient wisdom, at that – has it that the Niger River, the hour hand, runs parallel to the equator, and that somewhere to the east of centre of the continent it joins up with the Nile, the minute hand, which climbs due north. On some maps, a third great river, the Congo, is shown as a dash or an arc through the centre. To these dominant features, noble geographers have added other details. They are on safe ground along the coast, where they can plot towns and cities whose character and extent are known for a fact. But what to do with the interior? There are mountains, though no one in Europe knows where they begin or end; to these they have given fanciful names such as the Mountains of the Moon and the Mountains of Kong. Around them have been placed a clutch of kingdoms that some geographers have imagined as savage and barbarous. Others have conceived of noble capitals and mighty empires, worthy partners to Europe’s own kingdoms. Beyond this, mapmakers must choose between flights of fancy, or empty white spaces.

In recent years, Europeans, among them our Joseph Banks – the knighthood came in 1781, long after his travelling days – have sailed the seven seas, set foot on Australia, skirted both the north and south ice caps, observed the transit of Venus, escorted Tahitian royalty to London and even looked with some detail at the surface of the moon. Yet they and he remain surprisingly, frustratedly ignorant of Africa. Now they want to know more. Ever since James Brace’s return to Europe, their curiosity has been growing. ‘Africa is indeed coming into fashion,’ the chronicler Horace Walpole noted at the time. ‘There is just returned a Mr Bruce, who has lived three years in the Court of Abyssinia, and breakfasted every morning with the maids of honour on live oxen. Otaheite [the Tahitian prince whom Cook brought to London] and Mr Banks are quite forgotten.’4 *

In London’s salons, trading houses and government offices, the same questions are being asked: What does Africa consist of? Where are its legendary riches, the fields with their harvests of gold and precious stones? What of the achievements of its people? What do they grow there? What could Europeans grow there? What of their past, their future? A few, Sir Joseph among them, are also asking another question: How can they find out? He has to know.

We come to these questions at the other end of history, after the exploration of the continent and the subsequent scramble by European governments first to control Africa and then to colonise it. The oppression of the majority of Africans by a tiny minority of Europeans, the struggle for independence, the post-colonial catastrophes and the chaos and confusion that exists in many African countries today is a long, long way in the future.

We look at this puzzle of what lies in the interior of Africa from another point of view, coloured by the fact that Africa is now seen, in the words of a British prime minister, as ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’. How hard it is to forget all that, but how essential if we are to understand this story. It takes a great leap of imagination to appreciate how tantalising the African questions appear to Sir Joseph Banks in 1788 as he puts down the detailed map of the moon and picks up the sketchy map of the African interior.

A year and a half earlier, in January 1787, fifty-four years after the satirist Jonathan Swift’s attack on geographers who ‘in Afric maps,/With savage pictures filled their gaps,/And o’er unhabitable downs,/Placed elephants for want of towns’, the cartographer Samuel Boulton published a four-sheet map of Africa. Mapmaking is a matter of painstaking evolution. Scraps of information, gathered often in bizarre or dangerous circumstances, allow geographers to effect detailed corrections and minute expansions. Two paces forwards, one backwards. Boulton took as his starting point a map of Africa published in 1749 by the brilliant French geographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville. In this, he behaved no differently to the mapmakers who had gone before him. Even the great d’Anville had used an earlier map as his starting point and was, in effect, drawing heavily on medieval and classical geographers. The Frenchman had gone a long way towards removing those elephants and beasts from the map; Boulton now attempted to go one step further. In keeping with an age that prided itself on the rigour of its scientific enquiries, he decided to remove every town, port and geographical feature, whether mountain, river or desert, of whose existence he was not certain.

Rennell’s map showing Herodotus’ knowledge of Africa

Another Frenchman, de Mornes, had tried this on his own map of Africa just sixteen years earlier, in 1761, but was led astray by his love of rationality. Instead of putting down what was known for certain from first-hand sources, he attempted to accommodate the stuff of legends: ‘It is true,’ de Mornes wrote on his map by way of explanation, ‘that the centre of the continent is filled with burning sands, savage beasts, and almost uninhabitable deserts. The scarcity of water forces the different animals to come together to the same place to drink. Finding themselves together at a time when they are in heat, they have intercourse with one another, without paying regard to the differences between species. Thus are produced those monsters which are to be found there in greater numbers than in any other part of the world.’5 Geography, it will be clear from this, is a long and dangerous road, full of traps, ready to ensnare the well-intentioned but unwary traveller.

Like d’Anville and de Mornes, Boulton explained that he was including ‘all [Africa’s] states, kingdoms, republics, regions, islands, &c.’ Crucially, however, there were to be no more elephants, no dragons or two-headed beasts to cover up his lack of knowledge. Out went the Garamantes, whose speech the Greek historian Herodotus had described as resembling ‘the shrieking of a bat rather than the language of men’. (Herodotus, it should be pointed out, did visit North Africa but did not get as far south as the land of the Garamantes.) Out too went the Blemmyes, whom the first-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described as having ‘no head but mouth and eyes both in their breast’. The only decorations Boulton allowed on his map of Africa were some ships under sail in the oceans and a few African figures draped around the title, which pretty much summed up the status quo as far as Europeans were concerned. If he did not know something, he would rather leave a blank than hazard a guess. It proved to be more of a challenge than a cartographer in the Age of Enlightenment might have expected.

Since the Portuguese adventurer Lopes de Sequeira sailed around the continent 270 years earlier, there has been a regular and growing traffic between Europe and ports along Africa’s west coast and around the Cape of Good Hope. European sea captains have returned with charts, maps and soundings, gold, ivory and slaves and, perhaps most potent, a rich fabric woven from legends and hearsay. In West Africa, British traders have made headway up the Gambia River and their French rivals have done the same along the more northerly Senegal River. Plenty of Europeans have cut inland from the coast, some certainly making it a few hundred miles up the rivers, perhaps some of them even reaching the Niger and Timbuktu. A few have even sat down and written about their experiences, among them Richard Jobson, who sailed three hundred miles up the Gambia River in 1620 and returned to write The Golden Trade, or a Discovery of the River Gambia and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians. Jobson clearly enjoyed his journey, describing how he shared ‘familiar conversation, fair acceptance, and mutual amity’ with people along the river, particularly with a local trader by the name of Bucknor Sano. From Sano, Jobson heard of a city, two months’ journey inland, ‘the houses whereof are covered only with gold’. Other travellers returned with tales of snow-capped mountains, vast rivers, terrible deserts, miraculous lakes …