Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (5 page)

This was an Arab settlement. So, hating the slave trade as much as he did, it was cruelly ironic that Livingstone should have to remain on affable terms with slavers, who routinely murdered anyone resisting enslavement. Forty Manyema were killed one day, nine another, a hundred the day after that.
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And so it went on. Often Livingstone saw smoke curling above burning villages, and heard distant shots. His one consolation was the thought that his written descriptions of the mayhem might one day compel the British government to act against the trade. The heartlessness of it provoked some of his most haunting descriptions, written while he was immobilised in Bambarre, close to many recently captured men, women and children. ‘The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.’ He questioned many captives who were wasting away, apparently without physical cause. ‘They ascribed their only pain to the heart, and placed a hand correctly on the spot, though many think that organ stands high up under the breast bone.’
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An Arab-Swahili slave trader murders a sick slave (from
Livingstone’s Last Journals
).

Livingstone’s ability to be the friend of a man like Muhammad Bogharib owed a lot to his realisation that Arab treatment of domestic slaves was relatively mild. So, while the process by which Africans were torn from their homes was unspeakably brutal, and although they endured terrible suffering on their land and sea journeys to Zanzibar and the Gulf, Livingstone saw mitigation in the fact that their treatment on arrival was often better than that meted out to workers in British factories. His explanation of this paradox was that the Arabs were not yet thoroughly dominated by the profit motive – as were the plantation owners of the American Deep South. ‘When society advances, wants multiply; and to supply these, the slaves’ lot becomes harder. The distance between master and man increases as the lust of gain is developed.’
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All around him in Manyema, elephants were being shot, and chiefs forced to surrender their ivory. The trade in slaves was inextricably entwined with that in ivory, and Livingstone knew that the European passion for ivory piano keys, and for ivory knife-handles, had led to a vast increase in the number of slaves needed to carry tusks to the coast. So, in his eyes, responsibility
for events in Manyema did not rest solely on Arab-Swahili shoulders. Nor could he find it in himself to dislike all Arabs. When he had been gravely ill a few months earlier, Muhammad Bogharib had nursed him and saved his life.
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The Arabs justified maltreating the Manyema by claiming that they were cannibals. Taking the side of Africans, as Livingstone always did, he remained sceptical. Even after surprising a Manyema man carrying a severed human finger, wrapped in a leaf, he was unconvinced that people were killed deliberately for magical or alimentary reasons.
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He thought the Manyema ‘a fine-looking race’, and declared: ‘I would back a company of Manyema men to be far superior in shape of head and generally in physical form too, against the whole Anthropological Society.’
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Bogharib’s men – and indeed his own -were terrified of being killed and eaten whenever large numbers of Manyema assembled. ‘Poor things,’ wrote Livingstone of these local people, ‘no attack is thought of, if it does not begin on our side.’
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As for cannibalism, he saw no need for it. ‘The country abounds with food – goats, sheep, fowls, buffaloes and elephants: maize, sorghum … and other farinaceous eat-ables.’
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Yet when James, one of his six deserters, was killed and eaten close to Bambarre, there was no denying his fate.
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Other compelling evidence came Livingstone’s way, unbidden. Slaves, who had died from hunger or disease, were being exhumed and then cooked and eaten. Reluctantly Livingstone conceded: ‘I think they are cannibals, but not ostentatiously so.’
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But the red parrot feathers, which many men wore in their hair, were nothing if not ‘ostentatious’, though they had struck him as charming until he had learned that a warrior only qualified to wear one if he had first killed a man.
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Yet even when realising that Manyema were selling each other to the slavers, Livingstone never lost his conviction that they ‘retained their natural kindness of disposition’, and were never ‘ferocious without cause’, unless ‘abused by Ujijians’ or other intruders.
²⁹
(The Ujijians were slave traders based at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika.)

While confined to his hut, Livingstone longed for news of home, but no letters ever came for him via Ujiji, with the arrival of successive caravans.
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At times he despaired of leaving for the Lualaba. ‘This is the sorest delay I ever had,’ he wrote in his journal, and he had experienced many in the past. His friend Muhammad Bogharib offered to go with him to the river when he was better, but Livingstone needed more than a temporary escort. He desperately required new men to replace his deserters. And because Bogharib stood to lose money in the ivory trade if he parted with any carriers, Livingstone offered the equivalent of £270 – a vast sum.
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But this was to plan far ahead – until his feet healed, he would have to resign himself to many more months as an object of curiosity to the people of Bambarre. Though remarkably patient with villagers who stared, he drew the line when locals ‘came and pushed off the door of my hut with a stick while I was resting, as we should do with a wild beast [in a] cage’. Occasionally, moments of pure comedy delighted him: as when he washed his hair and the watching audience fled, having mistaken the soapy lather for his brains being taken out for a wash.
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As 1870 dragged by, Livingstone immersed himself in the Bible, which he read through a total of four times.
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He also pondered for days at a time Greek theories about the Nile’s source. Homer had called the river, ‘Egypt’s heaven-descended spring’, and because it flowed for 1,200 miles through the largest and driest desert in the world, at the hottest time of year, without requiring replenishment from a single tributary, Livingstone also thought it God-given and miraculous. At times, during his months of sickness, he lived in a trance-like state, with the Nile occupying what he called his ‘waking dreams’.
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It comforted him to rehearse a roll call of the ancients, who had ‘recorded their ardent desire to know the fountains’. They too had had to endure frustration:

Alexander the Great, who founded a celebrated city at the river’s mouth, looked up the stream with the same desire to know the springs, and so did the Caesars. The great Julius Caesar is made by Lucan to say that he would give up the civil war if he might but see the fountains
of this far-famed river. Nero Caesar sent two centurions to examine the ‘Caput Nili’.
³⁵

The centurions, according to Seneca – another name on Livingstone’s reading list – travelled with their 200 soldiers further up the Nile than anyone would manage until the mid-nineteenth century, ascending the river as far as the Bahr el-Ghazal (a White Nile tributary, briefly thought to be the main channel) and the marshes of the Sudd. Braving tribesmen’s attacks, overpowering heat and clouds of mosquitoes, they came at last through the shimmering haze ‘to immense swamps, the end of which neither the natives knew, nor is it possible for anyone to hope to know’.
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It would be 1841 – almost 2,000 years later – before the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali, sent an expedition that succeeded in penetrating the Sudd’s 300-mile maze of papyrus-choked channels. Only one of the nineteenth-century explorers, who subsequently struggled upstream through the Sudan and Equatoria, won more than faint praise from the exacting Dr Livingstone.

None rises higher in my estimation than Miss Tinné, who after the severest domestic afflictions, nobly persevered in the teeth of every difficulty … [she] came further up the river than the centurions sent by Nero Ceasar [she had passed Gondokoro and reached Rejaf], and showed such indomitable pluck as to reflect honour on her race.
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Alexine Tinné, Holland’s richest heiress, lost her mother and an aunt to fever while navigating the Bahr el-Ghazal. When Livingstone was penning his praise for her, he had no means of knowing that she had already been hacked to death by Tuaregs, during a valiant attempt to reach the Nile’s source by crossing the Sahara, and then heading east through Chad to strike the river, she hoped, near its head.
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As for Livingstone’s fellow Britons, Richard Burton, John Speke and Samuel Baker – he wrote little about these younger rivals, except to criticise them. For why praise explorers, who seemed certain to be ‘cut out’ by his Bangweulu ‘Nile’ sources, which were so far south of their entire sphere of operation?

Livingstone’s confidence that the Lualaba was the Nile received an unexpected boost while he was confined to his dark and smoky hut in Bambarre. Two Arab ivory traders arrived in mid-August, after a long journey that had taken them to Katanga and beyond. Their names were Josut and Moenpembé and what they said electrified the sick man. Their information was that Lake Bangweulu was not the only source of the Lualaba. A nearby spring, to the west of the lake, gave rise to a river, which, after joining with the waterway that issued from Bangweulu, flowed on northward as the Lualaba. So there were
two
sources of the Lualaba. The Arabs also announced that near to these north-facing sources, there were two additional springs, whose waters flowed to the south. What thrilled Livingstone was their account’s uncanny resemblance to what had been written about the Nile’s source by Herodotus, ancient Greece’s most famous historian.

In 457
BC
, Herodotus had visited Egypt and travelled up the Nile as far as the first cataract, eager to discover whatever he could about the river’s origins. He would be largely disappointed. From a variety of Egyptian and Greek travellers, he learned that the river probably came from far to the west, from the country we now know as Chad, but no convincing detail was volunteered. On returning home, Herodotus wrote: ‘Not one writer of the Egyptians, or of the Libyans, or of the Hellenes, who came to speak with me, professed to know anything, except the scribe of the sacred treasury of Athene at the city of Sais in Egypt.’
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But this one scribe made up for the vagueness of the historian’s other informants. Between two mountains, he said, could be found ‘the fountains of the Nile, fountains which it is impossible to fathom: half the water runs northward into Egypt; half to the south’. Although Herodotus had sensed that ‘the scribe did not seem to be in earnest’, Livingstone believed he had been. This was because the scribe’s version tallied so closely with Josut’s and Moenpembé’s. There was one difference. The scribe had mentioned two mountains between the four sources, whereas the Arabs had mentioned ‘a mound between them,
the most remarkable in Africa’.
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But, in Livingstone’s opinion, this difference seemed too small to worry about. A remarkable mound was likely to be a colossal feature: perhaps a range of mountains. Nor was he being naive to have believed the Arabs. The oral accounts of travellers often turned out to be true, and he knew already that the sources of the Zambezi, and the Kafue, were within a hundred miles of Bangweulu – so two southward-flowing rivers existed in reality.

The presence of mountains near the northward-flowing sources delighted Livingstone for another reason. In about
AD
150, the Greek astronomer and geographer, Claudius Ptolemaeus -Ptolemy, as he is generally known – had stated, in his
Geography,
that after marching for twenty-five days into the interior from somewhere near Mombasa, a traveller would arrive at ‘the snowy range of mountains from whence the Nile draws its twin sources’. Ptolemy had this information from the report of a Greek trader, Diogenes, who, on returning from a voyage to India a century earlier, had landed on the East African coast, where he claimed to have reached the sources after a twenty-five-day march. This would not have taken him far inland. More likely, he had heard from Arab traders that, while in the interior, they had learned about the existence of sources close to snow-peaks known as the Mountains of the Moon.
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Livingstone found this compelling: