Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (45 page)

Arab traders initially relied on African tribes to get goods from the interior. The first travellers to these places, men like Petherick, showed them a more direct route was possible – if you were armed. Arab traders and explorers went deeper and deeper into Africa. And these traders were not only after ivory, they wanted slaves. There had been slavery since the beginning of recorded history. Slaves in ancient Egypt, though they did not build the Pyramids, were used for domestic duties and acted as concubines. Unlike the position under later Islamic rulings, the child of a slave remained a slave even if one parent was a free man. Only the child of two free people could be considered free persons in ancient Egypt. Where did the slaves come from? Since we now know that the desert was less of a barrier, certainly in the Old Kingdom, many slaves may have come directly from central Africa across the desert. The other source would have been along the Nile or possibly up the east African coast to the Red Sea ports.

During the Ptolemaic period, there was already a long-standing slave trade serving the Indian Ocean. The seaport Berbera in Somalia, known as Malao in ancient times, is reported in the
Periplus
as exporting ‘myrrh, a little frankincense, the harder cinnamon, duaca, Indian copal and macir; and slaves’. Zanzibar, further down the coast, was another entrepôt of slavery, which made inroads into east Africa but left the Equatorial regions unaffected until the results were felt of the Turkish Egyptian invasion of 1820. In the northern parts of Sudan, as far as Khartoum and Obeid, slavery was controlled, after the 1820s, by the invading army of Muhammad Ali. In 1840, an English visitor to Cairo could write of the city’s slave market:

Further south, slavery was much more haphazard and, according to Petherick, endemic:

Baker, coming later, wrote about the prices for slaves among the Bunyoro in western Uganda. A healthy young girl was worth a single elephant’s tusk ‘of the first class’ or a new shirt. In other areas ‘where the natives are exceedingly clever as tailors and furriers’, a girl could be bought for thirteen needles. But this ‘innocent traffic’ was soon disrupted by such traders as Abou Saoud, who found it ‘more convenient to kidnap young girls, which saved much trouble in bargaining for needles and shirts’.

After giving a ‘sermon’ on the evils of the slave trade, Baker tells a chief of the Sheir tribe that, sadly, his own sons are dead. The chief tells him, ‘I have a son, an only son. He is a nice boy – a very good boy. I should like you to see my boy – he is very thin now; but if he should remain with you he would soon get fat. He’s a really nice boy and always hungry . . . You’ll like him amazingly; he’ll give you no trouble as long as you give him plenty to eat . . . he’s a good boy, my only son. I’ll sell him to you for a molote! [a native iron spade].’ Baker concludes: ‘I simply give this anecdote as it occurred without asserting that such conduct is the rule. At the same time, there can be no doubt that among the White Nile tribes any number of male children might be purchased from their parents – especially in seasons of scarcity.’

Baker makes the distinction between the practice of slavery, which, as in Egypt and ancient Rome – where slaves could reach positions of high regard and be well rewarded – was not an unmitigated evil, and the practices of slave hunters and traders, who, from all accounts, were entirely evil. The armies of the slave hunters roamed the countryside better armed than the people they preyed upon and stealing everything they might need to survive. ‘When the slave hunters sought for corn,’ explained Baker, ‘they were in the habit of catching the villagers and roasting their posteriors by holding them down on the mouth of a large earthen water-jar filled with glowing embers. If this torture of roasting alive did not extract the secret, they generally cut the sufferer’s throat to terrify his companions, who would then divulge the position of the hidden stores to avoid a similar fate.’

Schweinfurth, travelling at the same time as Baker, in the late 1860s, bore witness to the awful depredations of the slave trade. No European traveller (apart from traders such as the Maltese Andrea De Bono) ever condoned the slave trade run by the Turks and Arabs of Khartoum, though Schweinfurth was less proactive than Sam Baker. He watches a dying slave being lashed to ‘prove whether life was yet extinct’. The
slavers then proceed to ‘play at football with the writhing body of the still gasping victim . . . He was finally dragged off into the woods where a few weeks later I found his skull, which I deposited with those of many others of his fellow sufferers in the Museum of Berlin.’

Not all slaves were equal. Those from Bongoland (the Sudd region of southern Sudan) were much prized ‘as they are easily taught and are docile and faithful, and are, besides, good looking and industrious’. Female slaves from the Azande, or Niam Niam, were much sought after, ‘much dearer than the best Bongo slaves, but they are so extremely rare as hardly to admit of having a price quoted’. The Babuckur were considered difficult: ‘no amount of good living or kind treatment can overcome their love of freedom’.

Slaves kept for private use by the Nubian invaders were divided into four groups, according to Schweinfurth:

Schweinfurth reported the price of slaves in the
seribas
in 1871: eighteen pounds of copper would obtain a
sittahsi
– literally a child six spans high, that is eight to ten years old. Women slaves called
nadeef
, meaning ‘pure’, were in great demand among the settlers and fetched thirty pounds of copper or fifteen Marie-Thérèse dollars. Strong adult women who were ugly were cheaper, and old women ‘can be bought for a mere bagatelle’. Women or children were preferred, male slaves were considered too troublesome for trading (as opposed to keeping for oneself).

Burton wrote, ‘Justice requires the confession that the horrors of slave-driving rarely meet the eye in East Africa . . . in fact the essence of slavery, compulsory unpaid labour, is perhaps more prevalent in independent India than in east Africa . . . to this general rule there are ter rible exceptions . . . the guide, attached to the expedition on return from Ujiji, had loitered behind for some days because his slave girl was too footsore to walk. When tired of waiting he cut off her head, for fear lest she should become gratis another man’s property.’

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Varieties of affliction

A thorn is removed with a thorn
. Sudanese proverb

The Nile appears as a river of life, wending its way through the dead zone of the Sahara Desert, bringing life-giving moisture to humans, plants and animals. Yet, in the nineteenth century, the Nile was synonymous with disease – the cankers of Flaubert’s STDs, the agues and fevers of the explorer, malaria, plague, death. Then there were the bugs and biting insects. Speke went deaf when a beetle crawled into his ear, gnawed at his eardrum, curled up and died.

Sir Richard Francis Burton was critically ill at the moment that Speke first set eyes on Lake Victoria and pronounced it the source of the Nile. Burton probably already had syphilis, contracted in Somalia, and was
always mindful of his health. For long periods in his expedition to the Nile’s source he was carried on a stretcher suspended from a pole. Burton certainly knew about illness.

He is the explorer’s explorer, in as much as he returned with more news of strange places than any other man, and visited more strange places than any other – from Arabia to east and west Africa, South America and India. Arguably very few men of the nineteenth century had as much experience backed by as much learning, both of language and literature, as Richard Burton. His faults included an overweening zeal and a desire to shock, which to the modern sensibility is even more offensive than it was to the more hardened Victorian. To read Burton out of context is to feel oneself on occasion among the worst kind of ranting Boer farmer, yet a paragraph later all will be reversed: ‘the social position of the women is the unerring test of progress towards civilisation’ is not a sentence uttered by an unthinking reactionary. Neither was he a cruel man. Despite the rumours (put about by himself), there is no evidence that Burton ever killed anyone. The poet Algernon Swinburne wrote of him, ‘You cannot think how kind and careful of me he was . . . I know for the first time what it was to have an elder brother. He is the most cordial, sympathetic friend to me . . . and it is a treat at last to have him to myself . . . I rather grudge Mrs Burton’s arrival here on Monday . . . in our ascent of Puy de Dôme [a volcano in the Massif Central in France] he began at once gathering flowers to press for her.’

Burton was complicated. Much of his writing was intended to jolt people out of their complacency. When he was required to be accurate, he was; and the omnivorous curiosity he displayed in
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
provided every subsequent explorer with a veritable textbook for Nile exploration. Stanley was one of the few to admit his debt to Burton’s book; Speke, of course, could rarely admit he had learnt anything from Burton.

Visiting the source regions of the Nile was,
a priori
, an unhealthy business, partly because of the novelty of the possible illnesses on offer. At one point in
Lake Regions
Burton observed: ‘the vast variety of diseases which afflict more civilised races, who are collected in narrow spaces, are unknown in East Africa even by name’. But there were plenty of others. He remarked that fever was the main disease, and that smallpox was the most feared and the most dangerous. He told of seeing caravans of porters with over twenty sufferers of smallpox stumbling along ‘blinded and almost insensible’, and ‘mothers carrying
babes, both parent and progeny in the virulent stage of the fell disease’.

He added that both the Arabs and the Turks practised smallpox inoculation, which was also anciently known in South Africa: ‘the pus is introduced into an incision in the forehead between the eyebrows’. (The breakthrough of Sir Edward Jenner, the eighteenth-century scientist, was to use cowpox rather than smallpox itself as the vaccine.) There was also a milder form, more like chickenpox, which was cured by bathing in cold water and smearing the body with red earth.