Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (57 page)

Kitchener then had a problem: what to do about the Mahdi’s bones. A European with little experience of the Middle East might have let them lie in their tomb in Khartoum. Kitchener knew better. The tomb was destroyed utterly. The naturally mummified corpse was taken. The
head was dumped in kerosene – ‘for future disposal’, said the gruesome Kitchener. He had to be dissuaded from turning the skull into an ink-well. The rest of the bodily remains were cast into the Nile.

There is a strange symmetry to this act, as if Kitchener, despite his long association with the region, only half understood the mythic qualities of the river. We have seen that in ancient times, drowning in the Nile was thought to confer immortality. Casting the Mahdi’s bones into the river perhaps symbolized his rebirth, not his ultimate destruction. In 1947 his tomb was rebuilt by one of the Mahdi’s youngest sons; the dream of a purified Islamic state is still very much with us, long after Lord Kitchener remains best known for his impressive moustache and his demand that ‘Your country needs YOU’.

A good place to remember him is on his Nilotic island near Aswan, a gift to him from the Egyptian (read ‘British-backed’) government. The island is a menagerie, as Kitchener loved animals. It is located at the most symbolically important spot on the Nile, its navel in the ancient Egyptian world.

39
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Two gentlemen of Fashoda

‘Oh river what makes you cry out loud?’

‘The stones blocking my way!’

‘Oh stones what makes you rattle with anger?’

‘The running water pounding on us.’

Sudanese proverb

It was 1898 and Kitchener was busy trying to reconquer the Sudan. Meanwhile, Britain’s eternal enemies of the last millennium, the French, were busy with their own plans for world domination. They had somehow lost the Suez Canal, through the ineptitude of the Egyptian Khedive who had bankrupted the country, allowing the British to buy it up. They did not want to lose the Nile too. The French, in unconsidered moments, revealed their deeply held belief that, since Napoleon had been the first European to conquer the Nile, the Nile was
de jure
if not
de facto
French. Jan Potocki, the Polish Nile traveller who wrote in French and authored the
Thousand and One Nights
-like novel
The Saragossa Manuscript
(turned into a great 1960s movie – a favourite
of Jerry Garcia and Martin Scorsese), mentions in his narrative
Voyage in Turkey and Egypt
that the French are a people of intellect, the Spanish a people of passion and the English a people of action. He implies that when these peoples attempt something outside their realm of expertise they become either inspired or ridiculous – an English passion, a Spanish theory, a French adventure. And the Fashoda Incident, as it came to be known, was a truly French adventure.

Yet they were also somewhat careful. They did not wish to offend the paper rulers of Egypt, the Turks, even as they wished to oust the force behind them, the English. The French, with their interests in west and central Africa, knew that control of the whole continent was about controlling the Nile. Churchill, in
The River War
, states wrongly that the Nile drains a quarter of Africa. The real figure is a tenth. But the exaggeration has a truth – the Nile
controls
a quarter of Africa, perhaps more. A look at the map will explain why: with the north blocked off by the Sahara, the control points on the Mediterranean are Gibraltar, already British, and Cairo. We have seen that controlling the Nile controls Cairo, and by extension the eastern Mediterranean and its most important exit to India and the East. But that is the Med; what about Africa? The centre of Africa has two exits, the Congo and the Nile – control both of these, and you control the centre. The French already had the Congo, but without the Nile they were limited to the western side of the continent. If you take in the Blue Nile and the White, truly the whole eastern half of Africa down to the Equator is within your purview – you have the water source and you have the means of transport.

Naturally the British hold on Egypt looked impregnable, but the Nile did not rise in Egypt. If the French could cut it off somewhere higher up they would achieve their objective like a prankster standing on a garden hose yards away from the bemused gardener holding the nozzle.

The British did not take any of this very seriously until Victor Prompt, a French hydrologist and friend of the French President, delivered a paper before the Institut Égyptien in Paris explaining how the Nile could be controlled by a dam at Fashoda, at the southernmost end of Sudan. ‘Egypt could be ruined,’ he said, by vengeful operation of this dam. And with the ruin of Egypt, or its threat, would return some measure of control over the Suez Canal.

The French, in a way that was truly romantic (and an intellectual,
when he turns to adventure, is always a romantic), decided to send an expedition to cut off the Nile and claim it for France. The expedition would leave French territory in Gabon, traverse the most inhospit able parts of central Africa to arrive at the Nile at Fashoda. The man they sent was Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who would make a river journey across Africa the equal of Stanley’s and yet would leave the continent a failure, a blackguard, a mountebank and a usurper.

Jean-Baptiste Marchand was born in 1863, the eldest of five children. His father was a cabinet maker, not a rich man, and Jean-Baptiste left school at thirteen to become a junior copying clerk to a local lawyer, employed chiefly because of his round, clear handwriting. Jean-Baptiste had a broad forehead, wide but deep-set eyes and a small, undistinguished-shaped head, but his gaze, reportedly, was intense; his nickname in the army was, not surprisingly, ‘John the Baptist’. For six years he laboured as a copyist, all the time subject to intense ‘visions’ of a future exploring Africa. He idolised the great explorers – Baker, Burton, Speke, Stanley, especially Stanley, all of them British. He was religious, yet sought inspiration in all religions. At one point he was so taken with Islam that he dressed and lived as a pious Muslim.

With the help of his lawyer boss he gained admission to the Marine Infantry, which offered the best chance of being sent to Africa. After three years in the ranks, in France, his burning ambition and great competence were recognised: he received a commission. Finally he was sent to Africa, landing at Dakar in February 1888. He was twenty-five years old – not bad going. For all those who insist that access is denied to those that seek entrance to the hallowed halls of professions usually monopolised by the rich and entitled, there are all these counterexamples littering the annals of exploration: Stanley, Petherick, Marchand, Livingstone (Livingstone had worked at thirteen in a weaving mill, yet by taking night classes he gained enough of an education to become a doctor). What characterised them all was an intense desire to go to Africa.

For seven years Marchand suffered fevers and illness, yet he weathered the climate better than most. He
enjoyed
it. He had also formulated, or refined, the plan he had dreamed of as a boy back in Thoissey, a small town near Lyons. The dream: to out-Stanley Stanley. He did not see Thoissey again until September 1895. On that first holiday home in France he put up a formal scheme to the Ministry of Colonies: he
would be the first to carry the tricolore across Africa. His route would be new, untrodden by a European before. He would go further and faster than Stanley. He would at last be on an equal footing with the gods of his youth, his heroes, and would live his visionary dreams.

His seven years in Africa had made him no less prone to visions, but, like many, he needed to kill the source of his childish inspiration in order to achieve it: he began to hate the people he had once idolised – the British. Along with his fellow
soudanis
– the name was given to officers of the French Sudan, the easternmost part of French West Africa – he saw that the British were behind everything that spelt trouble in Africa. They were behind slavers though they professed to be against slavery, they pushed forward native kings hostile to French rule, they sought, successfully, to block French ambition in Africa at every turn. In other words they were the controlling power. The Germans, in contrast, were well thought of. It is easy to be popular when you have no power.

Marchand’s plan, the one accepted, was his most simple: to beat the British to the upper Nile. Kitchener’s railway had yet to be started. Omdurman was only a name in the gazetteer. It looked good.

But when Marchand landed in Libreville, the capital of the French Congo, in July 1896, the country was in uproar. One hundred and fifty Senegalese had been sent to accompany the expedition, but they had been held up by de Brazza, the Governor, who claimed that troops not under his direct control would upset the delicate balance of the Congo. The balance looked already to be upset, yet Marchand soldiered on; finally he confronted de Brazza about the lack of armed support and the condition of the country. De Brazza would be reported to the highest authority, if he did not co-operate. De Brazza gave way and Marchand set out to pacify the country between Luongo and Brazzaville (laughably beyond its namesake’s control). Six months after their arrival in the Congo the expedition arrived at their real starting point. As Burton said, there are many ‘starts’ to an expedition. They carted with them 13,000 pieces of luggage intended for the expedition, for resupply of French outposts along the way, and for establishment of the fort intended at Fashoda.

How big was a piece of luggage? Certainly a porter could carry no more than three or four pieces. One piece of luggage was a box of seeds, including
haricots verts
which one of Marchand’s lieutenants, Émile Landeroin, would later grow in the swamps of the Nile. En route he
provided, even in dire conditions of swamp and fever, haute cuisine with heroic roux and sauces made out of native butter and mealie flour, poured over whatever fell to hand: Nile perch, tilapia, reed buck, buffalo, crocodile. They travelled upriver in a steamship, the
Faidherbe
, which would be their sturdy companion until the last.

Marchand led by example. The expedition doctor wrote, ‘Our chief is so enthusiastic, so persuasive, that he manages everything by his own example . . . he never seemed to rest. Everyone was caught up in his urgency and wished to follow him, to feel himself one of us.’

Over a year later the expedition had steamed up one of the narrowest of the Congo’s tributaries, the M’bomu, managing to reach a point 130 miles from what was hoped would be a navigable tributary of the upper Nile. Between the headwaters of the Congo and the Nile lay a 2,000-foot-high forest plateau. On one side the water drained into the Congo, on the other it went into the Nile, but in the middle there was nothing for the
Faidherbe
to float in. In a move reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s 1982 movie
Fitzcarraldo
, their small steamer was sawn into sections to be carried by porters across this divide. More pieces of luggage. It took weeks to do this in a systematic enough way so that the ship stood a chance of being reassembled once they reached the other side. Marchand himself took a demonic interest in the dismantling of the ship, in the exact record of each nut, bolt and rivet – lose a bolt in the Ituri Forest and the ship might never steam again. They had many porters, sturdy Yakoma tribesmen, to carry the bits, but one vital part of the boat could not be subdivided: the boiler. It took several days to work out what to do. Marchand encouraged the whole team to brainstorm the problem. You can imagine what a Gallic fervour of ingenious thinking this would bring on. They thought of a sedan-chair-type arrangement with extended poles for the porters to carry – but it was impossible, too heavy. They thought of transporting the boiler in a kind of rope hammock – too unwieldy. Finally, with a kind of naive brilliance, Marchand cut to the heart of the problem: they would reinvent the wheel; it was decided to roll it the entire 130 miles to the Nile.

But to roll a wheel you need a road. So they built one.

It took a thousand porters to make a suitably wide and level track. A path was surveyed and cut, then widened and flattened. Logs were laid to make a rough road. The chief engineer, Jean Souyri, almost became demented watching his precious boiler being jolted over roughly hewn
tree trunks laid over crags, dry watercourses, ridges and pits, swaying as it was jerked from rock to rock, closer and closer to the now sacred destination of the Nile. The boiler was fourteen feet long and about four feet in diameter. Since it had to be rolled along its long axis, the road had to be fourteen feet wide. Wide enough for a humvee in fact; a vehicle which, unfortunately, they did not possess.

Having been travelling for over a year, the expedition was now spread out over about a thousand miles of country. Lines of communication were stretched almost to breaking point, but still Marchand pushed on like a crazed prophet determined to reach the upper Nile before the British could claim it. And the
Faidherbe
was not the only boat they carried: in the rear there were two metal whaling boats, also in parts, carried head high by the chanting Yakoma.

Imagine rolling a boiler from London to Birmingham, and then some. Around Coventry the jungle would give way to the dusty, rocky plains of the watershed. It was still hard going, and now they had to search out waterholes and straggly trees; finally they arrived at the upper Sueh, which flowed into the top of the Sudd swamp and eventually into the White Nile.

In a mad exercise of Imperial Meccano, it was time to reassemble the
Faidherbe
and continue the journey. Despite Marchand’s explicit records it was not a quick job. As they laboured to fit the jigsaw puzzle of the steamboat together, they saw that time yet again was against them. The rainy season was passing, and the river was getting lower by the day, ominous rocky pools forming as they watched. It looked as if the porters would need to shoulder their burden again – along with 90,000 rounds of ammunition, many hundred kegs of bordeaux and champagne, vin de Banyuls and ‘le corned beef’, much scorned though the latter was. As the water lowered, the
Faidherbe
,
sans
boiler (it would have weighed the ship down too much going over rocks), was put into accelerated reassembly and dragged over rapids a further one hundred miles. They hoped they would meet a great river that would bear them north without need of an engine. But here, by the side of a muddy tributary, at last beaten, they had to wait until the rains came. Four more months . . . and now they were separated from the very heart of the ship itself – the boiler.