Tag Archives: Bornu

Weird White Men

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European explorers went to Africa certain that they carried the banner of civilization and were superior to the natives, whose skin, after all, was dark, and whose fashions and physiognomies often didn’t conform to European models. To some explorers, and to many Europeans who came later, white was right and dark was ugly, barbaric, pitiable.

Africans had a different point of view. The early European explorers often found the tables turned—they were the ones pitied as ugly and barbaric. They were infidels with white skin–unenlightened, unsightly, pathetic. Africans stared at them as if they were circus freaks, sometimes with fright, sometimes with derisive laughter. At first this inversion shocked and sometimes offended the explorers, but most of them soon found it amusing.

Mungo Park

Mungo Park, for instance, was required to display his pale skin several times during his travels through the Gambia, usually for inquisitive women. One group of them asked for visual proof of his circumcision.

Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, who preceded Barth to Bornu in the 1820s, also attracted many inquisitive women, who investigated these white oddities by rubbing their unappealing pasty skin and touching their weirdly-textured hair. “Again,” wrote Denham, “my excessive whiteness became a cause of both pity and astonishment, if not disgust; a crowd followed me through the market, others fled at my approach; some of the women oversetting their merchandize, by their over anxiety to get out  of my way. . . . One little girl was in such agonies of tears and fright, at the sight of me, that nothing could console her, not even a string of beads which I offered her—nor would she put out her hand to take them.”

One evening as Denham passed three women in the street, they stopped to question him about why he was there. They also asked, “Is it true that you have no khadems, female slaves? No one to shampoo you after a south wind?” Yes, said Denham, explaining that he was far from home and alone. No, retorted one of the women, you are an infidel and a hyena who eats blacks. His only hope of becoming civilized, continued the women, was to marry a wife or two who would teach him to pray and wash “and never let him return amongst his own filthy race.”

Clapperton related similar encounters. After three of a governor’s wives examined his skin closely they “remarked, compassionately, it was a thousand pities I was not black, for I had then been tolerably good-looking.” When he asked one of them, “a buxom young girl of fifteen, if she would accept of me for a husband . . . She immediately began to whimper; and on urging her to explain the cause, she frankly avowed she did not know how to dispose of my white legs.”

Sheikh al-Kanemi

Some Africans suspected Denham and Clapperton of being monsters and cannibals—another inversion of common white attitudes about blacks. No wonder that when Sheikh al-Kanemi, the ruler of Bornu, publicly shook hands with Denham and Clapperton, his courtiers gasped at his bravery for touching these mutants. Another inversion.

Barth and his companions ran into the same things. When the young boy Dorugu first saw Overweg, who bought and freed him, Dorugu was appalled that Overweg’s “face and hands were all white like paper,” and he feared that this stranger was going to eat him.

James Richardson

After months of travel Barth turned as dark as an Arab (and eventually passed himself off as a Syrian sherif). But Richardson disliked the sun and was careful to keep his skin pale. Consequently he often attracted laughing crowds and was sometimes advised to let his skin darken so he wouldn’t look so disgustingly white—a telling inversion of the old advertisements once aimed at dark-skinned people to improve their looks by bleaching their skin.

Cast of Characters: in Africa

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Here are a few of the people most important to Barth during his five-year journey, and hence prominent characters in A Labyrinth of Kingdoms:

James Richardson

The expedition’s first leader. A British evangelical abolitionist, Richardson had traveled to Ghat in the Sahara several years earlier to gather facts about the slave trade for Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society. Soon after returning, he began urging the British Foreign Office to fund a more ambitious expedition that would bring back strategic information about caravan routes and the prospects for commercial profit in the little-known immensity called the Sudan. When he finally got the go-ahead in August 1849, he recruited Barth and another young German, Adolf Overweg to handle the science.

Almost from the start, Richardson and Barth chafed each other—too bad for them, fortunate for readers. Barth found Richardson slow, indecisive, and imperceptive in dangerous situations. Richardson considered Barth rash and overeager, and often on the edge of insubordination.

This was partly a matter of age—Richardson was 11 years older—and partly incompatible temperaments and values. For Richardson, science was a secondary issue; for Barth, it was the highest human endeavor. Clashes were inevitable.

Adolf Overweg

German geologist and astronomer. Overweg was born just a year after Barth but seemed much younger because of his boyish enthusiasm and lack of travel experience. Both Barth and Richardson acknowledged that Africans liked Overweg the best among the three Europeans, because of his sunny disposition and his willingness to spend hours trying to repair an African’s broken watch or distributing specks of medicine (he wasn’t a doctor and his prescriptions were random).

Barth regarded Overweg as an amiable, talented younger brother who was sometimes exasperatingly naive and messy. As an explorer and scientist, Overweg was as keen and tireless as Barth, but was less careful in every way, both personally and as a record-keeper.

El Haj Beshir ben Ahmed Tirab, the Vizier of Kukawa

In Kukawa, Barth spent a lot of time with the shrewd, worldly vizier, second-in-command to the Sheikh of Bornu. Barth admired Haj Beshir’s erudition and openness to new ideas, but thought his faults undercut his virtues. His “luxurious disposition” made him “extremely fond of the fair sex”–he had lost exact count of his harem, which numbered between 300 and 400 concubines. He could wax eloquently about Ptolemy, yet his greed and laziness were hastening the decay of Bornu. Barth accompanied Haj Beshir and his army on a horrifying razzia, or slave raid, the most disturbing section of Barth’s book.

Weled Ammer Walati

Scoundrel extraordinaire. Barth met the Walati, as he called him, while en route to Timbuktu. The rogue spoke six languages and knew the country, so Barth hired him as a fixer to ease his passage through unknown territories. “He was one of the cleverest men whom I met on my journey,” wrote Barth, “in spite of the trouble he caused me and the tricks he played me.”

The Walati did occasionally do his job. At one point, for instance, Barth was surrounded by 150 men with spears, “brandished over their heads with warlike gesticulations. The affair seemed rather serious.” The Walati saved the day by shouting that Barth was a friend of the Sheikh of Timbuktu and was bringing him books. “They dropped their spears and thronged around me, requesting me to give them my blessing.”

More typically the Walati saved his own skin while skinning the explorer.

Sidi Ahmed al-Bakkay, Sheikh of Timbuktu

Kunta tribesman, late 1800s

Barth almost surely would have been murdered in Timbuktu if not for the protection of Sheikh al-Bakkay, a member of the Kunta tribe, renowned desert scholars and religious leaders. Timbuktu had been conquered in 1826 by Muslim fanatics and was nominally under the rule of the Emir of Hamdallahi. When Barth arrived, the Emir ordered al-Bakkay to drive the unbeliever out of town. (The same order had been given in 1826 about the presence of Major Alexander Gordon Laing, who was expelled and murdered.) But al-Bakkay, at tremendous risk from both the Emir and his own political enemies, including a couple of his brothers, defied the emir and took Barth under his wing.

Al-Bakkay alternately charmed and exasperated Barth. The two men intrigued each other and had many intense conversations about history, theology, slavery, polygamy. No African meant more to Barth than al-Bakkay.

These were some of Barth’s companions as he traveled through the Sudan, and they became mine as well, as I traveled through Barth.

Kukawa and Its Keepers

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The dendal in Kukawa, from Travels and Discoveries

On April 2, 1851, a year to the day after the expedition started from the outskirts of Tripoli, Barth reached Kukawa, capital of the Bornu empire. He estimated its population at 30,000, periodically swelled by caravans and pilgrims making the haj to Mecca. Barth was befriended there, after a fashion, by Bornu’s ruler, Sheikh (or Shehu) Umar, and by Umar’s scheming vizier (prime minister), Haj Beshir.

From Kukawa he made four major excursions. All turned into quasi- misadventures (details in my book): south into Adamawa, northeast into Kanem, southeast into Musgu territory, and then farther southeast into Bagirmi.

In Barth’s era, Kukawa was actually two walled towns, each roughly a mile-and-a-half square. The sheikh, nobles, and their slaves lived in eastern Kukawa, the regular citizens in the western town. A broad avenue called the dendal connected them. “Rides along this main thoroughfare were always of novel and enthralling interest for me,” wrote the explorer Gustav Nachtigal, who reached Kukawa about 20 years after Barth, “revealing a life of such variety and even splendor as a European can scarcely associate with the idea of a Negro town.”

Barth and Nachtigal both described a kingdom weakened by corruption and indolence. In 1893 the renegade warlord Rabih sacked and burned Kukawa. The Sheikh of Bornu moved his capital to Maiduguri, where it remains.

Today Kukawa is a small dusty place. Evidently white visitors are still rare. When we exited the car at the residence of the district head, school was getting out, and a crowd of 40 children rushed towards us, laughing and pointing and shouting, “Baturi!” (white man!). Above the children’s shouts we heard amplified agitated preaching from the nearby mosque.

Some men led us through a rough courtyard to the district head. We took off our shoes and entered a dark room whose only light came from the doorway. The head man sat on carpets in the cool murk of the far corner. He leaned back against pillows, his water bottle and cell phone within easy reach. He looked like an old turtle, wary and slow-blinking.

Nasiru Wada introduced us and described my project. He pointed out that my visit here had been endorsed by the sheikh’s historian, whom we had met at the palace in Maiduguri. The district head listened with a stone face. When Nasiru finished, the man asked if we had a letter from the sheikh or his secretary. No? Then he regretted that he could not give us any information or allow us to talk to anyone or even to walk around. In fact, it would be best to leave right away. The old turtle, a bureaucrat through and through, liked his shell. I didn’t speak Hausa, but the tone and body language were international.

Nasiru, a bit stunned, put it all into words as we walked back to the car. The district head still seemed nervous because of the violence that had touched Kukawa some months earlier, instigated by the extremist group Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden.” He had only recently allowed preaching to resume at the mosque. In his view, a white westerner asking questions probably embodied Boko Haram’s aversions and spelled trouble. It was a small reminder of the times when edgy officials refused Barth’s requests to visit or explore their districts.

We considered asking the police for permission, but the district head was their boss, and besides, I didn’t want to go through the security rigmarole again. The two Nasirus shrugged and said there was nothing to be done. I understood the head man’s caution, but Kukawa was an important place for Barth and for my book, and I told the Nasirus that I wasn’t leaving until I saw what remained of it. After a long silence, they had an urgent conversation in Hausa. The men who had taken us to the head man watched us from the residence. Amplified shouting continued from the mosque.

To buy time, we slowly drove to a sugar-cane stand a few hundred yards up the road. As we paused there, a young man from the district head’s residence walked toward us. We expected him to say, “Move along.” Instead he said that he didn’t agree with the district head and would like to help us. For instance, he continued, the cinderblock wall 100 yards across from the cane stand marked the boundaries of the old palace walls within the destroyed royal town. Would we like to meet “the keeper of the old city”? Indeed we would.

Gate in wall surrounding former palace grounds

The keeper, informed about the district head’s rebuff, smiled and invited us through a gate in the wall. He would be glad to tell us part of Kukawa’s story. He was a young man who lived with his wife in a traditional hut just inside, on the old palace grounds. The walls now enclosed mostly sand.

But there was a building with a tin roof, the size of a three-car garage. We walked to it and entered. Inside stood two crumbling mud-brick mounds with squat wooden doors—the graves of the old sheikhs of Bornu, Umar and his father, Muhammed al-Kanemi. I had read many accounts, including Barth’s, about the men whose bones moldered in this modest place. They had once ruled an empire.

The keeper offered to show us the former boundaries of the old royal city. We drove about a mile into the empty countryside west of town. The keeper said all this had once been inside the walls. We stopped where a low broken wall surrounded a tall baobab tree—in Hausa, a kuka. The keeper said it was Kukawa’s namesake tree.

Barth mentions that Sheikh al-Kanemi supposedly built his new capital at Kukawa because of a young baobab there. The keeper told us a refinement of this local legend: the tree inside the broken wall had been a sapling when the adolescent al-Kanemi used to lean against it and dream of glory—that’s why he later sited his capital here. This pleasing story was flawed only by impossibility; al-Kanemi spent his boyhood far from Kukawa.

We walked across the flat empty land for another quarter mile, until the keeper said that we had reached the boundary of old Kukawa, before Rabih destroyed it. The keeper waved his arm in a circle that now took in nothing but sand, bushes, and scattered kukas. Shards of pottery testified on the ground all around us.

I asked him if he had ever heard of Barth. Yes, he said, his father and grandfather knew stories about the explorer, but he himself knew little beyond the name. He had no idea where Barth’s house had stood in old Kukawa. And anyway, he added, Rabih had destroyed it.

On the way back into town to drop off the keeper, we passed an old empty market, no doubt similar to the one once visited here by Barth. The desert wind whistled through its crooked poles and toupees of dry reeds. Lost empires, forgotten visitors, sacked cities. The remnants and vanities of dead men. At least in Kukawa they still had a keeper–not so different, in some ways, from a writer of history.

Under Control: the Beauty of the Traditional Way

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Channel on Lake Chad near Baga

The village head, a tall powerful man dressed in rich robes, sat in a room lit by one dim bulb, watching the news in English on Al Jazeera. His younger brother, clearly subservient, timidly introduced us and our situation. The big man listened without expression, then indicated that I should sit in an easy chair next to the couch where he presided. The two Nasirus sat on the carpeted floor, staying below him as a sign of respect.

After a few minutes of polite back-and-forth, Nasiru Wada broke the ice with some Fulani/Kanuri slave banter, which made the head man smile and reciprocate Nasiru’s threat of slavery. I was tired and hungry, which accentuated my direct American mindset; I assumed that we would ask the head man for accommodations and be on our way. After 10 or 15 minutes of relaxed conversation between the head man and the two Nasirus, my miscalculation became apparent. Protocols had to be followed, which I should have expected from Barth’s account. The two Nasirus and the head man, whose name was Lawal Bana, were settling in for a long palaver in Hausa.

Lawal Bana mentioned that his second wife was from Zinder, an old Sahelian city now in Niger. Ah, said Nasiru Wada, I am thinking of marrying a second wife who lives there. Are marriages to Zinder women expensive?

Oh yes, said Lawal Bana. For the dowry, wedding, and gifts, I spent $2.3 million naira. (About $16,000.)

Nasiru gasped: No!

Oh yes, said Lawal Bana, smiling ruefully.

Eventually Lawal Bana offered us an abandoned house of his on a nearby army base. He rummaged among his couch cushions for the key, unsuccessfully, so he ordered his younger brother, Mina, to pick up a hacksaw and some drinks for us on the way there. “Everything has changed,” said Nasiru Wada as we were en route. “We are no longer in control. We are under control. That is the beauty of the traditional way.”

Mina hacksawed through a padlock and opened the door to a room in a concrete house, in disrepair but snug. Someone soon brought a container of food from Lawal Bana. I bounced the beam of my flashlight off the ceiling so we could see: red stew afloat with globs of white cornmeal. Delicious. To thwart the majority of the mosquitoes, we left the door and windows closed, which turned the room into an oven. Barth often made the same choice. Lying in our sauna, slapping at the occasional skeeter, living under Lawal Bana’s control, I was getting a small taste of Barth’s routine for five years—reach a new place, visit the head man, get assigned quarters, hope that food arrives, spend a semi-sleepless night, move on.

Abdul and Nasiru Datti at our accommodations in Baga

At 5:00 roosters began crowing, followed by goats bleating in the bushes and the weird cries of guinea hens. Breakfast appeared: egg sandwiches, tea with butter, sugar, and condensed milk. Lawal Bana also had arranged for a boat to take us onto Lake Chad. But protocol required another audience at his house first.

Today he wore a lustrous brocaded robe. He was expansive, with a big laugh and fluid gestures. Two cell phones lay on the cushion next to him. The two Nasirus took their positions on the floor. There was no hurry. Several times the languid conversation was interrupted by men entering to do business with our host.

After a while he handed us over to the driver of his SUV. We roared over to the lake, glazing clusters of huts with dust. Our dramatic entrance drew a crowd. We boarded one of the painted boats, accompanied by Mina and two dignitaries–the chairmen of the water board and the boat owners’ association. Our boat ride had become an event.

In front: Nasiru Datti and Mina. Behind Mina, Nasiru Wada

The channel widened slightly, but the excursion strengthened my impression of Chad as a lake impersonating rivers and creeks. Fishermen in dugouts or larger boats disappeared into the reeds, following passages visible only to them. One fisherman floated in the water, draped over a hollow calabash the size of an exercise ball. His belly covered a hole in the top, trapping the air that floated him. His arms and legs dangled in the water, one hand holding a small net. When he caught a fish, he put it in the hollow gourd.

The two Nasirus rarely got the chance for a boat ride. Nasiru Wada paid the boatman an extra 200 naira, about $1.50, to do some fast spins. Nasiru Datti, landlubberly stiff, shook his head in disapproval.

On shore, after distributing “dash” all around (I’ll say more about dash in another post) we headed out in the SUV. Within a few hundred yards, a soldier gestured angrily for us to stop. He began shouting that the driver had sped past him on the way in, instead of stopping at the checkpoint. We could have been shot, he shouted, and if it had been nighttime, we would have been shot. The driver said that Lawal Bana had cleared everything beforehand. No one told me, shouted the soldier, who was soon joined by his shouting superior. Mina announced that he was going over their heads and calling his brother, the head man. OK, bellowed the superior, I’m calling my commander.

Nasiru Wada tried to calm things by offering the superior some dash. The man acted shocked. Are you trying to bribe me, he shouted? No, said Nasiru, it’s just for you to eat kola. Euphemism for dash. The suspicion resurfaced that I might be a foreign agent. The superior ordered his men to search the SUV for signs of spycraft. They overlooked my exploding pen and hollow heel.

Eventually we were ordered to report to the same military base where we had spent the night. The superior assigned a soldier with a rifle to ride with us, ostensibly to prevent us from bolting, but really just because he could, for intimidation. Mina said Lawal Bana was en route to vouch for us. As we prepared to leave, the superior decided that on second thought he could accept a wad of dash, but did so with huffy disdain, as if he were above such venality. This all would have been amusing farce if it hadn’t gone on so long in the intense heat.

At the base, an official welcomed us and questioned me about the purpose of my visit. He chided me for not checking in with military security yesterday. I said I thought I had, by answering questions from various alert agencies at the lake. He shook his head and said he had to check with the deputy commander about how to proceed.

Another soldier with a fancier uniform, probably the deputy commander, appeared and repeated the entire routine—same welcome, questions, admonishments. Lawal Bana showed up and smoothed feathers. Everyone relaxed. One of the officials probed me about my impressions of Nigeria and what I’d heard about his country in the U.S. My description of Barth intrigued him, and he wrote down the explorer’s name and the title of his book. We were now all friends and no one was in a rush.

After exchanging information for an hour under the shade trees, I made a few last disbursements of dash and we hit the road for Kukawa–once the capital of the mighty empire of Bornu, and Barth’s base for a year and a half.

Kola: the Coffee of the Sudan

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When Nasiru Datti was a boy in Kano, one of his jobs was to buy kola nuts for his father in the market. It was an honor and a big responsibility. In West and Central Africa, kola (also called goro and guro) has always been serious business, in all senses of that phrase. For the people there, noted Barth, kola was “as necessary as coffee or tea to us.”

The Arabs, devoted coffee drinkers, called kola “the coffee of Sudan.” This was true in several ways. Like coffee and tea, kola delivered a caffeine kick and was used partly as a pick-me-up. Laborers chewed kola to overcome fatigue and to blunt hunger and discomfort, in the same way that Andean peoples chew coca leaves. (In the late 19th century, an American combined carbonated sugar-water with extracts from coca leaves and kola nuts: Coca-Cola.) Kola also had some of the same social functions as coffee. Just as Turks and Arabs immediately served guests a cup of java, West Africans traditionally offered guests a kola nut.

Hugh Clapperton

But kola carried far more social weight than coffee. Hugh Clapperton, a British explorer of the Sudan in the 1820s, described its significance:

“This nut, which is in high esteem and general use all through the interior, is frequently applied to the same purpose as the calumet of peace amongst the North American Indians, and is likewise used on all public occasions to testify the good understanding that prevails in the assembly: when presented to private individuals, it signifies that there is peace between the donor and receiver.”

Kola nuts were essential at naming ceremonies, weddings, and funerals. People swore oaths, cemented business deals, and pledged daughters in marriage by breaking kola together. On important holidays, rich people distributed kola nuts to the poor as alms. In Chinua Achebe’s germinal novels, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, the ritual sharing of kola nuts signifies traditional values, a ritual threatened by new historical forces.

Chinua Achebe (photo by Stuart C. Shapiro)

Kola differed from coffee in another way: cost. Though considered indispensible by rich and poor, kola was also a luxury. In Barth’s day, one nut cost as much as many cups of coffee.

Naturally the kola trade was big business. In Timbuktu, wrote Barth, the nuts trailed only gold and salt in commercial importance. Kola was also central to Kano’s economy. Barth researched the kola trade with his usual thoroughness. The nuts came from two species of trees, but much variety occurred within the species in size, color, and quality. In Kano, for instance, he found four distinct kinds of nuts, all with different names. These four were further divided into three categories based on the season when the nuts were gathered. Kola reached the city each year on the backs of about 500 asses–5,000 to 6,000 nuts, wrote Barth, “constitute an ass-load.”

To get the nuts, Kano’s traders traveled west for several hundred miles to a small town called Selga in what is now Burkina Faso. There they haggled with Ashantis, the main suppliers of kola, who had come from the forests of Ghana. If the Kano traders didn’t bring enough asses, or if some of theirs had died en route, Mossi livestock dealers stood by to sell them replacements at three times the Kano price. Selga was a miserable place with little water, so water merchants hawked their product at exorbitant prices. The Kano traders didn’t linger in Selga. On the way home, they paid levies to every chief along the route. By the time Barth arrived, this commerce between forest and savannah had been going on for at least six centuries.

Gustav Nachtigal

The German explorer Gustav Nachtigal, who reached Bornu 20 years after Barth, described the careful measures required to transport kola nuts from the source to market. The trip took several months, and unless the trader was careful, his stock would spoil. Kola is finicky, requiring the right amounts of moisture and coolness—not easy to maintain in central Africa. The traders packed the nuts in baskets lined and topped with thick layers of damp leaves. During the rainy season the traders unloaded the baskets twice a month, spread them on the ground to air out, discarded any that were spoiling or worm-eaten, then sprinkled the rest with water and repacked the baskets. In the dry season they followed this procedure twice a week.

Market in Kedougou, Senegal - Kola nuts (photo...

The time, expense, and trouble paid off if the traders reached a big market with most of their stock intact, because customers craved their product. Nachtigal confessed that when he couldn’t get kola, he missed it more than coffee, tea, or tobacco. “It is regarded as a general calamity,” he wrote, “if a harvest failure or military operations diminish the flow into the market. . . . When one has been deprived of this luxury for a long time, the greatest sacrifices are made to get hold of it, and a Kanuri does not hesitate, for example, for this purpose to sell his horse or his concubine, the most valuable earthly possessions he has. A gift of [kola] nuts is always a mark of particular friendship, and a few of them are sufficient to purchase the favour of a frivolous girl.”

One song from Bornu lamented that one of the worst things about being captured as a slave and sent to the Barbary Coast was the scarcity of kola there. In fact the nuts were exported to northern Africa and fetched high prices, noted Nachtigal, but they usually arrived in such a dry wrinkled state that only the poorest people in Bornu would have deigned to chew such sorry specimens.

So for Nasiru, choosing his father’s kola nuts was a major responsibility. He learned how to judge them. The nuts needed to be smooth, plump, and uniformly colored. Too many brown spots suggested spoilage. Shriveled casings meant tough, dry kernels.

Before we left Maiduguri he bought some on the street and passed them around. About the size of walnuts, they were dusty maroon in color. He and Nasiru Wada expertly cracked theirs open at the seam, revealing kernels that were a lovely deep pink. They offered me one. When I bit into it, my face involuntarily puckered at the bitter astringency. They burst into laughter, then resumed chewing. “These are excellent kolas,” said Nasiru Datti.

Boko Haram, Maiduguri, Slave Jokes

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We reached Maiduguri in the dark. A city of about 1.5 million, it’s the capital of Borno State in northeastern Nigeria. Maiduguri felt different from Kano. On edge. Six months earlier, in August 2009, a radical Islamic sect called Boko Haram (“Western education is forbidden”) had started a jihad in Maiduguri, rioting and bombing police stations and government buildings. In response the government destroyed the group’s mosques, and its leader died in police custody while wearing handcuffs. Nearly 1,000 people were killed.

When we arrived, Boko Haram had gone underground, but it still haunted the city, or at least my perceptions of it. (I later read that Eliza Griswold, who wrote The Tenth Parallel (2010) about her travels along that latitude in Africa and Asia, where Islam and Christianity often mix uneasily, called Maiduguri the most alarming place she visited.)

The city seemed poorer than Kano, with more garbage everywhere and even less electricity. After sundown, most of this major city went dark. Smoke from thousands of fires turned the night hazy and stung the eyes. Dense waves of buzzing motorcycles swirled and eddied in the gloom. Their exhaust contributed to the choking murk. Most carried at least one passenger, often a robed woman riding side-saddle, sometimes an entire family, the children somehow tucked between parents. People walking on the side of the road in the pitch dark flashed by in our headlights like briefly illuminated ghosts. The smoke and noise and mobs of motorcycles zooming from the darkness and vanishing back into it made driving at night spooky, almost surreal.

Nasiru Datti, Abdul, Nasiru Wada

So, in a different way, was our hotel, the Maiduguri International. Modern institutional in style, it was succumbing to decay and mold. Only two of its floors remained open. In the long corridors, dim bulbs, widely-spaced, barely dented the dark, whenever the capricious electricity was working. The carpets were sodden. The ambitious swimming pool was now green with scum, and tall weeds grew from cracks in the tennis court.

By contrast, the red-brick palace of Bornu’s shehu, or sheikh, looked crisp and shipshape. Built in the 1940s, it had replaced one built in the early 20th century when the capital of Bornu moved here from Kukawa. Bornu has always been famous for its horses, and the sheikh had a stable of them.

Next to the palace, a huge mosque was under construction. A long sandy piazza fronted both. At night, by tradition, the piazza became a play-space for children.

One night, watching them play outside the palace, we met a district official dressed in a beautiful robe and cap. “Your sultan should come visit us in Kano,” said Nasiru Wada, “because he is our slave.”

The official stared at him, then roared with laughter. “No!” the man shouted. “You are all my slaves.”

This exchange had a history. Nasiru Wada and Nasiru Datti were Fulanis from Kano who spoke Hausa. In Bornu, the predominant ethnic group were Kanuris, who spoke their own language. Slave jokes, Nasiru Wada told me, were common between the two groups.

The reasons stretched back 200 years. The Islamic kingdom of Bornu rose to power when Europe was in the Middle Ages. Early in the 19th century, when the Fulani scholar Usman dan Fodio led the jihad that brought much of central Sudan under his control, he was unable to conquer Bornu. His brilliant son, Muhammed Bello, fared no better. Nor had Bornu been able to overthrow dan Fodio. For much of the century, the two kingdoms alternated between tense détente and slave raids into each other’s territory. If either kingdom had managed to defeat the other, the vanquished would have become the conquerors’ slaves. This was the history behind Nasiru’s joke and the official’s retort.

Though Kano and Maiduguri are only 300 miles apart, the Hausa and Kanuri languages are completely different. “They talk and I cannot understand one word,” said Nasiru Datti. Communication between the groups occurs in Hausa, which is more widely spoken. Barth was fluent in both.

He also preferred the dispositions of Hausas and Fulanis to Kanuris, calling the former cheerful and vivacious, the latter dour. Both Nasirus nodded at this. “They aren’t friendly,” said Nasiru Wada. “They are tough people, very tough.”

In the early morning, Maiduguri’s ghosts seemed less apparent. We went to an open-air tea shop. A wood fire heated a huge samovar. The owner mixed black tea with milk and poured the mixture back and forth between cups in long arcs, then served it. His partner cut thick slices of dense white bread and slathered it with butter. Two dozen men and boys chatted and ate breakfast, squatting or sitting on crude benches and wooden stumps.

Nearby, a woman was frying and selling kosai (bean cakes). They smelled delicious and tasted better than they smelled. I wanted to take the woman’s picture, but the day before, while shooting a street scene in Maiduguri, several men had glared at me and one had waved his arms angrily for me to stop. So I asked Nasiru to ask the kosai woman for permission.

“I’ll try,” he said, shaking his head, “but Kanuris are very tough. Very tough.” He asked. She studied him coldly, then me, then nodded curtly. She didn’t smile for the camera.

Several months after we left Maiduguri, Boko Haram emerged from underground. Energized and organized, they began targeting government buildings and churches in northeastern Nigeria. Over the last two years Boko Haram seems to have affiliated itself with other radical Islamic groups in north Africa, and may have received training and funding from al-Qaeda. They have claimed responsibility for dozens of bombings and hundreds of deaths, and are intensifying their operations. In January 2012 they began a campaign of terror in Kano, previously untouched by the violence.

Fura

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After escaping the avaricious emir of Kano, Barth moved east towards Kukawa, capital of the kingdom of Bornu. He expected to reunite there with his two European colleagues. Meanwhile he was broke. He fell in with a worldly Arab trader traveling with his concubine and her slaves. When the trader offered Barth coffee and fine pastries served on napkins, the explorer was mortified that he could offer nothing in return but “a couple of young onions.”

He passed through small towns with busy markets, through grass-hut villages where women sold foodstuffs on the roadside. He admired the stately trees—figs, tamarinds, acacias, shea butters, kapoks, occasional doum palms and baobabs. He noted fields of corn and millet, and granaries woven from reeds and built off the ground to foil rodents. Silage nestled in the crooks of trees, beyond the reach of the lyre-horned cattle. Slender graceful women walked to market carrying towers of calabashes filled with milk on their heads—a feat that would thrill a circus audience but was here an everyday skill. Such scenes hadn’t changed in the 150 years since.

Millet and guinea corn

Granaries

His first major stop was Gumel, four days and 85 miles northeast of Kano. It was “a most fortunate and lucky day for me,” he wrote, because he found mail waiting for him—his first messages from Europe in 10 months. Almost nothing buoyed the spirits of an explorer more than letters, or depressed him more than long silences from home. For Barth the mail was doubly exhilarating, since one envelop was heavy with two Spanish dollars, salvation for a man who had been living on “air and debts.”

Barth called Gumel a frontier town because it marked the westernmost outpost of the Bornu empire. It was a cultural and linguistic frontier as well. Hausa and Fulani began giving way to Kanuri, and still do. When Barth first visited in 1851, Gumel was calm and prosperous, with 300 market stalls. When he returned in 1854, war had scorched the region. Barth called on Gumel’s emir in the charred ruins of the royal residence.

Emir’s palace, Gumel

When we arrived, Gumel was again a bustling place of entrepreneurial mayhem. The emir’s palace looked rundown, with busted windows, yet two royal guards in red and green lounged near the entrance. Outside of town, several cheerful women were talking and pounding millet. I asked to take their picture. Wonderful! they said, never altering their throbbing rhythm. Then one of them asked for $200. The others laughed and promised, in high voices that carried over the thudding of their wooden pestles, to pray for us.

At Hadejia we turned northeast towards the Sahara. Dust thickened the air and the land flattened. By this point in his journey, Barth had become “very fond” of a dish called fura in Hausa, ghussub in Kanuri. He often depended on it for nutrition.

Fura remains essential in central Africa. Nasiru Wada and Nasiru Datti both were devotees. Near the town of Birniwa we saw two women selling the dish on the side of the road and pulled off for a fura break. Nearby, men in Islamic robes squated on their haunches beneath neem trees. Dogs panted in the red dust.

Nasiru asked one of the women to make us some fura. The process was still just as Barth described it. She uncovered a calabash of sour milk and dipped out enough to fill a larger calabash about halfway. From another calabash she took some dense gray-brown orbs the size of ping-pong balls. These were made from millet flour that had been moistened into paste, rolled into balls, and simmered in water. Some women flavor their fura with cloves or other spices. In the Sahara, Tuaregs often add powdered cheese.

The woman put the fura balls into the calabash of milk, sprinkled in sugar, and began stirring vigorously with a large spoon, mashing the balls to thicken the milk. When the dish was ready, we passed the calabash around, gulping from the dipper. It was delicious and tartly refreshing, like clumpy thin yogurt. The bill was 50 naira, about 35 cents.

Shadows were lengthening, and we were her last customers. She stood up. She had been sitting on a 16-ounce can. To close shop, she built layers on her head: first a thick folded cloth, then the can, then a thin woven ring as a stabilizer or trivet, then the three covered calabashes. On top went a small pot of water. She joined her fura colleague and sauntered casually toward home beneath her vertical inventory.