Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (48 page)

The irony of hatred is the inevitable imitation that develops between the hated and the hater. The hated, like the loved, begin to imitate their former oppressor. Both hate and love bestow an excessive attention, and what we look at enough we are doomed to copy. It’s a kind of law of nature. Israelis ghettoise Palestinians just as they were ghettoised in Europe, suburban America adopts the dress code of the criminal classes it fears so much: sagging jeans without a belt (in case the perp hangs himself) and tattoos. So, too, did Speke ape the style of Burton, going so far as to measure the fat women of King Rumanika’s court. Somehow, though Burton could get away with similar stuff, with asides in Latin and plenty of footnotes, in Speke’s hands it looked like plain sensationalism. Burton would have measured everyone, or made it a footnote. Speke makes of the measuring something of a party piece, revealing his smutty-postcard sensibilities – and it was this that started the tide against him, set the scene for the great debate. The grandees of the RGS were fickle: Burton had needed to be taught a lesson, and they had done so by initially favouring Speke and sending him on this expedition. But now Speke had returned from his two-year trip with the measurements of some fat ladies but no measurements of the Nile. One geographer showed that Speke’s readings suggested that for ninety miles the Nile ran uphill. Another, that he had seen the lake but at a distance, and had relied mainly on native information for his
conclusions. The explorer’s description of the Ripon Falls as being like a Highland stream met with incredulity that this could be the source of the mighty Nile. He was, of course, right. But, as one of Burton’s beloved Arabs would have it, ‘The master being wrong is more right than the student being right.’

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The Dinka are getting shorter

For the cow its horns are not too heavy
. Sudanese proverb

Speke, for all his faults, was no racist. He enjoyed the company of diverse cannibals and headhunters and, though he might deplore their diet and table manners, he did not stoop to the usual crude epithets of the race hater. In some quarters of the Royal Geographical Society it was openly said that Speke was too friendly with the natives, that he had let the side down, but it seems to me, when you get clear of his weaknesses and foolish hatred of Burton, that he really loved the people of the upper Nile.

For the overland part of his journey, when he had to circumvent the great swamp of the Sudd, Speke travelled in the company of the Dinka, known to be the tallest people in Africa.

In the 1950s, the first time a sufficient number of Dinka were measured, they were, on average, 5 foot 11.9 inches. Many were of course much taller, with several Dinka playing for the American National Basketball Association. But in 1995 the average height had dropped to 5 foot 9.4 inches. Cause: twenty or more years of civil war and strife and habitat destruction.

In 1983 the northern Sudanese Arabs armed with Kalashnikovs the Baggara tribe of the upper Nile. The Baggara still carried their long swords, and used them when they attacked Dinka villages and wanted to save ammunition. The Baggara had enslaved the Dinka in the time of Petherick and Baker. Now they were armed with enough firepower to do it again. They rode into villages and killed the men and carried off the women and children on their horses.

The Dinka culture, like the Nuer, like the Acholi, began the process of migrating from a cattle culture to a gun culture. But you cannot eat guns, so cattle remain, albeit of less significance than before the arrival
of the Kalashnikov rifle. Before the second civil war in the 1980s, the Dinka of the upper Nile were already giving up their old ways, moving to towns, converting to Christianity. The war stopped this and a great number fled to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Many left to go down the Nile to Egypt. Some made it to America. Now, with the independence of South Sudan in 2011, some of the Dinka have returned, but the old ways are not on the surface any more. They cannot be made into picturesque images any more. People must carry them in their hearts as stories.

The Dinka were a cattle people. The cattle were hardly ever killed. They took part in religious ceremonies. Strangely, many of the Dinka who left for the United States ended up working in great slaughterhouses butchering cattle. They were happy working with what they knew, even if it was dead.

The old ways might be strange, or even wrong. In the distant past a Dinka boy might sexually stimulate a cow by licking its vulva, this being a tried and tested way to increase milk production. People doubted such stories, but in the 1980s Kazuyoshi Nomachi photographed a boy with his face in a cow’s vulva and it was published in a collaboration with Geoffrey Moorhouse.

The Dinka smoke pipes bound with brass and copper wire. The tobacco is
Nicotiana rustica
, the wild tobacco also found in South America and thought to have been introduced from there. But when Petherick arrived each tribal group already had its own word for tobacco, a sure sign that they had been using it for far longer than the few hundred years the theory demanded.

The Dinka extract the four lower front teeth for aesthetic purposes. They tend to be stark naked, their bodies ghostly with ash, the facial lines looking like black cracks in the grey mask. They will sleep in ash and wear ash to keep away mosquitoes, and they burn cattle-dung fires all night for the same reason. In the morning, after the cattle have been released, fresh cattle dung will be scooped up to dry in the sun, shaped into pats the better to burn. The cattle are staked all night, each cow tethered to its own stake – you cannot stampede such an arrangement. The stakes are all in among the huts, which makes it hard to carry out a raid.

A Dinka village at dawn looks a little like a blown-up wood in the First World War, ghostly shades of destruction on the dry plains bordering the Sudd swamp with dry tree limbs poking from the ground, the
remnants of old hut circles. They look random, but they work. When the huts are completed they have a grass igloo-type covering over the rough wooden structure. The top tapers to a point like the top tassel on a Nepalese woollen cap.

Dinka men are uncircumcised mainly, and they wear a circular necklace, ivory elbow bracelets, a single decorative wire around the waist, brass wire anklets. They sleep either naked or with a cloth the size of a small towel over their lower body. Sometimes a bead corset is worn around the waist, nothing above or below. Sometimes a woolly hat may be worn. The Dinka mark their faces with cicatrices like most of the southern Sudanese tribes. Unlike the Shilluk, who incise their eyebrow line with bead-like cicatrices, the Dinka have three or four V-shaped scars high on the forehead.

Devotion to their cattle is shown by polishing the horns. These cattle have horns of great size, like the cattle depicted on ancient Egyptian friezes, horns up to three feet in length. When they are not tending to their cattle the young may relax by dancing. Or they may smoke, or weave cattle ropes from elephant grass. An old man might while away time having his hair groomed with an acacia thorn. The dedicated busy themselves filling a goat’s scrotum with ash, to be later used as part of a religious offering.

Because of the scarcity of water a Dinka boy will wash his hair clean of ash and earth in the early-morning stream of urine from a convenient cow. Cattle are rarely eaten. They are bled and the blood cooked or drunk fresh; they are milked and the milk drunk or turned into yoghurt and cheese. Again, in a culture with a minimum of division between man and beast, a boy will suckle direct from the cow’s teat, and this might be his only source of food for the morning. If the milk is to be stored, a hollow calabash serves as a pail.

The river Dinka live in the myriad waterways of the Sudd Nile on floating islands; from above, the cloth sun-protecting tents look like something by Christo, the avant-garde sculptor. The river-dwelling Dinka are fishermen, their musculature more developed than the elon-gated limbs of the plains Dinka. Some of the islands are made by constructing huge piles of papyrus; others are natural formations of foliage and reeds.

The Dinka way of life survived the ravages of slavery and colonialism, but will it survive the modern world – with its automatic weapons and global culture?

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Travel tips for the Nile explorer

For a poor person snot is salt
. Ethiopian proverb

Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Darwin and inventor of both the finger-print system and the IQ test, was a great eugenics enthusiast. Unlike Speke he saw in such tribes as the Dinka supporting evidence for his own sinister racism, his belief that the African had, through generations, arrived at physical excellence but not intellectual supremacy. Galton himself was not a very attractive man, though he was bright – it was he who coined the weather term ‘anti-cyclone’ and invented, ironically for an ugly man, the ‘statistical beauty map of Britain’ (the most beautiful lived in London, the least beautiful in Aberdeen).

He was also an early African explorer. His expedition to Lake Ngami was the start of a lifelong interest in African, and especially Nile, exploration. He chaired the controversial meeting in Brighton where Stanley tried to defend Livingstone’s belief that the Lualaba was the Nile. Galton asked Stanley if the waters of Lake Tanganyika were sweet or brackish. ‘There is no sweeter water for making a cup of tea,’ replied Stanley, thinking he had been mocked. He then went on the attack, calling Galton an ‘easy-chair geographer’, ‘Mr Francis Galton FRGS, FRSXYZ and I do not know how many other letters’. Stanley was being a little unfair. Galton may have been an unvarnished bigot, but he was also a genuine explorer and his book
The Art of Travel
(1872) is the distillation of much real experience. It belongs, along with Burton’s
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
, on the bookshelf of any self-respecting Red Nile explorer.

On the subject of donkeys – Petherick and Stanley always rode the beasts if they could – Galton wrote that asses can be taught not to kick. ‘Mungo Park says that negroes, where he travelled, taught their asses as follows: they cut a forked stick, and put the forked part into the ass’s mouth, like the bit of a bridle.’ The forked ends were tied together behind the donkey’s head while the longer piece protruded forward and struck the ground if the donkey put his head down. ‘It always proved effectual.’

To stop a donkey braying, a heavy stone should be lashed to its tail. When a donkey brays it habitually raises its tail; with it weighted down ‘he has not the heart to bray. In hostile neighbourhoods, where silence
and concealment are sought, it might be well to adopt this rather absurd treatment.’

Crossing a river may be effected using the ‘African swimming ferry’. Two large calabashes are used as a float by cutting off their small ends and joining them to make a single lightweight container. The passenger places his luggage on top of this float and then clings to it. The ferryman then balances this unstable set-up by holding on to the other side of the float and swimming, pushing the entire load across the river.

Illness, of course, was the main threat to early Nile explorers. Galton, who was trained as a physician in the early 1840s, advises that ‘powerful emetics, purgatives, and eyewashes are the most popular physickings’. He advises that explorers should keep in mind the old adage, ‘Though there is a great difference between a good physician and a bad one, there is very little difference between a good one and none at all.’

For a powerful emetic he suggests, ‘drink a charge of gunpowder in a tumblerful of warm water or soap-suds, and tickle the throat’. For fevers he suggests prophylactic use of quinine but points out that this did not help Dr Livingstone. In the end he concludes that the banks of a river are often less affected than the low hills that overlook them. He advises never to camp downwind of a marsh, sleep between two large fires and avoid starting too early in the morning.

For the common companion of diarrhoea he suggests nothing but broth or rice water. ‘The least piece of bread or meat causes an immediate relapse.’ The scourge of the Nile, especially in Egypt and Sudan, however, was always considered to be ophthalmia. He recommends sulphate of zinc as an eyewash. It should be properly astringent, which you can test by tasting it. Toothache could ruin an expedition too. Galton remarked, ‘An unskilled traveller is very likely to make a bad job of a first attempt at tooth-drawing. By constantly pushing and pulling an aching tooth, it will in time loosen, and perhaps, after some weeks, come out.’ For thirst he recommended: ‘drink water with a tea-spoon; it will satisfy a parched palate as much as if you gulped it down in tumblerfuls, and will disorder the digestion very considerably less’. For hunger, ‘Give two or three mouthfuls [of food, preferably broth] every quarter of an hour to a man reduced to the last extremity by hunger.’

As for fleas, ‘Italian flea-powder . . . is really efficacious.’ He reports a fellow explorer’s experience: ‘I have often found a light cotton or linen bag a great safeguard against the attacks of fleas. I used to creep into it, draw the loop tight round my neck and was thus able to set legions
of them at defiance.’ For ‘Vermin on the Person’, or lice, ‘You take half an ounce of mercury, which you mix with old tea leaves previously reduced to a paste by mastication. To render this softer you generally add saliva; water could not have the same effect . . . You infuse this composition into a string of cotton, loosely twisted, which you hang around the neck; the lice are sure to bite at the bait, and they thereupon as surely swell, become red, and die forthwith . . . renew this salutary necklace once a month.’

Snakebites: ‘Tie a string tight above the part, suck the wound, and caustic it as soon as you can. Or, for want of caustic, explode gunpowder in the wound.’ Scorpion sting: ‘the oil scraped out of a tobacco-pipe is a good application’.

To carry an ill man Galton advises making a litter. Two lengthy poles with cross-pieces are laid on top of the sick man, who in turn is lying on a blanket. The ends and sides of the blanket are knotted to the carrying poles, which are kept from moving in and out by the cross-pieces.