Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (52 page)

‘I thank your majesty but my companions are behind.’ And waited.

But Theodore waved him on. Rassam hesitated. It was another fiendish test. If Rassam continued to wait it showed he didn’t trust Theodore any more. He had to trust. Theodore would react badly if he wasn’t trusted at this late stage.

Rassam walked on and miraculously the captives walked free some way behind him.

Theodore sent a thousand cows and 500 sheep as another peace-offering reply, though Napier turned them away and sent them back, since he had been informed that acceptance meant he had forgiven Theodore and would leave his fort alone.

The British hadn’t landed forty-four war elephants to walk away now. Napier heard that Theodore might try to escape down a secret goat path at the back of Magdala. The fifty-seven-year-old general had given him enough chances to surrender. It was time to bring in the elephant-borne big guns.

Theodore, in an admirable last-ditch act of bravado, rode out in front of the massed British troops and challenged Napier to a one-on-one combat. Britain had long ago given up this chivalric ideal (though it was certainly a lot less wasteful than modern warfare – imagine if we’d sent George W. to bash up Saddam with only Tony Blair holding his jacket?). Not surprisingly Napier turned the duel down. Begged by his captains to return, Theodore wheeled his horse and disappeared up the mountain.

The end, when it came, was all too sudden. After a pounding bombardment and a half-hearted defence, the British rushed the gates of Magdala. The fortress was taken with only fifteen British wounded, two dying of wounds later.

Unnoticed at first, a bedraggled corpse missing half his head lay where he had fallen, defending the gate to the last. In his hand was a double-barrelled pistol that he had fired correctly this time, ending his own life before he could be captured. Rassam identified him as the Emperor Theodore. Souvenir hunters fell upon his corpse, but Rassam beat them back. The next day he supervised Theodore’s burial in Magdala church.

Stanley wrote that the looting was frenzied and terrible. The worst offenders were the former hostages, not excluding the missionaries among them, making off with jewelled golden goblets and plate, mitres and crowns, Sèvres china, cases of Moët champagne (now why hadn’t the hostages been offered that instead of mead?), ermine and bear furs, leopard- and lionskin capes, ornate saddles and highly decorated state umbrellas, tents, carpets and chests full of emeralds, sapphires and silver-set diamonds – all the treasure of Prester John.

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Battling slavery on the White Nile

When the river flows the wrong way make sure you are standing where you think you are before you hail a miracle
. Sudanese proverb

The transformation of the upper Nile regions started with the very best of intentions: end the diabolical practice of slavery. In 1869 Samuel Baker and Florence returned to the Nile to try and improve the conditions they had found on their first journey. Appointed a major general by the Khedive (the ruler under the aegis of the Ottoman Sultan, an upgrade from the earlier title of Wali) of Egypt’s army on £10,000 a year, Baker marched with 1,700 troops, a number that dwindled greatly as he proceeded past Khartoum and into the interior of Africa. He took not only his wife, the redoubtable Florence, but his nephew, Lieutenant Baker. They found the advancing front of the slave trade in the land just below the Murchison Falls on the upper White Nile. The very waterfall he had discovered five years earlier had now been subjected to the attentions of the Khartoum slavers.

Baker was also looking at ways of exploiting the resources of the country that did not involve slavery. ‘It appears that at Langgo the demand for beads is very great as the natives work them into patterns upon their matted hair. Ivory has little or no value, and exists in large quantities. The natives refuse to carry loads and transport an elephant’s tusk by boring a hole in the hollow end, through which they attach a rope; it is then dragged along the ground by a donkey. The ivory is thus seriously damaged . . .’

At one point Baker had an opportunity to arrest the notorious slaver Abou Saoud, who was recruiting local chiefs to fight and enslave their
neighbours in the southern parts of the country. ‘It may seem to the public that having “absolute and supreme power” I was absurdly lenient towards Abou Saood who I knew to be so great a villain . . . but had I adopted severe or extreme measures against Abou Saood, I might have ruined the expedition at the commencement.’

Baker had only 212 men and was trying to get to the Equator. He was now about 165 miles away. He contemplated releasing slaves at Abou Saoud’s slaving stations but realised the problems. ‘Abou Saood’s Fatiko station was crowded with slaves. His people were all paid in slaves. The stations of Fabbo, Faloro and Farragenia were a mass of slaves . . . Had I attempted to release some thousand slaves from the different stations, I should have required a large military force to have occupied those stations, and to have driven the whole of the slave hunters bodily.’ He realised that the slaves could not have been returned home easily as they were collected from a huge area. Nor could he feed them from his own rations. He had no choice but to ignore the ravaging slave trade and move on, for the time being.

A party of native hunters was surprised by Baker’s small army and fled, leaving behind its elephant spears. Baker’s men returned the dropped spears to the frightened natives when they encountered them later. This caused much astonishment as the people were used to invaders taking everything from them.

In order to placate Kabba Rega, a local chief, and win him over from supporting the Arab slave traders from the north, Baker reports giving him as a present:

After handing these over, Baker ‘proclaimed upon all sides that the reign of terror was ended’.

But it was not.

There was a brief interlude when envoys from the Ugandan King M’tese, who had known Speke, came to visit. As credentials they brought with them gifts they had been given by Speke and Grant many years earlier: a printed book, several watercolour drawings including one of a guineafowl, and a little folding book with sketches of British soldiers of various regiments. Baker impressed the native mission with the great luxury of his travelling tent, large mirrors and other curios: ‘a good shock with the magnetic battery wound up the entertainment, and provided them with much material for a report to their royal master upon their return to Uganda’. Before they left, Baker told them of Speke’s death back in England. ‘They had appeared much concerned at hearing of poor Speke’s death; and continued to exclaim for some minutes, “Wah! Wah! Speekee! Speekee! Wah! Speekee!”’

But Baker had more important concerns. Kabba Rega had proved deeply unreliable, favouring the Arab slavers even though they were ravaging his country. Baker and his retinue drew up their battle lines at Masindi and waited.

Kabba Rega sent over food and drink to try and appease Baker. Seven jars of plantain cider were accepted and distributed to Baker’s men. Shortly after dinner Baker was told by an overwrought aide, ‘many of the troops appeared to be dying, and they had evidently been
poisoned
by the plantain cider!’

Never one to panic, Baker recounted:

He also dosed everyone with as much mustard and salt as they could manage until ‘the patients began to feel the symptoms of a rough passage across the Bristol Channel’.

By the next morning the troops, ‘although weakly, were quite out
of danger’. At that point Kabba Rega’s men attacked. ‘Suddenly we were startled by the savage yells of some thousand voices, which burst unexpectedly upon us!’ Baker, who was wearing white cotton clothes, was an easy target. As he walked towards his divan or hut the sergeant walking beside him was shot dead. ‘Thousands of armed natives now rushed from all directions upon the station.’

With his ‘beautifully made’ Holland breech-loading double rifle, Baker started firing into the attacking horde. He ordered his men to set fire to Kabba Rega’s ‘enormous straw buildings’ which were near by. His men began to gain the upper hand using their Snider rifles against the inferior lances and rifles of Kabba Rega’s band. Kabba Rega, ‘the young coward, had fled with all his women before the action commenced, together with his magic bamba or throne and sacred drum’.

The battle of Masindi had been won, but Baker’s ever faithful officer Mansoor was killed, receiving thirty-two lance wounds – ‘treacherously murdered instead of dying on a fair battlefield’, as Baker put it.

Interestingly, Idi Amin sought to return Kabarega, as he became known, to more honourable and, he felt, deserving status. Amin insisted that Kabarega was really a hero, an anti-colonial fighter. With his own unpredictable sense of humour he ordered the Murchison Falls, named after Baker’s great friend and ally at the RGS, to be renamed after Baker’s great enemy in Bunyoro – Kabarega.

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Gordon goes because Florence says so

Though the mosquito sleeps inside the house, the bee sleeps outside
.
Ethiopian proverb

The Bakers retired to Devon, where Sam became an eccentric local worthy. Blacksmiths, tinkers, road menders and gypsies encountered while he was out striding the lanes would be asked back for tea in the billiard room at his estate in Sandford Orleigh. He was elected president of the Devonshire Association, and town councillor for Newton Abbot. But the old Baker, who could bring down a stag with his bare hands and a hunting knife, was never far from the surface. When a travelling strongman invited the audience to imitate his feat of snapping a chain wound around his bicep, Sam Baker, seated in the front row with
Florence, took on the challenge. Still with the massive arms that had cowed the natives of the upper Nile, Baker, with a blood-vessel-bursting grimace, huffed and puffed and broke the chain in two.

Florence kept an orderly house just as she had kept an orderly camp in the Sudan. Here there was far more luxury apparent. She liked to wear diamond tiaras. They had an Abyssinian servant, and when a footman spilled some soup on a guest she remarked in a thoughtful way, ‘You should be whipped.’ Perhaps in Gondokoro, but not in Devon; the remark was an observation but not an order. In fact the Bakers were very even handed. When a small boy, the son of a visitor, kicked the butler, he was imprisoned in his room on bread and water for a day. The former slave declared, ‘Servants are our friends. We do not kick our friends.’ Sam was equally tough on spoiled guests. When two young urchins – the future King George V and his brother – arrived for a weekend Sam Baker thrashed them for breaking the branches of a tropical tree he had earlier forbidden them to climb. Their father, the Prince of Wales, must have agreed, as he maintained his fond regard for the Bakers despite his mother’s opposition to Florence on account of her journeys, while unmarried, with Sam.

Sam Baker’s replacement as head of Equatoria was General Gordon (as well as exploring the region Baker had been appointed, by the Egyptian government, Equatoria’s first ruler). He had pursued Baker’s aim at stamping out slavery with great vigour and made enemies in the process. Now it was mooted that Gordon should take over and rule the whole of the Sudan. In an article for
The Times
Baker had written, ‘Why should not General Gordon Pasha be invited to assist the government? There is no man living who would be more capable or so well fitted to represent the justice which Great Britain should establish in the Soudan.’ Gordon knew better. He did not want the job, but he knew he had to find a replacement. If he managed to avoid the Khartoum assignment he had an offer to go with Stanley into the Congo, which was more attractive than being stuck in the dusty capital of the Sudan. So Gordon suggested to Baker that he and his brother Valentine, a high-ranking army officer, should take over in Khartoum as administrative head and commander in chief respectively. Gordon – who really did not want the job – travelled down to Devon and drove through the lanes with Baker, to try and persuade the older man to take this job. When they arrived for tea at Baker’s estate it was all settled. Gordon was off the hook and the Baker brothers would go to Khartoum. The
sixty-two-year-old former explorer was very excited – though he had reckoned without Florence. She put down her bone-china cup carefully with both hands and said with that trace of a German accent, ‘You promised me that you would never go back to the Sudan without me. I do not go. So you do not go.’