Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (58 page)

S
ans
boiler the noble
Faidherbe
would be useless against the current. She had no sails and was too heavy to row. So another wooden road, a neat parody, we can now see with the comfort of hindsight, of
Kitchener’s railway. Along this road, which ran alongside the dry river, the boiler would be rolled to the new resting position of the
Faidherbe
.

So in the south we have the French, quixotically making a wooden railway along which to roll a ship’s boiler. Up north you have the passionless, idealess
rosbifs
building a real railway – rails and sleepers and all – and they were winning. Kitchener’s army was already at the junction of the Atbara river and the White Nile, getting closer by the day. The British had steam trains while the French didn’t even have a boiler.

Engineer Souyri gave up in disgust and retreated back to the Congo. Days after he had left, the boiler arrived. Marchand’s men then rebuilt the engine slowly, painstakingly, relying on diagrams in their now rotting notebooks.

In the kitchen garden the expedition’s doctor grew lettuces, radishes, spinaches, aubergines, cucumbers. When a Dinka chief walked thirty miles with a brother who had, he said, been constipated for seven weeks, a terrible ailment it has to be admitted, the doctor mixed up a remedy involving spinach, cod-liver oil, senna pods and pepper. The results were said to have been explosively satisfactory. But still the rains did not come.

Unbeknown to Marchand, the British had meanwhile won yet another war – slaughtering the Mahdi’s men and taking Omdurman, all according to plan. The Prime Minister Lord Salisbury would probably have offered a face-saving formula to the French. The territory that Marchand had traversed along the Bahr el-Ghazal could have been given to the French, and, if the French government had not at that moment just imploded over the Dreyfus Affair, a more conciliatory attitude might have been taken. But Salisbury’s Cabinet were not so diplomatically minded. They had won a war that had cost few lives but a lot of effort; they would not be denied their absolute rights over the Nile.

Britain had a big army very close to Fashoda. The French, though on a war footing, with the navy in the process of mobilising, were very far from being able to fight a war in Africa over a few acres of swamp. Britain was willing, had an army
in situ
and a navy vastly more powerful than that of France. That didn’t stop the French drawing up an invasion plan – of Britain! The tentacles of the Nile reach everywhere. Control of a river in Africa was leading towards a great war in Europe.

The
Faidherbe
was moored on the Nile at Fashoda, where Marchand
and his men had built a camp. A few miles downstream were the British, who had travelled upriver as soon as Omdurman had been fought and won. The British were demanding that the French leave. The French wouldn’t. It was all very polite on the surface. There was no attempt to tear down the tricolore. Kitchener knew enough not to be heavy handed. The stand-off continued for months. The invasion plan was seen to be impractical and was withdrawn.

Meanwhile there was one last chance for the French to assert themselves, a 10,000-strong Ethiopian force with several Cossack mercenaries and a French citizen named Faivre and a Swiss citizen improbably called Potter.

The then Ethiopian emperor Menelik II (before being emperor he had been imprisoned by mad Theodore, though he ended up marrying Theodore’s daughter) had started sending Ethiopian troops south and west from the Ethiopian highlands to claim more of Africa. They had with them European advisers who naturally sought also to advance European interests. These men could lend their force to a joint French–Ethiopian claim to the upper waters of the Nile. The only problem was that the Ethiopian soldiers couldn’t see the point of marshy, disease-ridden Equatorial Africa. They found the conditions of travel so appalling that, though they reached the Nile, it was with a reduced force of only 800, the rest having deserted or died, lost to dysentery and malaria. When it came to asserting France’s claims alongside Ethiopia’s, they planted two fluttering flags side by side on the bank. Two Ethiopians swam out to an island to push their claims a few yards further, but of the French/Swiss force only Potter (or was he perhaps a cunningly placed British interloper?) could swim, and he was now delirious with fever.

Even with this failure, the French government clung to the hope of a solution that would be to their advantage. In the end they ordered Marchand, somewhat humiliatingly via a letter sent through Kitchener, that one officer should be sent to Cairo and then to Paris to further the decision-making process. Time passed, and conditions for the British were markedly worse than for the French. The French knew how to live. They sent daily baskets of produce from their gardens sown with European vegetables to Kitchener and his men, who were living on army biscuit, roasted hippo and a sort of Nile weed thought to be nutritious. There were a dozen deaths a week in the British camp, which was situated on the toad-infested mudflats downriver from Fashoda.
The temperature was often over 40 degrees and not even Kitchener’s officers had mosquito nets, whereas Marchand and every one of his Senegalese and Yakoma men had been using them since their departure from the west coast of Africa.

In the end the five months of waiting became too much for Marchand. He went to Cairo himself to plead with the French Ambassador to support his tenuous hold on Fashoda. The answer was not only no, it was a no that transformed Marchand at a stroke from being a man who had led an heroic force to being an isolated adventurer, an obsessional nut, an embarrassment. He was warned not to wear his uniform in Cairo for fear of giving offence. Unable to save face, the government in Paris sought to use Marchand as a scapegoat, claiming that his well-stocked fort in Fashoda was ‘on the verge of starvation’.

Marchand was so disgusted that he never again spoke of Fashoda. Like his government, he desired to wash that memory of the Nile for ever from his life. He wept openly at the handing-over ceremony to the British.

To justify his journey, perhaps only to himself, Marchand decided to continue with the gallant ship
Faidherbe
up the Sobat river into Ethiopia. It is the Sobat that pours ‘white’ silt into the Nile and gives the lower river its name. It was slow and tortuous going as they were now running against the current. The river grew rockier and drier, the
Faidherbe
ground against stones and finally bottomed out on a ledge of limestone and began to take on water. She would go no further. Rather than simply leave her, the expedition unanimously agreed that she deserved a more dignified resting place. Two days of hard slog saw the completion of a little dry dock. With huge effort the
Faidherbe
was dragged into it and saluted, then toasted in one of the last bottles of champagne they had left: ‘Our brave little ship! May she rest in peace.’

They trekked on for six weeks to Addis Ababa, Harar and finally the French port at Djibouti. The going was rough and stony but it was a blessed relief after the swamps and jungles. At the edge of the Indian Ocean they hoisted the tattered tricolore they had raised with such high hopes and lowered in shame at Fashoda. Marchand perhaps wept again. It is not recorded. Back in France the expedition was sidelined by the establishment, but over the years the reputation of Marchand’s incredible journey grew – though only within the French-speaking world. In Britain his exploits are all but unknown.

Rusted remains of the steamer
Faidherbe
lie to this day on the banks
of the upper Sobat, tribute to the determination of Capitaine Jean-Baptiste Marchand. Sadly, though, the boiler was taken out to be hammered into tribal weaponry many years ago.

40
•
The first trans-African traveller, circa 1898

‘Don’t come to me, I will come to you,’ said the malaria
.
Upper Nile saying

The days of the old Nile explorers were merging into a new age of colonial expansion: explorer + Maxim = colony being the general equation. The extent of European penetration into the Nile region around the turn of the twentieth century made for safer travel – if you were on the right side. This meant that much longer journeys through Africa were now possible.

Possibly one of the most unPC travellers was the empire builder Ewart Grogan, who in 1898–1900 became the first man to travel from the Cape in South Africa to Cairo, via the headwaters of the Nile. Grogan had failed at school and university in England, and had gone to South Africa to make his fortune. When he asked a young woman to marry him, she said she would not unless he proved he could succeed at something. So he rashly decided on his plan to become the first man to traverse Africa from south to north.

Mentored by Cecil Rhodes, Grogan saw Africa as one big opportunity for the British to extend the reach of their empire – through hard work, not mere appropriation, it must be said. Grogan was immensely tough and brave, a Cambridge dropout and a first-rate shot. His comments on people with a darker-hued skin are probably what has kept his otherwise fascinating account of walking from Cape to Cairo out of print, other than the poor print-on-demand copies which render some pages unreadable.

Grogan enters our story when he hits the Nile basin in eastern Rwanda. His Watusi guide had introduced him to some ‘ape-like creatures leering at me from behind some banana-palms’. One of these creatures is described as ‘a tall man with long arms, pendant paunch, and the short legs of the ape, pronouncedly microcephalous and prognathous’. These creatures were easily alarmed, but once they
realised that Grogan was friendly they explained by sign language exactly how to capture elephants – which was one of Grogan’s interests (he treated the whole trip partly as an extended hunting holiday). Grogan writes:

These primitive people were not pygmies – their height ruled that out – so who were they? Grogan could, of course, be telling a whopper. Yet earlier, when shown the carcass of what is obviously a giant mountain gorilla, he doesn’t embellish it by saying he has seen a living one. Grogan does, however, report the local rumour that these gorillas carry off local maidens from time to time. King Kong must be a hard-wired myth.

Of course people lie all the time just to tell a good story – and what could be a better yarn than a personal meeting with the missing link? And by showing the modern African’s dominance over the primitive hominid – from which he evolved – the account supports similar European notions of superiority over the African, notions which Grogan definitely subscribed to.

Yet it is important to note that Grogan came from a different age and, it is obvious from his writing, was far from enlightened about the abilities of people very different to himself. I don’t think he ever questioned for one moment his assumed superiority over the native African. Nor do I think that the character he displays, which is bluff and rather open, is congruent with the sly insertion of a bit of racial propaganda. He’s a racist, but an unthinking and undogmatic one, the kind who ‘loves’ (and patronises) Africans rather than hates and
despises them, and he sees as a ‘threat’ not the Africans themselves but other Europeans who would colonise the continent if the British weren’t smart about it.

Liars aren’t parsimonious with lies. They tell them in bunches. If you read an account by a liar such as Colonel Fawcett (who disappeared in the Brazilian jungle in the 1920s), you find every page has vagaries and amazements such as sixty-foot anacondas (there has never been a captured and recorded anaconda exceeding twenty-two feet in length), lost jungle cities and a paste used by Indians to dissolve stone. Liars don’t hold back and tell just one pointless fib in a book of 378 pages.

If Grogan is to be believed, and the matter-of-fact way he presents his story, with no hint of drama, suggests he should, then it is quite possible that he encountered a last surviving group of a hominid such as
Homo ergaster
/
erectus
(
ergaster
is usually considered to have preceded
erectus
, but sometimes the names are used interchangeably). We know from hearth evidence that
Homo ergaster
could use fire and we know he was a tool user. The fact that Grogan’s creatures have wiry body hair is also suggestive of what we know of
Homo ergaster
and earlier pre-
Homo sapiens
hominids. That such a group could have survived so long in isolation is remarkable, but far from impossible.
Homo erectus
, we know for sure, survived in Asia until less than 10,000 years ago. In the rest of the world he died out 200,000 years ago – or so we believe. Recently it has come to be accepted that Neanderthals and modern
Homo sapiens
may well have interbred. Some even consider that later
Homo ergaster
/
erectus
may also have interbred with
Homo sapiens
. Could Grogan’s ‘missing link’ have been a group of such hominids? We know from fossil evidence that
Homo habilis
and
Homo erectus
lived alongside each other for thousands of years. Perhaps, too, this happened for far longer than imagined between
Homo erectus
and
Homo sapiens sapiens
.

But it was not this information that interested the British authorities in Cairo, to whom Grogan reported (breathlessly perhaps?) at the completion of his stupendous hike. Ernst the Norwegian runner would have been proud of him. No, the information the British coveted was about the Atem river. Grogan suggested that this river could be used as an alternative channel to the Nile, which was so thoroughly blocked by the papyrus and elephant grass of the Sudd. It was the Atem which would later feature in the plans for the Jonglei Canal. The Nile was slowly succumbing to man’s control, or so it seemed.