The african adventure se.., p.2
The African Adventure (Search Book 9), page 2
It was the Arabs who snuffed out classical knowledge of Africa. As they overran the Byzantine rump of the old Roman empire in the latter half of the seventh century, their invasion altered the whole face which Africa turned towards Europe. Roman aqueducts were allowed to run dry; fields and towns abandoned. The large set-pieces of Roman architecture fell into disuse or became little more than quarries for Arab building material, as happened to the sixty Roman columns hauled off to the new mosque at Kairwan. Seldom was decay and change so complete. Obsolete statuary and marble was left to erode where it fell, like the broken-faced busts and sand-scarred vertebrae of the toppled columns lying in jumbled magnificence at Lepcis Magna, a few paces from the waters of the Mediterranean across which Roman galleys had once linked Europe with Africa.
Yet the Arabs also brought a more constructive revolution, for they were the first to undertake continent-wide journeys with the camel. Capable of travelling across two hundred miles of waterless desert where the Roman bullock cart had been hard put to manage a quarter the distance, the camel was as great an improvement in the Sahara as the development of the sailing vessel over the oared galley at sea. And the effects were much the same. Travel across the desert became more reliable; trade increased; new routes were opened; and perhaps most important of all, the people most skilled in the new mode of transport took control of the desert passages. But although the Sahara was less formidable as a physical barrier, the European explorer could only cross it with the connivance of the suspicious, and often fanatical, camel people.
Elsewhere in Africa, too, the newly-arriving European found himself embarrassingly dependent upon the Arab. All down the coast of East Africa, from the Red Sea to Mozambique, Arab dhow captains had traded and settled for hundreds of years. They called it the land of Az Zanj – from which came the word Zanzibar – and when Vasco da Gama brought his squadron of ships there, searching for a sea route to India, he was piloted past the treacherous coral-bound coast not so much by guesswork and a Portuguese leadsman in the bows, but by an Arab dhow master who knew the waters intimately. Three centuries later, when Stanley’s much publicized expedition ‘rescued’ David Livingstone from the blackest interior, he found the Scots missionary being cared for by a prosperous community of Arab traders who used Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika as their trading base.
Indeed in some ways it seemed that the Europeans were the slowest starters in the story of African exploration. When they began their journeys south of the Sahara at the turn of the fifteenth century, they scarcely knew as much about the continent as the far-off Chinese – who had at least seen a giraffe, sent to the Emperor as tribute and admirably painted at the imperial zoo by a Chinese artist. Another Chinese draughtsman knew enough about Africa to draw an exquisite profile of its east coast where, between the clumps of palms, he sketched in the flat-roofed houses of the Arab traders. Nevertheless it was still true, when the age of European exploration in Africa began, that almost no one had gone into the heart of Africa and returned with any worthwhile account of its peoples and places. From the north the Arabs, after crossing the Sahara, had halted on the forest fringes. In the east they preferred to stay close to the coasts. The outside world had only touched the hem of the dangerous continent. It was here, in the heart of Africa, that the European explorers were to contribute the most, as they walked, paddled, were carried in litters, or rode through an extraordinary landscape. They uncovered natural extravaganzas like the Victoria Falls on the Zambesi, the great gash of the East African Rift Valley, and a lake (Chad) with fresh water on one shore and salt crystals on the other. They found too, the incredible diversity of Africa’s peoples. With more than eight hundred languages between them – a source of considerable frustration for the travellers – native societies ranged from the sophisticated kingships of the Niger to the Stone Age cultures of the Kalahari bushmen; and their religions from simple fetishism to a fossil form of Jewry. Several tribes almost surpassed belief – Masai plastering their hair in dung and sucking fresh blood from their cattle; Sudanese warriors dressed in chain mail like refugees from the Crusades; and the Gulliver world of Ruanda where the elongated Tutsi, some of them as much as six and a half feet tall, lorded it over a race of 5-foot Twa servants.
Europe was to be fascinated by her explorers’ tales of strange sights and bizarre adventures. Pliny’s oft-quoted remark that there was always something new out of Africa was never more apt than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when every fresh journey only added to the popular appeal of Africa. Public interest was insatiable, swelling into a frenzied crescendo as explorer after explorer dashed off to make his own African discovery before it was too late. It was the great adventure of the day, and even national governments were caught up in the craze, pouring money into grandiose schemes for the exploration and acquisition of some of the most inaccessible, and worthless, territory. It was a stark contrast to the days, three centuries earlier, when African exploration was just beginning and the continent was regarded as little better than a nuisance, an irksome detour in the sea route to the Orient.
In those days, like the sun in eclipse, only the rim of Africa was seen. Portuguese ships had navigated her coasts; a handful of shore bases had been established; and any competent cartographer could have drawn an accurate outline of Africa. The empty interior, however, was reserved for the imaginative mapmaker to draw his griffons and cameleopards, his Negro kings and the wondrous Phoenix on a nest of cinnamon sticks. Under the circumstances it was not surprising that the first large-scale landings of Europeans in Africa below the Sahara should have been inspired by two semi-legendary figures – Prester John, the fabled priest-king of the eastern Christians, and Mansa Musa, Lord of Guinea.
CHAPTER TWO
Knights of Prester John
Prester John was a potentate to rival Mansa Musa. Half monk, half monarch, he ruled, it was said, over forty-two lesser kings and a strange tangle of creatures that included centaurs and Amazons and a race of shrinking giants, formerly sixty cubits tall but now dwindled to twenty. Throughout his realm there was neither lechery, nor poverty, nor robbery. His palace had walls of translucent crystal and a roof of gems, and no traveller or pilgrim was ever turned away, for every day thirty thousand guests sat down there at a miraculous table fashioned from solid emerald and held up by two pillars of amethyst. It was a table which had the marvellous quality that it prevented drunkenness, and sobriety was particularly necessary because the Prester’s guests of honour were always clerics, a dozen archbishops at his right hand, and a score of bishops at his left. Indeed so saintly was the Prester that even his domestics were luminaries of the church. His steward was a patriarch, his marshal an abbot, and his cook a prior. Through his kingdom flowed a river that spewed forth gems from a sea of sand; his clothes were made of precious salamander skin washed clean in fire; and the neighbouring kingdoms sent tributes by the camel-load. Yet amid all this magnificence the Prester himself remained a humble man. He used no grand titles but was content with the simple name of Prester, the ‘priest’, and though he had a flock of adoring wives, he allowed them to approach only four times a year. Each day he sang in person before the altar of the blessed St Thomas who had brought the true religion to his land, and his sole ambition was to crush the snake of Islam. At war he mustered a mighty host – including a division of cannibals who conveniently disposed of corpses after the battle – but in peace he travelled his dominions with only a plain wooden cross and a bowl of earth signifying that from dust he had come and to dust he would return. His death, however, was of no immediate concern, for in his kingdom sprang the Fountain of Life and anyone who bathed in it was restored to the full vigour of a man of thirty-two. The Prester himself, it was confidentially said, had taken the cure eight times and his real age was 562 years.
This extraordinary fantasy-figure had dazzled the minds of imaginative Europeans for at least four centuries before Portugal’s caravels rounded the southern horn of Africa in 1497. Quite where his fabulous realm was to be found, no one was sure. Out of Ethiopia came tantalizing snippets of information to clothe the image, reports of a Christian king who was a sworn enemy of Islam and whose court seethed with priests. Naturally it was a disappointment that his realm seemed so small, for even on the crude maps of the day Ethiopia looked a mortal-sized kingdom caught between the upper Nile and the Red Sea. But Europe’s theorists quickly found an excuse: they claimed that the Prester had been driven there by the same all-conquering Mongols who had so nearly swamped Europe. Ethiopia, therefore, was the true relic of the Prester’s famous empire, and would surely contain the quintessence of everything he had saved.
The Portuguese who first went to look for this Prester John in the 1500’s were scarcely suitable emissaries for so Christian a king. Many of them were degredados, convicted criminals given a remote chance of redeeming their sins. They sailed with ships coasting around Africa and were dumped ashore at various points along the coast with instructions to search inland for the Prester’s kingdom. If they had found it, they would have won full pardon. But the question never arose, for they never came back successful. Only by the northern and eastern approaches to Ethiopia was there any success. By disguising themselves as Muslims, at least two Arabic-speaking Portuguese travellers got through the Islamic cordon. But unfortunately for both of them, the ruler of Ethiopia was so delighted that he refused to let them return home, and the wretched men spent the rest of their lives at his court in gilded captivity.
There was just enough truth in the Prester John legend when applied to Ethiopia, to sustain the hopes of the men who sought the mysterious realm of the Christians. The medieval kingdom of Ethiopia lay sprawled across the high plateau which later generations would call the Roof of Africa. It was a severe and forbidding region, corrugated with wild mountains and ravines and obscured for several months of the year by thick drenching mists which hung over the uplands. In summer there were torrential downpours which made travel almost impossible along the narrow footpaths, and even in fine weather the rough terrain reduced all traffic to single files of porters and pack animals creeping laboriously through the spectacular defiles and over barren mountain passes. Settlement was confined to a handful of towns along the routeways, and to innumerable small hamlets huddling cautiously against the mountains on whose peaks the inhabitants took refuge in time of war. In more settled days their cattle grazed the valleys or their farmers tilled the thin soils of tiny fields scraped out of the hillsides. To the eye of the traveller the country had a striking and bleak grandeur – ridge after ridge of mountain folds extending to the horizon, and all their peaks rising to much the same height like the waves in an endless seascape of grey rock.
Ethiopia was unique in that she was a long-established Christian kingdom in Africa. In the fourth century ad Graeco-Roman traders had brought the religion to the port towns of the Red Sea, and from there the religion had spread up into the highlands, taking root and flourishing in a spectacular style. The Ethiopian ruler, the Negus, claimed direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; and many of his people held themselves to be heirs to an emigrant race of Jews. Their Christianity was fierce and belligerent. When fortune favoured her, Ethiopia lapped down from her mountain peaks and spread out over the lowlands, reaching north-east as far as the Red Sea coast. In the height of her pride, just before the Europeans found her, it was said that the Negus would beat the ground with his whip and called upon the earth to bring forth more enemies, for he had defeated all his country’s foes. When conditions changed and Ethiopia came under attack, she merely contracted back to her mountain fastnesses and the secure protection of the seven-thousand-foot rampart of the great rift valley which formed her eastern frontier.
Here on the plateau her Christianity took on strange mutations and splendid emphasis. An astonishing proportion of her population went into the church in one role or another, as monks or priests, as travelling mendicants, or as lay brothers. Women joined as nuns, and children could be baptized as deacons while still babes in arms. Fanatics performed strange acts of penance, wearing iron girdles studded with nails or sitting for days in tubs of freezing water up to their necks. Religious buildings were everywhere, in the villages and towns, as isolated monasteries on the mountain tops, or like the churches of Lalibela, carved from the living rock. The church was a great landowner and in government the clerics rose to positions of immense power. The entire edifice was founded on a peculiar and almost literal interpretation of the Testaments. Drawing upon the Gospels and finding inspiration in the episodes of Christ’s life, Ethiopian Christianity had flourished and put forth exotic blossoms in art and architecture, ceremonial and creed. There were the magnificent sad-eyed wall paintings illustrating the Gospel stories with a fascination for the role of Mary; enormous open-air consecrations at which the Abuna or archbishop of the country ordained hundreds of priests in a single ceremony; wild monks with matted hair and leather gowns who fought as berserkers in the imperial army; and mystic baptisms at which everyone, from the Negus downward, reconfirmed their faith by passing through tanks of water.
Beneath this religious fervour were the problems of ruling a warlike and scattered people, divided into clans and factions. At the centre lay the royal court clustered around the person of the Negus himself. His power was absolute, but in such a turbulent country his dynasty lasted only as long as his authority over the powerful war chiefs. So his court never rested in one place for long. A great tented encampment, it moved around the country like the royal pieces in a huge chess game, ready to checkmate the Negus’s rivals with the threat of an imperial army. The royal brothers, as potential claimants to the throne, were incarcerated for life in a mountain-top fortress and anyone who contacted them was put to death. Any provincial governor who grew too strong was dismissed; and the Negus himself built up a personal mystique, surrounded by his imperial messengers and the royal lions – the symbols of his authority.
Yet Ethiopia was not entirely isolated. Traditionally the Abuna was a foreigner, appointed by the Coptic church in Alexandria and sent from Egypt. In Jerusalem, too, there was a house for Ethiopian pilgrims to the Holy Land, and one or two religious embassies had carried on to Rome itself. There was, in fact, just enough contact for Europe to nurse hopes of finding Prester John in Ethiopia, a symbol as brilliant in his own way as the lure of Mansa Musa and his gold. The result, when the Europeans explored in earnest, was a feat of Portuguese knight errantry which was to come near to eclipsing the efforts of the conquistadors in the New World.
The first sizeable Portuguese embassy to get through to Prester John made a bad start. They landed on the Red Sea coast of Ethiopia in April 1520 and the local provincial governor, the Bahrnagast, came down to the beach to greet them with an escort of native tribesmen. In his honour, and incidentally as a useful demonstration of their technical prowess, the Portuguese squadron which had brought the embassy, fired off a broadside. Unfortunately one of their guns was still shotted, so that to everyone’s consternation a large cannon ball went whizzing through the group of dignitaries surrounding the Barhnagast. Luckily no one was injured, though the ball ricochetted three times on its way past. Full of apologies the Portuguese sent to make amends, only to be greeted with the Bahrnagast’s cool reassurance that no one was safe unless God pleased, and that the ball had done no one any harm. The Portuguese were happily ignorant that the Bahrnagast’s calm philosophy was based on the extraordinarily low value which he and his countrymen placed on human life. Far from standing on the edge of Prester John’s tranquil and prosperous kingdom, the Portuguese embassy was about to step into a turbulent African society which would surprise and shock them with its strange mixture of piety and violence.
The fourteen members of the Portuguese embassy were themselves an ill-assorted group to be representing their country. In command was Rodrigo da Lima. He had only recently been appointed because King Manoel’s original ambassador, a seventy-year-old diplomat, had died the previous month and his corpse lay buried in the sand of one of the off-shore islands. Da Lima was arrogant, young, and tactless, and he was already quarrelling with his second-in-command, Jorge d’Abreu, who fancied himself better fitted to lead the embassy. Trying to hold the balance between the two bantams was Father Francisco Alvarez, once a chaplain to King Manoel and now the priest with the task of investigating the religion of Prester John. His diary was to be the first account of Ethiopia published in Europe. Lesser figures in the embassy included a clerk; a painter who was supposed to put on canvas the sights which the party encountered and also to draw and paint for the amusement of Prester John in his palace; a musician in charge of a portable organ (also for the Prester’s entertainment); a barber-surgeon; and a number of Portuguese servants, mostly selected for their ability at singing mass melodiously. As a gift they had originally intended bringing a huge four-poster bed complete with blue and yellow taffeta curtains, blankets embroidered with the Portuguese coat-of-arms, and a canopy which showed an emperor crowning a queen while four men sounded trumpets. Unfortunately the bed had not survived the journey, and from a scratch collection among the fleet Da Lima found himself equipped with four lengths of tapestry, the organ, a gold sword with a rich hilt, two obsolete swivel guns together with some powder and shot, some pieces of armour, and a map of the world. It was a shabby offering for so magnificent a potentate as the Prester John they expected to find.
