The World полностью

One Omani–Zanzibari warlord, Tippu Tip, hacked out an empire of 250,000 square miles. He was ‘a tall, black bearded man, of negroid complexion, in the prime of life, straight and quick’, wrote a journalist. ‘He had a fine intelligent face, with a nervous twitching of the eyes,’ always dressed in dazzling white with a silver filigreed dagger. He had a dictum: ‘Slaves cost nothing; they have only to be gathered.’ When a boatload of enslaved women and children were lost over a waterfall, he just said, ‘What a pity – it was a fine canoe.’

Not all the slave trade was in the hands of Arabs: two Nyamwezi warlords ruled swathes of Congo for decades. One of those warlords, Mytela Kasanda, fought the Omanis, adopting the name Mirambo – Corpses – and leading his ruga-ruga militiamen who wore shirts of flayed human skin, caps of human scalps, belts of human intestines and teeth necklaces. His rival Msiri ruled his Yeke kingdom in Katanga, armed by his Afro-Portuguese ally Coimbra from Angola whose elegant sister, Maria de Fonseca, was a player in her own right. Msiri married his daughter to Tippu Tip to confirm their alliance.

In the south-east, the chief potentate was Mutesa, kabaka (king) of Buganda (Uganda), a strapping but psychotic dictator, his body embellished with copper rings and jewellery, who held court for thirty years from 1856 at a royal capital of huge huts, attended by his mother, 400 wives, ministers and executioners, deploying a vast army and a fleet of canoes that traded ivory and slaves. Winning power aged nineteen with a family massacre, Mutesa, whose dynasty had ruled for two centuries, maintained his dominance with capricious killings and tortures, sanctified by seasonal human sacrifices of 800 victims.

Ruling around two million people, the kabaka played off Muslims and Christians, Zanzibaris and Egyptians, as he expanded his kingdom. Further south, a fearsome Goan warlord, Manuel de Souza, known as Gouveia, leveraged his uncle’s plantations into a personal slaving and ivory fief in Portuguese Zambezia, building a private African army and taking over the Gasa kingdom to become Lord of Manica; he married the daughter of a Barue king, their son becoming heir to the throne. All of these were slave states locked in a frenzied spasm of predatory wars for land, slaves and ivory that now attracted the biggest African power: Egypt.

ISMAIL AND TEWODROS: THE BATTLE FOR EAST AFRICA

After taking Sudan, Ismail pushed further into central Africa, annexing Equatoria (northern Uganda), where as governor he hired General ‘Chinese’ Gordon, last seen fighting the Taiping for Empress Cixi. Even though Ismail was a slave lord, Gordon took the job to fight slavery.

Then Ismail turned to Ethiopia, a vast multi-ethnic region divided up into Christian kingdoms and Islamic sultanates, nominally ruled by a negus negust, king of kings – or emperor – of the Christian dynasty, claiming descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, though certainly descended from its medieval founder Menelik. In 1855, a minor nobleman, Kassa Hailu, conquered the kingdoms of Tigray, Gojjam, Showa and Wollo, imprisoned their Solomonic princes in his mountain fortress Magdala and crowned himself Negus Negust Tewodros II. ‘Of medium stature but possessing a well-knit muscular frame capable of enduring any amount of fatigue’, Tewodros had ‘a noble bearing and a majestic walk, and he was the best shot, the best spearman, the best runner, and the best horseman’.

At his Magdala eyrie, he favoured one prisoner, a young Showan prince named Sahle Maryam – later known as Menelik – to whom he married his daughter. Menelik had revered Tewodros, ‘who educated me, for whom I’d always cherished filial, deep affection’. After the death of Tewodros’s beloved wife, the emperor started to unravel. Menelik escaped, while Tewodros tossed his prisoners off a cliff, then killed and tortured many more. In 1862, the erratic emperor requested British aid against Muslim potentates and, when it was not forthcoming, he imprisoned British envoys and missionaries. Disraeli dispatched 13,000 troops under Sir Robert Napier, quintessential soldier of empire, who had fought Sikhs, Indians and Chinese. In April 1868, Napier defeated Tewodros outside Magdala, killing 900 Ethiopians to two British losses after which the desperate emperor released his British hostages, threw his Ethiopian prisoners off the precipice and then, as Napier stormed the fortress, shot himself. Rewarded with a peerage, Lord Napier of Magdala looted Ethiopian treasures but withdrew^* as rival princes led by Menelik of Showa and Kasa Mercha of Tigray vied for the throne. Kasa won, and was crowned Yohannes IV.