How was slavery - especially industrial-scale slavery, known as the slave trade - seen in the 18th and 19th centuries? As something completely normal and absolute. Not only by Europeans (although it was during this time that the first abolitionist movements began to gain strength on that continent), but also by Africans themselves, who were willing to sell each other for sophisticated goods such as an umbrella, a mirror, or a musket with bullets and gunpowder to then capture their neighbor and sell them as slaves.
And certainly, by the Arabs, who had been conducting that trade for over a thousand years under a monopoly through two routes. One was through the Sahara, from sub-Saharan Africa to the southern shore of the Mediterranean, marked by the skeletons of slaves along the way. The other was through the Indian Ocean, transporting captives to the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and India. In fact, the largest slave rebellion in history, with the exception of Haiti in 1791, was the Zanj Rebellion in what is now Basra, Iraq, in the year 869. It lasted 14 years, was suppressed by the total extermination of the rebels... and has been erased from history.
With this semi-official view of slavery, it is logical that four decades have passed since the last books or films were made that addressed the slave trade phenomenon with all its brutality and cultural complexity. Perhaps the last ones were the historical novel by the British author Bruce Chatwin The Viceroy of Ouidah, in 1980, and Cobra Verde, the brutal (but faithful) film adaptation made seven years later by the German filmmaker - and friend of the writer - Werner Herzog, in which Klaus Kinski played his final leading role of his career.
But if there are no recent works, there are testimonies from that era. And perhaps the most eloquent ones are those of European explorers of Africa. Firstly, because they all entered that continent through the slave caravan routes, often as part of the caravans themselves. Secondly, because their notes detailed the everyday life of African people, where owning human beings was absolutely normal. And thirdly, because they came from Europe, where slavery was beginning to be questioned.
And this is where a 24-year-old Scottish doctor (at the time, a surgeon), tall, handsome, and shy named Mungo - in honor of the patron saint of Glasgow, like his father - Park enters the scene, becoming one of the most important figures in British exploration of Africa.
Bruce the Ethiopian: the Scottish adventurer who 'discovered' the Nile... manipulating the story of the Spaniard who achieved it a century and a half earlier
Although he never completed his exploration, the name of Mungo Park is inexorably linked to the Niger, the river that brought him fame and ultimately death. In January or February of 1806, his canoe was mistaken by members of the Busa community - in the Northeast of what is now Nigeria - as part of a military expedition of the bellicose Fulani tribe. The boat was riddled with arrows and spears, and Park drowned while trying to reach the riverbank he had dedicated eight years - a quarter of his life - to exploring.
Traveling through the lower course of the Niger was suicidal. Local tribes had warned Park of the state of war in the region, making it almost impossible to reach the river's mouth alive, now a delta devastated by oil exploitation and organized crime. But Park was likely obsessed with reaching the delta, although he died 811 kilometers away from it, a distance almost equivalent to the entire length of the Ebro River.
The explorer's fixation is understandable. After all, Park had proven that the Niger, after describing a surreal curve into the continent, turned westward and emptied its waters into the Atlantic. Thus, he solved a geographical puzzle that had puzzled half of Europe for centuries, including far-fetched explanations such as the Niger crossing all of Africa to reach the Nile in a 3,000-kilometer journey, or dying in the Sahara, although another major African river, the Okavango (in Botswana and Namibia) or Cubango (in Angola), does pour its waters into the sands of the Kalahari Desert.
Although the Niger does not have the mythical tone of the Nile or the Congo, it is immensely large. It surpasses the Mississippi by over 500 kilometers in length and, to put it into an Iberian context, it is as long as four times the Tagus River. Discovering its course was critical for Great Britain and France, who were beginning the African race that would eventually divide most of the continent between the two countries.
In a politically fragmented continent, where commercial exchanges were limited to raw materials such as gold, ivory, beeswax, and human beings, rivers were the only access route to the interior. Controlling a river meant controlling its banks, its basin, and all the kingdoms or communities that depended on it. With Europeans unable to enter Africa due to tropical diseases, a few strategically placed military outposts along a major river could provide acceptable control over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of its basin.
The Niger was the main target of the newly created African Association, whose official name leaves little doubt about its objective: African Association for the Promotion of the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. The founder was Joseph Banks, a naturalist, millionaire, and companion of Captain Cook's voyage around the world, who in 1788 sent a former military man, Daniel Houghton, to discover the exact course of the Niger and its mouth (if it existed). Poor Houghton died of dehydration in what would now correspond to northeastern Mauritania, in the heart of the Sahara, after the inhabitants of the village of Tichitt (the first settlement in sub-Saharan Africa where stone was used in constructions 6,000 years ago) refused to give him food and water.
Houghton's death highlights the brutal difficulties of reaching the Niger. There were three options. The most common - and the most absurd - was to depart from Cairo, Egypt, and cheerfully cross 3,300 kilometers of desert - the distance between Madrid and Baghdad - to reach Timbuktu, the mythical city on the riverbanks. The second was to travel through what is now Morocco, Western Sahara, Algeria, and Mauritania before entering the tropical forests of Guinea. If thirst and hunger did not kill one in the first part of the journey, tropical diseases would in the second.
Park chose the third option: to enter directly from the Atlantic until he stumbled upon the Niger, and then follow it to its mouth. Others would take care of discovering its source. "My instructions were very direct and concise (...) to determine the course and, if possible, the source and termination of that river," he wrote. The African Association offered him a salary and equipment for his journey. But it did not promise him any reward if he succeeded.
That's how he arrived in Africa in May 1795, with only his notebook, a compass, and his unwavering determination. His plan seemed as destined for failure as those of his predecessors. But for some reason, Park was lucky, although he did not live to tell the tale.
"My instructions were very direct and concise: to determine the course and, if possible, the source and termination of that river."
What he did live for was to combine geographical exploration with the study of the region's tremendous botany and, above all, with observations of African life made from an absolutely respectful perspective. Park is possibly the explorer who viewed the people of Africa with the most dignity and virtues, far from the racist sensationalism of Burton, the racist imperialism of Speke, and the racist paternalism of Livingstone. Some of his texts were revolutionary for the time, such as when he wrote: "I am entirely convinced that any difference between the black and the European in the shape of the nose or the color of the skin does not affect genuine sympathies or the characteristic feelings of our common nature."
The examples of his nose and skin color were not coincidental. On more than one occasion, Park was stripped naked so that people could see that he was indeed white. In Ségou, then the capital of the Bambara Empire and now in central Mali, the concubines of a harem did not believe him when he explained that his elongated nose was natural, not the result of years of stretching.
And yet Park made his two trips to Africa in the company of slave traders and even as a commercial agent for those traders. First, he stayed at the home of John Dailey, a British man who bought and sold people in what is now Gambia. Park celebrates in his writings the "great humanity" of Dailey, who, when he left in search of the Niger, gave him one of his slaves, Demba, and assigned him a free man who went by the name of Johnson, whose life, incredible as it may sound to us today, was not uncommon at that time. He had been enslaved in Africa, taken to Jamaica, freed on that island, and, in the company of his former master, traveled to the United Kingdom before returning to his local community (Squanto, the Native American who prevented the Pilgrims who colonized the US from starving to death in their first winter, had been a slave in Spain).
Park's travels are marked by the usual hardships faced by explorers of the time. Highwaymen steal his provisions. Johnson deserts him. He falls ill countless times. And only his observation of the technological marvel of an umbrella that opens and closes convinces a local chief to let him continue on his way. So, over time, he learns, and joins the slave caravans. This slows down the march, because the traffickers need to see the merchandise, which is sometimes in terrible condition, having been kept in huts or even dungeons for years, in darkness and covered in their own excrement.
Park describes everything with absolute coldness, although at times lamenting "the sad appearance" of the captives, while defending the communities he visits (and from which the slaves themselves sometimes come) by writing that "these hospitable people are despised by the Moors as an abject race of slaves, and are treated accordingly."
Park's objective coldness means that his texts provide unexpected information about slavery, such as when he recounts that the journey through the interior of Africa, before being shipped to America or elsewhere, causes much more mortality among the captives than the Middle Passage, as the Americans of the time called the sinister route of the Atlantic slave ships.
He also explains something that seems surprising to us today: the slaves' greatest fear is psychological. Their fears center on superstitions such as whether in the land of the white people the ground is in the sky and vice versa, or why Europeans are so horribly ugly in their eyes, especially because of the straight hair characteristic of the white race, which makes them fear that they are demons who are going to eat them. When Park explains to them that in their destination country they will have to work the land, they calm down, perhaps because it is an activity they are familiar with and, possibly, because in the conditions in which they have been kept as slaves, it does not sound like a particularly serious deterioration in their living conditions.
And, in the end, it is Park who ends up enslaved when, sick and on the verge of death, he decides to give up following the Niger River to Timbuktu. He then begins his return to the coast and, in the kingdom of Ludamar, located between what is now Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania (a country that, incidentally, did not criminalize the possession of slaves until 2007), the local leader captures him. Although he is not a slave, because there was no market for white people, he recounts that he is "insulted, beaten, and treated with the utmost cruelty and violence. I considered myself a slave."
He escapes one night and, after crossing 300 kilometers of desert alone, arrives at the station of his friend, the slave trader Dailey. There, he recovers. But, with no money to return to Europe, he embarks as a passenger on the island of Gorée—one of Africa's largest slave ports, in Senegal—on a British slave ship bound for the Caribbean.
Park, always meticulous in his descriptions—especially those of people—barely mentions the journey, nor the (usually horrific) conditions on slave ships, nor does he say whether he used his knowledge of medicine and African languages to help keep the cargo alive, which, after all, tended to have a much lower mortality rate than that of sailors. Because a dead slave meant an economic loss, while a deceased sailor meant savings on wages.
Be that as it may, he finally arrived in the United Kingdom in December 1797 and his book Travels in the Interior of Africa became a bestseller. He married the daughter of his mentor in the arts of medicine, Allison Anderson, with whom he had four children in six years, and settled as a doctor in Scotland, on a property given to him by his father-in-law. Everything was going so well that he became bored. So in 1806, he embarked on another trip to the Niger with the African Association. His purpose, as he wrote to the leaders of the Association, was irrevocable: "To discover the mouth of the river or perish in the attempt."
The journey was a disaster from the start. Only four of the 44 men who set out from what is now Gambia reached the Niger. The region was at war, so he decided to avoid Timbuktu and continue south. That is how he disappeared in Bussa. His body was never found. But his writings, compiled by one of his sons, are a legacy that blends in equal parts the curiosity, courage, and humanity with which he faced the unknown. Far from being a conqueror, Mungo Park was a witness: to rivers, to peoples, to borders, and to the great moral contradictions of human beings, which are far more complicated than the geography of Africa's most secret kingdom.