African Genesis

THE STRONG BROWN GOO: THE STORY OF THE NIGER RIVER

by SANCHE DE GRAMONT 350 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $12.50.

This is history to make the gods weep, perhaps with laughter. Three incompatible cultures met late in the 18th century, when English explorers began to poke into the great fever swamp of western Africa that is now Nigeria. Arab traders had arrived 300 years earlier, recommending their religion and bringing news that a minor local industry, slave raiding, could be the basis of a thriving export trade. The Britons advocated their own faith. They also urged the unwelcome view that slavery was immoral. It interfered with the manpower needed for the palm-oil trade.

In a series of adventures that might have sprung from the imagination of Evelyn Waugh, Englishmen were sold leaky dugouts, assisted with false geographical information and detained as house pets by bemused native kings. Malaria felled the adventurers in wholesale lots. The curative properties of quinine had been known for two centuries, but the drug had been brought from Peru by Jesuits and thus was thought unfit for Protestants. At least one explorer, Richard Lander, was forced to drink poison. This ritual proved his good faith when he survived it, and he was permitted to watch human sacrifices. "The head is severed from the trunk with an ax," he wrote blandly, "and the smoking blood gurgles into a calabash..."

Baffling Travelers. A chronicle in which explorer after explorer vanishes into the jungle necessarily lacks the grand narrative sweep of Alan Moorehead's The White Nile and The Blue Nile. But Sanche de Gramont, an able journalist and popular historian (The French: Portrait of a People), has written a book, covering roughly the years 1790 to the present, with its own ironic fascination. At the outset, as was true of the Nile, no European knew the source of the Niger (in the mountains about 200 miles east of Sierra Leone). Its destination was also unknown. There were even disputes about the direction in which it flowed. One lunatic--and popular--theory had the river making its way across the Sahara to the Nile.

Only after four decades of exploration did the world learn that the Niger flowed northeast, then took a mighty turn at Timbuctoo and continued south into the Gulf of Guinea at the slave-trading settlement called Brass.

Geographical mysteries were thus solved, but the region's weakened and debased societies and its fever-ridden travelers remained baffling to each other. In 1854 a German Lutheran explorer named Heinrich Earth was detained in Timbuctoo for eight months before rival political factions agreed to release him. An Arab officer in favor of Earth's execution spoke disapprovingly of Christians: "They sit like women in the bottom of their steamboats and do nothing but eat raw eggs."

Forty years later a lack of rapport still was noticeable. In 1894 Sir Fred erick Lugard, who was to become Nigeria's first Governor, traveled to an inner principality called Borgu and succeeded in getting two treaties signed in favor of the British Royal Niger Company. As he returned there was a brief skirmish. Lugard reported with the stiffest possible upper lip: "The only casualty in the fighting line was myself, an arrow having penetrated deep into my skull." When he got home, he sustained another grievous wound: the signatures on the treaties were fake.

There is no falsity about the signatures that Africa has left on De Gramont's pages. Any flaws in this evocative account are those of omission, not commission. The emerging nation surrounding the Niger has great physical presence; it is its current political and social aspects that are largely unexplored.

The author refers to his own eventful Nigeria trip in a rather hurried epilogue, but he leaves the reader hungry for news of the interior, for reports on the nation that survived its predators. "The obscurest epoch is today," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strong Brown God proves it. Old Africa stands revealed; current Nigeria apparently remains terra incognita.

John Skow

With reporting by John Skow

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