Africa's Niger

...so Stanley's epic journey began high on the river, where it was known as the Lualaba...

...they were driven by a sense of adventure and intellectual curiosity...

...Some explorers believed the Niger flowed from West to East Africa and was in fact the Nile...

...Like the Nile, the Niger ends in a delta, with hundreds of entries to the ocean, which confuse the task...

...If there is any disappointment in The Strong Brown God it is that it is essentially a piece of historicism based on voracious reading...

...In The Strong Brown God, Sanche de Gramont, a distinguished French-born reporter formerly with the New York Herald-Tribune and International Herald-Tribune, has summarized the work and times of the great Niger explorers and the forces behind them, mostly in France and Britain...

...The Niger, as Gramont demonstrates, is a figure in its own right, high god of the water spirits of a host of small nations...

...Russell Warren Howe is a former foreign correspondent with long and wide experience in Africa...

...I would not argue with Gramont's conclusion that Heinrich Barth, a German, was the most accomplished Niger explorer of them all, yet Cornish Dick Lander, one of the few good rednecks to come to Africa, is a deservedly popular hero and an easier person to understand and like...

...the task of the explorer was to find the source of what the British explorer Richard Burton called the cradle of Moses...

...The estuary of the Congo was discovered in the late Fifteenth Century by a Portuguese navigator, Dioga Cao, who soon found that it was not uninterruptedly navigable beyond Matadi, a few days march from the coast...

...RUSSELL WARREN HOWE Africa has produced no explorers or navigators of its own, unless one counts an Arab ship's master from Zanzibar who reached New York under sail in the early Nineteenth Century...

...when Africans assumed Lander knew medicine, he produced placebo charms which often had psychosomatic curative effects...

...The dark continent of the British journalist and explorer Henry Stanley was essentially, by the standards of our mythology and mores, the female continent—visited, courted, and penetrated by others, the passive recipient of attentions...

...Louis on the Atlantic coast, making it the Sunuga, which the French called the Senegal...

...Native information about the course of the Kworra River, for instance, did not help until you knew that the Kworra was really the Niger (a European name, the Latin for black...

...Since tribe linguistics vary, it had, like the other rivers, a different name in every principality through which it flowed...

...The Niger's presence in the savannah uplands of West Africa was known, but no one knew which of the many river mouths of Africa marked its end...

...His book is a feast of characters and could inspire the sort of educational film series that BBC television has produced...

...For a reporter, Gramont is oddly reluctant to report, to bring his narrative to life...

...Still others believed the Niger poured into Lake Chad and never reissued, or emptied into several evaporating lakes in the savannah, or simply disappeared underground in the Sahara (an interesting theory in view of modern discoveries of vast lakes of fresh water just under the African desert...

...The three big rivers of Africa are the Nile, the Congo, and the Niger...

...Most of the heroes of Gra-mont's book are aristocrats prepared to die for little reward except glory...

...It is as though some great European river—the Danube, perhaps—began its course among the fur-hooded Lapps of northern Finland, gathered momentum among the dour northern Russians and Baits, then flowed through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and finally emptied into the Aegean Sea among bronzed and effervescent Greeks...

...The Niger might have been seen to grow more out of its history if he had led us on one of those tours and recounted the adventures of past explorers as he traveled...

...When Burton and his indomitable wife staggered down the banks of the Nyanza—which they renamed Lake Victoria—their conviction that the riddle was solved was not far wrong, for the true source is only a few hundred miles to the south, a pebbly spring near Bururi in modern Burundi...

...The Niger, economically Africa's most important watercourse, was a special case...

...Before Richard and John Lander, two poorly paid domestic servants, traced the Niger to the sea for London's "African Association," it had been the subject of copious conjecture...

...He ate everything that Africans ate, and he slept liberally with the nubile peasantry...

...Gramont twice descended the Niger as part of his research for the book, yet his only mention of the Niger as he saw it today is in a brief four-page epilogue...

...he is now based in Washington...

...It was Stanley's feat that he traced the entire course, except for the source itself, alone, with no help from earlier explorations...

...In the case of the Nile, the delta was one of the best known landmarks of antiquity...

...Others believed it flowed west from the Sahel and emptied at St...

...Lander had a greater rapport with Africans than some of his more cultured class superiors...

...From the age of the Enlightenment on, the western world's curiosity was piqued by man's ignorance—including African ignorance—of their geography...

...Few had any mercenary or mercantile or even altruistic motives...