Conversations with Myself

Today is the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa. Having spent 27 years incarcerated it would be less than five more before the country elected him President. The same year that he became President, 1994, his famous autobiography Long Walk to Freedom was published. Now, in connection with the 20th anniversary of his release, Pan Macmillan is to publish a second autobiographical book, this time based on Mandela’s personal archive of diaries and letters.

Nelson Mandela was born in Qunu, a small village in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, in 1918. As a child he was groomed to become chief of his local tribe, however while at University of Fort Hare he became increasingly interested in politics. After being expelled for helping organise a strike, and being unwilling to return to his family, he moved to Johannesburg. There, he worked in a variety of jobs, became very active within the African National Congress (ANC), and completed a degree by correspondence. He then went on to study law, and, with his friend Oliver Tambo, set up the country’s first black law firm providing free or low-cost legal counsel.

In December 1956, Mandela and 150 others were arrested and charged with treason, but after a marathon trial lasting several years all were acquitted. Then came the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when the police opened fire on a crowd of black protesters and killed 69 of them. Thereafter, Mandela - who had been influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s policy of non-violence - became increasingly militant. In 1961, he took over the ANC’s armed wing, and coordinated sabotage campaigns against military and government targets. But, before very long, in August 1962, he was arrested, and initially sentenced to five years imprisonment. Further charges brought a much longer sentence. For 18 of his 27 years in prison, Mandela was incarcerated on Robben Island.

While in jail, and despite his imprisonment, Mandela’s reputation grew to the point where he became, and then stayed, the most significant black leader in South Africa. With time, too, international pressure against South Africa’s apartheid regime increased to an extraordinary level. Although negotiations aimed at releasing Mandela were started by President P W Botha in 1985, it wasn’t until his replacement by President F W de Klerk that Mandela was finally released on 11 February 1990 - 20 years ago today.

Mandela returned almost immediately to the leadership of the ANC, and then guided it to an election victory in 1994. A year earlier, he and de Klerk had been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1999, Mandela decided not to stand for a second term as President and retired. Since then, he has been engaged as an advocate for a variety of social and human rights organisations.

Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, published in 1994, is said to have sold over six million copies. (Excerpts can be read at the Open Book Systems archive.) Then, last autumn, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Mandela’s literary agent Johny Geller at Curtis Brown sold the rights to a second autobiographical work, one to be based on Mandela’s personal archive of diaries, letters and other manuscripts.

Geller told The Bookseller: ‘What is so amazing is that [Mandela] wrote virtually every day of his life and kept all his notes. The book reveals the personal cost to him of his imprisonment on Robben Island and includes heartbreaking letters about the deaths of two of his children. It shows the personal side of this icon, his amazing humanity and wisdom. It is also a historical document which may bring about different interpretations of various events.’

Pan Macmillan won the auction for the new book and very quickly produced a flyer promising that the new book - to be titled Conversations with Myself - would be published this spring. It lists half-a-dozen source materials for the book, two of which are ‘journals kept while on the run in the early 1960s’, and ‘diaries and draft letters written in Robben Island and other prisons during 27 years of imprisonment’. Macmillan concludes on the flyer: ‘Not since the worldwide publication of his bestselling autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom . . . will there be such an important book.’

Egyptian diary in Pisa

An Italian diary, nearly two centuries old and detailing archaeological sites in Egypt that were subsequently destroyed, has just been found in a library at Pisa university. The diary was written by Dr Alessandro Ricci, an explorer, draughtsman and medical doctor. There is not much information about him on the internet, though he took part in the important Franco-Tuscan expedition to Egypt with Ippolito Rosellini, said to be the father of Italian Egyptology. Oh, and he died of a scorpion sting.

Last month, the Italian news service Ansa revealed the story of Dr Alessandro Ricci’s diary; and, since then, it’s been widely reproduced across the internet, but without any additional facts or embellishment. So, most of the information in this article is based on the Ansa-sourced story (as on the Archaelogy Daily News website, for example).

Ricci was born in Siena and left Italy in 1817 to travel to Egypt, staying first in Alexandria and then travelling through Nubia, where he found tribal fighting and hostility from the local governor. In 1820, while in Cairo, he joined a military expedition to the Siwa Oasis - 560km west of Cairo - organised by the Viceroy Muhammed Ali, who is sometimes called the founder of modern Egypt (see Wikipedia). Indeed it was Ali who claimed the Siwa Oasis for Egypt. During the trip, Ricci carefully copied inscriptions he found at the temple of Amun and mapped out the area around the oasis. Later that year, he travelled to Suez and to Mount Sinai, where he spent some time at St Catherine’s Monastery.

In 1821, Ricci returned to southern Egypt, joining another military expedition, this one led by Ali’s son Ibrahim Pasha. He returned to Italy in 1822 and set to work organising the drawings and notes he had made in Egypt. A few years later, in 1828, these notes would be of much service when he returned to Egypt, serving as a draughtsman and doctor, on the so-called Franco-Tuscan expedition. This was organised by a French philologist, Jean-Francois Champollion, and Ippolito Rosellini, of Pisa university, who would later be called the father of Italian Egyptology (see The Travellers in Egypt website). It lasted a year, and explored up river on the Nile as far as Wadi Halfa, but soon after it was over Ricci was bitten by a scorpion. He was paralysed and eventually died in 1834.

Ricci’s journal - the one that has just been rediscovered - concerns his first period in Egypt, the five years to 1822. ‘This is an exceptional find for the field of Egyptology,’ said Marilina Betro, the professor heading a Pisa university team researching the Franco-Tuscan expedition. This is partly because, Betro explains, Ricci describes and draws sites that were already destroyed by the time of Champollion-Rosellini expedition, but also because he writes about much more along the way, ‘the customs and habits of the people he met, the fighting strategies of armies, the condition of women and even the treatment of animals’.

The whereabouts of Ricci’s journal appears to have been a mystery for decades. Ricci gave it to Champollion in 1827, prior to the Franco-Tuscan expedition, apparently believing the French expert would publish it. But then both Champollion and Ricci died a few years later. Although Rosellini asked French authorities to return the journal to Italy in 1836, it remained in France.

The diary then vanished for several decades until surfacing in 1928, when an Italian architect working for King Fuad I of Egypt bought it in a Cairo bookshop (these details are all from the Ansa news story). This architect showed it to the Italian Egyptologist Angelo Sammarco, who recognised its value and was keen to organise its publication. A synopsis of the diary appeared in 1930 but the project never got any further. After he died in 1948, all trace of the journal vanished - until recently, when it was found at Pisa university by researcher Daniele Salvoldi.

‘Now, two centuries after it was written, our goal is to get this book published,’ said Betro.

(Postscript: See From Siena to Nubia: Alessandro Ricci in Egypt and Sudan, 1817-22 published in 2018 by Bloomsbury.)

The finding of Tutankhamun

Howard Carter, the archaeologist who is credited with discovering the Egyptian tomb of Tutankhamun, died 70 years ago today. Thanks to the Ashmolean Museum and Griffith Institute, in Oxford, diary entries made by Carter in 1922 when discovering the Tutankhamun tomb are freely available online.

Carter was born in Kensington, London, in 1874, the youngest son of an artist, and while still a teenager began studying inscriptions and paintings in Egypt. For much of the 1890s, he worked as a member of the Egypt Exploration Fund, directed by Édouard Naville, at the Hatshepsut temple of Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor. In 1899, he joined the Egyptian Antiquities Service, as chief inspector of antiquities for Upper Egypt, and then for Lower Egypt. In 1905, though, he resigned following a dispute between Egyptian site guards and some French tourists.

In the next few years, George Herbert, the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon, became interested in Egyptian antiquities and agreed to finance some archaeological work. It was agreed with the Egyptian Antiquities Service that Carter should take charge of the Carnarvon-sponsored excavations. They began at Thebes, and then moved to the Delta region, but in 1914 Lord Carnarvon secured a concession to excavate in the Valley of the Kings.

There were many delays to the excavations due to the First World War; and then, subsequently, in the years after the war, Lord Carnarvon became increasingly frustrated at Carter’s lack of excavation success. However, in October 1922, Carter - literally - struck gold by finding the now-famous tomb of Tutankhamun. In Wikipedia’s article on Carter, the tomb is described as ‘by far the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings’.

After completing the excavations, Howard Carter retired from archaeology and became a collector of antiquities, though he did visit the US in 1924 to give a series of lectures. He also visited Luxor often, and could be found at the Winter Palace Hotel, sitting by himself in willful isolation, says a short biography of Carter at Tracing The Past. He died in Kensington on 2 March 1939, 70 years ago today.

Carter was not a literary diarist, but he did keep an excavation diary, and this is held by the Griffith Institute, which is part of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, which itself is part of Oxford University. The text of the diary is available (on the Ashmolean Museum or Griffith Institute web pages). Here are two entries, one from the day that Carter first discovered the tomb, and the second from the day three weeks later when Lord Carnavon had arrived and the tomb was opened.

Saturday, November 4.
‘First steps of tomb found
At about 10am I discovered beneath almost the first hut attacked the first traces of the entrance of the tomb (Tut.ankh.Amen) This comprised the first step of the N.E. corner (of the sunken-staircase). Quite a short time sufficed to show that it was the beginning of a steep excavation cut in the bed rock, about four metres below the entrance of Ramses VI’s tomb, and a similar depth below the present level of the valley. And, that it was of the nature of a sunken staircase entrance to a tomb of the type of the XVIIIth Dyn., but further than that nothing could be told until the heavy rubbish above was cleared away.’

Sunday, November 26.
‘Open second doorway - about 2pm - Advised Engelbach
After clearing 9 metres of the descending passage, in about the middle of the afternoon, we came upon a second sealed doorway, which was almost the exact replica of the first. It bore similar seal impressions and had similar traces of successive reopenings and reclosings in the plastering. The seal impressions were of Tut.ankh.Amen and of the Royal Necropolis, but not in any way so clear as those on the first doorway. . .

Feverishly we cleared away the remaining last scraps of rubbish on the floor of the passage before the doorway, until we had only the clean sealed doorway before us. In which, after making preliminary notes, we made a tiny breach in the top left hand corner to see what was beyond. Darkness and the iron testing rod told us that there was empty space. Perhaps another descending staircase, in accordance to the ordinary royal Theban tomb plan? Or may be a chamber? Candles were procured - the all important tell-tale for foul gases when opening an ancient subterranean excavation - I widened the breach and by means of the candle looked in, while Ld. C., Lady E, and Callender with the Reises waited in anxious expectation.

It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to flicker, but as soon as one’s eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one another.

There was naturally short suspense for those present who could not see, when Lord Carnarvon said to me ‘Can you see anything’. I replied to him ‘Yes, it is wonderful’. I then with precaution made the hole sufficiently large for both of us to see. With the light of an electric torch as well as an additional candle we looked in. Our sensations and astonishment are difficult to describe as the better light revealed to us the marvellous collection of treasures: two strange ebony-black effigies of a King, gold sandalled, bearing staff and mace, loomed out from the cloak of darkness; gilded couches in strange forms, lion-headed, Hathor-headed, and beast infernal; exquisitely painted, inlaid, and ornamental caskets; flowers; alabaster vases, some beautifully executed of lotus and papyrus device; strange black shrines with a gilded monster snake appearing from within; quite ordinary looking white chests; finely carved chairs; a golden inlaid throne . . .

Our sensations were bewildering and full of strange emotion. We questioned one another as to the meaning of it all. Was it a tomb or merely a cache? A sealed doorway between the two sentinel statues proved there was more beyond, and with the numerous cartouches bearing the name of Tut.ankh.Amen on most of the objects before us, there was little doubt that there behind was the grave of that Pharaoh. . .’

The people of Pemba

Four centuries ago today, an explorer and sailor named Robert Coverte was landing on the island of Pemba, part of the Zanzibar archipelago off the east coast of Africa. A few days later, some of his crew were to be murdered there. Nevertheless, he wrote in his diary that the people of Pemba ‘seeme to bee louing and kind’.

Not much is known about Coverte, other than what can be deduced from his diary first published in 1612 with a very lengthy title (as copied from the British Library catalogue): A True and almost Incredible Report of an Englishman, that, being cast away in the good ship called the Assention in Cambaya the farthest part of the East Indies, trauelled by land through many vnknowne kingdomes, and great cities. With a particular description of all those kingdomes, cities, and people. As also a relation of their commodities and manner of traffique, and at what seasons of the yeere they are most in vse. Faithfully related. With a discouery of a great emperour called the Great Mogoll, a prince not till now known to our English nation.

An American rare book dealer, William Reese Company, is offering a copy of the second edition, published in 1614, for sale at $25,000. Its website provides what little information there is about Coverte. He and his men, it says, left Plymouth in March 1607 and were among the first Englishmen to see the Cape of Good Hope, arriving there in July 1608. Coverte eventually reached Gujarat, where his ship ran aground while approaching Surat. Not granted permission to remain in Surat, the crew departed to various destinations, but Coverte and others set out for the Moghul Court at Agra, arriving there in December 1609. They left in January 1610 and made their way back to the Levant travelling by way of Kandahar, Esfahan, and Baghdad. They reached Aleppo a year later, and then sailed to England, arriving the following April.

The entire text of the 1612 Incredible Report can be read at Early English Books Online. Here, through, are some entries taken from a copy of Coverte’s journal privately printed in Philadelphia in 1931 - see Googlebooks. It has an introduction and notes by Boies Penrose (a lawyer and politician) who said the narrative was ‘vigorous’ and ‘one of the best examples of a travel journal that the period produced.’ The following extracts date from December 1608, starting with one from exactly 400 years ago today.

‘The tenth day of December about two or three of the Clock in the morning, and the Moone shiny, we espied on a sudden low land with high trees growing by the shore side, we being not a league form the shore, so that if we had not espied the trees, we should haue thought the land to haue been a shadow of the Moone, and so might haue run ourselues on shore, and cast our selues away with ship and goods but it was Gods good prouidence thus to defend us from so great and eminent danger, whose name be blessed and praised now euermore.

This was the island of Pemba, which we tooke to be Zinzabar, untill by one of the people of the Countrey we found it to be Pemba. At the sight of this low Iland - after we plainely perceiued it, wee presently tackt about and set from the shore till day and then we tackt about againe to the shore side, and neering along the shore side for a harbour to ancor in, wee sent Pinnis in the meane time, to the shore withe the Gang onlie and master Elmore to seeke for a conuenient watering place, wee keeping our course till our Pinnis came to the shore side. Then two or three people of the Iland demanded in the Portugall language what we were, and one of our men made answer, that we were Englishmen.

Then they demanded againe what we had to doe there, in regard the King of Portugall was King of that Iland: wee replied, that wee knew not so much, neither came we thither for any euill intent whatsoeuer, but only to water, and would giue them satisfaction, for any other thing we should haue of them. Then it drew towards night, and our man came aboard and acquainted the whole Company with this their parly on shore.’

‘The 19 day our Long-boat went a shore in the morning verie early, to fill our Caske with water . . . they gaue the watchword and sounded a horne, and presently set upon our men at the watering place and slew Iohn Harrington, the boat-swaines man, and wounded Robert Buckler. Master Ellmores man very sore, with 8 or 10 seurall wounds, and had killed him, but we discharged a Musket or two, which (as it seemed) hurt some of them; for then they retired and cried out: and so (though weake and faint) he did at length recouer our boat. Also two or three more of our men by creeping, and lying close in the ditch, untill they espied our, got also safe aboard, and then counting our men, we only missed Edward Churchman, and Iohn Harrington, that was slaine: and so comming aboard, we certified the company of all our proceedings on shoare; and our surgeon dressed Robert Buckler; and after, did his best for his cure and recouery of his health. . .’

‘The twentieth day in the morning we went on shoare . . . we found Iohn Harrington dead and starke naked, whome we buried at another Iland, hard by the main Iland. . . The naturall people of the Iland Pemba, seeme to bee louing and kind: for they made signes to me and others, at our first comming, to beware of our throats cutting: which we tooke no heede or notice of, untill this their treachery put in minde thereof againe.’

Rescuing the Emin Pasha

Arthur Jephson, a young adventurer and African explorer, died one hundred years ago today. He’s not well remembered, but he would be even less so if it were not for a diary he wrote while accompanying Henry Stanley on one of his expeditions in Africa. Unfortunately, the text of the diary does not appear to be available on the internet, although copies printed in the 1960s are available, at a price.

One of twelve children, Jephson was born in 1858 to the vicar of Childerditch in Essex, and Ellen, the daughter of the recorder of Norwich. He trained for the merchant navy, but then spent time in the Antrim regiment of the Royal Irish Rifles, before resigning his commission and living under the patronage of Helene, comtesse de Noailles. In 1886, a donation by the comtesse secured Jephson’s place on an expedition along the Congo, being undertaken by Henry Morton Stanley. On Jephson’s return from Africa, he published an account of the journey which was translated into French and German, and also lectured on the subject. Despite wanting to return to the continent, he never did due to ill-health. He was appointed Queen’s Messenger (one who carries important documents for the sovereign) in 1895; in 1904 he married and had one son. Four years later he died, while still relatively young, on 22 October 1908.

But it is the expedition to Africa for which Jephson is most remembered. It was organised to rescue a man invariably called Emin Pasha. A physician and explorer from Silesia, he was originally named Eduard Schnitzer, but after becoming a medical officer in the Turkish army, he adopted a Turkish mode of living with the name Mehmet Emin. He later served under General Charles Gordon in Equatoria (an Egyptian province in the upper Nile at the time, now Sudan) as a district medical officer, and then succeeded Gordon as governor. However, an Arab revolt, that started in the early 1880s, increasingly isolated him and his few troops. Nevertheless, he managed to keep lines of communication open, and his communiques to Europe eventually attracted considerable sympathy, especially after Gordon’s death in 1885.

Thus, in 1887, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, led by Henry Morton Stanley, undertook to rescue the man by going up the Congo River and then through the Ituri Forest. Two-thirds of those who undertook the journey died. A Wikipedia article on Emin explains that Stanley did find Emin, in April 1888, but then spent a year arguing with him and his troops to leave for safer parts. During this time, both Emin and Jephson were imprisoned for some months by rebel officers, and only then was Emin finally persuaded to leave for the coast.

Jephson kept a diary during the expedition, but it wasn’t published until more than 50 years after his death, in 1969 (for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press). Its full title is The Diary of A J Mounteney Jephson: Emin Pasha Relief Expedition 1887-1889. It was edited by Dorothy Middleton, and has a preface, prologue and epilogue compiled by the editor in collaboration with Maurice Denham Jephson. As far I can tell there are no extracts available on the internet, but Abebooks has some copies for sale, starting at about £30. Wikipedia calls Jephson’s diary ‘frank, sensitive and open-hearted’.

A few more interesting details about Jephson and his diary are available at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography website (for which one needs a subscription, but UK public library membership allows for free access). The diary, it says, confirms ‘in graphic detail the extent of the violence and suffering’ that accompanied the expedition. It also argues that since Jephson had had no previous experience of either tropical travel or warfare, his very survival was considered something of an accomplishment. According to the AIM25 website (which provides information on archives in the greater London area), photocopies of the original diary is held at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Conrad, Hottot and the Congo

One hundred years ago today (19 August), the Belgian government finally approved the annexation of Congo Free State - the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo - from Leopold II, the king of Belgium. During the previous 20 years or so, some 10 million Congolese had died because of ruthless exploitation for rubber production. The international outrage, which had led to the annexation, was partly stoked by Joseph Conrad’s famous novel, Heart of Darkness, based on a journey he took in 1890. Conrad kept a diary of that trip. There are also diaries by a French explorer, Robert Hottot, travelling in the Congo Free State in 1908. Much more recently, of course, Che Guevara kept a diary of his exploits in the country.

In 1876, a few years after his famous search for Dr Livingstone (see online diary text at Project Gutenberg), Henry Morton Stanley undertook some exploration for Belgium’s king Leopold II who was keen to colonise an area of Africa which would become the Congo. Professing humanitarian objectives, Leopold then managed to play off various European rivals against each other and formally acquire the territory for himself at the Conference of Berlin in 1885. Thereafter, it was a corporate state - he called it Congo Free State - privately controlled by him through a dummy non-governmental organisation, Association Internationale Africaine. For the next two decades, the state was mercilessly exploited for rubber production to meet a growing demand for car tyres. Wikipedia’s history, of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, explains that an army called the Force Publique (FP) would cut off the limbs of the Congolese to help enforce rubber quotas.

The appalling situation in Congo Free State began to attract international criticism, not least from writers such as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, and eventually led to an important report in 1904 by the Irish/British diplomat Roger Casement. He estimated that the population had been decimated by three million because of indiscriminate war, starvation, reduction of births and tropical diseases, (while other estimates suggest that around 10 million Congolese died in this period). Casement’s report also led to the arrest and punishment of white officials, and ultimately - on 19 August 1908, one hundred years ago - to the Belgian government agreeing to annex the territory. A treaty to that effect was signed the following November. The territory was renamed Belgian Congo and administered by the Belgian parliament until independence in 1960.

Conrad went to Congo Free State in 1890, and used his experiences there for a novella, Heart of Darkness, first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899 as a three part serial. However, earlier he had published The Congo Diary, which in modern editions is often coupled with Heart of Darkness. Although the novella is freely available online at several sites (such as Ria Press), The Congo Diary is not. Some pages are available at Googlebooks, but thanks to Rod McLaren and his Rodcorp blog for providing a few extracts and relating them to Heart of Darkness. He says that stylistically, the staccato sentences of The Congo Diary are ‘the opposite of the elliptic, questing prose’ of Conrad’s later Heart of Darkness , but that it’s ‘an important precursor in content and emotion’.

A French explorer, A. Robert Hottot, also a diarist, travelled to Congo Free State three times in 1906, 1907 and 1908, the year Belgium finally acted to annex the territory from its king. Hottot died young in 1939, but had moved to Oxford in 1932 and had become a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. His papers, including diaries, and many fabulous photographs are held by Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which has an online exhibition about the man. One of the online photographs shows two pages from his 1908 diary, in which Hottot describes the measurement of the local Kango people (pygmies) at Lake Tumba and lists objects he’s collected: three women’s belts, nine units of the local copper currency, and forty poisoned arrows.

Sixty years later, a diarist of a very different ilk would head for Belgian Congo - Che Guevara. His Bolivian diary was in the news a few weeks ago (see Che’s Last Days), and The Motorcycle Diaries were made famous by a recent film. But he also wrote a diary about his time in Africa - The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. There’s quite a lot about Che’s time in the Congo on Wikipedia; The Guardian provided some extracts prior to the book’s belated publication in 2001; a few pages are viewable on Amazon; and etext.org has a longish review. Also, BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle followed in Che’s footsteps and made a programme about his trip.