The extracts of the Tarikh al-sudan Heinrich Barth had copied in Gando didn’t reach Europe till late the following year, after a tortuous journey across the desert. The task of reconstructing parts of the manuscript from Barth’s notes fell to the German Arabist Christian Ralfs, who spent much of the winter of 1854–1855 trying to make sense of the fragments he had been given. Whole sections were missing from the text, and the Arabic itself was wooden and occasionally ungrammatical. Nevertheless, by the spring Ralfs believed he had managed to produce a faithful German translation of the main points of Barth’s extracts, which were published in the journal of the German Oriental Society of Leipzig later that year. The explorer himself had not yet returned from Africa.
These new “Contributions to the History and Geography of Sudan” filled seventy-six pages, thirty-nine of which were devoted to the pair’s copious footnotes. In Ralfs’s opinion, the text showed the extreme poverty of all previous contributions to the knowledge of West Africa, including those of Ibn Battuta and Leo Africanus. Leo had made brief mention of a Songhay king, but the newly uncovered chronicle revealed a powerful empire ruled by a dynasty called the askiyas, including the “mighty conqueror” Askiya al-hajj Muhammad. This was but one example of the wealth of new historical information, which now enabled the Europeans to unlock the story of an “entirely unknown and now destroyed world.”
Barth had been told the chronicle was composed by Ahmad Baba, and indeed part of it was, since it included lengthy extracts of his biographical dictionary of Maliki scholars, the Kifayat al-muhtaj. In his haste, however, the explorer had missed key evidence pointing to the identity of its real author, Abd al-Rahman Abd Allah al-Sadi. Al-Sadi had been born into a Timbuktu family on May 28, 1594, and in 1626/1627 was made imam of the Sankore mosque in Jenne. A decade later he returned home, becoming an imam and administrator in Timbuktu. His chronicle was written in the seventeenth century in Arabic and ran to thirty-eight chapters, some of which were based on earlier histories, and some on the author’s own observations and interviews. Its grammar was imperfect enough to make later historians believe Songhay, rather than Arabic, was the author’s first language, and its style at times recalled the folk stories of the brothers Grimm or the tales of The Thousand and One Nights.
Barth, short of time and desperate to fill in the immense gaps in European knowledge, had extracted as much data as he could, focusing on the parts of the chronicle devoted to kings, identifiable dates, and empires. The broad sweep, in other words, of history.
The tarikh began with a list of ancient Songhay rulers, the Zuwa dynasty, and went on to relate the founding myth of their kingdom. The first of these princes was Zuwa Alayaman. This person, it was said, had left Yemen with his brother to travel the world, and destiny had brought them, starving and dressed in ragged animal skins, to the town of Kukiya, an “ancient city” on the Niger that had existed, according to the chronicle, since the time of the ancient Egyptians: it was even from Kukiya that the pharaoh had brought the troupe of magicians he had used in his argument with Moses. When the people of the city asked the strangers their names, one of the brothers misunderstood the question and said that they were from Yemen—jaa min al-yaman—so the Kukiyans, who had difficulty pronouncing the Arabic words, called him Zuwa Alayaman.
Zuwa Alayaman found that the people in this country worshipped a demon that appeared in the river in the form of a fish with a ring in its nose. At these times a crowd gathered to hear the demon’s instructions, which everyone would obey. After witnessing this ceremony and recognizing that the people were on a false path, Zuwa Alayaman determined to put an end to the creature. He threw a harpoon at the fish and killed it, and soon afterward the people took an oath to the slayer of the fish-god and made him king. “Zuwa” became the title of all the princes who ruled after him. “They bred and multiplied to such an extent that only God Most High knows their number,” al-Sadi recorded. “They were distinguished by their strength, intrepidness, and bravery, and by their great height and heavy build.”
Later in its history, the country of Songhay was subjugated by Mali, the empire that supplanted ancient Ghana in the Western Sudan, but the kingdom won its independence thanks to two princes of Songhay, the half brothers Ali Kulun and Silman Nari. It was tradition that princes of vassal states such as Songhay were sent to serve the Malian emperor and that they would disappear from time to time to pursue their fortunes. Ali Kulun, an “extremely intelligent and clever” prince, had another project in mind: the liberation of his kingdom. He prepared the ground artfully, traveling ever farther from the sultan’s court and closer to his Songhay homeland, building up caches of weapons and provisions along the way. One day, the brothers gave their horses a special strengthening food, and then they made their escape. The sultan of Mali sent many men to stop the fugitives and there were many skirmishes, but the princes always routed their opponents and safely reached their homeland. Afterward, according to the chronicle, Ali Kulun became the Songhay king. He took the title “Sunni” and delivered his people from the yoke of Malian rule.
Al-Sadi devoted a full chapter to the establishment of Timbuktu. The settlement was founded at the start of the twelfth century by Tuareg people who came to the region to graze their flocks, he wrote. In the summer they camped on the banks of the Niger, and in the rainy season migrated to the desert wells of Arawan, 150 miles north. Eventually some of them chose to settle on this route, a short distance from the river:
Thus did they choose the location of this virtuous, pure, undefiled, and proud city, blessed with divine favour, a healthy climate, and [commercial] activity which is my birthplace and my heart’s desire. It is a city unsullied by the worship of idols, where none has prostrated save to God the Compassionate, a refuge of scholarly and righteous folk, a haunt of saints and ascetics, and a meeting place of caravans and boats.
The travelers who came to this crossroads soon began to use it for storage. The traders entrusted their utensils and grain to the supervision of a slave woman called Tinbuktu—a word, al-Sadi reports, that signifies someone with a “lump” or perhaps a protuberant navel—and it was from her that the blessed place took its name. Settlers arrived in great numbers from neighboring regions—from Walata, the emporium of ancient Ghana, in modern Mauritania, and also from Egypt, Fezzan, Ghadames, Tuat, Fez, Sus, and Bitu—and little by little Timbuktu became a commercial hub for the region. It was filled with caravans from all countries, and scholars and pious people of every race flocked to it. The prosperity of Timbuktu sucked all the caravan trade from Walata, and brought about that city’s ruin. Meanwhile, in Timbuktu, straw huts enclosed with fences were gradually replaced by clay houses, which were surrounded by a low wall, of the sort that from the outside one could see what was happening inside.
The town’s development accelerated after Mansa Musa returned from his pilgrimage in 1325. On his way back from Mecca, Musa—“a just and pious man, whom none of the other sultans of Mali equalled in such qualities”—ordered the construction of a mosque wherever Friday found him. He built one of these at Gao, and then moved west to Timbuktu, becoming the first ruler to take possession of it. He installed a representative there and ordered the construction of a royal palace. He was also said to have built the tower-minaret of the Jingere Ber mosque, al-Sadi recorded. Musa and his successors ruled Timbuktu for a hundred years.
Malian power faded in the fifteenth century, according to al-Sadi, and the Tuareg leader Sultan Akil dominated Timbuktu from 1433/1434 until the rise of the Songhay king Sunni Ali, who reigned for twenty-four years, from 1468/1469. Sunni Ali was a great tyrant and an oppressor of the scholars of Timbuktu, al-Sadi wrote, but a man with tremendous physical strength and energy who turned his Songhay kingdom into a great empire. After his death, his son was deposed by one of Sunni Ali’s regional governors, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Turi, who took the throne in 1493 and was the first to assume the name “askiya.” Al-Sadi had nothing but praise for Askiya al-hajj Muhammad, or Askiya the Great, as he became known. He founded a dynasty of askiyas and built on his predecessor’s conquests to establish Songhay as the largest empire West Africa had ever seen, stretching from the Senegal River in the west to Agadez in the east, and from the salt mines at Taghaza in the north to Borgu in the south, an area the size of Western Europe. The reign of the askiyas would last 101 years, until the sultan of Marrakesh sent an army across the desert to seize the Songhay lands.
In Barth’s eyes, the Tarikh al-sudan was immensely significant. “I have no hesitation in asserting that the [chronicle] will be one of the most important additions which the present age has made to the history of mankind, in a branch which was formerly almost unknown,” he would write. The extracts demonstrated that Timbuktu was home to a rich and sophisticated society capable of recording its own account of the past, and it at last gave Europe access to more than the few isolated facts recorded by foreign visitors to the empire such as al-Bakri, Ibn Khaldun, and Leo Africanus. It also overthrew many of the ideas Europe had about this part of Africa: the kingdoms of the region were much older than anyone had believed, their geographical locations were at last adequately defined, and the chronology of the empires of ancient Ghana, Mali, and Songhay at last seemed complete.
Of course, the chronicle included embellishments and accounts that were based on oral histories and legends—perhaps the fish-god was based on a manatee, a real creature of the Niger? Or was it a representation of the holy river itself?—but it was unquestionably a work of history, and its discoverer would become the founding father of the discipline of Songhay studies.
Ralfs finished his translation with an entreaty to Barth to return safely so that he could enjoy the “reverence and admiration” he richly deserved.
The explorer reached London on September 6, 1855, in the company of two slaves Overweg had bought and freed, Dorugu and Abbega, whom Barth had promised to look after. They were amazed by England, a country that had grand houses but not even the least amount of sand. The Prussian, who had been away for nearly five and a half years and traveled more than ten thousand miles, logging every village, tribe, and geographical feature along the way, was “most kindly received” by Palmerston, who was now prime minister, and Lord Clarendon, now secretary of state for foreign affairs. Clarendon congratulated him on his “fortitude, perseverance and sound judgement” during the expedition.
The London Times, which had noted the false report of Barth’s death, made no reference to his safe return. In the decades to come, this newspaper and others would heap praise on successive African explorers, such men as Livingstone, Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Grant, and Samuel Baker. For Barth, though, there was no interest. It was an ominous indication of the way in which the public would treat him.
On October 1 he left England to see his family in Hamburg, with Dorugu and Abbega in tow.
WHILE BARTH WAS IN GERMANY, extracts from a second major text by a Timbuktu scholar appeared in Europe. These were taken from Ahmad Baba’s biographical dictionary of the scholars of Maliki Islam, the Kifayat al-muhtaj, the same work whose partial inclusion in the Tarikh al-sudan had fed confusion over the chronicle’s authorship. Barth had read this material but, in his haste to record the historical data, had not copied it out. Now two versions had been sent to the eminent French Orientalist Auguste Cherbonneau, who published translated sections of it in the Annuaire de la Societé Archéologique de Constantine, along with an introductory essay on the Arab literature of the Sudan.
Cherbonneau was as excited about Baba’s dictionary as Barth had been about the chronicle: it was “a singular and unexpected revelation of a literary movement in the heart of Africa, in Timbuktu!” he wrote, which opened up “new horizons” whose existence Europeans had never even suspected. The book contained numerous short biographies of the eminent scholars of the Maliki sect, who had been born in Timbuktu or had come there to teach. It revealed the existence of an education system in Timbuktu that was on a par with those in the great Islamic cities of Córdoba, Tunis, and Cairo, with schools run by learned men and attended by large numbers of students. It showed that considerable libraries containing hundreds of books had been kept in the city and explained how the scholars were eagerly supported by the princes of the country. Baba’s work did nothing less, wrote Cherbonneau, than demonstrate the participation of the black races in intellectual life, and reveal the almost infinite number of connections that existed between the Western Sudan and the Arab world.
Reading the extracts of Baba’s dictionary in conjunction with those from al-Sadi’s chronicle, Europeans now had a clear picture of the working lives of Timbuktu’s scholarly elite.
By the mid–fourteenth century, the city was a substantial commercial center and more and more scholars came to settle there. At its peak, there were an estimated two to three hundred scholars at the top of society, drawn from the leading families of the town. The most powerful citizens in the elite were the qadis, who dispensed justice based on their knowledge of Islamic law. Then came all manner of other holy men, including imams, jurists, and counselors, drawn mostly from the wealthy merchant class, as well as schoolteachers, mosque workers, and scribes, plus a large number of alfas, scholars of lower birth who earned a living from their Islamic education. The Sankore quarter was the center of scholarly activity in the city, and it was here that the influential descendants of Muhammad Aqit, the great-great-grandfather of Ahmad Baba, settled. The Timbuktu scholars were in regular contact with North Africa and Egypt, and some traveled there, while others came south to study in Timbuktu. They were therefore familiar with a wide range of secular sciences, including mathematics, astronomy, and history, although all such knowledge was taught in an Islamic context.
The preeminent Timbuktu scholars were not simply religious leaders and teachers; they were also believed to possess divine grace, or baraka, which enabled them to perform acts that would be impossible for lesser mortals. One of the earliest holy men mentioned by Baba was known simply as al-Hajj; he came to Timbuktu from Walata and held the post of qadi in the early fifteenth century, during the last days of Malian rule. One day, a group of people were sitting down to eat when they heard that the army of the neighboring kingdom of Mossi was approaching Timbuktu. Al-Hajj murmured something over the shared plate and instructed them to eat, then told them: “Go off and fight. Their arrows will do you no harm.” The Mossi army was driven off, and all the men returned except one: al-Hajj’s son-in-law had not eaten, as it would have been a sign of disrespect to share food with his wife’s father.
In the mid–fifteenth century, when the Tuareg chieftain Akil ruled over the town, the influx of Islamic scholars to Timbuktu reached new heights. Akil and his people continued to pursue their semi-nomadic lifestyle outside the city, leaving the town in the care of a governor who worked to promote its scholarly activities. One of the prominent men to arrive at this time was Modibbo Muhammad al-Kabari. According to Ahmad Baba, al-Kabari “attained the very pinnacle of scholarship and righteousness,” instructing a great number of students, and was also the source of many miracles. On one occasion, an influential Moroccan scholar started to slander him, punning that he was not so much al-Kabari as “al-Kafiri,” the Unbeliever. God afflicted this man with leprosy as punishment, Baba relates. Doctors were brought from far and wide to try to treat him, and one recommended that the only cure would be for him to eat the heart of a young boy. Many boys were slaughtered, but the man died “in a most pitiable condition” for disrespecting the great qadi.
Al-Kabari was even said to be able to walk on water. One year, on the feast day of Tabaski, he needed to cross the river to collect a sacrificial ram, so he simply marched across its surface. A pupil chose to follow him, but he sank, and when the shaykh reached the far side and saw his student struggling in the river, he went to rescue him. “What made you do that?” he shouted.
“When I saw what you did, I did the same.”
The shaykh was unsympathetic. “How can you compare your foot to one that has never walked in disobedience to God?” he asked.
A virtuous scholarly life was not only filled with divine grace; it could also be healthy and extremely long. The qadi Katib Musa was blessed with such an extraordinary constitution, it was said, that he never had to delegate a single prayer in the mosque. He attributed his great well-being to four simple rules: he never slept outdoors, always oiled his body before going to bed, took a hot bath every morning, and made sure he had breakfast.
Perhaps the most famous immigrant to Timbuktu in the fifteenth century was Sidi Yahya al-Tadallisi. Sidi Yahya was invited to Timbuktu by its governor, Muhammad-n-Allah, who built the mosque that still carries his name. In Baba’s description, Sidi Yahya “became famous in every land, his baraka manifesting itself to high and low. He was the locus of manifestations of divine grace, and was clairvoyant.” On the day al-Kabari died and his body was placed in a mausoleum, Sidi Yahya pronounced an elegy for him, which is one of the earliest examples of Timbuktu poetry. It included the following lines:
Muhammad Modibbo the professor, possessed of a fine intelligence, long suffering, and fortified with continuous patience.
I wonder if after him there will be one who makes things clear. O Arabs, is there any champion after him?
It was said of Sidi Yahya that “no foot more virtuous … ever trod the soil of Timbuktu.” He was a sought-after teacher, and one day he was giving a lesson at the foot of the minaret when dark clouds gathered overhead and a peal of thunder was heard. His students hurried to collect their things and get inside, but Sidi Yahya told them to stay where they were. “Take your time!” he said. “[Rain] will not fall here while the angel is directing it to fall on such and such a locality.” The rain passed them by. Weather forecasting wasn’t Sidi Yahya’s only talent: on another occasion, his servant girls spent all day trying to cook a fish, but the fire had no effect on its flesh. “This morning,” he told them, “when I went out for the early-morning worship, my foot brushed against something damp in the entrance hall; perhaps it was that fish. Whatever my body touches cannot be burned by fire.”
Of all the virtues that were valued in fifteenth-century Timbuktu, modesty does not seem to have been one of them.
Toward the end of his life, governor Muhammad-n-Allah had a dream in which he saw the sun setting and the moon disappear immediately after. He recounted it to his friend Sidi Yahya, who told him that as long as he promised not to become afraid, he would explain the dream.
Muhammad-n-Allah declared that he would not be afraid.
Very well, said Sidi Yahya. “It means I will die and you will die shortly afterwards.”
Muhammad-n-Allah became deeply upset.
“Did you not tell me that you would not be afraid?” said Sidi Yahya.
“My distress comes not from the fear of death,” the governor said, “but rather from concern for my young children.”
“Place them under the care of God Most High,” Sidi Yahya responded.
The holy man died soon afterward, and Muhammad-n-Allah followed him to the grave. The friends were buried close to each other in the same mosque.
The scholar for whom Baba reserves the greatest affection, and whose life he recounts in greatest detail, is his own teacher, Muhammad Baghayogho. A gentle and considerate soul, Baghayogho was “given by nature to … benign intent.” He was “guileless, and naturally disposed to goodness, believing in people to such an extent that all men were virtually equal in his sight, so well did he think of them and absolve them of wrongdoing.” He had great reserves of patience: he could teach all day without growing bored or tired, and took particular attention with the dull-witted, to the extent that Baba once heard a colleague say that he thought Baghayogho “must have drunk [holy] Zamzam water so that he would not get fed up during teaching.”
Baba gives a detailed account of the hardworking Baghayogho’s day. He would begin his lessons after the predawn prayers, breaking off only to perform the mid-morning worship, after which he would sometimes go to the qadi to plead on behalf of people who had asked for his help. Noon would find him teaching again, then taking the midday worship, and after that he would alternate teaching and prayers until the evening, when he would return home. Even then his day was not over, since he would spend the last part of the night in devotions.
Baghayogho’s saintliness was especially evident when it came to his books, some of which were the most rare and precious “in all fields.” He was so generous with these works that he would loan them out and not even ask for them back, wrote Baba:
Sometimes a student would come to his door asking for a book, and he would give it to him without even knowing who the student was. In this matter he was truly astonishing, doing this for the sake of God Most High, despite his love for books and [his zeal in] acquiring them, whether by purchase or copying.
In this way, Baba recorded, Baghayogho gave away a large portion of his library of books.
IT IS A CLICHÉ that the traveler makes unexpected friends abroad and finds unexpected hostility at home, but this was precisely the situation in which Barth now found himself. Yes, he had twice navigated the great Sahara; he had talked his way out of a dozen lethal scrapes and even come back from the dead, but he would prove poor at plotting a course through the smoke-filled rooms of nineteenth-century European society. In a just world, his heroic voyage would immediately have sealed his reputation as a great scientist-explorer, his name ranked with that of Humboldt. In this, as in so many ways, he would be disappointed. The prickly twenty-eight-year-old who had left for Africa had returned with a proud, almost haughty demeanor, and his native mistrust now reached alarming levels. “Everywhere he went,” his brother-in-law Schubert wrote, “he sensed deliberate and calculated attempts being made to exploit him.”
He was initially well received in Germany. He was lauded by Humboldt and dined with the king of Prussia. He was given a gold medal by the city of Hamburg, offered honorary doctorates and decorations, and invited to speak at the Geographical Society in Berlin. Even in England, his achievements were recognized: the RGS awarded him its prestigious Patron’s Gold Medal, and he was nominated for the Companion of the Order of the Bath. But Britain liked its heroes British, and as Hanmer Warrington had demonstrated three decades before, the doings of foreign gentlemen such as Barth were subject to a skepticism that bordered on paranoia. Even when he was traveling, officials in London had harbored suspicions about his loyalty. Why, the Foreign Office wondered, had he sent his infrequent dispatches to the Prussian ambassador in London and not to the government that was paying for the expedition? Why did his reports end up in German journals before they reached the RGS?
At the end of October, Barth received a poorly phrased letter from the RGS secretary, Norton Shaw, asking him to dine with some of the society’s members before the speech he would give there. Shaw’s presumption angered Barth, who fired back a letter saying that he had no such engagement and—forgetting his lecture to the Geographical Society in Berlin—would not address any scientific institution until he was ready to publish the narrative of his journey. Shaw became openly hostile after that, and an embarrassing feud ensued that lasted into the new year, when the explorer had returned to London. This was not Barth’s only problem: despite the fact that his expedition had for years been short of money, several British newspapers ran stories about his alleged excessive spending. The impression of financial irregularity was made worse by the British consul in Murzuk, in Fezzan, who accused him of pursuing German commercial interests ahead of British ones, and he found himself being investigated by the Foreign Office.
He began to wish he had never come back. “How I long for the freedom of a bivouac in the desert,” he told Schubert, “in that unfathomable expanse where, free of ambitions, free from the thousands of little things that torture people here, I would savor my freedom as I rolled out my bed at the end of a long day’s march, my possessions, my camels, and my horse around me. I almost regret having put myself in these chains.”
As a distraction, Barth threw himself into writing up the narrative of his journeys. The first three volumes of his Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa appeared in April 1857, beautifully published by Longman, with color illustrations based on Barth’s sketches. There would be five volumes in all, 3,500 pages of densely packed information, a magnum opus of Humboldtian proportions. In the eyes of a later geographer, Lord Rennell of Rodd, the work would raise Barth to the status of “perhaps the greatest traveller there has ever been in Africa,” but reviews at the time were less generous. No general reader could be expected to sustain an interest in the region over such an epic scale, critics said. This response pointed up the schism between Barth and the public: he believed his role was to deliver voluminous quantities of new data about Africa, much as his mentor, Humboldt, had compiled twenty-three volumes of scientific observations from his tour of the Spanish Americas. But the British audience was accustomed to more lightweight adventure stories of the sort Mungo Park had produced. They had devoured edition after edition of Park’s account of his first journey in Africa, while David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa would sell more than fifty thousand copies. By contrast, the first three volumes of Barth’s account sold poorly, and Longman printed only one thousand copies each of the last two.
None of that would have mattered if it had won Barth the academic acclaim he craved, but no British university offered him a position, and even Cooley was dismissive of his discoveries, failing completely to mention the new sources Barth had unearthed in his appraisal of the explorer’s work for The Edinburgh Review:
A splendid and powerful empire in Negroland, extending its sway even northwards over the desert, would be remarkable enough, were there any proof of its existence. But no ingenuity of conjecture, no nice adaptation of dry and scanty traditions, can convert these hypothetical glories into history.
Further dishonor for Barth could be found in the government’s treatment of his friend Shaykh Ahmad al-Bakkai. Barth had encouraged the Timbuktu holy man to establish diplomatic contact with the British government, believing it would be to the advantage of both: Britain would get a commercial partner in the heart of Africa; al-Bakkai would get the protection of a Great Power to stand with Timbuktu against the increasingly predatory French. The shaykh acted on Barth’s advice, sending emissaries to Tripoli in 1857 to open talks. But Britain and France were now allies, and when the emissaries asked for permission to proceed to London, the Foreign Office said that since it was October it would be rather chilly for such warm-blooded men, and would they wait for spring? Reading this brush-off for what it was, the delegation retired south while al-Bakkai wrote a letter to Queen Victoria complaining about their treatment.
The following year, fed up with England, Barth returned to Berlin, hopeful of finding the recognition that Britain had failed to give. Instead he ran into the mirror image of the problem he had encountered in London: the Prussians derided him for working for the country that was now blocking German unification. His evidence for the depth and breadth of culture and history in central and western Sudan and his positive attitude toward Islam were not, meanwhile, what the German intelligentsia wanted to hear. In 1859 his nomination for full membership in the Royal Academy of Sciences, one of the highest accolades in European academia, was rejected. He had been opposed by the historian Leopold von Ranke, who argued that while Barth was no doubt a bold adventurer, he was not a serious scholar.
Barth continued to travel, to Spain, the Balkans, and the Alps. In 1865, he returned from one of his journeys to learn that al-Bakkai had died in battle, fighting for Timbuktu. Later that year, on November 23, the explorer was poleaxed by a massive pain in his abdomen: his stomach had burst, most likely as the result of an intestinal disease picked up on his travels. He lived for two more agonizing days before dying on November 25. He was forty-four.
Almost a century later, in 1958, the RGS’s Geographical Journal commissioned a young lecturer from Liverpool University, Ralph Mansell Prothero, to write an appraisal of Barth’s contributions to African exploration. Prothero, who would later be an eminent geography professor, described Barth’s Travels and Discoveries as “without doubt the greatest single contribution to knowledge of the Western Sudan” and commented that it was odd that he had subsequently been so overlooked. One fact in particular struck Prothero: he had searched the RGS catalogue for all the papers published in Britain that had picked up on Barth’s work. To his great surprise, he had found only one.