The Field of Reeds as a Way of Life
On Lake Chad on the other side of Africa, another larger group of swamp dwellers, the Yedina tribe (earlier called the Buduma, meaning “people of the reeds”), inhabits papyrus islands and swamps. Like many other African tribes, they enjoy a cattle-based lifestyle with a diet of cow’s milk, fish, and occasional grain products. Early visitors to the region, such as Olive Macleod, the travel writer who came through there in 1912, were amazed to see the distinctive curved-horned cattle being herded into the water and made to swim to nearby islands, or small herds loaded onto large papyrus boats called kadays for transport on long journeys across the lake. If Egyptologists had seen this, they would have been quick to draw a parallel to the herdsmen of old Egypt, who drove cattle across branch rivers in exactly the same way, including the use of papyrus skiffs.
During the dry season, Yedina men move out to floating papyrus islands where they have fishing camps. At other times they live on the larger, more stable islands and make their huts from papyrus reeds in the same way that Roscoe found among the Bakene on Lake Kyoga and von Rosen found among the Batwa on Lake Bangweulu.
As in the fashion of the Bakene, the huts on Lake Chad can be lifted up and moved to higher or lower ground if there is a change in water level. But now they face a crisis. Lake Chad is drying up and the Yedina are very close to being forced to give up their aquatic lifestyle. Lake Chad was featured in Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, as one of the extreme examples of a disappearing ecosystem. Not mentioned in the film were the papyrus swamps, the habitat in which these people live, nor the people themselves, who are suffering as the lake and swamps dry out.
As Gore pointed out, “Once one of the largest lakes in the world, it has dried up over the last few decades to almost nothing, vastly complicating the other problems.” It has gone from 10,000 square miles down to about five hundred or less in a period of just ten years.
For the 88,000 Yedina, this is devastating. The drying up of the lake is due to a number of causes, including global warming and water extraction from the river that feeds the lake. The water that was taken from the river was used for irrigation and domestic use, but in any event it “starved” the lake. According to Sylvia Sikes, a naturalist who explored the lake by sailboat in 1969–1970, a large factor is the general drying of the region due to weather and man’s activities, or desertification caused by cutting and clearing vegetation in the basin.
In October 2013, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg snapped a photograph from the International Space Station that shows what’s left of the lake: a small patch of water illuminated by sunlight. Around it, and to the northwest, are ripples indicative of sand dunes in places that were once water. In one area smoke plumes, perhaps from fires set by farmers, drift over a former swamp region.1 It is now a desolate sight. If the lake does dry completely, all of the Yedina will be forced to take up dry-land farming or herding, a drastic change from their present lifestyle.
As the Bakene, the Batwa, and even the Yedina were well aware, papyrus swamps are great hiding places in times of trouble, provided that one can stay healthy. The first recorded use of papyrus swamps as hideaways comes from Egypt in the time of the Persian occupation (525–404 B.C.). Libyans and Greeks who served together as mercenaries in the Egyptian army rebelled at the harsh taxation leveled by the Persians. In defiance of the government, they settled in the delta and built several fortified towns in the papyrus swamps, one of which, Papremis, was the site of a famous battle won by the Libyan Inaros in 460 B.C. In the process, Inaros killed the Persian satrap (governor) of Egypt, Achaemenes; but after fighting for another year and a half in the papyrus swamps, Inaros was taken captive and later put to a barbarous death, a combination of impaling and flaying alive.
This swamp action lived on in Egyptian history until 206 B.C., when another rebellion arose that became one of the first historically documented guerrilla wars.2 Egyptians under the leadership of the last of the pharaohs revolted against the government in Alexandria. The rebels in Lower Egypt, in defiance of the Ptolemys, hid in the papyrus swamps of the delta for twenty-one years! Finally coaxed out with an offer of peace, the leaders were killed and the revolt halted; interestingly, the terms of the treaty that settled this rebellion make up part of the text on the Rosetta Stone.
Incredible as it may seem, it is possible to live for generations on floating reed rafts or artificial reed islands. Good examples are the boats and islands on which Marsh Arabs in Iraq and the Aymara Indians on Lake Titicaca currently live, which last for many years, provided that the substrate is replenished with dry reed over time. Potentially, the islands they live on could last forever if properly maintained, and papyrus islands are stable to the point that Chadians kept cattle on some of them. The marsh men of ancient Egypt may have found homes on man-made islands or large papyrus boats or rafts that acted as living platforms. Even if they gradually became waterlogged, new layers of dry papyrus stems could simply be piled on top of the old during the inundation, which lasted from late July to late October; after that, there was adequate time for the island or platform or boat to dry out before the next flood.
In modern times, the people living in papyrus swamps are there for a reason. When Livingstone was descending the Shiré River, a river that flows south from Lake Malawi into the Zambezi, he found a number of families of the Manganja tribe hidden in the broad belt of papyrus. They had been driven from their homes by the raids of a rival tribe. “So thickly did the papyrus grow, that when beat down it supported their small temporary huts, though when they walked from one hut to another, it heaved and bent beneath their feet as thin ice does at home. A dense and impenetrable forest of papyrus was left standing between them and the land, and no one passing by on the same side would ever have suspected that human beings lived there. They came to this spot from the south by means of their canoes, which enabled them to obtain a living from the fine fish which abound.”
Life in the swamps in von Rosen’s day was thought by some to be a unique and bizarre experience. The count’s adventures were felt to be so unusual that they starred briefly in the Tarzan series of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs used a Batwa-type village in his 1928 story Tarzan and the Lost Empire. One of his characters, a European archeologist called Erich von Harben, bore a remarkable resemblance to von Rosen. In the story, the young Erich and his trusty African helper, Gabula, are captured by Africans, allies of a tribe descended from ancient Romans, and taken to a lost outpost in a secret valley in Africa where “A half hour of steady paddling along winding water-lanes brought them to a collection of beehive huts built upon the floating roots of the papyrus, from which the tall plants had been cleared just sufficiently to make room for the half dozen huts that constituted the village. Here von Harben and Gabula became the center of a curious and excited company of men, women, and children . . . [and later were] conducted into one of the small huts of the village . . . [where] they were brought a supper of fish and snails and a dish concocted of the cooked pith of papyrus.”
The reference to eating the plant comes directly from Herodotus. In ancient times the rhizome was dried and ground into flour that was used to “stretch” local bread flour. Most experimenters (including myself) after eating it conclude that the plant might do as a side dish, but not as a main course. Quite often ancient and modern people living in or near papyrus swamps chewed on the green stem, which has a thin sweet sap like a diluted form of sugarcane juice.
One thing to note is that sugarcane was unknown to the ancient Egyptian. It may have arrived in Egypt with Alexander, or after, but the main sweeteners in the old days were figs and honey. In comparison, then, chewing on a fresh young papyrus stem might actually be considered different, almost a treat, and was made even more attractive because it was readily available at any time of the day or night, and it was free.
“Erich von Harben” is not far from Eric von Rosen. Did Burroughs ever read about any of von Rosen’s exploits in Africa? Before and after WWI, the count published scientific papers in English, German, and Swedish, as well as several books that became best sellers of their day in Europe. Burroughs appears to have sought them out.
The protection offered by papyrus swamps has been a blessing for desperate people many times in history. In its northern extension from the Nile swampland, papyrus is found in the Jordan Valley where the Bedouin sought refuge years ago. Papyrus swamps were also once found along the coastal road north of Jerusalem. These swamps were famously used by Richard I, the Lionhearted, to protect his troops during the Third Crusade.
During Richard’s march toward Jerusalem along the coast of Palestine in September 1191, he was pursued by Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, whose strong force hid in a forest overlooking the shore road. Saladin harassed the Crusaders mercilessly and was intent on ambush, but cautious Richard used the papyrus swamp that lay between him and the enemy to protect his troops for one evening, allowing them to rest through the night. The next day, the swamp also served to guard his rear flank while the king withstood the attack.3
Saladin was repelled, and Richard went on to capture Arsuf and later Jaffa. Seven hundred and twenty-seven years later, almost to the day, British troops again made use of the same swamp to drive Turkish troops away from Jerusalem in the First World War. This time going in the opposite direction, Gen. Allenby’s forces used the same swamp to protect their right flank. The swamp served them well, as in September 1918 they attacked the area north of Arsuf on their way to Damascus and victory.
This impassable ground was called Birket El-Ramadan and consisted of a papyrus swamp that was then six square miles in area. Later reduced by half by encroachment in the years following WWI, it was finally drained for agriculture by the British administration in Palestine in the late 1930s.
Perhaps the thought that papyrus swamps offered ideal cover for undercover operations led to the most novel use yet proposed for any papyrus swamp. This came about in June 1976, while the Israeli secret service was finalizing plans to recapture an Air France jetliner hijacked to Uganda, the famous “Raid on Entebbe,” an event made into a TV movie starring Charles Bronson in 1977. The Israelis proposed to parachute twelve fighters into Lake Victoria who would splash down, get into inflatable dinghies, paddle to the swamp edge, creep through the papyrus swamps (the same swamp that tourists see today on arriving by air in Uganda) to reach the terminal, and kill the terrorists.4
At the time, it seemed so very appropriate as a form of retribution against the tyrannical and murderous Idi Amin. Like Isis and her son Horus emerging from the papyrus swamps of old to wreak revenge on the evil uncle Seth, so it would have been with Amin. Somehow, someday, vengeance would emerge from papyrus and perhaps be his undoing.
Problems with the plan arose immediately when they considered what would happen if all twelve got stuck in the swamp, and how the evacuation of more than a hundred hostages would be carried out by this intrepid dozen. The plan was abandoned, and the rescue of the hostages went forward without the trek through the swamp. Instead, it was carried out at night by a specially trained assault team using transport planes that landed directly at the airport.
Unfortunately, the body of Dora Bloch, the only hostage to die in the attack, was found later in a papyrus swamp north of Kampala, a cruel irony considering how the rescue was originally intended to be staged. But the swamp would still have a role to play in expelling Amin from Uganda. Ten years later, in 1986, Yoweri Museveni, now the President of Uganda, led a successful overthrow of Amin and his government by launching what the BBC in 2001 called “. . . a guerrilla struggle based in the swamps of central Uganda.” The papyrus swamps of Lake Victoria would have a role to play after all in finally avenging the havoc wreaked by the murderous dictator and by shielding Museveni’s rebel forces. Papyrus, in its way, helped bring down Amin. If the papyrus swamps had not been there to provide that needed cover, the chilling thought lingers that Idi Amin might still be with us today.