Unto the third generation, July 1893
The shore loomed ahead in the twilight, low forested hills rising above a village. A few late fishing boats were still out, and Paulo’s dugout, looking for all the world like one of them, moved easily among them.
Somewhere nearby, Paulo knew, there were six others. They’d left the opposite shore together early that morning, but they’d taken separate courses across the lake just in case the French gunboat was out. No French captain would give a lone fishing boat a second glance, but seven together would draw suspicion, and Paulo couldn’t hope to match the gunboat on the open water.
But it hadn’t been out – that much of what Dimbele had told him was true – and for now his greatest worry was that all the boats would find the meeting-place. He could feel his troops’ tension easing as they saw the shoreline and knew that they wouldn’t find graves at the bottom of the lake; he saw one of them throw a pinch of tobacco into the water, an offering to the lake-goddess Mkangualukulu. He pretended not to see; the man was nominally Muslim, but he’d learned that Islam here was often a thin veneer over the old folk religion.
A few minutes more and they pulled up on the beach, grounding the dugout where the villagers had moored theirs. If things were as they should be, Dimbele would be in the village with twenty men, to guide Paulo’s troops to where the French boat was anchored. If things weren’t as they should be…
The relief Paulo had felt at the successful crossing drained out of him as if it had never been there. If this were a trap, he was doomed – he might be able to warn off the rest of his men, but he and the boatload who’d come with him were done for.
The village was just ahead, and they made their way to it nervously, starting at the shadows thrown by flickering cook-fires. But there, in the center of the huts, was Dimbele, grinning broadly and accompanied by sixteen warriors. Paulo’s weeks of careful diplomacy, and far too many dangerous lake crossings, had borne fruit.
“You made it!” Dimbele called in the Swahili dialect that served as a traders’ tongue on both sides of the lake.
“Some of us,” Paulo replied in the same language; it was still rough going for him, but he could speak it after a fashion, and he was coming along in Ibembe besides. “We got here first; there are six more boats coming, if they all make it.” A noise from the shore signaled that one of them had arrived.
“Nothing to do but wait, then,” Dmbele said. “Have some
urwagwa while they get here.”
Paulo accepted the drink; he hadn’t yet developed a taste for banana beer, but it would be impolite for even one of his religion to refuse. He sipped carefully –
urwagwa was potent, and he would need a clear head tonight – but as Dimbele had told him, there was nothing to do but wait.
He looked east, past the huts and beach to the calm water, scanning for the other boats. The scene seemed unreal to him, but these days everything did. Even after six months in Tanganyika, he still sometimes felt that he was in a dream, that he would wake up and laugh at the thought of being responsible for the defense of an entire region.
“District officers need to be everything,” Professor Hardwick had said, a lifetime ago in London. “Governor, diplomat, policeman, engineer - a master of all trades, because there may be no one else around to practice them.” Paulo had listened and noted the words down dutifully, but he’d never expected to need them so soon. He certainly hadn’t expected to be hustled off to Tanganyika before his probationary training was even complete, and given a post at the outer edge of nowhere. He had his suspicions about who had arranged that, but if that person had thought to send him somewhere out of danger, he hadn’t succeeded.
The Kigoma District, like most in Anglo-Omani Tanganyika, had three rulers. There was the nominal lord, an Indian merchant who’d been ennobled in exchange for equipping one of the Sultan’s regiments – he lived in Zanzibar, had never been to the district, and had little interest there other than collecting the profits. There was the headman who managed things day to day. And there was Paulo – the British resident, the one who governed by default, the one the people had learned to come to if the Sultan’s tax collectors were oppressive or the local courts gave no justice. The district officers before him had cultivated that role very deliberately, as a tactic to increase British influence at the Sultan’s expense, but that didn’t make it any less real.
Paulo had learned, yes, he’d learned – he’d been taught the rudiments of the language already, and the professors in London had grounded him in Tanganyika’s history and cultures, but he’d had to learn governing and mediating as he went along, with only his memories of his father as a guide. And then the war had come.
He suspected that nobody much had thought of Lake Tanganyika as a place where the war might be fought, but they were wrong. On the other side of the lake from his district – the side where he was standing now, waiting for his other dugouts – was the Congo. It was neutral and under international rule, in theory. In fact, since the member states of the international governing board had stopped cooperating, it had fallen to cantons and warlord rule – governors, garrison commanders, rubber barons, African mercenaries displaced from the Great Lakes wars, all had staked their claims. And the garrison immediately across from Paulo was French.
There were rumors that the French commander had greater ambitions – that he was gathering all the allied forces in the region, that he planned to attack the North German governor Dietmar Köhler in Sud-Kivu, or that he planned to
join forces with Köhler and persuade him to go warlord. What
wasn’t a rumor was that the Frenchmen had a gunboat – brought there, originally, to terrorize the local villagers into meeting their rubber quotas – and that they’d used it to attack the Anglo-Omani side. There had been raids and disappearances; there were dark rumors that the French soldiers were kidnapping villagers to do forced labor for their war effort; there were people starting to flee the district and fields left untended.
The Omanis hadn’t been prepared for this war; they expected that, if they had to fight at all, they’d fight along the Ethiopian border or against the Portuguese in Mozambique, and their available troops were concentrated there. The aging Sultan didn’t have anyone he could send to protect against raids in outlying districts, and wouldn’t for some time, so while he marshaled his forces, he commissioned every British district officer as a colonel in his army and authorized them to raise troops.
A colonel – Paulo was still amused that he ranked so highly at twenty-one, and that in fact he had the same rank as his father. But taking down a French gunboat when he had nothing but dugouts was no game. He’d raised a company of men from his district, and he’d offered land and money to a troop of Rwandan Muslim exiles and another of Congolese Mormons – he too could take advantage of the chaos in the eastern Congo – but the real keystone of his defense had been his surreptitious crossings of the lake, his meetings with the headmen on this side, and the agreements that had led Dimbele to meet him here tonight.
Agreements that won’t be worth anything if my own troops don’t come. Five boatloads had arrived now after making landfall at points up and down the coast; the chatter from the beach said that a sixth had arrived. But there was no sign of the seventh, no excited men running into their camp to report its arrival at some other village. Had it been stopped and apprehended? Did the Frenchmen know he was coming?
He couldn’t wait any longer. “We need to go now,” he said to Dimbele, and hoped that the six boatloads – a hundred and fourteen men – would be enough to do the job.
“I know,” Dimbele answered, already waving his own men up from where they were seated. “And knowledge without action is arrogance, so we go.”
The Bembe soldier was smiling – he knew whose favorite saying that was, and knew Paulo’s connection to that person. They’d heard of Paulo the Elder here, albeit through the lens of Tippu Tip’s prophecy and overlaid with a helping of folk religion, and his name was one of the things that had made them so ready to fight the French garrison. Sometimes the younger Paulo had a powerful sense of living in a world his grandfather had made, although surely there were far larger forces at work here.
The gunboat, according to Dimbele, was anchored six miles to the south – they couldn’t land closer for fear of discovery – and at night, there were sentries but not patrols. It would be a tough march, and they’d likely arrive after midnight, but they had nothing to fear besides the jungle. Paulo’s men followed as the Bembe led them down trails that barely existed, through undergrowth and patches of wild rubber, with the animals of the forest canopy making eerie sounds in the darkness.
Paulo had lost all sense of time when he saw a signal from Dimbele –
be quiet. They must be coming close now. If they could silence the sentry quickly and overwhelm the garrison before it could react…
But then, from the south, there came the worst sound possible: the noise of gunfire.
The seventh boat. It must have landed almost at the very place where the gunboat was, and the Frenchmen must have seen it. And now they knew he was coming, and worse yet, they had some of his men pinned down.
There was no use for silence anymore, and Paulo urged his men into a run. He could see a cleared area ahead, and knew that the French were close at hand; his only hope of saving his men was to get in fast.
There was a sentry post near the edge of the clearing. Earlier that night, there had been four men there, but all but one had left to join the fighting on the other side of the camp. The one man left had just time to call a warning before Dimbele shot him down. He fell abruptly, gouting blood, and Paulo realized that he’d never seen a man shot. His father was right – it was something that all the telling in the world couldn’t prepare him for.
The last two hundred yards to the French camp passed in a blur. The men still in the camp were firing, and battle was joined; Paulo saw some of his men fall, and hoped that their return fire was affecting the Frenchmen similarly. And then they were inside. There was a knot of French soldiers firing from a makeshift shed; Paulo shouted to his men and charged for the door. He broke through it with his rifle butt, and swung the bayonet around to face the closest one. The man lunged at him, but he parried with his rifle; he stepped inside the Frenchman’s reach and stabbed him in the gut. The soldier folded over Paulo’s bayonet, shrieking in pain, and Paulo was suddenly and violently sick.
He recovered quickly – there was no choice – and looked around to see that the knot had been cleared. He urged his men onward; it was plain that the fighting was on the south side of the camp, and that the bulk of the French troops were there. He passed through the rest of the camp with only scattered resistance, and the sounds of the firefight grew louder, when Dimbele suddenly waved him to a halt.
“Listen,” the Bembe said. Paulo gestured for silence, and did so; there was the sound of rifles, and a faster-paced staccato noise.
“Maxims,” Dimbele explained. “Two of them.”
Paulo understood all too well. The French had Maxim guns; they were pointed the other way now, but if his men broke cover and the Frenchmen turned the guns around, they would be slaughtered. “Can you tell where?” he whispered.
Dimbele listened again. “One there, by the woodline,” he said. A moment later: “The other by the water.”
Paulo thought desperately, trying to pick out a route in the starlight. “You take twenty men and come around through the forest,” he said. “I think I can get most of the way to the other one behind that wall there. Once we flank the guns, everyone else comes out.” The Bembe nodded and clapped him on the shoulder, and slipped away without a word.
Paulo broke cover quickly and dashed to the low stone wall that ran along the beach, throwing himself to the ground when he reached it. Sixteen men followed, the survivors of those who had come in the same dugout he had. He cradled his rifle in his elbows and high-crawled, glad that his father had taught him how; it certainly wasn’t something they taught in the African Civil Service school.
The wall ended barely twenty meters from the French troops; he could see the flashes of rifle muzzles, and saw that what was left of the seventh boatload had taken cover in a stand of trees. The Frenchmen – although that might be a misnomer, since at a good third of them were just as French as Paulo was British – were working their way in with the Maxims, and if nothing intervened, the men in the trees wouldn’t have long.
Paulo intervened. He saw where the Maxim was, raised his rifle and fired. At this range he couldn’t miss, even in the darkness, and one of the gunners fell; his other men were firing too, and the other three French soldiers on the Maxim’s crew joined their comrade. He leaped to his feet and ran, charging for the gun before any other Frenchmen could reach it and turn it around.
The French soldiers were shouting in surprise and consternation, and they turned to fire at him; he heard the crack of a bullet passing his ear and saw the man next to him fall. He’d have to worry about that later. He reached the Maxim, and his men formed a knot around it, defending it while they turned it around to face the French troops.
He heard shooting from the other side of the battlefield, and knew that Dimbele had flanked the other machine gun, and now the remainder of his force was charging from inside the camp. Paulo’s force outnumbered the Frenchmen two to one, and without the Maxims, the defenders had no chance; they threw down their weapons, and the battle was over. Only then did Paulo see what they had come to take – the French gunboat, riding peacefully in the water, with the words
La Reine de l’Afrique painted at the bow.
The rush of battle suddenly left him, to be replaced by more practical matters: what to do with fifty French prisoners, where to bury the dead and treat the wounded, how to get the gunboat out of there before more Frenchmen came from inland. He turned to Mustafa, the headman at Kigoma and his second in command. “Do any of us know how to pilot that thing?”
“No,” Mustafa answered, “but we can tow it. Send men to bring the other boats from the landing.”
Paulo looked at the boat appraisingly and agreed; the trip across the lake would be arduous, and he didn’t look forward to pulling the oars, but it was small enough for seven dugouts to tow. “Good enough. We’ll get the dead and wounded onto the gunboat, and two men to take care of the wounded. We’ll take the Maxims too, and the French rifles.” Guns and gunboat would both come in handy if the French retaliated, which they doubtless would.
“And the Frenchmen?”
“Guard them now. When we’re ready to leave, take their belts and boots and let them go.”
“Good enough.”
From the corner of his eye, Paulo saw the seventh dugout pulling away from shore, on its way to the landing point to get the other boats. They’d be ready to leave by dawn and, God willing, home the following day.
He sat down against the wall to think, and before he knew it, he was asleep.
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