Alexander Gordon Laing's First Expedition into the Interior of Africa

Alexander Gordon Laing's first expedition into the interior of Africa in 1822 carried him from the coast of Sierra Leone up the Rokelle River to the town of Falaba, close enough to the source of the Niger River to make a decisive geographical observation. The journey answered a commercial mandate — to open direct trade between the colony and the interior — while producing some of the earliest detailed European reports on the peoples, customs, and slave trade of the borderlands of present-day Guinea and Sierra Leone. This page follows that expedition step by step and sets Alexander Gordon Laing within the wider history of African exploration.

Alexander Gordon Laing's first expedition into the interior of Africa

When Alexander Gordon Laing set out to organize the first expedition into the interior of Africa — into the border regions of what are now Guinea and Sierra Leone, inhabited chiefly by the Dialonke and Kuranko peoples — the officials in Freetown had only a rough idea of both the distance and the route to be followed. No reliable map existed of the country beyond the coastal belt, so the plan rested on guesswork and on the accounts of coastal traders.

Alexander Gordon Laing's biography and colonial military service in Africa

Alexander Gordon Laing was a British army officer whose African career combined colonial military service with geographic exploration, a pairing common among nineteenth-century explorers acting on government instructions. At the time of the expedition he held the rank of lieutenant and travelled not as an independent scientist but as an envoy of the governor of Sierra Leone, Charles MacCarthy. This dual role shaped every decision he made on the march: he was bound by official instructions, answerable to the colonial administration, and responsible for trade goods entrusted to him by merchants in the colony.

His colonial military service continued after this journey. Laing was promoted to captain and given a company in the Royal African Colonial Corps, arriving on the Gold Coast in early 1823 as war loomed with the Ashantee kingdom. That combination of soldier and traveller placed him alongside a generation of men who mapped Africa in the service of British colonial expansion.

Organizing the expedition and the official instructions

Trade dominated the official instructions Alexander Laing received, and he returns to the subject repeatedly in his own book. He raised the question of commerce with almost every chief through whose territory he passed, because the central aim of the mission was to establish direct trading relations between the colony of Sierra Leone and the interior regions of West Africa. Geographic discovery, though it fascinated Laing personally, was secondary to that commercial purpose in the eyes of the administration.

Choosing the route up the Rokelle River

Laing chose to travel upstream along the Rokelle River because, in his words, "the river might prove a convenient trade road between the colony and the interior of Africa." In April, at the close of the dry season, the Rokelle was navigable for only about fifty miles, but during the rains that navigable distance increased considerably. A water route suited both trade and the movement of the expedition, since the travellers depended entirely on whether they could hire porters to carry their loads.

The Dialonke and Kuranko peoples: the tribal cultures of the region

The Dialonke and Kuranko peoples inhabited the interior country the expedition crossed, part of the rich diversity of African tribal cultures that Laing documented as he advanced. Political power in these communities rested with village chiefs, each of whom controlled passage through his own lands, and the route to Falaba wound through territory belonging to the Temne, Kuranko, and neighbouring groups. Laing paid close attention to these societies, and his willingness to record their institutions without contempt marks his narrative apart from many colonial accounts.

Trade interests — the central question of Alexander Laing's expedition

Trade interests were the main preoccupation of the expedition, and the biggest obstacle Laing anticipated was the reluctance of the inhabitants along his route to allow direct links between coastal Sierra Leone and the interior. No one wished to lose the profits earned from acting as a middleman. The water route was convenient for both commerce and travel, but the travellers remained at the mercy of local chiefs who were, as a rule, in no hurry to meet the strangers' needs.

Coastal trade and commercial ties with the colony of Sierra Leone

Coastal trade with the colony of Sierra Leone rested on a chain of intermediaries who controlled the flow of goods between the interior and the Atlantic ports. Chiefs and traders nearer the coast grew wealthy by standing between inland producers and European buyers, and they had every reason to keep that arrangement intact. Laing's mission threatened to bypass them, which explains much of the resistance he met. His reports nonetheless gave the colony valuable knowledge about the state of interior regions, relations among their rulers, and the prospects for commerce.

The role of chiefs in the middleman trade

Village chiefs decided in each individual case whether porters could be hired and whether the expedition could pass, and their authority was tied directly to the profits of the middleman trade. To ask people accustomed to the advantages of an intermediary position to give them up voluntarily was no simple matter. Laing understood clearly that even the friendly ruler Assana Yoro of Falaba prevented him from making direct contact with the people of the Sangara region for precisely this reason — direct trade would have cut out the intermediaries on whom local power depended.

Local customs along the route

Local custom in the districts near the coast required that a traveller obtain each chief's permission to continue, and the same custom dictated that it was simply improper to request such permission without offering a gift to the chief and the village elders. The size of that gift depended on many things, including the firmness of both parties — one seeking to receive as much as possible, the other to give as little as it could. A drawn-out dispute over the size of a present was sometimes resolved in the most unexpected way.

The system of permissions and gifts to chiefs

The permission-and-gift system governed movement through every territory along the coastal belt, and Laing could not escape it. Passage depended on presenting the right offering to the right chief, and negotiations over these gifts consumed a great deal of time. As the expedition moved east, where the inhabitants were less familiar with such marks of civilization as strong drink, one favoured method of smoothing negotiations grew steadily less effective.

The affair at the village of Ma-Bung: the dispute with chief Ba Koro

Early in the journey, at the village of Ma-Bung, a dispute broke out between the inhabitants and Laing over the payment for passage. Since neither side would yield, Laing sent chief Ba Koro a fairly substantial gift, though he was by no means certain the chief held enough authority to settle the matter in the Europeans' favour. To Laing's considerable surprise, Ba Koro arrived that evening with several elders. The guests demanded rum, and after two bottles had been emptied, Laing was informed that he might travel onward by whatever road he chose.

Dangers along the expedition's path

On 7 May 1822 the expedition reached the village of Ma-Bum, where Laing first met active opposition to his plans. The chief Modi Ismaila and his retinue demanded, in exchange for their friendship, gifts that Laing could not — and would not — present. Attempts to tempt the chiefs with the benefits of trade with Sierra Leone and the good reputation they would earn by letting a European pass came to nothing. "They had no need of trade or of a good name," Laing recorded, not without sadness. "They wanted money, and if they did not get it, I could go no further."

Opposition at Ma-Bum and chief Modi Ismaila

Modi Ismaila eventually appeared to relent, accepting the presents and granting leave to move on, but under various pretexts he delayed the expedition's departure from Ma-Bum, pleading now the lack of a guide, now the bad character of the villagers who lay along the white man's path. Only when Laing threatened to turn back and reclaim all the gifts did the chief consent to the passage — while secretly ordering the guide to lead the expedition to a village whose chief had already agreed to attack Laing's party and seize their goods. Thanks only to the caution of Laing and his interpreter Musa Kant did they learn of the plot in time and escape the danger.

Those hoping to profit from the property of Laing and his companions were not confined to Ma-Bum. Two weeks later, when the expedition reached the village of Kaniakuta, the local chief sent it onward along a deserted, roundabout path and laid an ambush upon it. The plan was not merely to rob the party by night but to kill Laing and sell his African companions into slavery. By pure chance one of the men sent to the ambush was a former soldier of the British colonial infantry named Tamba, who knew the black soldiers escorting Laing from their old service; Tamba delayed the war party, and it arrived too late — Laing had already passed the spot.

African responses to European contact and colonization

African responses to European contact, as Laing recorded them, ranged from armed resistance and extortion to genuine curiosity and cooperation, and he refused to reduce them to a single cause. Even the attempts to rob him he attributed not to any innate disposition among Africans but to three centuries of the slave trade, which had bred a habit of easy enrichment. After the failed conspiracy at Kaniakuta he made a telling note: men like those with him, long accustomed to the freedom they enjoyed so fully in Sierra Leone, "would sooner give the last drop of their blood than consent to be made slaves."

Twice mothers offered to sell Laing their children and were astonished and offended when he refused. After such refusals, word spread through the village that Laing was "one of those white men who suppress the slave trade and injure the prosperity of the country," and almost the whole village would then eye him with hostility. His narrative captures how deeply the slave trade had reshaped everyday expectations, so that the abolitionist stance of a British officer was read locally as an economic threat.

The consequences of the slave trade on African soil

Alexander Laing was, by conviction, a decided opponent of the slave trade, and he documented its destructive effect at every turn. He saw plainly what "this abominable traffic, which strikes at the very roots of production, destroys the bonds of social order, and even quenches the strongest kinship feelings of man" had done to African societies. He grasped its true causes as well: summing up his journey, he wrote bitterly that wars between African peoples flared up and dragged on for years, sustained by the greed of European merchants, and that without this trade Africans would have achieved far greater success in agriculture and craft.

Laing certainly overstated the benefit of the comparatively late abolition of the slave trade in British possessions; the humanitarian motives of the British Parliament in the 1806 measure were not as large as he supposed, and the trade continued for many years after its official prohibition. He observed that beyond British territory the slave trade flourished still, so woven into daily life that when he urged chief Assana Yoro at Falaba to stop raiding weaker neighbours — the town was then preparing for war against the Limba — the chief at first simply did not understand what was wanted: "I have many idle men and there is a demand for slaves, so how can I not make war?"

Alexander Laing's interest in the life of Africans

Laing's sharp condemnation of the European slave trade went hand in hand with respect for and interest in the Africans he met on the road to Falaba. When he wrote about them there was neither arrogance nor the tendency, common among Europeans, to regard Africans as beings of a lower order. On the contrary, he rated highly the capacity of peoples such as the Temne and Malinke to absorb the achievements of European culture, and he was especially struck by the ease with which they accepted so unheard-of a novelty as smallpox inoculation for children — a small supply of vaccine having reached him at Falaba. He could not resist comparisons unfavourable to "the most enlightened countries of Europe," recalling the troubles that Dr. Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccine, and his followers had faced with their first inoculations.

Laing was far from uncritical admiration, however. He noted that the African was poorly suited to trade and industry on the European model, and observed from the outset that time held no value for the people among whom he travelled — and that, in consequence, another's time held none either. Yet he watched the particulars of African life with close and sympathetic interest.

The secret society of Poro

Laing gave a detailed description of the secret society of Poro, one of the most important associations of pre-colonial West Africa. Such societies arose to prepare the young for their communal duties within the tribe: boys were raised into warriors, girls trained in the running of a household and the raising of children. An elaborate ritual, a system of prohibitions, and a veil of mystery all reinforced their influence. By Laing's time Poro had become a powerful organization that made wide use of terroristic methods; the population's fear of the society allowed its leaders to seize any property that caught their eye. Poro had ceased to be merely an institution born of communal need and had become an effective instrument for maintaining the power of the tribal elite who held its leading posts.

In the interior of present-day Sierra Leone no one could travel the country without the society's consent — that is, without paying it off — and Laing was no exception. His own encounter with members of Poro ended well: they came by night to a village where the expedition was lodging, and while the inhabitants usually shut themselves indoors during such visits, the soldier guarding the baggage, unaware of the custom, raised the alarm and held the intruders off with his bayonet until Laing appeared. "The Poro, being unsure of their power over the white man, hastily fled," he wrote. Laing did not understand the society's true character — he even linked it to the slave trade, supposing it was formed by people who had fled into the forests to escape the slave-hunters — but the connection, in fact, ran the other way: Poro's leaders sold people into slavery no less successfully than the village elders.

The skill of African craftsmen

The skill of African craftsmen roused the traveller's lively interest at every stage. Laing described metalworking in great detail, sketching the smelting furnaces used for iron, and he wrote with evident approval of the suspension bridge of lianas by which he crossed the Rokelle River. Listing the categories of craftsmen among Mandingo-speaking peoples, he stressed that artisans enjoyed great respect — an observation that runs against the era's easy assumptions about the interior.

The rainy season on the Atlantic coast

Advance into the interior was hard, for the rainy season was beginning, and in the districts near the Atlantic coast this is perhaps the most difficult time of all to travel. The pages of Laing's journal from these months are dotted with mentions of bouts of malaria; the illness so altered his appearance that a man who came to him at Falaba — destined to become his companion on the second expedition — failed to recognize him as a European. Yet Laing did not complain. His notes on the disease read as businesslike details, a sad inevitability against which nothing could be done, since for men of his time malaria was inseparable from travel through tropical Africa. It is this composure that commands still greater respect for him.

Lieutenant Laing at Falaba

Lieutenant Laing overcame every obstacle: on 11 June 1822, after two months on the march, his party entered Falaba. Two days after arriving he witnessed a solemn communal rite of the town's inhabitants — tradition required each person to work three days a year for the chief, one at the sowing of rice, one at its weeding, and one at the harvest, though the chiefs of the town's various quarters sent their slaves and dependants in their place. On 14 June, Laing first saw the supreme ruler of the Sulima country, Assana Yoro, at a ceremonial reception, where he presented gifts and, briefly — for he felt a bout of malaria coming on — set out the main aim of his mission: to establish direct trading relations between the colony of Sierra Leone and Assana's domains.

Alexander Laing's illness

Both the gifts and Alexander Laing's speech were received favourably, but no discussion followed: seeing the poor state of the governor's envoy, Assana dismissed him as quickly as possible. Laing came to himself only on 24 June, having lain mostly unconscious for ten days. In his notes he gratefully recalls the African healer who bled him and thereby eased the attack. What troubled him most was that during his illness his meteorological observations had stopped entirely, and — worse — no one had wound his watch or calculated the correction to its rate, so the longitude of the place could not be fixed with sufficient accuracy. "With a vexation bordering on despair I thought of my watch: no one but me could wind it, and it had stopped," he wrote. By early July he was able to write to his friends in the colony, and two local men agreed to carry the letters; their chief news was that he was rapidly recovering his strength and would soon be able to press on "even farther east." Having delivered the gifts and the governor's charge to Assana, he had in effect completed the official part of his journey — and now every thought turned to reaching the source of the Niger, and every effort to persuading Assana Yoro to let him do so.

Three days' journey to the source of the Niger

On 13 July Laing wrote that his strength was returning quickly, and with it his desire to move east: "I knew the source of the Niger could not be far from Falaba, and I wished to reach it, that by determining its height above sea level I might know whether it lay high enough to carry its waters to the Mediterranean by way of the Nile." The task was set precisely, for the great geographical debate of the age concerned whether the Niger River flowed toward the Nile River. That day he first told Assana Yoro of his intention to travel farther east and reach "the great river," hoping for a guide. Assana refused: "I am at war with the Kisi people, in whose country the river begins. If the Kisi learn you have come from me, you will be killed at once."

Attempts to change the chief's mind failed. Conflicting reports of the distance to the supposed source only added to Laing's frustration: people of the Sangara region said Falaba lay only three days from the source of the Niger, at the village of Semba he was told it was at least six, and the most knowledgeable men in Falaba spoke of twelve days by a roundabout road. Laing suspected that the longer he stayed at Falaba the greater the distance would grow — until his will to attempt the journey was worn away. "This combination alone was enough to discourage me," he recorded, weighed down by the rainy season, dwindling time, ill health, and the chief's hostility to his project as the deadlines set by MacCarthy's instructions ran out.

On 28 July the men Assana had sent to a friendly chief named Yusuf returned with three guides. Laing learned that for many years no one had travelled through the Sulima lands straight to the Niger; the way lay by a roundabout path through the country of the Kuranko people — first southeast, then north — a journey of five days, whereas the source lay only two days off as the crow flies. Even so Laing was glad of it. After two days of preparation he set out early on the morning of 31 July, accompanied by four men.

Obstacles in Laing's path

The travellers did not get far: a messenger from Assana overtook the party and ordered it, in the chief's name, to return. Sensing trouble but seeing no choice, Laing complied. Assana, it emerged, wished to test whether his guest could pay his way through foreign lands, and the trade goods Laing still held were judged insufficient. Above all he had neither salt — prized in the deep interior of West Africa almost above every other commodity — nor tobacco, and without these, he was assured, the Kuranko country could not be crossed. Laing protested in vain; he was told, courteously but firmly, that he could go toward the Niger only once Assana had obtained salt. To soften the blow, the chief added that on Laing's return a trade caravan gathered by the merchants of Sulima and Sangara would be waiting at Falaba, with which he might travel home.

Waiting resumed — the thing Laing's active nature bore hardest — the more so since on 3 August a large caravan arrived at Falaba from the village of Kovia on a tributary of the Niger. Two of its merchants had been at the source of the Niger some years earlier and confirmed that the source lay three days from Falaba, were the path through the Kisi lands not so dangerous, for the Kisi killed or enslaved anyone who ventured into their country. Laing told the merchants of his own land; when he mentioned that the tallest grass in England barely reached half a man's height, they wondered what the English roofed their houses with, and his description of tiled roofing met open disbelief — until he chanced to find a slab of mica schist and showed it to them, recovering their trust.

The road to the "great river" that never came about

With very little time left, Laing at last obtained Assana's leave to set out for the "great river." That was 19 August. But as before, soon after leaving Falaba, at the border village of Kanasina, a messenger from Assana overtook the expedition and announced that his master had dreamed an evil dream in the night and had therefore sent him to bring the traveller back. There was no arguing; he had to return. "The greatest misfortune I ever suffered in my life would not have caused me such vexation as this command," Laing recorded bitterly. It was now finally clear that Assana would not let the expedition reach the Niger, and a further attempt to persuade him produced only the repeated claim that he, Assana Yoro, feared for Laing's life. Laing himself was sure he could have reached the source of the "great river" and returned safely to Falaba, but in this case his opinion counted for least of all. He understood the objective difficulties well enough: his porters had been hired only as far as the Sulima country and would go no further, and he travelled not as an explorer but as the governor's envoy, with no right to risk the goods entrusted to him by the colony's merchants.

Surveying the surroundings of Falaba

While waiting for the caravan that was to travel with him back to the colony, Laing set about surveying the surroundings of Falaba. On 24 August he climbed Konkudugure hill, four miles south of the town, and from there first saw, to the south-southeast, Mount Loma, "from which the Niger begins." On 1 September, accompanied by three of the expedition's Africans and two guides, he set out from Falaba to the source of the Rokelle River, by which he had begun his journey from Sierra Leone, and on 3 September 1822 he fixed that source on his map. At the headwaters he wrote: "From the source of the Rokelle my thoughts passed imperceptibly and naturally to the source of the Niger, and, reflecting on the success that had attended my first experiment in the discovery of Africa, I ventured to foresee a time when the course and termination of that mysterious river would be as certainly known to me as now the position of its source." On the morning of 4 September, from a hill near the Rokelle, he saw Mount Loma some 25 miles to the south-southeast and felt again the sharp regret that a single day's march would have carried him to the mountain, and thus to the source of the Niger. "How deeply I lamented," he wrote, "the obstacles that arose in my path!"

Alexander Laing's decisive observation

Standing within twenty or thirty miles of the great river's beginning was itself no small achievement, but at the source of the Rokelle Alexander Laing made another important observation. From the summit of a hill whose height he measured at about 1,600 feet (480 m) above sea level, he found that the mountain holding the source of the Niger stood at roughly the same elevation. In effect this settled the "Niger–Nile" problem: at such an absolute height, the waters of the Niger simply could not reach the Nile, because "the difference in elevation proved insufficient for it." Laing fully understood the significance of his discovery.

The return of Alexander Laing's expedition

Alexander Laing's first expedition into the interior of Africa ended successfully. In 1823, after England's most popular scientific journal of the day reported the safe return of the expedition and the results of his observations, Laing found himself answering many correspondents eager for the details. A draft of one of his letters, to an unknown recipient, survives in the archives of the British Royal Society: "I have always held that knowledge of the height of the source of the Niger is of the highest importance, for if it is ever known to us, we could say with confidence where the river cannot flow, and thereby save much effort and expense in future inquiry into this geographical question."

Describing the reasons that had prevented him from reaching the very source, and his reasoning about the distance between the source of the Rokelle and the source of the Niger, Laing continued: "The source of the Rokelle lies, by the barometer, at 1,441 feet above sea level, and judging by the look of the country between the two sources, I could not suppose the source of the Niger to be more than 100 feet higher. Talk of the Niger joining the Nile must therefore be abandoned for ever — the height at its source proves too little to let it travel even half the distance." Later measurements by more accurate methods altered the figures Laing gives in this letter and in his later book, but they did not change the substance of the discovery: the Niger indeed cannot join the Nile, the difference in elevation being too small.

The return journey

With the caravan's preparation complete, only a few days remained before departure. On 17 September 1822 Laing set out on the return journey from Falaba, and this time the expedition moved without any particular incident, arriving in Sierra Leone on 27 October. His superiors could be well satisfied with the lieutenant's work. On this first expedition into the interior of Africa, Alexander Laing had indeed reached the Sulima country and delivered MacCarthy's charge to its ruler, and his reports yielded much useful information about the state of the interior, the relations among its rulers, and the possibilities of trade.

Direct commercial links with the peoples of the deep interior remained, admittedly, premature: it was no easy thing to make men accustomed to the profits of a middleman position renounce them willingly. Laing understood perfectly that even the well-disposed Assana Yoro had blocked his direct contact with the people of Sangara for exactly this reason.

British colonial administration and protectorates in West Africa

British colonial administration in West Africa framed Laing's mission from beginning to end, since he acted as the governor's envoy under formal instructions rather than as a private traveller. Governor Charles MacCarthy directed the colony of Sierra Leone as the base from which the expedition set out, and the colony's merchants supplied the trade goods Laing carried. This administrative structure of colonies and protectorates along the Atlantic seaboard determined both the aims of exploration — the opening of trade routes into the interior — and its limits, for an officer answerable to the government could not risk his charge for the sake of geography alone.

Laing did not abandon the idea of reaching the Niger, but circumstances in the British colonies on the west coast pushed geographical research aside for a time. In the colony of the Gold Coast, war with the Ashantee kingdom — the fourth of the so-called Ashanti wars — threatened to break out any day. Laing was promoted to captain and given a company in the Royal African Colonial Corps, arriving on the Gold Coast early in 1823. In February 1825 he would set out on his second expedition into the interior of Africa.

Laing compared with other historical explorers of Africa

Alexander Laing belongs among the pioneers of the European exploration of West Africa, and his approach to the Niger question links him directly to a line of explorers who tried to resolve the river's course and termination. Mungo Park had earlier proven that the Niger flowed eastward; Richard Lander and his brother John Lander would later trace it to the sea; and Hugh Clapperton pushed inland toward Kano and Bornu in the same era. The great trans-Saharan goal of reaching Timbuctoo (Timbuktu) across the Sahara Desert, first achieved for Europe by René Caillié, was one Laing himself would pursue on his fatal second journey. Later German travellers such as Heinrich Barth and Gustav Nachtigal, and figures on the Nile and in the Congo like Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley, extended the same project of mapping the continent.

What sets Laing's narrative apart from many in the tradition of European explorers' travel journals is the seriousness with which he treated African societies and his consistent condemnation of the slave trade. Later authors of hunter-traveller and sporting literature — among them Frederick Selous, Andrew A. Anderson, Alfred Aylward, Sir James Edward Alexander, and Mary Kingsley in West Africa, along with a broad shelf of works catalogued on the history of the continent — approached Africa as a field for adventure and natural-history observation. Laing's book, by contrast, reads as a sober report on peoples, trade, and geography, which is why it remains a valuable source in the history of the exploration of Africa.

Laing's book as a source in African travel literature

Laing's account of the first expedition stands as one of the earliest detailed European sources on the interior of Sierra Leone and Guinea, prized both for its geographical result on the Niger–Nile question and for its ethnographic observations. His descriptions of the Poro society, of iron smelting and the liana suspension bridge, of the permission-and-gift system, and of the workings of the slave trade give the book documentary weight beyond its narrative of travel. For readers of nineteenth-century African travel literature it offers a record shaped by official purpose yet unusually attentive to the people Laing met, and it prepared the way for his more famous, and ultimately fatal, attempt to reach Timbuctoo.