STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal

Faber £25

Tim Jeal’s book is not just an absorbing, sometimes horrifying biography but a feat of advocacy — an ardent, intricate defence of a man history has damned. Henry Morton Stanley, Victorian explorer and hero, has been indicted in modern times as a brutal racist who connived with King Leopold II of Belgium in the vicious exploitation of the Congo. He is also popularly, and mistakenly, identified as Mr Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Jeal is the first biographer to have had unrestricted access to the Stanley archive in the Museum for Central Africa in Brussels. That alone gives his biography new edge, and his subject could not be more topical. For the question at the core of the book is, do we have the right to force our idea of civilisation on peoples whose cultures are abhorrent to us?

Stanley’s early life was a freakish mix of deprivation, adventure and lies. He was born John Rowlands, the result of a teenage pregnancy, in the Welsh town of Denbigh in 1841. His mother abandoned him, and his father was unknown, so he grew up in the workhouse. At 17 he signed on as a cabin boy on an American freighter, and jumped ship at New Orleans. Henry Stanley was a local cotton magnate, and Rowlands took his name, later claiming to be his adopted son, though they never met. Under his new name he joined the southern army in the American civil war, fought at the battle of Shiloh, was captured, changed sides and joined the federal army, deserted, joined the federal navy, deserted from that, and became a journalist, covering fights with redskins in the wild west and a British military foray into Abyssinia.

His quest to find David Livingstone was financed by his paper, the New York Herald. Nothing had been heard of the great explorer since the previous year, when he was somewhere on Lake Tanganyika. Stanley set out from the coast near Zanzibar, 700 miles away, in March 1871, resplendent in solar topee and white flannels and mounted on a thoroughbred stallion. A large party of guards and carriers strung along behind. The disadvantages of African travel soon became apparent. The stallion was killed by tsetse fly within days, and carriers started to desert, taking vital stores with them. Those who stayed were decimated by a lurid selection of diseases — dysentery, smallpox, malaria, elephantiasis, flesh-eating ulcers. The tribes whose lands they passed through naturally regarded them as invaders and showered them with spears and poisoned arrows. Then there were the cannibals. In the 1970s some anthropologists denied that cannibals ever existed. Cannibalism was a “cultural libel” invented by the West. That was not Stanley’s impression. Warriors pursued his party shouting “ niama , niama ” (meat, meat). After one clash, he recorded in his diaries, those left on the battlefield were mutilated, and their faces, genitals and stomachs boiled and eaten, mixed with a little rice and goat meat.

Of course, Stanley and his white companions had no right to be there. They were, he admitted, “self-invited — therein lies our fault”. But once there, their only choice was to defend themselves or be cut to pieces. When they were threatened by hordes of armed warriors, it made sense, in the last resort, to shoot one or two in order to scare away the rest. Carriers who made off with stores put the whole expedition at risk, so stern preventative measures were needed. Stanley had deserters pursued, brought back and flogged, or, on three occasions in his 16 years of African exploration, hanged. There is no escaping the fact that these were crimes. But Jeal pleads in mitigation that other explorers did worse. All of them, even the missionaries, were reduced to beating their carriers. Stanley was unusually restrained. Under armed threat he always tried gifts and diplomacy before ordering his men to open fire, except once, on his second African exploration, and that was because the tribe concerned had tricked and tried to kill him on a previous occasion.

Comparison of his diaries with his published accounts of his adventures shows that he exaggerated the harshness of his disciplinary methods and the number of Africans he shot. The Victorians liked reading about “enemy” casualties, and white men being tough with “natives”, and he pandered to their tastes. It worked. His books enjoyed colossal sales. But it has harmed his reputation. Jeal thinks even his most famous utterance, “Dr Livingstone, I presume”, was a fabrication. Livingstone’s account does not mention it. Writing up the great moment afterwards, Stanley was probably trying to catch the tone of the British army officers whose sangfroid he admired in Abyssinia. He was one of the few Europeans to witness the effects of the slave trade in Africa. Though abolished throughout the British empire in 1833, slavery flourished in east and central Africa as it had for centuries, with chieftains selling their own people to Arab slave traders for guns and merchandise. Thousands were massacred. One trader, known to Stanley, lined the road to his house with human heads. The burnt, deserted villages, and the files of captives, including women and children in chains, convinced Stanley that the trade must be stopped, and the only way to do it, he believed, was to open up Africa to European influence. That was the aim of his epic trans-Africa journey of 1874-77, a night-marish 7,000mile trek from the east coast to the mouth of the Congo. It was after this that King Leopold employed him to go back up the Congo establishing trading stations. But the common accusation that he duped the tribal chiefs out of their territories is, Jeal argues, false. On the contrary, he repeatedly refused to impose treaties that yielded sovereignty over the land, as Leopold wished.

His third and last great African expedition of 1887-89 has tarnished his name because of the conduct of his subordinates. In 1874 he had selected humble companions — a hotel clerk, two Kentish fishermen. The expedition’s dogs were from Battersea Dogs’ Home. All behaved gallantly, and all died on the journey, including the dogs. But in 1887 he chose British army officers and gentlemen. It was a disaster. Left in charge of the rear column, a Major Barttelot behaved with fiendish cruelty, and was shot by a carrier. James Jameson, heir to an Irish whiskey empire, bought an 11-year-old girl for the price of six handkerchiefs and gave her to cannibals so that he could watch her being dismembered, cooked and eaten, while he sketched the whole process. When Stanley found out, much later, after Jameson had died of fever, he was sickened and furious. Buthe reflected that Barttelot and Jameson might not have been “originally wicked”. Africa and its horrors had dehumanised them.

Jeal persuades us that they did not dehumanise Stanley. He comes across as a man of dauntless courage, intent on reducing the sum of suffering and injustice in the world. Anyone who, after reading this book, imagines they would have behaved better than Stanley, if faced with the same dangers, must have a vivid imagination.

Available at the Books First price of £22.50 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Read on... books: www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hstanley.htm Biography and writings

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist