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.
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8585
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