Jeal’s magnificent life of Henry Morton Stanley, like all the best biographies, manages to be several things at once: a rehabilitation of this most courageous of Welshmen, too often lazily dismissed as a racist, imperialist brute; a terrifying depiction of King Leopold’s Belgian Congo; and a brilliant account of Stanley’s travels, especially the awesome Trans-Africa journey down the Congo to the Atlantic seaboard. The story is frequently horrific, dramatising afresh all the old questions about colonialism, slavery, the Heart of Darkness, and whether Europeans corrupted Africa, or Africa Europeans? Stanley himself was appalled that colleagues so easily latched on to Africa’s endemic cruelties and barbarities, enjoying the opportunities that continuing slavery, especially sexual slavery, offered to the visiting white man, with barely pubescent girls purchased from Arab slavers for “six pieces of handkerchief”, and then sold on to local cannibals for amusement. A riveting biography, and more unusually, an important one, too.

STANLEY: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal
Faber £25

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