Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer Read online

  Stanley, according to most of his biographers, had been highly volatile as a young man, and at times ruthless - and I knew for a fact that his treatment of his two white travelling companions on the Livingstone search expedition had been harsh. But I also knew what malaria could do to more long-suffering temperaments than Stanley's. Dr Livingstone, at the sober age of forty-six, had once had a fistfight with his clergyman brother in south central Africa, in which both men had drawn blood. Burton and Speke had fallen out, forever, during their expedition to Lake Tanganyika. Yet though many white men behaved badly in Africa, Stanley alone stood condemned, principally by the things he himself had written about his actions at a later time and by the tone he employed. An excellent example is the much quoted passage about how, by beating his carriers, he restored `the physical energy of the lazily inclined' and encouraged them often `to an extravagant activity'. I had quoted this myself in my Livingstone.' But I realized, as I began work on Stanley, that sardonic humour would not have been encouraged or taught in the St Asaph workhouse, where he lived and was educated as a boy.

  However, as a young and insecure `special' correspondent in East Africa in 11868, Stanley had been immensely impressed by the insouciance of upper-class Englishmen in the military. I wondered whether he had been tempted to emulate, in despatches to the New York Herald and in How I Found Livingstone, the cheerful heartlessness of army officers' casual conversations and the off-hand way in which they wrote of death and disaster in their memoirs. I certainly suspected that rejection by his parents had left him needing to describe himself as hard and powerful in order to survive. Yet whatever I might find out, it would make no difference to the fact that he had left himself permanently vulnerable to hostile selective quotation. In recent years such quotes have very rarely been counterbalanced, in print, with any of his far more numerous positive statements about Africans.

  Unwisely, given the lip-service paid to religion by his contemporaries, Stanley made influential enemies as a young man by poking fun at churchmen and pious evangelicals. His famous offer to them of `seven tons of Bibles, four tons of Prayer Books, any number of surplices, and a church organ into the bargain' if they could reach longitude 23° `without chucking some of those Bibles at some of those negroes' heads' would be quoted against him time and again, as would his surmise that `the selfish and wooden-headed world requires mastering as well as loving charity'." But by his forties he would number missionaries among his friends. Such were W. Holman Bentley and Alexander Mackay, who by the late 188os had lived many years in Africa and, like Stanley himself, sometimes beat their carriers, as did virtually all European travellers. With trade goods dwindling and little food to be bought, expedition leaders argued that they had to drive their men on for the sake of their own survival.

  There were three occasions during Stanley's sixteen years in Africa when I knew he had taken the extreme step of hanging a man. He claimed in mitigation that his whole expedition would have fallen apart, and most of its members have starved to death or been killed, if he had not ended a spate of violent thefts and mass desertions by a single draconian act. But would his justifications on these three occasions carry conviction when subjected to close examination?

  I was well aware how hard travel had been for Livingstone as he entered regions where Africans (already victims of slave raids) refused to sell food to his people. His dilemma had been whether to take food by force, or to risk marching on in the hope of obtaining food at the next village. On many occasions, he was obliged by destitution to throw himself on the mercy of the Arab-Swahili slave traders and ask them to feed him and his followers. During my first visit to Belgium I read a very significant passage in one of Stanley's diaries, which I had never seen quoted in any book. In this entry, Stanley showed that he had recognized the fundamental moral problem facing all European travellers. `We went into the heart of Africa self-invited,' he wrote; `therein lies our fault. But it was not so grave that our lives [when threatened] should be forfeited."9

  This was the conundrum facing explorers of Africa - especially in the r 87os and r 8 8os, when attacks on them were much more numerous than had been the case in the relatively peaceful 1185os. As they had indeed come `self-invited', could their efforts to make geographical discoveries be morally justified, given that they would almost certainly be obliged to shoot in self-defence an unknown number of Africans (who had only been trying to defend their land)? Stanley himself argued - as Livingstone had done before him - that, by the r 870s, the terrible and worsening humanitarian situation in Africa had made exploration, and opening the continent to European influence, imperative on humanitarian grounds.

  I had learned when writing my Livingstone that the East African Arab-Swahili slave trade was far older than the Atlantic trade, and increased in volume from the 1186os, just when the Royal Navy had at last managed to strangle the seaborne trade from West Africa to the Americas. During the nineteenth century, some z,ooo,ooo slaves were estimated to have sailed from Africa's eastern shores or been taken overland to Egypt, Arabia and the Gulf by trans-Saharan routes. In zooz, Ronald Segal, in his masterly history of that neglected trade, confirmed these figures and argued that African chiefs had also been deeply implicated."O I recorded in my life of Livingstone that - shortly before his meeting with Stanley - the doctor spent many days explaining to chiefs that `if they sell their fellows, they are like the man who holds the victim while the Arab performs the murder'." He asked them repeatedly why they found it necessary to sell their people to a handful of intruders, and was told: `If so and so gives up selling so will we. He is the greatest offender in the country.' `It is the fault of the Arabs who tempt us with fine clothes, powder and guns.' `I would fain keep all my people to cultivate more land, but my next neighbour allows his people to kidnap mine and I must have ammunition to defend them." I also quoted Dr Livingstone saying that `this perpetual capturing and sale of children' from subject tribes (by Africans) was a crime that made the Arab and Portuguese slave trades `appear a small evil by comparison'."

  The old fabric of tribal custom, such as hospitality to strangers, had broken down largely because of the violence spread by the Atlantic and the East African slave trades. Yet African tribal migrations like those of the Ngoni, Kamba and Yao also contributed to the spreading frontier of violence. Stanley narrowly escaped death at the hands of Mirambo of the Nyamwezi, when that brutal ruler was fighting the Arab-Swahili for control of the eastern slave routes. Later, Stanley wrote that he and his men felt that they were `considered as game to be trapped, shot or bagged at sight'. Both he and Livingstone witnessed horrific massacres.14

  It appears to be widely imagined today that Africa was a paradise before Stanley and other explorers entered it - indeed, Liebowitz and Pearson end their book with a statement to that effect. `He [Stanley] and his ilk broke Africa wide open, and no one has yet found a way to put it back together again.'z' In reality, Stanley was a latecomer. The Arabs had arrived on the East African coast in the ninth century. Livingstone had found African middlemen of Portuguese slave traders at the heart of south-central Africa on the Zambesi in 1851 and, twenty years later, he met Arab slavers at Nyangwe on the Congo, in the very centre of the continent. By the 188os estimates were appearing in Europe that put the figure for depopulation at half a million a year in central Africa alone. Earlier, Livingstone had argued that the situation would only improve if Europe tried to develop Africa economically through colonization. Stanley has been attacked for holding similar beliefs about the desirability of colonies. So the nineteenth-century context for such beliefs was clearly going to be another key subject for me to address. Would Stanley number among the genuine idealists, or the exploitative money makers who urged on the earliest Empire builders in Africa?

  Thirty years ago, I wrote about one of the greatest of the many ironies affecting Stanley's reputation. This was the fact that he had done more than any living man to create the myth of saintly Dr Livingstone, only to suffer for it ever afterwards by
being adversely compared with the good doctor. Yet no irony affecting Stanley's reputation seems as great as the one that was revealed to me as I started my research. He had stated that he longed to do something wonderful for the African tribes along the Congo, and instead, as would become all too apparent, had set them up for a terrible fate. In 1877 he came down the great river as the first European ever to do so, declaring his hope that the Congo should become like `a torch to those who sought to do good'." Instead, it became the torch that attracted the archexploiter King Leopold II of Belgium.

  The shadow of Leopold, the misdeeds of the officers of the Rear Column during Stanley's last expedition and his pre-emptive attack on the natives of a small island have dogged Stanley down the years, and have combined to prevent his being remembered in any positive way. Now, with the poverty of Africa still being blamed on colonialism as much as on natural disasters, or the Cold War, or the unfairness of twentieth-century Western trade policies, or the corruptness of African governments - it is inevitable that many sceptics will be unconvinced that a man with Stanley's beliefs about the benefits of `European civilization' deserves a fresh hearing, even in the light of copious new evidence of what he really did and thought. Yet to shirk looking again at Stanley's life simply because many minds are made up already would be to deny another post-colonial generation the chance of gaining new insights into a unique phase of world history and the story of an astonishing man, who has scarcely been acknowledged as British, let alone as Africa's greatest explorer.

  ONE

  Dreams of Love and Freedom

  John Rowlands - who would one day be known to the world as Henry Morton Stanley - was five and a half when a great disaster befell him. His grandfather, Moses Parry - once a prosperous butcher, but now living in reduced circumstances - dropped dead in a potato field on the outskirts of the Welsh market town where John had lived all his life. The place was Denbigh, the date zz June 11846, and the old man was seventy-five years old.'

  John was born illegitimate, and his eighteen-year-old mother, Elizabeth Parry, had abandoned him as a very young baby and had then cut off all communication. She would go on to have five more children - by two, or possibly three other men - only the last child being born in wedlock. Yet all these children would be granted some attention by her, unlike her rejected firstborn, John, who would be doubly disadvantaged, since he would never meet the man named as his father in the parish registers.' It is not known why John alone should have been abandoned by her. From his earliest months, he was cared for by Moses Parry, his maternal grandfather, which was why Moses' sudden death was such a shattering blow. Twenty years after the event, John - by then calling himself Henry Stanley - was moved to write a tribute to his grandfather on a scroll of special blue paper. In his best calligraphy, he described Moses' cry, as he raised both hands to his chest and fell, taking just three more breaths before dying. Every detail recorded by a local journalist was precious to the grown-up John, who ended by listing the virtues of the only relation who had ever cared for him: `Let us emulate his goodness, his kindness, his good deeds, for they were worthy of EMULATION.'3

  The old man had taken a liking to John from the beginning, and shortly after the boy's birth had thrust a gold sovereign into his mouth so he could bite on it and guarantee himself a prosperous future. His grandson would remember him as `a stout old gentleman, clad in corduroy breeches, dark stockings, and long Melton coat, with a cleanshaven face, rather round, and lit up by humorous grey eyes'. The little boy accompanied Moses everywhere, including to the town's Wesleyan chapel, where he would struggle not to fall asleep among the lavender-scented pews. At home, sitting on the old man's knee, John was taught to write his letters on a slate.4

  Stanley's grandfather's cottage, where he was born

  After his grandfather's death, John's uncles, Thomas and Moses junior, decided - though they were prosperous butchers - that John would have to leave his late grandfather's cottage in the shadow of ruinous Denbigh Castle. At first they arranged for him to be boarded out in an overcrowded cottage close to his old home and placed in the care of its owners, Richard and Jenny Price, a couple in their fifties, four of whose children still lived with them. Richard maintained the castle bowling green and was known as `the green-keeper'. He also dug the graves at nearby St Hilary's Church, where John had been baptized. The Prices were very poor and refused to look after John for less than half a crown a week, perhaps £6o in today's money. In the day, John briefly attended the Free School in the crypt of St Hilary's Church. After a few months the place was closed down because `the floor and seats were broken, and damp from the churchyard penetrated into the crypt'. No arithmetic had been taught there and few children could even read words of one syllable. John took away with him the memory of `a terrible old lady with spectacles and a birch rod'.'

  At the Price's cottage, John played on the grassy slopes beside the Castle, just as he had done when living with his grandfather. He also continued to witness the arrival of the well-dressed members of the bowling club, whose refreshments were sent up to the castle by various purveyors, in baskets with the names of their businesses on the sides. The boy studied these names carefully. "`Well, John, what do they mean?" asked a member of the Price family. He answered in Welsh, "Byddigion," which is the infantile word for "gentlefolk".'6 His precocious awareness of his own low social status would make the next development in his life all the harder to bear.

  About six months after his arrival at the Prices, when the little boy had settled in well, his uncles decided to stop paying for his keep.? Richard and Jenny Price suspected that John's relatives were gambling on their being too fond of the boy to part with him. The Prices were having none of this and told their twenty-seven-year-old son, also called Richard Price, to get John Rowlands ready for a journey.

  Richard's own account of what happened was given to a journalist forty years later, at which date he still lived in the cottage where John had once been cared for. `So I requested my mother to dress him ... Then I put him to stand on that chair there, and taking his little hands over my shoulders, I carried him down through the town passing the houses of his well-to-do relatives ...' For part of the journey, Richard let the boy walk. The six-year-old John was very anxious and often asked in Welsh: 'Ble rydan ni'n mynd, Dick?': `Where are we going, Dick?' John had been told that he would soon be seeing his aunt Mary, who lived in a hamlet to the north of Denbigh. When their eight-mile journey ended at the doors of the St Asaph Workhouse, and Richard Price turned to leave, having rung a bell that clanged deep within the building, the child asked him where he was going. `To buy cakes for you,' replied the shamefaced Price, before hurrying away. The `false cajolings and treacherous endearments' lavished upon him during that journey on zo February 1847 would live forever in Henry Stanley's memory.' `Since that dreadful evening,' Stanley would write in his fifties, `my resentment has not a whit abated ... It would have been far better for me if Dick, being stronger than I, had employed compulsion, instead of shattering my confidence and planting the first seeds of distrust in a child's heart.'9

  There has been a lively debate among scholars about how humane, or inhumane, the St Asaph workhouse really was - with one historian arguing that a child in this newly built institution was better housed, better fed, better clothed and better educated than many a boy or girl reared with his or her parents in a rural cottage.'° Yet emotional deprivation is immensely more damaging than ignorance or poverty. Nor should the main social objective of workhouses be forgotten. Apart from preventing the poor from starving in the streets, they were meant to deter people who had failed to provide for themselves from ever failing again, and to persuade anyone who might be thinking of relying on the state, rather than on his or her own labour, to reconsider.

  The new arrivals, whether adult paupers or deserted children, were subjected to a humiliating ritual. First they were washed in cold water, then their hair was cropped short and, to complete the removal of their individuality, they were
clad in identical drab fustian suits if male, or striped cotton dresses if female. If, for any reason, they ever left the workhouse, which required permission, they would at once be recognized as inmates. It was as if, wrote Stanley, they had committed a crime, and yet their only offence was to have `become old, or so enfeebled by toil or sickness that they could no longer sustain themselves', or, if young, their sin was to have been deserted." Workhouse inmates were at the bottom of the social heap, in a cruelly snobbish society, and were made to know their place every day of their lives. They rose at six, and were penned into their dormitories at eight in the evening. Their bread and gruel was unappetizing, and meant to be. Husbands and wives were separated, parents and children too, and even brothers and sisters were kept apart. `It is a fearful fate that of a British outcast,' wrote Stanley, `because the punishment afflicts the mind and breaks the heart.'1z