Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  Unfortunately, within a week of Stanley's landing in Mutesa's kingdom, the Ganda were at war with the neighbouring Wavuma - the people who had attacked Stanley in canoes on the eastern side of the lake. There was now no question of Stanley being lent the substantial force that Mutesa had promised would escort him to Lake Albert.52 Without such help, Henry had been warned, the warlike rulers of Bunyoro and Ankole would kill him before he reached the lake. After two months of waiting, Stanley at last met up with the z,ooo men originally promised by Mutesa. He himself had just under 170 men of his own.

  By early January 11876, Stanley and his party had travelled 350 miles to the north-west and found a stretch of water, which he thought was an arm of Lake Albert but which was in fact a small lake unknown to Europeans at the time. The Bunyoro chose this moment to make an appearance in full war paint, and to threaten bloodshed unless Stanley and his allies left at once. When his Ganda escort refused to risk offending these warriors, Stanley had no choice but to head south for Lake Tanganyika, leaving Lake Albert's mysteries intact. En route, he spent several weeks exploring the Kagera River, which flowed into the western side of Lake Victoria and which he had first seen before meeting Mutesa. Even at that first sighting, he had suspected, because of its depth, width and rapidity of flow, that it might be `the real parent of the Victoria Nile'. Now, he sounded it at Kitangule and found it was 84 feet deep and 1 zo yards wide. Henry attempted to trace it into Rwanda `but was driven back to the boat by war cries, which the natives sounded loud and shrill'. On the verge of `another grand discovery', to quote him, he was thwarted.53

  The Kagera river's most southerly source has recently been located (March zoo6) in western Rwanda's rainforest of Nyungwe by a threeman New Zealand and British expedition, and claimed by them as the Nile's most southerly source - though because scores of feeders drain into Lake Victoria, it seems unlikely that the lake itself is about to be usurped as the Nile's primary source.

  Two months later, still heading for Ujiji, Stanley met the African ruler who had come close to killing him when he had been journeying to meet Livingstone in 1871. These two great figures in African history - Stanley and Mirambo - came face to face at the village of Serembo. This was a perilous situation for Henry, since the warlord had with him an army of 1 5,000 men. S4 Mirambo was in his mid-thirties, and surprised Henry by being `mild, soft-spoken, and with a meek demeanour ... indicating nothing of the Napoleonic genius which he has for 5 years displayed in the heart of Africa'. That evening, in the warlord's tent, the two men became blood brothers `by an incision in each other's right leg above the knee until a couple of drops of blood were drawn; which [were] interchanged and rubbed on with butter'. Before the ceremony, Stanley was told by one of Mirambo's chiefs: `We never take middle aged men, or old men to our wars, always youths not yet troubled with wives or children. They have keener eyes and lither limbs.' `Boys', the same chief called them." This employment of boy soldiers was not a complete surprise to Stanley, who knew that Mirambo had killed tens of thousands of men, and that `skulls lined the road to his gates'.56

  Stanley and his men arrived at Ujiji on 27 May 11876, after travelling roughly 3,500 miles by land and water since leaving Zanzibar in November 11874. 17 Without Livingstone there to greet him, he found Ujiji `forlorn and uninteresting'. 5' For weeks now, he had been obsessed with finding letters from Alice awaiting him in this Arab settlement. But there were no letters at all. Because he now planned to sail round Lake Tanganyika, and expected this to take two months, he ordered five of his most trustworthy men to travel to Uyanyembe - a round trip of boo miles - to bring back any mail that might be stuck there, including letters from Alice.59

  For a week after his arrival Stanley was ill with fever, then, for Alice's benefit, he sat down and wrote a letter, which his chosen men would take with them. He told her that though he had not `torn his hair and shrieked', he had `soberly grieved' over his lack of letters. His weight, he informed her, was 11118 lb, rather than 1178 lb, as it had been when he had last seen her - meaning that he had lost a third of his body weight. `I am sure that if you saw me now you would deny acquaintance with me ... Yet the same heart throbs with deepest love.' Stanley outlined for Alice his plans.

  In about five days I am going to set out in the `Lady Alice' for a voyage round the Tanganyika, which is boo geog. miles long by about 30 in width. The task I have to do is to discover the river which flows out of the lake. A great many noble rivers enter the lake, but the question is where is the river which discharges the surplus water ... Lieut. Cameron, who was here two years ago, says he has found it to be the Lukuga on the south-west coast. Perhaps he has found it, but the Arabs and the natives all deny that the river which he saw flows out. They say that it flows in. 6o

  This was a matter of considerable geographical significance, since if the Lukuga really did flow out of the lake and then, after zoo miles, entered the Lualaba, which itself then flowed north into Lake Albert, and thence into the Nile, as Livingstone had believed, Lake Tanganyika would qualify as the the most southerly reservoir of the Nile, cutting out Lake Victoria.

  By 311 July, Stanley was back at Ujiji after fifty-one days spent mapping the lake. He was the first man to have circumnavigated Tanganyika - proving it to be 450 miles from north to south, and therefore the longest freshwater lake in the world. It is also the second deepest lake in the world - being in places (as Henry found) almost 11,300 feet deep. More significantly, Henry confirmed Cameron's claim that the Lukuga river was the lake's only outflow, apparently draining into the Lualaba.6i This river also turned out to be an important slave route. While on its banks, Stanley encountered a caravan of 11,zoo men, women and children captured in Manyema, bound for Ujiji. Many of the children were close to death. `The chest jutted out with the protuberance of a skeleton frame ... legs were mere sticks of bone, trembling weak supports to the large head and chest.' These were the very sights that had caused Livingstone such anguish. Near this place, Stanley came across `many detachments of banditti ... fired by avarice and blood'. These were Africans - Nyamwezi and Ngoni professional fighters, who had settled north-west of Tabora, and were known there as Watuta. Mirambo employed them and they were more generally known by the name ruga-ruga. Now they were raiding in Manyema, `depopulating extensive lands and driving despairing files of slaves to the Arab markets'.62

  On returning to Ujiji, Henry was dismayed to learn that his messengers had not yet returned from Unyanyembe. But though he longed for news of Alice, there was no question of staying on in Ujiji where fifty people were dying each day from smallpox - indeed, five of his own men had recently perished and six more were very sick. So on 14 August he wrote Alice what he believed would be the last letter he would be able to despatch till triumphing or dying. In it, he said little about his fears, but instead told her he hoped to reach Zanzibar by December 11877, having followed the Lualaba to the Atlantic. Evidently, he had by now dismissed the possibility that the Lualaba might be the Nile. He ended: `My love towards you is unchanged, you are my dream, my stay, my hope, and my beacon ... I shall cherish you in this light until I meet you, or death meets me. This is the last you will get, I fear for a long time. Then my darling accept this letter with one last and loving farewell.'63 He signed this letter, as all his others to her, Morton, in deference to her whimsical dislike of Henry. Several days after writing, Henry was shivering with the onset of malaria, though the temperature was 113 8° Fahrenheit in the sun.

  Yet while at Ujiji, Stanley heard one piece of glorious news, which he related to his co-employer, Edward Levy-Lawson.

  We have obtained a signal triumph over Cameron, the Protege of the RGS, whose attainments were said to be vastly superior to those of Burton, Speke, Livingstone & Baker - if [Clements] Markham [Secretary of the RGS] was to be believed ... By crossing the Lualaba and striking off in the wrong direction he [Cameron] has left the question of the Lualaba where Livingstone left it.64

  So, Cameron, like Livingstone, had failed to follow t
he Lualaba north from Nyangwe. Instead, he had headed south-west on a trans-Africa journey of no particular significance. Now Stanley knew that - if he could only stay alive - he could complete Livingstone's work, becoming, in a century of great explorers, the greatest. On 25 August, he finally felt strong enough to leave for Manyema. The hardest of his three labours now lay ahead of him - and for it, he was going to need the unquestioning loyalty of his followers. He was therefore appalled when the roll was called that same day and he found he now had only 113 2 men. Fifteen had recently died, and more than twenty had deserted, apparently too scared to travel through Manyema with its cannibal tribes.65 Henry was now down to a mere thirty men who could be trusted with the expedition's Sniders. The prospect of losing any more guns before the most dangerous part of his journey started was a horrifying one.66

  During the relatively short land journey along the shores of the lake to the crossing point for Manyema, Henry lost another three men through desertion. And on the far side came a worse blow - Kalulu deserted. Given the time they had spent together, Stanley felt personally betrayed. Yet though distressed to lose the boy he had paid to educate, it was a great tribute to the loyalty he commanded that so many of his men did not desert him at Ujiji, when all he was offering them, instead of an early return to Zanzibar, was a journey of unimaginable dangers. The loyalty of men like Manwa Sera, Wade Safeni and Uledi would amaze Henry repeatedly. A few deserters were recaptured quickly, with Kalulu being caught on a small island near the Lukuga, negotiating a passage back to Ujiji.67 So when Stanley began his march to the Lualaba, Kalulu began the fateful journey in chains.

  When Stanley met Livingstone in 118711, the great explorer had just returned from two and a half years in Manyema, and he had been full of tales of the region's majestic scenery. Stanley also found beauty, but deplored `coarse grasses that wound like knives ... tough reeds tall as bamboos, creepers of cable thickness ... and thorns like hooks of steel.'68 Halfway to the Lualaba was Kabambarre, a place where Livingstone had suffered from horrifying flesh-eating ulcers and had been unable to leave between July ii 87o and early 118711 . While the doctor had been waiting for his feet to heal, James, a teenager and one of his dwindling band of followers, was killed and eaten by cannibals.

  Yet Livingstone had not turned against the Manyema. He pitied them for the way they were being enslaved and their ivory stolen. Stanley asked Chief Mwana Ngoy what he recalled of the doctor and was told: `He was good to me, and he saved me from the Arabs many a time ... often he would step between them and me.i69 Henry also learned that Manyema chiefs, including Mwana Ngoy, had offered slaves and ivory to various Arabs so that they would agree `to assist them in destroying their neighbours'. Henry was himself offered bribes by three chiefs to attack nearby villages. He was told by them, when he refused, that `white men were not as good as the Arabs, because - though it was true we did not rob them of their wives, ravish and steal their daughters, enslave their sons, or despoil them of a single article - the Arabs would have assisted them'.7° These shortcomings did not blind Henry to the fact that the Manyema were the victims of a terrible crime against humanity. Wade Safeni, his coxswain and translator on Lake Victoria, told him that eight years previously this whole region `was populated so thickly that we travelled through gardens and fields and villages every quarter of an hour. There were flocks of goats and droves of black pigs round every village.' Today, this same country was very sparsely peopled .71

  On 17 October 11876, a month after leaving the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, the expedition arrived at Mkwanga, where Stanley saw the Lualaba for the first time. He was at the very heart of the African continent, more than a thousand miles from any coast, and yet in front of him was an immense pale grey river, winding its way slowly northwards into the unknown. Almost a mile across, it contained numerous small islands. Stanley was reminded of the mighty Mississippi `before the impetuous, full-volumed Missouri pours its rusty brown water into it'.7z For the sake of this river, Livingstone had sacrificed himself, having traced it for much of its 11,3oo-mile course from its origins in Lake Bangweulu. How far it had yet to flow before reaching the sea as the Congo, or merging with the Niger or Nile, Stanley had no idea. But however far it might be, he knew he was going to solve the last great problem of African geography, or die in the attempt. Yet it was a daunting fact that Livingstone in 118711, and Cameron in 118 74, had stood near this spot, and yet both had failed to follow the Lualaba north.

  The following day, at the Arab-Swahili trading post of Mwana- Mamba, Stanley made one of the key decisions of his life. Here he met the most important Arab slave trader in central Africa and, calling to mind Livingstone's and Cameron's failures, decided he had no choice but to do a deal with him. The Zanzibar-born Tippu Tip - whose nickname supposedly mimicked the sound of bullets, and whose real name was Hamid bin Muhammed el Murjebi - was master of the land between Lake Tanganyika and the Lualaba, and to have tried to press on northwards against this man's wishes would have got him no further than Nyangwe. Another consideration made Tippu Tip's support an absolute necessity. In the Arab-Swahili town of Nyangwe, Henry's Wangwana carriers would face the same temptations to desert as at Ujiji, only this time more acutely, since ahead lay the terrifying Lualaba and a thousand miles of territory that was a blank on the map. And thanks to the local slave traders, there would be hostile tribes on both banks for more than a hundred miles. But if Tippu Tip were to provide an armed escort through this dangerous country, Stanley's Wangwana would not try to slip back to Nyangwe.73

  In 11876, Tippu was a handsome, black-bearded man of forty-six and had been in Manyema and its environs for about fifteen years, amassing a huge fortune in ivory.74 He was attended by a large retinue of Arabs, Wangwana and Nyamwezi. Stanley considered him `the most remarkable man' he had ever met among Arabs in Africa. One of his grandmothers had been the daughter of a Lomani chief - a fact explaining his dark skin.75 `His clothes were of a spotless white, his fez-cap brand new ... his dagger was splendid with silver filigree, and his tout ensemble was that of an Arab gentleman in very comfortable circumstances. '76

  Tippu Tip

  Between r9 and 2-2 October, Stanley negotiated an agreement, by which he would pay the Arab $5,000 (about £r,ooo) in exchange for which Tippu would accompany him for sixty marches north of Nyangwe - a march being no more than four hours long. The entire engagement should not exceed three months. Tippu agreed to bring with him 140 armed men, whose food Stanley would pay for." Cameron had attempted to persuade Tippu to accompany him north but had failed, though he had had ample funds.71 Yet something about Henry's character persuaded Tippu that this particular white man was special.71 It occurred to the prescient Tippu Tip - despite the many dangers involved - that there might never be a better chance than the one being offered by this self-willed man to pioneer a route along the river. The outcome might be the opening up of a vast new area in which to steal ivory, and capture slaves. After all, who else but this Stanley, with his piercing grey-blue eyes, had ever travelled the 340 miles from Lake Tanganyika to the Lualaba in forty-three days? Most Arab caravans took three months. And who else had discovered as much about central Africa? Only `Daoud Liviston', and Stanley was only half his age.8o

  So how blameworthy was Stanley to have gone into partnership with this prince of slave traders in order to achieve his geographical objective? Certainly no more culpable than David Livingstone had been for travelling with Tippu Tip for four months in 11867. Livingstone had justified himself by observing that individual Arabs, like Tippu, and Muhammed Bogharib, treated their personal slaves better than British factory owners treated their `free' workers. Arabs were not thoroughly dominated by the profit motive, as were, for example the plantation owners in the southern states of America." Livingstone, Stanley and Cameron had all been drawn to the man, despite hating slavery. It was some mitigation that because of Britain's naval blockade, few of the slaves captured by Tippu Tip in Manyema were being marched to the coast these days.82 (Inst
ead, they were used as carriers between places like Nyangwe and Ujiji, or were becoming the armed followers of Arab traders.)

  Yet though exonerating Tippu Tip from the worst forms of brutality, Stanley knew that the Arab-Swahili rulers of Nyangwe were cruel and ruthless men, who hunted down Africans rather as rich English gentlemen conducted drives for game. 13 A day after Stanley's arrival in this unhappy town perched on a reddish bank above the Lualaba, the Arab slaver Mtagamoyo launched a night attack on the Wenya fishermen of the left bank of the river, and brought back fifty to sixty women and children in chains. A week earlier 300 slaves had been brought in from the west.84 Henry's deal with Tippu marked no soft ening of his opposition to such deeds. In a passionately indignant letter written to the Daily Telegraph and the New York Herald from Nyangwe, Stanley charged the Arab-Swahili traders of Manyema, Rua and Ujiji `with being engaged in a traffic specially obnoxious to humanity - a traffic founded on violence, murder, robbery and fraud'. `I charge them with being engaged in a business which can be called by no other name than land piracy, and which should justly be as punishable as piracy on the high sea.' Stanley ended with a plea that Britain should act against `these whole-sale murders of inoffensive tribes in the interior of the sad continent'."