Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  The Dent concession, Leopold insisted, should be Stanley's template for all new treaties. Anyone drafting these treaties - himself included - should aim at `avoiding as much as possible to acknowledge the chiefs as having a right of suzerainty on the territories which they abandon to us'. Knowing that Stanley would detest this provision, Colonel Strauch gave many reasons why there was no alternative to acquiring sovereignty for the AIC. Apart from being essential for resisting French land-grabbing, the acquisition of sovereignty was vital if capitalists were to feel secure enough to invest funds in longterm projects like a railway. Stanley was told he would not be 'dispossessing the natives', but rather `protecting their autonomy' from rapacious European nation states lacking the king's civilizing aims. This self-delusion increased Stanley's anxieties.

  The beauty of Alfred Dent's concession, in Leopold's eyes, was that it gave to an individual (if he were rich enough) the right to mimic a nation and take upon himself all powers and reward himself exactly as he wished. But unlike the lucky Mr Dent, who had only had two sultans to deal with, the AIC would have to sign treaties with hundreds of chiefs. This was work Henry dreaded being pressed to carry out as a matter of urgency.' The previous December, he had written to Colonel Strauch describing how - after Ngaliema had been ostracized by `neighbouring chiefs who had accused him of selling the country' - he (Stanley) had calmed local emotions in this key location by telling the chiefs and their people `that the country had not [Stanley's emphasis] been sold to the white man; but that he had been permitted to build as much as he wished and was a brother with all the chiefs'. This statement, Henry told Strauch, had caused `zoo people to shout aloud their joy'. Strauch and his royal master later rebuked Stanley for having given such an assurance just when French plans were making sovereignty a vital issue.4 Stanley's only consolation was his realization that the king would never gain legal recognition from Britain and the USA for any AIC, so-called free state, or `confederacy', unless he convinced them that he believed in free trade and meant to keep the river open to all nations.

  Still pale and emaciated, Stanley met the king at Laeken on r October 188z. The day before, Strauch had warned the explorer that Leopold expected him to return to Africa within a month. But Henry had already chosen not to excuse himself on medical grounds, as he could easily have done.' For his own idealistic reasons, he was prepared to risk his life to save what he believed were the fruits of his `sacred task'.' He had just heard two reports of Belgian officers killing Africans. Of one incident, Swinburne had written saying that Valcke and Nilis, two Belgian officers, had fought with zoo men `over a paltry calabash of palm wine', shooting dead fourteen Africans.7 Henry therefore began his meeting with Leopold by complaining about his many problems with Belgian officers - especially their lack of sympa thy towards Africans - and said that before he could agree to go back to the Congo, he must have the king's permission to send home three or four of the worst of them. He was surprised to have little trouble convincing Leopold that it would be sensible to replace his Belgian incompetents with British officers.' In October 188z, out of fortythree European agents of all sorts (clerks, storekeepers, engineers, officers), only three were British, but by the end of 1883, out of 117 agents, forty-one were British.' The fact that the king might regard a British ascendancy as a way to warn off France (because the French government feared Britain) was something that Stanley put to the back of his mind.

  By now Stanley had lost some of his royalist illusions. `I think less of the pomp, the ceremony & the glitter surrounding Majesty than I did,' he confided to his diary. But he still managed to persuade himself that Leopold's reassurances about his underlying altruism were genuine. If the king's impressive diplomatic skills ever made his colony a reality, why should it not be run for the benefit of the Congolese while also rewarding the AIC and international traders? On his way down the Congo in 187 7, Stanley had `dreamed of some Rothschild undertaking the civilization of the Congo basin', and he called this to mind as Leopold amazed him with a promise to increase the expedition's annual expenditure from £iz,ooo to £6o,ooo and to raise the expedition's force, then standing at about 2- 5o men, to 3,000, if they could be found. Stanley was told that his part of the bargain would have to be sending huge amounts of ivory from the Upper Congo to Vivi. He pointed out that unless a thousand carriers were taken on, he would have to use his entire workforce to carry tusks instead of building the new stations. Henry now made it a condition of his return that he should not be asked to do impossible things.'°

  He also insisted, to the king's face, that he must have a dozen new officers - two to command each of the king's three new stations between the Pool and Stanley Falls, and the rest to be shared out between existing stations. The king consented to this, and in return Stanley conceded the urgency of gaining concessions from chiefs on both banks of the Congo, and on the Kwilu river. If he controlled the Kwilu-Niadi basin, which lay between the Ogowe and the Congo, he knew he could cut off future French expeditions from de Brazza's concessions on the north side of the Pool, making them valueless.'' Stanley was relieved to be told he would not be expected to make these treaties or any on the lower Congo. In his confidential instructions, dated i November 1882 and mailed to him after his last meeting with the king, Strauch stated `our agents at the Stanley Pool and at Manyanga are to secure the intervening ground with every privilege that may be acquired between Stanley Pool and Mayanga on the left bank - same round Isangla and Vivi on the right bank'. Stanley himself would only have to make treaties connected with his new stations on the Upper Congo.

  Though Leopold insisted that the chiefs would have to cede sovereign rights if the Congo was ever to be legally recognized as a `state', Stanley maintained passionately that the soil itself must remain the property of the chiefs." But with French determination to take over the entire Congo growing almost by the day, Leopold had already made up his mind not to wait for Stanley to come round to his way of thinking. Instead, the king had decided to employ a retired British general and senior Indian civil servant to push ahead with `confederacy' treaties, by means of which numerous chiefs on the Lower Congo would sign the same form of words, yielding sovereignty through identical agreements in legalese that they could not possibly understand. The obliging Sir Frederick Goldsmid was ordered to explain to the chiefs, through translators, the purpose of the `confederacy' they would be joining: to encourage mutual defence against intruders, to strengthen their country by raising a `public force', and to unite them all under the AIC's blue flag with a golden star." Later, Sir Frederick's assistant, Lieutenant Louis Valcke, took over, and an English officer, Major Francis Vetch, would lavish enough cloth, brass wire and beads on roughly 300 chiefs to persuade them to add their names to those already signed up.

  The problem Leopold feared most was that, in any confrontation with a European state, a trading company like the AIC would have no right to resist a military attack on its territory. Strauch was soon instructed to send to Stanley a dozen Krupp field guns and four machine guns, but Leopold knew these weapons could do no more than suggest to the Congolese that their possessors were powerful men, to be preferred as allies to de Brazza's people.'4 Certainly, no French expedition could be fired upon without causing an escalation, which would end, inevitably, with France taking everything. Only a state recognized by others could defend itself against another nation, and that was why Leopold was sure he could not wait till Stanley changed his mind about the morality of `buying' sovereignty and linking chiefs in illusory political unions.

  With Leopold already vexed with Stanley for his attitude to treatymaking, an event now occurred that greatly increased the king's irritation. From Brussels, Stanley went on to London for a week, and then to the French capital where he arrived on r9 October 1188z, having accepted an invitation to speak at a banquet mounted by the Stanley Club. He wrote in his diary: `As de Brazza will be in Paris, it will be the best occasion I shall have for explaining what we are doing, & the truth about de Brazza so far as
it may be necessary to disillusionize [sic] some of our French friends who attribute to him an apostolic character!"' `What can be done to make Stanley keep quiet?' an anxious Leopold asked Strauch, fearing that incautious criticism of France's hero would redouble French efforts to secure the Congo. The king now suspected that Stanley had faked illness and come back to Europe solely to get even with de Brazza.

  Soon after checking in at his favourite rendezvous in Paris, the Hotel Meurice in the rue de Rivoli, Henry was surprised to be told that Comte Savorgnan de Brazza was waiting to see him. Far from refusing to receive the man who had unjustly accused him of brutality, Stanley welcomed him. `We had a good deal of talk of an amiable kind, because personally he is unexceptionable and has lots of good humour.' Stanley told his fellow explorer about the banquet that was to be held for him that very evening, and facetiously declared that he intended to give him `le coup mortel' in his after-dinner speech. De Brazza then surprised him by asking if he could come along. As good natured as ever, Henry said he would ask the organizers' permission. On arriving at the Hotel Continental, Stanley found that the banquet was a far larger event than he had imagined. Everyone who was anyone in British and American circles was there, as well as fifty distinguished native Parisians. But Henry was not going to allow the presence of Frenchmen, or his earlier meeting with de Brazza, to dissuade him from delivering a blistering attack on his rival."

  Stanley had always been courteous about de Brazza's claims to be a great explorer, although he could easily have ridiculed his short journeys on the Ogowe and his brief excursion on the Congo below Kwamouth. Yet the absurdity of being treated as de Brazza's equal, when he (not the Frenchman) had first discovered the Upper Congo and the Pool at great personal cost, finally got the better of him. Stanley also had good reason to resent de Brazza for ordering Malamine to represent him to Africans at the Pool as evil and bloodthirsty, and nor had he liked de Brazza's claim, in a country where fetishism was widespread, that only chiefs who displayed the tricolour emblem would be safe from white men who might otherwise shoot them. 17 But now - whether de Brazza chose to show up or not - Stanley felt that his moment of revenge had come.

  He got up at the end of the dinner and launched into a mocking diatribe against the so-called Makoko Treaty. The eulogistic sobriquet, in use by French journalists, that most annoyed Stanley when applied to de Brazza was `the apostle of liberty' - as if he were a latter-day Livingstone `who had dealt a death blow to slavery in west Africa'. Could anyone of common sense credit this, Stanley asked his audience, after having described `the shoeless, poorly dressed person' whom he had first met in 1188o `about forty miles from our lower station'. Then Stanley reached the heart of the matter - de Brazza's deliberate lies about his treaty.

  Speaking with heavy irony, Henry asked how anyone could be naive enough to believe that King Makoko of Mbe had been so

  struck by the simple ways of the great traveller, and so full of admiration for the tricolour flag ... that he chose a piece of his territory - nine miles long - with its revenues, villages, inhabitants, goats, pigs, all its habitations and presumably its income tax as well, and therewith endowed the traveller, to mark the happy event of his meeting with so marvellous a white man?

  Would anyone suppose it possible, when `all M. de Brazza's presents to Makoko and the chiefs of Mfwa would not pay for the goats they had let him eat'? Stanley said he had learned from talking to `Makoko's greatest chief, Gobila' that Makoko had never meant to cede an inch of territory to de Brazza. Stanley then poured scorn on the idea that Makoko could have `known what this document in triplicate meant'. The chief wanted to trade and was happy for de Brazza to have a trading post there, just as the tribes to the south of the Pool had been happy for Stanley to build among them. But they had not given away their land, any more than had Makoko. In any case, de Brazza had been sent out by the French Committee of the AIA and had had no right to make treaties on behalf of France. So he was guilty of a breach of faith with the philanthropic men who had sent him. Having accused de Brazza of introducing `an immoral diplomacy into a virgin continent', Stanley declared: `I am an American, therefore free of all political leanings and interested in Africa solely as an unhappy continent.' Much of his speech was perfectly sincere, since he genuinely believed that Leopold's plans for civilizing the Congo were greatly superior to the alternative of its becoming a French colony."

  As he sat down to loud applause, Stanley was handed de Brazza's card. Convinced that he had already gained an unassailable advantage, and apprehending no danger from anything de Brazza might say, Henry urged the club secretary to admit him. Resplendent in evening dress, his black beard neatly trimmed, his dark eyes glowing in the gaslight, de Brazza acknowledged the rapturous applause of the French guests. Then, speaking in English, he delivered a wellrehearsed speech, which ended: `I see in Mr Stanley not an antagonist but simply a labourer in the same field, where our common efforts, although we represent different interests, converge towards the same goal: the advance of civilization in Africa.' He raised his glass: 'Gentlemen, I am a Frenchman and a naval officer, and I drink to the civilization of Africa by the simultaneous efforts of all nations, each under its own flag."9 This pretence to amity, although wholly disingenuous, raised a storm of clapping from the French contingent. A number of American guests complained that it was unpardonable for the Frenchman to have `thrust himself in at a dinner given by a private club of Stanleyites'. They were right that de Brazza had used the Stanley Club event for his own political purposes. He had known about the banquet for several days before he had paid his call on Stanley - time enough to write a speech in English and learn it by heart, working all the while on his English accent."

  Next day, when the French newspapers were delivered to his hotel, Stanley realized that he had made a serious tactical error in allowing de Brazza anywhere near his banquet. Although the Frenchman had answered none of Stanley's entirely valid points about the shortcomings of the so-called Makoko Treaty, or denied that he had been sent to Africa to explore for the AIA rather than to annexe for his government, the Parisian press denounced Stanley for mocking the tricolour, for calling their hero a `va nu-pieds', a barefoot tramp, and worst of all for being 'Albion's Trojan Horse'. At moments of pique, the French press still refers to Britons and Americans indistinguishably as AngloSaxons, and on that October morning `the Anglo-Saxon Stanley' was widely represented as the stalking horse for the British government. Only a month earlier, because of French dithering, Gladstone's cabinet had felt obliged to abandon Britain's dual control of Egypt with France, and had acted alone against Colonel Arabi to save the Suez Canal from requisition by a military dictatorship. Lord Wolseley's spectacular victory at Tel el-Kebir was seen in France as a defeat for the French nation, since from now on Britain would control Egypt unaided. This wider context shows why Henry had been foolish to give de Brazza the chance to cross swords with him in public. His error of judgement made French ratification of the Makoko Treaty inevitable and ratcheted the Scramble for Africa into a higher gear - exactly what Leopold had hoped to avoid.

  Yet Stanley did not allow the unfairness of the newspapers to upset him, as he had done in Brighton a decade earlier. This time, just two days later, he gave a breakfast at the Hotel Meurice for thirty guests, and welcomed everyone cordially. Edward King was there, along with many expatriate friends. But to the surprise of everyone, Stanley had also invited de Brazza, whom he welcomed with a smile. The man had been nothing but trouble to him." So the fact that Henry could behave with civility to someone who had tried hard to thwart his most cherished plans showed what a long way Stanley had travelled, in terms of savoir faire and maturity.

  Stanley was back in Brussels to see the king on 3 r October, when the news broke that the Makoko Treaty would be ratified in Paris later that month. So now Stanley was involved in a more bruising race with de Brazza. Would he be able to found his new stations between the Pool and Stanley Falls before de Brazza could get there? This time he wa
s determined to preserve absolute secrecy about the timing of his return to Africa. The following nine months would determine whether all his efforts since 1878 had just been preparing the ground for another explorer and another nation to take over the river system, which his extraordinary courage and leadership had first revealed to the world.

  EIGHTEEN

  After the Slave Raids

  Stanley was forty-one years old when he paused for a week in Paris in November 1188z, on his clandestine way back to Africa via Spain and Cadiz. With his grey cropped hair, pale penetrating eyes, and lean, deeply tanned face, Henry was a more distinguished-looking man than he had been a decade earlier. Not even the guarded detachment with which he faced the camera all his adult life could conceal his greater self-assurance and more reflective cast of mind.' His habitual expression of latent sadness, overlaid with masterful determination, spoke eloquently of what he had endured emotionally and physically. After his great trans-Africa journey, the secret ties to his mother and half-sister, which had once been so sustaining, had started to fray and sunder. Now, travelling with Dualla and a recently engaged English valet, Stanley rarely thought of Mrs Jones and Emma. The family that he missed was his African one - Swinburne, Christophersen, Mabruki Ndogo, Susi, Uledi and the rest - with whom he felt at ease, as he never did with well-connected people in London. In Africa, it was always `a relief to find oneself among unconventional people with whom one can talk without a chance remark being flung & broadcast before readers'.' But he still yearned to find a woman to be close to, and perhaps marry.

  From Brussels he had written to Edward King, whom he trusted as no one else, and with whom, just before leaving for the Congo, he had holidayed in Switzerland in 11879. To his friend, Henry bemoaned his lack of female companionship, admitting that his rejection by Alice might have been because he was bad at talking to women. 'Fiddlesticks!' King wrote back. `You can talk to women as well as to African chiefs. Come along over and visit for a fortnight ... Come while the ladies are here ...'3