by Tim Jeal
Yet the combined loss of 700 lives (even if raised by say 300 to take account of African deaths) looks modest when placed in a wider African context. Deaths occurring during the Bugandan civil war, the Arab-Swahili uprising against the Germans, the military campaigns of African rulers such as Kabarega and Mirambo, and the continuing slave raids across a wide swathe of the continent, would each have dwarfed the loss of a mere thousand lives. Late in 11883, Stanley had learned that over 5,000 slaves had been dragged from their villages in one small area just below Stanley Falls.77 Such memories increased Stanley's fury with Tippu Tip for his part in the fate of the Rear Column. He reported to Colonel Euan Smith: `These tragedies and catastrophes, which reduced a completely equipped and well-organized column of 2711 men rank and file to 11 oz meagre, starved, and anaemic souls, were due in the first place to the breach of contract by Tippu Tip.' Undeniably, if Tippu had brought the 400 carriers at the anticipated time - eleven months earlier than he actually did - Barttelot and Jameson would have been able to start in pursuit of the Advance Column long before their men became enfeebled and started dying.78
In apportioning blame for the expedition's shortcomings, besides blaming Tippu Tip, Stanley also pointed a finger at King Leopold for misleading him about the number of steamers that would be available at Leopoldville. That unexpected shortage of vessels had plunged him into a crisis that had made splitting the expedition inevitable. Stanley also felt that Emin's letters to friends, in which the Pasha had represented his position as immediately perilous, had put pressure on the members of the expedition to make haste their first priority at whatever cost. Yet though Stanley felt the need to justify himself in his official report, and to blame others - including the late Major Barttelot and his friend James Jameson - the world's press was not yet bothered by the fact that lives had been lost. In fact the sufferings of the expedition's personnel made Stanley's achievements seem all the more remarkable. For in the eyes of the public in Europe and America, his willingness to pay in blood in order to bring the `noble' Emin and his devoted followers from the heart of Africa to the coast made his feat truly heroic. That he had also united his fractured expedition - nearly starving during an extraordinary feat of inspirational leadership - simply added to his lustre. It would be widely believed, and with good reason, that no other explorer could have kept his expedition in being against such odds, and have brought some of it home after an epic journey of more than 5,000 miles.
Yet when Henry organized payments and bonuses to the widows of the dead Wangwana just before leaving Zanzibar, it appalled him that the people he had tried hardest to protect had suffered most. Saying goodbye to grey-haired Uledi, who had served him loyally on all his major journeys since 118711, Stanley knew that he was also bidding farewell to his own days as an African explorer and pioneer.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The Shape of Things to Come...
On arrival in Zanzibar, early in December, Stanley was photographed with his four officers of the Advance Column, all of them fashionably moustachioed and the three younger men wearing smartly tailored tropical whites while their boss sports a more casual linen jacket with a formal waistcoat. Henry looks like a man of seventy-five: gaunt, hollow-eyed and grim. Stairs and Nelson have aged ten years since they set out - the latter looking sadly reduced and frail. Both have the expressions of haunted victims, rather than aggressors guilty of atrocities, as both men were. The thoroughly decent Jephson (his position next to his leader reflecting Henry's especial regard for him) looks his actual age, although even he stares at the camera with a worried frown. Surgeon Parke was too ill to be photographed, and Bonny had been excluded because of a drunken fistfight with a local doctor in Zanzibar's Grand Hotel. None had any inkling that all were doomed to early deaths - Nelson and Stairs in Africa, thanks to their leader's enthusiastic references, and two at home, Jephson and Parke, through damage already done to their constitutions.' On zq December, Stanley sailed from Zanzibar - after three weeks' recuperation. He and his four officers, and Sergeant Bonny, had all put on weight and seemed in far better health now than three weeks earlier.
Stanley planned to spend several months in Cairo while writing his book about the expedition. He was in no hurry to return home to the loveless life he had escaped by going out again to Africa. The only time he had looked forward to returning had been six years earlier after his pioneering period on the Congo, when Edward King's friend, May Sheldon, had offered to find an apartment for him close to hers in west London. Since his rejection by Dorothy Tennant, he had made no fur ther efforts to seek out marriageable women. But soon after his arrival in Cairo, Stanley wrote to May asking her to tell him honestly what ,our personal friends' thought about the outcome of his expedition. It was for friends like her, he explained, that `we do our best to please, but sometimes fail despite every effort'. A month later, he invited May to come to Cairo, in the same letter offering her his `Stanley cap', which he had worn across the continent. Sometime earlier, she had joked about giving him a fancy price for it.' Though delighted to be promised his trademark cap, she decided against coming. She was, after all, still married, and, as a journalist, knew how intense press interest was going to be in the great man.
A year later, this intrepid woman sailed to Zanzibar and, without the aid of any white companions, led an expedition of zoo pagazi into the East African interior, through Masai country, eventually circumnavigating unexplored Lake Chala near Mount Kilimanjaro. This trip was very much her personal tribute to the man she admired more than any other. On her return to Europe, Stanley poured out his admiration for her to Henry Wellcome, her devoted patron, saying that she had `distinguished herself in almost everything. Good woman, kind nurse, tender friend, cheery companion, translator, novel writer, sculptress, newspaper correspondent, female physician, & African traveller. She is a paragon & quite deserving of our love and respect.'i May would regret her decision not to go to Cairo when, only two years later, her husband died without warning. By then, her `one great passion' could never be fulfilled. Soon after May Sheldon declined his invitation, Stanley received a brief letter of congratulation from Dorothy Tennant.
On his return to England, before any romantic approaches could be made to him by Dorothy or anyone else, Stanley became totally preoccupied with the power politics that were changing the map of Africa even as he began to write his book. In April 18 89, when Stanley had been about to leave Lake Albert for the coast, Sir William Mackinnon (who had just been made a baronet) had written offering him the post of Chief Administrator of the Imperial British East Africa Company, with his headquarters in Mombassa.4 Given the emotional significance of his chartered company to the childless Mackinnon, it was unfortunate that this important offer should have been handed to Stanley at Zanzibar, just when the prospect of writing his new book was weigh ing on him like lead, and he had zoo telegrams and almost 400 letters to attend to. Not surprisingly, he temporized over the offer. In Cairo, where he arrived on 14 January, Stanley at last replied to Mackinnon. The ship owner, he insisted, was his `one good friend', whose interests he had placed above all others during the expedition.' But he was sorry that he could not commit himself to any job at this time; and in early February, he repeated this refusal.'
For Mackinnon - at sixty-seven - his company seemed to offer the last chance of bringing commerce and Christianity to a large part of Africa (as his compatriot Livingstone would have wished); but Stanley, at forty-nine, suddenly felt that he needed to settle down and lead a more peaceful existence.7 Perhaps he recoiled from the immense responsibilities that would go with building a railway to Lake Victoria, and installing a more stable king than the butcher Mwanga of Buganda. Yet though Henry had refused a post that would have made him the future ruler of Kenya and Uganda (greater Buganda), he went on supporting Mackinnon's aims - in the first instance by giving his friend the means to enlarge the British East African sphere with territory that would otherwise have become German.
Having seen evidence of
German misrule in the shape of burned towns and mission stations, Stanley's `gift' to his friend's company was intended to prevent similar events in the territory west of Lake Victoria. Henry told Sir William that after crossing the Semliki he had made `friendly arrangements [in that region] ... verbally but not written'. He then listed the immense territories of `Ankor [Ankole], Usongora and Unkonju': `given to me on the same terms treaties are made - and all my rights of course I turn over to you ...'. In reality, though he had arbitrated between a couple of tribes, and had undergone bloodbrotherhood ceremonies with several chiefs and with a chief's son, nothing had been ceded to him. But because he had reached the coast at a crucial moment in Anglo-German competition for East African territory, he had decided, on the spur of the moment, that he ought to hand to Britain and Mackinnon some helpful new cards.
In May Mackinnon wrote gratefully to Stanley: `I have a little note from Lord Salisbury [the prime minister] asking me to send him a map showing as accurately as possible the ground covered by your treaties.'9 In the negotiations leading to the Anglo-German Agreement of July r 8go, Stanley's `treaties' and maps enabled Sir Percy Anderson, Britain's negotiator, to lay claim to an enlarged Uganda, extending far to the south and south-west of what had previously been thought of as Buganda's borders. Stanley next addressed a large public meeting in the Albert Hall, giving his backing to the Scottish missions, then warning the government against German designs on Nyasaland (Malawi) - the territory Livingstone had tried to make a British protectorate during the r 86os.i°
For Stanley, too, the prospect of ending the suffering of the slave trade made the colonial development of East Africa urgently necessary. He was one of very few Europeans to have seen with his own eyes the extent of the mass murder in central Africa. In August, Mackinnon said he was determined to build a railway to Lake Victoria `as the solution of the slave trade question'. Make it, he told Stanley, `a principal text when you have occasion again to speak about Africa'." With the arrival of traders, chiefs could sell their produce rather than their people (as many did to the Arab-Swahili) in exchange for European goods. As European agricultural methods were employed (so the theory went), Africans would learn to work for wages, which could eventually be taxed and at last make possible the public works - railways, roads, schools, hospitals - on which all more advanced societies depended. As Jephson had put it after talking to Mackay and Stanley:
The ordinary native only grows just enough corn for the use of himself & his family; let him once see that what he grows has a very substantial value & he will cultivate more & be more hardworking & thrifty; he will not then be so ready to go to war with his neighbour ... & the little petty wars which are the curse of Africa, will, with the coming of the railway, & the consequent increase in trade, gradually zZ cease.
Stanley and Mackinnon were paternalists, who believed their own society was superior to tribal ones, but this did not make them hypocrites. For Mackinnon, the prospect of making money during his lifetime from his immense investment in East Africa looked incredibly remote. Despite his own hard beginnings, Stanley believed that industrial societies - in which millions of people could earn more money than they needed for their subsistence - offered to their citizens choices of occupation, and ways of life that could never exist in changeless tribal communities - least of all in those reduced to chaos by slave raids. Even before leaving Zanzibar, he had discussed with the British Consul-General, Colonel C. B. Euan Smith, the feasibility of enforcing an international arms and gunpowder embargo, aimed at crippling the slave trade." That the British government had other more urgent priorities would soon become apparent to Stanley and to Mackinnon, his `one good friend', with disastrous financial consequences for the latter.
Of course, the argument that the slave trade could only be tackled if Africa were to be colonized offered a convenient justification for the politicians, businessmen and adventurers engaged in the `Scramble for Africa' for purposes of prestige and financial gain. But Stanley's desire to destroy the slave trade was not a cynical stratagem. While Henry was in Cairo writing his book at the secluded Hotel Villa Victoria, an exhibition was drawing crowds in London's Regent Street. Called the `Stanley and African Exhibition', the name was a tribute to his unique fame and the fact that a large number of the exhibits came from his collection of African weapons and artefacts. Admission receipts produced a sum that would be called the `Stanley Fund'. This money, Henry decided, should be spent on building two steamers for the use of missionaries and traders on Lake Victoria. Placing steamers on lakes in order to cut slave routes had been one of Livingstone's big ideas.14
While in Cairo, Stanley wrote his book, In Darkest Africa, in fifty days - a rate to rival his earlier astonishing feats of book production. Typically, he would rise at six and work till eleven at night, only emerging for meals, and cursing his boy, Sall, for every telegram he brought to his work desk, however exalted the sender.I" Stanley dedicated his miracle of speed-writing to Sir William Mackinnon. Yet despite the presence of his publisher, Edward Marston, in Cairo, the book went off to the printer containing several passages destined to plunge Stanley into a terrible public row on publication - while nevertheless helping his sales (£z4,ooo earned in Britain alone in a year).
His book completed, Stanley left Cairo on 7 April 11880, and after a few days with Mackinnon in Cannes, he arrived in Brussels on the 119th for talks with King Leopold, who was still paying him £11,ooo per annum as a retainer. The Congo was currently costing Leopold 3,000,000 francs a year - one-fifth of his original fortune every year - and he was only getting back one-tenth of this in export duties on ivory and palm oil. (The Berlin Conference had forbidden him to levy any other form of duty.) His courtiers called his expenditure on the Congo `Congodelirium'.i6 Stanley still resented the way the king had treated him in 11885 and 11886, and did not intend to go back to Africa for him, but he still admired the man's tenacity of purpose and his lib erality. He had no clue that Leopold meant to create state monopolies in ivory and rubber and squeeze free trade out of the Congo, in direct contravention of the Berlin decrees.
Sitting at a marble table opposite the king, in a room he knew well, Stanley observed that the king's beard had turned as white as his own shorter hair. Given the king's losses, what more natural than that he should enquire about the trading potential of the enormous tropical forest stretching from the mouth of the Aruwimi to within fifty miles of Lake Albert? `He listened to what I had said,' noted Stanley, `with the close attention of one who was receiving an account of a great estate that had just fallen to him.' What was marketable in the forest? Timber, of course, Stanley told him, before adding as an afterthought: `Almost every branchy tree has a rubber parasite clinging to it ... A well organized company will be able to collect several tons annually.' Since, in 1890, this would have been worth very little to the company harvesting it, Leopold was more interested in the rich variety of hardwoods that could be floated downstream as logs. Stanley made a point of stressing how important `gentle treatment of the employed natives' would be, if their labour was to be utilized.'7
Little that Stanley told Leopold gave him any reason to think he would be earning much from the Congo until the railway had been built. Neither he nor Stanley knew that a Scottish veterinary surgeon, living in Belfast, had amused himself in 1887 by fitting an air-filled tyre to his son's tricycle to improve the boy's ride. The ingenious vet had patented his `pneumatic' tyre a year later, and in 1889 had floated the Dunlop Tyre Company. This would not be established in Europe and America until 18 9 r - the first consignment of bicycle tyres reaching America on Christmas Day 189o. The great bicycling craze would then begin, lifting the price of rubber to levels that would have seemed unimaginable even a year or two earlier."
When Leopold told Stanley that he wanted him to return to Africa to take Khartoum and Join the Sudan to the Congo, Stanley was incredulous. Such a venture would require 5,000 white troops and 10,000 black, and would take several years to prepare. It was, he told L
eopold bluntly, `impossible with your present means'. Frankly, he should not even think of expansion into the Uele and the Bahr el Ghazal regions - there was just one priority, and this was to attack the Arab slave traders between Stanley Falls and the Kasongo and `stop their awful work' in the Auruwimi valley and on the Lualaba. `Direct all your strength and means first to extirpate these awful people, and when you have done that then talk about extension of territory.'i9 Before Henry left Brussels for London, he gave an impassioned talk to the Anti-Slavery Conference, then in session in that city, arguing the need for an immediate arms embargo. This should be aimed not only at slave traders but at warlords like Mirambo, and Msiri, who between them had brought terror to a vast area between Lake Victoria and Katanga. The great powers had a moral duty `to pass stringent laws'. Germany and Britain could together `prevent the trade altogether [in East Africa]'.z°
Before Stanley left Brussels, the king presented him with a malachite and ebony casket containing the Grand Cross of his personal order, and the Diamond Star of the Congo. Had Leopold instead persuaded him to take charge of the Congo, a great human catastrophe would have been prevented a few years later.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Dorothy's Other Love
Stanley was greeted by cheering crowds at London's Victoria Station at the beginning of a month of banquets, lectures and celebratory occasions. At Sandringham, where he had been invited to stay, he gave an after-dinner speech on Africa to the Prince of Wales. The Royal Geographical Society, in full retreat from past insults, packed the Albert Hall with royalty, peers, politicians and travellers eager to celebrate his homecoming with the largest reception he had ever been given.' Constant exposure to rich food soon brought him to the brink of gastritis. As Henry remarked wryly to Mackinnon: `When hundreds of feasts are in prospect, the stomach declines to work ... When I had a stomach I had nothing to eat.'Z Among other honours, Oxford and Cambridge awarded him honorary degrees.
