by Tim Jeal
Right from the baby's first day with him, while he was still too ill to get up, Stanley's greatest pleasure was to have the year-old child placed beside him on the bed. `Ah, it is worthwhile now to get well,' he told Dolly." The child was baptized with water from Lake Albert in Cadoxton Church, near the Tennants' country house in south Wales. Stanley and Dorothy said they had decided on the name Denzil, because she would have been called it, had she been a boy. (Dolly was descended from Oliver Cromwell, one of whose close friends was Denzil Holles.) Stanley would privately have relished this name since Den suggested Denbigh and zil is Liz spelled backwards. Stanley's mother had been a Liz and the adopted child's mother had also been called Elizabeth.78 From now on, Stanley's happiness became almost entirely bound up with giving his son the love he himself had never known. Even his sidelined autobiography caused him fewer pangs of conscience.
Nine months before the adoption of Denzil, Stanley had travelled to New Orleans to try to work out what to do about his own fictitious `adoption'. He returned to the city incognito, as Mr S. M. Henry. Knowing, from several press articles, that the presence of surviving Stanley relatives in New Orleans made it unsafe for him to claim to have been adopted by Henry Hope Stanley, he decided to search in the city's cemeteries for a family of Stanleys who had lived in New Orleans at the right time and were now dead. He needed a Mrs Stanley who had died in r 8 59 or 1186o to support his fiction of `his mother's' early death. Between 114 and 118 October, he walked for miles in several large burial grounds. He found the grave of a Mary Ann Stanley in Metairie Cemetery, but he made no comment in his notebook to show that he realized he had stumbled upon his `father's' first wife, even though the words `Wife of Henry Stanley, a native of Cheshire, England' were carved into the stone.79 It is hard to resist the conclusion that Stanley did not know that H. H. Stanley came from Cheshire, or had once been married to a first wife. In any case, her death in 1846 had been over a decade too early to be of any use. He found the gravestones of a number of other Stanleys and noted down their dates of death. It seems he did not go near the shared grave of Henry Hope Stanley and his second wife, Frances, which was in another part of the cemetery in which Mary Ann lay buried.
Despite all his efforts, Henry failed to find a safely defunct Stanley family with roughly the right dates. Given his precarious health, there is something unbearably poignant about this world-famous man peering at the graves of total strangers for hour after hour, all because he could not endure the thought of admitting that his adoption had never happened. The hurt went so deep that he still needed to pretend that he had been cherished by an adoptive family, and dreaded being ridiculed should he fail to furnish `proofs' to support his story. But one graveyard visit that October was inspired by a genuine desire to pay his respects. This was to the tomb of James Speake, the storekeeper who had done so much for him, and beside whose dead body he had watched the whole night through, before his burial."
While walking through the city for the very last time, and visiting the places he remembered, Stanley crossed Orange Street on his way to St Thomas Street, where he had lived in a boarding house in 1859 and 186o, and naturally he did not pause, en route, to look at Henry Hope Stanley's house, although it was then only twenty-five yards away. On this sentimental journey through familiar streets, he had no desire to search out houses where he had never lived. His final aim on this trip was to return to Baltimore via Hagerstown, to visit the village where he had been nursed back to health in ,86z. In New York, he dined with Edward King, his oldest friend, who had known him in Spain before he had found Livingstone. King would die in March the following year, so the few hours the two men spent together, and which King (in his own words) `immeasurably enjoyed', would be their last.8i It would also be Stanley's final visit to the country that had been the springboard for his career.
On returning to London, Henry effectively abandoned his autobiography. In a section of uncompleted manuscript, he wrote: `To lie is considered mean, and it is no doubt a habit to be avoided by every self-respecting person. But the best of men & women are sometimes compelled to resort to lying to avoid a worse offence. On certain occasions I have had to lie ... to defend myself against inquisitiveness & stop impertinence."' He would have needed to publish some epic lies to sustain the story of his adoption; and though he did invent a fictitious Mr Stanley (significantly different from Henry Hope), he could not have relished the prospect of exposing his invention to a readership inevitably including people who had known him in 118 5 9. For this reason - and to avoid writing truthfully about his Welsh relatives - he stopped work, blaming his failure to finish on his duties as an MP. His polished manuscript ended in r 86z - though he had also written draft accounts of the Livingstone meeting and of his great Congo journey, and the Emin Pasha expedition. The typescripts made, after his death, by Dolly and her hired professional author, George Merriam, replaced Stanley's earlier manuscripts (many of which no longer exist).
Stanley failed to write the book that could have been his most enduring work, but at least, when he returned from America, it was to his little son. In the person of Denzil, he told Dolly, `the secret object of my inward thoughts is realized ... as though it were a pre-natal vision embodied in actual existence'.83
THIRTY-TWO
Stanley, Leopold and the Atrocities
From the mid-r8gos, tragic developments on the Congo cast a long shadow over some of Stanley's greatest achievements - especially his years of pioneering. All his prodigious labours seemed merely to have ended with the creation of a colony in which atrocities were used to boost rubber production as a matter of deliberate policy. Clearly, the nature of his response to these atrocities is important for his moral reputation. In the early 118gos he, like Sir William Mackinnon, Sir John Kirk, Baroness Burdett-Coutts and many humanitarians, continued to believe in Leopold's desire to help civilize Africa using humane methods. Of course, Stanley and the rest of them knew that the king wanted to make money from the Congo, but this seemed perfectly natural, given the monarch's staggering annual losses. In October 1890, Leopold told Stanley that unless he could raise £50,000 more per annum by taxation, he could not continue to find the £170,000 required each year to pay for the state's administration. As Henry understood it, the future of the colony was at stake. The only tax Leopold was permitted to levy under the Berlin decrees was an export duty, on ivory and palm oil, then producing about a tenth of the cost of the State. Since the king's expenses were rising every year, and he would soon be paying for a war against the Arabs, Stanley was willing to stick his neck out and argue the need for Leopold to impose an additional tax.'
Leopold did not mention to Stanley his decrees of October 1891 and May 11892-, by which he made it illegal for natives to hunt elephants or harvest wild rubber, unless they handed over these commodities to the State's officers for a small fixed sum per kilo.' Nor was Stanley informed of the decree of 3 o October 1189 z, by which `vacant' lands (that is, those not lived on or farmed by Africans) were to be divided into three zones, one of which, the Domaine Prive, was a vast territory that included the valleys of the Aruwimi and the Uele - all of which would be reserved entirely for the State.' In 1189z, although the Dunlop Tyre Company was by now trading in Europe and America, rubber sales were still only achieving one-thirtieth of the tonnage recorded at the century's end, so it was not yet apparent that rubber would save the finances of the Congo Free State. Apart from the king's debts, there was another reason why Henry did not speak in public against Leopold's new policies. By the time he heard about `vacant lands' late in 118gz, the king's force publique had attacked the ArabSwahili in the east of Leopold's vast country and the war Stanley had been urging for years had started.
It took almost a year of fighting for the State to defeat the slave traders and their African allies in the Aruwimi valley, on the Lomani and the Upper Congo. Recalling the carnage inflicted by these same slave traders in the 1188os, Stanley was delighted by Leopold's successful campaign.4 It would be se
veral years before Henry discovered that Captain Francis Dhanis (Leopold's most brilliant commander) had fought in alliance with ro,ooo cannibals of the Batetela tribe, and that scores of their captives had been eaten on the field of battle.' Inevitably, this brutal campaign did not bring security or prosperity to the `liberated' areas. News from this anarchic and deeply traumatized region only reached the outside world in 1896 and 11897. But before these terrible revelations reached him, Stanley was outraged by an act of Belgian injustice against an individual who happened to be a British subject. The beginning of the end of Stanley's long relationship with Leopold was at hand.
Stanley had met the trader and former lay missionary Charles Stokes in Cairo, and had corresponded with him in 1889 about his intention of arming Mwanga in order to restore him to the Bugandan throne.' Though Stanley disliked the idea of selling guns in Africa full stop, he considered that selling arms to Africans was not as heinous as supplying them to Arabs. So he was horrified when he heard in August 11895 that Stokes had been arrested and summarily hanged by a Belgian officer, Captain H. J. Lothaire. The Briton's alleged crime was importing guns into the Congo from German East Africa. When the relevant papers were sent to Stanley by Charles Liebrechts, the Free State's Secretary General of the Interior, he saw that, though Stokes had been `foolish, rash, and even wicked ... Lothaire's conduct had been utterly indefensible'. Stokes had not smuggled `two or three hundred breech loaders with some thousands of cartridges' into the Congo, but only obsolete muzzle loaders; and he had neither resisted arrest, nor withheld his property from Lothaire. Stanley considered that the worst that should have been done to him was the imposition of a heavy fine and a prison sentence.7 When Stanley met the king at the Grosvenor Hotel, in London, in January 118 9 6, he was taken aback to find him totally unapologetic. The Stokes affair obliged Henry to see that the king could be callously indifferent to an individual case of injustice, even when he knew all the facts. Stanley would not forget this.
In April 11895, Henry had been visited at Richmond Terrace by William Hoffman, his former valet, and by the Dutch trader and consul at Leopoldville, Antoine Greshoff, shortly before they both returned to the Congo. In the past few years, the Dutchman, whom Stanley considered a friend, had written a stream of letters warning him never to go back to the Congo - even if Leopold asked him to. The Belgian officers, he said, were as brutal as the Arabs. Furthermore, the State's officials were deliberately destroying free trade on the river. Stanley suspected that Greshoff hated the Belgians because they had wrecked his business, but he still found his letters disconcert- ing.9 With William Hoffman's departure, Stanley realized that he would now have a chance to test Greshoff's accusations. William had earned his former master's admiration by going out to the Congo to work as an interpreter for the State in November 118gr, after serving for a year in Mombassa with Mackinnon's company.'° In June 11892, Hoffman had joined an expedition to the Nile watershed, and had then served on the River Congo itself until 11894." He returned to the Congo Free State again in April 118 as a lieutenant, and would soon be stationed in the troubled eastern `Zone Arabe'.
But in November 11895, before Stanley had received any significant information from Hoffman, an American missionary from Equator Station, J. B. Murphy, told a Reuter's correspondent that, in his area, Africans were having their hands cut off if they failed to collect large amounts of rubber." Corroboration of these claims came from a source Stanley had to take seriously. Two years earlier he had himself recommended two Britons, Captain Philip H. B. Salusbury and Sergeant Graham, for service with the State's force publique. Although Graham was killed and eaten by cannibals a year later,I" in September 1896, Salusbury and another Englishman, Alfred Parminter - both of whom had worked for Sanford's company - published articles in the British press alleging that there had been many recent atrocities in the Congo, some gratuitous and some inspired by a desire to force the Congolese to collect more ivory and rubber. Officers of the State were poorly paid, claimed Salusbury, and received a z5 per cent commission on ivory and r z per cent on rubber.14
Faced with these revelations, Leopold asked Stanley to write to The Times, suggesting that the atrocities had been isolated incidents." Stanley's letter - published in the paper on 116 September - was a disappointment to Leopold. Henry obligingly stated that the recent atrocities had been committed by a tiny proportion of the total number of officers in the force publique (as indeed they had been), but he made it very clear that truly horrifying crimes really had been committed by Belgians, or by Africans under their orders. Stanley repeated unchallenged the claims that a Lieutenant Hansen had ordered a woman's breasts to be cut off, that a Lieutenant Jansen had flogged a woman with zoo lashes, and that a Lieutenant Bunsen had caused a girl to be dismembered. He also repeated Parminter's statement that he had seen a Lieutenant Blochteur praise a native sergeant who had just brought him a collection of severed ears. The fact that Stanley named names, as Parminter had done, showed that he was entirely convinced that these particular crimes had happened and had no intention of whitewashing anyone. He also repeated a ghastly account of Bangala soldiers cutting off a girl's feet when under the command of a Lieutenant de Keyser.
Stanley reproved Parminter for failing to name the worst officer of all, whom he had accused of giving two women several hundred lashes each, and then ordering his men to cut off their breasts and leave them to die. `When and where was such a revolting crime committed? Was the District Governor informed of it, and if so, what did he do about it?' Stanley stated his conviction that if the authorities were told about such cases, they would act decisively against the evil-doers. He applauded the publication of allegations of brutality, since `it could not fail to act as a deterrent on evil doing, as there is no station so distant as to be beyond the moral effect of a newspaper'.i6
A few days later Stanley backtracked somewhat, suggesting in a letter to the Saturday Review that some of the atrocities might have been invented in trading stations, as a result of anti-Belgian sentiment. 17 But in reality, he was desperately upset by what Parminter and Salusbury had revealed, and the day after his letter appeared in The Times he wrote to William Hoffman, enclosing Parminter's most recent revelations and asking his old valet if he could name the Belgian officer who had ordered a woman's breasts to be cut off. `Are the Belgian officers as cruel as reported? Do they allow their soldiers to riot, murder and mutilate? Is it a common report? ... I may have to speak about these Congo matters in Parliament - of course nothing but the absolute truth will do."' William's reply was written in December and arrived three months after that. It was not reassuring. He explained how the Batetela warlord, Gongo Lutete, who had served under Dhanis in the war against the Arabs, had been accused of plotting against the Belgians and had been tried by four young officers and shot before Dhanis could save him. This deplorably foolish act had led to a Batetela mutiny, which was spreading dangerously. William reported that in recent fighting against the mutinous Batetela cannibals, sixteen Belgians had died and zoo government black soldiers. No mercy had been shown to women and children, who had been `cut up and eaten' by the mutineers, who had also `hung up [captives] by their feet along the roadside ...[with] all the chair humaine [human flesh] cut off'. Government blacks were also eating their enemies.
Recently, between Leopoldville and Kasongo on the Upper Congo, eight whites had been sentenced for sickening crimes: one had `tossed a girl into the river with hands and feet bound'. This murderer had received a five-year sentence and a fine of 5,000 francs. But lighter sentences had been given to men guilty of similarly bestial crimes. Although these eight criminals had been whites, others crimes were being carried out by Africans with the knowledge of whites, or without it. William said that in the current fighting against the Batetela, `many cruel acts were often committed without the white man knowing anything about them'. This terrible picture was one that Stanley had to believe." It comforted him that Hoffman was in the lawless `Zone Arabe', which was still experiencing the
aftermath of war. And even there, atrocities were being detected and punished (albeit inadequately). These crimes, Henry prayed, were the work of very few Belgians and their ill-disciplined black troops. For surely, if such barbarities were truly widespread, there would have been an outcry from many of the 400 missionaries on the Congo. George Grenfell, the Baptist missionary and friend of Stanley, had told him nothing.2O However, Stanley did not wait for further information from the mis
sionaries but wrote firmly to Leopold: `I would suggest to your Majesty that something should be done to prevent this continuous supply of Congo sensations ... people fed as they are with stories of atrocities will be apt to believe that some of them must be true and that the state ought to be suppressed in consequence.' He warned the king that there was a real danger that Britain might join France in open hostility to the Congo Free State. More atrocities would lead to demands for international action.21 Stanley's tone shook the king, who replied that he had `given new orders to suppress all irregularities ... and the state inspector has been charged to proceed to all places alleged to have been the scene of such'" Leopold wrote to his Secretary of State for the Congo, Baron Edmond van Eetvelde: `If there are abuses in the Congo, we must stop them. If they are perpetuated they will bring about the collapse of the State.' Leopold set up a 'Commission for the Protection of the Natives', made up of three Catholic and three Protestant missionaries who were to inform the Governor-General of any cases of brutality that came to their notice. Whether Leopold meant this commission to succeed is open to question. The individual missionaries were hundreds of miles apart. In any case, it was the systematic use of forced labour for rubber collection that needed to be changed, and that was left in place.23
