Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure

by Tim Jeal

  Bonny informed him that Jameson, the whiskey heir, while on his way to Kasongo, had purchased an eleven-year-old girl and given her to cannibals so that he could watch her being stabbed to death, cut up, cooked in a pot and eaten, while he made sketches of the whole grisly process.16 According to Bonny, Jameson had gone downriver and would soon be returning. In fact he had died of fever on the day Stanley reached Banlaya. One of the other officers had been invalided home and another had chosen to station himself 600 miles downstream on the Congo. Bonny did not tell Stanley that he and all the other officers had purchased slave women from the local Arab slave traders. ‘Our cannibal concubines’, he called them in his diary.17 The moral collapse of the Rear Column’s officers and the deaths at Yambuya would haunt Stanley for the rest of his life. He knew that people back in England would assume that Barttelot and Jameson had been:

  … originally wicked … They will not reflect that circumstances changed them … At home these men had no cause to show their natural savagery … They were suddenly transplanted to Africa and its miseries. They were deprived of butcher’s meat & bread & wine, books, newspapers, the society & influence of their friends. Fever seized them, wrecked minds and bodies. Good nature was banished by anxiety. Pleasantness was eliminated by toil. Cheerfulness yielded to internal anguish … until they became but shadows, morally & physically of what they had been in English society.18

  Yet Stanley could not afford to surrender to despair. Karl Peters might already be on his way to Lake Victoria and the Pasha’s men had to be there ahead of him, so Stanley gave the half-starved survivors of Banlaya ten days in which to recuperate, before leaving Banlaya on 30 August 1888. Back at the lake, he was appalled to find that Emin Pasha had not yet returned from the north after consulting his men about their relocation.19 Then Stanley received the shocking news that Emin was being held captive by mutineers from one of his own regiments. The Pasha’s life seemed to be hanging by a thread. Plainly all hope that he would take his men to north-eastern Uganda had gone. At best, it appeared that Stanley would now be taking a small number of Emin’s loyal soldiery to the coast en route to Egypt. By failing to be honest about his true situation, Emin had turned a difficult situation into a disastrous one.20 Now, Equatoria would probably be overrun by the jihadists with the connivance of Emin’s men, and Uganda would become a German colony. Stanley’s officers felt great bitterness towards the Pasha. ‘We were led,’ said one, ‘to place our trust in people who were utterly unworthy of our confidence and help.’21

  At the end of December, Emin and a handful of loyal officers and soldiers arrived at Tunguro on Lake Albert, having been released unharmed from involuntary detention at Dufile, 140 miles to the north on the Nile. Although Emin claimed that a thousand men were still loyal to him, on 10 April 1889, the agreed date of departure for the coast, only 126 officers and men assembled in Stanley’s camp, along with about 350 servants, wives, concubines, children, clerks and officials. To bring away these people, described by one of Stanley’s officers as ‘the dregs of Cairo & Alexandria’, had to date cost Stanley about 400 lives, and had put back by months the date on which he could expect to reach Alexander Mackay and his missionaries and converts in Buganda. Fortunately, Stanley would soon learn that these much-persecuted people had managed to escape from Buganda to Usambiro, on the southern shores of Lake Victoria.

  On arriving at the lake Stanley was moved to tears by the 32-year-old Mackay’s courage. The diminutive and dapper missionary had only left Buganda with his converts when certain that they would otherwise have been killed. Mackay warned Stanley that Karl Peters was already fighting his way through Masailand. Furthermore, the Germans had recently moved inland in large numbers into their East African ‘sphere of influence’. En route to Lake Victoria from Lake Albert, Stanley had undergone several blood brotherhood ceremonies with chiefs, and now decided to represent these to the British government as ‘verbal treaties’ which might possibly be used in negotiations to prevent western Uganda falling into German hands.22

  According to Mackay, Peters was closing in on Buganda itself, leaving a trail of burned villages and murdered Masai warriors behind him.23 But Stanley was in no position to try to reach Buganda ahead of him. With only 215 members of his own expedition to call upon, and handicapped by having to supervise Emin’s straggling column of 300 enfeebled men, women and children, his column had to concentrate on its own survival. Any attempt to do more would end in disaster.

  As Stanley came to the sun-bleached borders of Masailand and saw stretching ahead of him the parched, acacia-studded plain which he remembered so well from his Livingstone search, he could just discern a caravan approaching through the quivering haze. It was led by a young German officer, and Stanley was disconcerted to be hailed ‘with a perfect volley of “Guten Morgens”‘ from the Nyamwezi porters.24

  Despite Stanley’s belief that the Pasha would accompany him to Europe, Emin had secretly resolved never to leave Africa. In 1875, on his last visit to his native Germany, he had abandoned his former Turkish mistress, Madame Hakki, and had fled to Egypt, taking her jewels and money with him. She had obtained a judgment for 10,000 marks after his disappearance, leaving Emin in no doubt about her determination to put him behind bars should he ever return to German or Turkish jurisdiction.25 Not until reaching Cairo would Stanley learn about the scandal of Emin’s Turkish mistress and her lawsuit. He buried the information in his diary and never breathed a word to anyone, knowing that Emin’s criminal treatment of his mistress, if it were ever made public, would cause a storm of anger that good lives should have been lost to rescue an immoral cad.26

  At the coastal town of Bagamoyo in early December 1889, the short-sighted Emin fell from a balcony during a celebratory dinner and gashed his head. The German officers who had organised the dinner spirited him away to their military hospital and Stanley never saw him again. A month later, Emin announced that he intended to work for Germany, and in April 1890 he marched out of Bagamoyo at the head of a well-equipped expedition. He hoped to recruit his old Sudanese soldiers, who had been left behind on the shores of Lake Albert, and with their help to claim Equatoria for Germany. But he would soon discover that his former officers had remained loyal to Egypt and Britain. So Emin vanished into the interior on a mysterious mission of his own, which ended with his capture by Kibonge, an Arab-Swahili warlord and slave trader, somewhere south of Stanley Falls on the Congo. Emin Pasha was arrested and beheaded on the orders of Kibonge. ‘The very day he was kissed by his countrymen he was doomed,’ remarked Stanley, drily.27

  Emin’s ingratitude underlined the complete failure of Stanley’s expedition to achieve what he and Mackinnon had most wanted to do: namely strengthen Britain’s strategic position in East and Central Africa. Whether Britain, Germany, or even France, was going to emerge as the guardian of the source of the Nile and its upper reaches still remained an open question.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Prime Minister’s Protectorate

  Dr Karl Peters, the slender and scholarly German explorer with a taste for shooting Africans and decapitating their corpses, had hoped to join forces with Emin Pasha in his advance on Buganda and Equatoria; but after the Pasha vanished into the interior, Peters had been obliged to act alone. Supreme gambler that he was, the bespectacled German pushed on with only sixty men, and -after stealing a march on the British traveller, Frederick Jackson, whom Mackinnon had sent in a desperate last minute effort to intercept him – arrived at Mwanga’s court and persuaded the kabaka to sign a treaty. This coup was achieved with the support of the French priests, who knew that if Mackinnon triumphed, the British missionaries would be favoured in the kingdom to their detriment. The Germans, they fondly hoped, would be neutral.1 But just when Germany seemed to have triumphed, Lord Salisbury unexpectedly decided that vital British interests were involved after all.

  And what had caused the Prime Minister’s eleventh hour volte face? The answer was his recognition that a seismic shift was takin
g place in the broader region. While the Mahdist fundamentalists had remained in uncontested control of the Sudan and the Upper Nile, Lord Salisbury had been confident that the ruling Caliphate could not dam or interrupt the river’s flow because it lacked western-trained engineers. But when in 1889 an Italian army advanced into Abyssinia and declared it a protectorate, Salisbury informed them very publicly that Britain would bar their troops and those of all other nations from approaching the Nile itself.

  In June of the same year, Count Hatzfeld-Wildenburg, the German ambassador in London, took the hint and assured Salisbury that all places north and east of Lake Victoria were ‘outside the sphere of German colonisation’. So it had been obvious to Lord Salisbury that Prince Bismarck no longer supported Karl Peters’s colonial schemes. But Bismarck was dismissed in March 1890, and Salisbury was at once warned by the German Secretary of State, Baron von Marschall that no understanding existed between Germany and Great Britain about the territories to the west of Lake Victoria – the region in which Stanley had supposedly made his ‘verbal agreements’.2 Only a general European settlement in East Africa now seemed to hold out any prospect of discouraging German adventurers like Dr Peters from advancing towards the Nile through Equatoria.

  On first hearing about Peters’s vexing treaty with Mwanga, Salisbury knew it would take a masterstroke to snatch back Uganda and the Nile’s sources. So, as if plucking a rabbit from his hat, he produced the island of Heligoland and offered it to the delighted German Emperor. Count Hatzfeld-Wildenburg, the Kaiser’s negotiator, was informed by his master that this barren island in the North Sea, which had been captured by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, was vital for the future defence of Hamburg and the Kiel Canal. Nothing must be done that could jeopardise its acquisition. So Peters’s treaty was revoked, and Buganda – incorporating wider Uganda and Equatoria -once again seemed destined to become a British protectorate. Nor was that all. The Ruwenzori Mountains, along with half of Lake Albert, the whole of Lake George and the hinterland to the west of Lake Victoria, as far south as the Kagera river, would no longer be claimed by Germany as part of Tanganyika. So Stanley’s ‘blood-brotherhood treaties’ were not to be thrown away. Lord Salisbury also negotiated an extension of coastal land at Witu on the Indian Ocean to seal off the Upper Nile from possible German forays.3

  So it seemed that Mackinnon was finally to get what he had asked for all along and the ‘legacy’ of the Nile explorers Speke, Grant, Baker and Stanley would be saved for Britain. Another way of looking at the Heligoland Treaty was that two European nations had traded a minuscule rocky island in the North Sea for a vast chunk of Africa without reference to the people who lived there. For Mackinnon and Stanley however, Mwanga’s participation in the slave trade, his murder of Bishop Hannington, and the mutilation and roasting alive of scores of mission converts seemed more than sufficient justification for intervention.

  Lord Salisbury

  Yet in nineteenth-century Africa, few arrangements made in distant places went smoothly, even when a British prime minister and a crowned German head of state had decreed they should. In reality the situation in Buganda remained remarkably volatile, even after the removal of the immediate German threat. Buganda’s capital, Kampala, was a thousand miles from the coast, and Mackinnon, whose Imperial British East Africa Company was close to bankruptcy, was nevertheless being asked to gain control of the kingdom as quickly as possible.

  To achieve this, the shipping mogul and his directors sent to Central Africa Captain Frederick Lugard, an intense, dark-eyed young Indian Army officer with a floppy black moustache and a fondness for crumpled light-weight khaki uniforms. He had the classic background for a successful African adventurer, having been jilted by an adored fiancée, whom he had caught in bed with another man. So where better than Africa to re-establish his manly credentials? This he had started to do near Lake Nyasa in 1888, where he had fought bravely and been wounded while saving missionaries from death at the hands of Arab slave traders.

  On arriving in Kampala at the end of 1890, Lugard found that Mwanga’s sympathies lay with the powerful faction of chiefs supporting the French missionaries. So, on their advice the kabaka refused to sign a treaty with Lugard. After all, why should he allow any outsider to limit his powers as hereditary ruler of Buganda and take away his right to wage war, buy gunpowder and trade in slaves?4 Only Lugard’s small but disciplined force, and his Maxim gun, eventually persuaded Mwanga that he had no choice but to sign. This was not the first time that disaster had befallen the kabaka. The Muslims had long ago curtailed his independence, and the rivalry of the French and British missionaries and their African factions had caused a civil war in his kingdom that had driven him briefly into exile.

  Shortly after curtailing Mwanga’s powers, Lugard beat back a Muslim incursion into Buganda from Bunyoro. Nevertheless, the worsening antagonism between the supporters of the Catholic Mission, the Fransa, and of the Protestant Mission, the Inglesa, presented him with a more serious problem, especially since Mwanga was encouraging the Fransa to assert themselves militarily. Knowing that his men and the British mission’s supporters were outnumbered by the French alliance with Mwanga, Lugard strengthened the position of Mackinnon’s company by marching to Lake Albert and recruiting 200 of the Sudanese troops left there by Emin Pasha. Lugard was back in Buganda in December 1891 and found that relations between the missions had worsened. A return to civil war seemed inevitable, with the British mission and their Bugandan adherents likely to be on the losing side. So Lugard was horrified on his return to find a letter from the directors informing him that the company was insolvent and that he must withdraw. With Lord Salisbury’s majority in the Commons now down to four, and the Liberals and Irish MPs invariably voting against every Tory motion advocating government backing for a railway line to Uganda, there seemed no chance that Mackinnon’s company would be making any profits in the foreseeable future.5

  But rather than endanger the lives of the Protestant missionaries and their Inglesa converts by obeying the order to quit, Lugard vowed to stay on until a shortage of ammunition and other supplies forced him to pull out. Before that happened, some emergency fund-raising in Britain by supporters of the Church Missionary Society enabled the young officer to cling on in Buganda.

  Then, on 22 January 1892, coincidentally Captain Lugard’s thirty-fourth birthday, one of the Fransa chiefs who supported the French White Fathers murdered an Inglesa convert. The crime was committed in Mengo, close to the kabaka’s palace, and the body was left out in the sun all day. Lugard climbed the hill and demanded that the kabaka hand over the murderer so he could be tried and, if found guilty, executed by firing squad. Instead, Mwanga released the arrested Fransa on the grounds that he had acted in self-defence. Then the French priests incited their flock to violence by telling them that Lugard was merely the representative of a trading company and ‘could be driven out with sticks’.6 They denounced the Scottish Protestants as heretics, and refused to tell their flock to disband and disarm as Lugard asked them to do. Their leader, Monsignor Jean-Joseph Hirth, warned Captain Lugard that the French nation was watching events in Buganda very closely.

  Lugard feared that unless he could force Mwanga to hand over the murderer, the kabaka and the Fransa would take it as a sign of weakness and be encouraged to attack the Inglesa and the company’s men. Lugard sent Dualla, his trusted diplomat and interpreter (formerly Stanley’s most valued assistant on the Congo) to warn Mwanga to comply or prepare for war with the company. Flanked by Fransa chiefs, Mwanga told Dualla that he and his allies would never give up the accused man and were ready to fight.7 Hearing this, Lugard armed all his porters as well as his servants and soldiers. Even so, he was considerably outnumbered, although to compensate his 200 Sudanese soldiers were armed with modern Sniders, and he had a Maxim gun. A second Maxim had recently come up from the coast but was not in working order.

  On 24 January, Lugard fixed his binoculars on the straggling lines of Fransa and In
glesa colliding in the valley between the lush hills of Rubago and Mengo. Some of the Fransa were waving an immense tricolour. Rather than let the Protestant Scots and their followers be defeated, Lugard deployed his one functioning Maxim with predictable results. The Fransa and the French missionaries fled in terror towards Bulingugwe Island. Then they declined Lugard’s well-intended invitation to them to return to Mengo and begin negotiating peace terms. The kabaka’s rejection of this offer was a tragic mistake. Lugard ordered his second-in-command, Captain Ashley Williams, to take a detachment of Sudanese troops and his one functioning Maxim to drive them from the island. In the ensuing fight a hundred people lost their lives (many being drowned) and Mwanga fled into exile with the majority of his Catholic supporters.8

  An understandably emotional version of events was sent to Paris by Monsignor Hirth where it aroused passionate indignation. In London, Lord Salisbury and the British press played down the incident, and defended Lugard from allegations of bad faith and brutality. It would turn out that no French missionary had been killed.9 Soon after these events Lugard sent emissaries to invite Mwanga to return to Kampala, which he did on 30 March 1892, signing a treaty several days later. This would mark the end of Buganda’s independence. The various offices of state were removed from the kabaka’s gift and shared out by Lugard between the religious groups, including the Muslims. Control of different parts of the country also passed to the factions, with the Protestants being treated most favourably. Yet, at this moment of apparent triumph for Lugard and Mackinnon, Lord Salisbury lost his slender majority in the House of Commons, and Mr Gladstone was invited by Queen Victoria to form a government.