by Tim Jeal
CODA
Lacking the Wand of an Enchanter
In less than a quarter of a century, a small group of exceptionally brave explorers and their remarkable African porters, guides, translators and servants had solved the greatest geographical mystery on earth, covering many thousands of miles in the process, mainly on foot. They had risked their lives repeatedly, had been detained for months at a time by chiefs and kings, and had survived by judging when best to be long-suffering and when assertive. Rarely, when exploring, had they found themselves in a position to impose their will. Their joint efforts lifted the veil on one of the planet’s last great puzzles.
The cost in human lives had been very high, as Stanley’s great trans-Africa journey illustrates. Of the 228 people who set out from Zanzibar, exactly half lost their lives.1 Of the four Europeans, he was the only survivor. The vast majority of deaths had been suffered by the far more numerous Wangwana. ‘The execution & fulfilment of all plans, and designs,’ Stanley told a friend: ‘was due to the pluck and intrinsic goodness of 20 men … Take these 20 out and I could not have proceeded beyond a few days journey.’2 Among these had been Manwa Sera and Chowpereh, who had both been with Livingstone on his last journey. With him too had been Uledi, whom Stanley valued more than any other captain on that same great 1874-77 journey.
The indispensable nature of the services of the leading Wangwana captains and carriers becomes obvious when the famous journeys they made possible are listed. Uledi had also been with Stanley on his Livingstone search and with Speke and Grant between 1860 and 1863. Sidi Mubarak Bombay had been with Burton and Speke in 1857-59, then with Speke and Grant several years later, and with Stanley on his Livingstone search. Susi had been with Livingstone since 1863. With Chowpereh, Susi led the men who brought their master’s body to the coast in 1873. He then served with Stanley on the Congo between 1879 and 1884, and was put in charge of constructing the first trading station at Leopoldville. Dualla, Stanley’s great diplomat on the same expedition, would later become Lugard’s most valued African caravan leader in the 1890s. Some of these men lived long enough to retire, as Bombay would do in 1885, on a Royal Geographical Society pension, but they were the lucky ones, outnumbered by those who died while travelling.
Of the principal European actors in the Nile search, only David Livingstone died in Africa. But Samuel and Florence Baker came as close to death as is possible without actually dying, thanks to pressing on across swampy, mosquito-infested country having exhausted their quinine. On one occasion Stanley entered the tunnel of light now popularly associated with near-death experiences. Richard Burton suffered so severely from malaria that he was unable to walk for the best part of a year; Speke endured an agonising illness with symptoms like acute hydrophobia, as well as bouts of fever, temporary blindness and a permanent loss of hearing in one ear. For nine months, Grant was immobilised by tropical leg ulcers, and Farquhar and Shaw, Stanley’s two companions on the Livingstone search, died from complications of malaria. The Pocock brothers and Frederick Barker, on Stanley’s second journey, died respectively from smallpox, drowning and malaria.
Livingstone could easily have died several years earlier than he did – and in the same violent manner in which the murdered British explorers Mungo Park and Richard Lander had met their end – but the spears hurled at him missed by inches. Less fortunate were Burton and Speke, who both received serious stab wounds at the hands of Somali tribesmen. European travellers were not infrequently murdered by Africans at this time. Between 1845 and 1865, the French naval officer Lieutenant Maizan, the German scientist Albrecht Roscher, and his compatriot Baron Klaus von der Decken were all killed by East African tribesmen. Stanley’s friend Ernest Linant de Bellefonds was murdered by the Bari in 1876, two of Mackay’s missionary colleagues in 1878, and two British Army officers, Frederick Carter and Thomas Cadenhead, were killed with sixty of their followers by Mirambo’s men in 1880. Five years later, Bishop James Hannington and his followers were stabbed to death on the orders of Mwanga, the kabaka of Buganda, and soon after that, Emin Pasha was murdered by the warlord Kibonge. The Nile explorers might easily have shared the same fate as these unfortunate travellers.
Despite their obvious merits, Speke and Livingstone received no reward at all from the British state for their contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Grant was awarded a beggarly Companionship of the Bath, Baker was knighted and Stanley, who finally explained the geography of the entire central watershed, received the same honour many years after his geographical triumphs were over. Burton also received a knighthood thanks to his aristocratic wife’s tireless campaigning. As his reward for a campaign that had ended in a single morning of mechanised slaughter, Major-General Sir Horatio Kitchener was made a baron and was voted the astonishing sum of £30,000 by Parliament.
Because the explorers arrived first in the interior before other whites, to be followed soon afterwards by the missionaries, and then by imperial agents, is it fair to say that the Scramble for Africa was a single seamless process? In one sense linkage is self-evident, since exploration was the essential precursor to later white rule and settlement. But what had the Nile explorers actually wanted to happen to Africa after they had penetrated and mapped so much of it? Such a question is not easy to answer because, with the exception of Richard Burton (who dismissed African colonies as unworkable because he considered the inhabitants of the ‘Dark Continent’ too primitive to absorb European culture), some of the others, though in favour of creating colonies, changed their views over time.3 A case in point is Samuel Baker who was the explorer most directly responsible for extending the Sudan to the south with such appalling future consequences. In 1889, he performed a complete volte face and said that Britain should have nothing more to do with Equatoria and Uganda and should not occupy either because tropical Africa would always be a drain on the British taxpayer. Needless to say this late opinion was not listened to.4
David Livingstone, whose opinions and theories would influence the British general public more than those of all the other Nile explorers combined, began by doubting whether large-scale contact with whites would ever do anything but harm to Africans. ‘If natives are not elevated by contact with Europeans,’ he wrote, ‘they are sure to be deteriorated. It is with pain I have observed that all the tribes I have seen lately [in Botswana and Cape Colony] are undergoing the latter process.’5 He refused to condemn polygamy, saying that it could not be considered adultery. Livingstone understood at once that many wives were needed to produce the large families essential for chiefly power.6 He also realised that because individuals were not allowed (under threat of accusations of witchcraft) to build up grain surpluses for their personal use, the tribe was better placed to feed everyone in a famine than would have been the case if grain had been privately, rather than communally owned. Yet, as a missionary, Livingstone had been obliged to rule out the possibility of leaving Africans to their own devices. His God-given duty, as he saw it, had been to save the souls of as many people as possible.
So between 1849 and 1851, he made three journeys to the far north of Botswana in an attempt to find an untouched tribe whose members might, he hoped, be more receptive to Jesus’ teachings than those living close to the Boers. But to his horror he found during the early 1850s, that even the remotest tribes on the Zambezi had been visited by Portuguese slave traders, or their African agents, the Mambari. Indeed members of Livingstone’s favourite tribe, the Kololo, turned out to have sold men and women to the Mambari in exchange for cloth, guns and stolen cattle.7 It now seemed very unlikely that he would find any uncorrupted tribes along the Zambezi. In these distressing circumstances, Livingstone concluded that only widespread European intrusion would have any chance of effecting a moral change.
His position was a painfully ironic one. He had come in search of an untouched people, but having found them corrupted was now about to advocate even more contact with outsiders. But unless the Kololo were enabled to sell their animal skins, bee
swax, resins and ivory to the kind of traders who would not expect to be paid with slaves for the factory goods the tribes craved, the slave trade and the gun-frontier would continue to spread on like wildfire. Livingstone believed that only ‘commerce and Christianity’, and in the end colonies, could prevent this disaster. He was convinced that chiefs would never abandon their customary rights to enslave captives taken from neighbouring tribes until they could see proof of the material superiority of European society to their own. Only the appearance of metal-hulled steamships and machinery seemed likely to create a crisis of confidence for powerful African chiefs.8 Livingstone’s earlier sympathy for African customs made it harder for him to think like this.
Yet the moment Livingstone decided that the slave trade would only ever be conquered if the Europeans created African colonies, he began to put pressure on successive British governments. He met with no success at all in the fourteen years left to him. In 1860, Lord Palmerston wrote: ‘I am very unwilling to embark on new schemes of British possessions. Dr L’s information is valuable, but he must not be allowed to tempt us to form colonies only to be reached by forcing steamers up cataracts.’9 In mid-century, Britain was the workshop of the world, out-producing all its rivals, and did not need new colonies, in the eyes of its politicians, in order to increase its wealth or power.
Like David Livingstone, John Speke saw the creation of colonies as the best way to improve life for Africans. When he first reached Lake Victoria, he was shocked by the poverty of local people, given the extraordinary fertility of the land. Why were they so poor, he wondered? In part, their bountiful environment seemed responsible. They did not need to make clothes because the weather was so congenial, and the soil produced enough in its natural state to make agricultural effort unnecessary. So why build up a food surplus to sell and thus provide the means for other projects? Most of all, he blamed poverty on small local wars. ‘The great cause [of poverty] is their want of a strong protecting government to preserve peace, without which nothing can prosper.’ It struck him that,
… if, instead of this district being in the hands of its present owners, it were ruled by a few scores of Europeans, what an entire revolution a few years would bring forth. An extensive market would be opened to the world … and commerce would clear the way for civilization and enlightenment.10
Speke, again like Livingstone, feared that Africans would be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’ by the Arab-Swahili slave trade, unless Britain established some African equivalent of the British Raj.11 A few years later, he appealed for missionaries to go out to the Sudan, Bunyoro, Buganda and Rwanda to pave the way for ‘legitimate commerce’. In his opinion, Africans ‘considered the slave trade legitimate from the fact that slaves are purchased with European articles of merchandise’. What was required, said Speke, was that Africans themselves should be ‘taught to abhor the slave trade’. Pressure, he said, should also be put on the Sultan of Zanzibar to end the trade in his dominions.12 If Speke had not died in 1864, his voice would have been added to Livingstone’s in advocating the formation of new colonies for humanitarian reasons.
Stanley would only come to believe that colonies (as opposed to internationalised rivers and trading stations) would have to be created after he came across 2,300 recently captured slaves on the upper Congo in 1883 and thought himself ‘in a kind of evil dream’, witnessing such ‘indescribable inhumanity’. He guessed that in order to obtain this number of slaves, the Arabs would have shot the same number to prevent resistance. At this time, half a million people were being displaced or enslaved annually in central Africa.13
The case for intervention was a very powerful one. These explorers had not – as is sometimes suggested – broken open an unspoiled paradise and exposed it to the exploitative greed of the world’s capitalists for the very first time.14 On the upper Nile in the early 1860s, Samuel Baker had found European, Egyptian and Sudanese slave traders in the process of establishing trading posts within fifty miles of Lake Albert. Also in the 1860s David Livingstone had been shocked to find Nyamwezi chiefs selling members of neighbouring tribes and indeed their own people to a handful of alien intruders.15 The internal slave trade of the Africans themselves provoked him to say that this ‘perpetual capturing and sale of children’ from subject tribes made the Portuguese and Arab trades ‘appear a small evil by comparison’.16 A decade earlier, David Livingstone had encountered the Portuguese slave trader Silva Porto in the centre of the continent on the Zambezi.
In the 1840s the Victorian passion for ivory piano keys, knife handles and the backs of brushes could no longer be met by African traders alone, so the coastal Arab-Swahili (whose Arab ancestors had arrived on the East African coast in the ninth century) had started to penetrate deeper and deeper into the interior to bring back ever greater numbers of tusks and the slaves required to carry them. Stanley wrote incredulously:
Every pound weight of ivory has cost the life of a man woman or child, for every five pounds a hut has been burned, for every two tusks a whole village has been destroyed … It is simply incredible that because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste.17
Samuel Baker remarked sardonically that because the slave traders had made the country so dangerous, he had often had no choice but to travel with their large caravans:
It is remarkably pleasant travelling in company with these robbers, they convert every country into a wasps’ nest. There’s no plan of action or travelling and I being dependent on their movements am more like a donkey than an explorer.18
From Rwanda and Buganda in the north, to Lake Nyasa (Malawi) and the Shire Highlands in the south, the Nile explorers found that Arab-Swahili traders had preceded them by a decade or two, bringing destruction and suffering in their wake. The slave and ivory traders had also brought gunpowder and guns far into the interior – though, sadly, these were not recent imports. The Dutch had sold 20,000 tons of gunpowder annually along the West African coast from 1700 for over a century, while on the East African coast the Portuguese had first sailed into the Zambezi estuary with gunpowder and cannons in the mid-1500s.19
African migrations and warfare also brought widespread disruption. The northward movement of the Ngoni was witnessed by Speke and by Livingstone, who recorded the murders and the thefts of cattle near Lake Nyasa. In the 1870s Mirambo of the Nyamwezi, with his child soldiers and Ngoni mercenaries, fought the Arabs for control of the caravan routes to Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria in a prolonged war that sucked in many innocent people,20 while Msiri, another central African ruler, was extending his power by invading his neighbours’ land and by allying himself with the arch slave trader Tippu Tip. This enabled him to kill the kasembe of the Luba-Lunda people and consolidate his power over south-east Katanga with its copper resources.
Not that Mwata Kasembe VII had been an angel as David Livingstone had observed in 1867:
When he usurped power five years ago, his country was densely peopled; but he was so severe in his punishments – cropping the ears, lopping off the hands, and other mutilations, selling the children for very slight offences, that his subjects gradually dispersed themselves in the neighbouring countries beyond his power.21
If Britain, France and Germany had not established colonies and protectorates within the area investigated by the Nile explorers, the Arab-Swahili slave traders would have continued up the Nile extending their control over Bunyoro and Buganda. The fate of the tribes in Equatoria would have been annihilation. The Sudanese Arabs would also have spread westwards through Chad, having first overwhelmed the Sultanate of Darfur. Even in Baker’s and Gordon’s day they had reached the Bahr el-Ghazal and Equatoria. Arabs from the south had made Lake Victoria an immense depot for the slave trade a decade before Stanley arrived. By then Tippu Tip’s empire stretched from Lake Tanganyika, through Manyema to the Congo and the Lomani. Inevitably, the whole of central equatorial Africa would have become part of the Muslim world, with slavery an inescapa
ble part of it, unless the colonial powers had come to stay. They did, and by the opening years of the twentieth century had suppressed the slave trade throughout East Africa, stopping a horrifying annual loss of people. Between 1800 and 1870 nearly two million slaves had been exported across the Sahara or by sea to Egypt, Arabia and the Gulf.22
In 1859, Speke had listed the benefits which in his opinion would accrue if ‘a few scores of Europeans’ came out to manage the southern shores of Lake Victoria, and a little later Livingstone described his ideal colonial administrator. This versatile individual would not compete with Africans in manual labour, but would ‘take a leading part in managing the land … and extending the varieties of the production of the soil’. He would take ‘a lead too in trade and in all public matters … [and] would be an unmixed advantage to everyone below and around him, for he would fill a place that is practically vacant’.23 This might almost have been an advance job description for the later colonial district commissioner. Doubtless Livingstone would have approved of these men’s university degrees, and their practical agricultural skills and advice-giving, but would have less admired their colonial assumption of superiority in all things. He had written of Africans in the mid-1850s in a different spirit:
With a general opinion they are wiser than their white neighbours … Each tribe has a considerable consciousness of goodness … In Africa they have less of what the Germans call philosophy to uphold their views; less diplomacy, protocols & notes … They have few theories but many ideas … There is no search after the supreme good such as we are to believe the ancient philosophers engaged in … But the African cares not at all for these utterly inane speculations. The pleasures of animal life are ever present to his mind as the supreme good, and but for his innumerable phantoms he would enjoy his luscious climate as well as it is possible for a man to do.24
