All posts tagged Lake Tanganyika

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh (1931)

How wrong I was, as it turned out, in all my preconceived notions about this journey.
(Remote People, page 97)

After weeks of reading heavy factual and often horrifying history about Africa, it was like getting into a warm bubble bath to read some Evelyn Waugh. He is a wonderful writer, clear and smooth – admittedly with occasional old-fashioned locutions and sometimes antiquated word order which makes you realise he was closer to the Victorians than to us – but he is nonetheless a deep pleasure to read because of his calm, clear, quietly cynical, drily humorous attitude. For his sophistication and style. For his combination of super-civilised manners and bright heartlessness. For his permanent alertness to the absurdity of life.

We sat in the open under an orange-tree and drank chianti and gossiped about the coronation, while many hundreds of small red ants overran the table and fell onto our heads from above. (p.72)

We saw a bridge being built under the supervision, apparently, of a single small boy in gumboots. (p.153)

[Jinja golf course] is, I believe, the only course in the world which posts a special rule that the player may remove his ball by hand from hippopotamus footprints. (p.156)

Temporary correspondent

Waugh establishes his a) posh, country house party persona and b) all-important membership of the network of posh public schoolboys who ran everything in 1930s England, by telling us that he was travelling by train back to London from a splendid country house in Wales when he bumped into an old chum who worked for The Times and, by the time the train journey had ended, his chum had promised him a job as a temporary correspondent to cover the upcoming coronation of the new emperor of Ethiopia, scheduled for November 1930.

So that’s why the reader opens the book to discover Waugh aboard a steamship, the Azay le Rideau, which has sailed from Marseilles across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and is now docking at Djibouti on the coast of French Somalia. The ship is packed with dignitaries, royal guests, diplomats, journalists and cameramen, plus a unit from the Foreign Legion down in 4th class, and even military bands, all heading for the coronation.

There is ample Carry On comedy about the behaviour of guests on the ship, fuss about porters and baggage, and endless complications about who’s going to get priority places on the very occasional train service which runs from Djibouti up to the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa.

Haile Selassie

A few words about Haile Selassie. He didn’t inherit the ancient throne of Ethiopia in a straightforward manner, by being the eldest son of the previous emperor, it was much more complicated than that. His most notable forebear was the emperor Menelik II (ruled 1889 to 1913) who extended and consolidated Ethiopia’s imperial rule over its neighbouring territories and defeated the invading Italian forces at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Menelik left no immediate male heir and was succeeded on his death in 1913 by young Lij Iyasu (Lej Yasu, in Waugh’s spelling), who was the son of Menelik’s eldest daughter.

However, Lij Iyasu quickly alienated the powerful Ethiopian aristocracy with his erratic behaviour and the last straw came when he abandoned the millenium-old Ethiopian Christianity for Islam. He was dethroned and replaced by his aunt, his mother’s half-sister, Zewditu (or Zauditu as Waugh spells it). (Waugh also mentions that many of Lij’s Muslim followers were massacred at the town of Harar, p.18.)

Zewditu is an interesting figure in her own right, the first female ruler of Ethiopia in its history, she ruled as empress till her death in 1930. However, long before that, she had appointed young Ras Tafari Makonnen her heir.

Ras is a traditional title in Ethiopia. It translates somewhere between ‘duke’ and ‘prince’, which explains why accounts of its history are full of people with ras in their names. Tafari is a personal name which means ‘one who is respected or feared’. Makonnen was his family name.

Tension arose between Empress Zewditu and Ras Tafari because she was a deeply conservative and devout Christian whereas the young Tafari though Ethiopia needed to modernise. In 1928 conservative elements in the court tried to overthrow Tafari and have him exiled, but they were defeated by a majority of the more progressive aristocracy. Zewditu was forced to confer on him the title of Negus or king, confirming his position as regent and heir to the throne.

Renewing the feud, in 1930, Zewditu’s own husband Ras Gugsa Welle led a rebellion against Negus Tafari in Begemder, hoping to end the regency in spite of his wife’s repeated pleas and orders to desist. But Gugsa was defeated and killed in battle by the Ethiopian which Tafari had devoted the previous decade to modernising, at the Battle of Anchem in March 1930.

A few days later the empress died, whether as a result of long-term illness or from shock at the death of her husband remains a subject of speculation to this day. Either way the path was now clear for Ras Tafari to inherit the throne and he was officially recognised by his peers as Negusa Nagast which translates as ‘King of Kings’. It is this title which is usually translated into English as ‘Emperor’.

It took 6 months to arrange for the actual coronation to be organised. It took place on 2 November 1930. It was traditional that, upon his coronation, the emperor choose a regnal name and Tafari chose to retain the name given to him at his baptism, Selassie, and incorporate it into his full imperial name – Haile Selassie. In the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez, Haile means ‘power of’ and ‘Selassie’ means Trinity – so Haile Selassie means ‘Power of the Trinity’.

So much for his names. They’re just one aspect of the way that, the more you study it, the more the history of Ethiopia and Selassie’s place in it, become complicated and flavoursome.

Waugh at the coronation

Ethiopia was, at the time, more or less Africa’s only independent country, untainted by colonial rule. Italy had tried to colonise it in the 1890s but the Italian army was massacred at the Battle of Adowa in 1896 and signed a peace treaty with Ethiopia recognising its borders and independence.

Once news of this grand imperial coronation became known, the European countries sent their own princes and dukes to attend the ceremony of a fellow royal. There were also ambassadors quietly jostling for position, and the Americans sent business representatives to try and do deals with the new ruler. Hence the presence of the Duke of Gloucester (King George V’s son), Marshal Louis Franchet d’Espèrey of France, Prince of Udine representing King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and representatives of the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Sweden, Belgium and Japan.

This all explains the atmosphere of colourful and confused diplomatic parties and Ethiopian ceremonies which were held during the official week of celebrations leading up to the coronation and which Waugh reports with glee and satire.

He emphasises the surreal atmosphere of posh Westerners in top hats and monocles walking through streets full of white-robed locals riding mules and wearing bandoleers and antiquated rifles.

Every man in Abyssinia carries arms; that is to say, he wears a dagger and bandolier of cartridges around his waist and has a slave boy walking behind with a rifle.

The nearest thing he can compare the ‘galvanised and translated reality’ of Addis Ababa in coronation week to is Alice in Wonderland. In fact surreal details crop up throughout the narrative, making the reader gasp. I was particularly struck when, later in the story he goes for a stroll round the shabby town of Harar and discovers that a lion in a wooden cage is kept behind the courthouse (p.83).

The text continually teeters on the edge of fiction. I mean it is continually turning into a novel. Presumably most of what he reports actually happened but Waugh’s account dwells on characters and incidents which feel like they’re from a fiction. Thus (characteristically showing off his intimacy with the aristocratic Bright Young Things of his generation) he falls in with ‘old friend’ Irene Ravensdale, the fantastically posh Mary Irene Curzon, 2nd Baroness Ravensdale, Baroness Ravensdale of Kedleston, and they go on trips together to local attractions. They spend an afternoon scrambling through the forest of Jemjem ‘in hopeless pursuit of black-and-white monkeys’ (p.71).

He also becomes friendly with an American professor – Professor W. – who is depicted as a comic character because he is supposedly an expert on Ethiopian history and culture yet doesn’t speak the language and consistently misunderstands what is going on – particularly at the coronation service itself where he gives a running commentary on proceedings which turns out to be wrong in every detail.

Despite this Waugh decides to go on a mini expedition with the professor, to Debra Lebanos, a remote monastery which has for four centuries been at the heart of Ethiopia’s spiritual life. The chapter describing this little jaunt exemplifies many of Waugh’s strengths as a traveller, observer, writer and, dare one say it, thinker.

First of all there are the colourful characters: the Armenian taxi driver they hire to take them on the long, gruelling desert journey, with his no-nonsense attitude and catchphrase, repeated at every crisis: ‘Ça n’a pas d’importance.’ The professor, who’s brought along a crate of empty Vichy water bottles to fill with holy water from the sacred spring but which keep rolling underfoot or falling out the car every time they stop. Then, once they get to the ‘monastery’ there are extended descriptions of the priests who turn out to be a pretty shabby lot, though not as shabby as many of the ‘monks’ who are, in reality, the sick and the halt and the lame who came on pilgrimages and stayed on to populate the place.

One aspect of these blunt descriptions is Waugh’s lack of pretence. About two things he has sentimental blind spots – the Catholic faith and a shamelessly sentimental, William Rees-Mogg-style fantasy about an Old England of enlightened paternalistic squires. But about everything else he is pitilessly, inexorably accurate.

Thus he doesn’t hesitate to describe the sacred monastery as a filthy dump, full of shabby undisciplined ‘monks. Even when they deign to take him and the professor up to the sacred stream, their guide gives a good indication of their general level of piety by pausing the walk to shuffle off into the nearby rocks and have a crap.

The chapter makes a more general point about travelling, or about the kind of travelling Waugh is doing, to very out of the way places – which is he doesn’t hesitate to show that a lot of these ‘legendary’ places turn out to be nothing like they’re cracked up to be. It is refreshingly not the tourist brochure or movie version, but a pitiless gaze at the impoverished, scrappy reality. Same goes for the various coronation scenes and religious ceremonies he witnesses which are often chaotic and shabby.

Then there’s broad comedy, epitomised by the honey scene. Waugh and the professor have brought with them a hamper full of choice Western delicacies (jars of olives, tins of foie gras, crackers), but when the priests offer them food they can’t, of course, refuse.

At first the priests insist that they sacrifice a beast, either a sheep or a goat, despite our heroes’ protestations. It takes the Armenian driver to make them understand that the priests exist on a very scanty diet and so killing a goat for visitors is a big treat for them, the priests. It is typical sly satire that, even when he knows this, Professor W.’s high-minded Boston principles – he is a vegetarian – make him refuse the gift, to the priest’s obvious disappointment.

But what happens next is brilliant. The priests offer to put them up in the only spare room they have, which they describe as a great honour, so Waugh and the professor are horrified to discover it is a filthy shack full of lumber and junk and pullulating with fleas.

Worse is to follow for the priest then returns with some traditional food, namely some rounds of disgusting local soggy grey ‘bread’ and, worse still, a jar of local ‘honey’. This is not the honey you buy at Harrods; it is authentic Ethiopian honey collected the traditional way, scraped off the trees where wild bees have their nests. And so the jar of translucent gloop visibly contains bits of bark, dead insects and bird poo.

Our heroes are horrified but the priest hunkers down and then looks on expectantly, evidently waiting for his honoured visitors to tuck into the monks’ bounty. Stymied and refusing to touch the poisonous viands, our heroes are at a pass, until the professor overcomes his scruples and feigns an attack of severe stomach upset, holding his tummy, pretending to be faint, mimicking throwing up.

Suddenly all attentive, the priest goes to fetch some water, then makes sure they are comfortable for the night, condoling with the poor professor. As soon as he’s left the squalid little hut, our starving heroes tear open their hamper, pull out tins of grouse and bottles of beer and have a feast – being very careful to tidy every scrap of evidence back into the suitcase before the priest returns a few hours later (pages 63 to 64).

And the last point to be drawn from this chapter, is that on occasion Waugh rises to the level of really serious insight. Not allowed into the inner sanctum of the monastery to watch the priests perform their hidden rituals, Waugh has an epiphany. He realises the enormous contrast between the obscure, secret and hidden rites of the pagan East and the bright, open, public ceremonies of Western Christianity. He spends a page explaining how Roman Christianity performs its rituals in the open, in the light, for all to see and participate in and, the corollary of this, how its liturgies and theology give clear, hard-edged verbal definition to the hazy, murky intuitions, the holy terrors and ecstasies of the East.

Obviously whether this is precisely true is debatable, but it’s a big, thought-provoking idea and it arises naturally from the bed of pitiless observation and dry comedy which he creates for it. The unflinching gaze, the comedy and satire, are all based on deeper ideas, which you may or may not agree with, but which provide a serious, substantial foundation for the comedy.

Gentlemen of the press

Waugh is well aware he is masquerading as a foreign correspondent aware that he has no experience of such a role and nothing to qualify him except the self confidence inculcated at a jolly good public school and Oxford. He is alert to the ridiculousness of his own position but also to the farcical aspects of the job. For example, the assembled press cohort realise that the coronation itself is going to take place too late for their copy to make the first editions. Waugh gives a comic survey of the way the entire press corps responds by deciding to make up descriptions of the coronation and gives us choice excerpts of detailed descriptions of the exotic ceremony which were published in various British newspapers and which were entirely fictional. There are also grace notes, as it were, describing the unruly pushing and jostling of the cameramen, especially the one and only film crew in attendance (from America, of course).

The point for Waugh fans is this sets the tone for the even more farcical description of the press and foreign correspondents which he gives in the book’s sequel, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) and which formed the basis for what is often described as the funniest satire ever written about the British press, the magnificent comic novel Scoop (1938).

Harar

The assignment to cover Selassie’s coronation forms the first part of the book but it is only the start of an odyssey in which Waugh takes the opportunity to visit a number of British colonies in East Africa. All in all, the trip was to take 6 months (p.84) and take in an impressive list of countries, namely Aden, Kenya, Zanzibar, the Belgian Congo and South Africa.

He explains how, once he had filed the requisite number of reports via telegraph back to The Times his contract came to an end and he was a free man. In London he had booked passage by boat from Djibouti to Zanzibar, but now finds he has ten days to kill and is uncertain what to do. Until, that is, the British Consul in Harar, Mr Plowman, kindly invites him to come and stay.

In fact the consul has to remain a few more days in Addis, so Waugh decides to make his own way overland to Harar, travelling by train and taxi. Harar was the first Ethiopian town visited by the famous Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and one of the first territories conquered by the warrior emperor Menelik II. It was the town where the caravans met between highlands and coastal lowlands; where Galla, Somali and Arab interbred to produce women of outstanding beauty.

Or so Waugh fantasised. In reality, he finds it to be a dingy medieval town. He is visited by the bishop of Harar and quizzes him about the French poet, the boy wonder Arthur Rimbaud, who lived here after he fled France and became a gun runner to the emperor Menelik II. He is disappointed to learn that the bishop remembers him only as a solemnly serious man, who took a native wife and had a gammy leg (p.79).

The owner of the hotel where he stays, the Leon d’Or, is ‘an Armenian of rare character’, Mr Bergebedgian, who has a wonderfully relaxed attitude to life. The Armenian takes him to all the shops in the town, where he incites himself in, has a coffee and chat with the owner, moves on, telling Waugh all the gossip of the town, shows him the town prison and courthouse (the one with a lion in a wooden cage behind it).

In an aside Waugh says he grew to really admire this man’s character: he thinks he is the most tolerant man he has ever met. Bergebedgian takes him to a hilarious local party at the governor’s house, and then on to a wedding party, which he only dares visit when fully armed and accompanied by two armed police.

Slavery

Last point about Ethiopia. When Haile Selassie ascended the throne, slavery was still legal and common in Ethiopia. An estimated 2 million of the population were slaves. As a modernising ruler the King of Kings moved quickly to abolish it but, inevitably, it lingered on in remote rural areas for decades.

First nightmare

This is the name Waugh gives a short 6-page section describing his unbearable tedium at missing a train connection and so being marooned in the dull dusty town of Dirre-Dowa and then, when he did manage to get a train to the coast, just missing the steamship to Zanzibar and so being marooned in Djibouti.

It is a dithyramb on the excruciating dullness of being stuck in a tropical town with nothing to do and no-one to visit. His attempts to alleviate the boredom are accurate and funny, including a painstaking attempt at reading the complete works of Alexander Pope which he has (for some reason) brought with him. When he gives up Pope, he is reduced to reading through a small French dictionary in alphabetical order. Then he sits staring out the window in a state of stupefaction. As he accurately notes, most travel books don’t honestly recount the amount of time that is spent in boredom and inanition and frustration and, occasional, depression.

This short chapter certainly rang a bell with me, reminding me of many moments of boredom and loneliness on my various foreign travels. It’s another aspect of Waugh’s unflinching truthfulness.

Aden

It is very surprising to discover the importance which politics assume the moment one begins to travel. (p.120)

His description of Aden as a shabby rundown dump is a masterpiece with many laugh-out-loud moments. He meets the usual cast of eccentrics, or people who, in his novelist’s hands, become eccentrics, such as the two enterprising young German engineers who are working their way round the world. He finds the bachelor world of chaps dining at their clubs very congenial. After all, he says, it’s the womenfolk who ruin colonies, insisting their menfolk stay at home in the evenings, indulging in ferocious snobbery and pooh-poohing the natives.

Waugh describes going to the open air cinema where, a few minutes into the black and white comedy he realises almost everyone around him has fallen fast asleep. He attends a scout meeting where the patient British scoutmaster hopelessly tries to teach Arab youths how to build a fire or the ten rules of scout law.

He attends a council of local Arab chiefs and goes into great detail about the social and political situation of Yemen and southern Arabia. It was barely ten years since the entire area was taken over by the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire which had run it for centuries. There is a detailed analysis of the complicated rivalries among the tribes, exacerbated by Ottoman rule and now complicated by British attempts to bring peace between internecine feuds. The council is a jurga hosted by the Sultan of Lahej and attended by Sir Stewart Symes, Resident at Aden from 1928 to 1931. He gives detailed insight into the challenges of trying to manage such a fissiparous people.

The tendency of Arab communities is always towards the multiplication of political units.

Disintegration, tribalism, feuding, rivalry, enmity and war. Britain withdrew from South Yemen in 1967. Since September 2014 (seven years and 2 months) Yemen has been torn apart by a brutal civil war in which about 380,000 people have died, including some 85,000 children who have died of starvation. Still. Independent of the ghastly British.

Zanzibar

Zanzibar turns out to be an ordeal. Sweltering oppressive heat and the subterranean prevalence of black magic. December is the worst time of year to visit. He spends all day sweating, only achieving peace a few times a day for a few minutes under a cold shower.

The general point he makes about Zanzibar is that it was taken over by the British with the express aim of abolishing the long-standing East African slave trade run by Arabs, which had increased in volume after the Sultan of Oman relocated his court to Zanzibar in 1840.

Now, in 1930, Waugh sees all around him evidence of the decay of Arab rule and ownership and the steady buying up of everything by merchants and businessmen from India. Waugh overtly likes the old aristocratic Arab culture and deprecates the ascension of what he sees as the ‘mean and dirty’, lower middle class merchant culture of the Indians (p.128) (but then he dislikes the sharp-elbowed middle classes of every race).

Kenya

He has an unpleasant experience with two officious British passport control officials at Mombasa on arriving at the Kenya coast, but once he gets to Nairobi he starts to have a wonderful time. It is Race Week and he has letters of introduction to top chaps, such as the Governor’s aide-de-camp, and spots various chaps and chapesses he knows from school and London (the benefits of being part of that network of public schoolboys and their sisters, wives and girlfriends), and so is swept away in a whirl of race meetings, parties, gambling, cocktails and nightclubs. It is London’s Bright Young Things nightclub society recreated on the equator.

This chapter contains a long serious section about the race issue in Kenya, about race and imperialism and the problems of the white settlers. It is fascinating to read an account from the period, as he grapples with what, to him, are recent developments, such as the government White Paper on the future of Kenya published in 1923.

Basically, Waugh comes out strongly in favour of the colonial settlers. He thinks they acquired the land legitimately, by buying it at fair auction. He thinks most of the land was waste and uncultivated before white farmers invested their life savings to buy it, then reinvested their profits to develop it. He accepts at face value the idea that the whites have a special ‘love’ for the country and its people.

He brings in the broader argument that all of human history has been a record of mass migrations and so the white settlement of the best parts of Africa is just another form of migration and time will tell whether it works out or not.

And finally, he makes the case that many of the white settlers represent a model of the traditional English squirearchy which has died out in the motherland, that they represent something fine and noble, with a patriarchal concern for the natives who they are slowly lifting out of savagery and into civilisation.

More than that, he thinks the way the mindset of the white settlers is so at odds with the socialising ideology of the modern they live in that they have a sort of special connection with the figure of The Writer, who is also at odds with his time.

Hmm. He’s wrong and the settlers were wrong. They might have had legal right on their side, but it was a system of law imposed by the conquering empire, a system which, notoriously, took no account of the African natives.

Waugh’s account is valuable and interesting because it isn’t an out-and-out racist, white supremacist argument, it’s much more mixed and nuanced than that. He happily criticises the whites, saying Anglo-Saxons are peculiarly prone to paranoid fears of other races. He says the appropriation of Masai land was a great injustice. He dislikes incidents of overt anti-black racism when he sees them. But, at the same time, his depiction of the white settlers as country-loving squirearchy is laughably sentimental and rose-tinted.

His account is valuable because it takes you into the complex dynamic of the situation circa 1930. There are:

the hard-working white settlers and farmers
the white professionals living in Nairobi and the towns who have made a killing out of property speculation
the distant government and civil service in Whitehall who all the settlers think don’t understand them and are gagging to sell them out
the colonial government on the ground in Nairobi which tries to mediate between London and the settlers, while also taking into account the interests of the natives
the native Africans who remain almost completely invisible and silent in Waugh’s account
much more visible and vocal are the Indians, successful businessmen who outnumber the whites, are often richer and more successful than them, but are infuriated at the way they are excluded from all aspects of white colonial life by a solid colour bar

In this account it is the Indians who are subject to pronounced racist attitudes. Waugh gives a tendentious account of three Indians he has a conversation with in Mombassa who get very heated. They are angry that they have no rights in Kenya, no legal or political rights and are discriminated against. Then they get angry about Indian independence. Waugh clearly dislikes them.

But they’re in the right. And he acknowledges the fact when he spends half a page dwelling on the hysteria which perfectly ordinary Anglo-Saxon people are driven into when abroad, when part of this absurd empire and their white privilege is threatened. He finds it incredible that the merest speculation that the governor might amend the law to allow Indians a vote in the Kenyan government has hot-headed whites muttering in their clubs about kidnapping the Governor and staging an anti-London protest similar to the Boston Tea Party.

He concludes the 4 or 5 pages he devotes to the subject by saying the entire colonial thing is an experiment. It’s perfectly possible that in the next 25 years the whole thing will be swept away. And, of course, eerily enough, that is just what happened. The entire ants nest of squabbling interest groups was swept away in the great tide of African independence which reached Kenya just 30 years later in 1963, to be replaced by an entirely new dynamic of tribally based political parties and much more severe problems.

Race and class

It comes as no surprise that a public schoolboy travelling the British Empire in 1930 occasionally betrays a condescending and patronising tone towards the ‘natives’. The two obvious things to go on to say are:

1. That he regularly expresses more or less the same condescending criticism towards Europeans, royalty, the English middle classes, colonists and so on, in fact about the entire enterprise of Empire which, like so many of his generation, he finds endlessly ridiculous. When he has dinner with a Quaker doctor and his wife there was ‘no nonsense about stiff shirts and mess jackets’; they eat dinner outside in their pyjamas.

2. For every negative comment about this or that group or tribe, there are plenty of positive remarks about other groups or nations or races or tribes.

For example, he goes out of his way to remark that the two most impressive and congenial people he met in his entire 6-month trip were Armenians and gives extended descriptions of their characters.

When I came to consider the question I was surprised to realise that the two most accomplished men I met during this six months I was abroad, the chauffeur who took us to Debra Labanos and Mr Bergebedgian, should both have been Armenians. A race of rare competence and the most delicate sensibility. (p.84)

No white supremacy there. He is full of admiration for the beauty of the women of Harar. And what prompted me to write this little section was a remark he makes à propos of his time in Zanzibar.

The Arabs are by nature a hospitable and generous race… (p.128)

He very much enjoys the company of a Turk he met on the boat to Zanzibar, enjoys discussing history and hearing history from an intelligent man born and bred entirely from the Mohammedan point of view (p.124).

The dividing line for Waugh isn’t race, as such: it is the line between civilisation and barbarism. Black men who can read and write, are educated, or maybe neither but still have manners and decorum are, for him, civilised. The Arabs demonstrate tremendous courtesy and hospitality. His two favourites among the hundreds of people he met were Armenians for their tolerance and capability. So it’s not to do with race, it’s to do with culture and civilisation.

On the other side of the line are what he calls the savages, the uneducated, illiterate, filthy and threatening natives, the ‘savages with filed teeth’ with long hair glued together by rancid butter dressed in rags. And then the homicidal behaviour of natives remote from all townships, who murder strangers on sight, sometimes eating them. For Waugh it’s not about skin colour as such, but behaviour and values, and these can be shared by anyone regardless of skin colour or ethnicity.

There is a third category which is the pushy, angry, Indian merchants and the occasional Jewish entrepreneur he encounters, and who he takes an instinctive dislike to. But again this isn’t necessarily about race. He just dislikes money-minded merchants of any culture: he is reliably contemptuous of British businessmen, especially lower-middle-class shopkeepers, and deprecates the commercially minded Yanks who hang round the emperor’s coronation. It’s not racism, it’s snobbery.

Alert and malicious

One contemporary described the young Waugh as having the appearance of ‘an alert and malicious faun’. Exactly. He is always alert. He notices (or invents) details which give his descriptions and accounts a tremendous specificity.

But this alertness of observation only ‘exists’ because of the way it is embodied within the text by the preciseness of his vocabulary and the timing of his phrasing, which themselves enact the aloof, scrupulous, alertness of attitude.

After a profoundly indigestible dinner, Mr Bergebedgian joined us – the unsmiling clerk and myself – in a glass of a disturbing liqueur labelled ‘Koniak’. (p.80)

I’m not claiming Shakespearian mastery of the language for Waugh, but pointing out the accuracy of observation and description. The way he casually mentions that the dinner was ‘profoundly indigestible’ is funny, continuing a theme about the general poverty and dirtiness of most of the places he stayed in, indeed the hotel kept by the affable Armenian Mr Bergebedgian is described in the only travel book of the region as one to be avoided at all costs.

But it’s the placement of the adjective ‘disturbing’ which made me burst out laughing. The unexpectedness but preciseness of the word. And then it is also part of the stylised vocabulary of the public school Bright Young Things. It is part of the pose they are trained in to underplay disasters and setbacks. ‘Oh I say, how unfortunate / how regrettable / how simply ghastly’ they say as their plane falls out of the sky, canoe goes over the falls, or the roast beef is a trifle overdone. ‘Disturbing’ is typical of that public school understatement: why say something as crudely explicit as ‘disgusting’ or ‘unpalatable’ when you can achieve humour and mastery of the situation with English understatement? So this one word raises a host of connotations. It is a complex effect delivered with immaculate timing, and it is the combination of a) surreal detail described with b) English understatement c) with perfect timing, which are a key part of Waugh’s reliably entertaining style.

On other occasions it is just the sheer beauty of his descriptions. On the ferry across Lake Tanganyika he is forced to make a rough bed on the deck, all the cabins having gone to the savvy passengers who had bribed the captain:

As we got up steam, brilliant showers of wood sparks rose from the funnel; soon after midnight we sailed into the lake; a gentle murmur of singing came from the bows. In a few minutes I was asleep. (p.170)

It’s not the most dramatic scene, but he describes it with such smoothness and style, having taken a few overnight ferries I recognise the mood, I felt I was there. When it is appropriate to be simple and descriptive, he is.

At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes it is the extended caricatures of the people he meets.

Soon after five the captain appeared. No one looking at him would have connected him in any way with a ship; a very fat, very dirty man, a stained tunic open to his throat, unshaven, with a straggling moustache, crimson-faced, gummy-eyed, flat-footed. He would have seemed more at home as the proprietor of an estaminet. (p.168)

Variety and innocence

This leads into my last point which is that the book contains a great diversity of characters. Alright, there aren’t any speaking parts for Africans once he’s left Ethiopia; but this large caveat aside, I found it wonderful that wherever he went, there was this diversity of races and nationalities: the two Armenians stick out, but plenty of Italians, French, Belgians, Germans, the Indians in Zanzibar, the Arabs and Jews in Aden.

And it’s not just nationalities, but a florid variety of characters and types, ranging from the shabby ship’s captain mentioned above to the most correctly dressed Governors and ambassadors, via Quaker missionaries in pyjamas, the monks of Debra Labanos in their filthy tunics, Kikuyu serving ‘boys’, Abyssinian bandits dressed in white gowns and riding donkeys, the historically-minded Turk, any number of demoralised Greek hotel keepers.

It has the same abundant mix of nationalities and types all rubbing along together which you get in the Tintin books of the 1930s and 40s. One of the things I loved about Tintin when I was a boy was the way all the characters are so colourful, come from different countries, speak different languages, cook different cuisines, are so wonderfully varied. The argumentative sea captain, the dotty professor, the dignified butler, the unstoppable opera singer, her timid assistant, the piratical South American dictator, the nitwit detectives – how unlike the very boring, samey suburban English people I grew up among, what a wonderful escape into a realm where everyone is a vivid and distinct character.

The same variety is evident right from the opening scenes of this book on the cruise ship bringing Waugh to Djibouti with its colourful cast of passengers, from princes to Foreign Legionaries.

I’ve just read half a dozen books about African countries where, at independence, almost the entire European population fled (Congo, Angola) or, soon afterwards, was expelled and all their businesses nationalised (Zaire, Uganda).

Buried in the chaos of the Second World War were huge ethnic cleansings and attempted genocides. The Cold War saw ideological differences stop being entertaining and become murderous. In Africa (and South America and South-East Asia) communist guerrillas kidnapped and murdered foreigners, dictatorships ran death squads, the world became a much more dangerous place. In Africa, specifically, successive nationalist regimes nationalised all foreign businesses and expelled their owners. The Greek hotel owners, the Armenian taxi drivers, the Russian who runs a hide company in Addis Ababa, the other European oddballs who’d fetched up in remote corners and, of course, the large Indian business communities in many African countries – all expelled, all banished, all swept away. Replaced by much more homogeneous societies, 100% black, 100% African.

I think that’s what happened. By the time I went a-travelling in the late 1970s it felt like the colourful bricolage or personalities you regularly encounter in Tintin or pre-war travel books had vanished: in Egypt I met only Egyptians, in Thailand only Thais, in Turkey only Turks, in Greece only Greeks.

The colourful world in which you pulled into an Ethiopian or Ugandan town to find the only hotel run by a morose Greek and the only taxi in town driven by a cheerful Armenian taxi driver and got chatting with a jolly Turk happy to explain the Mohammedan view of history – that colourful world of real variety and diversity had gone for good.

Credit

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh was published in 1931. All references are to the 1985 Penguin paperback edition.

Remote People online

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by Simon on November 29, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, British Empire, Travel writing

Tagged Abyssinia, Addis Ababa, Aden, Africa, Alice in Wonderland, Arabs, Arthur Rimbaud, barbarism, Battle of Adowa, Battle of Anchem, Belgian Congo, Bright Young Things, Cold War, colonialism, comedy, coronation, Debra Lebanos, Djibouti, Duke of Gloucester, Ethiopia, Evelyn Waugh, Foreign Legion, French Somalia, Galla, Ge'ez, Haile Selassie, Harar, imperialism, Irene Ravensdale, Jemjem, Jews, journalism, jurga, Kenya, Kikuyu, Lake Tanganyika, Lej Yasu, Lij Iyasu, Marshal Louis Franchet d'Espèrey, Mary Irene Curzon, Masai, Menelik II, Mombasa, Mr Bergebedgian, Nairobi, Negus, Negusa Nagast, Ottoman Empire, Prince of Udine, race, racism, Ras Gugsa Welle, Ras Tafari, Ras Tafari Makonnen, Remote People, satire, savagery, Sir Richard Burton, Sir Stewart Symes, Slavery, Somalians, South Africa, South Yemen, Sultan of Lahej, The Times, Tintin, Travel writing, Victor Emmanuel III, Waugh in Abyssinia, Zanzibar, Zauditu, Zewditu

Posted by Simon on November 29, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/remote-people-evelyn-waugh/

Congolese soldiers in the world wars

Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck is a wonderland of a book. The accounts he gives of the involvement of Congolese soldiers in the two world wars are so remarkable and so little known that it’s worth recording them in a standalone blog post.

In his characteristic style, van Reybrouck interweaves traditional, factual history with first-hand, eye-witness memories by veterans or the families of veterans, which add colour and human scale to such huge abstract events.

First World War (pages 129 to 139)

Congo as a buffer state

At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Belgium itself was conceived as a sort of buffer state between the powers, between France and Prussia. In a similar way, at the Berlin Conference of 1885, King Leopold persuaded the powers that his seizure of this huge chunk of Africa would serve as a sort of buffer between territory controlled by the old rivals Britain and France in west Africa and the territory claimed in east Africa by the new kid on the block, Germany.

The final agreement of colonial borders in Africa meant that Congo shared a 430-mile-long border with German East Africa. Given that the Germans owned Cameroon to the north-west of Congo, it made sense for them to ponder seizing a corridor through the Belgian colony in order to link German East and West Africa. In fact, just before war broke out, the German foreign office actually approached the British with the suggestion of dividing Congo between them, which the British wisely rejected.

Germany attacks

After war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the colonial authorities expected Congo to remain neutral, which it did for all of 11 days, until Germany attacked. A steamship crossed Lake Tanganyika from the German side and shelled the Congo port of Mokolubu, sinking some canoes, then German soldiers landed and cut the telephone wire. A week later the Germans attacked the lakeside port of Lukuga, too.

Main battle zones

Because of the lack of roads and infrastructure, the First World War in Africa wasn’t fought along huge fronts, as in Europe, but was a matter of seizing strategic points and roads. Congolese forces ended up fighting on three fronts, Cameroon, Rhodesia and East Africa.

1. In 1914 a handful of Belgian officers and 600 Congolese troops were sent to help the British in the battle for Cameroon where German resistance to British, French and Belgian colonial units finally ended in March 1916.

2. By mid-1915 South African troops had secured the surrender of German South-West Africa but German forces threatened Rhodesia and so the Belgian government in exile (in Le Havre) ordered seven Belgian and 283 Congolese soldiers to help the British defend it.

Battle of the lakes

3. But the most intense Congo-German engagement was in the East. Here the border between Congo and German East Africa had only been finalised as late as 1910. In 1915 German forces led by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck made repeated attempts to move into Kivu district (to the west of Lake Kivu, which formed part of the border between Belgian and German territory), with a view to pushing on north to seize the Kilo-Moto gold mines of the Ituri rain forest.

The Germans took initial control of lakes Kivu and Tanganyika which they patrolled with armed steamships. In reply the Allies i.e. the British, organised the transport of steamships broken up into parts all the way up the Congo and then across land to the lakes. They also sent four aquaplanes, which undertook a campaign to bomb and sink the German ships.

The Tabora campaign

Meanwhile, a large infantry force of 15,000 soldiers was assembled on the east Congo border under Force Publique commander, General Charles Tombeur. An important fact to remember is that, in the absence of decent roads, almost all the materiel needed for these campaigns had to be carried by porters, just as in Victorian times. It’s estimated that for every soldier who went into battle there were seven porters. In total, throughout the war years, it’s estimated that some 260,000 native porters were recruited or dragooned, out of a total population of less than ten million. This disruption had a negative impact on local economies and food production, but the conditions of the porters weren’t much better, with all experiencing inadequate food, shelter and little drinking water. As usual in every conflict, disease became rife and about one in ten of the porters died on active service, a total of some 26,000, compared to 2,000 soldiers.

As to the campaign itself, in March 1916 General Tombeur led his army across the border into Rwanda and seized the capital, Kigali, on 6 May. They then marched the 370 miles south-east to Tabora, which had been a key staging post for the explorers of the 1870s and 1880s and was now the nexus of German administration. It was the largest engagement of the campaign. Tombeur’s forces joined with another army which had marched from Lake Tanganyika and, after ten days and nights of intense fighting, Tabora fell to the Belgian-Congo forces on 19 September 1916. The Belgian flag was raised in the town centre amid widespread celebrations.

In 1917 Tabora was used as a staging post for a campaign to capture Mahenge, 300 miles to the south, but the battle of Tabora was the one which went down in colonial memory. Tombeur was given a peerage and songs were written about his famous victory.

Interview with Martin Kabuya

Typical of van Reybrouck’s method of humanising history, he tracks down an army veteran, Martin Kabuya, whose grandfather fought in the Tabora campaign and, he claims, provided cover for the soldier who raised the Belgian flag in the conquered town square (p.135). And then talks to Hélène Nzimbu Diluzeti, 94-year-old widow of Thomas Masamba Lumoso, a Great War veteran who served in the TSF or telégraphie sans fils (i.e. wireless) section from 9 August 1914 to 5 October 1918, so for only a weeks short of the entire duration of the war (pages 135 to 137).

Here’s the map van Reybrouck provides. You can see the black arrows indicating movement of Congolese forces through the two small unnamed states of Rwanda and Burundi towards Tabora in what is now called Tanzania but was then German East Africa. On the top left of the map you can see the borders of Cameroon and understand how German strategists, at one point, might have fantasised about annexing northern Congo in order to for a corridor of German colonial territory from Tanzania through north Congo and joining up with Cameroon. One of many colonial pipe dreams.

The Congolese in Belgium

Not many Congolese soldiers had time to be transported to Belgium before it fell to the Germans’ swift advance in August 1914. Van Reybrouck tells us the stories of two of them, Albert Kudjabo and Paul Panda Farnana, members of the Congolese Volunteer Corps. They were among the tens of thousands deployed to defend the Belgian city of Namur but the Germans swiftly captured it and these two Africans who spent the next four years in various prisoner of war camps. Among transfers between camps, forced labour and various humiliations, they were interviewed by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Committee which recorded Kudjabo singing traditional songs. The recordings survive to this day (p.138).

Van Reybrouck returns to the two POWs on page 178 to describe their chagrin and anger when they were finally repatriated to from Germany to Belgium only to read commentators in the press saying the likes of them should be packed off as soon as possible back to the land of bananas (p.178). They had fought side by side with their Belgian brothers to protect the motherland. Where was the gratitude? It left a legacy of bitterness.

Paul Panda Farnana

We know a lot about Farnana in particular because he played a central role in founding the Union Congolaise in August 1919, an organisation set up to assist ‘the moral and intellectual development of the Congolese race’. The Union called for greater involvement of the natives in the colonial administration and opened branches across Belgium.

In December 1920 Farnana addressed the first National Colonial Congress in Brussels and then took part in the second Pan-African Congress organised by American civil rights activist W.E.B du Bois. In 1929 Farnana returned to Congo and settled in his native village, but died there, unmarried and childless in 1932. He is often considered the first Congolese intellectual, but his was a very isolated voice. It would take another world war and decades of simmering discontent before real change could be affected.

Consequences of the Great War

After Germany’s defeat its African colonies were parcelled out to the allies. England took German East Africa which was renamed Tanganyika (and then Tanzania, on independence in 1961). Belgium was handed the two small states on the eastern borders of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

Earlier in the book van Reybrouck described the process whereby colonial administrators defined and helped to create tribal identities. Originally much more fluid and overlapping, these names and categories hardened when the authorities issued identity cards on which every Congolese had to match themselves to a limited list of bureaucratic tribal ‘identities’.

When they took over Rwanda, the Belgian authorities applied the same technique, insisting that the previously fluid and heterogenous Rwandans define themselves as one of three categories, Tutsi, Hutu or Twas (pygmy), an enforced European categorisation which was to bitterly divide the country and lead, ultimately, to the calamitous Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Although the war disrupted societies and led to significant native casualties in the eastern part of the country, the mining regions such as Katanga experienced an economic boom and huge explosion of jobs which increased urbanisation. But after the war there was a sudden drop in demand which led to layoffs, unrest and strikes.

Second World War (pages 182 to 189)

And then it happened all over again, except on a bigger scale, in 1940. In 18 days the German army rolled through Belgium as part of its conquest of France, Belgium was defeated and occupied. While the Belgian government fled to England, King Leopold III was taken prisoner to Germany. For a while there was uncertainty in the colony about which way it would jump – support the victorious Nazis or align with the humiliated government in exile? The decision was taken by the man on the scene, Governor General Pierre Ryckmans who to his great credit decided the Belgian Congo would align with the allies and fight fascism.

Ethiopia

Mussolini had invaded Haile Selassie’s Abyssinia in 1935. In 1940 Churchill sent troops from British Kenya into Ethiopia to neutralise the Italian threat. Starting in February 1941 the Brits were reinforced by the eleventh battalion of the Congo Force Publique. This consisted of 3,000 Congolese soldiers and 2,000 bearers.

They drove across British-controlled Sudan in blistering heat but had to manage the mountainous west of Ethiopia mostly on foot. From scorching heat it started to rain and the troops found themselves mired in mud. The Congolese took the small towns of Asosa and Gambela but faced a stiffer challenge at the fortified garrison town of Saio. After heavy shelling, on 8 June 1941, the town surrendered. Congo forces took nine Italian generals including the commander of all Italian forces in East Africa, 370 Italian officers, 2,574 noncoms and 1,533 native soldiers, along with a huge amount of munitions and equipment.

Van Reybrouck makes the droll point that the expulsion of the Italians (who had only held Ethiopia for 6 years) allowed the return of the emperor Haile Selassie, which gave renewed vigour to the small sect of Rastafarians in faraway Jamaica who had started worshipping the emperor as a deity during the 1930s. Thus Congolese soldiers helped in creating the spiritual side of reggae!

What Tabora had been in World War One, Saio was in World War Two, a resounding victory for African troops. More than that, for the first time in history an African nation had been liberated by African troops (p.185).

Nigeria

Van Reybrouck interviews Congo veterans who fought in the campaign, Louis Ngumbi and André Kitadi. He takes a path through the complicated wartime events in north Africa through the career of Kitadi. Having routed the Italians in the East, the focus switched to West Africa. Kitadi was a radio operator in the Congo army. In autumn 1942 he was shipped up to Nigeria and trained for 6 months in readiness to take Dahomey (modern Benin) from the Vichy French. However during the training period, Dahomey switched to General de Gaulle’s Free French and so the focus now switched to Libya where German forces under Rommel were based and repeatedly threatened to invade Egypt.

Kitadi and the other Congolese soldiers travelled across the desert of Chad (a French colony run by a black governor allied to de Gaulle). Van Reybrouck dovetails Kitadi’s story with that of Martin Kabuya, another radio operator in the Force Publique, who had also been shipped to Nigeria, but now found himself sent by sea right around Africa and up through the Suez Canal.

Egypt

Kitadi spent a year in a camp outside Alexandria. There were lots of Italian prisoners of war, kept in barbed wire POW camps. The Arabs stole everything. Kabuya was stationed at Camp Geneva near the Suez Canal, intercepting enemy Morse code messages. Once he was attacked by a big SS man who he stabbed in the gut with a bayonet and killed.

Palestine

When fighting in Europe ended, both men stayed in the army and were moved to Palestine to help with the new British mandate there (p.188).

The paradox of scale

Paradoxically, although the scale and reach of the Second World War was dramatically larger than the first, the involvement of Congolese was significantly smaller for the simple reason that the army no longer needed bearers and porters – they had trucks and lorries. So the number of Congolese directly involved in the war was nothing like the 260,000 Congolese porters dragooned into service in 1914-18, with the results that casualties were correspondingly much smaller.

The odyssey of Libert Otenga

The strength of van Reybrouck’s approach is demonstrated by the story of Libert Otenga. Otenga joined a mobile medical unit of Belgian doctors and Congolese medics.

The Belgian field hospital became known as the tenth BCCS, the tenth Belgian Congo Casualty Clearing Station. It had two operating tents and a radio tent. In the other tents there were beds for thirty patients and stretchers for two hundred more. During the war, the unit treated seven thousand wounded men and thirty thousand who had fallen ill. Even at the peak of its activities it consisted of only twenty-three Belgians, including seven doctors, and three hundred Congolese. Libert Otenga was one of them.

Van Reybrouck tracks down an ageing Otenga in Kinshasa to hear his story. First the medical unit was sent to Somalia. Then they went with British-Belgian troops to Madagascar, where they tended German prisoners of war. After Madagascar, the unit went by ship to Ceylon, where the medical unit was reorganised, and then on to India, to the Ganges delta in modern Bangladesh, a long way up the river Brahmaputra and then overland to the border with Burma, a British colony which the Japanese had captured in 1942. This was their longest posting, they treated soldiers and civilians, they had an air ambulance at their disposal. As van Reybrouck remarks:

The fact that Congolese paramedics cared for Burmese civilians and British soldiers in the Asian jungle is a completely unknown chapter in colonial history, and one that will soon vanish altogether. (p.189)

The travels of Congolese forces during the Second World War

Congo and the atom bomb

The uranium in the Big Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained uranium mined in the mineral-rich Katanga province of Congo (p. 190).

Edgar Sengier, then managing director of Union Minière, saw to it that Congo’s uranium reserves did not fall into the wrong hands. Shinkolobwe had the world’s largest confirmed deposit of uranium. When the Nazi threat intensified just before the war, he had had 1,250 metric tons (1,375 U.S. tons) of uranium shipped to New York, then flooded his mines. Only a tiny stock still present in Belgium ever fell into German hands. (p.190)

The Cold War

During the war the Congo had come to America’s attention as an important source of raw materials for war goods. By 1942 the Japanese had captured most of the Far East, so new sources were needed. the Congo turned out to be a vital source of metals like copper, wolfram, tin and zinc, and of vegetable products such as rubber, copal, cotton, quinine, palm oil for soap and, surprisingly, use in the vital steel industry. (p.191)

This was before the scientists of the Manhattan Project discovered how to make an atom bomb at which point uranium became a vital resource of strategic significance. All this explains America’s interest in the Congo in the 15 years after the war, and then its intense involvement in the events surrounding independence and its support of the dictator Mobutu through the entire Cold War period.

CIA activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Conclusion

One way of seeing these events are as colourful sidelights on the two world wars and then the low level capitalist-communist antagonism which followed and van Reybrouck’s focus on individual experiences helps the reader understand how all our lives are determined and shaped by vast impersonal historic forces.

Another way of looking at it, is to reflect that from the moment it was first mapped and explored by Stanley in the late 1870s, the second largest country in Africa has never been free of interference, control and exploitation by Europe and America.

Credit

Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck was published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2010. All references are to the paperback version of the English translation by Sam Garrett, published by Fourth Estate in 2015.

Surprisingly for a contemporary book, Congo: The Epic History of a People is available online in its entirety.

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by Simon on September 27, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Second World War, War, World War One

Tagged Abyssinia, Albert Kudjabo, Alexandria, André Kitadi, Bangladesh, Belgian Congo, Belgium, Benin, Berlin Conference, Burma, Burundi, Cameroon, Ceylon, Chad, Charles Tombeur, CIA, Cold War, Congo, Congo: the epic history of a people, Congolese Volunteer Corps, Congress of Vienna, copper, Dahomey, David Van Reybrouck, East Africa, Edgar Sengier, Egypt, Ethiopia, First World War, Force Publique, Free French, General de Gaulle, German East Africa, German South-West Africa, Germany, Great War, Haile Selassie, Hélène Nzimbu Diluzeti, Hiroshima, history, Hutu, imperialism, Ituri rain forest, Japanese Empire, Katanga, Kigali, Kilo-Moto gold mines, King Leopold II, King Leopold III, Kinshasa, Lake Kivu, Lake Tanganyika, Libert Otenga, Libya, Louis Ngumbi, Lukuga, Madagascar, Mahenge, Manhattan Project, Martin Kabuya, Mokolubu, Mussolini, Namur, Nigeria, oral history, Palestine, Pan-African Congress, Paul Panda Farnana, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, Pierre Ryckmans, Rhodesia, Rommel, Royal Prussian Phonographic Committee, rubber, Rwanda, Rwandan genocide, Saio, Sam Garrett, Second World War, Shinkolobwe, social history, Somalia, South African, Sudan, Tabora, Tanganyika, Tenth Belgian Congo Casualty Clearing Station, Thomas Masamba Lumoso, Tutsi, Twas, Union Congolaise, Union Minière, uranium, van Reybrouck, Vichy France, W.E.B. Du Bois, war, Winston Churchill

Posted by Simon on September 27, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/09/27/congolese-soldiers-in-the-world-wars/

Explorers of the Nile: the triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure by Tim Jeal (2011) part two

‘[Dr Livingstone] left an obligation on the civilised nations of Europe and America, as the shepherds of the world, to extend their care and protection over the oppressed races of Africa.’
(Henry Morton Stanley in his obituary of Livingstone published in the Graphic magazine, 1873)

Expeditions covered in the second half of the book

Stanley’s expedition to find Livingstone, 1871 to 1872
Livingstone’s final expedition, 1872 to 1873
Stanley’s great expedition across Africa from East to West, 1874 to 1879
Stanley working for King Leopold II of Belgium, 1879 to 1885
The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1886 to 1889

This is the third version of the meeting between Welsh workhouse boy-turned-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley and famous Scottish missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone which I have read, and arguably the most effective.

This is because, in the preceding chapter (chapter 18) Jeal had given a clear and vivid description of how utterly prostrate Livingstone was, his obsession with tracing the river Lualaba crushed by porters paid by Arab slavers to refuse to accompany him, forced to return to the miserable slaver town of Ujiji on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika where he discovered that all the trading goods and supplies which had been carefully selected, bought and sent to him by Dr John Kirk, British consul in Zanzibar, had been treacherously sold off by the Arab in charge of delivering them, so that all his native porters abandoned him, leaving the man penniless, betrayed, abandoned and completely demoralised by the complete failure of his expedition to the Lualaba, the crushing of all his hopes as an explorer. That is the moment when Henry Morton Stanley walked into his compound, accompanied by hundreds of porters laden with supplies. So the reader understands why the meeting came as such a huge psychological relief to both men.

As to Stanley’s epic trek across Africa which revealed for the first time that the Luabala was a tributary of the Congo, I have covered that in my review of Jeal’s biography of Stanley.

The origins of the Nile and what is an ‘origin’?

On reflection, I think Jeal would have done better to have started this book with a factual description of the actual geography of the Nile, carefully explaining what we now understand of its modern course; because, with this information imprinted on our minds, the reader would be much better placed to understand the importance of all the discoveries and theories bandied about by the explorers whose expeditions he describes over the next 350 pages.

It is only on page 316, in the context of Stanley proving once and for all that the river Luabala did not flow north and east to form a tributary of the Nile, but instead flowed north and west to become the main tributary of the Congo, thus, in effect, confirming Speke’s discovery that the northern outlet of Lake Victoria is the origin of the White Nile – it is only here that Jeal, almost casually, comes clean and explains the entire modern understanding of the multiple sources of the Nile, referencing subsequent expeditions, in 1891, 1898, 1935, and as recently 2006, which have traced its origins further and further into obscure watercourses in Rwanda and Burundi.

And it is only tucked away in the heart of his book, that he raises a central question which is: How do you define the source of a river? Eventually all major rivers splinter into tributaries which themselves divide into contributory creeks and streams and springs and so on. How many do you include? How do you define The Source? Apparently Stanley said that, if you go that far, it was only a small step to attributing the origins of a river to the clouds passing overhead and the rain that falls.

Jeal, like the explorers, is happy to stop at the assertion that Lake Victoria is the source of the White Nile.

Some incidents

Stanley on the Congo

Stanley’s work for King Leopold II of Belgium, building a road up the river Congo, establishing way stations, transporting sections of steam ships along it which could be assembled above the Congo’s fearsome rapids, are all placed in the context of establishing the infrastructure for the wicked Congo Free State which Leopold was seeking to establish (described in detail in chapter 28).

De Brazza

Stanley’s work for Leopold is also placed in the context of international rivalry with France embodied by the attempts of French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza to claim the north side of the river Congo . This led, among other incidents, to the confrontation at Stanley Pool with Brazza, who had soldiers and tried to claim the south bank of the Congo for France. It was only by the resolute action of the British station chief at Kinshasa, young Anthony Swinburne, that the region, and what would go on to become Congo’s capital, remained in Leopold’s control.

The Congo situation was to be stabilised at the 1885 Conference of Berlin by the formal assignment of the vast region of the Congo to Leopold’s personal fief. Jeal covers all this but, because his focus is the Nile, he is most interested in the fate of central and East Africa.

Muslim versus Christian

Here the deep structural issue was whether the region would fall under Muslim or Christian domination. The Christian British were, in a sense, biased, identifying the cause of civilisation and progress with themselves and their religion. But most of the Brits involved knew the simple fact that Islam represented slavery, because east central Africa was being laid waste by a slave trade carried out entirely by Muslim Arabs, seizing black African slaves to ship them to the Arab Middle East, destroying entire villages, laying waste to areas, shooting slaves who were too weak or ill to trek the thousand miles to the coast.

Samuel Baker founds Equatoria

This is why those concerned for the region didn’t want it to fall under the control of Egypt, because Egyptian control would almost certainly involve the extension of slavery into the region of the Great African Lakes, Buganda, Bunyoro and so on.

Nonetheless, it was the noted explorer Sir Samuel White who penetrated south on the Nile with a host of soldiers and riverboats given by the Khedive of Egypt, and simply declared, without consulting any of the native rulers, the existence of a new southern province of Egypt which he named Equatoria, in May 1871.

This incident, peripheral to the quest for the source of the Nile, would go on to have long-term political ramifications which echo to this day.

Retreat to Fatiko

When Baker attempted to penetrate further south, he was met with fierce resistance from the army of king Kabarega of Banyoro and was forced to stage a fighting retreat to Fatiko, one of those defeats in the face of stronger African foes which were to be presented as a kind of moral victory in the British press (Isandlwana, 1879, Gordon and the Khartoum garrison massacred, 1885).

According to Jeal, it was the publicity surrounding Baker’s military expedition which first really publicised to many politicians and businessmen the geographic and commercial potential of opening up central Africa.

Stanley’s call for missionaries

This is why one of the most important events of the period was Stanley writing a letter, in May 1875, which was published in the Daily Telegraph, saying that the region was crying out for Christian missionaries to set up schools, educate the locals, encourage Western style trade, with a view to stamping out slavery and other barbarous practices like human sacrifices, to develop and raise the living standards of Africans. And the numerous missionary societies of Britain responded (p.302).

Almost inevitably, when the missionaries came, they faced the same kind of antagonism and sometimes horrific violence which the explorers had faced or witnessed but, by and large survived, because the latter had guns and were moving through, not settling in, dangerous territories.

Atrocities against missionaries

In January 1885 Mwanga king of Buganda, arrested the missionary Mackay and had three of his young black converts taken from the mission school, their arms hacked off, and then slowly roasted to death on a spit (p.348). In October 1885 Bishop James Hannington who had been sent by the CMS to become the first bishop of East Africa, was arrested by Mwanga and speared to death along with all 50 of his porters (p.349). On 30 June 1886 Mwanga arrested and executed 45 Catholic and Protestant converts, strangling several with his own hands, having the others castrated and burned alive (p.349).

These sorts of atrocities inevitably caused outrage in the newspapers and forced European governments to step in ‘and so something’ to protect our gallant missionaries. Thus the 1890s saw a wave of annexations and mandates, Malawi in 1892, Uganda declared a protectorate on 27 August 1894.

Rivalry with Germany

It must also be noted that, if the British endured a rivalry with a France determined to push east from their West African possessions, beyond Chad, across the desert and into Egyptian and Sudanese territory, and south as far as the Congo, the British also faced rivalry with Germany in East Africa.

Chancellor Bismarck sent envoys to sign deals with local rulers, amassing influence over such a large area that eventually it justified a full-blown diplomatic agreement between the two governments, in 1886, which secured for Germany the southern portion of the region which was to become Tanganyika, and present-day Tanzania.

In response, the British government approved the granting of a royal charter to Sir William Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company, sowing the seeds of what was to evolve into Uganda and Kenya (pages 362 to 363).

Wikipedia has two maps which vividly contrast territorial ‘ownership’ of Africa in 1880 and 1913, before and after the great ‘scramble for Africa’. Apart from showing the obvious way in which an entire continent was gobbled up by half a dozen European powers, the two things which stand out for me are 1. The extent of French possession, coloured blue. 2. The fact that German East Africa (dark grey) presented an impassible obstacle to imperialists like Cecil Rhodes who wanted to create one unified band of British colonies stretching the length of Africa. How frustrated he must have been!

Political geography of Africa 1880 and 1913. Source: Wikipedia

The Emin Pasha relief expedition 1886 to 1889

I’ve summarised the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition in my summary of Jeal’s Stanley biography. Suffice to say that, as in his descriptions of Livingstone’s two last expeditions or Stanley’s trans-Africa trek, arguably the summaries Jeal gives in this book are better than the ones in the Stanley book because they are much shorter, much punchier, and focus on the key events and decisions: I understood the importance of Stanley’s fateful decisions during the Emin Pasha expedition much better from the 10-page summary given in this book (pages 365 to 375) than from the several chapters devoted to it in the Stanley biography which, for me, buried the important things in a sea of details. In particular, the notorious moral collapse of the Rear Column into Kurz-like barbarism is much more vivid when compressed onto just two pages (pages 371 to 372).

Royal Navy anti-slavery

It gets very little publicity but the British government tasked the Royal Navy with maintaining squadrons whose sole purpose was to intercept slave ships and quell the ocean-borne slave trade.

During the nineteenth century, 17,000 members of the Royal Navy died as a result of their service with the West and East African Anti-Slave Trade Squadrons. (p.362)

Part two

Part two of Jeal’s book is titled ‘The Consequences’ and deals with just that, the long term consequences of all this imperial jostling for African territory at the end of the nineteenth century. I’d read almost all the stories Jeal tells of the earlier expeditions in his biography of Stanley or Frank McLynn’s book about African exploration. Part two of Jeal’s book leaves all that Victoriana behind to deal with the dawning era of state-sponsored exploration. It broadens out to be about the general Scramble for Africa during the 1880s and beyond – to my surprise, to a great deal beyond – in some instances (Sudan and Uganda) bringing the story right up to date, with summaries not only of their twentieth century histories, but their post-colonial political histories right up to the year the book was published, 2011.

Sudan

In both countries Jeal says the British made a series of fateful mistakes. In Sudan it was yoking together the utterly different Muslim Arabs of the north with the African animists and Christians of the south. Since the British got on better with the Arabs, who had more Western-friendly economic and social systems, the northerners inherited most of the political, economic and military levers of power and looked down on the black African southerners. Jeal singles out the British commissioner Sir Harold MacMichael (served 1916 to 1933) for refusing to even visit the south for his first seven years in post and then being so shocked by its primitive condition that he perversely refused to encourage investment in it.

All this made it almost inevitable that, once the country was granted independence, many in the south would want their own government. South Sudan tried to secede in 1955, leading to a civil war which continued on and off for over 60 years until South Sudan gained its independence as a nation state in July 2011. (With depressing inevitability a civil war then broke out within south Sudan in 2013 which lasted till last year, 2020.)

In other words, the long term consequence of Britain drawing the borders of the territory as it did, and administering it as it did, was long term instability, war and suffering.

Uganda

The other major British error Jeal lingers on, was not retaining the region of Equatoria, claimed and invented by Baker in 1872 in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, as a distinct country.

Although it contained numerous tribes, the inhabitants of Equatoria had the advantage of being related by language and tradition. Instead the British made the disastrous mistake of dividing Equatoria along a horizontal line through the middle and assigning the northern half to Sudan and the southern half to Uganda, a decision taken by Sir Harry Johnston in 1899. Jeal goes into some detail as to how the inclusion of the Equatorial kingdoms, of Baganda in particular, helped to unbalance the tribal makeup of Uganda from the start.

Jeal gives a brisk summary of Uganda’s history after it gained independence from Britain in 1962, namely: the rise of a typical African dictator or Big Man, Milton Obote; a crisis caused by how to handle the semi-independent nation of Buganda within Uganda: Obote suspends the constitution in a 1966 coup and rules as a dictator until he was overthrown by his military leader Idi Amin, who himself emerged as a murderous tyrant ruling for 8 years until himself overthrown when the army of neighbouring Tanzania along with Ugandan exiles invaded and restored Obote for the next 6 years (1980 to 1986). Currently Uganda is ruled by former general Yoweri Museveni, who overthrew the previous regime in 1986 and has ruled a one-party state ever since.

Summarising the plight of both countries, Jeal says:

Britain should have stayed longer in Sudan and Uganda, should have spent more money there and better prepared these countries for independence. (p.418)

The case for intervention

In his final pages Jeal recapitulates the case for European intervention in the area of central Africa he’s been describing. One of the central motives was to stamp out the slave trade which the big five explorers he focuses on (Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Grant and Stanley) witnessed, described and railed against with passion and persistence.

Jeal argues that if the Christian European nations had not intervened in central Africa, the area would not have remained a pristine paradise, as some anti-colonialists claim. It had already been heavily despoiled by the Arab slave trade which was encroaching deeper and deeper into the interior with every year, bringing devastation, mass murder and enslavement.

The whole of central equatorial Africa would have become part of the Muslim world, with slavery an inescapable part of it, unless the colonial powers had come to stay. (p.430)

On this reading the case against the Europeans isn’t that they colonised Africa, as such. Jeal goes out of his way to assert that the British in particular did bring impartial justice, schools, education, railways, roads and economic development which lifted most Africans out of grinding poverty to levels of affluence and literacy inconceivable only a few generations earlier.

No, the case against the European colonialists is that they made terrible decisions about borders and administrative regions, tried to run their colonies on the cheap, ignored native traditions and chieftains and kingdoms in preference for a British style central administration and parliamentary democracy and that, when they handed all this over to African rulers in the 1960s, it quickly became obvious that the countries couldn’t be ruled by Westminster-style politics, but only from the barrel of a gun in the hands of the country’s strongest institution – the army.

The criticism is not that Britain colonised Africa. It’s that the British did it so badly. Upon independence, the continent’s 3,000 ethnic groups ended up divided up into 47 nation states. Colonialism lasted just long enough to destroy centuries-old beliefs in animism, spirits and personal responsibility, but not long enough to imprint the universal literacy and faith in education which underpins the success of the West. The complete inappropriateness of imposing a Westminster-style parliamentary system onto nations with radically different traditions and definitions of power and authority, led almost all of them to collapse and be replaced by the rule of Big Men backed by the army. In the mid-1990s there were 31 civil wars raging in Africa, resulting either from the terribly drawn boundaries or the deliberate incitements of Big Men (p.434).

Responsibility

It seems to me attributing ‘responsibility’ or ‘guilt’ for the dire post-independence fates of many African nations is pointless. Identifying errors and mistaken decisions with a view to avoiding them in future or using the analysis to try and address current problems might be a worthwhile activity. But blaming some white guy for what he said or wrote 150 years ago seems futile. It’s only a form of self-promoting rhetoric and psychological bonding for the righteous who like to make those kind of criticisms. Blaming ‘the white man’ or ‘the West’ or ‘Europe’ hardly seems very practical to me.

As Jeal candidly admits, the violent and semi-genocidal actions of the Islamic government in Khartoum dwarf anything the colonial authorities ever did. Similarly, Idi Amin’s regime undertook large-scale repression of sections of Uganda’s population, which may led to as many as 500,000 deaths and the wholescale expulsion of the country’s entire Asian population (30,000 came to the UK, some 10,000 to other western nations).

The idea that what exactly Speke said to Burton in Aden 150 years ago is given more space in the book than the massacres commissioned by the governments of Sudan and Uganda almost amounts to a subtle kind of racism, or at the very least, bias, whereby what one white man said or wrote 150 years ago is considered more important than the death of 100,000 Africans in the recent past.

To put it another way, once your mind is contemplating the murderous post-independence regimes of Sudan or Uganda, being concerned about what exactly Speke said to Burton 150 years ago seems absurd and irrelevant. In a way the brutal realities Jeal describes in the last 30 or 40 pages of his book, make the entire account of the Victorian explorers seem like a fairy tale, like a weightless fiction, like Alice in Wonderland.

Attributing some kind of responsibility to the colonial authorities who took bad decisions from the late 1890s through to the 1950s is probably a more worthwhile activity, but Jeal zips through this final part of the book at top speed. The colonial and post-independence history of two nations like Sudan and Uganda are just too big and complex to be managed in such a short space, and by an author who is much more at home investigating Stanley’s father complex or Baker’s love for his slave wife. In other words, is happier retailing ripping yarns of Victorian derring-do than giving a dryer, cold-blooded analysis of contemporary African politics.

Still, I suppose it’s to Jeal’s credit that he doesn’t just end the book with the fiasco of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition in 1889, as he might have done but makes an attempt to bring it up to date, skimpy though it feels.

Up until the last 40 or so pages Explorers of the Nile: the triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure is full of extraordinary stories of Victorian heroism and endurance, illness and obsession. It is entirely fitting that this book was turned into a series of BBC Radio 4. It has exactly that Radio 4 feel of comforting, white bourgeois, public school nostalgia. And if you’re in that kind of mood, why not? But the harsh realities described in the final passages make you realise that that world – of dashing Victorian chaps – only really survives between the covers of this kind of Radio 4-friendly history.

Logocentrism

Mind you, this aspect of Jeal’s book, namely the foregrounding of European written accounts over African oral or unrecorded accounts, is a subset of the larger bias embedded in Western practice, which is the privileging of the written word.

Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Grant and Stanley are the subject of so many books not only because they are such epitomes for those who like tales of Victorian adventure, but because they wrote so much and so much of it is stored in libraries and archives. This presents potentially endless opportunities for each generation of biographers to rework the sources and present new versions of their lives. It guarantees a steady little cottage industry which keeps their names in the public eye, sort of (among fans of this kind of thing at any rate).

Whereas where are the biographies of the Africans they met, of King Kamrasi of the Bunyoro or King Mutesa of the Baganda, to name a couple of the most notable? What of all the other chieftains and leaders, let alone their hundreds of thousands of subjects?

There is a profound structural inequality not just in the fact that the West or, in this case, Britain, with its public schoolboy taste for foreign adventure encouraged by its public schoolboy publishing and public schoolboy bookselling industries, will carry on writing, publishing and consuming books of imperial derring-do for the foreseeable future and getting them comfortably serialised on Radio 4. But in the way that we in the West foreground writing and written sources, written accounts and written description, journals, diaries, letters and every form of text over other types of record or history (predominantly oral).

In this deep sense, the very way the subject of history is conceived and practiced in the West militates against cultures with alternative methods of recording the past. Consigns them to eternal silence and subordinateness.

The sources of the Nile

My major practical criticism of the book isn’t any of these: you get what you pay for and Jeal delivers an intelligent and pacy account of the five great Victorian explorers of Africa.

But I think even on its own terms, the book would have benefited from a better explanation of the actual sources of the Nile, which are only partly explained in a throwaway few pages around page 316. I had to google the subject to find out what current knowledge on the sources of the Nile is (and to be surprised that, right up to the present day, explorers are still claiming to have found the ‘real’ source, tucked away in the rainforests of Rwanda, so that there is still, surprisingly, scholarly debate on the subject). I think this could have been stated and explained, with maps, much more clearly; and that, on balance, the best place to have put it would have been at the start so the reader had the clearest sense possible of the geography, before commencing the accounts of the explorations.

Chief Cammorro’s view

‘Most people are bad; if they are strong they take from the weak. The good people are all weak; they are good because they don’t have the strength to be bad.’

The words of Cammorro, chief of the Latuka, as quoted by the explorer Sir Samuel Baker, who is not necessarily a reliable witness and who, possibly, put into the chief’s mouth his own hard-bitten and cynical views. But in the context of the violent Africa described in this book, very apposite whoever exactly said it.

Credit

Explorers of the Nile: the triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure by Tim Jeal was published by Faber and Faber in 2011. All references are to the 2012 paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 8, 2021 • Permalink

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Explorers of the Nile: the triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure by Tim Jeal (2011) part one

‘The mere animal pleasure of travelling in a wild unexplored country is very great.’
(David Livingstone Last Journals, 1874, quoted on page 248. Ironically, Livingstone suffered appallingly from a wide range of African diseases and was in almost constant discomfort and sometimes terrible pain during most of his journeys)

There’s quite a lot of overlap with his earlier books. Jeal published his ground-breaking biography of David Livingstone as far back as 1973. Sections of this were obviously recycled into his huge and meticulously researched life of Stanley (2007) which I’ve just read. I recognised not just facts and events but phrases from the Stanley book repeated in this one.

Jeal’s account doesn’t start chronologically, but plonks us in media res with Livingstone landing on the east coast of Africa in March 1866, and describing his journey to the interior, before going back to recapitulate his career, and then – after this warm-up – to recapitulate the entire history of exploration of the Nile going back to the ancient Greeks. (A lot later, Jeal explains that he opened the entire book with the Livingstone venture because it is virtually a compendium of everything which could possibly go wrong for a European explorer [p.253].)

The Greeks recorded rumours they heard about the Nile and were the first to talk about the ‘mountains of the moon’ (Ptolemy, p.26). Alexander commissioned an expedition which didn’t get far. Nero commissioned another one which got bogged down in the Sudd, the vast expanse of swamp and papyrus 2,000 miles south of Alexandria, fluctuating in size but averaging some 30,000 square kilometres (p.24, 25, ).

The existence of the Sudd explains why it was thought reasonable by the geographical societies of various European nations to try and ascertain the source of the Nile from the south by entering either from east Africa, whose most popular jumping off point was the town of Bogamoy opposite the island of Zanzibar; or, after Stanley had mapped it, from the river Congo in the west (though this remained the longer and more difficult route, because of the Congo’s many cascades and the way it was lined with violent tribes).

So Jeal’s book tells the stories of the (mostly British) explorers who tried to find the source, being:

David Livingstone, 1866 to 1871
Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, 1856 to 1859
Speke and James Grant, 1860 to 1863
Samuel Baker and Florence von Sass, 1862 to 1865

Judging and jurying

As in his biography of Stanley, Jeal’s narrative, on the surface, provides what are in effect BBC Bitesize summaries of the long books all these men published about their explorations. His narratives echo other narratives of their explorations for the simple reason that all later authors are reliant on their primary accounts. But another, important motor for the whole thing is his tendency to want to sort out controversies of the period. Thus the Stanley book is, in essence, a long attempt to rebut the many criticisms made of his hero and rehabilitate him.

Burton and Speke

Something similar happens here, especially in the several chapters about the ill-fated expedition of Richard Burton and John Speke, who ended up hating each other and expressing a vituperative feud via the letters page of the Times, in their various books and public lectures. Jeal doesn’t just tell us what happened, he goes to great pains to try and establish a final verdict on who was right, who was to blame, addressing what are obviously cruxes and key moments and then using thorough research to establish the rights and wrongs of each issue.

For example, one of the cruxes of the Burton versus Speke dispute is that Speke caught an earlier ship back to Britain and before the pair parted, in Aden, they made a pact to only present their findings to the Royal Geographic Society when Burton had joined him and they could do it as a pair. But no sooner had he arrived in London than Speke accepted an invitation to do just that and presented the expedition’s findings by himself, an act of perfidy, ‘a blackguard business’, which Burton excoriated Speke for in private and public, criticisms which were repeated by his widow in her biography of him and all six subsequent biographies. So Jeal devotes several pages trying to get to the bottom of the matter and reach a definitive judgement on the two men’s behaviour (pages 112 to 116).

Speke versus Petherick

Similarly, at the end of Speke’s separate expedition accompanied by Captain James Grant (1860 to 1863) Speke hurried through the last stages of the exploration because he was under the impression that John Petherick had been sent up the Nile by the Royal Geographic Society expressly to bring him much-needed supplies – and so was mortified and then livid to arrive at the scheduled meeting place of Gani and find no sign of Petherick or the boats or goods he was pledged to hand over. In the meantime Speke and Grant had been greeted, fed and watered by the freelance explorer Samuel White Baker. Only weeks later did Petherick arrive, with a harrowing tale of endurance and trials overcome to which Speke was obstinately unsympathetic.

This developed into another feud which Speke carried back to England, speaking badly of Petherick to the Royal Geographic Society (who had hired and paid him) in person, in lectures and in print, while Petherick and his feisty wife, replied in kind, fully justifying themselves and describing the terrible ordeals they’d undergone trying to deliver boats and supplies to Speke and Grant. Once again Jeal investigates the matter in detail in order to try and provide a definitive adjudication.

Speke’s suicide

Same again for a major biographical incident pertaining to this subject which was the death of John Speke by a gunshot wound as he was spending an afternoon out shooting on his uncle’s estate in the West Country. He had been scheduled to appear aT a massive, highly publicised debate with Burton the next day in Bath and, when he heard of Speke’s death, Burton immediately attributed it to suicide and fear that his (Speke’s) theories about the Nile would be refuted, an aspersion which has been repeated by Burton supporters down to the present day. Jeal, as you might expect, gives a detailed account of the gunshot, quoting the two eye witnesses on the spot, and uses this and other evidence (Speke had recently been enthusiastically talking about plans to return to Africa on a humanitarian mission to abolish slavery) to refute the suicide theory and promote the ‘death by accident’ theory – which is actually the finding the coroner returned at his post mortem. Jeal devotes an entire chapter to the subject, chapter 14, ‘Death in the afternoon’.

Frankly, I don’t really care and Jeal’s obsession with a careful, annotated forensic analysis of every one of these many contentious issues gets a bit wearing. Half way through the first expedition, Speke lost his temper with his loyal servant Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who had disobeyed a direct order, and resorted to punching him in the mouth, several times, knocking out some of his teeth. Well, it was a long time ago, in the middle of nowhere, when they’d been out of touch with normal Western manners for years, and were constantly ill and worn down, so it doesn’t surprise me very much. But it is typical of Jeal’s approach that he spends some time explaining all the extenuating circumstances to us in order to rehabilitate Speke’s ‘moral reputation’ (a phrase Jeal uses repeatedly, for example, pages 307, 324).

The endless vexations of African travel, and the hypersensitivity caused by repeated attacks of malaria, could sting the most patient of men into violent over-reaction. (p.146)

Jeal’s book contains a lot more explicating and justifying, judge and jurying than you might have expected.

Geography

he book is surprisingly light on the geography of its subject. If you want to find out out about the actual sources of the Nile, you’d do best to google it. This book only intermittently concerns itself with the actual geography of the river Nile, with maps of waterflow and so on. I learned a handful of things about the explorers’ theories: Livingstone thought the river Lualaba, which flows north parallel to Lake Tanganyika, was a source of the Nile. This is completely wrong. A tributary, the river Lukaga, flows out of the Lake Tanganyika west into the Luabala, which then flows north before making a huge curve round to the west to form the core tributary of the might river Congo. Nothing to do with the Nile.

Map showing the river Congo and its tributaries. At the far right is the long vertical blue strip of Lake Tanganyika and half way up on the left is the river Lukaga which drains it into the river Lualaba which flows north and, around Kisangani, changes its name to the Congo and describes a vast arch to the west and south. By contrast, you can see that Lake Victoria (over on the right) drains north, just to the east of Kampala, into Lake Kyoga (not named on this map), continues as a river to the northern tip of Lake Albert before emerging as the White Nile to flow north into Sudan, to Juba and beyond

Burton and Speke fell out because Burton speculated that Tankanyika flowed out into a northern river which must form an origin of the Nile, but he was wrong. The river he placed his hopes on flows into the lake. Lake Tanganyika, it turns out, drains westward via a river which flows into the Luabala i.e. the Congo.

Speke was correct in speculating that the main source of the white Nile was a river leading from the northern end of Lake Victoria and via a succession of smaller lakes. He was, however, prevented from directly following the course of these rivers because the tribal chieftains he stayed with on uneasy terms wouldn’t let him.

On the map below you can see how the stretch called the Victoria Nile flows north from Lake Victoria into Lake Kyoga, then curves north and west to flow to the northern tip of Lake Albert. Here it forms a marshy delta and out of this a river exits Lake Albert flowing north which, for this stretch, is known as the Albert Nile, before crossing the border from Uganda into South Sudan, at which point it becomes known as the White Nile.

But for me the most striking thing about this map is it vividly shows how bewilderingly complicated the river networks of the region are, so that you can fully understand why the handful of white men who were the first to explore it, in incredibly patchy ways, limited in where they could go by rival tribal chieftains or lack of porters or food, and the fact that most of them were very ill most of the time (Burton was too ill to walk for most of his expedition, Speke had to be carried in a litter for months at a time, Baker and his mistress nearly died of fever on several occasions, as described, for example, on pages 230 to 235) found it so hard to arrive at a definitive answer.

Rivers and lakes of Uganda. Source: Wikipedia

It was Baker who proved that most of the flow of the Nile actually derives from the so-called Blue Nile which flows out of the mountains of Ethiopia. It is the heavy rains which falls in theses mountains in late summer which account for the annual influx of the Nile.

Violence

Instead Jeal’s narrative is very much about the human relations between the leaders of the expeditions, their men, being (the often Arab) ‘captains’ of the huge numbers of native African porters they hired (they were contracted and paid in a regular way).

And most vivid of all with the many tribal rulers and kings that they encountered on their long, arduous, and highly dangerous ventures. All kinds of anecdotes, stories atrocities leaped off the page at me.

In July 1870 Livingstone was forced back to the Arab slave-trading depot of Bambarre where he witnessed the rapacious violence of the Arab slave trade. Forty Manyema were killed one day, nine another, a hundred the day after that. He saw the smoke curling up from distant villages and distant shots as settlements were massacred (p.20).

While there one of the six who had deserted him was killed and eaten. Cannibalism was rife in all the experiences of the explorers. Livingstone learned that slaves who had died of illness or famine, were being exhumed, cooked and eaten (p.22).

Alexandrine Tinné, born 1835, was a rare female explorer. The richest heiress in Holland, she embarked on a well organised expedition up the Nile and got as far as Khartoum where her mother and aunt, who’d accompanied her, died of disease. In 1869, in an attempt to cross the Sahara, she was hacked to death by Tuareg tribesmen, aged 33.

In both books Jeal describes the massacre of Manyema women in the market square of the village of Nyangwe on the right bank of the river Lualaba carried out by Arab slavers keen to spread terror, which Livingstone witnessed at first hand and vividly described (p.32).

Three men of Dugumbé ben Habib massacre women at the market of Nyangwe on the river Lualaba, 15 July 1871. Illustration from the Journals of David Livingstone (p.255)

Johann Ludwig Krapf (b.1810) was a German missionary in East Africa who explored East Africa with Johannes Rebmann. They were the first Europeans to see Mount Kenya, in 1850. He narrowly escaped being killed by a group of Masai warriors who butchered their African porters (p.40).

Richard Burton was immensely talented and clever, speaking half a dozen languages, but never fit in, and was very precious about his reputation, one of the causes of his feud with his companion on the expedition of 1856-59, John Speke. Burton is quoted as describing the society created by the British in India as: ‘like that of a small county town suddenly raised to the top of the tree [where it lost its head] accordingly.’ (p.37).

Jeal gives a full description of the incident on Burton and Speke’s expedition into Ethiopia when their camp at Berbera was attacked and Burton received a spear through the mouth, entering one cheek and exiting the other, shattering several teeth, and how the captured Speke was tied up and then punctured with a spear for entertainment (pages 50 to 54).

To give them a sense of the world they were entering, the British consul on Zanzibar took Burton and Speke to prison to meet an African locked up because he’d been found guilty of playing a drum while tribesmen had tortured, mutilated, then beheaded an explorer named Lieutenant Eugène Maizan. They were Zaramo tribesmen under Hembé, the son of Chief Mazungera, and they tied Maizan to a calabash tree, amputated his limbs and sliced off his genitals while still alive, before beheading him. He was 25 (pages 67 and 129).

Broadly speaking, Burton despised Africa’s blacks, appalled by their illiteracy and lack of culture, and thought the widespread slave trade was their own fault for failing to fight back. Fluent in Arabic, he admired Islamic culture and got on well with the Arabs they met. He thought Britain’s anti-slavery efforts were futile and despised the bien-pensant anti-slavery activists back in Britain who knew nothing of the real conditions of Africa.

Speke, on the other hand, also initially dismissive of black Africans, came to admire and respect them and to loathe the Arabs they met, almost all of whom were involved in the slave trade and implicated in dire atrocities, village burning, massacres, enslaving women and children. Travelling the same route years later, Stanley found many of the African leaders he met spoke warmly of Speke and his respect and sympathy.

That said, Burton did take a five year old slave away from one of the head porters, Mabruki, because he continuously beat and mistreated him, and gave him to the kindlier Bombay (p.105)

None of the locals the explorers met understood their obsession with knowing about lakes and rivers, their names and size and position and flow. For all the Africans they met, these water features were just there. Instead a lot of the locals were made suspicious about the white men’s endless questions, suspecting them of spying or, on a less educated level, were made anxious that their incessant questions and requests would lead to bad luck and disaster (p.87). It was best to say they’d come in search of particular goods or treasures; Africans immediately understood material motives (p.96).

On Burton and Speke’s return journey to Zanzibar (when they both had to be carried in litters, they were so ill) one of the head porters they’d taken on at Ujiji (on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika) had been loitering behind because his woman was too footsore to keep up with the caravan’s pace. Eventually she could go no further and so he cut off her head to prevent her becoming another man’s property (p.105).

Mutesa king of Baganda and his palace on Mengo Hill were the most impressive ruler and royal compound Speke and Grant encountered, an entire hill covered with giant huts (p.147).

Mengo, capital of the Kingdom of Buganda in the time of King Mutesa I (1837 to 1884). Engraving by A. Sargent from Unexplored Africa by Henry Morton Stanley (1887)

Speke was struck by how tall, noble and handsome Mutesa was and drew a sketch which survives to this day. It was only as the days passed that they began to witness sights of casual brutality and murder. They witnessed servants and even some of the king’s 400 or so wives being dragged off to be executed on the slightest whim (p.153). A favourite wife prompted an outburst of psychotic rage when she offered the king a piece of fruit when it was the job of a specified court functionary. Mutesa began beating her with a stick and yelled for his executioner to drag her off and behead her, till Speke intervened to save her life. A royal page who misinterpreted a message from Speke to the king had his ears cut off. A woman ran away from her cruel husband and was sheltered by an old man. They were discovered and both imprisoned, fed and watered while parts of them were amputated each day and fed to waiting vultures. And so on (p.162).

Though they didn’t learn it till later, Mutesa had sacrificed over 400 people in a vast ritual sacrifice to celebrate the coming of the white man (p.144). Every day Speke and Grant walked past the hut of Maula, Mutesa’s chief enforcer, and heard the cries and screams of torture victims (p.164). The longer they stayed, the more nervous they became about the safety of themselves and their porters. And the continuity between the brutal lack of respect for human life of rulers like Mutesa and of post-independence African rulers, for example, Idi Amin, strikes the modern reader. Later on we learn that when Mutesa was dying of illness he had thousands of his subjects killed in ritual executions to appease the ancestral spirits. ‘As many as two thousand were executed in a day.’ (p.374).

One of the features of Mutesa’s court was how fat his wives were. They were force fed milk and goodies until they swelled up like balloons. Speke became very friendly with the women of the court, unashamedly falling in love with one (Méri, pages 158 to 162), and developing a close friendship with Mutesa’s mother, who he treated for her various medical ailments, thus acquiring a reputation as a doctor (p.154). And the fat women allowed him to get a tape measure and take their dimensions.

King Mutesa I affected a stylised way of walking, designed to copy the gait of a lion, which Speke found unintentionally hilarious (Ministry of Silly Walks). He had sense enough to keep a straight face, as did every other member of the king’s court for fear of being dragged off for execution.

When Samuel White Baker and his enamorata Florence von Sass travelled deep into Bunyoro, Baker repeatedly thought he was so ill he was going to die. Florence was so sick of fever she almost stopped breathing and the porters started digging a grave outside her tent. The couple were kept in a form of house arrest by King Kamrasi. On the way into Bunyoro and back again to the Nile, Baker was forced to keep company with the much larger caravan of a slave trader, Ibrahim it was the only way to guarantee protection from attacking tribes. They tried to mitigate the slavers’ habitual cruelty. Baker intervened to prevent a girl slave and her mother who had tried to escape from being hanged; Florence cared for small slave children.

When Baker and Florence finally made it to Khartoum in 1865, it was soon after some 500 of the garrison of 4,000 had died of the plague. Incurable, virulent disease was everywhere (p.240).

On his 1866 journey along the Rivola river Livingstone saw evidence of the Arab slavers’ brutal treatment of enslaved Africans everywhere: a woman tied round the neck and to a tree and left to die; groups of corpses, some shot, some stabbed to death, some tied together and left to starve and rot. He wrote extended letters to the British Foreign Secretary demanding that the slavers’ island of Zanzibar be blockaded by the Royal Navy (p.249).

African words

Jeal uses these words without explaining what language they’re from. Maybe they are from a variety of languages since they appear derive from various tribes, some from India.

banians – merchant (254)
bomas – hedges
dahabiya – large Nile pleasure boat
kabaka – king
lukiiko – Mutesa’s senior advisers (150)
machilla – hammock for sick white men carried by porters (84)
mbugu – triangular bark-cloth bikini bottoms worn by African women (208)
omukana – traditional title of the kings of Bunyoro (170)
nganga – witch doctor (159)
namasole – title of the king’s mother (154)
nyasa – large body of water, lake (98)
nganga – witch doctor (159)
pombé – beer (154)
wakil – agent (175)
wakungu – courtiers (154)
wangwana – name given to free Africans originally brought to Zanzibar by slavers, who gained their freedom and hired themselves out as porters for pay

African kings

Fowooka, an ally of Riongo (237)
Kabarega, king of Bunyoro in 1871 (338)
Kamrasi, ruler of Bunyoro (225)
Katchiba, chief of the Obbo (222)
Mahaya, the chief at Mwanza
Machunda, king of Ukerewe and Mtiza
Mutesa, king of the Baganda people
Nchuvila of Kinshasa (355)
Sekeletu, chif of the Kololo (246)
Commoro, chief of the Latuka

According to Speke, Kamrasi of the Bunyoro was a much better ruler than Mutesa of the Baganda, a lot less brutal (p.238).

Summary

You learn something but not that much about the actual geography of the river Nile, although repeated mentions of the names of the major lakes does build up a good mental image of the region. You learn an awful lot about the squabbles and fallings out of the various explorers, and the rivalries and small p politics of exploration, which set them all at loggerheads. More than these, you learn all about the gruelling journeys, the many illnesses they endured and the difficulties of dealing with local tribes and chiefs.

But above all, to open this book is to enter a realm of astonishing brutality, violence, murder, torture and cannibalism.

Credit

Explorers of the Nile: the triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure by Tim Jeal was published by Faber and Faber in 2011. All references are to the 2012 paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 6, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Africa, imperialism, Slavery

Tagged Africa, Albert Nile, Alexandrine Tinné, Baganda, Bambarre, Berbera, Blue Nile, Bogamoy, British Empire, Bunyoro, cannibalism, Chief Mazungera, David Livingstone, Dugumbé ben Habib, East Africa, Eugène Maizan, exploration, Explorers of the Nile: the triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure, Florence von Sass, geography, Henry Morton Stanley, history, James Grant, Johann Ludwig Krapf, Johannes Rebmann, John Hanning Speke, John Petherick, kabaka, Kampala, Khartoum, King Kamrasi, King Mutesa I, Lake Albert, Lake Kyoga, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Victoria, Luabala, Lukaga river, Méri, Mengo Hill, Mount Kenya, Mutesa, nganga, Nile, Nyangwe massacre, nyasa, omukana, Richard Burton, River Congo, River Nile, Rivola river, Royal Geographic Society, Samuel Baker, Sidi Mubarak Bombay, South Sudan, Sudd, Tim Jeal, Uganda, Ujiji, wakungu, White Nile, Zanzibar

Posted by Simon on September 6, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/09/06/explorers-of-the-nile-tim-jeal/

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (2)

‘Niama! Niama!’ (‘Meat! Meat!’)
The excited cry of cannibals on the Congo river when they saw Stanley’s expedition approaching (p.197)

Jeal’s exemplary and hugely researched biography (winner of the Sunday Times Biography of the Year award 2007) takes 570 pages (including notes, index etc) to given an immensely detailed narrative of the life of Henry Morton Stanley, widely acknowledged to be the greatest European explorer of Africa. There’s a huge amount about his disastrous childhood, his adventures as a young man, his numerous romantic attachments ie the various engagements which collapsed because he kept on disappearing off to Africa for years , speculation about his psychological profile and needs (an orphan in search of a father who created surrogate families of younger men on his various expeditions).

What interested me more was the general light Jeal’s book shed on the Africa of the 1870s. The French owned Algeria and had footholds in Dakar and Gabon, the British owned the Cape Colony, and a handful of outposts on the Gold Coast (Lagos) and provided military and financial support to the Khedive who administered Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman sultan, while pushing south into Sudan. The Dutch Boers had asserted states in the Orange Free State and Transvaal, and Portugal claimed the coastal strips of Angola and Mozambique in the south west and east coasts, respectively. But huge areas remained unclaimed and unexplored.

Africa before colonial partition, circa 1870

Some large regions were ruled by established African rulers or tribes, such as the Ashanti in the west and the Matabele in the south. Abyssinia was ruled by a long-established Christian emperor. In the 1830s an Arab Muslim ruler had established the sultanate of Zanzibar. The region of Buganda had a king or Kabak, at this period Mutesa, who kept an impressive court and had 300 wives.

I’m not going to attempt a historical overview. I just want to record notes on the social conditions Stanley encountered.

The second Ashanti war

After the success of his Livingstone mission, in 1874 Stanley was sent by the editor of the New York Herald, Bennett, to cover the second Ashanti War. The powerful Ashanti tribe resented the encroachment of the British. When the British bought their last outlet to the sea, Elmina, off the Dutch, it triggered war. The British government despatched General Sir Garnet Wolseley who invaded Ashanti territory, inflicted a crushing military defeat and burned down the capital, Kumasi. The treaty enforced on the king was to pay 50,000 ounces of gold reparations, keep the trade road to Kumasi open, and abandon human sacrifices. Stanley witnessed and reported on all this. He also saw the put outside the capital city where Ashanti kings ritually decapitated slaves, prisoners and enemies. Their blood was kept in a huge bowl and used in religious ceremonies. There was a pile of skulls alongside rotting bodies (p.152).

The Arab slave trade

The Sultanate of Zanzibar was the epicentre of the East African slave trade, which was entirely run by Arabs. Up to a third of the population of 200,000 was slaves, working as servants or workers on the island’s many plantations. Up to 20,000 slaves a year were brought by Arab slavers from the interior, about half being kept on the island the other half shipped north to become slaves in the Middle East. British estimates varied but the most horrifying calculated that as many as 9 in 10 of the slaves captured or bought in the interior survived the long trek, in chains, back to the coast at Bagamoyo.

The British were dedicated to trying to stamp out the East African slave trade but it could only be done with the co-operation of its managers and of the Sultan. In 1873 he was persuaded to sign a treaty abolishing the trade by Sir Bartle Frere. Jeal emphasises the importance of Stanley’s long reports on the Livingstone mission about the evils of the slave trade, which were published in London just as the Parliamentary committee was debating the trade and helped crystallised British determination to enforce the treaty on the Sultan. However, the actual condition of slavery was not abolished, the slave traders merely found new outlets on the coast, and it is possible the number of slaves captured and traded actually increased for a decade or more after this date (p.160).

For the European explorers there were two big points: almost wherever they went they saw examples of the devastation wrought by the Arab slave traders. But, much worse, all too often, the European explorers opened up entire new areas to the slave trade. Frank McLynn’s book, Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa, contains numerous descriptions of explorers returning to regions they had first encountered as lush, fertile and densely populated areas a few years later to find they had been burned and emptied of people by Arab slavers who followed in the European explorers’ wake. Humans, eh.

The great trans-Africa journey 1874 to 1877

Stanley set off from Bagamoyo with 224 porters (known as ‘wangwana’), 3 white companions and five dogs in November 1874. Within weeks all four white men had contracted malaria and fevers of various types. In January 1875 Edward Pocock died of smallpox. Eventually all three white men would perish and all the dogs.

As the going got harder, numerous porters absconded. Stanley sent ‘detectives’ to find them and drag them back. Absconders were put in chains for a couple of days to set an example. Travelling through the territory of the Wanyatu tribe, a straggler was captured and hacked to pieces. A porter who had gone to cut wood was killed by a spear. The tribe attacked but was fought off with rifles, killing six. Next day they attacked again, were fought off but when Stanley told his men to counter-attack, they lost discipline broke into smaller groups and some were speared to death, others hunted through the forest, presumed killed.

By the time they arrived on the shore of Lake Victoria 102 days and 720 miles later, Stanley had lost 62 men, through disease, desertion or killed in fighting with locals. His train of 224 was down to 166. Stanley had brought a boat, broken down into sections so as to be portable by the wangwana, and named the Lady Alice (after his rich man’s daughter girlfriend back in America). They now assembled it and undertook the first ever circumnavigation of Lake Victoria, mapping and charting and measuring as he went. He had complex interactions with the numerous tribes living around Lake Victoria, trying to manipulate tribal enmities to his advantage, nearly being massacred by the inhabitants of Bumbireh island when he landed his boat looking for food, and only just pushing off and escaping with the lives of himself and the 11 porters who accompanied him.

The mighty warlord Mirambo was responsible for the deaths of thousands of men and skulls lined the road to his gates (p.185). It was a custom of the Nyamwezi people to strangle their mtemi (leader) when they became unfit to rule. When I read that, for a split second I wondered what the effect would be if we imported that custom into contemporary Britain.

By the time Stanley and his men reached Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika in May 1876 he weighed 118lb, having lost a third of his body weight. It took Stanley 51 days to circumnavigate and map Lake Tanganyika, discovering it was 450 miles from north to south and therefore the longest freshwater lake in the world.

As Stanley travelled with 130 porters and their camp followers, by boat and canoe along the river Lualaba, they were repeatedly attacked by cannibal tribes, the paths to whose villages were lined with human skulls.

Some of the tribes they parlayed with were very suspicious of writing, which they saw as witchcraft designed to curse the tribe. They insisted Stanley hand over his notebook so he handed over his edition of the complete Shakespeare which was ritually burned in front of the whole tribe (p.198).

None of the expedition had any idea that there were 32 separate sets of waterfalls beyond the 15 mile lake they named Stanley Pool, itself a distinctive lake-like widening of the river, 22 miles long and 14 miles wide and littered with islands large and small. It is gruelling to read of the struggle to carry canoes along the river bank or risk running the river to the next set of falls. Numerous canoes were lost with 20 or so porters and the last, most effective and loyal white man, Frank Pocock, swept over a fall and drowned.

When he had announced on 25 July that they were not far from the sea, his loyal lieutenant, Wadi Safeni, who had saved the Lady Alice on several occasions and been a vital ‘captain’ of the wangwani broke down and went mad, clasping Stanley’s legs, gibbering about an end to their suffering, before running off into the jungle and never being seen again.

In the last 50 miles to the Atlantic coast they ran almost completely out of food, the hundred or more porters were all ill, several women had given birth Stanley sent a letter by the fittest men to the small European settlement at Boma. Miraculously they returned several days later with food, and more arrived by porters. They were saved.

It is touching to read about the fuss Stanley then kicked up with Bennett and the British government to ensure that the survivors of ‘his people’, with whom he had suffered so much, were taken by British gunboat round the Cape and returned to their homes on Zanzibar, fully paid off and compensation given to the families of those who had perished. He had left Zanzibar in November 1874 with 228 people. He returned in November 1877 with 108 (p.217).

Tribes mentioned

The Bangala (cannibals), Barundu, Ganda, Haya, Kumu (cannibals), Manyema, Ngoni, Nyamwezi, Wajiwa, Wané-Mpungu, Wanyaturu, Warasura, Wasongoro, Wakonju, Wavuma, Wasambye, Wasukuma, Wenya.

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by Simon on September 1, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, British Empire, History

Posted by Simon on September 1, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/09/01/stanley-africas-greatest-explorer-tim-jeal-2/

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (2007)

The workhouse boy in paradise… (p.104)

When news broke that the large and expensive expedition led by the American journalist Henry Morton Stanley and funded by the biggest newspaper in America, the New York Herald, had succeeded in locating the ‘lost’ Scottish missionary, Dr David Livingstone, in deepest darkest Africa (in fact, at the town of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 10 November 1871) it was telegraphed round the (developed) world and overnight made Stanley one of the most famous men on the planet.

Over the next 15 years Stanley would lead a series of epic expeditions through central Africa, making important geographical discoveries, drafting maps, establishing contact with local inhabitants, naming lakes and waterfalls and founding settlements which last to this day, especially along what developed into his main area of activity the enormous Congo river.

Stanley’s later expeditions were financed by King Leopold II of Belgium and played a vital role in marking out the territory which Leopold, at the epochal Congress of Berlin in 1885, claimed as his own personal demesne. The Congo Free State under Leopold’s personal rule had, by the turn of the twentieth century, become a byword for brutality and exploitation. Maybe as many as a million natives of the huge Congo region were killed, maimed or worked to death by white overseers intent on extracting rubber and other marketable commodities by any means necessary.

1. This association with the evil king, along with 2. numerous damning stories and rumours spread about him by his rivals (that Stanley was gay, his marriage was a sham, that he went to Africa to indulge a) his homosexual inclinations or b) his homicidal inclinations), and even 3. Stanley’s own writings in which he poses as a tough and merciless leader of men, exaggerating the battles he was in and the men he’d whipped or even killed, all these factors contributed to blackening Stanley’s reputation, from his own day down to ours.

In his introduction to this long, thorough and meticulously researched biography, Tim Jeal explains that these accusations were given their modern expression in Frank McLynn’s 1990 biography, Stanley: Dark Genius of African Exploration.

Young Stanley, aged 31, posing as the great white explorer with Kalulu, an African boy he bought out of slavery during the Livingstone expedition and took to London with him where he sent him to a church school in Wandsworth. A year later Stanley took Kalulu on the trans-Africa expedition, where the boy would die when his canoe was swept over a huge cataract on the Congo river

By sharp contrast, Jeal sets out to give a strongly revisionist account. He goes to lengths to explain that, unlike any previous biographer, he has been lucky enough to have access to the vast archive of Stanley’s papers held in the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Central in Brussels, some 7,000 items, including some 5,000 letters to him from a vast range of correspondents.

It is a close reading of Stanley’s unpublished journals, letters to early sweethearts, to his wife, and masses of other unpublished documents which have led Jeal to take a much more nuanced approach to Stanley’s character and achievements and to actively rebut some of the traditional accusations made against him.

In addition, Jeal has spent most of his working life researching the classic Victorian explorers in Africa. His 1973 biography of Livingstone took the same approach, using private letters, diaries and archives to reveal the deeply flawed and troubled man behind the legend. And a few years after this book, Jeal published Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (2011), a group portrait of the key European explorers – John Hanning Speke, James Augustus Grant, Richard Francis Burton, Samuel White Baker, Stanley, Livingstone and many others from 1856 to 1878.

The point is that Jeal has devoted a lifetime to in-depth research of these figures and it shows – in the length and scholarliness and immense attention to detail of this biography.

The central premise of Jeal’s account is that Stanley exaggerated his own brutality and the violent means he used in his explorations for personal and commercial reasons. 1. On a personal level, Stanley had experienced a childhood of Dickensian harshness and deprivation. Short, unloved, abandoned by his family and brought up in a workhouse, he over-compensated with fantasies of power, projecting himself as an invulnerable tough guy. 2. On a commercial level, Stanley was a journalist writing for American newspapers and they, too, valued sensationalism and tough guy heroics.

So both personally and professionally Stanley was incentivised to exaggerate the number of hostile tribes he encountered, the number of battles he fought, the casualties on all sides, the brutal way he enforced discipline on his own porters, the cruel way he inflicted punishment on warlike tribes. Jeal’s extensive notes indicate the thoroughness with which he re-investigated every single one of these claims and found time and time again a pattern of exaggeration and embellishment.

With the result that the Stanley who emerges from Jeal’s account is a much more intelligent, flexible and strategic figure, using violence where it was required, fighting back when attacked, but also encouraging his men and preferring to sign peaceful treaties with local chieftains, where possible. We have written evidence that he respected and admired Africans, wanted them to be treated fairly, and went out of his way to praise the lead porters who managed his extensive baggage trains. And he emerges as a much more psychologically damaged and vulnerable figure than the superficial history books suggest.

Stanley aged 44 in 1885, sporting the hat he designed to keep off flies and the sun, but which was widely mocked

Stanley’s early life

Accounts of Stanley’s three big Africa expeditions and his extended spell as explorer and negotiator for King Leopold can be found on any website about African exploration:

Livingstone expedition, 1871 to 1872, written up in How I Found LIvingstone, which single-handedly created the legend of the saintly missionary
African Great Lakes and Congo River, 1874 to August 1877 (999 days)
working for King Leopold, 1879 to 1885
Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1886 to 1889

Overall Stanley’s career in Africa covered some 18 years.

What is less well known and absolutely flabbergasted me was Jeal’s detailed description of Stanley’s early years. The young Stanley had one of the most action-packed and extreme lives I’ve ever heard of. So much happened to him that at several points I wondered whether I was reading a kind of spoof or parody of a life of derring-do. Surely nobody could have had so many adventures!

Stanley’s real name

For a start his name wasn’t Henry Morton Stanley and he wasn’t American. The boy was born John Rowlands in the town of Denbigh, north-east Wales, about 30 miles from the border with England.

Stanley’s mother

His mother was a teenager, Elisabeth Parry, who ended up having five children by three different fathers. Stanley never knew his father. He had suspicions and in later life tried to find out, but as a boy had no father figure in his life, and was haunted by the very real literal of abandonment.

Abandoned

His mother handed him over to his grandfather, Moses Parry, to look after but the grandfather died a few years later and the toddler John was passed onto cousins. They in turn fell on hard times and at the tender age of six, his uncle said he was taking him on an adventure, carried him on his shoulders the six miles to the nearby town of St Asaph and dumped him on the doorstep of the workhouse, rang the bell and walked away, abandoning him with no explanation. Imagine. Arguably John never recovered from these twin boyhood betrayals and the rest of his life can be interpreted by psychologists as a sustained attempt to regain the love and trust and sense of self-worth which he was robbed of at such an early age.

Workhouse

John Rowlands spent the next ten years living, eating, working in a workhouse where conditions were grim. Workhouses were inspected by local authorities and maintained a certain level of hygiene, food and education, and so young John was taught to read and write. He ended up as the equivalent of head boy and Jeal suggests that it was here, abandoned by parents and family, that he developed a taste for having younger, male followers, who he could order around, who gave him a sense of confidence and worth, which the Africa expeditions were to prove a an outlet for on a much larger scale.

Homosexuality?

In the St Asaph workhouse the boys slept several to a bed and contemporaries record that the older boys ‘took part in every possible vice’. Another Stanley biographer speculates that he was sexually abused there. Some of the girls were inducted into prostitution at an early age. Jeal quotes Stanley’s own writings asserting that this atmosphere had the opposite effect on him, putting him off sex, making him fastidious and disgusted. Maybe. There’s no doubt that his earlier, pre-Africa adventures and expeditions involved young male devotees. Was it platonic adoration or did it have a sexual tinge? This is the kind of psychosexual speculation beloved of modern biographers and encouraged by modern publishers because sex sells. Personally, I find it demeans the subject of this fruitless speculation and degrades the reader.

Jeal spends time producing the (limited) evidence and speculating. Personally, I don’t give a damn about anyone’s sex life except insofar as it directly effects their public actions or written works, and even then, most psychosexual biography seems pointless to me. Sexuality is so complicated, contradictory and chaotic that it seems to me presumptuous and generally futile to waste pages on idle speculation. I always skip these bits.

Liverpool

On coming of age Stanley left the workhouse and had to make his way in the world. His cousins arranged for him to go and stay with a relative, Uncle Tom Morris, in Liverpool (p.28). The family were friendly enough but turned out to be hard up and so John had to scout for work, eventually finding a job as assistant in a haberdashery. But the Liverpool docks were a romantic scene for a young man, full of sailors with stories of distant lands.

Cabin boy

Not surprising, then, that one day John announced to his relatives that he had signed up as a cabin boy on the Windermere bound for America. They warned him against it, it was a common practice to promise ‘cabin boys’ the equivalent of an apprenticeship but then treat them like dirt.

New Orleans

This is exactly what happened to young John and by the time the Windermere docked in New Orleans he’d had enough bullying and bad treatment, and jumped ship (p.31).

Hardware store

He wandered the streets and may have slept rough a couple of nights before getting into conversation with the owner of a hardware store and persuading him to take him on. In his autobiography John says the store owner’s name was Henry Hope Stanley and that he, John, needing a new identity in a new country, copied it. Jeal shows in meticulous detail that, as you might expect, the process was much more tentative than that: that the name might not have been that of the storekeeper himself (who Jeal identifies as a completely different person, James Speake) but certainly belonged to an eminent and successful New Orleans businessman and that John’s adoption of it was piecemeal and experimental over a period of years during which he experiments with variations on the names to create a new, American identity.

The Wild West

The store owner advised the man we can now call Stanley that he’d never make his fortune as a delivery boy, and to move up the Mississippi into the ‘the West’ where there were more openings for an enterprising man. So in August 1860 Stanley shipped up to Arkansas, to the small town of Cypress Bend fifty miles from Little Rock, where he got a job in another hardware store. Here he saw at first hand the violent, selfish, law unto themselves attitude of many of the settlers of what could be described as the Wild West. He gained in-depth knowledge of stores and supplies and provisions which would be of great use in his African adventures, and also of the very latest in guns and ammunition.

American Civil War

In April 1861 the American Civil War broke out. There was the usual rush of bellicose enthusiasm in both north and south. If young men didn’t volunteer for the army they came under concerted pressure, not least from young women, to show their manliness. Reluctantly young Stanley, still only 20, joined a regiment in the Confederate army (p.44). He fought at the famous Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, where Jeal gives a vivid description of the mayhem and massacre around him. Miraculously, Stanley survived unscathed and was taken prisoner by Union forces (p.45).

Briefly back to Wales

Stanley spent several months in a POW camp in Illinois where the prisoners came under pressure to sign up to the Union army which, eventually, Stanley did, on 4 June 1862 (p.48). A few weeks later Stanley discharged himself, made his way to Baltimore and took a ship back to Liverpool, to go see his estranged family (p.49). His mother was now the landlady of a pub in Denbigh, and when he arrived, hungry and tired, having walked from Liverpool, she rejected him. He stayed in the area a few days before returning Liverpool and taking ship back to the States.

Merchant seaman

For the next year and a half he bummed around as a sailor on American merchant ships which visited ports in Spain and France (p.51). In July 1864, still at a loss what to do in life, Stanley enlisted in the Union navy. He was appointed ship’s clerk or writer on the USS Minnesota. He was an eye witness to the bombardment of Fort Fisher in December 1864, and wrote it up not only for official records, but managed to sell colourful descriptions to several local newspapers. This marked his debut as a journalist (p.52). In February 1865 he persuaded a younger shipmate, Lewis Noe, to desert the ship when it was refitting in docks at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They escaped wearing civilian clothes he’d bought from some carpenters.

Rafting down the Platte river

Stanley returned to New York where he resumed working for a man named Hughes. But he wanted a life of adventure, he avidly consumed accounts of adventures, he wanted to see the West. In May 1865 Stanley travelled to St Louis and managed to wangle a job a freelancer for the Missouri Democrat. To supplement his income he got a labouring job at a smelting works. Here he picked up another acolyte, William Harlow Cook and managed to persuade him to go on an ‘adventure’ and navigate the Platte River some 600 miles from Denver to where it joins the huge Missouri river (p.57).

It was at moments like this that I began to wonder whether Jeal was pulling the reader’s leg, but then I realised he is taking these accounts directly from Stanley’s own autobiography. As Jeal is a tremendous stickler for accuracy and devotes pages of text and extensive footnotes to even tiny details of the expeditions, one assumes he has cross-checked and verified Stanley’s accounts of his early adventures, too. And Stanley and Cook did have adventures, rafting during the day, camping in a tent at night: the raft capsized, losing a lot of their equipment, they were arrested by an army officer looking for deserters till Stanley threatened to shoot it out, the righted the raft and continued the journey, till it overturned again, Cook held on and was quickly carried away while Stanley had to make his way by land to Nebraska where they were eventually reunited.

Adventure in Turkey

Stanley returned to New York with Cook in tow and was reunited with Lewis Noe and his family. Somehow Stanley now managed to persuade both Cook and Noe to accompany him on an expedition to Turkey. They sailed from Boston to Izmir where, funds being low, Stanley could only afford two horses: one of his young acolytes had to walk. The journey turned into another ruinous farce. Noe set fire to some bushes to scare Cook but started a major conflagration which saw the three Americans get arrested.

Securing a release they continued inland till another controversial incident took place where Stanley tried to murder a Turk they met with a sword: he claimed he was fighting off the Turk’s sexual advances to Noe, Cook claimed Stanley meant to murder the Turk and steal his horses (p.59). The fight attracted ten other Turks who robbed our guys of all their belongings, dragged them to a nearby village, tied them up. Noe was gang-raped at knifepoint. A local magistrate heard of their situation and had them conveyed to a proper gaol. The local judge found the alleged assailants in possession of what was obviously Stanley’s American goods and so our guys all Stanley’s were released from prison and then spent some time suing the Turkish government for compensation. Stanley contacted the American ambassador at Constantinople who reluctantly lent these shabby American chancers £150, enough to pay Noe and Stanley’s fares to Marseilles, then to Paris, London and onto Liverpool (Cook had to stay behind to give evidence in the trial).

(Later we learn that much of the substance of these adventures were ratified by Lewis Noe himself who sold his version of events, from jumping ship in Portsmouth through the Turkey debacle, to the New York Sun, when Stanley returned from the Livingstone strip and was famous.)

Denbigh again

Stanley detoured, once again, from Liverpool to Denbigh to track down his mother the publican, this time wearing an officer’s uniform he’d had knocked up in Constantinople, to impress her with what a success he had become. Once again, she was less than impressed. He stayed over Christmas, visited other relatives, tried out his new persona of Henry Morton Stanley, moped around Liverpool, again, then took ship back to America.

The Wild West

In February 1867 Stanley arrived back in St Louis and wangled a full-time job on the Missouri Democrat at the princely salary of $15 a day. The very next day he was given the assignment of reporting on General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Indian campaign against the Kiowas and the Comanches (p.67). He covered the whole campaign, describing Indian atrocities and scalpings, the army’s destruction of native villages, he interviewed Wild Bill Hickock. He was right there in the Wild West.

The imperialist principle

Jeal makes the important point that it was here, watching the native Americans being harried, murdered and burnt off their ancestral land, that Stanley imbibed the key principle of imperialism – that backward nations and peoples will fall ineluctably and unpreventably before the forces of ‘civilisation’, industrialisation and economic development. In his writings Stanley sympathised with the Indians but thought that nothing could be done to save them; modernisation was an inevitable process; if not this general then another one. And this was the hard-headed, ‘realist’ attitude he took to Africa.

The New York Herald

But a fire burned in him to see the world, to have great adventures, to go to Africa. In December 1867 he travelled to New York, to the offices of the best selling newspaper in America, the New York Herald, where he bluffed his way into an interview with the tough editor James Gordon Bennett Junior, the hard-driving editor of America’s most successful newspaper, the New York Herald. Stanley pitched his idea of going in search of Dr Livingstone, but it was too speculative for Bennett who suggested a more practical assignment – reporting on the British military expedition into Ethiopia.

Journalist in Ethiopia

In 1867 the emperor of Ethiopia, Tewodros II, had taken a British envoy and others hostage the British government despatched a force to release them. Stanley arrived in Suez in January 1868 and promptly bribed the telegraph operator to transmit his despatches before any other journalist (p.71). accompanied that force as a special correspondent of the New York Herald.

He made several big discoveries on this trip. First was that, by posing as an American, he sidestepped the wretched British class system, and was treated as an equal by the lofty British officers. He was impressed by their cult of nonchalance and aristocratic indifference and cultivated the same pose. He also discovered how to be a success, ensuring that his account of the Battle of Magdala in 1868 (where the British, predictably, whipped the Ethiopian forces) was the first to be telegraphed back to Europe and America. It was a sensational scoop which made his reputation as a journalist and secured him a permanent job at the Herald (p.72)

Spain

Bennett now treated Stanley like any foreign correspondent and sent him to trouble spots to report. In October 1868 he was sent to Spain which was experiencing a civil war between monarchists and republicans. Taking a break from reports he returned to London, where he invited his mother and half sister to visit him, now staying in a grand hotel and unambiguously a successful man of the world. He returned to Spain in 1869 and Jeal uses Stanley’s autobiography to describe Stanley’s hair-raising adventures in Madrid, running across streets as the bullets flew and barricading hotel windows to stop stray bullets in scenes reminiscent of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (p.82).

Through Asia

As you’d expect, Jeal deals with his customary thoroughness with the thorny question of who had the idea to go looking for the famous British missionary, Dr David Livingstone, who had departed for central Africa several years earlier, who nothing had been heard of for years, and who was feared dead. Was it Bennett’s idea or was it, the preferred option, a long-standing ambition of Stanley’s which he pitched an at-first sceptical Bennett?

Either way, although Bennett agreed it was a good idea, he decided to leave it on the back burner while public interest in Livingstone’s mysterious fate grew. Instead he paid for Stanley to go on journalistic assignments through ‘Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, the Crimea, Persia and finally India’ (p.85). During this year of travels Stanley reported on the opening of the Suez Canal, examined excavations in Jerusalem, visited Odessa and the battlefields of the Crimea, interviewed the governor of the Caucasus at Tiflis and travelled to the Persian Gulf via Persepolis.

Go ahead for the Livingstone expedition

He ended up in Bombay in October 1870, which is where he finally received the go-ahead from Bennett to proceed with the expedition to find Livingstone who was, still, ‘lost’, his whereabouts unknown. With promise of full funding Stanley set sail from Bombay across the Indian Ocean to Zanzibar, the traditional provisioning and jumping off point for east central Africa, in January 1871 (p.91).

It’s important to emphasise that there had been some news about Livingstone. In November 1869 the Bombay Gazette had published a letter Livingstone had sent from the interior, dated 6 months earlier and stating he was at the town of Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. And this was, indeed, where Stanley was to find him.

Provisioning an African expedition

But the journey inland was perilous and logistically challenging. In the absence of any roads or wheeled vehicles or pack animals who could survive the dreaded tsetse fly, all provisions had to be carried by porters, hundreds of porters, who as well as food and drink carried the trade goods and gifts which had to be doled out liberally to all the tribal chiefs whose territory had to be crossed.

Jeal goes into characteristic detail about the funding, recruiting and provisioning for the great adventure. He hired local porter managers who had helped other explorers with their expeditions, and four white men to act as companions. Stanley led his large force out of Bagamoyo, the coastal port opposite Zanzibar, and into the interior on 21 March 1871. He had just turned thirty years old.

Summary of Stanley’s early life

What a life he had led! Just reading about his exploits is exhausting. Rejected by his mother, abandoned by his family, workhouse boy in a swamp of depravity, self educated, runaway to America where he acquired a new identity and reinvented himself as a buccaneering journalist in the Wild West, leader of absurd adventures on rivers and into faraway Turkey before bluffing his way into a top job as foreign correspondent with America’s premier newspaper, reporting from all over Europe and the Middle East. And only now, aged 30, embarking on the great adventure which would make his name and which, in turn, inaugurated 16 years of exploring, trekking, fighting, signing trade deals and mapping out huge swathes of unexplored central Africa.

He had packed more into his life before he set out to find Livingstone, aged 29, than many adventurers could claim to have experienced in their entire lives. (p.469)

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by Simon on August 30, 2021 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on August 30, 2021

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Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn (1992)

Frank McLynn

McLynn, 80 this year, has made a very successful career as an author, biographer, historian and journalist, having written some 30 books. He clearly aims to produce enjoyable, accessible and non-scholarly histories and biographies for a wide audience. This is suggested, among other things by his use of casual and rather boys’ own adventure story diction:

It was the Moors who had done for Major Houghton. (p.16)
His plight was grim. His horse was on its last legs. (p.16)
The Landers shook the dust of Badagry off their shoes with gusto and plunged into the wilderness… (p.27)
The master of the Thomas proved to be a blackguard. (p.30)
Speke would not have to fear the supercilious basilisk eye from a superior beetling brow, as with Burton, every time he wandered off to slaughter a few dozen of Africa’s wildlife.
Once again the expedition came within an ace of disaster… (p.104)
Meanwhile the Upper Nile was proving a hell on earth… (p.119)

I found McLynn’s book about the Mexican Revolution very useful, accessible and gripping, and was impressed by his talent for shaping the complicated facts into a compelling narrative. But that book had the advantage of telling the story of a huge social upheaval through the lives of just two legendary figures who are central to the entire drama, which itself only covered a period of about 20 years.

Here the challenge is the reverse: there were hundreds of European explorers to Africa, most of them undertook more than one expedition, many stayed for years carrying out complex sequences of explorations, and the total period of Western exploration lasted about a century (from 1788 to around 1890). In other words, there’s a lot more subject matter to cover and so it’s harder for this book not to feel more scattered and diffuse.

Brief history of exploration up to the European era

The ancient Greeks and Romans probed into Africa but never crossed the barrier of the Sahara or managed to penetrate far up the Nile. From the seventh century, Muslim Arab traders explored the east coast of Africa, set up numerous settlements and established a lucrative trade in black slaves. From the 1480s onwards the Portuguese created stopping off points on their circumnavigation of Africa to reach India. But McLynn tells us that the accepted date for the start of the ‘modern’ exploration of Africa is 1788. For it was in this year that the African Association was set up in London by a dozen London businessmen led by Sir Joseph Banks, the noted botanist who accompanied Captain Cook on his journeys to the South Seas.

The African Association (to give it its proper name, The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa) sponsored a series of expeditions throughout the 1790s, then activity went into abeyance for the duration of the wars with France (1793 to 1815) before being revived once peace returned. As soon as you google this subject you discover it is extremely well covered online and there is a recognised and much repeated canon of early explorers, namely:

Pre-Napoleonic war explorers

John Ledyard, set off 1788, died in Cairo aged 37.
Simon Lucas, departed Tripoli 1788; forced to abandon expedition south by tribal wars.
Daniel Houghton, 1790, penetrated deep up the river Gambia in West Africa before being robbed and murdered aged 51.
Mungo Park, 1795, penetrated further into West Africa than any European to date, discovering that the Niger flowed east, but died in the attempt to travel the length of the Niger by canoe, murdered or drowned it’s not clear to this day, age 35.
Friedrich Hornemann, 1797, set off from Cairo to travel across the Sahara to Timbuktu and was never heard of again; if he died around 1800, he would have been 28.

Post-Napoleonic war explorers

Alexander Gordon Laing, Scottish, first European to reach Timbuktu in 1826, being murdered by Tuareg soon afterwards, aged 31.
René Caillié, son of a convict (!) first explorer to visit Timbuktu (in 1828) and return to tell the tale, before dying of ill health and tuberculosis aged 38.
Heinrich Barth, considered one of the greatest of the European explorers of Africa for his scholarliness and commitment to learning Arabic, spent five years living in Sudan, crossing the Sahara to West Africa, first person to visit remote Timbuktu since Caillié (in 1853).
Charles John Andersson, explored south-west Africa from his base in Cape Town, at one stage was a war lord to the Damara tribe, died of fever aged 40.
Karl Mauch, son of a Bavarian carpenter, taught himself and scraped the money to travel to South Africa, where he worked to earn the funds to pay for an expedition up into south-east Africa. He discovered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in 1872, but was ignored when he returned to Germany and died in poverty aged 37.

General conclusions

McLynn draws a handful of conclusions from these early pioneers:

1. Exploring Africa was a young man’s game.

2. All the explorers fell ill, very seriously ill, multiple times, and a high percentage, even of the young and fit, died.

3. This didn’t stop the obsessive ambition of many of the most successful ones to be ‘the first man to see’ whatever feature they had been sent by the Association to discover: the fabled city of Timbuktu, the origins of the river Niger, various waterfalls and so on.

4. African exploration was connected to low birth. It presented an opportunity to people condemned to lifetimes of lowly obeisance in Britain’s class structure, to make a splash, to make a name for themselves, to achieve wealth and status. Simon Lucas was the son of a vintner. David Livingstone was one of seven children who grew up in a tenement in a grim Scottish mill town and was sent aged ten to a cotton mill where he and his brother John worked twelve-hour days as piecers, tying broken cotton threads on the spinning machines. Henry Morton Stanley was abandoned by his mother and spent ten years from the ages of 6 to 16 in a remote Welsh workhouse.

5. Many of the explorers were Celts, outsiders to the English establishment: Mungo Park and David Livingstone came from lowly backgrounds in Scotland, Stanley from a wretched workhouse in rural Wales. Hugh Clapperton from Annan, Dumfriesshire (died of dysentery in Sokoto, aged 38). Richard Lander, son of a Truro innkeeper (died on the Niger river, aged 29) and so on.

6. Expeditions do not bring people together. Many of these trips are notorious for the extreme hatred and bitterness they engendered between the protagonists. Most notorious is the tremendous falling out between the famous Arabist Richard Francis Burton and the big game hunter John Hanning Speke on their 1858 expedition from Zanzibar into East Africa, during which they mapped Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria, which lasted after they returned to England and pursued a feud against each other in the press right up till the day of Speke’s death (or suicide?) in 1860.

A blizzard of names and dates

McLynn plunges straight into accounts of these early expeditions, telling them in pared-down, summary style with the result that I felt bombarded by names – of European explorers and of the countless villages and towns they discovered/arrived at, and the plethora of Africa tribes with their kings and sheikhs who they encountered, traded with, fought against and so on. I soon realised I was never going to remember.

Much more interesting and enduring are the broader points he makes about Africa in general and the perils of European exploration in particular.

The African scene

Pitiful agriculture

Most African cultures lived right on the breadline, on the border of starvation (p.146). This was caused by poor soil, poor climate and erratic rains which, in the tropical regions, fell almost constantly all year round. Many Africans lived on a very basic diet of yams, manioc, corn, supplemented by berries and fruits, only rarely fish or meat protein. There was rarely the kind of guaranteed agricultural surplus which had allowed for the creation of complex civilisations in the Fertile Crescent and then across the Middle East and Europe for millennia.

Therefore, even a slight incursion by outsiders, let alone domineering white men leading a train of 300 porters, could upset delicate ecological balances and plunge villages and entire regions into famine. In fact the explorers regularly came across whole regions which were in famine conditions, where the locals were starving and where, therefore, no food could be bought for their huge trains for any amount of calico or beads (e.g. pp.217 to 219)..

And this explains many tribes’ fierce protectiveness of their territory and the often hostile response of African leaders to the arrival of the explorers and their huge hungry trains.

Tsetse flies

Tsetse flies were a menace to humans and livestock in Africa. They are to this day.

Tsetse flies, through the cyclical transmission of trypanosomiasis to both humans and their animals, greatly influence food production, natural-resource utilization and the pattern of human settlement throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. It is estimated that the annual direct production losses in cattle alone amount to between US$6bn and $12billion, while animal deaths may reach 3 million. (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization)

Lack of pack animals

There was a lack of pack animals or domesticable animals such as had underpinned the development of civilisation across Eurasia, which was home to oxen, cattle, donkeys but above all horses, which had performed a key economic function for millennia.

The evidence was overwhelming that all domesticated animals, whether oxen, camels, mules, horses or camels, succumbed very soon to the effects of climate and disease once taken north of 5°N. (p.132)

Later on he links the lack of pack animals to one central factor, the tsetse fly which transmitted the trypanasomes which caused ‘sleeping sickness’.

It was the tsetse that has barred passage to black Africa by killing off the Arabs’ horses and camels. The fly also kept the technology of black Africa primitive, since, deprived of animals, the African could hand plough only small plots of land, had no transport and lacked a source of first class protein. (p.240)

Lacking any kind of pack animals, most sub-Saharan cultures were primitive in the extreme. (The importance of domesticatable animals and of the wide range of edible grasses to the rise of Eurasian civilisations is explained in Jared Diamond’s 1997 classic Guns, Germs and Steel.)

Hundreds of porters

Therefore, an enduring feature of African exploration was simply that humans had to carry everything. (McLynn does describe a handful of explorations which experimented with horses, donkeys and even elephants, but in every case the animals wasted and died, leaving the human porters with even more to carry.) Hence native porters numbering in the hundreds. McLynn reports that of all the different tribes the Nyamwezi were head and shoulders the most reliable, foresightful and organised of porters. On the east Africa coast, at Zanzibar and the vital coastal town of Bagamoyo, huge numbers of porters were available and certain individual porters rose to prominence, were able to organise and manage their peers and so were hired by successive explorers and feature in accounts of successive expeditions.

Expeditions routinely included two to three hundred porters, and Stanley’s exceptionally well funded ones, up to 800! He had to be a master of organisation, man management and discipline, and McLynn gives examples of moments when European masters either a) managed to, or b) miserably failed to, maintain discipline and rank.

Lack of roads

Explorers discovered an almost complete lack of transport infrastructure. Most of the rivers were too large to be navigable or presented obstacles such as rapids and waterfalls. Roads through tropical jungle were impossible to maintain, so most people used narrow tracks.

‘The pathway seldom exceeded two feet in width, with tress and tall grasses growing up to its edges.’ (Alfred Swann, quoted on page 133)

There were few if any roads as understood in the developed world, nothing like canals and nothing remotely like Western railways. McLynn tells us Western-style tarmaced roads, and railways, didn’t really arrive in Africa till the 1930s.

The perils of European exploration

Sub-Saharan Africa remained unexplored for so long for a number of reasons.

No navigable rivers

Most African rivers debouch into sandbanks and have neither natural bays nor deep estuaries which characterise European and American rivers and allow ships to anchor and navigate upstream. If ships did anchor, water-borne explorers found it impossible to proceed far upriver because of rapids, cascades and waterfalls.

Violent humans

Anyway, chances are they would be attacked by any of the complicated patchwork of tribes and regional warlords who fiercely protected their territory. A simple motive for African violence and resentment was related to the dire poverty of most African communities but there were also continual low-level conflicts between neighbouring tribes; there are calculated to have been around 700 distinct tribes. But as MacLynn emphasises, Africans owed far more allegiance to their villages, village elders and traditions. There were hundreds of religions, mostly primitive ancestor or fetish worship.

What this amounts to in the book is a blizzard of names of the kings of umpteen different tribes and regions which the explorers pass through, most at war with all their neighbours, thus making negotiating with them for safe passage very dicey, plus all these rulers tended to want presents and dues. Hence the enormous trains of porters the explorers required to carry not only their food and weapons and tents etc, but also a sizeable treasury of Western goodies to be handed over to the series of rulers they had to mollify. The African word for it was hongo which translates as ‘tribute’ or ‘bribe’, depending on your worldview. As the (admittedly rabidly anti-African explorer) Samuel White Baker complained:

‘It is the rapacity of the chiefs of the various tribes that render African exploration so difficult.’ (quoted on page 75)

And plenty of explorers were just murdered outright by nomads, bandits, lawless tribals. McLynn gives a vivid account of the attack by the Eesa tribe on the expedition of Burton, Speke, Stroyan and Herne along with 42 porters encamped just outside the town of Berbera on the coast of Somaliland on the night of 19 April 1855. Lieutenant Stroyan was killed outright, Burton took a spear thrust through one cheek and out the other but managed to run to the beach and safety while Speke was captured, suffered spear thrusts in eleven places including right through one thigh, was tied up and threatened with castration until he was left in the care of one armed guard who he managed to knock out before also running to the sea where he was discovered by rescuers then following morning (p.255).

Violent animals

No continent has so many fierce animals as Africa. Lions routinely attacked and killed members of exhibitions. If travelling by water, crocodiles and the surprisingly aggressive hippopotamus were a peril. Aggressive birds attacked larger animals, for example camels, leaving wounds which festered and killed.

Heat

Explorers died of simple heatstroke or from the combo of heat and high humidity in forest regions.

Disease

But disease was the most obvious peril. All Europeans attempting travel into sub-Saharan Africa quickly became ill, often seriously ill. Malaria, typhoid, ophthalmia, and any number of causes of diarrhoea, afflicted almost all European explorers with devastating consequences. Half the explorers who set out were killed by disease; most of the survivors emerged severely weakened by prolonged illness with lingering debilitating effects. McLynn mentions smallpox, fever, ague, amoebic and bacillic dysentery, guinea worm, ulcers acquired when scratches (from thorn bushes or tall sharp grass) got infected and festered in the heat and humidity, bronchitis, pneumonia, rheumatism, sciatica, athsma, dropsy, emphysema, erysipelas, elephantiasis, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), bilharzia, filariasis, hookworm infestation (ankylostomiasis), river blindness (onchocerciasis), exanthematic typhus, yaws and leprosy.

Regularly you read that the explorers were laid up for months on end with fever and dysentery, or rendered so weak they literally couldn’t walk and had to be carried in hammocks. In fact McLynn devotes an entire chapter, chapter 11, to the subject (pages 227 to 252).

Attrition rates

Thus it was that all the expeditions suffered appalling death rates. For example, Stanley left Bagamoyo in mid-November 1874 with 4 white companions and 342 African porters. By the end of February 1875, 181 had been lost to famine, illness, desertion or attacks by tribesmen. On the Emin Pasha expedition, Stanley left Zanzibar in spring 1887 with 708 men. Two and a half years later only 210 returned (p.152). The situation was summed up by the German explorer Wilhelm Junker:

‘Famine and disease are the chief causes of the depopulation of Central Africa; in comparison with these the export of slaves is but a small item.’ (quoted on page 117)

No profit

And, despite all the rumours of treasure and secret cities and rare gems and valuable resources, it turned out to be impossible to make a profit from any of these expeditions. They were either sponsored by national geographic associations, by missionary organisations, or by wealthy backers (p.146). None of the explorers McLynn describes got involved in any businesses set up to trade with Africa, there were few if any businesses involved there. Stanley came the closest, in the sense that he was central to helping King Leopold of Belgium set up his evil and rapacious regime in the Congo, but that was more slave exploitation than a ‘business’. A number of explorers ended their days as colonial administrators, such as da Brazza, Frederick Lugard and Carl Peters. But most came home, wrote up their experiences and lived off their ublications and lectures.

The great British explorers

Having skated through the early pioneers McLynn slows down and pays more attention to the famous expeditions of David Livingstone, Richard Burton (the first European to see Lake Tanganyika, which he wrongly thought must be the source of the Nile) and John Hanning Speke whose joint expedition was sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society and lasted from 1856 to 1859.

Burton and Speke were involved in the great quest to find the source of the mighty river Nile. Speke won, showing that its main source is Lake Victoria, to the anger of the far more scholarly and conscientious Burton, who made the wrong call when he attributed the source to Lake Tanganyika. On their return to England in 1859 they embarked on a long and bitter war of words through the press and pamphlets.

And Samuel White Baker, who I’d never heard of but, apparently, was second only to Livingstone in popular fame, for his extensive 4-year-long explorations around the Great Lakes region of central east Africa (1861 to 1865).

Baker was the first European to see Lake Albert and a substantial waterfall on the Victoria Nile which he named Murchison Falls after the then-president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison. Back in Blighty he wrote a considerable number of books and published articles which bolstered his reputation as the grand old man of Africa exploration and an expert on the Nile, though he was almost as famous for his extravagant big game hunting on four continents, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

Suppressing the slave trade

Britain abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807. The actual state of enslavement i.e. slavery as a whole, wasn’t abolished, and existing slaves freed, until 1833. By the 1850s suppression of the slave trade carried on by other nations had become a major moral crusade for the British. The Royal Navy had an Africa squadron specifically tasked with patrolling the west African coast and intercepting slave ships, forcing them to return their captives to Africa.

In east and central Africa where the great competition to find the source of the Nile played out, there was a long established slave trade run by Arabs, capturing and transporting black Africans up the coast to the Muslim world. High-minded missionaries like David Livingstone raised funds and publicity by their stated aim of combining geographical exploration with steps to suppress the slave trade. Baker was another Brit who boosted his reputation among high-minded Victorians by emphasising his anti-slavery credentials, without much justification, in McLynn’s view.

Yet McLynn brings out how ambiguous the relationship between British explorer and Arab slaver could be on the ground, in reality. This is epitomised in the career of Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, better known by his nickname, Tippu Tip, which is Swahili for ‘gatherer of wealth’. Born in 1832 in Zanzibar, Tippu rose to become one of the wealthiest men of his time, based on his twin trades in ivory and slaves. Eventually he became the leading slave trader in East Africa, supplying the Muslim world with hundreds of thousands of black slaves and himself owning plantations worked by an estimated 10,000 enslaved blacks.

The point is that if you were a white man who wanted to explore central Africa from the most reliable starting point of Zanzibar, you had to reach an accommodation with Tippu who had established and ran the key trading posts, watering holes, provision stores and so on on the main routes inland from the coast to the great lakes, from Bagamoyo on the coast via the trading entrepot of Tabora, which was equidistant from Lake Tanganyika in the west and Lake Victoria in the north. And so David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, to name the most famous, were forced to forge working relationships with Tippu.

It was one thing to make grand declarations in Britain about abolishing the east Africa slave trade; it was quite another to find yourself amid rich, powerful men who ran it, who had everything to lose by its abolition, and try to reach practical accommodations with them.

Tippu Tip was famous enough to feature on the front cover of the Illustrated London News, 7 December 1889 issue.

Later, non-British explorers

After the high profile, super-publicised expeditions of Livingstone, Stanley, Burton, Speke and Baker, the narrative goes on to describe scores of lesser figures. The Big Names are big because they sketched out the really central issue of African geography, they were the ones who traced the paths of the major rivers (the Niger, Congo, Zambezi and Nile) and discovered the complex of great lakes in east-central Africa. The created the frame and established the broad shapes, like completing the border round a jigsaw.

But there was still a huge amount of work to be done to join the dots, for example to work out the order of flow between the umpteen lakes in the African lake district which eventually led into the sources of the Nile, or to identify each of the scores of tributaries of the river Congo – and this was done by a host of lesser names, most of them not British and therefore not enshrined in our national history.

McLynn notes that two other nationalities became prominent: Belgian explorers, once King Leopold had established his ‘right’ to the vast Congo basin at the 1885 Congress of Berlin; and the same event crystallised the urgency among German politicians and scientists to secure their slice of the African pie, so there was a notable upswing in the number of German explorers, for example George Schweinfurth.

This left the French who, as usual, burned with envy and at the successes of their hated rivals, the British, and spurred them on, post 1880, to map and seize as much territory as possible. The national rivalry was made plain in the individual rivalry between Stanley, who was contracted to explore and establish waystations along the river Congo by Leopold of Belgium well into the 1890s, and the lead French explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who also explored the Congo basin in the 1870s and 80s, going on to become a French colonial administrator in the 1890s. The capital of the Republic of the Congo was named Brazzaville in his honour and retains the name to this day.

A body of work was done by ‘Gordon’s men’, a set of adventurers hired by General Gordon when he was governor of Equitoria province in the service of the Khedive of Egypt in the 1870s, who included Emin Pasha (despite his name, actually a German Jew born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer), Frederick Burnaby, Rudolph Slatkin, Romolo Gessi, Mason Bey, Gaetano Casati, Linant de Bellefonds, Carlo PIaggia and others. McLynn gives us brief pen portraits of these men and their exploratorial adventures.

Kenya, of all African countries the one with the climate most congenial to Europeans, was, surprisingly, one of the last to be explored, an achievement credited to the trio of Joseph Thomson, Harry Johnston and Samuel Yeleki.

The end of exploration

The era of exploration by dashing individuals drew to an end during the 1880s and may be considered over by 1890 (p.128). It was replaced by the era of colonialism i.e. the now-surveyed and mapped areas passed into the administration of the European nations which had drawn lines on maps and defined administrative areas at Berlin. Administrative regions were consolidated into ‘nations’. The map of Africa as we know it today crystallised during the 1890s and turn of the century. In most cases it was a continual process of ongoing accretion and centralisation.

To take Nigeria as an example. Britain annexed the coast region of Lagos as a crown colony in August 1861. At the Berlin Conference in 1885, Britain’s claims to a West African sphere of influence were recognised. The next year, in 1886, Britain set up the Royal Niger Company under the leadership of Sir George Taubman Goldie, which proceeded to subjugate the independent kingdoms along the Niger River, conquering Benin in 1897 and other regional leaders in the Anglo-Aro War (1901 to 1902). In 1900, the company’s territory came under the direct control of the British government which established the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. The British then moved north to subdue the Sokoto Caliphate, which was defeated at the Battle of Kano in 1903 and the British set up the Northern Nigeria Protectorate. By 1906 all resistance to British rule had ended. On 1 January 1914 the British formally united the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and the Northern Nigeria Protectorate into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. 46 years later, Nigeria gained independence from the United Kingdom on 1 October 1960.

A thumbnail sketch of how exploration passed on to patchwork colonial administration, government takeover, integration of various territories into a nation, which then fought for and gained its independence.

Bad maps

The maps are terrible. You’d have thought the people producing a book entirely about exploration would realise the importance of maps showing just what was explored, when and by who.

1. The book does contain about 14 maps but, as my vagueness implies, there is no list or index of them at the front.

2. Far worse, though, is that none of the maps have titles or numbers. So a map suddenly appears in the text but you have no idea what it’s meant to be showing. Of course, you can see it depicts a bit of Africa, but there’s no indication why, you have to deduce this from the text.

3. When I read the accounts of the first few explorers described, Daniel Houghton, Mungo Park, Joseph Ritchie, Hugh Clapperton and others, the text mentioned the African villages and towns they travelled to but none of these appeared in the map. I spent ten minutes trying in vain to find any of the placenames mentioned in these expeditions on the bloody map. There were lots of places indicated on the map but none of these appeared in the text! What?

4. Worst of all hardly any of the maps show the single most important thing you want to know, which is the routes of the actual expeditions. The first couple of maps, which show the river Niger and the region around Lake Chad appear to be there to show the first few explorations of the region in the late 1700s but there is no indication of the routes taken by the explorers named in the text. Later maps, relating to Burton and Speke or LIvingstone and Stanley, do bother to have routes marked on the maps but no title indicating whose journeys they were. In every instance a quick google of the expedition in question produced umpteen maps on the internet showing quite clearly the route you need to be able to see in order to make sense of the narrative.

The poorness of the maps is a real limitation of this book.

African words

Obviously, hundreds of languages were and are spoken across this vast continent. McLynn’s text mentions certain key words in Swahili:

askaris – soldiers
chikote – strip of hide used as a whip
hongo – bribes or tribute to chiefs
kanda – long, narrow canvas carry bag
karaba – a brass measure for rations
kitanda – litter (to carry people in)
madala – weights hung at each end of a pole carried over the shoulders
masika – season of heavy rain
mukongwa – slave fork in which the slave’s head was fastened
pagazi – porter
posho – daily rice ration
ruga-ruga – irregular troops or mercenaries
tembe – camp or base
wangwana – ‘sons of the free’

English words

McLynn enjoys writing and is a pleasure to read. Along with his occasional boys’-own-adventure register, he sprinkles the text with recherché terms which are a pleasure to look up in a dictionary and savour.

febrifuge – a medicine to reduce fever
feculent – of or containing dirt, sediment, or waste matter
fuliginous – sooty, dusty
lacustrine – relating to or associated with lakes
ophiolatry – worship of snakes
riverine – relating to or situated on a river or riverbank; riparian
rugose – wrinkled or corrugated
thaumaturge – a worker of wonders and performer of miracles, a magician
the veridical – the truth

Credit

Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn was published in 1992 by Hutchinson. All references are to the 1993 Pimlico paperback edition.

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by Simon on August 23, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History, Slavery

Tagged Africa, African Association, ague, Alexander Gordon Laing, Alfred Swann, Anglo-Aro War, askari, athsma, Bagamoyo, Battle of Kano, Benin, Berbera, Biography, Brazza, Brazzaville, British Empire, bronchitis, Burton, Cape Town, Carlo PIaggia, Charles John Andersson, chikote, colonialism, Congo, Congo basin, Congress of Berlin, Daniel Houghton, David Livingstone, diarrhoea, disease, dropsy, dysentery, elephantiasis, Emin Pasha, Emin Pasha relief expedition, emphysema, Equitoria, erysipelas, fever, Frank McLynn, Frederick Burnaby, Friedrich Hornemann, Gaetano Casati, General Gordon, geography, George Schweinfurth, George Taubman Goldie, Great Zimbabwe, guinea worm, Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, Harry Johnston, Heinrich Barth, Henry Morton Stanley, history, hongo, Hugh Clapperton, Illustrated London News, imperialism, Jared Diamond, John Hanning Speke, John Ledyard, Joseph Ritchie, Joseph Thomson, Karl Mauch, Khedive of Egypt, Lake Albert, Lake Chad, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Victoria, Leopold of Belgium, Linant de Bellefonds, malaria, Mason Bey, Mungo Park, Murchison Falls, Niger, Nigeria, Nile, Northern Nigeria Protectorate, ophthalmia, pagazi, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, pneumonia, porters, René Caillié, Republic of the Congo, rheumatism, Richard Burton, Richard Francis Burton, Richard Lander, River Congo, River Gambia, River Niger, River Nile, River Zambezi, Roderick Murchison, Romolo Gessi, Royal Geographic Society, Royal Navy, Rudolph Slatkin, ruga-ruga, Sahara, Samuel White Baker, Samuel Yeleki, sciatica, Simon Lucas, Sir Joseph Banks, slave trade, Slavery, smallpox, Sokoto Caliphate, Somaliland, Southern Nigeria Protectorate, Speke, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sudan, Swahili, Tabora, tembe, Timbuktu, Tippu Tip, Tuareg, typhoid, ulcers, wangwana, West Africa, Wilhelm Junker, Zambezi, Zanzibar

Posted by Simon on August 23, 2021

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