Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

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Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays Page 11

by Adam Hochschild


  The weights Johnny uses to measure gold are kitcheles—penny-size coins that date from forty or fifty years ago, when Congo still used coins. Now, after decades of headlong inflation, there are only bills. Each seller is paid with a big brick of them, since even the largest denomination is worth less than $1. The person whom Johnny is buying from when we come in, a stocky, silent man of perhaps forty, who doesn’t want to say where his gold came from and looks too old to have mined the metal himself, Van Woudenberg and Bisubu think; he’s probably a middleman who spent the day buying from miners. He walks off with a wad of bills about three inches thick, worth some $60.

  Most of the men who sell gold to Johnny spend some of their earnings in his store, buying soft drinks, rice, biscuits, toilet paper, sardines, flour, or lanterns, all arrayed on shelves behind him. He also sells mining supplies, of which the most important, for the equivalent of $5 apiece, are shovel blades; one of these lasts two months, less if you’re digging in rocky soil. But, as always seems to be the case in Congo, the shop’s profits are going elsewhere, for this is not Johnny’s own business, he explains; its patron, or owner, is in Butembo, many hours away. He calls Johnny every morning on his cell phone—there are no landlines here—to tell him the price to pay for gold that day.

  • • •

  The next morning we jounce and bump a half-hour farther into the hills, past the village of round huts that will vanish if AngloGold Ashanti digs its open-pit mine, to the small town of Pili-Pili. From its one sweltering, sunbaked dirt street we descend another half-hour on foot, on a path that goes steeply downward into a valley, past flame trees with red blossoms, butterflies flitting about blue flowers, and grass that reaches higher than our heads.

  On a patch of land most of the way down is a camp where hundreds of miners live. These are people mining by hand, many of whom may be thrown out of work as industrial mining starts up again. The miners are divided into teams of up to fifteen men, who live here in huts whose walls are reddish mud packed around interwoven sticks. The overhanging roofs are grass thatch; sometimes a blue plastic sheet with a UNICEF emblem—from aid supplies to refugee camps—is thrown on top for additional rain-proofing. All food, drinking water, and mining tools are carried in. On the walls of the camp chief’s dirt-floored hut are two large Inauguration Day posters of Barack Obama.

  It’s only about 10 a.m., but the tropical sun is already broiling. We keep on descending, and farther down the trail we stop to talk to a young miner with a gentle smile and intelligent eyes, walking back uphill to Pili-Pili. His name is Alex, and he is twenty-two. He says he had to drop out of high school two years ago for lack of money and has been mining ever since. “There is no work in Congo. We suffer a lot.” He and the friend who is with him, he explains, are cascadeurs—a word that most commonly means movie stuntmen but here refers to someone working in a pair or on his own, who does not belong to one of the fifteen-man teams. Alex shows us a small plastic bag of sand with tiny flecks of gold in it, which, he estimates, the two of them can sell in Pili-Pili for the equivalent of $1. That’s their usual take for an entire day, and they are delighted to have found this much so early. They bid us a warm goodbye and continue up the trail.

  The bottom of the valley is dotted with clusters of men in their teens and twenties. Miners usually have to buy their places on these fifteen-man teams, often going into debt to do so. We talk to men in one group, who say they started work by lantern light at 3 a.m. to get as much as possible done before the midday heat. Shovels are their only visible hand tools, and with them they have gouged out of the side of the hill an indentation perhaps twenty feet wide and twenty deep. At the bottom of it, they’ve also dug a tunnel about three feet high, with just enough room to enter on your hands and knees. It extends twelve to fifteen feet into the earth, as far as you can go without danger of the tunnel collapsing. They believe the dirt farther back has a higher concentration of gold.

  A man-high mound of red earth from all their digging is piled up next to the stream that runs along the valley floor, and now two of the men turn to another task: one tossing shovel-loads of dirt and the other pouring pans of water into a homemade chute of boards. Mud flows down the chute, across a patch of woolen blanket crossed by leafy twigs, which slow down the flow and give the heavier gold a chance to sink to the blanket, where the shiny specks stick and can be carefully removed. A majority of these men, they tell us with smiles and laughter as we ask each in turn, are former fighters from rival militias. But now this past seems forgotten as they all focus on finding enough gold to survive.

  On an average day the team finds $30 to $50 worth of gold to divide fifteen ways. Off the top, however, 30 percent (after a hefty initial fee before the team could even start working here) has to be given to the patron who has the mining rights to this site. Gold miners then face a variety of other fees, the largest of which is about $3 per week per miner in payoffs to the army or police, as protection against harassment. What’s left, for the average Ituri miner and his family, is roughly $40 to $60 a month.

  Finally, we head up the trail again, wanting to climb back to Pili-Pili before the sun reaches its zenith. A miner coming down who passes us wears a T-shirt from one of those imported bales of cheap second-hand clothing; across the chest is printed in English “staytruedreamtrue.” Passing back through the miners’ camp, we stop to chat for a moment about how hard the work looks and how meager the rewards. One man says simply, “We’re on automatic.”

  Back on Pili-Pili’s main street, we run into Alex and his friend, the cascadeurs. They’ve sold their dollar’s worth of gold from this morning, he says, and with it bought themselves a breakfast of green beans. Now they’re about to head back down to the valley again to try to find enough gold to buy dinner.

  2010

  EIGHT

  A Showman in the Rainforest

  FEW HISTORICAL FIGURES SEE THEIR STOCK RISE and fall as dramatically as do explorers. Poor Columbus, formerly revered for discovering the New World, now has Native American protests on the holiday named after him. Robert Falcon Scott, once widely admired for reaching the South Pole, these days is seen as a bumbler who started off too late in the season, brought too little food, and, refusing to use dogs to haul his sleds the final half of his journey, led himself and four exhausted colleagues to a frozen end. His famous last letters about dying for king and country now seem an eerie preview of the senseless deaths of the First World War.

  The nineteenth century’s most celebrated explorers were Dr. David Livingstone and Sir Henry Morton Stanley. Livingstone, the elder of the two, a physician and missionary, was the first European to cross Africa, where he named a great cataract Victoria Falls after his country’s queen, and survived dozens of bouts with tropical diseases and one mauling by a lion. He also crusaded against the slave trade between the east coast of Africa and the Islamic world, which continued after the Atlantic slave trade ended. Physically brave, morally righteous, man of God and man of science, Livingstone was the perfect hero for Britons who wanted to believe that their increasing interest in Africa was a wholly altruistic one.

  In 1866, Livingstone set off on a new expedition, one of the aims of which was to find the source of the Nile, an age-old European obsession. When he hadn’t been heard from for many months, the enterprising publisher of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett Jr., sent the young Stanley, his star reporter, in pursuit. After a long and harrowing journey, Stanley was finally able to utter—if we are to believe him—his famous “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” The two men hit it off and began to explore together; they traveled by boat around the northern end of Lake Tanganyika hoping to find the Nile flowing out but, to their disappointment, found another river flowing in. Nearby, they came upon and christened the New York Herald Islands. Stanley then returned home with the journalistic scoop of the century.

  Stanley became a promoter of colonialism and the most successful travel writer of modern times. Several more African expeditions lay ahead
of him, most notably a thousand-day trek across the continent, from 1874 to 1877, which for the first time determined the course of the Congo River and led to the colonization of its enormous watershed. He was the right hero for the Scramble for Africa, when Europeans wanted to be told that they were doing a good thing in civilizing the African barbarians, by force if necessary. It is no accident that so many of Stanley’s books have “dark” in the title: In Darkest Africa, Through the Dark Continent, My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories.

  Livingstone died in Africa in 1873, after braving more illness, plodding farther, and sometimes finding himself neck-deep in swampy water that was not, alas, the Nile. When his body was brought back to England, it was greeted at Southampton by a 21-gun salute and a special train to convey it to London. At his funeral in Westminster Abbey, the Prince of Wales and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli were among the mourners. Stanley was equally lionized. When he married some two decades later, it was also in the Abbey, and his coach needed a mounted police escort to get through the wildly cheering crowds. Queen Victoria sent the bride a locket with thirty-eight diamonds. Presidents, kings, and generals were eager to meet him, and as he made a lucrative lecture tour of the United States and Canada, it was in a private railway car named the Henry M. Stanley.

  There are more than a hundred biographies of Livingstone alone, and a bibliography from some years ago of works having to do with the two explorers lists 1,766 titles, including Stanley und Livingstone, Stanley et Livingstone, and Stanley y Livingstone. An international Victoria Falls of words and images still pours forth: TV documentaries, museum exhibits, a Swedish novel in the voice of one of Stanley’s followers. Christie’s recently sold a collection of Stanley memorabilia, including his Winchester rifle and a water-stained map, for more than a million dollars. Despite the continuing public fascination with the two men, however, the way people look at them has changed sharply. The 1960s, a time of major cultural upheavals and the end of colonial rule in most of Africa, were the Continental Divide of revisionism. Few heroes survived intact, particularly if they were white men in sun helmets trekking through the bush and staking out colonies.

  Stanley has fared especially badly. He was driven to his extraordinary feats of exploration by intense shame about his origins, as an out-of-wedlock child named John Rowlands who grew up mostly in a Welsh poorhouse. For a long time, he passed himself off as American-born: Mark Twain even sent congratulations to his “fellow Missourian” on finding Livingstone. Then, as the secret of his early years leaked out, he spun further fictions about his life. About his first two great expeditions to Africa there was no one to contradict him because, most conveniently, the few other white men involved all died along the way. In Stanley’s telling, they were cared for by their benevolent leader to the end. “I sprang to him—only in time, however, to see him take his last gasp,” he says of one. No journalists bothered to interview these expeditions’ surviving African porters, and so Stanley got to shape his own heroic story unhindered. In the past few decades, however, critical biographers, principally Richard Hall, John Bierman, and Frank McLynn, have begun to pull it apart.

  Among much else, these writers examined various claims that Stanley made about his youth. According to his Autobiography, the teen-age immigrant to America was given a job, then taken in and adopted by a kindly New Orleans cotton merchant named Henry Stanley and his wife. In 1859, Mrs. Stanley died tragically, of yellow fever, but not before saying, “Be a good boy. God bless you!” Soon afterward, her widower embraced his adopted son and told him that “in future you are to bear my name.” The two became constant companions, reading aloud to each other, discussing the Bible, traveling on Mississippi riverboats. Then, sadly, in 1861, this generous adoptive father followed his wife to Heaven. Records show, however, that the elder Stanleys lived until 1878 and that their adopted children were both girls. The future explorer stayed not in their home but, according to city directories, in various boarding houses. And at one point the merchant Stanley had a furious quarrel with his young employee, sent him off to work at someone else’s plantation in Arkansas, and apparently never saw him again. Much of the Autobiography turns out to be a similar tissue of wishful thinking.

  Today, it is also hard to look at Stanley without noticing his brutality. Even in his own books, beneath the adventuring and the details about towering jungle trees and exotic wild animals, there is a steady drumbeat of recalcitrant porters being flogged and insolent natives being taught a lesson with bullets. When Hiram Maxim gave Stanley the latest model of his machine gun to take along on an expedition, Stanley said that the invention would be “of valuable service in helping civilisation to overcome barbarism.”

  David Livingstone has had a more ambiguous revisiting by modern writers, beginning with a judicious 1973 biography by Tim Jeal. As with Stanley, Livingstone’s biographers have exposed embarrassing personal details that Victorian mythmakers ignored. The explorer got on well with Africans but was haughty and cruelly insensitive to white fellow-travelers, to the point of having a fistfight with his own brother. He dragged his pregnant wife and children along on one expedition across the Kalahari Desert, which left the children horrendously sick, Mrs. Livingstone partially paralyzed for a few months, and a new baby dead. Afterward, he sent his family to England with no money to live on. His wife became an alcoholic; he saw little of his children, and his estranged oldest son changed his last name.

  Stanley himself had been an early burnisher of Livingstone’s image, thereby indirectly adding luster to his own. In his newspaper dispatches and in How I Found Livingstone, he portrayed a saintly man, confiding only to his private journal his “suspicions . . . that he was not of such an angelic temper as I believed him to be.” The editors of Livingstone’s posthumously published Last Journals further polished the picture. They changed wording, removed ill-spirited jabs at Prince Albert and many others, and censored Livingstone’s observations on African sexuality. (“Testicles” became “tenderest parts.”) The fact that Livingstone was supposedly found dead in a kneeling position meant, of course, that the good doctor had risen from his deathbed to pray to God “to break down the oppression and woe of the land.”

  Another facet of Livingstone revisionism, however, makes him a deeper and braver man than his legend. He first went to the continent before African exploration became irrevocably linked to Europe’s seizure of African land, and despite his Victorian faith in the magic of free trade and his paternalism toward Africans, he took their side—in a manner that his contemporary admirers ignored—in the struggle with white settlers over that land. In an article that a British magazine refused to publish, he wrote, “No nation ever secured its liberty without fighting for it,” and said that the battle for freedom by the Xhosa people of what is today South Africa was morally similar to the 1848 uprising of the Hungarians against Habsburg rule: “England . . . has been struggling to crush a nation fighting as bravely for nationality as ever Magyar did.” Kenneth Kaunda, former president of Zambia, calls him “the first freedom fighter,” and a major Zambian town is still known as Livingstone. Stanleyville, in the Congo, was long ago renamed.

  Movies about the two explorers reflect their changing reputations as well. In a 1939 film, Stanley and Livingstone, Stanley is given a comic Wild West sidekick. When their caravan gets attacked by Africans with bows and arrows, he tells Stanley, “Don’t stand there in the open! This is Injun fightin’!” A compassionate Livingstone, played by Cedric Hardwicke, says nothing against colonialism or in favor of African land rights and, instead, cures sick children and leads the grateful natives in singing a rousing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Spencer Tracy, as Stanley, has only enough flaws so that he can be transformed by his contact with the gentle doctor. When Stanley finds an African named Bongo trying to steal a pocket mirror from his baggage, he knocks him down. Livingstone reproaches him, saying, “You should never strike one of these simple people.” As Stanley leaves, some weeks later, he gives Livingsto
ne the mirror for Bongo.

  By contrast, a 1997 TV film, Forbidden Territory, tells the story in harsher tones. “If I succeed, it will prove I am somebody,” Stanley says at the beginning. Once on the march, he is shown as a brute who screams at the white members of his caravan, whips the black ones, and, at one point, punches an African woman. His transformation differs from the earlier film as well, and Livingstone undergoes one too. Deep in the bush, the two men practice mutual psychotherapy. In modern, confessional style, Livingstone reveals his self-doubt and admits that he wasn’t a good father. Stanley tells him, “My whole life has been a lie,” and, when they part, tearfully says, “You have been like the father I never knew.”

  • • •

  The changing images of the two explorers over the years offer as rich a terrain for a writer as do the two men themselves. But anyone who expects to see this promising territory investigated in Martin Dugard’s Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone will be disappointed. His pedestrian rehash of the story reads almost like one of the Victorian hagiographies. Even its form, with alternating sections about the two men on their separate travels until Stanley utters his “. . . I presume” and their journeys become one, has been used before.

  Dugard’s prose, not unlike Stanley’s, has an over-the-top ring: “Character is built through trials and turmoil”; “What would happen in the next few minutes would alter the future of exploration, Africa, and the world”; “The call to adventure is genetic in a handful of men and women”; Stanley’s travels took him to “the entrance to Africa’s beating heart”; “He would learn for certain whether the explorer was dead or alive. . . . He could not stomach the maudlin limbo of doubt.” Maudlin limbo?

 

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