by Tim Jeal
Yet Stanley also put his finger on the central weakness of his own position. `We went into the heart of Africa self-invited - therein lies our fault."9 Several years later he would even concede that Africans were entitled to `assert their undeniable right to exclude strangers from their country'."O Indeed the position of all explorers was fraught with flaws and inconsistencies. From whom could they claim to have acquired the authority to kill, even in self-defence? Lacking this, were they not simply buccaneers? The editor of the Saturday Review was aghast at the thought of `a private American citizen, travelling with negro allies, at the expense of two newspapers' causing the deaths of indigenous people `with no sanction, no authority, no jurisdiction - nothing but explosive bullets and a copy of the Daily Telegraph - into a country where he and his black allies are intruders and natural ene- mies'.ZI Although Stanley brought back evidence of thousands of deaths being caused by Arab-Swahili slave raids, these did not cause the same indignation.
In the end, Henry was rescued by his former enemies at the Royal Geographical Society. Clements Markham began supporting him thanks to his long delayed explanation of why he had attacked the islanders. In the Geographical Magazine, Markham now accepted that Stanley had used force only `under circumstances of absolute necessity'. He also pointed out that Henry's newspaper employers had made the decision that the expedition should go out to Africa bearing arms.22 Yet even those who conceded that killing in self-defence was legitimate in certain circumstances asked whether expeditions were `necessary' if they were likely to lead to deaths of any sort. `Perhaps,' suggested the editor of the Saturday Review sardonically, `the Geographical Society cannot exist without rivers, and it may be so noble an institution that all the horrors of war must be perpetrated rather than it should perish."3 This point was met head on by Stanley's old enemy, Francis Galton. `Stanley,' he wrote, `has dissected and laid bare the very heart of the great continent of Africa', and beside this astonishing achievement `the death of a few hundred barbarians, ever ready to fight and kill ... will perhaps be regarded as a small matter'.14
In fact, Henry never resorted to such arguments, insisting that he had killed at Bumbireh in self-defence. It had been his inescapable duty to his people to protect them. `As long as they are in my charge I will not look calmly on a parcel of savages resolved on murder and massacre. Unless they consent to reason, they must accept the conse- quences.'•5 And Stanley felt he had given `reason' a very fair chance before his attack. But the murder of the leader of the Ganda delegation - himself a chief - had been an act of war justifying immediate punishment.
At first, Stanley had thought it futile to try `to refute calumny, based upon cant and malice', because anti-Americanism and hatred of the Daily Telegraph would guarantee him enemies whatever he wrote or said. So, after his return to Britain it would be two whole weeks before he spoke in his defence at an RGS banquet in Willis's Supper Rooms.26 Although Henry's defence - on lines very like mine above - failed to end the sniping, it did at least lead the editor of the Saturday Review to concede that `Mr Stanley must be taken to be the best judge of the necessities of his position.'27 What particularly annoyed Henry was the way in which editors loved
to point to Livingstone as having been able to travel long distances in Africa without quarrelling with the natives. Well, I have also travelled thousands of miles in Africa without a quarrel, but I well know that though the caravan route to Ujiji has been travelled over numerous times without a breach of amity, a day's march to the North or South could bring me face to face with a difficulty which no tact could remove.2s
Stanley sometimes spoke of well-known travellers - even as famous as Speke, Burton and Cameron - having travelled for miles by `Arab parcel post', protected from the violence that they would otherwise have had to face alone and unaided. And a few years later he would point to the many white travellers murdered in supposedly safe East Africa, just off the beaten track. Yet they had never faced tribes nearly as ferocious as those on the Upper Congo. Nevertheless, Captain Frederick Carter and Lieutenant Thomas Cadenhead were murdered by Mirambo's men at Mpimbwe in 188o, along with more than a hundred of their followers. Yet little fuss would be made in Britain. Later, Stanley also reminded his readers that `the murder of Bishop Han- nington and sixty of his men may be read in his biography', and that `six French Fathers of Urundi were set upon while celebrating mass, and murdered at the altar with their converts and young pupils'.29 Mungo Park and Richard Lander had died, a generation earlier, from wounds received in different attacks by tribesmen on the Niger - Henry's point being that Africans could be violent and dangerous too.
But some people were never going to allow that any mitigating circumstance existed. Dr John Kirk was one of them, and in late February 11878, to his great joy, he was asked to mount an official inquiry into the behaviour of Stanley and his men on their epic journey. The ubiquitous Horace Waller - who was related to Kirk by marriage - combined with his other philanthropic duties membership of the executive committee of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa. One of this mission's clerics, the Revd J. P. Farley, was stationed near Bagamoyo, and had recently interrogated a number of Stanley's Wangwana (very likely on Waller's prompting). Farler now claimed to have been told by these carriers that Stanley had stolen ivory from Africans and had sold into slavery people whom he had captured. Since Stanley's diary contains many accounts of forcing his people to return stolen goods, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Wangwana had been pulling Farler's leg.3° Improbable though his notes were, Farler sent them to the Anti-Slavery Society, whose secretary passed them on to the Foreign Office on Waller's suggestion.31
A couple of months earlier Kirk had written to Stanley's friend, the shipping-line owner William Mackinnon, describing the explorer as `pugnacious, conceited and small-minded' - confirming (if this were needed) that he was the worst possible person to carry out an impartial inquiry. On his arrival at Zanzibar, in December 1877, Stanley had suggested to Kirk, in an attempt to bury the hatchet, that Kirk, rather than himself, would be the most suitable person to present medals to the men who had brought Livingstone's body home to the coast.j2 Kirk's response was to send a letter to Lord Derby, the foreign secretary, alleging that Stanley had told the Sultan about `the many colli sions he had had with the native tribes who seem everywhere to have given way before Snider rifles and repeaters'.33
When Kirk began his investigation into Stanley's `atrocities', he invited the explorer's captains to his house, and gave them money to tell him what he wanted to hear. The American merchant Augustus Sparhawk had observed their furtive visits to the British Consulate and accused Manwa Sera of being `a big rascal and too fond of money'.34 As might have been expected, the report that Kirk sent to Lord Derby on r May 11878 was pure character assassination. Stanley was said to have accepted from Mutesa a slave girl as his mistress - a claim that Stanley's unfeigned disgust with Shaw's and Farqhuar's promiscuity makes extremely implausible (as does his later advice to expedition colleagues to avoid having sex with Africans).35 Stanley was accused of gross cruelty to the Wangwana, kicking one to death and keeping many chained for months. Though he sometimes whipped carriers - as all explorers did when faced with thefts or desertion, the rest was simply untrue. Kirk repeated the accusation that Stanley had sold carriers into slavery - an extraordinary claim given the disgust expressed by both Stanley and Frank Pocock at the suffering caused by slave traders.36
Since Kirk's principal informants were Manwa Sera and Kacheche - who were described by Stanley and by Pocock as loyal followers and friends - bribery seems the likeliest explanation. Furthermore, since both men had been members of Stanley's expedition to find Livingstone, and both had been happy to re-enlist with him in 11874 and had accompanied him loyally for the next three years without deserting, they could hardly have found him brutal or cruel. (Many would enlist with him again between 11879 and 11884.) Kirk's report would be confidential, and so Stanley never had an opportunity to defend himself against
the accusation that his expedition had been `a disgrace to humanity'.37 Six weeks later Queen Victoria was writing in her diary that Stanley was cruel to Africans and had kept female slaves - making it clear just how widely Kirk's lies were circulated within the British establishment. The consul's report would ensure that Stanley was received by no government minister or senior civil servant, and that the nearest he came to court was when the Prince of Wales attended two of his lectures and spoke to him at a banquet.38
It is therefore intensely ironic that during the opening months of 1878, when Stanley was being pilloried as a monster - angrily in lib eral periodicals, and sotto voce in official circles - his greatest ambition was to obtain British government help in making David Livingstone's grand plan for Africa come true. After his betrayal by Alice, it kept Stanley sane to dream of transforming Africa and destroying the slave trade along the lines David Livingstone had described to him in 1872. European trade and colonization, the doctor had explained, were the essential precursors to Christian conversions and 'civilization' in Africa. Henry had been impressed by Livingstone's account of his attempt to open up the Zambezi River as a `highway' along which settlers, traders and missionaries could embark in steamers and travel rapidly through the fever-ridden deltas into the healthier interior. There they could sell to African chiefs - in exchange for local products such as palm oil, ivory and copal - the beads, guns and European cloth the chiefs coveted. Hitherto, their only way to obtain these things had been by selling their own people to Portuguese and Arab slave traders.39 Livingstone's secret hope had been that the arrival of traders and missionaries would one day `result in an English [sic] colony in the heart of central Africa'.41
In conscious emulation of Livingstone, Stanley, in his first newspaper despatch from Kabinda on the coast, had urged traders and missionaries to come to West Central Africa and expressed his hope that ,the English [sic] especially' would grasp the commercial opportunity which the Congo, `that great highway of commerce to broad Africa', now held out.41 Weeks later, he was more explicit:
I feel convinced that the Congo question will become a political question in time. As yet, however, no European power seems to have the right of control. Portugal claims it because she discovered its mouth; but the great powers - England [sic], America and France - refuse to recognize her right ... The question is: What Power shall be deputed in the name of humanity to protect the youth of commerce in this little known world? ... [unless] England arranges at once with Portugal to proclaim sovereignty over the Congo River.42
Yet despite such insistence on the need for `English' involvement, it was Livingstone's longing to help Africa and Africans that had inspired Stanley, rather than the jingoistic potential of the doctor's colonial ideas. It delighted him to learn that within weeks of his appeal for missionaries appearing in the Daily Telegraph in 1875, £24,000 had been raised, and within a year of his putting pen to paper the first British missionaries had been on their way to Uganda. Henry had written in his final Congo diary in 1877 `I hate evil and love good', and a few pages later had expressed his fervent hope that the Congo would become `a torch to those who sought to do good': `I wish I could give utterance to a hundredth part of the noble thoughts I had in Africa.' Just as Livingstone had enjoyed imagining Glaswegian paupers prospering as farmers in Africa, Henry thought that Britain's `outcast children' (such as he had once been) should be trained in colonial schools as future African settlers.43
In mid-January 118 7 8, on his way back to London, Stanley had broken his journey at Marseilles to address the local geographical society. He had been surprised to be greeted on the railway platform by two men sent by King Leopold II of Belgium to secure his services for an African project, apparently close to the heart of the forty-three-year-old monarch. These two diplomats were Baron Jules Greindl, the Belgian ambassador in Madrid, and Henry Shelton Sanford, a Florida landowner and former US consul in Brussels, who now collaborated with the king on various business ventures. Keenly aware of Belgium's size and lack of influence, for almost twenty years Leopold had longed to acquire a colony. Aged twenty-seven he had visited Madrid, not for pleasure, but with the intention of `going through the Indies archives and calculating the profit which Spain made then and makes now out of her colonies'.44 Since then he had scanned the world for possible colonial openings in countries as distant as Formosa, Fiji and Sarawak. In January 11876, Leopold had been electrified to read in the London Times that a British explorer, Lieutenant V. L. Cameron, RN, had crossed central Africa and had declared it to be `a country of unspeakable richness', containing an abundance of coal, iron, gold and silver.4' Overjoyed to believe that in the Congo he had found the perfect money-making colony, Leopold lost no time in visiting the Foreign Office in London, and was vastly relieved to find that Britain had no interest in the Congo basin.46
In September 11876, when Stanley had still been marching towards the Lualaba, Leopold hosted and supervised an international Geographical Conference in Brussels, at which he launched what he himself described as `a crusade' to `open to civilization the only part of our globe where it has yet to penetrate.'47 His ostensible plan was to orchestrate a wide-ranging international project with operational bases at Zanzibar and at the mouth of the Congo, and medical and scientific stations in the interior, from which the slave trade could be observed and ultimately destroyed.48 The International African Association (the AIA, from its initials in French) was formed at the conference. After Leopold had been voted its president and an international committee and a number of national committees had been set up, it seemed destined to be an impressively broad-based body. In reality, Leopold planned to use this innocuous-seeming international structure as a smokescreen behind which he could pursue his own commercial plans. Much faster even than Leopold had dared hope, the international components of the AIA fell away, leaving behind a fourman executive and the Belgian national committee, both controlled by the king himself.49 Leopold expressed his real purpose in a letter to his ambassador in London, with astonishing frankness and cynicism: `I do not want to miss the opportunity of our obtaining a share in this magnificent African cake.''°
As the king was penning this letter, Stanley was taking the Wangwana home, having focused the world's attention on the Congo. To Baron Solvyns, his minister in London, Leopold explained exactly what he wanted from `this able and enterprising American'.
I believe [wrote Leopold] that if I commission Stanley to take possession in my name of any given place in Africa, the English would stop me ... I am therefore thinking in terms of entrusting Stanley with a purely exploratory mission which will offend no one and will provide us with some posts down in that region, staffed and equipped, and with a high command for them which we can develop when Europe and Africa have got used to our `pretensions' on the Congo."
Of course, Greindl let slip none of this to Stanley. Nor did Henry Sanford. Though Stanley later pretended that he had dismissed the king's emissaries almost at once - telling them that for months to come he would be too `sick and weary' to consider returning to Africa - in fact he had met Henry Sanford the very next day, and spent six hours with him.52 During this meeting, Stanley learned that the king wanted him to return to the Congo, under the auspices of the AIA, to set up posts, build roads, and pave the way for later commercial developments.S3 At this date, Stanley had had no idea that the king wanted a colony, let alone one that would be his personal fief. Since Henry planned to ask the British government to send him back to the Congo in the interest of international trade, Leopold's project had sounded like a perfectly acceptable faute de mieux alternative. So, in case he were to fail in London, Stanley had hinted strongly to the two men that it was just possible that `six months hence' he might `view things differently'.54
Within days of arriving in England, Stanley had begun a series of meetings with establishment figures, hoping to gain a hearing from government ministers. Earl Granville, the former foreign secretary, currently without a seat in the cabinet, was sympathe
tic but held out little hope. At three receptions Stanley talked with the Prince of Wales; he also dined with General Sir Garnet Wolseley, the future commander-in-chief, had meetings with Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the patron of numerous missionary societies, and discussed his plans with William MacKinnon, the owner of the Imperial British India Steamship Navigation Company, who wanted to invest in Africa for altruistic, as well as commercial reasons.55 But none of this talking led to an invitation to brief ministers. After his epic journey, it seemed a personal slight that he was not invited to meet the foreign secretary.
Meanwhile the prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (recently ennobled as Lord Beaconsfield), was facing a grave foreign crisis. In the wake of the massacre of Bulgarian Christians, Russian forces had reached Constantinople after eight months of fighting, threatening to bring an imminent Turkish collapse, and with it an abrupt end to the European balance of power. So in the very month of Stanley's return to England, Lord Beaconsfield sent the British Fleet to the Dardanelles and was on the point of declaring war. And sadly for Henry, there were other pressing reasons why the cabinet was in no mood for colonial advances in Africa. In Egypt, the Khedive's government was bankrupt, and Britain and France had been obliged to assume control in order to protect the Suez Canal. In the Transvaal, too, the cabinet expected imminent difficulties. The timing of Stanley's pleas for the Congo basin could scarcely have been worse. In any case, just at this crucial time John Kirk's vitriolic report damaged him in official quarters. After reading it, Queen Victoria wrote to warn her cousin Leopold that he should be very careful about employing a brutal man like Stanley. Lord Beaconsfield gave him a similar warning.s6 But the King of the Belgians was not going to be put off, now that he believed he had found the perfect man to create for him his long desired African colony.