by Tim Jeal
Yet Stanley never found private faith nearly as easy as the idea of a God-given mission of a practical and public kind. The latter had first been made real to him by Livingstone, and would sustain him in the r 8gos when `imperial mission' was taken up by the late Victorian establishment as its central idea. His enemies said that Stanley pretended to be more religious than he was. But in a moralizing age, when the boldest evil-doers feared social disgrace, and Mr Gladstone modelled his style of public speaking on the cadences of sermons, the temptation to sing from an elevated hymn sheet can easily be understood.
At Usambiro, Stanley learned that most of the letters redirected to him and his officers from Zanzibar had been stolen en route to Buganda. But two addressed to Emin had made it from the coast.3 s They plunged him into immediate gloom, for reasons Henry would only discover four months later. Mackay chose this moment to tell Henry and his officers that James Jameson had died of fever on the Congo over a year earlier. Equally depressing was the news that the Germans had moved inland from Bagamoyo, into their East African `sphere of influence', and had behaved with such heavy-handed arrogance that they had provoked an uprising. That the land in which Stanley had `found' Livingstone was now in German hands was painful for him.36 So too was the news that Carl Peters, the German adventurer, had recently fought his way through Masailand, in the more northerly `British sphere', having set his sights on snatching Buganda for the Kaiser.
More personally hurtful to Stanley than any news about German intentions was the fact that the EPRE's committee had instructed the British traveller Frederick J. Jackson to go to Wadelai to relieve Emin - the assumption being that Stanley must have failed. This made Henry all the more determined to bring Emin and his followers to the coast as rapidly as possible, and show them to the world.37 But just as Henry's eagerness to exhibit his `trophy' was intensifying, so too was Emin's desire to wriggle free. The Pasha seized on the arrival of Frederick Jackson to put pressure on Stanley to solicit the Briton's help in settling him and his men at Kavirondo. According to Stanley, when he rejected Emin's plea - on the reasonable grounds that he had far too few followers to make such a settlement viable - the Pasha replied ominously: `It does not matter ... my life is always at my own disposal and I can end it when I like.'38 At this time, in a letter to a friend, Emin admitted: `All my hopes are shattered, and I return home half blind and broken down. I indeed hope that I shall not be judged too harshly."' Another reason why Stanley could feel no pity was that if he had let Emin settle near Lake Victoria, he might have tried to join up with Peters, in order to snatch Buganda for Germany. But above all, Emin could not stay on in Africa because he had too few men for his own safety. `Out of ro,ooo people,' Henry told Mackinnon, `he has only two servants faithful to him!!!' So, `Nolens volens, the Pasha had to come home.'4°
Stanley and his expedition were with the missionaries for nineteen days, and Mackay hated letting him go. `I shall never forget the pleasure of the alas too few days which your visit afforded me.'41 It was Mackay's great hope that Stanley would soon return to Africa to run Mackinnon's Imperial British East Africa Company, and secure Buganda for Britain with the help of a rail link from the coast.42 Stanley tried to persuade Mackay to return home with him for a period of rest and convalescence, but he refused, just as Livingstone had done. To Stanley's grief his new friend would die of fever five months later.43
On iz September, only 559 people marched with Stanley from Mackay's mission - so 6o per cent of those who had left Kavalli's in April were no longer with him. Many of these absentees had been forced to serve as porters and slaves by the Pasha's men, and it seems that Stanley had simply allowed them to return home. The journey from Lake Albert had been peaceful, food had been plentiful, and very few had died.44 Emin's party had not looked after itself so well. It had been 570 strong at Kavalli's, but numbered 344 men, women and children on leaving Mackay's. Some of Emin's people had been tempted to march back to Equatoria to join up with Selim Bey, but about zoo others had died of sickness, many of them babies and children. Ahead of the seventy-seven surviving Egyptian children stretched Boo dusty miles to the Indian Ocean.
Only two days into their journey, Wasukuma tribesmen started to harass the caravan. According to Jephson: `Stanley behaved with the utmost patience & forebearance & not a shot was fired. But the very next day the natives became so outrageous that it resulted in a colli sion.' On zo September, the Wasukuma ordered Stanley to camp on the spot. He refused `& some men came and struck at Stanley with a spear' upon which they were shot dead by the Wangwana, who then chased after the other Africans who had pressed in on the column and shot a number of them too. The next morning, `we soon had hundreds of natives following us on either side of the column', their aim being to `swoop down on the rear-guard & try and get at some of our women & children, but they were always repulsed'.
When these attacks became worse, Stanley sent Nelson and Jephson to burn a village - a process Jephson hated. However, it seemed to bring a change of heart, since on zz September some Wasukuma appeared saying they wanted peace. Stanley therefore allowed a number of them into his camp, and made no effort to disperse several hundred others who gathered around the camp. But when the `peace-makers' suddenly killed a man, and wounded two others, the Wangwana fired back killing seventeen. Not even this retribution stopped the attacks, so on the evening of the z4th, when the Wakusuma began to mass again, Stanley authorized using the Maxim - the first time he had ever permitted it to be fired in anger. The result, surprisingly, was just one man killed, largely because the unfamiliar noise of the gun made hundreds flee.4i Marching on through Ukusuma, Stanley was shocked by the exorbitant amounts of hongo demanded. Recently some missionaries had been charged £270 in fees in three days' travel through Ugogo.46
On the borders of Masailand, Stanley came to the endless acaciastudded plain he remembered well from his search for Livingstone, when he had been young and in perfect health. To Jephson this country of lions and hyenas was `a terrible place, burnt up & parched ... a wilderness in which there are great tracts of quivering plains the very sight of which takes one's breath away'. But Stanley felt sentimental, sensing that he would never again see this vast landscape. Leaving Ugogo, he was depressed to be hailed `with a perfect volley of "Guten Morgens"', on encountering a column of Nyamawezi heading west.47 At Mpwapwa, on ro November, Lieutenant Rochus Schmidt greeted the Pasha like a hero, and hinted (as Emin noted with satisfaction) that the German government `would try to make use' of him `for East Africa'.48 Emin observed how anxious this made Stanley. `When we are alone, he reproaches me for being in sympathy with Germany.'49 At Mpwapwa they saw the burned-out English mission house and the Germans' ruined fort. Many people had died in the recent rebellion against the new colonial power.
On z9 November, when the expedition was a few days from the coast, they were met by two American journalists: Edmund Viztelly of the New York Herald, and Thomas Stevens (a friend of May Sheldon) of the New York World. They were surprised to find that Stanley was `a quiet-looking, unassuming individual' wearing patched clothes. Expecting him to be taciturn, Stevens found him `one of the most charming talkers I ever heard', who was even candid about his failures with women.5° In the last phase of the journey, Henry was more amiable to his officers, but he still could not let them get close to him. `If I had lifted the lid of my reserve I should have let out that which would harass & worry me more than blackwater fever.'5' Given the pain he had been caused by those closest to him - his mother, his uncles, and the women he had hoped to marry - his fear of intimacy was understandable. Yet, at the end of the journey he found it in his heart to forgive Stairs for his letter to Barttelot.5z He also behaved with generosity to his thieving servant, William Hoffman - whom all his officers detested - paying him in full, and then recommending him as a servant to Mr J. Mackenzie of the Imperial British East Africa Company, for whom he would work for a year in Mombassa.53
At dusk on 3 December, as they approached the Kingani River, the ev
ening gun on Zanzibar was heard, and the Wangwana `set up earpiercing cries of joy'. After their long and terrible journey across the continent, just over a third of the original 623 Zanzibaris were still with him and certain to reach home. At the Kingani, the expedition was met by Major Herman von Wissmann, the German Imperial Commissioner, who escorted them into Bagamoyo, where the familiar streets were decorated with palm branches.-54 The following evening Wissmann threw a banquet in honour of Stanley, Emin Pasha, and the relief expedition. Thirty-four people sat down at a long table in an upper room of the mess-house of the German officers. They included the two guests of honour, as well as Captain Casati, all Stanley's officers, the British vice-consul from Zanzibar, the German consul, the Italian consul, numerous German naval and military officers, and the officers from two British ships. A German ship's band played while a surprisingly varied menu was served, along with some choice wines. Although this was gratifying to Emin, he faced an uncertain future. Further employment with the Khedive was out of the question, so would he be wise, he wondered, to accept employment from his own nationals, or should he wait in case Mackinnon's offer was renewed? And if nothing turned up from his fellow-countrymen, or from Mackinnon, what would happen to him and his six-year-old daughter, Ferida?
As the dinner was ending, Sall, Stanley's head-boy, whispered in his ear that `the Pasha had fallen down'. At first Henry assumed that Emin had `stumbled over a chair', until Sall shrieked in Swahili: `He has fallen over the verandah wall into the street.' When Emin was spirited away to the German hospital, Stanley realized that this strange accident had ended his already remote hopes of taking the Pasha to Egypt or Europe. This fall had not been stage-managed by Emin and the Germans. Stanley saw him in hospital with `his right eye closed by a great lump formed by swollen tissues'. Most people formed the view that a drunken Emin had gone to watch the Wangwana celebrating in the street, and being so short-sighted had tripped over the balcony walls'
However, in Cairo, Stanley would be told some facts by Georg Schweinfurth, the German explorer, that made attempted suicide seem a possibility. According to Schweinfurth, who knew Emin well, the reason why the Pasha had been determined never to leave Africa had been his fear that in Europe his former mistress, Madame Hakki, would ruin him in a highly-publicized court action. When abandoning the hapless widow in Germany in r 875 (having made out that he was her husband), he had stolen her money and jewels. She had then obtained a judgment from a German court for ro,ooo marks in alimony, but could not collect anything from a man hidden away in Africa. The best that Madame Hakki had been able to do was publish a pamphlet in Constantinople naming and shaming Emin.s6 But when she heard that he had been found and would shortly arrive at the East African coast, she had sent letters to him via Zanzibar, demanding justice. Stanley deduced that `he had received one at Mackay's Mission, which caused that fit of depression wherein he hinted at suicide; a second was handed to him in the mail he opened at Bagamoyo - which contained also the printed story of his desertion of her. To a man who magnified small faults as crimes for which there was no forgiveness, Madame Hakki's terrible denunciations & threats would sound like a sentence of perpetual exile.''' At Bagamoyo, Jephson was struck by Emin's `inexpressible sadness', and pointed it out to Parke.'
Believing that Schweinfurth had told the truth, Stanley was placed in an awkward position. He could, had he wished, have demolished the idea that Emin was refusing to return to Europe because he had come to hate his deliverer, but he realized that to give away Emin's secret `would be to denounce ourselves as fools'.59 To have spent so much money, and to have suffered so many deaths, in order to save a man who could treat a woman so dishonourably would have been thought grotesque if known about. Stanley also kept quiet about his suspicion that Emin might have tried to commit suicide, and he was wise to do so. With the Pasha's daughter, Ferida, totally dependent on him, it seems most unlikely that he would have contemplated ending his life at this particular moment. He had not received any pay since 11883 and was therefore owed at least £5,000 by the Egyptian government. In fact, while in hospital at Bagamoyo, he gave Gaetano Casati `a general power of attorney', so that his friend could settle his (Emin's) claims against the Khedive's government without him having to visit Egypt in person. When the money was paid, most was placed in a trust for Ferida, but a smaller payment was made to Madame Hakki.6o The Pasha's private life had certainly given him an exceptionally good reason for wishing to remain in Africa.
REtiU[ED !
`Rescued': a Punch cartoonist jokes about who rescued whom, and discerns the reluctance of Emin to return but not the reason why
Before Emin Pasha left hospital at the end of January, he told Wissmann that he wished to work for Germany.6i Later Emin disingenuously told Stairs: `the reason I went over to the Germans was simply because I could not get work with the IBEAC [Mackinnon's company] & could not afford to wait'.62 Although Stanley knew that his expedition would look ridiculous if the Pasha signed up with Wissmann, this never tempted him to press Mackinnon to make the Pasha a new offer of employment. In fact, out of his genuine concern for Mackinnon's best interests, he did his very best to discourage this, telling him categorically that Emin was unfit to run any large or small enterprise." In March Bismarck approved Emin's `engagement for foreign service', and in April the Pasha set off from Bagamoyo at the head of a large German expedition. But his hopes of claiming Buganda for Germany were to be dashed by the Anglo-German Agreement of July 118go, by which Buganda was placed inalienably within the British sphere. In less than a year, Emin fell out with his German employers and vanished into the interior on a mysterious mission of his own. In 118gz, a hundred miles from the Congo, he was beheaded by Arabs in alliance with a warlord called Kibongo. The Pasha's sixty Sudanese followers were all shot.64 Stanley's comment was: `So long as he was in the British camp, he was safe. The very day he was kissed by his countrymen he was doomed. 65
Emin had represented himself in his letters to his friends as a man fighting against impossible odds, and had never admitted that his real adversaries were rebels within his own soldiery rather than the Mahdist forces that had swept away Gordon. When, later, Stanley was compared adversely with the `gentle' Emin, he did not point out that Emin had killed a great many people with his shelling of Kibiro in Bunyoro.66 Henry's cruel predicament - that he would be damned if he told the truth, and damned if he did not - plunged him into depression, even as he was being bombarded with telegrams of congratulation from monarchs and world leaders. `I am subject to conflicting emotions of pity for Emin, pity for ourselves, pity for the waste of life, & efforts, & money in a worthless cause, & they often send me to bed sickened in mind. 67
Sadly for Stanley, because of Emin's charm, his scholarly habits, his short sight and his capacity for generosity, the popular image of him that has come down is of a peace-loving old man being bullied by a younger and more energetic one. Yet what Jephson would remember most vividly would be the Pasha's Egyptians beating their servants to death and behaving so cruelly that even the cannibal Manyema would not sell slaves to them. `The Pasha should do something to stop it,' wrote Jephson, `but he is more incapable and impotent than ever, nor do I think that he greatly cares.'68 Emin never expressed public gratitude to Stanley, and his letter of thanks to Mackinnon was heavily ironic. But the Pasha's claim that Mackinnon had only sent Stanley to central Africa so that he could take possession of his (Emin's) province and his ivory was unjust. Mackinnon had certainly hoped to combine rescuing Emin with pioneering a permanent route from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria to facilitate opening the area to commerce.61 But this did not mean that his eagerness to rescue Emin was only cosmetic. The Scotsman gave £3,000 personally, and his friends and relatives put up a further £116,ooo. Stanley had been generous too - interrupting a lecture series in America, costing himself, according to Mackinnon, £110,ooo; then leading the expedition for nothing, and donating the £z,ooo he had been paid for all his reports on the expedition sent to newspapers.7
°
On Zanzibar, Stanley at last reckoned up the human cost of the expedition. He did not, however, enter in his diary a record of the dead, but Jephson in his diary stated that out of 708 people who started out from the lower Congo almost three years earlier, only zro had survived.'' From Henry's diaries, and from his official report to Colonel C. B. Euan Smith, the British Consul-General on Zanzibar, it is possible to confirm Jephson's figure - although adding to it the two Europeans and twelve Sudanese who had returned home earlier via the Congo, raising the number of survivors to 2I972 [see note for more details]. Since 708 expedition members had sailed from Zanzibar for the Congo's mouth (a total of 805 with the inclusion of Tippu Tip and his 96 followers), it follows that 490 men died of disease, were killed or deserted during almost three years. It is impossible to say how many died and how many deserted, though in a letter written after he had reached the coast Henry stated that the expedition had `cost us 400 lives', showing that deaths were far more numerous than deser- tions.73 But whatever the actual proportion, the loss of 490 men from all causes was a melancholy statistic, which Stanley found it hard to come to terms with or to admit to.
Since the purpose of the expedition had been to relieve Emin Pasha, the fate of Emin's 570 followers, who had left Lake Albert on ro April 11889, is also highly relevant. By r r November their number had declined to 294, on which date Stanley made a list: `3o heads of households (Emin Pasha, Signor Marco, Capitano Casati, Osman Effendi, etc.), 71 women, 59 children, rzr servants, 113 carriers '.74In his official report he stated that he arrived in Bagamoyo with z9o of Emin's peo- ple.75 So z8o (roughly half) had either died or been abandoned en route.76 Some chose to stay on Zanzibar, and Stanley eventually repatriated z6o to Egypt. Against this paltry total, he had to set the 400 dead Wangwana, whose lives he thought immeasurably more valuable.