Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer

by Tim Jeal

  On 6 April 11897, the first of two devastating extracts from Edward Glave's diary was published in Century Magazine. Here, at last, was a source that Stanley accepted as gospel truth. In the first diary extract, Glave stated that in 1895 the State had been using Baluba and Manyema soldiers, without white officers, against local tribes on the Upper Congo around Kabambare, Kasongo and Nyangwe. In consequence there had been many massacres of innocent people. The released slaves of the Arab-Swahili, not long after returning as free men to their villages, had been `shipped south to be soldiers, workers, &c., on the State stations'; `what were peaceful families have been broken up'. Glave had seen `in stations in charge of white men ... strings of poor emaciated old women, some of them mere skeletons, working from six in the morning till noon, and from half-past two till six...'. These innocent `prisoners of war' had been brought in by black government soldiers to be forced labourers.14 Five months later, far worse revelations from Glave's diaries would be published, with graphic descriptions of hangings and floggings. `I conscientiously believe that a man who receives Too blows is often killed and has his spirit broken for life.' Then this grave indictment:

  The State has not suppressed slavery, but established a monopoly by driving out the Arab and Wangwana competitors. The State soldiers are constantly stealing, and sometimes the natives are so persecuted that they resent this by killing and eating their tormentors. Recently the State post on the Lomani lost two men, killed and eaten by the natives. Arabs were sent to punish the natives; many women and children were taken, and twenty-one heads were brought to the Falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of his house ... [Rebellion] is the natural outcome of the harsh, cruel policy of the State in wringing rubber from these people without paying for it. The revolution will extend ... Does the King of the Belgians know about this? If not, he ought to."

  For Stanley, even the milder April instalment of his dear friend's diaries had been enough to galvanize him into urging further action from Leopold. On 23 April 11897, Henry had travelled to Brussels to tell the king he ought to permit an international `High Tribunal' to visit the Congo in order to establish what was really happening there. If the atrocities were isolated events, the tribunal would merely confirm this. The king was outraged by the suggestion. There were plenty of other countries that ought to admit tribunals to their colonies before he did. Britain should admit one to Matabeleland (Rhodesia) where Cecil Rhodes and two British regiments - for whose services the diamond king was paying the Colonial Office - were attempting to crush the Matabele (Ndebele). And why not send a tribunal to Ireland to investigate the grievances of the Fenians? Another one could look at what the Americans were doing in the Philippines. As a parting shot, the king reminded Stanley that Britain had been the last of the powers to recognize the Congo Free State and had always been prejudiced against it.26

  From 3 to 7 September, Stanley went to Belgium to see the Congo Exhibition at Tervuren, just outside Brussels. To generate a more sympathetic interest in the Congo among his fellow countrymen, Leopold had paid for 267 African men, women and children to be brought from the Lower Congo to be living exhibits. They were installed in three specially built `villages' in the park, one beside a lake, mimicking river frontage. Stanley arrived incognito and took a tram to Tervuren like any member of the public. He went unrecognized through the site, although Dorothy's portrait of him was prominently on show. At first Stanley had no desire to see Leopold again, but then, on 6 September, the day before he was due to leave, he sent a note asking for an audience. Although the king was in Brussels and received this letter on the day it was written, he did not reply until the 8th, saying disingenuously that he was sorry not to have had an opportunity to meet him.27 This brush-off meant that the two men never met again.

  But even though he was disillusioned with Leopold, Stanley (like many high-profile people with Congo links) went on believing, to the century's end, that the king was doing what he could to prevent more atrocities. George Grenfell, the Baptist missionary with almost twenty years' experience of the Congo, wrote as late as 11904: `I cannot believe His Majesty is careless of the people so long as the rubber comes in, or I would have to join his accusers.'z8 Even Edmund Morel, the mastermind behind the campaign to expose the atrocities, had doubted until I9oo that Leopold's officials could be systematically using forced labour, beatings and mutilations to compel Africans to collect rubber for nothing. After all, out of those 400 missionaries, only a handful had professed any knowledge of deliberate brutality.

  For us today, after the facts have appeared in print many times, it is easy enough to accept that a man known for years as Europe's most philanthropic monarch had in fact employed `legalized robbery enforced by violence' to make himself unbelievably rich." But for King Leopold's contemporaries - especially men like Stanley, who had worked for him - the pill of having been utterly deceived was too bitter to swallow whole. If the report that Roger Casement, Britain's consul on the Congo, prepared for his government about the atrocities had been published earlier, Stanley would have had no option but to accept his conclusions. He had liked Casement when he had met him in April 11887, working for Sanford's company.i° But by February 11904 - the month of Casement's publication - Stanley only had two and a half months to live, and was too ill to read. Before that, he had seen the problems on the Congo as being due less to the king's greed and inhumanity than to a criminally incompetent Congo Free State government.

  It is highly significant that Roger Casement - who would do so much to expose Leopold - admired Stanley, and had written to him in June 118go from the Congo, telling him that he (Casement) had been `proud to be serving under your [Stanley's] orders in the founding of the Free State'." With phrases such as `moral malaria ... and deep layers of filth', Stanley hinted at corruption without making specific accusations against the State's senior officials. `An erring and ignorant policy' combined with `unqualified officers ... cumbersome administration, neglect at every station ... and waste in every office' had produced, he said, a disgraceful situation. Henry was sure that if Leopold had ever sent him back to deal with what he called `that Augean stables', it would surely have killed him."

  Stanley visited Africa one final time during the last decade of his life. But though this was a flying visit to witness the opening of the railway line linking Mafeking with Bulawayo, it faced him again with the complexities of what `civilizing' a vast and complex continent really involved. Before leaving, he wrote for an American magazine some thoughts on this subject: `Africa is practically explored, and the intelligence of its inhabitants demonstrated ... What we want now is to develop the country, not so much for the white man, but for the natives themselves."' Stanley neither liked nor trusted Cecil Rhodes, the arch-imperialist. When he met the diamond king in January 1895, Rhodes was then prime minister of the Cape government, the virtual owner of Kimberley, as well as the mighty joint stock company, Gold Fields of South Africa. Yet Stanley was unimpressed. `Rhodes's selfcontrol is not so perfect that he is not liable to the defect of vanity. He is now under the influence of his latest success and I fear it may lead him to undertake something that may lead to a disastrous collapse.'34 How right he was, with the disastrous Jameson Raid only a year away. Stanley had never been inspired to go to Africa by the thought of making a personal fortune - and had never profited except by his books. Livingstone, rather than Rhodes, had been his model.

  Stanley believed in colonialism, despite his disdain for Rhodes's model. Henry's personal experience had convinced him that British officials would not behave like the young Belgians he had sent home in the early 1188os. Men like Glave, Swinburne, Saulez, Grant Elliot and Davy had got on well with Africans and had learned their languages. Interestingly enough, Joseph Conrad himself - despite his scathing indictment of imperialism in Heart of Darkness, and his contempt for Belgian officers - admired the British Empire builders of the r 89os, and even compared them with creative artists. In A Personal Record,
he wrote of that `interior world' where novelists, like frontiersmen, were drawn to `imagined adventures where there are no policemen, no laws, no pressure of circumstance, or dread opinion to keep them within bounds'. In The Rescuer, the imperial administrator is seen as `one of those unknown guides of civilization, who, on the advancing edge of progress, are ... like great artists, a mystery to the masses, appreciated only by the influential few'.35 In Heart of Darkness itself, Marlow is made to say that British colonies were `good to see at any time, because one knows that real work is done in there'. And Marlow was speaking for his Polish-born creator, who had written that `liberty ... can only be found under the English flag all over the world'.36 Certainly the benefits of British colonial administration seemed very real to Stanley while travelling south from Bulawayo on the newly opened railway, through peaceful British Bechuanaland (Botswana) where David Livingstone had once worked as a missionary.

  But whatever his personal views, there can be no denying that Stanley was one of the unwitting begetters of the historical process that led to terrible exploitation and crimes against humanity on the Congo. This is deeply ironic, since he had spent nine months trying to persuade the British government to take over the Congo before going ahead with Leopold as his second choice. He had dismissed Belgian officers for cruelty, and criticized Leopold's attempts to keep out foreigners and restrict trade. Stanley would therefore have been amazed to read, in the past couple of decades, ill-informed condemnation of his pioneering work by respectable academics. `The purpose behind Stanley's work in the Congo for Leopold II,' wrote Richard Brantlinger in a well-known book, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914 (1988), `was not far removed from the Eldorado Exploring Expedition in Heart of Darkness: "to tear treasure out of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe".'37

  Elsewhere Stanley has been listed as the prototype for Joseph Conrad's diabolical Mr Kurtz - a claim resting on the mistaken assumption that Conrad had spent his six months on the Congo between 1879 and 1884 - rather than in i 890, five years after Stanley had ceased to be the king's Chief Agent in Africa.38 Heart of Darkness was not published till 1899 and its inspiration lay in the bloody events of the late r 89os. It was Conrad's reading of Glave's articles, especially his description of Captain Rom, that seems to have inspired him to create the evil Kurtz. What an irony that the young man, whom Stanley had admired more than any other, should have provided a great novelist with the ammunition to create a monster who was later compared with Stanley, his hero.

  THIRTY-THREE

  `Before it is Too Late'

  When I was your age - how I scorned valetudinarians. I was coming down the Congo then with energy enough to satisfy a score of such as I am now. Emaciated it is true - but every nerve like steel wire & a strong healthy heart that renewed life through & through with every beat. Heavens, what a change.

  Stanley to his wife 189os

  By the late r 89os, Africa was ceasing to be the overwhelming preoccupation for Stanley that it had been in earlier years. While briefly in southern Africa in 11897, he had felt homesick for England and especially for Denzil - though his dog (another Randy) and his grey parrot also merited enquiries in his letters home. But Denzil was his new focus - `our own cherub', he called him - and he urged Dolly to `let him be the apple of your eye, as he is to me'. Though Henry's relations with his wife had been damaged by her determination to force him into politics, he assured her that his love was still strong. `Look well into your own heart, try & recall when once it was full of tenderest [sic] love, and trust that in mine is something very like what yours was then."

  From his mid-fifties Henry looked an old man, thanks to the terrible punishment his body had taken in Africa. Apart from himself, only Mounteney Jephson and William Hoffman survived of all the Europeans who had travelled in the party that had found Emin Pasha. And Jephson - a handsome young man ten years earlier - was almost unrecognisable by r9oo, shocking both Dolly and Stanley by his `dreadfully altered appearance'.' Henry himself was gravely ill for two months in 11896, and two years later suffered another dangerous attack of gastritis, which began while he was holidaying in the Pyre pees. He was rapidly moved to Biarritz, where doctors were on hand. After each slight improvement, Dolly dreaded the onset of another attack, with the shivering `so violent that the bed he lay on would shake, and the glasses on the table vibrate and ring' - the pain being so sharp that he would cry out. `I knew by the sound of his voice, when he called me in the middle of the night, that the pain had come; sometimes it left quite suddenly, and we looked at each other, I, pale with fear, lest it should return.'4 He was seriously ill from August to October, and though Denzil, and Dolly's nephews, Harold and Leo Myers, were playing every day on Biarritz beach, Henry could not join them. Instead he lay in his room in a comatose, morphine-induced state for the entire holiday.'

  Earlier that year, Stanley had taken three-year-old Denzil to Lowestoft for a brief break from London. `Baby is ever delightful,' he wrote home to Dolly. `The sound of his voice just thrills me, it is so birdlike & sweet. He tells me lots of things which make me smile ... His eyes are brilliant & they have quite an arch expression.'6 Nothing gave Henry greater pleasure than to be a loving parent to this little boy who, like himself, had been born illegitimate. The idea of being for Denzil what no man had ever been willing to be for him when he had been abandoned lay at the heart of his great love for his adopted son. In May 11899, Stanley took Denzil, now aged four, to Seaford on the Sussex coast, with his nurse, Mrs Ballianis - Galley'. As usual, Dolly had chosen to stay in London. `Nurse and I take long walks with baby who is quite a pedestrian able to make his four miles a day ... He is perpetually chatting & dancing up and down to the smallest trifle.' Stanley would occasionally speak of Denzil as `baby' until he was six - perhaps prolonging his delight on first adopting him. At Seaford he took photographs of his son, preserved his drawings, and delighted in all his quaint sayings. That same year, the little boy caused much amusement on being lifted up by the returning Arctic explorer, Dr Nansen, and insisting that the hero should: `Look at my new boots.' Henry told his friend and agent, Major Pond, that `every morning I take him [Denzil] a ride by train to some distant part of the States - Chicago to San Francisco, or to New Orleans and he delights in playing the conductor's part - and calling out "Salt Lake City!", "Sacramento! " or Atlanta! "17

  Stanley kept an eye on his son's toys, and when a friend gave sixyear-old Denzil a gun he was told very pointedly that at the moment `a new monkey called Mr Puff' was monopolizing the boy's attention.8 The South African war was in progress, and Henry reproved Denzil for saying he hated the Boers. The boy responded: `If they are not wicked people, why do we fight them?'9 - a very sharp reply for a sixyear-old, and a tricky question for Stanley, who, though pro-government in public, privately held different views. In fact, only a year after the war ended, Stanley welcomed to his home the Boers' two most brilliant generals, Louis Botha and Koos de la Rey.'° Stanley also held out a hand of friendship to another man who had suffered a great ordeal. This was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the victim of anti-Semitism and injustice within the French army. Henry and Dolly wrote expressing their sympathy and admiration for his courage, and saying that when he came to England they would be honoured if he would stay with them."

  While Stanley spent much of his time with Denzil, Dolly painted portraits, and attended social events, which held no appeal for her husband. One such had been the society wedding of her cousin, Margot Tennant, to Herbert Asquith, the gifted young heir apparent to the Liberal party.12 Because Henry loathed dressing up in uncomfortable clothes, and having to make small talk, he tried to avoid such occasions. Once he wrote revealingly to Dr Parke: `I am alone again, and free for a while from feminine supervision. It is grand to be able to draw a free breath once in a while. When Mrs Dolly comes to my door and says, "Bula Matari! I want to speak to you", I have to drop the cigar & the book and .
.. pretend that I am glad to have been relieved from the tedium of loneliness. Ah, marriage is a great institution!"3

  In the summer of 1894, Dolly and Henry had visited Switzerland and the Italian lakes, and in December the same year they stayed in Monte Carlo, Cannes and Mentone. This was to satisfy Stanley's love of clear skies and sunshine. In letters to friends, Dolly made it clear that she herself could be `as happy at home in dear foggy, muddy London - where lamps & firelight are compensation for sunshine'.14 In fact Dorothy's love of London, and Stanley's desire to be in the country, once mutually conceded, provided them with the time they needed to be apart from one another. If compelled to be more than two or three weeks away from the capital, Dorothy would complain of feeling 'homesick'."

  In November 11898, Stanley longed for the next general election to be announced so his period of being an MP would be at an end. The stale air in the House of Commons, the interminable hours, the endless debates about matters that did not interest him, and the numerous speeches by men he thought foolishly self-satisfied exasperated him. Nor were the speakers he admired - such as Sir Charles Dilke and Arthur Balfour - on their feet often enough to give him much pleasure. It was a very hot summer when he was first elected, and quite often Stanley returned home in the early hours feeling as if he `had undergone a long march'. `We are herded in the lobbies like so many sheep in a fold; and among my wonders has been that such a number of eminent men could consent voluntarily to such servitude."6 Then there was the expense of postage and secretarial help - by 119oo, he had paid out £4,600 in the years since his first candidature. It made him wonder why he had not resisted Dolly and had not instead chosen to be `a writer on a daily newspaper', rather than `a dumb dog' with less influence than a political journalist.