Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure
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Speke not only discovered the Nile’s source but instinctively understood the nature of the whole watershed long before any other European had grasped it. He also enjoyed the company of Africans, much as Livingstone had done, and he relished the uniqueness of the privilege of entering the kingdom of Buganda as the first European ever to have done so. His travel books are more readable than Burton’s and are not self-conscious. Burton, for all his reputation for unconventionality, yearned for recognition by the state, and resented the fact that Speke’s father had been allowed to add a hippopotamus and a crocodile to his family’s coat of arms (in reality a trifling reward), and told numerous friends that he deserved similar changes to his arms and a knighthood as well. ‘I opened the way & did the whole work of opening [the continent] from East Africa,’ he complained to the historian, William Hepworth Dixon.29 After a spirited campaign by Burton’s aristocratic wife, fought with her husband’s wholehearted approval, he was knighted in 1886 – not for his literary accomplishments, but for his achievements as an explorer. Isabel Burton had sent letters and memoranda to the Prime Minister and his cabinet, to MPs, senior military officers and members of the royal family.30 The same reward had been refused to Speke twenty-two years earlier, despite his immeasurably greater achievements in Africa. Burton had been carried for the greater part of his Tanganyika expedition, and had not visited the western shores of that lake, as Speke had done, nor gone with him to Victoria Nyanza.
In confirming Speke’s greatness, Stanley had upstaged him with his own incomparable journey. Yet his homecoming would be no happier than had been his return to London after his successful search for Livingstone. At Zanzibar he expected to find letters from Alice, his fiancée. Indeed there were letters from her, but all were dated 1874. So he remained agonisingly uncertain whether he would be returning to happiness, or to the misery of rejection. A letter from his publisher, Edward Marston, made clear which it was to be.
I now come to a delicate subject which I have long debated with myself whether I should write about or wait for your arrival. I think however I may as well tell you at once that your friend Alice Pike is married! Some months ago I received the enclosed letter saying that Miss Pike is now Mrs Barney! … It will I fear prove another source of trouble to your sensitive nature.31
For a man who dreaded rejection, it was a terrible blow. Mr Barney was both younger and richer than him, being heir to a huge rolling-stock fortune. Nor was romantic anguish Stanley’s only source of unhappiness. Thanks to his foolish exaggeration of hostile encounters on the river, and his failure to give a proper context to the bloody events on Bumbireh Island – he would return to England to face accusations of brutality from an RGS gold medallist, Henry Yule, and his ally, the socialist writer H. M. Hyndman. Their campaign would be so passionately prosecuted and so prolonged that his moral reputation would be seriously damaged although his critics acknowledged that his journey had been ‘the greatest feat in the history of discovery’.32 Unfortunately for Stanley, six years earlier, in 1872, he had made enemies in the British establishment by falling out with the committee members of the RGS and with Dr Kirk. Consequently, the British government refused to consider commissioning Stanley to go back to the Congo.
After his betrayal by Alice, it kept him sane to dream of transforming Africa and simultaneously destroying the slave trade along the lines which Livingstone had laid out. He had hoped to return to make a commercial and geographical assessment of the Congo as a Livingstonian ‘highway’ along which missionaries and traders would travel on their way into the interior. Before leaving Africa’s Atlantic coast, Stanley had written for the benefit of his Daily Telegraph readers:
I feel convinced that the Congo question will become a political question in time. As yet, 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? … Let England arrange with Portugal at once to proclaim sovereignty over the Congo River to prevent the sensibilities of the world being shocked some day when least expected.33
His final sentence would turn out to have been remarkably prescient. So, with the British government turning its back on him, who might be prepared to send Stanley to Africa again?
He had written in his final Congo diary of his fervent hope that the river might in future become ‘a torch to those who sought to do good’.34 Tragically, the man most eager to pick up that torch was secretly contemplating measures that would be the reverse of ‘good’. He was King Leopold II of Belgium, who, in November 1877, wrote in confidence to his ambassador in London: ‘I do not wish to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.’35
The following January, on his way back to London from the Congo, Stanley was approached, on the echoing railway platform at Marseilles, by two diplomats sent to intercept him by the Belgian king. The job of Baron Jules Greindl, a career diplomat, and Henry Shelton Stanford, a Florida landowner and former US consul in Brussels, was to secure the services of ‘this able and enterprising American’ for a royal project in Africa. The Nile Search would have many historic consequences, but none greater than those that would spring from this encounter in a French railway station at the end of Stanley’s Nile mission.
PART 2
THE CONSEQUENCES
TWENTY-FIVE
Shepherds of the World?
Even before Stanley left Zanzibar at the start of his great journey, the early consequences of the Nile explorers’ discoveries were being felt in the wider world. David Livingstone might have failed in his quest for the Nile’s source, but it was his life story and his sense of mission that now inspired a whole wave of African initiatives. When his last African journals were published in 1874, the public absorbed the horrors of the East African slave trade as never before and learned of the doctor’s determination to ensure that African chiefs be given the opportunity to buy the factory goods they craved from European traders, rather than from Arabs who insisted on being paid with slaves. ‘It is the fault of the Arabs who tempt us with fine clothes, powder and guns,’ one African chief had told Livingstone. ‘I would fain keep all my people to cultivate more land, but my next neighbour allows his people to kidnap mine and I must have ammunition to defend them.’1
Livingstone’s lonely death in the swamps of Bangweulu, and his followers’ heroism in bringing his body to the coast, conjured up images so powerful that British Anglicans, Nonconformists and even Liberals (who might have been expected to oppose colonial ventures) felt an urgent need to act in order to bring liberty and change to Africa. Stanley summed up this feeling in his obituary in the Graphic when saying that the doctor had ‘left an obligation on the civilized nations of Europe and America, as the shepherds of the world, to extend their care and protection over the oppressed races of Africa’.2 Although the politicians seemed unmoved, the editors of newspapers sensed that the thousands of ordinary men and women who were suddenly donating to philanthropic societies with African connections ought not to be ignored. Perhaps the moment had come to give ‘Christianity and Commerce’ a trial. ‘The work of England for Africa must henceforth begin where Livingstone left it off,’ declared the editor of the Daily Telegraph.3
Livingstone’s remains landed at Southampton.
James Stewart, a young missionary representative of the Free Church of Scotland had become so disillusioned with Livingstone during the Zambezi Expedition (not least for driving Mary Livingstone to drink) that he had flung his copy of Missionary Travels into the Zambezi, with the words: ‘So perish all that is false in myself and others.’4 But during the doctor’s funeral in Westminster Abbey he experienced, as it seemed to him, a miraculous change of heart and decided to found a mission on the shores of Lake Nyasa. He would call his settlement Livingstonia. The established Church of Scotland also sen
t a party – not to the lake – but to the Shire Highlands. Their settlement would be named Blantyre, after Livingstone’s birthplace. Today, Blantyre is Malawi’s business centre and its most populous city. Roger Price of the London Missionary Society had nearly lost his life in a Livingstone-inspired mission in the Barotse valley, which had turned out to be a death trap; but he, like Stewart, had a transforming change of heart and went out to Lake Tanganyika to search for sites for new missions. Scottish businessmen took up the ‘commerce’ part of the African challenge. John and Frederick Moir started an enterprise, later to become the world-famous African Lakes Company. One of the men subscribing capital was William Mackinnon, who would go on to become a key figure in the colonial history of East Africa. In 1887, fourteen years after Livingstone’s death, Arab-Swahili slave traders attacked the missionaries and the workers of the African Lakes Company. After a spirited campaign on their behalf in England and Scotland, a Protectorate was declared over Nyasaland (Malawi) in 1891. The colony which Livingstone had first dreamed of in the 1850s eventually came into existence eighteen years after his death.
These informal and voluntary responses to Livingstone’s life and work by groups of philanthropic people were paralleled by interventions of a more calculated and formal kind, in which rulers sent expeditions to Africa, as if in response to humanitarian pressure, but really to carry out rapacious, self-interested agendas of their own in the territories revealed by the Nile explorers.
Sir Samuel Baker – a very different kind of explorer to Livingstone – led the first expedition into equatorial Africa at the behest of a powerful ruler. Baker’s plan for creating colonial order bore no resemblance to the gradual process Livingstone had wanted to try out in the Shire Highlands until thwarted by slave raids and famine. The missionaries summoned by the doctor had been dying fast before he could begin his second phase and introduce traders. So he never planned an actual administration. Baker, by contrast, believed in immediate ‘military occupation and despotism’ as the necessary first step before ‘the first seeds of civilization’ could be planted.5 Apart from holding deeply pessimistic views about Africans, he differed from Livingstone, Speke and Stanley in another crucial way. He did not mind whether or not the area he had explored became a British protectorate or colony. A country closer to hand, he thought would do just as well.
As early as June 1867 (a decade before Stanley solved the Nile mystery), Baker had told Sir Roderick Murchison that Africa could only be opened to European influence ‘by annexing to Egypt the Equatorial Nile basin’.6 This opinion would have been music to Khedive Ismail’s ears. The modernising Europhile ruler of Egypt had already dreamed at that time of extending his African empire through the immense hinterland of Sudan (Africa’s third largest country) as far south as to incorporate the source of the Nile.7 One of the khedive’s motives for wishing to employ Sir Samuel to extend his territory was to rebut claims that the slave trade was about to be extended rather than curbed – as would have been suggested if any Egyptian officer had been given command of an expedition to the far south. Whatever his other faults, Baker hated slavery and had written spirited diatribes against the slave trade in his book, the Albert N’yanza.8
In June 1868 Baker met Nubar Pasha, the khedive ’s foreign minister, on a visit to London. Together, they discussed, in detail, Sir Samuel’s return to Africa to annexe the upper Nile, to promote commerce there and root out the slave trade.9 Baker was offered a staggering salary of £40,000, spread over four years, which must have more than made up for the doubts he must have felt about the venture. From the beginning he knew that the Egyptians were great slave owners, along with all their officials in Khartoum. So help from them was never going to amount to much.
Basker Pasha
In September 1870, a speaker at the geographical section of the British Association suggested that ‘if this expedition was successful, Mohammedanism [on the upper Nile] would be triumphant and Christianity extinguished’. Another complained that Muslims would take control of Bunyoro and Buganda in the far south.10 Baker was to have three substantial steamers, 800 Egyptian troops, 500 Sudanese and 200 Sha’iqi cavalry and fourteen cannon. So his expedition had to be taken very seriously.
The permanent acquisition of an immense region in the interior of tropical Africa by a technologically advanced state had not been attempted before and could clearly not be compared with earlier more hand-to-mouth expeditions. Even before Livingstone’s death, it had caused adverse comment among Nonconformists and Liberals that the person chosen to establish the first foreign administration in central Africa was not a humanitarian.
In answer to a note from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, about Baker’s mission, Prime Minister William Gladstone wrote that Baker should ‘be told that HMG [will] undertake no responsibility whatever for the consequence of it [the expedition] either as regards themselves or as regards any matters connected with it’.11 But Baker was immune to the ‘Grand Old Man’s’ disapproval. ‘My dear little wife,’ he told a close friend, ‘is full of determination to launch once more on the Albert Nyanza -this time we have a steamer of 130 tons and a little army instead of thirteen men …’12 His dear little wife would soon be facing difficulties and dangers almost as extreme as those encountered on the way to the Luta N’zige.
TWENTY-SIX
Creating Equatoria
During February and March 1870, Sir Samuel Baker KCB, the khedive ’s newly appointed Governor-General of the Equatorial Nile Basin, possessing powers of life and death over his men, was temporarily defeated by rafts of aquatic plants in the shifting channels of the Sudd. Somehow he had to get through the White Nile’s most famous obstacle in order to reach Gondokoro and the still more distant kingdoms of Bunyoro and Buganda. Many of his men were ‘up to their necks in water’ for days at a time, trying and failing to cut through the dense web of papyrus with hoes, billhooks and rakes. Seven men died in the two months of trying, and 170 were so sick afterwards that they had to be sent back to Khartoum, forcing Baker to retreat downstream to Taufikia, where he remained stuck until December 1871. Fifty smaller boats were needed merely to transport Indian millet, the expedition’s staple food. So with camels, horses, donkeys, Arab boat builders, and 1,500 soldiers also needing transport, the logistical problems caused by the lengthy hold-up threatened the future of the whole enterprise.
Baker finally escaped the Sudd seven months after first entering it, and only managed to reach Gondokoro (Ismailia, he would shortly rename it) on 14 April 1871.1 By then there were only two years of his contract left to run, but at least he had arrived at the northern frontier of the vast territory over which he was expected to establish Egyptian rule. His firman from the khedive authorised and instructed him:
To organize and subdue to our authority the countries situated to the south.
To suppress the slave trade. To introduce a system of regular commerce.
To open to navigation the great lakes of the Equator and to establish a chain of military stations and commercial depots, distant at intervals of three days march.2
This absurdly ambitious programme largely rested on his ability to reach an understanding with local Africans. He had hoped that the tribe in the neighbourhood of Gondokoro, the Bari, would gratefully accept his protection against the agents of the foremost slave trader in the region, Muhammad Ahmad al-Aqqad. He could not imagine they would not. But to his horror, he found that the Bari chief, Alloron, had recently allied himself with the slavers – his people voluntarily acting as al-Aqqad’s porters and mercenaries. So when Baker tried to buy foodstuffs, he was turned down. Evidently, it suited the interests of the Bari to gain immunity by coming to an accommodation with the ruling caste of Arabs permanently settled in the south. Baker had disliked these people on his earlier passage through their territory and now pronounced them ‘naturally vicious and treacherous’.3
But though the Bari posed a serious problem, Baker experienced a worse one in his own camp, as Florence confide
d to her diary: ‘I must confess that I am rather disgusted with the whole expedition together with the natives, and as to the soldiers, they are perfect brutes in every way – I know it worries Sam very much to have to command such troops.’ Florence was shocked to hear the soldiers boasting of the numbers of Africans they had killed. One man deserted after breaking the sight on his rifle, and when recaptured, Baker sentenced him to a horrifying 200 lashes. Another received the same punishment for the far greater crime of murdering a prisoner. Baker was even shamed at times by members of his scarlet-shirted, èlite corps of black Sudanese Arabs, whom he had affectionately nicknamed the ‘Forty Thieves’. Florence saw one of them capture a girl of ten in order to make her his slave. When told what she had seen, Baker tore off the man’s clothes, took away his gun and told him he would be shot if he offended again.4 Baker genuinely wanted to end the slave trade and be seen as a liberator by Africans, but their natural dislike of his association with the slave-owning Egyptians doomed his efforts from the start.