Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (49 page)

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 sent 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.