The unique character of Stanley's Waj
proceeds from its author's long fascina-
tion with the life of a man and the lure
of a continent. Even as a boy Thomas
Sterling dreamed of following Stanley's
way into the Africa of legend, mystery,
danger and challenge. A brief visit in
1956 confirmed his deep affinity for the
land and its people, and he returned
soon, this time to enter Central Africa
and begin the joining of dream to reality.
This is the record of that journey. It pre-
sents two vivid and contrasting but skill-
fully interwoven pictures of Africa: the
land as it was when Stanley first ex-
plored it in 1871, and the country today,
just awakening to its enormous potential.
Sterling's view of Stanley is clear and
unprejudiced, but informed always with
his sense of the man's true stature. So
too he sees clearly the life around him as
he travels from Zanzibar to Stanleyville.
Against the background of the legend-
ary events of the nineteenth century he
paints arresting portraits of British offi-
cials, African leaders, Dutch Catholic
priests, a Belgian psychiatrist and, most
movingly, of Epis, the tall, appealing
African girl who befriended Sterling in
Stanleyville and taught him so much of
on kick jlij))
] ticket design: Charles Goslw
92 37877si
Sterling
Stanley's way
60-2173^
BY
THOMAS STERLING
STANLEY'S WAY
is 60
THE SILENT SIREN
THE EVIL OF THE DAY
IC)S5
STRANGERS AND AFRAID
1^52
HOUSE WITHOUT A DOOR
STANLEY'S WAY
Thomas Sterling
STANLEY'S WAY
A Sentimental Journey
Through
Central Africa
NEW YORK ATHENEUM PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1960 by Thomas Sterling
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number 6o-
Printed in the United States of America by
The Murray Printing Company^ Forge Village^ Massachusetts
Bound by H. Wolff, New York
First American Edition
A portion of this Look originally appeared in
The NewYorker^ in different form
TO
P. M. STERLING
IN BELATED GRATITUDE FOR HER SUPPORT AND NURTURE
Scale of Miles
o 200 400 eoo
< - 1 - L_ - \
Stanley's first journey, 1871
to find Livins
ngstone
Stantefs second journey, 1874 .*r........
Stanley's third journey, ;58/ ^ _-_ .
Expedition
STANLEY'S WAY
"Good-bye, good-bye! Come again soon. Come
any time. And please, please, don't write a book
about us!"
A group of Africans in Uganda saying farewell
to a European friend
INTRODUCTION
"T IJTESTERN America in the 19205 was ruled by the standards
V? of the previous century, in which it was born. So that
for me, as a child, finding Henry Stanley's works on the book-
shelf was as much in the pattern of things as watching, through
tears, my grandmother scrubbing my feet in the kitchen sink
with a stiff brush, or listening to my mother's stories of
Wyoming.
Those books furnished austere dreams of romance and
adventure which I did not then suspect were hopelessly
anachronistic. The world was no longer divided between the
savage and the civilized, as it was in Stanley's time. We were
destined to be one or the other together.
Then in Rome, thirty years later, I came across a copy of
How I Found Livingstone and all the old nostalgia came back,
nearly ruined by the certain knowledge that it was ridiculous.
I had already been to Africa once and I knew that one often
met people a good deal more cultivated than oneself. Adven-
ture, in the patronizing sense that I had intended as a child,
was out of the question. Of course there is still a great wilder-
ness in Africa but in these days it seems chiefly inhabited by
White Hunters on safari great leathery boys who mean no
harm to anyone. The real jungle is all around us and there is
no reason to go looking for it on other continents or even on
other streets.
But I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of this
young American explorer again, just because it takes us back
to our beginnings. I thought, also, that it would be more
amusing if it were told against the background of the places
9
Stanley originally saw and the people he met as these have
changed enormously. So I left Italy a few months later and
followed his route through the dark continent from East to
West. I wasn't looking for savages and, with two exceptions,
both European, found none.
Unless otherwise specified, all amounts of money mentioned
historically here have their original values. If you wish to trans-
pose these, the dollar from 1870 to the turn of the century was
worth about three times what it is now, the pound about five
times. These are conservative estimates and often misleading,
which is the chief reason I have not transposed them myself.
Clothing was relatively much more expensive than it is now,
food less. A man could be rich on a few hundred pounds or even
dollars a year, simply because there were so many people who
were very poor.
10
CHAPTER ONE
HE wore walking shoes, high stockings, a pair of khaki
shorts which he claimed to have got in North Africa
during the war, a shirt to match, and a slouch American hat
with an unobtrusive but genuine flamingo feather in the band.
He picked off the hat at the doorway and came into the dining-
room, peering through shadows until he saw me. The room
was silent beneath discreet luncheon noises as the merciless sun
banged against the shutters. He put his hat and the Tanganyika
Standard on an extra chair and sat down, smiling like a death's
head. He asked if I had got my kit together, using that word,
and I said that I had managed to find a few things in Nairobi
and would get more here, in Dar-es-Salaam. He nodded and
summoned a waiter, from whom he ordered courses by their
number on the menu, so as not to tax the man's English. I
found it hard to remember that he was a British Journalist and
not a seasoned White Hunter; he was so carefully threadbare
and had the unshakeable poise of a man who has been sitting
on verandas in bare knees for years. Of course he had been to
Africa before, three or four times.
"You know," he said, leaning forward. "You don't have to
get wool or cotton stockings. For a few shillings more you
can buy nylon. Stay up by themselves, too. No garters."
It was for things like this that I valued his growing friend-
ship. He had helped me get a room in the hotel and had done
several other little favours which were the sort no one feels
obliged to do.
We discussed a map, which he had brought from London
and was going to lend me. It traced the journeys of Burton
ii
and Speke, Speke and Grant, Livingstone, Stanley, and
Cameron. He was worried that his Burton and Speke line was
off in one particular. As he was writing a history of early
explorations in East Africa this was important. He knew that
I was interested in Stanley and thought I might know some-
thing about the other routes. Suddenly, I looked to him, across
a plate of dead English vegetables, and asked if he weren't
pleased to be back in Africa.
"Oh my God, yes. I feel so free."
He went on, then, to speak of other things but the word 'free'
was repeated several times, even when another might have
served as well or better, and I could see that it preoccupied him.
He may have been celebrating his escape from the small quarrels
of European life, or simply from troubles at home. In any case
it was clear that being here was almost a physical pleasure for
him the muscular release of an animal turned out of a cage.
"Of course/' he said, at last, "I wouldn't live here. I don't
see how I could. But . . ." He ordered number 6, the diced
mangoes, instead of number 5, the pudding.
I, too, was glad to be in Africa, but not for the same reason.
Fd been here before, in the Sudan, and something the tre-
mendous sky, the great distances or the clear light had caught
me. As Miss Dinesen said, ". . . everything you see is made for
greatness and freedom and unequalled nobility." It was much
like falling in love, in the beginning an unreasonable attach-
ment which is all the stronger for being so.
Also, in Central Africa, one may step back in time. Not a
great distance, it is true; fifty years, usually, seventy-five or
eighty at the most (from October 1958). Every now and then
one may see the nineteenth century caught in a gesture or a
word, life-like, as a fly in amber. Sometimes it is like going
through a drawer of old family photographs those enduring
portraits printed on cardboard, frayed at the corners and
12
smelling of must. Here are the Norcrosses and the Stanleys
and Mapeses, rigid, determined figures, a bit suspicious of the
camera, vigorous and self-assured. The colour of the skin and
the clothing is different, but the expression is the same.
Here, in a sense, our own grandparents are reliving their
lives in the midst of outrageous contradiction and social
change. I mean our grandparents, for there is something
peculiarly American about these people. They are undergoing
the revolution not always political which changed the face
of the United States just after the Civil War in the period now
called Victorian. Before that, our land was a wilderness; after-
wards . . . We know what came after, but seeing it all again
in Central Africa is like reading a historical novel whose last
chapters are known. The characters haven't yet gone through
the triumphs and disasters, marriages and divorces, which the
plot has in store for them. And there is also just a chance not
a very good one that it isn't the book we know at all but a
sequel . . . something with a happier ending.
Here are the skilled craftsmen, the ward bosses, the labour
leaders, the women fighting for emancipation even to list
them sounds like a line of Whitman's; and, more important,
here is a great mass of people stirring of its own accord,
gathering in cities, going to schools, holding meetings, assert-
ing its independence in every way and shrugging off the hand
of custom. This is not always wise; sometimes it is very stupid.
It may all lead to disaster. But you can't help feeling, watching
people who seem to have stepped out of oleographs, that you
are in better company than you are used to. They are a bit
more than life-sized and their gestures are grander.
And so I was glad to be back. Also, though it is really part
of the same thing, I had always been interested in Henry M.
Stanley and was now half-committed to follow his firm, Vic-
torian steps across the continent for a news-feature syndicate.
13
He -would not recognize the Central Africa of today, but It
would recognize him.
My new friend was speaking of Stanley's journey with
Livingstone on Lake Tanganyika, which they had called a
picnic. We rose and went to the veranda to take coffee, and
when I envied his hat he said that he thought, if all went well,
that he might get a snake-skin band for it. He was wonderfully
bronzed and sinewy and I think I was the only one there who
knew that he had got that weathered look sitting on the top
deck of a Lloyd Triestino cruise ship all the way down from
Venice, drinking gin and tonic. He left his map with me and I
promised to drop it off at the desk. That was the last I saw of
him for a number of months*
In these days, people who are not fond of cruises enter
Africa by air. From Khartoum on down in spite of ruddy,
puffing Englishmen en route to Nairobi, and their martial
wives whose uniform is the print dress and whose pack is the
regulation blonde vanity case the continent is still primitive.
The tiny shadow of the plane darts over vast lands where
Nature is absolute sovereign. To the right is a lake, which
might take days to row across, lying In what appears to be a
larger lake of mud, surrounded by rolling scrub hills and
hundreds of miles of forests and raw, eroded earth.
At Nairobi itself Nature is temporarily put in her place
when one learns in an airport waiting-room that there are
European-type gentlemen and non European-type gentlemen.
And in town no amount of flowering jacaranda can dispel the
gloom that racial tension creates. So it is a genuine relief to
take to the air again and, crossing the equator, to look down
on the green velvet land, sequined here and there with rivers
and pools, looking as though it had been mauled by a kitten.
And it is a joy to land at last by the crystal sea, in the thoroughly
unreal world of Zanzibar.
CHAPTER TWO
*\V7 HEN Stanley fi rst came to ^i 8 island In 1871, leading the
\V New York Herald Expedition to rescue Livingstone, he
expected to find little more than a sandbar In the Indian Ocean,
pestilent, hot and ugly. What he found was the very prototype
of a languorous, garlanded, tropical island; and that is more
or less what it is now. Here are lovely courtyards lined with
bougainvillaea, like jewel boxes, and shady rooms hidden
behind blue and green shutters. Here are lissom Indian girls
spitting betel-juice, bearded Oman and black, clean-shaven
mainland Arabs in white cotton kanzus. The air is thick with
the smell of cloves, of which Zanzibar and its neighbouring
island, Pemba, are the world's major producers. The warm,
green sea laves a powdery shore and at night hundreds of
thousands of flowers cast their scent on the breeze.
At times, when it is night and there is a swollen moon in
the sky, the streets are bathed in an exotic light which may
almost never be seen outside of the precious isles and enclaves
that shelter the characters of Ronald Firbank. One half expects
to find Mrs Yajnavalkya and Queen Thleeanouhee of the Land
of Dates gossiping before the Blue Jesus. And somewhere,
surely, Lady Parvula de Panzoust is wending her erotic way.
It is hard to walk through Zanzibar without remembering
Firbank's phrase about Mohamadanism being fine if only it
didn't sprawl so, and it becomes alarmingly clear that he wrote
with far less imagination and more documentation than anyone
supposed.
In Stanley's time the island was a good deal less neat and
museum-like. The streets were filled with filth, bodies of
15
slaves were cast away on the beach and there were regular
epidemics of cholera. But the sudden blight of Zanzibar's
most important crop human beings fixed it as a period of
physical splendour. The Arab architecture remains, and cool
halls and courts now dream behind heavy, carved, brass-
studded doors which nevertheless look a bit self-conscious
from being mentioned so often in guide books. The great
wooden chests are still brought over on dhows from India on
the north-east monsoon (December to March) and if they are
more flimsily constructed now, that is due to a revolution in
India, not in Zanzibar.
These same dhows return during the summer on the south-
west monsoon carrying cloves and copra and other produce of
the islands, nostalgic for the old days when a cargo of slaves
and ivory would have brought a fortune. What remains most
unchanged here is the population itself, There are the eternally
middle-class Indians, squatting on the floors of their shops,
investing their capital, and guarding their children like precious
vases. Then the Arabs, some of whose ancestors have been
here since the thirteenth century. Most of them are now more
African than Asian, as they were in Stanley's time. They stand
around in the streets fondling their walking-sticks, talking
politics and drinking ginger-flavoured coffee. And finally there
are the Africans, or Afro-Shirazis as the political majority call
themselves. They claim descent from the Persians in the dim
past but very dim. They do most of the island's labour.
It was from among these last that Stanley chose the first
members of his expedition as guides and soldiers. Six of them
were veterans of a former expedition of Speke's-and one, a big
man named Bombay, had had his front teeth knocked out in a
fight with his employer in Uganda. Stanley made him Sergeant-
Major. He also appointed two ex-sailors named Shaw and
Farquhar as his assistants, a boy from Jerusalem called Selim
16
as his valet, and Omar, a Turkish dog, to watch over his
effects. Stanley was offered quarters by the American consul
until he collected his supplies and, what is in these days
astonishing, a guarantee of credit. With this he managed to
cash drafts on the New York Herald with the local Indian
merchants at a rate of seventy-five cents on the dollar.
It was one thing to have money for supplies and another to
know what to buy. No one in Zanzibar among the European
colony had the faintest idea what one had to take into the con-
tinent. Only four white men had gone there before and they
had left no notes. At last he went to an Arab merchant engaged
in the ivory trade, who sent him on to other merchants.
It was, he found, just as fatal to take too many goods as it
was to take too few. Forty yards of trading-cloth a day would
feed one hundred men but, of that, a little less than two-thirds
had to be American sheeting (Merikani). The rest was to con-
sist of Kaniki (Indian blue jeans) and such coloured cloths as
Barsati, Sohari and Kunguru-Cutch, blue and pink. Thus,
Stanley calculated, two years 5 travel would require 16,000 yards
of American sheeting, 8,000 yards of Kaniki, and 5,200 yards
of mixed coloured cloths. Then he had to take beads, and not
all of the same kind. In Unyamwezi he could only use red
(sami-sami) beads. Black (bubii) beads were currency in
Ugogo, sungomoffi in Ujiji and white Merikani beads in
Usagara. There were as many systems of exchange as there
are in modern Europe.
In addition, he was required to take three hundred and fifty
pounds of wire, for, as Stanley said, if beads were like copper
in trading; cloth was like silver and pure copper wire was gold.
Then came the ordinary provisions of an expedition, cooking
utensils, rope, tents, needles, bedding, ammunition and tea, of
which he drank about twenty cups a day. He also purchased
twenty-two donkeys. Altogether he had six tons of material,
including such diverse supplies as Liebig's meat-extract, a dog-
whip, Collis Browne's Chlorodyne, field-glasses and a sextant,
quinine, and a bottle of Elixir Vegetal de la Grande Chartreuse.
Before he left for Bagamoyo, directly opposite Zanzibar on
the coast, where he was to pick up porters, he sought out Sir
John Kirk who was the acting British consul at Zanzibar. He
wanted to ask him about Livingstone, particularly as Kirk had
served with him on the Zambesi explorations a decade before.
One of Stanley's chief difficulties on this first expedition of
his was to hide from everyone, including himself, his real
objective. He had been told to find Livingstone and no one but
his editor considered the man exactly lost. It was known that
the Doctor had gone into the heart of the continent in 1866.
From time to time he had communicated with the outside
world, and he was generally believed to have his base at Ujiji,
on Lake Tanganyika. Stanley had really been sent to get a
sensational story and get it any way he could. The New York
Herald was then the most flamboyant newspaper in the Eng-
lish-speaking world and James Gordon Bennett, Jr. whose
idea this was was the most ardently unscrupulous editor of
an era that equated sensationalism with sensualism.
But Stanley had that kind of literal, inner sincerity which
turns the most devious plot to stalwart legend. In his own
mind, before his journey was over, Livingstone really was lost
and he had come to save him. What was more, fate agreed with
Stanley as it usually did and by the time he arrived at Ujiji
the old Doctor, who had not been in need before, was.
This sincerity did not keep the young newspaperman from
being circumspect. He had let it be known in Zanzibar that he
had come to explore the Rufiji River, but as his expedition
eventually cost well over forty thousand dollars and Stanley
had been spending money recklessly in Zanzibar for a month,'
people did not believe him.
18
When he met Kirk he was so ponderously sly ( s "Ah yes,
Doctor Kirk/ 3 1 asked, carelessly. "About Livingstone, where
is he do you think, now?" ') that the consul grew suspicious
and told him that he thought the Doctor didn't want to see
anybody and that he would probably run away if Stanley were
to 'stumble on him/ as the young man had suggested he might
do. As it turned out, this is more or less the way he did come
on Livingstone. But, as I have said, no matter how elephantine
Stanley ever managed to be, fate came on with even heavier
steps.
Henry M. Stanley, like many great men, moved so grandly
on the world stage because he was following an intense per-
sonal drama which had little or nothing to do with the big
show. While everyone else saw his journey as a heroic attempt
to save the man who had, almost alone, thrown the light of
European civilization on the dark continent, Stanley's view
was a great deal simpler. He was looking for his father.
Henry Stanley had little patience with symbols or abstrac-
tions, but he would have admitted to any close friend that all of
his life he had been looking for his father and, for that matter,
any other member of his family on whom he could lavish his
frozen love. He speaks of it many times in his writings, his
longing to cling to any family any mother, any brother, any
sister and most of all any father who will have him. The two
most important events of his life were a direct result of that
search.
He was born in Wales in 1841. During his early youth he
was called John Rowland, after the man who begot him. The
boy never saw him and hardly ever saw his mother who was a
domestic worker in London. She left him in the country with
her parents as soon as possible and went back to work.
At the age of six, his grandfather having died, he was
marched to a workhouse under the impression that he was
going to visit his aunt Mary. When the door closed behind
him and he found himself with a strange man he broke into
tears. As he said later, 'It took me some time to learn the
unimportance of tears in a workhouse. 5
The place was known as St Asaph's and was the very model
of those Dickensian institutions where sadistic assaults are
made on the heroic natures of little children. Here was a one-
handed schoolmaster, unqualified as a teacher in any way, who
savagely beat his charges for the least infraction of the rules.
The workhouse was also the unofficial home of the pimps,
drunks and prostitutes of the parish whose influence on the
children was all the stronger because they were under no other.
The Board of Governors had refused to supply slates and
maps, as they considered knowledge of arithmetic and geo-
graphy unnecessary, and lessons were based on the Catechism,
the Scriptures and Doctor Mavor's Spelling Primer. The
children slept two to a bed, an older with a younger, and no
doubt this led them to practise what they saw practised so fre-
quently around them. It is hard to see how one could con-
sciously design a school more apt to teach its pupils to despise
the society around it.
One day, a boy whom Stanley described as 'king of the
school for beauty and amiability/ died under peculiar circum-
stances. Stanley sneaked into the room where he was laid out,
lifted the sheet and discovered that he was covered with welts
and bruises. His description of this scene has a Tom Sawyerish
quality which robs it of what must have been its true horror.
This frequently happens in Stanley's books and it is strange
to reflect that one of the world's great reporters was so nearly
inarticulate, Florence Nightingale called his How I Found
Livingstone "the very worst book on the very best subject I
ever saw in all my life.'
20
The brutal schoolmaster's name was John Francis, and when
John Rowland was fifteen years old, in perfect Victorian
tradition he knocked the bully down and beat him senseless
with his own birch. Then he climbed the workhouse wall and
ran away to a world that he was shortly to conquer. Also true
to tradition, John Francis went insane some time later and was
dragged off to a madhouse, where the poor man died in con-
ditions which were probably more inhuman than any he had
created at St Asaph's.
After this, young John Rowland went to live with his aunt
Mary, the woman he had thought he was going to see nine
years before. She was an unpleasant person, but she was fair
and even generous, and the boy was comparatively happy,
working as a shepherd. All he lacked, as he said, was a bit
of love. A few years later he went to live with an uncle and
an aunt in Liverpool, where he got a job as an errand boy.
In these flights to aunts and uncles one can sense his need
of a family and his heart-broken disappointment at not being
accepted.
Years later, when his mother died, she had a brass plate put
on her coffin saying that she had borne 'Henry M. Stanley,
African explorer,' and if her son ever saw her grave it must
have taken a great deal of strength not to feel bitter. But he
might have been moved simply to pity, especially if he knew
then that his illegitimate half-sister, Emma, who had been
some years with him at St Asaph's, had quietly taken the name
Stanley.
He stayed with the family in Liverpool for a few months
but he was continually treated as a poor relation and at last
took a job as a cabin boy on a ship to America. If my discon-
tent had not been so great/ he wrote, C I had clung to them
like a limpet on a rock/
The ship proved an even greater hell than the workhouse
21
and when he arrived in New Orleans he deserted. While
wandering around, he allowed another boy to take him to a
brothel but was so horrified by what he saw that he ran out.
This would have been a very normal reaction in any boy, but
aside from the fact that Stanley was not a person who had
exactly normal reactions, his nine years in St Asaph's must
surely have taught him something of these matters.
This, plus the fact that he had nothing more to do with any
woman until he was married at the age of forty-nine, tends to
confirm rumours, years after, that he was homosexual. Stanley's
emotions were probably a great deal more complex than that.
It seems clear that he had withdrawn them almost entirely from
areas that are considered normal, but he did not necessarily
express them abnormally. His longings were in the direction
of a family and anything that fell short of one failed to move
him. This indifference to either a healthy or an unhealthy sex
life worked to his enormous advantage later in Africa.
One morning in mid-February 185:9, about a week after he
discovered that his room-mate, whom he called Dick, was an
English girl named Alice Beaton who had run off to sea in
breeches, John was walking down Tchapitoulas street when he
saw a man reading a newspaper. He walked up to him and said,
perfectly in character,
"As you are the first gentleman I have seen, I thought I would
apply to you for work, or ask you for advice as to how to get it."
"So," the man ejaculated [and one imagines that in those days
people really did ejaculate and asseverate], tilting his chair back
again, "y u are friendless in a strange land, eh, and want to work
to begin making your fortune, eh? Well, what work can you do?
Can you read? What book is that in your pocket?"
"It is my Bible, a present from our bishop. Oh yes, sir, I can
read."
* Let me see your Bible . . . Can you write well?"
"Yes, sir, a good round-hand, as I have been told."
22
The man's name was Henry Morton Stanley. He was a
former minister, still ordained, but now a wealthy merchant.
As it happened, young Rowland was deeply religious, be-
lieving in God, as he said, c as a very real personage,' and in
the 'immediate presence of angels/ good and bad. It is not sur-
prising that both of the men who took the place of a father in
his life should have been God's official representatives.
Mr Stanley brought John into his family, where young Mrs
Stanley was 'the first lady I ever conversed with/ Stricken by
his own lack of culture he began to read Paradise Lost, the
Decline and Fall and Pope's Homer in fact all the books which
would enable him in later years to pass as a gentleman and
which had such a lamentable effect on his prose style.
During one of the absences of his patron, who had gone
upriver on business, Mrs Stanley fell gravely ill and John left
his job with Speake and McCreary, commission merchants, to
nurse her. She died, however, and one half of the boy's new
family was gone. When Mr Stanley returned he was so touched
by the young man's devotion to his late wife that he gave him
his name and promised to care for him. This was the first show
of affection John had received in his life.
He wrote: Before I could quite grasp all that this declaration
meant for me, he had risen, taken me by the hand, and folded me
in a gentle embrace. My senses seemed to whirl about for a few
half-minutes, and finally I broke down, sobbing from extreme
emotion. It was the only tender action I had ever known, and, what
no amount of cruelty could have forced from me, tears poured in a
torrent under the influence of the simple embrace.
He travelled with his new father for several years, learning
his business. The boy was very quick and had an astonishing
memory. He could learn a page of figures by glancing at them.
It seems, however, though Stanley doesn't mention it, that
23
something went wrong between them and the older man never
did legally adopt him.
At last the merchant was called to Havana to visit a sick
brother and left young Henry in the care of a friend in Arkan-
sas. In Cuba he died, though Stanley did not learn of this for
several years. From this time he was again without a parent.
People whose natures are essentially extravagant and grand,
as Stanley's was in spite of its surface propriety, seem to be
involved by accident in a series of momentous events which
sweep them up and deposit them far from their beginnings. In
less than ten years Stanley joined the rebel army during the
American Civil War (he said, because someone sent him a
negress's petticoat), joined the northern army after he was cap-
tured in the battle of Shiloh, joined the U.S. Navy as ship's
writer after he was discharged from the army, deserted the
Navy and went to Turkey, was shipwrecked off the coast of
Spain, covered the Indian wars with Generals Hancock and
Sherman for the Missouri Democrat and, finally, scored a three-
week beat on General Napier's Abyssinian campaign for the
New York Herald and became its star reporter.
During this time he also made two visits to members of his
family in England, including his mother. His welcome grew
warmer in direct proportion to his affluence.
In 1869 he was earning two thousand dollars a year not
much, by our standards, for a famous foreign correspondent,
though he did have an unlimited expense account and was
shortly to use it as no other journalist has dared since. He had
begun to indulge a taste for luxuries he hadn't even known
existed ten years before. When collecting his supplies for the
Livingstone expedition, for instance, he included a bottle of
Sillery, a rare champagne from the neighbourhood of Rheims,
made only of white grapes and much lighter and dryer than
ordinary champagne. On his eight-and-a-half-month journey
24
to Ujiji he brought, as personal effects, a bearskin, a Persian
carpet, a bath, silver eating-utensils, a silver teapot and two
silver goblets to drink his champagne with Livingstone. He
also carried, loyally, bundles of back numbers of the New York
Herald.
On the sixteenth of October he was in Madrid, having just
covered the battle of Valencia, when he received a telegram
from James Gordon Bennett, summoning him to his suite at
the Grand Hotel in Paris.
Bennett had already shown an interest in Livingstone
and, the year before, had sent Stanley to Suez to check on
rumours that he was coming out of Africa by way of the
Nile. At that time David Livingstone was one of the heroes of
the world especially of the wealthy and arrogant part of it
which spoke English. He was a doctor, a missionary and an
explorer and so, at one stroke, satisfied the longings of the
Victorian era for science, faith and adventure. His paternal
figure loomed in the day-dreams of red-blooded young men
and guided, with gentle firmness, the tightly corseted judgment
of their sisters. What was more important, Livingstone had
devoted his life to the abolition of slavery, and the anti-slavery
movement was one of the most explosive forces of the nine-
teenth century, to its eternal credit. As this man hadn't been
heard of for several years Bennett felt that a story was building
up, and he was perfectly right.
"Where do you think Livingstone is?" Bennett said to
Stanley.
"I really do not know, sir."
"Do you think he is alive?"
"He may be and he may not be."
"Well, I think he is alive, and that he can be found, and I
am going to send you to find him . . . Draw a thousand
pounds now, and when you have gone through that, draw
another thousand, and when that is spent, draw another thou-
sand, and when you have finished that, draw another thousand,
and so on; but FINP LIVINGSTONE." Bennett was going to regret
that 'and so on. 9
But this was all perfectly in the tradition of adventure-
journalism, and the astonishing thing about the entire story is
that, from beginning to end, not one person forgets his part,
The weaklings are weak and the strong are strong. The rich
and capricious have the courage of their impulses and the poor
show such patently false humility that in the wink of an eye
they themselves become rich and capricious. A man may be
a wastrel or he may have a will of iron; he is not fond of
half-measures.
Before Stanley went after Livingstone, Bennett, a practical
man for all his caprice, suggested that he go to the inauguration
of the Suez Canal, proceed up the Nile to learn about Sir
Samuel Baker's expedition into Upper Egypt; go to Jerusalem
and look into the discoveries of a certain Captain Warren; visit
Constantinople and find out about the trouble between the
Khedive and the Sultan; visit the Crimea and the old English
battle-grounds, go across the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea, go
through Persia to India and write an Interesting letter from
Persepolis,' drop in on Bagdad and 'write up something about
the Euphrates Valley Railway.' Then, after India, he could go
for Livingstone.
"Good night, and God be with you."
"Good night, sir. What it is in the power of human nature
to do I will do; and on such an errand as I go upon, God will
be with me."
Bennett was no doubt certain that this strange little man with
black hair and a red, fat face with hypnotic grey eyes and a
chest like a gorilla, was equal to the tasks he had given him. But
he might have been doubtful had he known that Stanley was
26
going to strike into the centre of Africa, to Ujiji, where only
three Europeans had been before. One was Livingstone himself
and two others were army officers, rigorously trained in the
tropics.
In fact, two years later, when he first received Stanley's
enormous drafts to equip his expedition, he refused to honour
them. He changed his mind, however, when it became evident
that the young man might succeed. He had no way of knowing
that Stanley was on another single-minded and fanatic quest
for his lost parent.
27
CHAPTER THREE
-r y THEN Seyyid Said bin Sultan, the Imam of Oman, trans-
\V ferred his capital to Zanzibar in 1832, he began to pro-
mote commerce primarily in slaves and ivory with the
interior of Africa. The island was therefore the staging-ground
of most of the early Arab expeditions, and the principal trade
route was that leading to Tabora and on to Ujiji, which
Burton reports the first Arabs reached in 1840,
With certain deviations this is the line of the present railway
crossing Tanganyika. The coastal terminus has moved a few
miles south to Dar-es-Salaara, the capital of the territory.
Bagamoyo, which saw hundreds of thousands of slaves embark
for the markets of Zanzibar and the Middle East, is now chiefly
noted for its seaside country club.
As a measure of slavery's defeat the Universities Mission
church in Zanzibar was built on the site of the old slave
market, with its altar raised over the whipping-post. For all
their commemorative zeal, the missionaries produced a
very ordinary church, and though built of coral stone it is
otherwise like thousands of others in the Anglo-Saxon
world.
When I visited it on a Thursday afternoon at the end of
October no one was there. It seemed to have just recovered
from a prayer meeting. Forlorn Swahili hymnals were scattered
on the pews and there was an odour of grained wood and of
propriety. It was all so painfully sincere and so anti-climatic.
On the lectern, across which must have been delivered some of
the dullest and most heart-felt sermons on earth, were two
long-playing records of Chopin's Nocturnes.
28
This persistent and faintly antiseptic English character per-
meates Zanzibar and wars with its luxuriant nature. One has
the sensation of drinking chartreuse out of a tooth-glass. On
the Residency Road, for instance, stands a stone column with
a sign beside it reading, 'Visitors are asked to refrain from
scribbling on the milestone/ On the face of the column are
carved the names of several towns, Dar-es-Salaam, Tanga,
Mombasa, etc., with their distances. And at the very top it
reads, 'LONDON 8064 miles. 3 In the post office one must learn
that * Tofadhalini sunameni kua mis tan 9 means ' please queue
up.'
The Zanzibar hotel, where I stayed, was also triumphantly
British. It had a pleasant lobby lined with deep chairs suggest-
ing comfort without being particularly comfortable, a small bar
that kept English drinking hours and a busy reception desk
above which were optimistic slogans reading, 'You don't have
to be crazy to be in this business but it helps/ and, "The
impossible we try to do at once, a miracle takes a little
longer/ And on the Jubilee Wharf, in front of Bargash bin
Said's old palace, which now houses the Government offices,
rickshaw men doze in their own rickshaws, gossip and
drink fruit-juice in their unmanned carriages throughout the
somnolent afternoons. Here I left a note for Mr Robertson,
administrative officer of the island, asking for an appoint-
ment.
That night at the hotel, after an English boarding-house
dinner, served with almost satirical care, I had coffee and
brandy in the lobby with the hotel receptionist, a voluble girl
with straw-coloured hair and painfully sunburnt arms.
"Have you been to the Pigalle? Here in Zanzibar, I mean.
It's the only hotel for food, not that I want to run down my
own place." She leaned forward and put her glass down.
"Two real Frenchwomen run it."
29
Others were coming in from dinner, among them an old
Indian woman, wearing a gauze-silk sari and a diamond in a
wing of her nose, whose every movement and hulking gesture
proclaimed her to be some miserable girl's mother-in-law.
"You see him? He's an assistant District Commissioner but
he'll never be promoted/'
I glanced across the room and saw a large, dejected-looking
man sucking a pipe, A couple entered and sat at my right. She
was brisk and horsy; he had blue shoebutton eyes and brindle
moustaches.
" . , always thought Zanzibar was full of humming-gales
and all those blue things," my companion continued.
Brindle mumbled something.
"Don't be ridiculous, Nigelif they go out to the reserve
in the afternoon they won't see anything. You know perfectly
well the lions don't get up till tea-time."
The assistant District Commissioner had grown conscious
of his hands. "Why won't he be promoted?" I said.
". . . can go boating every day and I might not quit if
I could just get a tan. After all, I'm practically the only girl
on the island only girl that is."
The assistant District Commissioner got up and walked out,
staring into the bowl of his pipe. His shorts bagged badly
behind.
The following morning at breakfast I had word that I could
see Mr Robertson. Meeting British officials is always an intimi-
dating experience, not because they are unfriendly as a rule but
because they represent a nation which insists on having plates
warmed when the temperature is over ninety in the shade, and
has arrogantly decreed that its only two edible meals break-
fast and tea shall be those which most other people m the
world never touch.
30
The inside of Bargash's palace, where Mr Robertson had his
offices, looked like an old-fashioned department store sold
out. It rose In galleries supported on slender wooden pillars
and was open in the centre to the roof. This was levered up
and extended over the four walls so that there was space for
air to circulate. Everything was sparely and delicately con-
structed, though the doors to the rooms off the galleries were
thickly carved and the banisters were cut to lacy patterns
different on each floor and painted white.
In this building Mr Robertson was wonderfully at home.
He wore a perfectly cut white suit and shirt, a tie that seemed
to have grown to his neck, and a smile that comforted one with
understanding. He sat down at his desk, indicated my chair,
and tented his immaculate fingers while I explained my visit.
He was extremely handsome, running a Bit to flesh no more
than a pound or two and had the complexion of a gardenia
petal He was probably athletic in a few chosen sports. What-
ever the assistant District Commissioner had done to lose his
promotion, it was obvious that his greatest fault was in falling
so far short of this splendid ideal.
This was the only sort of man who could frighten Henry
Stanley. He was sure that any real gentleman would snub him.
That was why he took such a strong dislike to Sir John Kirk
when he arrived on this island. He thought the man despised
him, which may have been true. But it did not occur to Stanley
such was his innocent conceit that he could be despised foi
any other reason than his birth. He never forgot the cornet in
the Scinde Horse in General Napier's campaign, who, on being
approached, drew back as though bitten and said, "Whom have
I the honour to address?"
Mr Robertson was very kind and helpful, though actually
not too informative. As he sketched the history of the island
there were even several important events of which he seemed
3 1
to be unaware. But he was personally such a magnificent
expression of government that it was difficult to believe that
he had not feigned his ignorance for some critical reason of
state.
Until recent years the history of Zanzibar and its neighbour-
ing island, Pemba, is the history of the sultanate. Of the ten
rulers only the first three had any degree of autonomy. These
were Said bin Sultan, who established Zanzibar as his capital in
1832 and his two sons, Majid bin Said (Sultan 1856-70) and
Bargash bin Said (Sultan 1870-88). From that time the Sul-
tans' power was largely curtailed by the British. The present
one, His Highness Seyyid Sir Khalifa bin Harub, GCMG, CBE
(whom God preserve) acceded on 9 December 1911, and has
held his title longer than any other ruler on earth by agreeing
with the Colonial Office that he is not wholly competent to
administer his realm.
Recently there has been agitation among the Arabs for a
larger voice in the Government. In 1957 they managed to
force elections for half of the Legislative Council, which
might have been a great victory for them if they had re-
membered that they, as well as the British, were a minority
on the island. The Africans, who used to be more tractable,
treacherously organized a party of their own and won the
election . . .
But politics become mercifully unreal in a place like Zan-
zibar, and it is really impossible to remember how many
students Nasser invited to Cairo or whether or not there are
any Communists here or how the Indians voted in 1957 . . ,
One wanders off into Ngambo, the African quarter, where
sticks of trading beads are still sold and one may see violently
coloured women's brassieres in the shops with alternating
green and red breasts. Duller matters fade from the mind when
one discovers that a woman who assumes that an ivory button
32
in her upper lip is attractive, or at least tantalizing, is perfectly
tight.
As a child I used to read those huge books of Stanley's with
marbled covers filled with wonderful, stiff woodcuts in
which drama was primarily a matter of posture. One of those
illustrations all yellow and with its page flaked at the edges
showed a young girl being marked out by cannibals for
butchering. As she was naked this scene was especially
fascinating.
Those books, now lost, had been in my mother's family
since she was a girl and I had been told by an aunt, who kept
track of such things, that Mr Stanley was my kinsman, being
related to grandmother Stanley. When I learned the truth
about his birth I never dared tell her because she was very
proud of her Stanley connections and had given one of her
children that name.
But before I left Zanzibar I saw the girl in the woodcut
again. I had gone swimming. On the beach the clove-spiced
air mingled with the tang of the sea until the bay seemed to be
a great bath, faintly clouded with Cologne. The African sky
stretched for hundreds of miles and held blue heavens and
black storms as casually as a hand may hold a few patches of
coloured stuff.
After swimming in the honeyed water I fell asleep on the
sands and woke in the presence of a beautiful little girl, as dark
as sleep, wearing a bright green dress which hung on her thin
shoulders as on a hanger, and carrying a long piece of black
seaweed. She stared at me with the remarkable concentration
that children achieve while being merely interested. Her shaved
head was perfectly elliptical and her lovely teeth showed
through a half-smile. Still smiling, she turned and walked to
33
the water and began to beat it mercilessly with her seaweed
whip.
She was, in fact, a young version of Epis, who lives fifteen
hundred miles farther on, in the Congo. Of course, at that
time I had not met Epis, but there are certain people in the
world who are nearly perfect, within the limitations they have
set, and one is always heading away from one and towards
another, like landmarks on a road*
So now this child, who wore pretty black moccasins com-
pletely run down on the sides, tramped through the tide
proudly ruining her shoes, glancing from time to time at me
and whipping the sea. At last I got up and walked over to her,
while she stood still I pointed to her, trying to ask her name,
but she thought I was asking her to button the top of her dress
and did so.
We stood together, then, and looked out towards the sea at
a bobbing sailboat, while tiny, translucent crabs crawled from
homes in the sand and fled the incoming waves. In the distance
we could hear someone hammering. The girl didn't move, and
with adult impatience I asked her name again. She spanked
the water in embarrassment and at last looked up. Her eyes
were full of trust not of me, she didn't exactly trust me
but of the world itself. It seemed, on the surface, absurd that
anything so frail shouldn't be frightened. But she wasn't. And
then she turned and went, walking up the strand dragging
her whip, never looking back, as a breeze ruffled her green
dress like a flag.
From those books of Stanley's, also, another character
strayed Into the dreams of my childhood. His name was Tippu
Tib and his home is preserved in Zanzibar as a historical monu-
ment. It has a stiff and almost prim look which curiously befits
the former residence of a mass-murderer. This man was half-
34
African, and when he died in 1905 he left his mother's land
with a hatred and fear of slavery which, all things considered,
is a valuable legacy.
No other continent on earth has been so systematically
pillaged and none was so poverty-stricken to begin with. Its
living creatures elephants and men were its only wealth.
Literally millions of men were torn from their homes and sold
on the markets of the world. And for every one of them, at
least one more person was killed in slave raids in which human
beings were deliberately slaughtered as a means of creating
panic. Furthermore, in a land where food was scarce, it was a
great temptation to consider slaves as cattle; hundreds of thou-
sands were butchered simply for meat, and a traveller could
buy a person to take along with him and eat on the way.
The raiders completely destroyed the villages and planta-
tions they attacked, leaving the few survivors to die of starva-
tion. Possibly a hundred million people were sold or murdered.
It is not surprising, then, that this remains the central memory
of Africa and that the word 'freedom* may on occasion have
an almost hysterical significance.
Not that these raids came entirely from outside. They were
generally led by Arabs especially from the east and from the
north but many of these, like Tippu Tib, were themselves
partially African. In addition, the staunchest allies of the slave
hunters in Central Africa were the people of the Maniema
country on the eastern approaches to the Congo basin. By the
time Stanley returned on his second expedition in 1874 to
'complete Livingstone's work* Tippu Tib had already pene-
trated far west of Lake Tanganyika to Nyangwe. He had been
stopped short there, however, and did not go farther until
Stanley himself blazed the way.
That was hardly what Livingstone would have called com-
pleting his work. The old man had thought that if Africa were
35
opened to normal trade, slavery would disappear. This eventu-
ally happened, but in the beginning the only practical result of
these explorations was to make more of the continent accessible
to the slavers.
Years later, while leading an expedition to rescue Emin
Pasha, Stanley found Tippu Tib entrenched deep in the Congo
at Stanley Falls. He bought the slaver's co-operation by
making him governor of that station and proceeded through
the great forest to Lake Albert. It was typical of Stanley to
keep his eyes on the main chance and to sacrifice everything
to it, including his convictions. But if Livingstone had
been alive then it is likely that the two men would have
stopped speaking.
The old missionary cared for nothing but his convictions.
For him, tolerance of human slavery was an unforgivable
sin.
David Livingstone was among the last of the Abolitionists.
In common with many of his predecessors he expressed a
revolutionary belief in the Rights of Man with the unmis-
takable accent of the London Missionary Society. The Aboli-
tionist movement had swept England in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and even as early as 1689 Locke could say :
"Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so
directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our
nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman,
much less a gentleman, should plead for it."
Later, the Quakers began their active opposition to it and
in 1774 they decreed that any Friend who had anything to do
with the slave trade should be expelled from the Society. By
1808 the trade had been abolished in England, and twenty-five
years later slavery itself was outlawed, while West Indian slave
owners were given an indemnity of twenty million pounds.
William Wilberforce, then one of the leaders of the Aboli-
tionist movement, lay dying as this particular bill was being
debated in Parliament and more accustomed than we to
think of slaves as property which could be purchased, even to
relinquish title he said: "Thank God that I should have lived
to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty
millions for the Abolition of slavery."
England was also pumping that money into a badly crippled
industry and, at the same time, doing away with a system of
labour which was proving uneconomic. It was not the Aboli-
tionist campaign to eat East Indian instead of West Indian
sugar that doomed slavery in the Caribbean but the simple fact
that eastern sugar, produced by free labour, cost less. Backed
by these practical interests the Abolitionists suddenly became
powerful.
This is not to say that England took the lead in the anti-
slavery movement simply because it was more practical to do
so. Throughout Europe and America there was a growing
acceptance of the principle that men are born equal, before
God, and when Adam Smith said in 1776, "It appears from the
experience of all ages and nations that the work done by free-
men comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves,"
he didn't mean that if slavery were less expensive he would be
in favour of it.
It is also hard to find the profit motive though there may
have been one in the British offer to Portugal in 1815 to
remit four hundred and fifty thousand pounds debt and to
make an outright gift of three hundred thousand pounds on
the condition that she would confine her trade in slaves to trans-
port from south of the Equator to her own possessions across
the Atlantic meaning that only Angola and Mozambique
could export and only Brazil could import. What was
more, British naval patrols to enforce the abolition of the slave
37
trade employed about one-sixth of the fleet and cost the
English taxpayers seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds
a year.
In spite of these measures, during the height of the Aboli- -
tionist movement in 1840 the slave trade flourished as never
before. Britain had been pressing countries with which it had
anti-slavery treaties for the right of reciprocal search of their
ships, to check slave smuggling. As the United States was one
of the last countries to accept such search most slavers flew
the American flag, whether they were American or not.
America's position on slavery was naturally a delicate one.
There were many Abolitionists in the North who would have
been delighted to have American ships searched in such a
cause. From the beginning there had been strong anti-slavery
feeling in the United States and in the first draft of the Con-
stitution Jefferson, a slave owner, tried to include a condemna-
tion of slavery, but the clause was struck out on the objections
of South Carolina and Georgia. And one of the reasons why
England herself had so little difficulty getting out from under
the commercially and morally deadening weight of slavery was
that the successful American Revolution had stripped her of
the largest of her slave territories, and therefore of those
colonists most likely to object to Abolition, As in Africa today,
European settlers violently opposed changes which their home
governments practically took for granted.
Quite naturally, human suffering on slaveships intensified
as slaving persisted beyond the law. Sometimes half the cargo
would die in conditions which were no longer even nominally
regulated. And when there was danger of being overtaken and
searched the cargo would often be jettisoned.
For this reason Abolitionist circles felt that the only way
finally to abolish slavery was to open up Africa itself to nine-
teenth-century trade and colonization. In this, also, one can
see self-interest not too carefully hidden. But that hardly dims
the fame of a man like Livingstone who devoted his life to this
'positive policy 5 for abolishing human slavery.
To make Africa known to the world he performed a series
of remarkable explorations. While serving as a medical mis-
sionary in Bechuanaland he crossed the Kalahari desert and
reached Lake Ngami in 1849, when Stanley was eight years old
and at St Asaph's. In 1851 he discovered the Zambesi River.
Between 1853 and 1856 he made his way on foot with in-
adequate supplies from Linyanti on the upper Zambesi to
S. Paolo de Loanda on the coast of Angola. Then he came back
across the continent to Quilimane on the coast of Mozambique,
thus becoming the first European known to cross the con-
tinent. An Arab named Said bin Habib bin Salim Lafifi possibly
did it a few months before.
Between 1855 an d l %&39 while Stanley was establishing him-
self in America, he explored the Zambesi region.
Having thoroughly proved his qualifications, moral as well
as physical, Livingstone was chosen by the Royal Geographical
Society in 1865 to go west of Tanganyika, into what is now the
Congo. There is no doubt that a good deal of his support
including a grant of money from the Government came
from British trading interests who felt that Arab slavers were
ruining legitimate business in Africa, as no doubt they were.
But his own passionate opposition to slavery was entirely
ideological.
His description of the human market in Zanzibar shows his
feelings. 'All who have grown up seem ashamed at being
hawked about for sale. The teeth are examined, the cloth lifted
up to examine the lower limbs, and a stick is thrown for the
slave to bring and thus examine his paces . . .*
He started on his last journey in March 1866, five years
before Stanley set out to rescue him. Everywhere he went he
39
found occasion to complain of the slave trade, even declaring
that it was responsible for inflation in some areas so that he
hadn't cloth enough to buy food. His loathing of slavery
extended to the slaves themselves. He said that they never
became men again.
During the trip he read the Bible four times over, by oil
light. He was obsessed with the idea of finding some literal
proof of the Old Testament in order to confound the Evolu-
tionists. He felt that the followers of Darwin and the new
sciences were trying to prove that some societies of men are
historically more evolved than others. He was worried that this
view, however mistaken, would make backward peoples
eligible for slavery of one sort or another, especially as the
term 'backward' is used only by those who consider them-
selves forward.
He hoped to discover Meroe, which, according to legend,
Moses had founded in honour of Pharaoh's daughter Men.
Also, he believed that there were four fountains rising in
Katanga (from which vast quantities of copper and uranium
ore now flow), thus confirming Herodotus arid perhaps
Genesis. If he could find these, he said, then the ulcers on his
feet, which were often so bad they ate to the bone, 'would only
be discipline.*
A far more severe discipline for him would have been the
knowledge that the rising class in England that supported his
religious, anti-slavery views was also coming out on the side
of the damned Evolutionists and the scientists who questioned
the authority of the 'Word. The contradiction was less Living-
stone's than the world's for, like Stanley, he had a boyish
simplicity which rose above such things. He solemnly referred
to the Governor of Bombay as c a brick* for offering to help
in his anti-slavery work; and when he began his final journey
he wrote:
40
The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place
is that the mind is made more self-reliant . . . The countenance is
bronzed and there is no dyspepsia . . . No doubt much toil is
involved and fatigue . . . but the sweat of one's brow is no longer a
curse when one works for God . . . actually a blessing.
In the seven years that remained of his life he was to see
only one other European. And to that man this bigoted old
humanist entrusted his mission.
CHAPTER FOUR
T YYHEN Stanley had collected his supplies in Zanzibar he
W moved across to Bagamoyo on the mainland where he
finished recruiting. Here, for about twelve dollars apiece, he
found porters willing to go on to the trading-post of Tabora,
three-quarters of the way to Ujiji. As the journey lasted three
months that was only a few cents a day for each.
A porter was expected to carry, on his head, a seventy
pound load across mountains, swamps, forests and deserted
savannah, subsisting on the barest rations and risking his life
at the hands of hostile tribes. At Tabora, if he were lucky and
still sound, he could hire out to a caravan returning to the
coast. The other members of the expedition were paid by the
year. The soldiers got thirty-six dollars, Stanley's sergeant-
major, Bombay, eighty dollars, and the white men, Farquhar
and Shaw, each three hundred dollars, which they never lived
to collect.
Stanley 'the vanguard, the reporter, the thinker, and leader
of the expedition/ as he called himself had decided to send his
column in five contingents to disguise its size and reduce the
amount of tribute that would have to be paid to tribes along
the way.
On 18 February 1871, the first party left for the interior
under the leadership of one of the sergeants who was also a
tribal headman. Another followed on the 2ist and a third,
under Farquhar, on the 25th, Two weeks later the fourth and
largest caravan left under two native chiefs, and on March 21
the last party, carrying two boats, boxes of ammunition and
personal effects, filed up a narrow lane shaded by two parallel
42
hedges of mimosas, chanting "Forward!* 5 which Stanley had
chosen as its 'mot du guet* and proudly displaying the
American flag.
Sporting a Hawkes patent cork solar topee, a white flannel
tunic and size-eight Wellington boots, Stanley rode at the head
of this caravan on a big bay horse. Shaw brought up the rear
on a donkey, wearing sea-boots and a topee that looked like a
canoe. The expedition numbered 192 souls, two horses, twenty-
seven donkeys, some goats and Omar the dog. The reporter
and thinker mentions that they left Bagamoyo with a good deal
of eclat, which is certainly understandable when one realizes
that his expense account was already twenty thousand dollars,
was destined to go to more than twice that, and that probably
nothing comparable has come into the accounting office of the
New York Herald or its successor since.
Few of the people who watched Stanley depart ever thought
to see him again. In those days Americans were looked upon
with almost as much condescension as Africans are now. It was
inconceivable that this graceless young man should venture
into an unknown land which had strained the resources of
Burton, Speke and Grant, and Livingstone himself.
Even now, in British East Africa, one feels that there has
been a conspiracy to forget as much as possible about Stanley.
He wasn't really the right sort; there was something ignoble
about him. He was, of course, an egomaniac, but that wouldn't
necessarily disqualify him as a British hero* Any account of his
adventures is just a little embarrassing because he longed not
for power or fame or even wealth, but merely success and
respectability. During his first months in the interior he
was undoubtedly more frightened of making a fool of himself
than of losing his life. At the same time he was absolutely
determined to accomplish his mission and was prepared to
go all the way across the continent to the Atlantic Ocean
43
if necessary, keeping a careful account of expenses along the
way.
He was, in short, a typical American of his time, suffering
from an immense sense of inferiority and endowed with the
boundless energy and genius of the European poor. The pride
he took in being an American was the pride of a man who sees
his way open, at last, to the top. Only after his position was
secured, many years later, would he admit to anyone that he
had been born in Wales or that his name had ever been John
Rowland.
The odds were very much against his ever reaching Ujiji.
The three other white men who had done it were carefully
chosen for their experience in the tropics. They also had the
support of the Royal Geographical Society, an organization as
august as its Queen and probably richer. All Stanley had was
the quirky backing of an unscrupulous editor and his own high
sense of destiny. He plunged into the heart of Africa to find his
parent and his fortune, which were confused in his mind
because they had so little external reality. His one other advan-
tage, which may have been decisive, was that he had been born
and had lived the first eighteen years of his life in the teeming
jungles of lower-class England. There were few beasts in Africa
more savage than those he had already fought.
For a number of days the party travelled through park land,
occasionally fording a stream and getting along very comfort-
ably. At the Kingani River Stanley amused himself by taking
pot-shots at hippopotami, trying first a Winchester '44 (no
effect) and then his trusty No. 12 smooth-bore. He also went
hunting in a jungle dressed in flannel pyjamas and sneakers and
got badly torn and cut and bruised, so that he said, with cus-
tomary heavy humour, 1 mentally vowed that the penetralia
of an African jungle should not be visited by me again, save
under most urgent necessity/
44
Notwithstanding his 'epidermal wounds' he finds the coun-
try lovely., not at all what he had been led to expect by Burton's
The Lake Regions of Central Africa. He had pictured hundreds
of miles of swamp choked with 'crocodiles, alligators, lizards,
tortoises and toads, 5 with a 'miasma rising from this vast cata-
clysm of mud, corruption, and putrescence, as thick and sorely
depressing as the gloomy and suicidal fog of London.' But
instead of foul beasts and warring adjectives he found a sweet
country of meadow and intermittent jungle. He obviously felt
it was cut to his measure and his high spirits are entirely appro-
priate to a young man just turned thirty, setting out on the
greatest adventure of his life.
However, troubles begin as he overtakes his dilatory fourth
caravan and passes into tsetse-fly country. Because Sir John
Kirk in Zanzibar had warned him that this fly would sooner or
later be fatal to all his animals Stanley would never admit, out
of dislike for the man, that this was the cause of their death.
Livingstone had already described the insect in his book on
South Africa, stating that this particular species (glossina mor-
sitans) destroys most domestic animals but does no harm,
except to cause pain, to men or wild beasts. In the interest of
science Stanley permitted one to alight on his flannel pyjamas,
of which he evidently had several pairs. Its sting, he said, was
like the deep thrust of a fine needle. But he was so determined
not to believe John Kirk that he was barely concerned when he
saw the horses and donkeys streaming with blood and rearing
in pain.
From this point the animals began to die and Stanley spent
a great deal of time and patience on autopsies to prove that the
flies hadn't killed them.
The absence of any pack animals but human beings was
one of the main reasons for the isolation of interior Africa.
45
Deprived by the tsetse fly of both transport and nourishment 3
most tribes became comparatively immobile, changing territory
only in slow migrations.
This situation persisted until the beginning of our own cen-
tury, and even now there are huge tracts of land which cannot
be visited except on foot, where a hundred miles is equivalent
to a thousand. In 1871, however, this isolation was sometimes
a blessing as it kept out the Arabs, who were a good deal more
dangerous than fly. Until Stanley penetrated beyond Nyangwe
into the Congo five years later the inaccessibility and utter
poverty of the vast central basin of Africa had protected the
inhabitants from every savagery but their own.
It is difficult for people from indolent northern climates to
picture the poverty of that region, where any food at all is con-
sidered something of a wonder. Our minds reject the thought
that a land so nearly primeval is not also generous. We think of
Nature as an abundant mother whom we have betrayed by
becoming civilized and to whom we must return to be renewed.
This is the final luxury, like enjoying a blizzard through a
picture window, or admiring the fluid beauty of a caged tigress.
In fact, this country is often so spare and implacable that it
may become as barren as arctic tundra. Like the American
plains before they were domesticated, it has no respect for
human life and food is grown and stored with the greatest
difficulty. Wheat and white potatoes and apples may be raised
at high altitudes, but they are generally too exotic to be pro-
duced on a large scale. Many things are grown, when the rains
come on time and if they last long enough, and some of them
can be stored. Central Africa is nothing like so poor as it was
a few hundred years ago.
It is hard to see how anyone could have lived there then.
Nearly all the victuals now consumed have been brought in
from the outside. Manioc, corn, sweet potato and tomato came
46
from America; banana, sugar-cane, rice, sorghum, citrus,
mango and breadfruit from Asia. Practically nothing is native.
There has always been game, but it is not easy to kill creatures
your own size or larger who are hungry themselves. The
pigmies, who are the only certainly indigenous people here, are
with the Eskimos also the world's last great hunters.
The distance between the coast and Tabora was five hundred
and twenty-five miles. Between those points there were no
settlements which were even remotely civilized except for two
native townships called Simbamwenni and Mpwapwa, the first
a hundred and nineteen miles from Bagamoyo and the second
sixty-eight miles beyond that. Here, they could rest and find
adequate supplies of food and water.
The first of these towns took nearly a month to reach, as the
caravan pushed across the maritime plain. Stanley had caught
up with his fourth contingent several times and had been con-
siderably delayed by it. His men were also beginning to be
plagued by a sickness they called Mukunguru, which the leader
subsequently caught himself. As a cure he used an old Arkansas
remedy, a purge and fifteen grains of quinine, with excellent
results.
But Stanley's greatest accomplishment during this first
month was to keep his people going ahead. Arab caravans
made this trip continually, but they had a great deal more
experience than he had. Henry Stanley's success must be
weighed against the great probability of his failure. The
animals were dying, the rainy season had begun, there were
desertions and thefts and the men suffered from rheumatism,
sore throats, weakness of the loins, bilious fever and diarrhoea.
At sunrise this energetic and officious little American would
rush out of his tent, which was tall and square like a bathing-
hut, and run around the camp in his pyjamas banging a tin pan
47
with an iron ladle. There is no doubt that he was thoroughly
loathed by everyone, but he was also beginning to inspire trust.
At least, as they came farther and farther from the coast they
were constrained to depend on his will to go forward, simply
because there was no place else to go.
He, too, sensed his growing power as civilization disap-
peared behind them, and his account of the journey acquires
a lumpish good humour. He describes c the belles of Kisemo,
of gigantic posterioral proportions* grinding corn with mortar
and pestle.
Swaying with the pestle as it rises and falls the pectoral and posteri-
oral exuberances alternate to her strokes in the very drollest
rhythm; so strongly marked that I feared for the walls of the hut
before which I saw the corn-pounding going on.
It is no doubt this style which a London critic later referred to
when he spoke of 'the racy, sub-erotic flavour of the New York
Herald:
At Kisemo an Arab caravan delivered a file of late Heralds
to Stanley, sent by the American Consul at Zanzibar. Among
them he found a description of President Grant's second levee,
written by a colleague named Jenkins whom Stanley didn't
like. He accuses him of laboured verbosity and contrasts the
grand toilets of the ladies the lavender ostrich plume, the
diamonds, the overskirt with ruchings of crimson satin with
the simple attire of the plump black girls of Kisemo who were
at that moment peering through the door of his tent.
Apart from the fact that Jenkins couldn't really help what
Washington ladies were wearing (and laboured verbosity was
hardly a safe charge for the author of How I Found Livingstone
to fling at anyone) Stanley had no right to accuse his paper's
White House correspondent of being adulatory because he
spoke of a Republican President's deep manly voice and
searching grey eyes.
48
The Heralds must have made him homesick, however, for
shortly afterwards he professes to see in the country beyond
Kisemo the very likeness of Central Park.
Take away the gravelled paths, the lakes and ponds, the museums
within, the trellised arbors, the kiosk, the uniformed policemen and
well-dressed visitors . . . and Central Park thus denuded, with only
its refreshing lawns, gentle hollows, and grove-clad ridges, would
present, to those who could imagine the New York park in this
state, a not unfaithful image of the country which opened before us.
Stanley rested five days at Simbamwenni, a fortified town of
about four thousand inhabitants ruled by a Sultana. He sent the
fourth caravan on ahead again. It was raining heavily 'a real
London rain' and their camp was infested with red, white
and black ants, centipedes, worms, wasps and beetles as large
as mice. On the morning of April 23 there was a bit of sun and
they forded a swollen river and struck out towards Mpwapwa.
Stanley had heard from passing Arabs that Farquhar's cara-
van, ahead, was in a pitiful state. While down with fever at the
beginning of May he had Shaw write the following note:
Dear Farquhar at the request of Mr Stanley I write you to
asertain all your misfortunes, what quanterty of clorth you have
expened and how much you have left, how many donkeys is dead,
and, in fact, all the perticlurs . . . What is the matter with you.
What is the matter with Jacko, and what was the matter with the
donkeys that dide ... In two days we shall be up with you.
They were up with him in five days and found him in a state
of complete hysteria. His body was bloated with elephantiasis
and he had spent almost all of the supplies of his caravan satis-
fying what Stanley called his lust for goatmeat, eggs and
poultry.'
Nine of his ten donkeys were dead and he had so abused his
men that they were terrified of him and he had to offer them
large bribes to serve him. He was continually crying like a sick
49
baby for half a dozen people to wait on him, and flew into
rages when they did not understand his English. He had be-
come, in short, a moral weakling obeying the Inexorable
Victorian law that a man must sound whatever depths he has.
Shaw also was beginning to disintegrate, and at Slmbamwenni
had started whining and complaining of overwork and
threatening to quit.
The two men together resolved on mutiny. On May iy, at
breakfast time, when Stanley invited them to have a roast
quarter of goat, stewed liver, half a dozen sweet potatoes, hot
pancakes and coffee, Shaw who had apparently rehearsed the
wrong line said, "What dog's meat is this?" and after a brief
argument with his employer, in which he was reminded of his
position, he measured his length on the ground.
That night, when Stanley had gone to bed, a shot was fired
and a bullet tore through his tent. He went at once to Shaw and
found him pretending to sleep, with a warm revolver beside his
pillow. With this token rebellion the conspiracy collapsed.
Both Farquhar and Shaw had now become blubbering
wrecks and the leader grew each day more like a heroic statue
of himself. He never spoke again of the incident until he met
Doctor Livingstone, a fellow statue. The tale, by then, must
have acquired an epic childishness, for the Doctor listened
sternly, then replied, "He intended murder! 33
The third and fifth caravans arrived in Mpwapwa on May 17.
Stanley's watch-dog, Omar, had died a few days before, just
on the threshold of the Ugogo country where, as his master
pitilessly reminded him, he might have been of some use. They
rested three days in this place, filling their stomachs with milk
and mutton and bullock hump, and when they pushed on, the
otiose Farquhar stayed behind with six months' supplies. He
died several weeks later, but the news didn't reach the caravans
until the middle of August when they had all gathered in
50
Tabora. Stanley, by that time, had Shaw so terrified that when
he told him the news he added, "There is one of us gone,
Shaw my boy, who will be the next?" Probably each was cer-
tain that it would be Shaw, as it was.
Both of these unfortunate victims of Stanley's triumph come
very much alive in his book, and their escape from oblivion
may console them for a miserable end. But the African members
of the expedition are seldom more than black faces, showing
now and then some animation and then disappearing. Before
crossing the Kakata swamp, for example, Bombay loses
the property tent, an American axe and a pistol, and is de-
moted by Stanley for being irresponsible and lazy. A man
named Uledi is also relieved of his post as second captain for
the same reason. But it is apparently this same Uledi who, five
years later, repeatedly saves Stanley's Congo expedition from
disaster.
On leaving Zanzibar I intended to go straight to Bagamoyo
and follow Stanley's route in a Land Rover. But when I began
to check the possible roads and assailable dirt tracks I saw that
they deviated from his route far more than the present rail line
does. I felt foolish riding on to Tabora in a train, even a slow
train, but consoled myself with the thought that a good many
other people would be coming along.
I was mostly worried about Stanley or rather his ghost.
Then I remembered that he had said, "I live at railway celerity."
Surely no one else could have said a thing like that and it
seemed to settle the matter. As soon as I arrived at Dar-es-
Salaam, a few miles down the coast from Bagamoyo, I went to
buy a ticket.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE young railway clerk asked if I had any objection to
sharing a compartment with an Asian; there were no other
second-class seats for Europeans. As he wore a large, blue Sikh
turban his impassivity was remarkable. Actually, I think he
was tired of the whole subject. There is always the danger that
the burning issues of one generation will become simply boring
to another. Already the idea of white supremacy has a certain
fustiness which, in the course of thirty years' fashion, could
make it a charming anachronism, like a fringed lampshade in a
rocket ship. As the train left twice a week I would have several
days' wait.
Dar-es-Salaam was originally planned by Bargash's older
brother, Majid bin Said. Its name means Port-of-Peace and
many people now simply call it Dar. The newcomer must
beware of this, however, for old residents will grow pedantic
and their 'Darislaam' becomes a reproach. Majid died before
his new capital was complete, and work was only begun again
in the 'eighties under the Germans. Many of the buildings of
that period achieve a Bavarian-tropical effect which is very
pleasant.
Along Azania Front, on the harbour, one frequently sees
these great, peaked, wooden boxes with inviting porches.
Many of them have been used as government offices, but they
are gradually being torn down in favour of structures more
suitably banal. My hotel was also German-built and was
wonderfully comfortable.
The city has about a hundred thousand inhabitants, and
every morning a radio programme called 'J a mi>o!' wakes them
with a song:
"Jambo! happy meeting you
Jambo! means how do you do."
This is a standard greeting all over East Africa and it soon
becomes natural to use it, though not necessarily at dawn. The
European section is bounded at each end of the harbour by the
government offices and the railway station, and in asking direc-
tions one is oriented by the Askari Monument at the centre of
town, where there are a number of good shops besieged in
early November by Christmas shoppers.
Unlike Nairobi, there is very little feeling of race tension
here, and people of all colours come and go pretty much as
they please. The city is well furnished with churches, banks,
mosques, temples, hospitals, picture palaces and schools.
There is also a Yacht Club, which was founded in 1933. An
official publication, striking a faintly archaeological note, men-
tions that 'there is evidence that another yacht club existed in
1922 but apparently failed for lack of boats and people keen
enough to race regularly/ As the British only took the city over
in 1919, at the conclusion of peace with Germany, this feeble
response may be forgiven. Even now, the sporting activities of
the community are sometimes curtailed by hippo bobbing in
the harbour and an occasional leopard patrolling the suburbs,
perhaps attracted by the RSPCA drinking-pans before public
buildings.
As I had time, I arranged with the Government Informa-
tion Office to see a representative of the Tanganyika African
National Union, a political organization headed by Mr Julius
Nyerere. TANU has control over all of the elective seats in the
Legislative Council and is vigorously preparing to form its
own government when the British leave. There is naturally
some argument about when that will be, some of it bitter. But
TANU will probably have its way in a few years.
53
M/Nyerere was visiting in Uganda, at Maketere University,
and I was put in the hands of an ebullient young man named
Crabbe who acted as a sort of liaison between the government
and African movements it otherwise held at arm's length.
Perhaps this was more a question of delicacy than disdain, par-
ticularly in the case of Mr Nyerere's party, which, though anti-
British, is as parliamentarian as Britain's Labour Party, which
some people also believe to be anti-British.
Getting too chummy with the opposition would have been
a little like opening its mail. Of course many Africans did not
understand this and as has happened in other lands they
mistook complicated British rules of behaviour for outright
dislike, which they very much resemble.
Mr Crabbe, who had the bload, resolute look of a scout
leader, took me into a district called Kariakoo, north-west of
the railway station. The roads were lined with casuarina and
frangipani trees, and it was so hot my body left a print in the
seat of the car when I got out of it. There had been a sudden
shower that morning, a foil, direct fall as though a tub had
been emptied overhead and now the air was heavy with
moisture.
I was taken to TANU headquarters on New Street, a parallel
of Livingstone Street, bisected by Stanley Street. There I was
introduced to Mr Isak M. Bhoke Munanka, treasurer of the
Union. Before I had a chance to look around, Mr Crabbe was
edging to the door. He spoke heartily of some unnecessary
errand. Mr Munanka and I both urged him to stay. "Oh no,"
he said, glancing desperately towards the street. "You two will
want to be alone." His ears had gone red.
"But won't you have something to drink," Mr Munanka
said. "A cup of tea?"
"No no. Thanks awfully. Have to get on. Terribly late
now, really. Good heavens! Half-past three." He backed into
54
the blazing street and jumped into his car. We followed him
out. "Good, then one hour suit you?' 3 1 nodded, noticing an
Arab Music Club across the street which harmoniously dis-
played the portraits of Nasser and Queen Elizabeth. Crabbe
drove off, and Mr Munanka led me back into the mud building
which was his office.
It was little more than a square hut, built contiguous with a
small garden. It had corrugated iron roofing, but most of the
houses on the unpaved street were thatched. The walls were of
mud, plastered over entwined sticks. The garden had a thatched
roof over the part nearest the hut and was partially shaded by
several trees. There was no natural shade anywhere else, and
anything metallic left in the sun for more than a few minutes
literally burnt one's fingers.
Mr Munanka was fat, with the deep-set grace of a man who
was born to it. He had a shrewd, ugly face, all convex so that
his features formed one continuous curve from Ms forehead to
his chin, like a scimitar. I asked if it were true, as I had heard,
that TANU accepted no members who weren't African.
"That is correct, we are an organization of Africans."
I pointed out that in a country where ninety-eight per cent
of the people are African and where TANU controlled the elec-
tions this would eventually have the effect of disenfranchising
the Asians and Europeans it amounted to race discrimination.
Mr Munanka smiled. "Probably* We didn't really begin it
here, you know discrimination, I mean."
I asked if they had any way of determining who was an
African and who was not.
"Oh yes. Indeed we have/'
"How?"
"You are an African if both of your mother's parents were
African." He shifted his weight in his chair and called a boy to
the doorway, then said to me> *Tm sorry. Would you like a
55
Coca-Cola? I'm afraid it's a bit hot for you. Just before the
rains, you know."
I wiped my forehead and nodded. He sent the boy racing
out in the infernal heat. I asked if there were any religious
differences in TANU, between Arabs and Christians, for instance,
"Not at all Mr Nyerere is a Roman Catholic, as you may
know. I myself am a Lutheran. Some of us are Arabs and some
have no religion. Our basis for organization is nationality, not
religion. That is why in the last elections we . . ."
He began to discuss politics with the total absorption of a
professional, hardly noticing that I wasn't taking it all in.
". . . Legislative Council with thirty-four official and thirty-
three unofficial members . . ." He paused, significantly,
"Hmmm," I said.
" of the unofficial, ten Asians, ten Africans and ten
Europeans representing the ten constituencies and the other
three . . ."
Mr Munanka's nose was very sharp at the ridge, and looked
like a pruning knife. I wondered if, in spite of Lutheran con-
nections, he might not be partly Arab.
" first elections last month . . . fifteen unofficial mem-
bers . . . three from each of five constituencies . . ." He pro-
ceeded to give me detailed results of the election, and at last
the boy came back with the Cokes, which were hot.
What did he think of the British? I said, taking advantage of
Crabbe's absence, after all. Did he like them?
For the first time Mr Munanka frowned. It was clearly a
question he had pondered before. He said "yyyyesss,** at last,
"I believe they mean well Really I do," he added hastily, and
with determined emphasis. 'The Government, that is. It's the
white settlers who're bad. Fortunately, we don't have too many
of them. Nothing like Kenya or the Rhodesias. They're the
ones causing all the trouble."
56
"But you do think they mean well the Government/*
"Welllll, yes. I think so."
"That's something, isn't it? After all, you wouldn't say that
about some other governments, I suppose."
"No, I suppose not." Mr Munanka paused, then looked
straight at me, for the first time displaying uncertainty. "Are
they very much worse?"
Then, after a long silence, he called into the next room, in
SwahilL In a moment a ragged young man came in with some
mimeographed sheets stapled together. The light inner surfaces
of his hands were stained with ink and he wore a nobly fanatic
expression which can only be found in religious revivals and
progressive political movements.
In the background I heard the clicking of the mimeograph
machine, without which no liberal organization can function.
Munanka explained that this was the approved constitution of
still another society dedicated to the overthrow of the well-
meaning British. It was called the Pan-African Freedom Move-
ment of East and Central Africa and was known, predictably,
as PAFMECA. He happened to be the Secretary.
Glancing down at the papers I saw the words, 'White racial-
ism . . black chauvinism . . . so-called trusteeship . . . foreign
self-seekers,' and looked up at Mr Munanka. He was sipping
his Coke benignly. The mimeograph clicked.
To assist in the establishment and organization of united nation-
alist movements in African territories through periodic conferences
[God yes, periodic conferences] . . . press for full industrialization
and the enhancement of cooperative methods and for the control
of the major means of production . . .
Mr Munanka broke in. "As you are going on to Tabora, I
thought you would like to meet some of our people there."
I thanked him and said that I would.
"Good. I'm having letters of introduction typed for you.' 5
57
He stood up. "And now, I would like you to come into the
yard with me to visit our day school The British say they are
giving us enough educational facilities, but why should we set
up our own schools if they were?" He stood aside as I pre-
ceded him out the door into the stifling yard. Behind us the
mimeograph machine ground out endless smudgy messages of
hope.
Shortly after, with my letters safely put away, I was picked
up by Mr Crabbe. We drove past some labour unions on Liv-
ingstone Street and stopped at his office, which was a small,
nearly empty store, where people were encouraged to congre-
gate. Here, Mr Crabbe practised a kind of rough-and-ready
public relations by democratically distributing pictures of the
Queen, which were much admired. He also tried to help people
get work and to represent their legitimate interests to the
Government.
He spoke now to a group of children outside the office and
they dissolved in giggles. His Swahili was headlong and fluent
and perhaps not very accurate. He was obviously well-liked in
the neighbourhood, though I believe it was in spite and not
because of his frantic cordiality. I noticed a sign in his window
and asked him to translate it.
"Follow the bees and find the honey!" He beamed. "Our
motto."
Behind him a little girl wickedly dangled a dead mouse down
her sister's back. Another lowered her tightly braided head and
charged at a small boy's stomach like a goat.
"You see what that means?" Mr Crabbe said, cheerily. "It's
an old Swahili saying/'
"No, I don't see," I said, dodging the goat-girl.
"It means, associate with educated people and some of it
wears off" on you,"
"Some of what?"
58
"Education/ 5
"You're sure that's what It means In Swahili?"
"Positive. Come, Fll take you back to the hotel. Have a good
talk? Nice chap, Munanka. Bit hot, isn't It?"
On the day my train was to leave for Tabora there was
another quick shower, and I was thoroughly wet. In addition,
I had been hit on the head by a falling mango, not very ripe
and therefore hard, and by the time I found my compartment
I had a headache and was much dispirited. I felt, however, that
Mr Stanley would not have been pleased with the way I was
meeting the hazards of African travel and resolved to take
heart and so ordered a bottle of beer. After all this talk about
Asians I was to be alone, and as this was a long trip I settled
back to enjoy the pleasures of segregation.
The carriage was about forty years old, built in the heroic
age of railroads, with stiff views of Tanganyika on its oak walls
and uncompromising instructions from the East African Rail-
ways Corporation framed by the door. As we began to cross
the plain we passed some native huts and, about four miles out
of Dar-es-Salaam, a graveyard for old automobiles. It began to
rain again, but the people who stood along the track waving to
us seemed not to notice. At an improvised stop some boys
came up and performed liquid dances on the siding.
In the first-class cars of this train one generally saw Euro-
peans and rich Indians, in second-class were thrifty and prob-
ably even richer Indians, Arabs and myself. Africans, with
some well-dressed exceptions, were confined to the third-class.
For the most part, the division seemed to be financial rather
than racial, though this amounted to practically the same thing.
The Africans were poor, and they lived in their carriages
much as poor Europeans do as though hiding out in bomb
shelters or charity hospitals. They came on board loaded with
59
food and drink and kerosene lanterns and children and many
mysterious packages. Once inside, the women and children
spread, the men sprawled, and bits of food began to pile up
beneath the wooden seats and in the aisles. There was con-
tinuous lively confusion and heads and arms stuck out the
windows like unbound stuffing.
Only a pure, unStanley-like fear of sitting more than twenty-
four hours on a hard wooden bench, trying to provide for
myself without a word of Swahili and making everyone uncom-
fortable in the process kept me from travelling third class.
What is more, travelling in third can be extremely expensive
unless one knows how to bargain. At each station, as in
Southern Europe, merchants passed under the windows selling
food. Here, it was coconuts, mangoes, bananas, pineapple and
paw-paws in beautifully woven palm baskets. At one stop I
managed to keep from paying three dollars for a coconut only
by leaning perilously out the window and cancelling the ex-
change with a grab and a toss, A bunch of bananas normally
cost about five cents, a mango one cent, a large pineapple about
eight cents and a coconut from one to three cents. This seems
very cheap, but if you earn eight or nine dollars a month if is
not. If you earn even less, or nothing, it is disastrous except
when a mango falls on your head.
An hour and a half from the coast we were more or less in
Stanley's own tracks, and the underbrush was so thick one
would have had to tunnel through it with an axe. As we gained
altitude a little later the growth thinned out.
The ground was somewhat sandy and, in spite of a few palm
trees and some vaguely tropical plants like eucalyptus, the
country resembled those rare, undeveloped portions of New
Jersey and Rockland County after a long, dry summer. The
enormous sky was spotted with rain clouds and the sun streaked
through them like fresh dye.
60
Now and then the land was planted with paw-paws, corn and
squash. Squalls of rain swept across the fields, but the ground
soaked it up as fast as It fell The uncultivated plains were black
from grass fires which had been set deliberately to avoid acci-
dents. All of the unforested stretches of tropical Africa,, which
during the rainy season run to ten and twelve foot grass that
dries to parchment in the sun, are threatened by flash fires.
Here and there were small villages, some with solid stone
houses and rich enclosures of frangipani growing around.
At sunset we arrived at the first sizeable town west of the
coast, a place called Ngerengere. A few people got out of the
third-class coaches, among whom I noticed a young woman of
about twenty-three or twenty-four carrying a bundle on her
head, a three-legged stool in one hand and a small paper suit-
case bound with twine in the other. She approached a young
man who was standing on the platform waiting for her.
When she had come up to him she put down the stool and
the suitcase and, with an especially graceful gesture, lifted the
bundle from her head and set it on the stool Only then did she
reach out her hand to touch his. Though neither smiled or clung
to the other for more than a moment one could see as one
always can that they lived intimately with each other. That
was the first time I had noticed this strangely detached and
undemonstrative greeting which may also be a leave-taking.
Afterwards I saw it many times and even performed it myself.
Africans seem to be less volatile about these things than we are.
They consciously refrain from kissing and embracing and other
displays of emotion, but they are not less warm for that.
We rode on as night fell The rain had washed out the stars
and a blunt rnoon to the west shone through ragged clouds.
The dark beyond the window was so intense one longed to
push a finger through it. In America the nights are sometimes
this black but, even there, one hasn't quite the feeling of
61
unlimited space, splendidly invisible. My window was partly
open and breezes pushed gently in, smelling of cooling fields
and damp earth. In the next compartment a child with croup
gasped for air as its mother tried to soothe it. A waiter came
through the car playing savage rhythms on a dinner-gong
while, outside, disembodied voices of children cried to us and
a drum chattered.
The territory of Tanganyika lies just south of the Equator,
and is bounded by Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika, Nyasa and the
Indian Ocean. It is seven hundred and forty miles long and
about as broad. It was first inhabited by men of a stone-age
culture in the Pleistocene period. During this time it was also
the home of the largest land animal known to have existed, as
well as a giraffe with antlers and an elephant which had tusks
like a walrus. Much later, during historic times, the littoral was
visited by the Chinese, who didn't like it, by the Persians, who
colonized it, and by the Arabs, who conquered it and developed
the Swahili language and culture* The interior was visited by
practically nobody until a century ago.
During the modern era, after a brief period of British influ-
ence, Tanganyika became part of German East Africa. This
was brought about largely by the activities of a man named
Carl Peters, who in 1884 and again in 1888 invaded Africa
with fire and sword and treaty forms and lined up a great many
petty chiefs under German protection in country which had
been more or less controlled by the Sultan of Zanzibar. This
was no more than the French, Belgians and British were doing
in various other parts of Africa, but Peters distinguished him-
self by developing a policy he called Schrecklichkeit (frightful-
ness). At one point, in Ugogo, when the local ruler sued for
peace, he replied: "It shall be the eternal peace. I will show the
Gogo what the Germans are/' He did this so efficiently that
62
Hitler was moved to admiration fifty years later, called him 'a
model., if stern 3 administrator/ and had him made a colonial
hero.
Tanganyika was subsequently ruled so conscientiously by
these model administrators that barely two hundred thousand
people were killed in mistaken rebellions, and many outmoded
tribal organizations were destroyed. Probably Count von
Gotzen was right when he described these rebellions as the last
fling of paganism against the Christian culture of Germany, for
when the British took over in 1919 they largely ceased and the
dictum of a famous Prussian general that it was Impossible
in Africa to get along without cruelty* was modified.
At present, Tanganyika is under United Kingdom trustee-
ship, by agreement with the United Nations. Because of this
special international status, and because the disintegration of
tribal culture had tended to create genuine nationalist senti-
ment, as demonstrated by TANU; this might well be the first
country to attain independence in East Africa.
At sunrise we stopped in a place with the splendid name of
Humwaw Halt. A chill breeze blew through a desolate stone
block village which was built around the station. A man in an
undershirt and a sarong stood on a rock with a tea kettle in one
hand, brushing his teeth, while children walked stiffly across
the station house gravel and brightly shawled women withdrew
in doorways from the cold.
The sun was already gleaming in the tree-tops and the sky
was pink at the horizon. We were some distance past Mpwapwa
and had travelled in eighteen hours as far as Stanley had gone
in two months.
I felt him getting angry again and rang for a pot of tea,
remembering that he and Livingstone used to drink it by the
pint (the old man shared Stanley's passion for it) and talk about
63
food. * s You will think of me/' the Doctor said, speaking of the
banquets at the Royal Geographical Society, "when you taste
those marrow bones at the Geographical, and the Devonshire
Cream. 85 1 had bought two large and rather bitter bananas the
evening before and made a breakfast on them and the tea
which, in East African Railway carriages-, flows like water from
six in the morning on.
Shortly afterwards we came into Dodoma, which Is the
largest rail and road centre east of Tabora. "We stopped in a
railway yard next to some Shell and Caltex storage tanks.
Though it was quite early there were many people wandering
around the station. One man, wearing nothing but a pair of
saffron corduroy pants, led a group of women with rings on
their ankles and bundles on their heads on to the train. A small
fellow, nearly a pigmy and almost naked, followed a tall police-
man to the ticket office, holding his hand or being held.
Here, also, were willowy warriors, carrying spear-shafts and
umbrellas, and wearing patches of rubber tread tied to their
feet, Most of the women, even the very young ones, had baties
strapped to their backs under their shawls. One girl suddenly
clapped her hand on her child's backside and raced for the
lavatories.
It was the women who were most impressive here, as they
seemed to be all across Africa. The men succumb easily to the
stresses of modern life and, as with us, step from full tribal
regalia into business suits and rimless glasses with very little
difficulty or even shame. But the women are passively and
stubbornly consistent.
Enveloped by their shawls, which they are always hitching
up at the waist and which lie loose across the breast so that
the baby may be shifted around to suck without breaking a
stride, they harbour dignity and tradition, oblivious of the
world of men.
64
This does not mean they have decided that a woman's
place is In the hut 3 and that they must give up all idea of run-
ning off to be literary agents or advertising executives or sena-
tors. (A large number of women were leaders of TANU, as I
later learned.) Their secret seems to be that they haven't
decided anything, and they walk around without that strange
double emotion towards the other sex which so much bothers
us. When they flirt they do it most openly and, it seems, with
every intention of immediate fulfilment. They do not appear to
have had their respect for their own sex placed even tempor-
arily in doubt.
The train moved on across a plateau of acacia scrub and
short, umbrella-shaped trees. There were mountains to the
south, and the air was full of the smell of burning grass. In a
dry country such as this a railway exerts the same fascination
as a river, and at each little village people ran from their huts to
dance and wave and wish they were somewhere else.
At the outskirts of one village a hunter leaned desolately on
his spear, shaft in the ploughed earth, blade in his hand. At a
distance behind him some great brown and white birds, three
or four feet tall, suddenly rose into the air and, circling, flew
away. The hunter turned and walked eastward along the
tracks.
We were several hours beyond Dodoma and human dwell-
ings were becoming less and less frequent. The last we had seen
was a complex of mud huts and sheds and thatched roofs sup-
ported on poles, evidently the communal buildings of one
large family or small tribe, the men of which all seemed to
cany neatly folded umbrellas and were otherwise fairly
naked.
Then, in the bush, I saw a large animal bound from view
and a moment later we passed a pack of baboons in a clearing
who appeared to be arguing. I felt, as a cousin, that they should
65
be warned about the large animal, though perhaps they already
knew and were indifferent, as I had heard that they were fierce.
But all of a sudden this innocent bush country, which a moment
before had appeared to me to be properly in the hands of lightly
clothed men carrying umbrellas, showed itself in its true light.
It was just not safe that ant hill might be a crouching lion,
that tree a buffalo and to one who is used to safety this comes
as a shock.
All that day we travelled across the central plateau of Tan-
ganyika, which rises to well over four thousand feet and may
become quite cold at night. We reached Itigi at noon, vivid
with light and dark orange flamboyant trees, poinsettia, cosmos,
pink roses and great, plain geraniums. Here, children dragged
blocks of wood tied to fibre strings behind them, pretending
that they were railway cars or maybe animals. Here, also, above
a land which would have made the south Italian coast look
drab, was an infinite sky dotted with puffs of clouds greying
together in the distance. The young men of Itigi, I noticed,
tended to wear imitation leopard jackets and vests.
At lunch, the dining-car was crowded with Europeans.
Other races either couldn't afford the meal or were forbidden it
by wise dietary laws. The English, who understood the proper-
ties of the food, sensibly buried it in salt; but a very fat Belgian
couple, who had grown in domestic harmony together until
they could no longer lift each other, chewed methodically down
the menu.
Next to them a grizzled District Commissioner, who hadn't
noticed what he was eating in years, was giving gratuitous
advice to an Indian landowner. " can't understand why they
don't grow cotton up there. Same land in Uganda gives the best
cotton in Africa. 5 ' The landowner politely nibbled some fruit.
"Been to Mem lately? They've opened up there. Round in back
of the mountains, you know. Interesting. That whole coun-
66
try's being opened up. You want a steady rain the whole year
around, though. Can't raise anything without it. Steady/'
There was also a woman I had seen several times on the
station platforms, a great, deep-chested English garden lady.
Opposite her sat a pale young man with bitten finger-nails,
who may have been her son. He was reading Paul Bowles, and
the D.C. would have said that he wanted to get out in the open
more.
That evening, as it grew dark, we came into Tabora, having
made the whole trip in a little more than thirty hours. It took
Stanley from 21 March to 23 June, 1871, to cover the same
ground eighty-seven years four months and eleven days ahead
of me.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN Henry Morton Stanley arrived in Unyanyembe of
which Tabora was the main Arab compound he was
received with the honour and deference due to a veteran
traveller and a rich man. The first, second and fourth parties of
the New York Herald Expedition had arrived safely ahead of
him, confirming his fame and affluence.
He was warmly greeted by Mkasiwa, ruler of Unyanyembe,
and by the Arab Governor of the district, Sayd bin Salim, who
presented him with a comfortable house an hour's walk from
Tabora. And just as he was getting settled a troop of slaves
arrived from the other Arabs, bearing gifts of food and live-
stock. As he had paid off his porters, his people were now
reduced to twenty-five and he ordered a bullock slaughtered to
celebrate this 'prodigal plenitude/
Stanley said that he considered himself to be on classic
ground and, as usual, one must take him almost literally.
Unyanyembe had been hallowed by the presence of Burton,
Speke, Grant and Livingstone, and in the young explorer's
incorruptibly child-like mind these were mythical names. He
could not have been more awed if he had been following in the
footsteps of Hector or Achilles or Paris, or if he had been sent
to bring comfort to a lost Agamemnon.
By now he firmly believed that if he and his companions
lived to complete their task they would become Immortals.'
He was not far from the truth. Stanley's dreams were made of
such solid stuff that he was assured of nearly eternal fame less
than five months later, if only for one of his pompous phrases.
With over five thousand inhabitants, Tabora was the largest
68
Arab settlement in Central Africa. Though they were so nearly
isolated, here at the edge of the unknown, the important
traders nevertheless received stores of luxuries regularly from
the coast. Moreover, the settlement itself possessed large herds
of cattle and goats, and the fertile land provided all the grains?
fruits and vegetables that could be found in Zanzibar.
Most of the Arab establishments were furnished with
Persian carpets, sybaritic bedding, precious dinner services
and harems. Stanley strongly disapproved of Mohammedan
sensualism and scorned the Arabs not only for 'gratifying the
pruriency of their animal natures' but for
. . . lingering wantonly over the inharmonious and heavy curves of a
negroid form, and looking lovingly on the broad, unintellectual
face, and into jet eyes that never flash with the dazzling lovelight
that makes poor humanity beautiful.
In all of his books on Africa, Stanley accepts the idea of
white supremacy as thoroughly as he does every other
Victorian convention, frequently in the face of overwhelming
contrary evidence. He does this, one feels, less from malice than
loneliness. He tries so hard, always, to belong to someone and
he takes a genuine pleasure in being for want of any other
family a lonafide member of the white race.
A few days later, the Arabs invited him to a feast at the
tembe of Sheikh Khamis bin Abdullah, whom Stanley describes
as 'the noblest Trojan amongst the Arab population/ When he
arrived he found a number of Arabs in white gowns and caps
in heated discussion. 1 was in time for a council of war they
were having/ he says. As Stanley had in his possession a great
many arms, more modern than could be found anywhere in
Tabora, it is probable that he would have been in time for
this council of war if he had come a day, or even a week,
late.
He was asked to join in and did so, highly flattered. He
69
learned that a native called Mirambo, who had formerly been
a porter for one of the Arabs, had gathered a band around him
and, some years ago, had succeeded by force to the chieftain-
ship of a near-by tribe. From these beginnings he had extended
his power over a great area and had lately blocked an Arab
caravan bound for Ujiji. They had been sent back to Tabora
with the alarming news that passage to the lake by the direct
route through Mirambo's country could only be made over his
dead body. This was a severe financial blow, for in Ujiji a slave
could be bought for a little more than a pound that would bring
five times as much in Zanzibar*
"This is the status of affairs," said Khamis bin Abdullah.
"Mirambo says: that for years he has been engaged in war against
the neighbouring Washensi and has come out of it victorious, he
says this is a great year with him; that he is going to fight the Arabs,
and the Wanyamwezi of Unyanyembe, and that he shall not stop
until every Arab is driven from Unyanyembe, and he rules over this
country in place of Mkasiwa. Children of Oman, shall it be so?"
Then the children of Oman, with one or two cautious
exceptions, made impassioned speeches swearing that it should
not be so, while the child of Park Row listened excitedly. After
all, he thought, if the war were over quickly at most within
fifteen days, as the Arabs had promised why not? He had to
get to Ujiji somehow and this was the shortest route. Stanley
rose and, glowing with martial ardour, volunteered to join the
war party.
The Arabs were sanguine of victory,' he wrote, 'and I
partook of their enthusiasm. 5 This healthy optimism was not
justified. Not only was that year a great year for Mirambo but
so were the following twelve, and when he died of natural
causes in 1884 he had carved out an empire for himself nearly
70
the size of France and controlled all routes to Lakes Tan-
ganyika and Victoria-
James Gordon Bennett would have been appalled to learn
that his special correspondent was blithely preparing to risk his
expedition in a fight that had nothing whatever to do with the
New York Herald^ or Livingstone. The young warrior himself
awoke to his responsibilities in a few days, but by that time it
was too late to try to make any sort of deal with Mirambo, as he
was known to have supported the Arabs.
After that he had no choice but to strike out on another
route of his own, if he was still determined to find Livingstone.
The whole blunder must be laid to high spirits and what
stout-hearted young man wouldn't have joined the fiery sheiks
of Tabora against an ignorant marauder?
The trouble was that most of the sheiks were really great
cowards and Mirambo was far from ignorant. As this savage
chieftain later wrote to the British Consul in Zanzibar:
Is it expected that if my power is destroyed the petty chiefs of
this country would make it ... more open to traders, more peace-
fill? ... I can only say that this country is a hundred times more
prosperous ... a thousandfold more safe than it ever was before
I became chief of it. I wish to open it up ... to learn of Europeans
... to trade honestly with my neighbours.
When the council of war broke up, Khamis bin Abdullah
caused to be served a great dishful of rice and curry, in which
almonds, citron, raisins, and currants were mixed. The guest
was also brought
platters of roast chicken, kabobs, crullers, cakes, sweetbread, fruit,
glasses of sherbet and lemonade, dishes of gum-drops and Muscat
sweetmeats, dry raisins, prunes and nuts.
Stanley always lovingly described his food. Eating was one
of the few means he had of gratifying the pruriency of his
71
animal nature and when he was with Livingstone he liked to
fix special dishes for the old man, which the two would con-
sume while drinking several quarts of tea and speaking about
their digestions.
After the banquet Stanley was taken around Tabora and
shown the homes of the best people. He also visited the site of
Burton and Speke's house, as a shrine, and returned to his own
tembe towards evening with more gifts of food and no sense at
all of having been taken.
Preparations for war took up the first days of July, but on
the seventh Stanley fell ill with fever. Malaria is particularly
virulent around Tabora, even now. While delirious the scenes
of his life passed in review before him:
... a young life's battles and hard struggles came surging into the mind
in quick succession; events of boyhood, of youth, and manhood;
perils, travels, scenes, joys, and sorrows . . . The loveliest feature
of all to me was the form of a noble, and true man, who called me
son . . . And I remembered how one day, after we had come to live
near the Mississippi, I floated down, down, hundreds of miles,
with a wild fraternity of knurly giants, the boatmen of the Missis-
sippi, and how a dear old man welcomed me back as from the grave
... I remembered also my travels on foot through sunny Spain,
and France, with numberless adventures in Asia Minor, among
Kurdish nomads ... I remembered the shock it gave me to hear
after my return ... of the calamity that had overtaken the fond
man whom I called father, and the hot fitful life that followed it.
Perhaps because of his constant attacks of delirium, Stan-
ley was beginning to look upon his expedition as divinely
accredited, or at least backed by a higher power than the New
York Herald. Prodded by faith in his cause he began to wonder
if his friends the Arabs weren't trying to keep him from
Livingstone and use him in their fight against Mirambo.
In an extract from his diary, written one night after a bout
of fever, he says:
72
If they think so, they are much mistaken, for I have taken a solemn,
enduring oath ... No living man, or living men shall stop me, only
death can prevent me. But death not even this; I shall not die, I
will not die, I cannot die! And something tells me, I do not know
what it is ... something tells me tonight I shall find him, and
write it larger FIND HIM! FIND HIM! Even the words are inspiring.
I feel more happy. Have I uttered a prayer? I shall sleep calmly
tonight.
In a week Stanley had recovered; Shaw and his Arab valet
Selim had nursed him. Then It was Shaw's turn, and afterwards
Selim's. By July 29 Stanley had fifty men loaded with bales,
beads and wire for Ujiji.
It was his plan to accompany the Arabs on their journey to
Mirambo's stronghold, leave his baggage in the rear and attack
with them. They marched out of Tabora singing and letting
the American flag snap in a stiff wind. They thought this
banner might terrify the enemy.
On the third day out they came to a town called Mfuto,
where Stanley proposed to leave his supplies while they went
and thrashed Mirambo. Here Shaw lay down and declared that
he was dying and Stanley gave him a glass of port, a bowl of
gruel and put him to bed.
On August 3 the combined forces marched against Mirambo.
They didn't reach the first of his fortresses until noon of the
5th, by which time Stanley was again down with fever and had
to be carried in a hammock. This fortress was invested and,
from there, parties sallied out against other enemy positions,
leaving the two Europeans behind, delirious.
On the sixth, however, news came of a crushing Arab defeat
and by the morning of the seventh everyone was talking of
retreat. Stanley strongly advised the Governor against this as
it would only draw Mirambo on Tabora itself, but in the after-
noon of that day Selim roused him from his sick-bed and told
73
him that everyone was running away, even Khamis bin
Abdullah, the noblest Trojan.
He staggered out and found Shaw stealing the saddle off his
donkey* Only seven of the original fifty men who had left
Tabora could be found, among whom were Bombay and
Mabruki Speke. They struck out on the road for Mfuto,
glancing over their shoulders. Shaw kept falling off his donkey
and finally Stanley had him held in place by men walking on
either side of the animal. He ? too, was very sick and was ready
to lie down and die,, but he was supported by thoughts of his
high mission.
Fortunately for Stanley, Mirambo didn't press his counter-
attack and he was able to get all his supplies out of Mfuto and
back to Tabora. Here he retired to his tembe, cut loopholes in
the walls for guns, and refused to have anything more to do
with the Arabs who had left him, he claimed^ to die on the field
of battle. They denied this and said that they thought he had
already gone, but relations between them continued strained.
Stanley now had not only to defend himself but to hire a
whole new set of porters; the ones who had gone to Mfuto
would only agree to travel by the regular road and he was
proposing a southern detour.
On August 14, a week after the retreat, Shaw again fell ill,
this time seriously. On examining him Stanley decided that he
was suffering from a Venereal affliction.' He gave two soldiers
a hundred and fifty dollars apiece to go to Zanzibar to get some
medicine for him, as he had not thought to bring along any-
thing for such a disease. This was surprisingly prudish even
for Stanley as spirochaete and gonococcus were as common
in Central Africa as white ants. The leader was beginning to
have doubts about bringing his assistant along on the second
stage of the journey. Shaw, by this time, had become practically
fungoid.
74
On August 22 Tabora was attacked. Khamis bin Abdullah,
atoning for his previous retreat by a show of bravery, marched
out to meet the enemy together with some of the younger
Arabs and eighty slaves. Mirambo drew them into a trap, drove
off the slaves and surrounded Khamis and four of the Arabs.
These his men killed, and cut off the skin of their foreheads,
their beards, the skin of the lower parts of their faces, the fore
parts of their noses, the fat over their stomachs and abdomens,
their genital organs and a bit from each heel. From such
assorted bits of flesh they made a powerful medicine which, like
all weapons of war, was intended to insure that the same thing
wouldn't be done to them.
Stanley spent the next two days reinforcing his house,
determined to sell himself dearly. He had heard that Mirambo
and his principal officer carried umbrellas and he planned to
make a gold bullet to pick the chief off with. In the meantime
he kept the American flag flying over his tembe, hoping that
this would shatter the nerves of the superstitious savages.
In the end the attack fizzled out, though Tabora was parti-
ally sacked and burnt. Mirambo retreated with a large quantity
of booty and the Arabs made a show of chasing him away.
Stanley returned to his plans to reach Ujiji by a southern
detour. Shaw began to improve but seemed incapable of any
work and looked on listlessly as everyone scurried about.
To hearten him, Stanley took him aside and revealed that
they had not really come to map the country, as he had always
told him, but to FIND LIVINGSTONE. This news had very little
effect on the sick man and probably wouldn't have moved him
much if he were well. He was just terribly sorry he had come,
though he could never hope to make his employer understand
this.
On another day, knowing Stanley well by now, and know-
ing what would impress him, he said that his father had been
75
a captain in Her Majesty's Navy -and that he had been present
at four levees of Victoria. Stanley took this news gravely. It
would have been a great blow to him if it had been true. But,
as he said in his diary,
this can hardly be as I cannot imagine a naval captain's son being so
ignorant of penmanship as scarcely to be able to write his own name,
nor can I see how it is possible that he could have been presented
to the Queen, for I have always understood that the Court of St
James's is the most aristocratic in Europe.
It was only after the former John Rowland had himself been
presented to the Queen who gave him a gold snuff-box
that he began to feel free of the incubus of his vile birth, and
socially at ease. Though it would have hurt him, he might not
in his heart have disagreed with the Queen's description of him
in a letter to the Princess Royal in Berlin: 'I have this evng.
seen Mr. Stanley, who discovered Livingstone, a determined,
ugly little Man with a strong American twang/
During their last days in Tabora Stanley was even sicker
than his assistant and Shaw began to perk up. He went around
the camp saying that if anything happened to the leader if he
should 'die like a donkey/ for example he would head back
to the coast and to hell with Livingstone. To Stanley this
seemed heresy, but to a man who believed his life depended
upon it as Shaw's did this was a purely reasonable attitude.
Once, a bit maliciously, he came to his employer's bedside at
the height of one of his fevers and asked to whom he should
write in case of death* "Even the strongest of us die/* he added,
perhaps remembering Stanley's heartiness when they had
heard of Farquhar's lonely end.
On September 20, amidst 'considerable shouting, and laugh-
ing, and negroidal fanfaronnade/ Stanley marched out of
Tabora towards the south with a caravan of fifty-four men,
76
most of whom he had hired at treble pay to take this uncharted
route. He had also lightened the porter's loads to fifty pounds,
leaving the bulk of his supplies behind, so that he could make
longer marches.
The New York Herald Expedition had been three months in
Tabora almost as long as it had taken to get there from the
coast. Stanley would have been the first to criticize this way-
wardness in another man, though he didn't seem to think that
he himself had been at fault in joining the campaign against
Mirambo.
And, as usual, luck was squarely on his side. If he had left
Tabora a few weeks after he arrived at the end of June, he
probably would never have found Livingstone. Since March
1871 the old man had been deep in Central Africa, at Nyangwe,
trying to get boats to go down the Lualaba and, thence, down
the great river that Stanley later proved to be the Congo* But
before the rescue caravan left Tabora the Doctor turned back,
sick and weary. He arrived at Ujiji in October less than a
month before Stanley found him in time to save that ruthless
young man from oblivion.
Though Stanley was still very ill when he started he wanted
to put a distance between himself and Tabora so that his men
wouldn't run back to see their women friends. They hadn't
gone an hour, however, before Shaw whose moment of
triumph was over fell off his donkey. He never was a very-
good rider. At his screams, everyone ran up. "What is it, my
dear fellow?" Stanley asked. "Are you hurt?"
"Oh dear, oh dear! Let me go back, please, Mr Stanley."
"Why? Because you have had a fall from a donkey? Come,
pluck up courage, man . . ." The leader then delivered the kind
of lecture that had been so deeply depressing his assistant all
these months. A few days later Mr Shaw's foot missed a
stirrup and he fell flat on his face. Stanley refused to allow him
77
to be picked up and let him lie for an hour in the sun. When he
spoke to him at last the unfortunate man burst into tears.
"Do you wish to go back, Mr Shaw?"
"If you please, I do not believe I can go any farther; and if
you would only be kind enough, I should like to return very
much."
"Well, Mr Shaw, I have come to the conclusion that it is
best you should return. My patience is worn out. I have
endeavoured faithfully to lift you above these petty miseries
which you nourish so devotedly. You are simply suffer-
ing from hypochondria . . . Mark my words to return to
Unyanyembe, is to DIE! ... Once again, I repeat, if you
return, you DIE!"
But with this question settled and it seems likely that the
poor fellow deliberately chose death to Mr Stanley's further
endeavours to lift him above his petty miseries the two men
became friends. The evening before they parted Shaw played
some nostalgic tunes on his accordion, among which was
Home, Sweet Home. Stanley said that he fancied that they had
softened towards each other, but no one ever heard Shaw's side
of the story. He was sent back with a leg of kid and a canteen
of cold tea to Tabora, where he died a short while later.
78
CHAPTER SEVEN
TABORA of the present day has expanded considerably
beyond its old boundaries, not so much because there has
been a great increase in population but because the Germans,
who gave the town its form at the close of the century, expected
it to become the capital of Tanganyika. It was possibly laid out
in Berlin by someone who had never been here, and walking
through it now is like walking on a great, empty blueprint. The
roads are straight as rulers and cross each other at regular
intervals, leaving huge meadows which were meant to be filled
with buildings.
The main highways all lead to the Boma, or Government
offices, and are so broad and tinobstructed that they may easily
be raked with machine-gun fire. If things had gone according
to plan it would have been one of the most disciplined cities in
the world. But in spite of the fact that Tabora's weather is far
superior to Dar-es-Salaam's and that it lies in the very centre
of the country, when the British took over they preferred
to remain at the coast in the friendly shade of their warships.
I went first to see Mr B. J. A. Dudbridge, who was the
political counsellor of the district, not so much because I was
interested in politics but because I had his name. To reach his
office I had to walk down several miles of undeviating roads
bordered by empty fields, made green here and there by clumps
of mango trees. Once in a while there was a house, surrounded
with palms and dark red frangipani and flowering thorn.
The yards of many of these dwellings were neat and undeni-
ably English. Some of the others, less neat but with more
essential order, grew delicate Indian children, guarded by
79
African nurses. There was a constant wind ? which Stanley had
mentioned, and it seemed a perfect country for kites.
Mr Dudbridge was a tall man with a stern manner which hid
a pleasant, actuarial nature. He liked to be precise about things
and to make sure that his listener understood him. His office
was trim and designed for three hundred honest days 9 work a
year. He had a habit, when speaking sincerely, of slipping his
little finger towards one nostril and then trailing it guiltily to
the comer of his mouth. This seemed to have been acquired at
some over-strict public school.
Mr Dudbridge had devoted many years of his life to the
British Government and to the people of Tanganyika and was
a thorough and thoughtful civil servant. I showed him the
names on the two envelopes that the Dar-es-Salaam TANU
chapter had given me. One, Chief Fundikira, he approved of
strongly. The other, a man named Maswanya, he was less
enthusiastic about. "Former Warrant Officer/' he said, in-
dicating by his tone the sort of person that might be. "Of
course I can't stop you from seeing him," he continued, defin-
ing the position of his Government more than his own wishes.
People in this part of the country, I gathered, were sensi-
tive about questions from strangers. On several occasions
they had been criticized by the United Nations Trusteeship
Committee for their administration of the Territory, and they
felt that they had been treated unfairly, as they may have been.
1 asked possibly at the wrong moment about the status
of Africans and the discrimination against them by Indians and
Europeans, "If there is any discrimination," Mr Dudbridge
said, with marked restraint, "it is all to the African's advantage.'*
He proceeded to remind me of the various laws in force to
protect African work and property rights, and of the tax
system biased in their favour.
I persisted, saying that, after all, one did feel it here though
80
not as strongly as in Kenya. "Oh, if you're talking about feel-
ings" he said, leaning back in his chair, obviously relieved.
"Yes, 33 1 said, "I guess that's what I was talking about."
Mr Dudbridge shrugged. "You know, we regret that very
much. But what do you suggest we do about it? There is, after
all, a certain cultural discrimination we can't help."
1 asked what he meant.
He smiled. "May I know what your father did?"
"He was a business man."
Mr Dudbridge nodded. His little finger, which had been
lightly touching his jaw, crept gently upward. "That's what I
was expecting you to say."
I watched, fascinated. "What do you mean?"
"Well would your father have invited his typists home
with him?" The finger reached the nostril and shied away.
By coincidence, my mother had been a typist, so that I had
an excellent opportunity to score a point on his own analogy,
but the finger was creeping upwards again and the moment for
attack passed.
"You see what I mean? 33
"Well . . ."
"Well what?"
"Well," I finished lamely, "in French Africa there isn't very
much cultural discrimination, as you call it."
Mr Dudbridge dropped his hand from his face and leaned
forward. He spoke with simple, disarming pride, "Yes, but my
dear fellow, I am an Englishman. I can't change that!"
Before I left he kindly called the Educational Officer, Mr
Kingdom-Hawkins, and asked him to see me. In this he showed
considerable judgment. As I later learned, there were two sorts
of Europeans in Tabora the bridge people and the hi-fi
people. I was taped as hi-fi and sent over to Education. He,
obviously, was bridge.
81
Before seeing Kingdom-Hawkins, I dropped in on Chief
Fundikira* The family Is an old one and there was a chief by
this name ruling the Wanyamwezi (people of the moon) during
the days of Said bin Sultan, over a hundred years ago. They
have survived several scandals, including a nasty case of
embezzlement and suicide. The present Chief is a plump young
man with a good education, five official wives and a cream-
coloured Chevrolet. He had lately been elected to the Legisla-
tive Council with the help of TANU, being sensitive to the
changing patterns of rule.
I took a taxi in the direction of Stanley's old tembe, though
I hadn't yet had time to see it. Fundikira's compound was built
in the native style, with mud buildings and thatched roofs, but
it was on a very much larger scale.
At the entrance to the grounds, baked hard by the sun and
packed by naked feet, there were a number of great drums
suspended from a ridge-pole. I tried hitting one and it rumbled
like thunder. Some young men came around the corner of the
house and looked at me. I covered my embarrassment by ask-
ing where I could find the chief, but before they understood
the question he came wandering across the yard in slacks and
an open white shirt.
We went inside out of the sun, and his followers, who
normally sit on the floor outside of Ms office, rose and clapped
their hands twice. Fundikira nodded, in an abstract and distant
manner, suggesting dignity, and led me into a room dominated
by an executive desk, with the usual appurtenances, including
a telephone.
This was the first African chief I had ever met, and, inevit-
ably, the experience was disappointing. Not that I expected
feathers and bones, but a member of the first elected legislature
should have been a little less ordinary, a little less like an
American politician. He dutifully mouthed all the current
82
slogans and repeated catch-words like 'reactionary' and
'imperialistic* and even "liberty 5 as though they were signs of
office.
Of course, a Congressman would have had other words and
slogans but the effect was much the same. Fundikira then spoke
warmly of the poverty of his people, which was evident enough
in the waiting-room outside his office, and said that he hoped
the Western world would remember its responsibilities towards
them. He said nothing of his own, and one had the feeling that
it would come as a sharp surprise to him one day to discover
that there were any.
The chief was otherwise such a model of caution that he
managed to seem practically mute. He criticized the English, of
course, but that was the style these days. At all events he was
never so far out on a limb that he couldn't crawl back.
Before lunch I dropped into the headquarters of TANU, on
Usagara Street, off the market. The block here was formed of
strong, mud-walled houses, connected along the length of the
unpaved street with rush fences. In small gardens behind these,
families contended.
TANU had a great mango tree before its door and a number
of people were gathered in its shade. Mr Maswanya, District
Chairman for Tabora, could only spare me a minute this morn-
ing but promised to come and see me the next day and take me
around to the local offices of his organization.
Maswanya's office had a tattered old carpet, an oil-can cut in
half for a waste-basket, pictures of Nkruma and Nyerere on the
walls, splintered office furniture, torn folders in a makeshift
file; on his desk there were some ink-smeared rubber stamps, a
telephone and a pair of 4 in* and 'out' baskets.
He was tall and muscular, possibly thirty-five years old, with
a habitually impassive face. Though he was neither as well
educated nor as well thought-of as Fundikira, he had got the
83
chief elected and he meant to see that no one forgot It, In this,
at least, he was the more sophisticated of the two men a sort
of elementary Tammany leader, doing his best with the
material at hand.
On leaving, I asked why he had quit his job as a Warrant
Officer in the Government security forces. He smiled and
there was a faintly mocking light in his eyes. "Well, I just got
tired of teaching young Englishmen my own job and finding
that they had been made my superiors at my next station." He
paused and then continued, still smiling, "And then I didn't
honestly like being a policeman/' In everyday Swahili there is
probably a word for e cop/
The hotel in Tabora was originally built as a hunting-lodge
for the Kaiser, though he never saw Africa. It caters now to
commercial travellers, transient government people and an
occasional Indian merchant.
After lunch, which included saute potatoes, carrots maitre
d'hotel and beans aux fines herbes, which turned out to be
chips, boiled carrots and parsley-and-beans in white sauce, I
was browsing through the books in the hotel office where
Larousse Gastronomique y Good Housekeeping Cookery Book^
Gourmet Cookery Book^ Constance Spry Cookery Book and
Cooking of All Nations glare all day in silent reproach at their
director when Kingdom-Hawkins dropped by for me. He
was going to visit the Tabora boys* secondary school and
asked if I would like to come along.
Although distinctly hi-fi, he was every bit as efficient and
dedicated as Mr Dudbridge. He had a dark, Scottish face and
though he was of a humorous and permissive nature he was
probably subject to black moods. He drove very fast, talking
vplubly and well. I had the impression that in his present job
he didn't get a chance to do either as much as he liked.
We swerved out into the main road. "Notice all those
84
mangoes around here?" Kingdom-Hawkins said, pushing the
little Peugeot into top gear. "All brought in by the Arabs and
the Germans. Also a lot of wattle and gum from Australia.
Changed the face of the country. As a matter effect, the most
common name for East Africa is 'the place of foreign trees. 3 "
He turned out of the path of a meandering bicycle. "Never
teach anyone to stay on his own side of the road . . . Terribly
funny about the mangoes. If you buy them on the land the
trees themselves, I mean they cost sixteen shillings; they just
grow by themselves, you know, and the tree is full of fruit.
There're thousands around here. But in the market the fruit
costs twopence apiece."
He turned sharp left. "Sweet little car. We've been awfully
pleased with it. I picked it up second hand and never had a bit
of trouble. American cars used to be very popular out here but
they've rather outpriced and outstyled themselves now. Can't
get over a bump in the road with them and there's too much
power going to waste." He slowed for a crossing. "That can be
important. On the road to Pemba there's a sign. It says: stop?
have you food and water, petrol and oil, have you checked your
motor? That sort of thing. You have been warned it says. Great
big skull and cross-bones. And it's really like that, you know.
Hundreds of miles with nothing at all but the road. If you break
down you're stranded for weeks, if you live."
I stared down at his knees. In East Africa these are often a
man's most extrusive feature. "Rather interesting school out
here, /think. Of course the boys you're going to see are a good
deal older than they would be in European or American
schools. They start later. That's why we don't have co-educa-
tion. Anyway, the girls get married when they're fifteen or
sixteen so they're hard to educate. And you can't really expect
more than two years' work out of a woman teacher but I
suppose she goes off and teaches her own family."
85
I said that I had noticed a number of other schools around
Tabora and asked what they were and how they differed from
this one. "Well, this is mostly a school for Africans. Oh yes,
there's quite a strong colour feeling in the schools. Not just
among the whites. The Indian half-castes as well, Goans and
people like that. They all want to stay with their own/' I
learned, however, that the Catholic church was soon to
establish an inter-racial school.
Kingdom-Hawkins turned to me. "Not too much wind on
you, is there? The weather is marvellous out here. That's the
best part about it. This is just as hot as it gets. It can even be
very bracing but of course there is the wind. Up that road
is the Livingstone tembe, where Stanley stayed." I reminded
him that it was the Stanley tembe, where Livingstone
stayed.
"Really? Well drop by afterwards if you care to. I hear they
have it all fixed up. I don't know that I've seen it. All these
things are great frauds if you ask me never learn history that
way. Now right down the road there Is the tsetse-fly barrier.
They'll let you out all right but they won't let you in without
checking. The fly doesn't travel by itself, you see, it has to
catch a ride."
"Tabora itself is quite healthy, but it's just an island. There's
plenty of bilharzia and yaws and trachoma out there. The
Africans lose about fifty or sixty per cent of their children . . .
here we are. We turn in here."
We were greeted by the superintendent, who showed us
around. The school spread over a large area and was composed
of long, rectangular buildings stuck together like dominoes.
A new section had just been added and was not entirely
finished; its windows were purposely made small, for in Africa
even a crack in the door will flood a room with light. Otherwise
the school was depressingly like every other one in the world;
86
the dormitories smelled of old sneakers ? the Chem labs dis-
played neat files of bunsen burners and test-tubes, and on the
blackboard of one classroom, temporarily deserted, someone
had been trying to divide
x z + 2x z + fa + I0 by x z 3* + 2.
In still another room one of the teachers had asked his pupils
how the British colonial dependencies in tropical Africa were
progressing towards self-government and how far they had
been successful. This seemed a rather dangerous subject, but
the truly noble British capacity for sticking out iheir own
necks and teaching others the art of beheading was even better
displayed in a corollary question which asked the students to
describe the activities of the leaders of the French Revolution
and to say how much they sympathized with them. Many of
the teachers at the school were African and most of the lessons
were given in Swahili.
"Our real trouble here," the superintendent said, "is to keep
our boys from studying too hard. They would just burn them-
selves out if we let them. We had a student for a while from
your country, I think it was California, but he didn't last very
long. Things got too tough for him/* he added, with a touch
of satisfaction. "Of course you understand that most of the
boys here are picked. That probably explains it. We'll have
some failures when we have more schools," he said, con-
fidently. The superintendent was also trying to say that Ameri-
can schools weren't very good and he was probably right*
I asked what sort of work the students did and he gave me
a number of papers for an examination they had just taken.
Among other things they had been asked to write down the
expansion by the binomial theorem of f ^x - K and simplify
the coefficients; to prove that the ratio of the areas of similar
8?
triangles is equal to the ratio of the squares on corresponding
sides; to show how the slave trade was organized either in East
or in West Africa and how Europe became aware of its evils;
and to reduce two hundred and eighty-seven English words to
one hundred. There were also the usual questions, designed
to restrain eager spirits with a dead academic hand. This was
probably all for the best, for without having to illustrate
Chaucer's delight in detail by reference to three of the follow-
ing, and without having to write on Tennyson's use of simile
and metaphor or the vividness of his descriptive passages by
reference to suitable poems, these young men in spotless white
shorts would soon have out-stripped their masters and then it
wouldn't only have been the boy from California who found
the going too tough.
When we were let out of school we went over to Stan-
ley's tetnbe and found it hopelessly forlorn as any souvenir.
Kingdom-Hawkins raced me through the little museum, past
Stanley's room and Bombay's room, as though he were afraid
someone would catch him. He was suffering the embarrassment
that afflicts people in Rome and New York when they take
visitors to the Vatican and the Empire State Building. I sug-
gested that we go, and he joyfully shoved me into the Peugeot
and sped off, past the tsetse-fly barrier.
We were going some distance from town to visit a school
that was being constructed on the land of a Catholic church.
As the Government contributes a fixed share of the expenses
of the religious schools it was part of Kingdom-Hawkins' job
to inspect the work.
"From here on out you can expect fly," he said, closing the
windows of the car. "Always travel closed up like this, no matter
what the temperature."
1 said I thought theglossina morsitans only affected domestic
animals.
88
"Not necessarily. You can catch sleeping sickness any time,
though it can be easily cured unless it gets into your spinal
fluid. But they bite like needles, you know, especially in the
bright sunlight. When we were driving up North last year I
had to put water in the radiator and we waited for an hour in
the sun for a cloud to pass overhead ... It was in the sky, a
little patch, then bigger and bigger, but it wouldn't come. You
see, when they hitch a ride with your car you can't get rid of
them unless a bigger car comes by a truck or something.
They they go off with it. Unfaithful creatures, thank
God."
When we arrived, Kingdom-Hawkins ran off to look at
his buildings and I wandered towards the church. Its peaked,
thatched roof dominated a small settlement. Beyond this was
nothing but empty fields and bush, but there must have been
several villages near by or the church would never have been
built here. It looked like a great native hut; very large inside,
really cathedral size, with the highest point of the roof reaching
up forty or fifty feet.
Birds had made their nests there in the open thatch, and the
vast room, unobstructed except for low, hand-carved wooden
benches, echoed their Franciscan voices. There were several
little chapels with hideous porcelain statues set before charm-
ing paintings. One of these was of Mary, and beneath it was a
phrase in Swahili.
A voice behind me spoke: "It says, *I will cleanse you of
original sin/ " I turned and found a small, dried priest, very
black and very old. Behind him was another priest, a bit
younger. "Where do you come from?" the old one said, hum-
ming his words at the back of his throat, as one might after a
lifetime of liturgy.
I mentioned Kingdom-Hawkins but they shook their heads.
They wanted to know where I lived. I said that for the present
89
I lived In Rome, and they nodded wisely. Perhaps Kingdom-
Hawkins had already told them.
"Then you are a priest/' said the youngest, with assurance.
I said I was not. "But you must be. Why do you live in Rome?"
Nothing could persuade them that I wasn't at least some kind
of priest, and when they mentioned a bishop who had been
educated in Rome they were astonished that I didn't know him.
Their voices became more confiding and professional and
the old man slipped so far into liturgy that it was almost
impossible to understand him. I was crowded into the vestry to
see their yellow, green and black vestments, their personal
chalices and the sacred host. They kept me there, showing off
their innocent gaudery, until Kingdom-Hawkins came looking
for us.
Though it has witnessed savage perversions of its mission,
the Christian Church, Protestant and Catholic, seems to feel
more at home in Africa than in Europe. Here, with the roots of
its faith bared, it may take up a natural function that it has
almost forgotten elsewhere. It moves among the people, at
times, as though it were again at its origins and is unexpectedly
refreshed by the necessary mechanics of charity and compassion.
The prevalent notion of a missionary as a tight-lipped fugi-
tive from deep analysis is not accurate. Many of the white
priests and pastors who come to work in Africa especially in
the interior where there are few European settlers are either
radically different from their colleagues at home or they grow
different with their work. In the presence of a real need for
their secular services, and sometimes even for their religious
ones, they lose the injured, Christian Democratic look they are
likely to have when they leave Europe or America. The black
clerics also seem to share this sense of fulfilment and they have
not yet quite formed a separate class a sort of spiritual bour-
geoisie like so many of their white brothers.
90
In heavily settled areas, relations between the Church and
Indigenous peoples aren't so idyllic. It has often fallen under
the influence of the white colonists who have made it a sop for
the Africans and tried even to use it against each other in
national quarrels.
The establishment of Protestant missions in Tanganyika,
for instance, was frequently interrupted by the tribal wars of the
British and the Germans, who turned religious orders against
each other and sometimes against the ideals of Christianity.
At the outbreak of the Second World War a portrait of Adolf
Hitler, painted by a clerical admirer, was found behind the
altar of a German mission near Dar-es-Salaam. This did not
dispose the members of an inferior race to worship, especially
at such an impermanent shrine.
All considered, it is only natural that the more international,
Roman Church which had been working these vineyards with
fewer interruptions for nearly a century, should have made
great gains. By now, the majority of Christians in Tanganyika
are Catholic.
Among the Roman Orders now at work are the White
Fathers to whom Pope Leo XII in 1878 entrusted the evan-
gelization of the regions of the Central African lakes. These
men are pleasant, tolerant Hollanders with traces of cigar ash
on their white robes and good beer on their breaths, but there
would be no further reason to remark them if not for the fact
that they seem to be the instruments of a new Church policy
in Africa.
As one of their main stations is at Tabora, which is the rail
hub for lines which go to Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, I
asked Kingdom-Hawkins to drop me off to see Archbishop
Bronsvelt, to whom I had a cautious introduction from the
Superior General in Rome. Before Kingdom-Hawkins left he
invited me to dinner to meet his wife.
9*
The Bishop was an urbane, comfortable man who had
devoted his life to teaching- Though his own position was
conservative, he seemed to confirm what I had heard about the
Order that they were firmly on the side of TANU and were
actively supporting the independence movement. The Bishop
disapproved of some of Nyerere's speeches (a few were un-
necessarily inflammatory, he said, and were only made to keep
his following), and he was surely not anti-British; but he
obviously intended to keep the White Fathers here long after
the English had gone and he believed this was the way to do it.
So far, everything was going well, with the leader of TANU
itself a communicant. "Mr Nyerere has a good, big, Catholic
family," the Bishop said, with immense satisfaction. But this
alone was not enough. Leaders may be deposed*
The White Fathers at Kipalapala, just outside Tabora, own
and operate one of the largest and most versatile printing
plants in East and Central Africa. They do a good deal of
government work also for the Rhodesias many bibles in
odd Sudanese and Bantu dialects, prayer books, religious
calendars, a Swahili translation ofPinocchio, etc. They also, as
though by chance, edit and publish the most fiercely nationalist
and anti-imperialist newspaper in all of British Africa, It is
almost wholly written by a small, pallid, indignant Dutchman
called Father Van Dam, whose proudest boast is that few
people who read the paper know he isn't black.
Both Bishop Bronsvelt and Father Van Dam would object
to this description of Kiongosi^ a name which I believe means
Guide or Herald. The Bishop would have said that I have
exaggerated the intentions of a religious publication, written in
Swahili and of little interest to anyone but Africans. Father Van
Dam, on the contrary, would feel that these intentions were
strongly political. As it was, he suspected me of pro-imperialist
sympathies and accused me of not seeing enough Africans.
92
His conception of Kiongosi was probably accurate. It made
token passes at moderation but it owed its enormous success to
the fact that it took the African side In political as well as in social
matters. Mr Maswanya, for instance, thought very highly of it.
Considering that each copy was read by at least five people
and often aloud to whole villages, its 24,000 circulation in
Tanganyika was the equivalent of the combined weekly
editions of Time and Life in the United States and, in concord
with them, it viewed the Church of Rome benevolently.
I saw Father Van Dam towards dusk, all in a lovely garden
at Kipalapala behind the busy printing plant. The Father had
a pimple on his nose and spoke long and earnestly over a
bottle of beer. His views were classically liberal. Reactionary
forces were battling progress in their old blind, stupid way,
unwilling to see their own salvation being held out to them.
There would come a time when the extremists would take over
and then . . .
"If they would only reali^e" he said, leaning forward in
his wicker chair, his ascetic head set off in a background of
hibiscus flowers, "that these people are . . /' His 'they* was a
typical liberal 'they,' the others, everyone else but us in this
case the British. 'These people,' of course, were Africans. He
might have said 'our,' or even 'my people/ but he was so dead
white it was embarrassing.
Father Van Dam was probably right, but one couldn't help
but feel that if a miracle happened if 'they' did realize; if, for
once, reactionary forces stopped battling progress and allowed
themselves to be saved from their own folly, this good and
charming man would be miserable.
When I left we passed through the plant, weaving through
African printers slugging out paragraphs and locking in
frames, who looked on us with the unsmiling superiority of all
craft union men. As I got into my cab the Father said, a little
93
wistfully, "I don't suppose you could get me a good picture of
the new Pope, could you? I have one but it isn't much. I mean,
if you're going to Rome . . . Something for the front page."
Dinner was served at eight at the Kingdom-Hawkins' com-
fortable little modern house. We had a drink first and discussed
cars, as he planned to retire in two years. They were torn
between a DKW and an Opel Caravan. "We're not sure, yet,"
his wife said, "all we know is we don't want an English car."
She was a small, pretty woman, very pale and usually quiet. She
was Tabora's librarian. Letting one thing suggest another I com-
mented on their hi-fi set and said that of course in New York or
London it would be considered rather inadequate with all the
woofers and tweeters and what not they were putting on sets
now.
"Yes," said Kingdom-Hawkins, "but you must remember
that its hard to get things like that out here." The doors to the
porch were open and I looked out into the black night at a huge
pair of yellow eyes. Was one supposed to mention such things
or ignore them? A moment later it proved to be the servant,
carrying two lanterns across the yard towards the house.
Casually I spoke of wild animals.
"Oh, there're plenty around," Kingdom-Hawkins said.
'They stay away from Tabora because most of the natives have
guns, but during the war when it was hard to get ammunition
they started to move right in. There were elephants on the golf
course . . . did quite a lot of damage. Then there were lion and
leopard and other pests. We had a hyena out on the lawn just
a little while ago." I glanced again towards the porch.
"But the driver ants are the most dangerous. They can come
straight through a house a swath about a foot wide. They eat
anything that's flesh. If you leave a dog tied up in their path
he's nothing but bones in a few hours their jaws are so strong
that sometimes they let them bite on a closed wound and use
94
their heads as stitches. Some people we knew came home one
night and found their baby's crib covered with them. They had
to pick him up and toss him back and forth like a hot potato
until they could get him under the shower. All bitten up even
so. I can't think of anything worse than that unless it was that
lion those nuns had in their privy."
At dinner I learned that lions are also especially prevalent
in the neighbourhood of sisal plantations. The owners of the
plantations encourage them because they have a tooth for
bushpig which do thousands of dollars' worth of damage a
year. Unfortunately, they also have a tooth for plantation
worker, but this is the owner's calculated risk. The all-time
favourite movie in Central Africa, I learned, is Tartan.
Back at the hotel I had a final brandy before going to bed.
There was an English party sitting at the back of the bar,
having one of those conversations which so much puzzle
people of other races.
". . . thought a great deal about this during the war and I
don't think I could have stood torture."
"Well, I think if I could have gone through the first five
minutes ..." a woman said.
Someone broke in. ". . . the first minutes? I don't know
even at school I mean bullying and all that sort of thing."
"... I mean you get angry" the woman insisted.
"Now" said the wife of the man who had thought a good
deal during the war, "why doesn't one play it very, very
cleverly and say everything and . . ."
"Look, darling, they've got a provision for that."
"They," in this case, was Anglo-Saxon for anyone else in
the world who might be unfortunate enough to become in-
volved in a war with England, provision or no provision.
The following morning I went for a walk, to pass the time
95
before Mr Maswanya was to call for me. At six-thirty the hotel
garden was bathed in fresh light, as strong and clear as a
northern noon. Oleanders and simple petunias nodded in the
dawn breeze. Going down the road towards the market place
(where I hoped to buy a pair of rubber bands because my
nylon stockings weren't staying up) I noticed that some of the
more prosperous young men flashed cowboy hats and leopard
sneakers.
The women, as usual, wore shawls bright with flowers and
loving-cups and footballs and spirited Swahili phrases- One
young lady had a magnificent cloth with a picture of the
Viceroy's palace, over which flew Indian and British flags;
another had draped herself and her child in a bold sputnik
print.
Before I had gone far, a taxi raced up behind me, with Mr
Maswanya and a friend in it. They wanted to know if I would
come along with them to see some TANU meetings. They spoke
so casually and with such typical African understatement that
one could have refused without realizing that they had gone to
great pains to arrange these meetings.
The taxi driver, for instance, had volunteered his services
for the entire morning and everywhere we went people were
wearing their best clothes* They had also baked stony cookies,
rehearsed songs and questions and gathered in multitudes to
applaud and gape. Very soon I felt like an impostor, and before
the moraing was out Mr Maswanya seemed to have guessed
that I was at least as far as nationalist movements were con-
cerned. But he took a certain mocking pleasure in the proceed-
ings and we grew to be friends.
Our first stop was a small, mud-plastered hut, which con-
tained two whitewashed rooms* These were lined with battered
chairs and we filed in and took seats behind a table. The chairs
were occupied by officers of the group. The leader was a
middle-aged, broad-minded, quick-tempered., lusty woman
the sort who doesn't mind if her husband's friends get ashes on
the rug. We were in Tabora township still and all the people
in the room were clearly her friends and neighbours* Outside
there was a great crowd of people.
The Chairwoman wore one of her shawls over her head so
that a corner of it kept falling down over her eyes and she
habitually brushed it back as she spoke, Maswanya gave me a
running translation as she lit into the British. She stopped from
time to time to allow me to ask questions but I could think of
none. I was remembering something I had seen in the Catholic
Times of Africa in Archbishop Bronsvelt's office. Mrs Catherine
C Byrne, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, had written:
In Ireland we have no colour bar and please God we never will
One reason put forward for the exceptionally happy, united life led
by white and coloured in Dublin is that many of the immigrants
come from countries with much the same sort of history as Ireland,
evolving over the centuries to partial freedom or complete in-
dependence. The Irish, in consequence ... go out of their way to
welcome the coloured.
At last the Chairwoman pointed with positively Celtic wrath
to the children buzzing around the doorway likeflies. "Look at
them!" she said. "They need food and medicine and we can't
afford enough for them. Look at them see how ragged they
are! That's why we want to run our own country."
I said, through Mr Maswanya, that it didn't seem to me that
self-government had much to do with what they could or
couldn't afford not directly anyway. That is the sort of con-
tradiction people don't generally like and, jammed in as I was,
it was hardly reassuring to remember that these people's
immediate ancestors had fought in Mirambo's army and had
treated Shiekh Khamis bin Abdullah very unpleasantly.
But as no one seemed to be angiy yet I took heart and went
97
on to say that I had heard that the people of the Belgian Congo
had even less self-government than those in Tanganyika and
yet they were much richer. This freedom she spoke of might
even work the other way around. Would she want it if it
meant less to eat and fewer medicines for the children?
The Chairwoman gave her answer very quickly and as I had
guessed what it was before Mr Maswanya told me, I smiled.
The room burst into wild laughter and suddenly everyone
began to sing and beat time. It sounded like a camp meeting.
There was a familiar lilt to the music and I leaned over and
asked Maswanya what the words were. He grinned and shouted
back, "May the British go for ever, and down with the United
Tanganyika Party!" It might have been Onward Christian
Soldiers or One More River to Cross.
It was no good pointing out that it is very foolish to com-
plain one moment that your children are starving and to say
the next moment that you don't care if they are as long as
you're the one who's responsible. Perhaps it isn't even safe.
The object of revival meetings is to affirm a cause, not to
reason about it. The room rang with joyous song and outside
women gave ululating screams of triumph. Tea was served.
As we were about to leave, the Chairwoman asked Mas-
wanya if I might be presented with an award. He said that I
might, and gave me no chance to refuse. Standing before the
taxi I was loudly serenaded while the Chairwoman came before
me and put a red and blue Hawaiian lei around my deep red
neck. There were more cheers and blood-chilling screams and
I ducked into the car.
As soon as we were out of sight I took off the lei and put
it behind the seat. Mr Maswanya smiled faintly and stared
straight ahead at the hot, dusty road.
The second meeting-place was in a suburb of Tabora a
short, unpaved street with mud huts. Here the leader was a
tall, grey-haired man. He and his fellow officers were wearing
robes that were splendidly barbaric from a distance and close
up were nothing but tacked-together bits of cheap cotton and
leopard print, like stage costumes. But maybe that is all
splendid barbarism has ever been.
We were crowded into a stifling room for more tea and
cakes and songs while several hundred people pressed around
the doorway. There were speeches and lively discussion. The
chief complaint here was that the residents of the district had to
walk a mile for their water. They said that they paid taxes and
they wanted a pump. They had applied to the Government
often but had heard nothing.
I whispered to Maswanya that /wasn't the Government and
that I hoped he hadn't told anybody I was. Anyway, I said, a
political boss worth his salt should be able to get a water pump
out of the Government if he tried. Maswanya had only been in
politics for two years and had been mostly concerned with the
idealistic aspects of his work. But he was a sensible man and had
lately begun to feel that principles alone were not enough. He
was delighted by the practical possibilities of the pump and
made a note to see Mr Dudbridge not, I hoped, before I
left town.
Riding out towards the bush for our next meeting I began
to realize that the isolated native villages we passed, filled with
yapping dogs and scurrying children, were just ordinary farm
towns and that those women with bared breasts going to and
fro with baskets on their heads were simply farmer's wives and
daughters.
The farmers themselves, lean and nearly naked, are not
different from men who cultivate the soil anywhere, though
they may have a more difficult time here. They have the heavy,
calloused hands of southern dirt farmers or Italian peasants
and, when we stopped at one of the villages, I noticed that they
99
had the same, stiff Sunday clothing though more rudi-
mentary. We were greeted by a chorus of the farmer's daughters
wearing prim, identical frocks. They stayed just outside the
meeting-house, while we took tea and cookies, and they burst
frequently into song, like a flock of restless birds.
The Chairman, who was twenty-three years old, had gone
to primary school and then had been apprenticed to a carpenter
in Dar-es-Salaam, from which he had lately returned home.
Stanley would have remarked that this young man had very
bad features, by which he would mean that he was as far as
possible from the Hamitic or Semitic types one frequently sees
in Africa which are in turn closest to the Caucasian types of
Europe. As most Europeans and Americans (including Ameri-
can Negroes) have adopted this standard of physical beauty it is
very difficult to stand aside from it, even for a moment. He is
ugly, I caught myself thinking, but very intelligent just as
Solomon thought that someone was black but comely.
Nevertheless he was very intelligent, and by far the most
coherent of the TANU speakers I had met, including Maswanya.
I asked if there was very much tribal feeling here. The boy
smiled. "We don't think of tribes any more. We don't remem-
ber where we came from, just where we are going."
One of his officers was a young girl, with whom he seemed
to be familiar, either as a sister or a wife. She, too, was very
quick and spoke fluently of political events in North Africa and
Europe about which I knew little.
Our final stop was a fair-sized village lying close to Tabora.
It was half rural and half urban and I understood that there
was considerable unemployment in the place. We sat out under
a mango tree this time, and for a change drank Coca-Cola.
The whole population of the village gathered around us.
The leader here was a rather sententious man of fifty or sixty.
He made a long speech which Maswanya carefully translated
100
all about unequal pay for equal work and other forms of dis-
crimination. He was very angry with the British but, under-
neath, perhaps not as much as he pretended. A nationalist
movement must have enemies as well as friends and sometimes
in the beginning it is necessary to invent both. He said, at
last, that he hoped Tanganyika would eventually join the
Commonwealth.
There was no singing here and I noticed that many of the
people were extremely poor. The shirt of one boy was little
more than a white web hanging from a bony shoulder and his
torn shorts were tied around his waist with a piece of twine.
I saw a young girl in tatters edging towards the table. She
had large teeth, a lovely, full face strengthened by bold planes,
and hair piled on top of her head in a black cloud. When the
Chairman had finished she leaned forward and asked a question
in a clear and unhesitant voice. I asked Maswaoya what she
had said.
His eyes sparkled. "She wants to know if the report of the
United Nations Trusteeship Council has been published and
if it is true that Africans have as much trouble in Arkansas as
they do in Tanganyika/*
As I could not answer either of those questions we shook
hands all round and left. At the hotel Maswanya reminded me,
ironically, of my decoration. I fished it out from behind the
seat and invited him for a beer. Before he left he gave me a
letter to the District Chairman of TANU in Ujijl
101
CHAPTER EIGHT
OTANLEY only really got his column moving south on 27
kj September 1871, when he had rid himself of everyone
he felt to be unfit for the journey. He was perfectly sure that
he could reach Ujiji, but he had no idea if Doctor Livingstone
was there or not.
By now he felt that his search was heaven-blessed, and when ?
on October 7 his men rebelled because they wished to stay
longer in the rolling game country south of Tabora, Stanley
put down the uprising with a remarkable show of courage.
Standing with one armed man at his back and one at his front,
in a circle of hostile soldiers and porters, he succeeded in
disarming them both and then lecturing the entire party
mercilessly until they were in agonies of remorse. They soon
picked up their burdens and marched off 'with astonishing
alacrity,' as Stanley said, unconscious of the wracking effect
of his sermons.
Twice during October he had word from passing caravans
that there was another European farther west, but only on the
27th was he sure it was Livingstone.
"A white man?" we asked.
"Yes, a white man/ 5 they replied.
"How is he dressed?"
"Like the master," they answered,
"Is he young or old?"
"He is old. He has white hair on his face and is sick."
But he still had a week of hard travel, made especially diffi-
cult because the petty chiefs in the neighbourhood demanded
tribute at every stop. For the last few marches Stanley had to
102
sneak through the country like a thief so as to save what was
left of his supplies.
He was rather pleased to do this though it was risky
because he was afraid that Livingstone would run away if he
heard that he was coining. He was not only thinking of what
Kirk had said he had his own reasons ... Of course the
Doctor would be running from him. Months later, in a letter
to a friend in London, Livingstone remarked with some
surprise that when Stanley reached him at Ujiji he 'behaved
as a son to a father/
On the morning of November 3 (the official date is the
tenth but that is an error), seven months and thirteen days
after Stanley had left Bagamoyo, he put on a new flannel suit,
freshly oiled boots, a chalked helmet with a new puggaree
folded on it and set out on c a happy, glorious morning 5 on his
last march. Ujiji and Lake Tanganyika, now visible, lay just
ahead.
Hurrah! The men responded to the exultant cry of the Anglo-
Saxon with the lungs of Stentors, and the great forests and the hills
seem to share in our triumph.
Stanley eagerly asked Bombay where Burton and Speke
had stood when they first saw the lake. Bombay made the
sensible reply that he hadn't the least idea but that he supposed
it was around here somewhere.
Nothing could dampen Stanley's spirits. He was busy
living the saga of Stanley finding Livingstone. He bore down
on the good doctor so fast that the man would never have had
a chance to escape if he had wanted to. It was really more of a
capture with the American flag flying over the striking force.
The presence of this flag rather puzzled Doctor Livingstone,
as it has a good many Englishmen since. On the whole he was
glad to see it. "I had thought you might be French/* he said,
later, "come to replace Lt Le Saint who died a few miles above
103
Gondokoro. But I was rather glad you were an American
because I have no French and if he didn't know English we
had been a pretty pair of white men in UjijiT
But this was on the following day when they had grown
more accustomed to each other. On this first meeting Stanley
approached the old man on the flank of a hill, overlooking the
lake. It falls off rather steeply just beyond the point of their
meeting, now marked by a dull monument which takes what
dignity it can from the description simple. After crossing a
wilderness and displaying customary courage and fortitude,
he was frightened to death,
Stanley was terrified of being snubbed, especially by an
Englishman. This is even now a typical American reaction.
The fact that he was born in the old country and ended his
days with a knighthood only confirms the pattern. The most
important thing in the world for him was to be well thought
of, and a social affront at this moment would probably have
reduced him to tears.
He said that he wanted to rush forward and throw his arms
around the man but he had in mind the story of two English-
men who passed each other with caravans in the middle of the
Sinai desert and, having nothing to say, courteously doffed
their hats and passed on, as though they had met in Bond
Street. So Stanley, in this other wilderness, clutched at form-
ality and became immortal
He never ceased to regret his phrase that day, there in the
shade of a mango tree, misunderstanding completely the
springs of his own fame. It was merely the most correct
introduction he could think of, and it hid a quaking depth of
passion. He said later that if he had been rebuffed had, as he
fully expected, been asked for a letter of introduction he
would have turned on his heel and left*
No letter was required, but Livingstone perhaps outdid
104
Stanley's question by replying with the single word, "Yes/ 5
Then he smiled and contact was made, though they didn't
unbend until the following day.
"Tell me the general news/ 3 Livingstone said when they
had retired to his house. "How is the world getting along? 55
Then Stanley told him that the Suez Canal was no longer a
wild dream and that there was regular trade between Europe
and India. "That is grand news, jvhat else?'*
Well, the Pacific Railroad had been completed, a victorious
general had been elected President of the United States, the
Cretan rebellion had terminated, a revolution had divided
Spain, Prussia had humbled parts of Western Europe, and
France was in trouble again. Plus c'est la meme chose sort of
news.
While these two were talking the Arabs of Ujiji sent around
hashed-meat cakes, curried chicken, stewed goat and rice.
Livingstone, whose digestion had been bad, ate vigorously.
"You have brought me new life/' he said, "new life/ 9 Stanley
ordered the bottle of Sillery champagne to be served, and
handed the Doctor a silver goblet brimful of it.
"Doctor Livingstone, to your very good health, sir.' 9
"And yours/ 5
Then these implacable men sat through the evening, listening
to the thunder of the Tanganyika surf while insects, no doubt
deadly, sang. From time to time they spoke of their stomachs.
Their minds, Stanley assures us, were busy with the day's
remarkable events. At last, the Doctor said: "Good night, and
God bless you/'
"Good night, my dear Doctor/*
And they went stalwartly to bed, having found each other.
"Doctor," Stanley said before breakfast the next morning,
"you are probably wondering why I came here/*
105
"It is true, I have been wondering. But I didn't like to ask
you yesterday because it was none of my business."
Stanley laughed. "Don't be frightened when I tell you that I
have come after YOU!"
Some months later, when Stanley had returned to the coast,
Sir John Kirk said to Livingstone's real son, who had arrived
at Zanzibar with another rescue expedition, "Stanley will
make his fortune out of your father." Oswell Livingstone
sent this comment on to the Doctor in a letter which he
prudently gave to someone else to deliver at Ujiji unfilial
conduct which shocked Stanley.
Livingstone, who had remained in the interior to continue
his explorations, reinforced by Stanley's supplies, wrote back:
"He is heartily welcome, for it is a great deal more than I
could ever make out of myself." There is no doubt that Stanley
later considered his fame and solid if not absolutely leaden
respectability to be a legacy from the old man to his heir
apparent.
One of the best ways to insure that legacy, he saw im-
mediately, was to get Livingstone to write a letter to the
New York Herald, thanking the paper for his rescue. This
would be the best way to handle the story and it would be
irrefutable evidence that Stanley had gone where he said he had
gone. Already, as his dispatches began to arrive from Africa,
people were saying that he was writing the whole thing from
a hotel room in New York. The Herald in its heyday was much
less inhibited about such things than its successor. Even
Livingstone had heard of it and thought it despicable. That
made the thank-you note more difficult to get but, in his
present weakened state, the Doctor though imposing enough
to cow any ordinary man was no match for his young
guest.
106
"Mr James Gorden Bennett, Jr . . . has commissioned me to find
you to get whatever news of your discoveries you like to give
and to assist you if I can, with means."
"Young Mr Bennett told you to ... find me out, and help me! It
is no wonder that you praised Mr Bennett so much last night."
"He is an ardent, generous, and true man."
"Well, indeed! I am very much obliged to him; and it makes me
feel proud to think that you Americans think so much of me. You
have just come in the proper time; for I was beginning to think that I
should have to beg from the Arabs I wish I could embody my
thanks to Mr Bennett in suitable words . . ."
Stanley said that nothing would be easier and got him to
agree to write a letter which would, of course, be published.
"And now, Doctor, having disposed of this little affair,
Ferajji shall bring breakfast; if you have no objection."
"You have given me an appetite," Livingstone said, a bit
dazed.
So began their first breakfast, the day after Stanley arrived
in Ujiji. Livingstone said he had been having trouble with his
teeth, which had been loosened by gnawing on green ears of
corn. Consequently they had soft dampers, though Stanley
would have preferred com scones. This was a deeply serious
matter for each of them. They were frequently so alike in their
reactions that they would have been surprised to learn that
any other sort of men existed.
It is extraordinary how many family traits these two did
share. They were both authoritarian, teetotal, brave, stubborn,
religious men. They had the same passion for the kitchen and
for hot drinks and pompous conversation. They were in-
tolerant of weakness, physical or moral, they shaved every
day, both were inclined to be stout and energetic, each had a
prodigious memory, and neither one could bear ridicule.
Their only disagreement at this time was over Disraeli and
Gladstone.
107
Livingstone put their likeness bluntly, if not accurately.
"Americans and Englishmen are the same people. We speak
the same language and have the same ideas. 5 '
A few days later Stanley wrote in his diary:
His manner suits my nature better than that of any man I can re-
member of late years. Perhaps I should best describe it as bene-
volently paternal. He ... converses with me as if I were his own
age or of equal experience. I get as proud as I can be, as though
I had some great honour thrust on me.
As the days passed Livingstone began to confide in the
young man. He had come to Ujiji from the Matiiema country
only a few weeks before, and he was full of plans to return to
Nyangwe on the Lualaba River. He was morally certain that
this river was the upper Nile; so much so, in fact, that he
proposed to lead his critics in London astray by pretending
to them that it was really the Congo.
As this was precisely what it was, it wouldn't have been
a very effective trick, but Livingstone never lived to be
disillusioned and Stanley for all his outward similarity to
Livingstone did not have that sort of illusion*
The Doctor wanted it to be the Nile; he never wanted any-
thing so badly not only because it would confound his critics
but because the Nile was a biblical river and the Congo was
not. He persisted in error as strongly as he would have per-
sisted in the right and it is perhaps a merciful thing that he
died still dreaming of the lost cities of Zirah and Tirhaka
died two years later on his knees beside his bed in the
middle of the African night, praying to his militant, abolition-
ist God.
"Have you seen the northern head of the Tanganyika,
Doctor?* 5 Stanley asked one day,
Livingstone replied that he had not that the main line of
108
drainage In Central Africa was the Lualaba and he had con-
sidered that most important.
"Well, if I were you. Doctor, before leaving Ujiji, I should
explore it, and resolve the doubts upon the subject; lest, after
you leave here, you should not return by this way."
And so they decided to take a canoe and go off to determine
if the Tanganyika had a northern outlet in the Rusizi River.
They waited in Ujiji for a while, so that the older man could
get his stomach in shape on Stanley's cooking (fresh-churned
butter, eggs, roast mutton, eggplant, cucumber, white honey,
beans and at last corn scones). For the Doctor, stomach
trouble and nervousness was sure to end in diarrhoea, whereas
with Stanley this produced excessive costiveness.
What with arrangements for a crew and a boat and earnest
colonic conversations they did not get started for several
weeks. The upper end of the lake is deep in what is now called
Ruanda-Urundi, the Belgian trust territory, and the Rusizi
River is not far from present-day Usumbura.
Both men enjoyed the pleasant days on the water, languidly
watching the palm-fringed shore slip by, and occasionally
trading in a fishing village. From time to time they would
occupy themselves with soundings, but the water was so deep
they lost much of their line.
They had no idea, of course, that this was the second
deepest lake in the world and that thousands of feet down,
where their line had parted, there is absolutely nothing alive
not a creature or a plant of any sort. Unlike the restless sea,
fermenting with life, the water dies of its own stillness seven
hundred feet down. And yet in the upper strata of the lake
there are fish usually found only in the oceans, and no one
can explain how they come to be here in the middle of the
continent. In the forests, also, was a kind of prehistoric animal
an air-breathing fish-reptile that will even now attack a man,
109
but which the surviving inhabitants of the region claim is
delicious.
Very little of moment happened on this journey except
that the two explorers grew to be firm friends. When Stanley
had a bad attack of fever, his first since Tabora, Livingstone
nursed him devotedly and the young man wrote that though
the attack was especially severe he did not regret its occurrence,
'since I became the recipient of the very tender and fatherly
kindness of the good man whose companion I now found
myself.'
In fact, he had not spent such an idyllic time since his trip
up the Mississippi with the Louisiana merchant who gave him
his name. For Stanley, the experience was heavily emotional
and was no doubt sufficient in itself. But he could not help
being aware that when he returned to the world, this time, he
would bring not only a name but a fortune.
Their only real trouble came from their employees. Released
from daily lectures, now that these two tirelessly clean-living
men had themselves to speak to, Bombay, and Susi, Living-
stone's servant, sensing that they had a lot in common, got
regularly drunk. One night, because of their inattention, or
total stupor, some ammunition, a bag of flour and all of the
Doctor's white sugar was stolen. At the end of another spree,
Susi so far forgot himself as to crawl into the Doctor's bed*
The old man made room for him, thinking it was Stanley and
some really serious preaching went on the next morning.
The Rusizi River, which rose near a lake called Kivo now
called Kivu and full of Belgian resort hotels was a disappoint-
ment. At this time of year it was little more than a few small
streams sprawling over a delta. It was, as everyone seems to
have known in the first place, an influent, not an effluent river
and so could have nothing to do with the drainage system of
any major river flowing north. This would hardly rock anyone
no
at the Royal Geographical, but it was nevertheless Henry
Stanley's first taste of pure exploration in the company of a
master, and at this point the New York Herald and the world
lost a magnificently incoherent newspaperman.
When he returned on his second expedition five years later
Stanley was backed by his old paper and the London Daily Tele-
graph, but by then he considered himself primarily an explorer.
The adventurers did discover a small group of islands, which
were locally called Kavunvweh. As this seemed too difficult,
even for the islanders, they decided to re-christen them the
New York Herald Islets, and after carefully noting that they
were in lat. 3 41' S. they solemnly shook hands.
The rest of the twenty-eight days on the lake were fairly
uneventful, though they did have several close scrapes with
hostile natives. Stanley's account of this journey could have
been written for Boy's Life^ and contains a lot of good camp-
lore. Both men, when not actually facing enormous obstacles,,
had the bracing emotional age of ninth-graders.
The Doctor had decided to go back with Stanley to Tabora,
where he would collect the few supplies he had there. He would
wait while Stanley went to the coast, outfitted another expedition
and sent it back alone so that he could return to the interior.
Except for a five-hundred-pound draft from Livingstone, a
great deal of this went on James Gordon Bennett's tab. Though
the old man wrote a fervid note of thanks, and the New York
Herald got what it paid for, Mr Bennett was understandably
annoyed when he found that Stanley had been offered forty-
five thousand dollars for a lecture tour in America more than
enough to cover the entire cost of the expedition.
It is doubtful that Stanley was ever aware of his displeasure.
Both he and Livingstone moved majestically through the
world of money, hardly noticing it except as a means to their
ends, which were wildly expensive.
in
They reached Tabora after nearly two months* journey
by the southern detour, and lived together for another month
in Stanley's old temte while Livingstone finished his journal
which was to be brought back to civilization.
There the younger man suffered several severe attacks of
fever, but the two found time to bury Shaw's body in a huge
stone cairn, forgiving him the final weakness of dying.
On March 14 they rose at dawn for their last breakfast
together, which neither could eat. Livingstone walked a way
with Stanley (the latter implies in his book that this was a long
stroll but it actually takes half a minute. For all their suscepti-
bility to manly sentiment they were both eager to get about their
work). They said good-bye under a great tree, since called the
Tree of Parting, and Stanley, forcing back tears, turned and
marched away* He had spent four months and four days with the
Doctor, during which time, as he said in his diary, he was
Indescribably happy. 3 For the rest of his life March 14 was a
solemn day.
A week later, on the trail, he received a note addressed to
'Henry M. Stanley, Esq., wherever he may be found/
I wish I could give you a better word than the Scotch one to
'put a stout heart to a stey brae' [a steep ascent] for you will
do that; and I am thankful that, before going away, the fever had
changed into the intermittent, or safe form. I would not have let
you go, but with great concern, had you still been troubled with
the continued type. I feel comfortable in commending you to the
guardianship of the good Lord and Father of all. I am gratefully
yours, David Livingstone.
Stanley reached Bagamoyo in thirty-five days three times
as fast as he had come, and faster than any other European
had travelled the distance. He had lost seventy-six pounds.
He had also lost the obsession of Bis youth. His own hair was
turning grey and he had found what he was looking for.
112
CHAPTER NINE
T ARRIVED at Lake Tanganyika on the morning of November 6
JL after sprawling all night in a coach with a Belgian cook who
was going to work in one of the Kivu resorts. The railhead is
five miles north of Ujiji and I took a taxi there through a forest
glade. We sped around the boles of ancient trees, dodging
naked children, bleating lambs and women pounding flour.
Twice the axle nearly cracked.
At Ujiji, which is now merely a settlement a few huts,
some drab, half-dressed people and some scrubby animals
the TANU headquarters is in an old store, a few yards from the
monument commemorating Stanley's meeting with Living-
stone. I could see little but trees. A tall man stepped through
the door of the TANU building and I approached him.
"Mr District Chairman?* 5 1 said, holding out my letter.
"No/ 5 he said, politely. "I am the Propagating Secretary.**
He led me into the building and into a dim room where a young
man with gold-rimmed glasses was sitting at a desk.
"Mr District Chairman, I presume?"
"No, sir, I am afraid the District Chairman is not here at
present. May I help you? I am the Recording Secretary."
I presented Maswanya's letter.
He read it and looked up. "Won't you have some tea?"
he said. "I expect the Chairman will be back shortly."
I explained that my boat left soon for Usumbura and that I
couldn't stay long.
"I am very sorry to hear that," the Propagating Secretary
said.
The other pulled up a chair for me. "The District Chairman
113
will be very disappointed." He was wearing a clean white shirt.,
open at the neck.
We chatted a while about the work of their organization
which had a very large membership here in the Western
Province. I was going to ask them to accompany me to the
monument, but I saw that this would be a mistake, like sug-
gesting an ordinary Washington sight-seeing tour to an ADA
group. Also, from the way they spoke of it when I asked the
direction, I could see that the site had imperialist connotations
for them. They saw me to the door, urging me to wait for their
Chairman.
The memorial was set in a circle of pavement on a baked
hillside. On its face a map of Africa was inscribed with a cross
which stretched from Capetown to Tripoli and from Addis
Ababa to Timbuctoo. Looking down the hill at the green tree-
tops I could understand Stanley's elation at coming out on top
of this leafy sea. A faint breeze from the lake stirred the
branches and dry voices whispered:
"Doctor Livingstone, I presume?"
"Yes."
"I thank God, Doctor, I have been permitted to see you."
"I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you/*
The cab-driver honked impatiently, as I was on a fixed fare,
and we raced for the boat.
114
CHAPTER TEN
"n m?
V/ The young man was dressed all in white and was
obviously a member of that class of Congolese the Belgians
once called holms though the word is now considered
patronizing,
A wooden plaque on his desk identified him as a cashier.
I put down my bag. The Belgian company which runs the
Tanganyika boat service has an extra-territorial base at
Kigoma, the British railhead. Stepping past the customs barrier
is in some ways like stepping through the doorway of a middle-
class Belgian home.
\ told him in limp French what I wanted.
He blotted his ebony forehead with a folded handkerchief.
"Ilfaut voyager premier classe en ce bateau, rnsieu"
I tried to explain that I wanted to make the trip north to
Usumbura and then across to Albertville as cheaply as possible,
but he was unmoved and repeated that I had no choice but to
ride first class.
I felt, for the first time, the stolid presence of this burgher
government. There was no colour feeling involved here. Both
racial discrimination and political awareness have been nearly
rooted up in the Congo to encourage the growth of the profit
motive, which may be predictably cultivated like a rubber
plant.
I was invited to take a chair while he made out my ticket.
He asked if I had francs.
I nodded sulkily. The trip on the lake was to last several
days and the price was depressingly high, after Tanganyika.
115
I hadn't yet learned that one may avoid almost every incon-
venience in this part of Africa but expense.
At last everything was arranged and I thanked the suave
young man. "Mais non, msieuf" he said, leading me to the
door. "Ce nest rien"
The Africans under Belgian rule seemed to be a great deal
better off than those under the British. They surely had more
money and greater numbers had an elementary education. But
I was to meet people including some Belgians who be-
lieved that this contributed to their unhappiness.
Of course the people just outside Ujiji, walking along the
forest trails carrying bunches of fat bananas and baskets of
cassava probably do not consider themselves particularly in
tune with their sylvan surroundings. And if they could have
heard the words of a priest in Stanleyville, speaking of the
evalues in his parish ("You see, they are lost. They have nothing
but the little money they make and they spend that all at the
end of the month."), they would probably wish to God they
could be so lost.
I had an African seminarist as a room-mate, but as the boat
was not crowded he at last excused himself and asked for an-
other cabin, saying that he had recently been ill and did not
sleep well. He was learning English and carried a Webster s
Dictionary instead of a devotional work. He couldn't have been
more than twenty-two years old and had the languid, super-
ficial beauty of a court favourite* His home was near Lake
Kivu.
There was a fog on the lake and it was growing quite cooL
We pulled slowly away from shore to the keening of railway
whistles. My ex-room-mate asked me up to the forward deck
to help him with his English, but I put him off.
Kigoma was disappearing in the fog and the captain wheeled
about the bridge shouting "salaud!" and "cochon!" at any deck
116
hand who dared to show his head. Behind me, in the tiny first-
class mess, some Belgians were drinking beer and speaking a
French that sounded as though it were being blown through
mashed potatoes. It was difficult to leave Tanganyika. By any
standards it was hardly perfect., but there was a curious sense
of freedom in the air. The British, for all their insularity,
accommodate exotic cultures just because they are so con-
sistently themselves. They offer the prosaic protection that
poetry needs to survive.
I remembered the cafe beside the pier in Kigorna. On the
back wall was a giant official picture of Queen Elizabeth,
standing in the midst of a tortured train of red velvet as though
in a pool of blood. It was November 6, a few days before the
British Legion's buddy-poppy day and the barmaid offered me
a poppy with my beer. I handed her a bill.
"Sorry. Can't 'andle that. The missus's out and she always
locks things up. You know how they are." I gathered that the
proprietress was something foreign. "How's she expect me
to make change, I wonder?"
I struggled through my khaki jacket. "Tell you what, dear,"
she went on, "you could try the bank across the street." She
found this very funny and ran a damp hand through her
platinum hair. "Well, I tried, didn't I? Can't say I didn't
Probably they'd say, hold on, what's 'ee doing 'ere. Git 'ira
out!" She patted her large chest cheerfully. "Still, you could
try. Why not, luv? When you've 'ad yer glass. Hot, isn't it?"
I asked if she'd been long in Kigoma.
"No we been up only a few months, from Rhodesia.
'Usband's got a contract 'ere. Getting north slow but sure. I
could do with a nice bit of fog and snow. Too hot for me 'ere.
But I suppose some day we'll wish we was back."
There was, of course, another class on the boat below first.
117
It was a sort of steerage, packed tight with noisy humanity
all African. But there was never a question, as there might have
been in British Africa, that anyone with the price of a ticket
wouldn't be welcomed commercially to the top deck. Here was
a very real kind of tolerance, the logical by-product of the
traditional Belgian distaste for poverty. But it had its limita-
tions.
I was introduced to these almost immediately, at lunch. I
asked the seminarist if he was coming in to eat and he said that
he was not allowed to. I assumed that this was because of his
colour, but he quickly reassured me. "I have not francs for
all the repasts," he explained. "And the captain will not permit
me to purchase one or two. Vous comprene^? On doit manger
tout ou rien du tout.' 3
I offered to lend him the money but he refused. As we
landed the following noon in Usumbura this prideful gesture
wouldn't really hurt him, especially if he had remembered to
bring a few bananas in his luggage and I assumed that this
was why he had wanted a room to himself.
But at lunch I remembered that he had said that he was sick
and, as I was not particularly hungry, asked a waiter to take
several of my dishes to him in his room, in order not to em-
barrass him by calling him in.
No one seemed to want to do this, and at last I brought them
in myself, losing some temper. Later, I was charged for two
lunches and refused to pay. There was a scene and when you
are in such a situation there is always a moment when the tide
of public opinion turns for or against you. This time, in a room
full of silently chewing Belgians, it turned against. There
followed a sombre interview with the captain a choleric
man with a face full of violence and I was nearly deprived of
mess rights.
This was bad enough; but it was worse to be forgiven
118
because I was an American. Everyone knows how sentimental
we are, I tried to point out to the captain that sentimentality
had nothing to do with paying double for one's lunch but he
dismissed this as a minor point, "Besides," he said, in English,
"you cannot bring the plates to the cabins because they call
the small beasts/ 3 I returned to my own, feeling like the
American in Mr Greene's novel, a sower of social disorder.
During our discussion the captain had several times referred
to the young priest, in the most condescending way, as a
'black fellow/ Obviously he believed he had no right to be on
the upper deck and would have banished Mm to steerage if
he hadn't already paid for his ticket. But the distinction was
financial, not racial The engineer of the boat, for instance,
was partly African and he got on with his chief as an equal in
all but rank.
The captain simply felt that the boy was rising above his
station. He wouldn't have minded if he had been rich. This Is
perhaps not such a bad way of making distinctions if they must
be made. It is at least a neutral one. But, as I learned later, it
sometimes places those on the bottom under a double handicap.
It is bad enough to be black in the Congo, but to be black and
poor is misery compounded.
That night I awoke and began to climb out of bed for a glass
of water, but changed my mind when the light was on. The
captain was right about the small beasts. They were not even
very small.
The northern end of the Tanganyika is surrounded by high
hills; two large towns, Uvira and Usumbura, lie on either side
of the Rusizi River mouth, which Stanley and Livingstone
explored in 1871. Usumbura, to the east, is the administrative
capital of Ruanda-Urundl, the Belgian Trust Territory.
This country, to the north of Lake Tanganyika and west
of Lake Victoria, is another remnant of German Africa that
119
changed hands after the First World War. In the beginning,
the Belgians did little with it, but recently they have been
pouring a great deal of money into the land, and no one,
not even the Belgians themselves, can quite understand why,
as they are merely administrators and are committed to leave.
The country is interesting because of its people. Three
distinct races live in it, and originally they must have been a
constant source of wonder to each other. They are the Tutsi,
the Hutu and the Twa. The former are related to the gigantic
Nile peoples, racially Hamitic. The Hutu are of normal Bantu
stock and the Twa are pigmoid. Generally, the first are pastoral,
the second agricultural and the last hunters of game. The
Tutsi represent about fifteen per cent of the population and are
the aristocrats; the Hutu make up the mass; the Twa, of whom
there are less than fifty thousand in a population of five million,
are frequently bound in service to the others.
For the rest, apart from customs peculiar to their modes of
life (the Tutsi have a more precarious emotional balance than
the others because they are generally brought up by nurse-
maids and lack the security of their mother's backs), they exist
pretty much as other people, and have others' defects as well as
virtues. Racial prejudice is a problem among them, as the Hutu
believe they are superior to the Twa and the Tutsi know they
are superior to everyone. But in spite of the shameful counsel of
their elders the young people are tending to intermarry.
Their home life is also ordinary, and if a husband and wife
wish for a divorce they must first try temporary separation
because the interests of two patrilineal families have become
involved. But most reasonable people would agree with them
that valid grounds for a final break are habitual cruelty, refusal
to cohabit, lack of support, non-performance of domestic
duties and repeated adultery.
Many of them are very handsome and as a measure of pros-
no
parity has come to their land the men often deck themselves
with double-pork-pie hats and black shoes with white piping.
The women show their affluence by piling on gorgeous
shawls. Some are very tall, and I saw one seven-foot lady with a
huge and unconfinable bosom, strolling past crates of heavy
machinery on the dock with the bemused and tolerant ex-
pression of the mother of the world.
In Usumbura I went to see M. Clement at the government
information office. He was a brisk, likeable man and he kindly
drove me around the town, speaking quickly, in excellent
English, though with a difficult accent.
There was really an enormous amount of building going on,
and in places the town looked like Scarsdale, twenty years
younger. M. Clement said that when he first came here it was
all very wild, and infested with carnivorous animals. They have
since retired to the hills and elephants no longer come down
to the lake. In 1930 the first road was built in Ruanda-Urundi
and now there are over ten thousand kilometres of it.
In Usumbura, I learned, there were swimming-pools and
tennis-courts for blacks and whites, several hospitals and
sufficient inter-racial schools to give about ninety-eight per
cent of the children some sort of education a figure which
is fairly consistent throughout the Congo, though it doesn't
apply to higher schools.
The governor's mansion in Usumbura is surrounded by a
low, decorative wall, but the one around the municipal playing-
field is forbiddingly high and armed with shattered glass.
Streets in the town have names like rue d* Industrie and rue de
Science, and some of the best coffee in the world is processed
here for the American market by making it soluble.
M. Clement was obviously proud of the work the Belgians
had done and he had every right to be. Recently, the country
has become a tourist centre and there are ten resort hotels at
121
Lake Kivu. Many people also come to see the Tutsi (Batutsi or,
in Swahili, Watursi) dancers, and a number of professional
companies have sprung up to meet the need, though they will
not wave a plume until the tourist puts down fifty dollars.
Back on the boat, headed for Albertville, I lolled on the deck
through the afternoon, reading Colette's La Vagabonds and
looking up from time to time at the hills, some of which lay
out in the water like great, tired beasts. The land was dappled
green and beige, and mango trees were stuck to it like children's
cutouts. The lake was an impenetrable blue.
According to a legend, the Tanganyika was originally a
small and bottomless well owned by a man and his wife. In
its sweet water delicious fish sported. The couple had been
warned, as such couples always are, that if they revealed the
source of their good fortune disaster would follow. Unfor-
tunately, the lady took a lover and, not content with simple
infidelity, brought him some of the family fish. One inex-
cusable thing led to another and at last she revealed the well
to him. The water flowed out, became a lake, and everyone
drowned.
The following midnight we reached Albertville. The town
lies across the lake, southwest of Ujiji, and is some miles below
a forgotten village called Mtowa where Stanley landed at the
beginning of September in 1876, headed for the great Lualaba
River, which he intended to follow to the South Atlantic
or to the Mediterranean, wherever the current and his own
courage would take him.
122
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN the five years that Stanley had spent away from Ujiji he
had become one of the most talked-of men In the western
world. On his return to Europe In 1872 he was given a
triumphal welcome, temporarily marred by the refusal of the
Royal Geographical Society to recognize his claims. In Paris
the American colony gave him a banquet at the Hotel Chatham
which appropriately featured Poularde truffle a la Stanley. In
London, when the R.G.S. capitulated at last, the Queen gave
him a jewelled snuff-box, the Turners' Company a gold
medal, the eldest Miss Livingstone a silver locket, and the
Duke of Sutherland a gold tie-pin embellished with a cairngorm
in the shape of a heart, surmounted by a pearl coronet. America
gave him money and wild acclaim.
"Within weeks of his arrival in New York a play about him,
called King Carrot, was produced; there were burlesque lec-
tures on his trip at the Grand Opera House on 23rd Street; and
a full-length saga, Africa^ played at the Theatre Comique on
Broadway. It featured the comic team of Harrigan and Hart
and a coconut shuffle by dancers reputed to have come from the
Congo. Its backers took the entire front page of the New York
Herald to advertise it.
But there was an undertone of laughter in the cheers, that
spoiled the triumph for Stanley. In spite of Livingstone's own
peaked consular cap, and in spite of his little black page,
Kalulu, who had been presented to him by the Arabs of Tabora,
and whom no one ever thought to call a slave, he felt people
snickering. There was just something funny about him.
People made up rhymes in Congress mocking his journey,
123
and undignified songs and sketches celebrated what was after
all a great achievement. No one ever made jokes like that
about Burton or Speke or Grant or Livingstone.
And, after eighty-nine years, the name Stanley still evokes a
titter. This Is not simply a response to his I presume 5 phrase,
though that is funny enough when it is not touching. The
reason is that this common little man was one of the first of
our modern heroes, undeniably brave and strong and resolute,
but at bottom a person no better than ourselves. He was
popular democracy's wry answer to the princely adventurers
of the past. As an explorer Stanley had already displayed
greater will and endurance than most of those who had gone
before him, but these very virtues were embarrassing in an
ordinary man. He made people aware that ideals they had
believed to be safely unattainable were, in fact, well within
reach. Laughter Is the only thing that can save such a man from
being downright unpopular.
So the Royal Geographical Society was not entirely wrong
in denying him admission to their roll of immortals. If Stanley
was a great man no one was. Sir Henry Rawlinson, the
president of the R.G.S., wrote to The Times and said that it
was not true that Stanley had discovered Livingstone > but that
Livingstone had discovered Stanley. And an eminent publica-
tion called for an examination of the American s stories by
experts, and professed to find 'something inexplicable and
mysterious* In the matter.
This wasn't merely British-American rivalry, as Stanley
knew. They were attacking him, not his adopted country.
Things were put right eventually; in the course of time the
greying explorer was given the honour due a distinguished
gentleman. But that took patience and three more expeditions
and always, just beneath the surface, was a rippk of laughter.
After the first flurries of excitement he settled back to work
12,4
as a reporter for the Herald^ at no increase in salary. During
the year and a half he had been In Africa, the German Empire
had risen from the ashes of the Franco-Prussian war, Rome was
taken by Garibaldi, a great fire raged through Chicago, and
Dumas and Dickens had died.
Late in 1873 Stanley returned to Africa, this time on the west
coast, to cover the Ashanti wars. On his way back to Europe
he heard in April 1874 that Livingstone was dead and that his
body was being taken to England to be buried in Westminster
Abbey. He hurried to London and acted as one of the pall-
bearers. Then, in three weeks, he turned out his usual turgid
book on his most recent African experiences and set about
planning another adventure.
It had occurred to him that if he were to return to Central
Africa to finish Livingstone's work no one would dare laugh
at him again. He wrote, peevishly,
What I have already endured in that accursed Africa amounts to
nothing, in men's estimation. Surely if I can resolve any of the
problems which such travellers as Dr Livingstone, Captains Burton,
Speke, and Grant, and Sir Samuel Baker left unsettled, people must
needs believe that I discovered Livingstone.
Thus he decided to return to Africa not to earn a name
or money, which he had already, but to get people to take
him seriously.
This time Stanley seemed to have guessed that James
Gordon Bennett wouldn't foot the bill alone. He first got the
approval of the Daily Telegraph in London and then wired
New York. Bennett replied, 'Yes/ but it is probable that a
letter followed limiting his liability. Henry Stanley's two-
volume book describing this immense journey through the
dark continent is dedicated to the proprietors of both papers
and, in smaller type, to Mr Edwin Arnold, F.R.G.S., who had
125
championed him in England. But this time he was going as an
explorer and not as a reporter.
He proposed to do twice what anyone had done before.
First, he was to follow the route of Speke and Grant to Lake
Victoria, which he would circumnavigate. This was of lively
interest to the geographical world; Burton and Speke had had
a falling out over that lake and while the latter lived
wouldn't speak to each other except in the columns of The
Times.
After this, Stanley meant to come down to the Tanganyika,
map its entire coast-line and look for a river draining it, and
then he was to go across into the Maniema country and finish
Livingstone's work. This involved proving whether the Lua-
laba River was a tributary of the Nile or the Congo.
Depending on which it was, Stanley could expect to emerge
from Africa if he survived in widely different latitudes.
There were about four thousand miles between the mouths of
these two rivers. The man who successfully followed either
one along its whole course could almost certainly count on
being taken very seriously.
He set about collecting a staff. Convinced that Shaw and
Farquhar had died because of drink and venery he got to-
gether three of the most innocent young Europeans Africa
had ever seen. Two were brothers, *y un g English boatmen of
good character,' who had been recommended to him by his
friend Edwin Arnold. Their names were Frank and Edward
Pocock and they were the sons of an honest fisherman at
Lower Upnor, Kent, who kept Arnold's yacht for him.
These lads were wild to go, and Stanley finally signed them
on as assistants^ after warning them of the dangers they would
face. His third assistant was a clerk named Frederick Barker,
whose entreaties were seconded by his mother until Stanley
gave in. In addition, he brought along his page, Kalulu, who
126
had spent the last few years in an English boy's school, and he
recruited five dogs two prize mastiffs, a retriever, a bulldog
and a bull-terrier. On 15 August 1874, he again left England
for Zanzibar.
Reaching the island in September he leisurely set about
getting the expedition together. Stanley was determined to be
properly prepared this time. He hired an African named
Manwa Sera, who had been the chief of his second caravan in
1871, to command the native carriers and soldiers. He also took
on Mabruki Speke, Chowpereh, Uledi and a few others from
his previous expedition. The company had a boat called the
Lady Alice which was so built that it could be broken into
sections and transported overland.
The Pocock boys and young Barker were having the time
of their lives and requested permission to fly the Union Jack
over their tent. Stanley drew a deep breath and said to Frank
Pocock, "My dear fellow, you surprise me by imagining for
one moment that I could possibly refuse you. This is not an
American Government or a British Government Expedition,
and I have neither the power nor disposition to withhold my
sanction to your request. If it will be any pleasure to you by
all means . . /* Probably the boys* attention wavered before
this speech came to an end a few minutes later, but soon they
were observed patriotically snipping and sewing a little British
flag, the size of a lady's handkerchief. In this they manifested
much delight.
Before the expedition left Zanzibar, Manwa Sera and some
of the other chiefs came to Stanley and asked to know precisely
where they were going and when, if they were lucky, they
might expect to return. On hearing what lands they were to
visit they grew nervous, pointing out that the journey might
take from six to ten years. Livingstone, they said., stretched a
127
two-year trip to eight, and died on the shores of Lake Bang-
weolo without ever getting back, Stanley replied that Living-
stone was an old man, and that if he himself had made the round
trip to Ujiji the first time in sixteen months he was not likely
to be slower this time. "Was I not like a boy then, and am I
not now a man?"
Thus reassured, they retired to enter into proper agree-
ments before the consul. Stanley was right about the time.
The journey didn't take anything like ten years. He was gone
exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine days, about the time it
took many of the Arabs to reach Ujiji. But when his band
stumbled into the tiny settlement at Boma, on the other side
of the continent in August 1877 more than half of the original
expedition had died. Of these, smallpox, dysentery, battle
and murder claimed eighty-one while another thirty or so
were carried off by crocodiles, insanity, starvation and the
great Congo river itself. Those who survived this gruelling
trip, Manwa Sera, Uledi, Mabruki Speke, Chowpereh and their
wives, as well as Stanley himself, were those who had survived
before.
On this journey Stanley lightened the customary loads of
the porters, to gain speed. This later became a standard practice
in the Congo and was one of the reasons the Europeans had
greater mobility in their wars with the Arabs during the
'nineties. He had eight tons of material two tons more than
on his first expedition and he had hired two hundred and
seventy men to carry and guard it. His wage scale was lower
this time, going from two to ten dollars a month and he had
bargained more shrewdly for his supplies.
At the end of Ramadan, on 12 November 1874, the
Expedition embarked from Zanzibar for the mainland. The
'charming, simple manners and manly bearing* of Stanley's
young English assistants had won them a host of friends on
128
the island. Many of these waved good-bye at the dock, con-
fident that Stanley would bring the gallant boys through.
It was surely a sprucer company than that which had left
three and a half years before to find Livingstone. But,
apparently, stainless virtue offered no greater protection
against the fevers of Africa than uncurbed vice. Two months
later Edward Pocock died, beating even the dissolute Farquhar
by a month or so. He was followed a short while after by
Frederick Barker.
The first part of their journey shook down the crew. Of
the Europeans, Frank Pocock and Stanley were the only
survivors; among the Africans, desertions and death took their
toll. Even the dogs dropped out, one by one. In the end
everyone had to measure up to Stanley's "respect for order and
discipline, obedience and system (the true prophylactic against
failure).' The order was his order and the obedience was to
him; above all, it was his luck they were riding. Stanley was
the leader and there was never any mistake about It.
This little band of people, who were shortly to open up
the great heart of Africa to the slave-traders, caused still more
havoc during their boat trip around Lake Victoria. Here they
met Mtesa, Kabaka of the ancient kingdom of Uganda. His
were very highly developed people by any standards on earth
and Stanley sent off urgent letters to Europe for missionaries to
turn them into Christians, much as Gordon did In the Sudan
a few years later.
As a result, the Church Missionary Society and 3 on their
heels, the White Fathers of the Societe des missions africaines
descended on these feudal people and converted their leaders to
Christianity.
When Frederick Lugard, one of the architects of British
Imperialism and a friend of Stanley's, arrived la Uganda in
1890, he found a miniature Puritan War raging. Catholics and
129
Protestants were communicating only with battle-cries. The
Kabaka of that time was an emotionally baroque young man, a
venial member of the Catholic party, whose bias against the
Protestants incited rebellion. But before a Cromwell could
rise to complicate matters, Lugard stamped out the fighting
by replacing men of God with nineteenth-century English-
men.
From Lake Victoria the expedition headed south to Ujiji
on Lake Tanganyika, Using this town as a base, Stanley
explored the lake, and then, early in September 1876, two years
after his arrival in Zanzibar, he crossed over to Mtowa and
struck into the Maniema country.
Many of the tribes on this side of the lake were extremely
poor, and so miserable they were hardly even hunted by the
Arabs. In describing them Stanley rises to heights of hyper-
bolic condescension.
Though I knew quite well that some thousands of years ago the
beginning of this wretched humanity and myself were one and the
same, a sneaking disinclination to believe it possessed me strongly,
and I would even now willingly subscribe some small amount of
silver money for him who could but assist me to controvert the
discreditable fact.
When they reached Uhombo, the frontier village of
Maniema, they began to meet bolder and handsomer people.
They were now on the edge of the Congo basin, a vast area
which was once the floor of an inland sea. However, it main-
tains an altitude of a thousand to fifteen hundred feet, and
though it lies entirely within the tropics it is not all steaming
jungle, nor is it always hot.
The people of the Maniema country were warlike, and were
armed with a light, balanced spear which Stanley says was the
most beautiful weapon in the world next to the spear of
Uganda. Their villages consisted of one or more broad streets,
130
a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet wide, flanked by low,
square huts. At one end of these streets were the council-
or gossip-houses. Here, also, the women pounded their grain.
Besides corn, they lived mostly on bananas and plantains and
cassava. The Guinea palm supplied them with oil and wine.
Within the first month Stanley was asked three times by
Maniema chiefs to help them in local wars. He had had enough
of that back at Tabora, fighting Mirambo, and refused. He
learned that this was a custom among the Maniema. They
would frequently invite the Arabs to fight for them, Differing
the women and children and ivory of the enemy as an induce-
ment.
This was very short-sighted. Frequently their own women
and children and ivory were taken as well. In turn, large
numbers of people were displaced and joined the Arabs as
mercenaries rather than starve to death. It was with these
troops that Tippu Tib and his companions fought their last
bitter battles with the European invader in 1892.
In October the Expedition arrived at the confluence of the
Luama River with the great Lualaba. The latter was about
fourteen hundred yards wide. It was a pale grey colour, and
Stanley likened it to the Mississippi before the Missouri
poured its rusty brown water into it.
Somewhat farther on, in fact, the Congo becomes dark red.
Stanley was rapturous.
The great mystery that for all these centuries Nature had kept
hidden away from the world of science was waiting to be solved
. . . now before me lay the superb river! My task was to follow it
to the Ocean.
It was a task a good deal more difficult than he expected
and he nearly died completing it.
131
CHAPTER TWELVE
4 LBERTVIIXE on a Sunday morning has the sickly calm of
J\ almost any European or American city over the weekend.
On the wharf a small party of middle-aged Belgian men wear-
ing pith helmets and carrying brightly coloured plastic pails
and collapsible fishing-rods were climbing into a motor-
launch. The harbour smelled of sewage, and I hurried towards
town.
The people seemed prosperous. A number of Africans were
driving great, hell-bent American cars and the streets were a
peril of bicycles and motor-cycles. The men were frequently
dressed in Western clothes, but none of the women wore any-
thing but shawls, some of which were printed with bright
yellow lions crouched above the words Bonne Annie.
These women generally carried at least two babies, one on
the back in a tight little hammock, and one in the womb, and
for both purposes their shawls were perfectly adapted. The
infants are constantly being swung as the mother walks, and
crying is practically unknown. The older children are ex-
tremely well-behaved and when with their mothers are usually
occupied in carrying things.
Watching them, it is clear why cloth was money in nine-
teenth-century Africa, as it was in Europe during the Middle
Ages, It has a great many more uses than most of us remember,
Besides clothing, it serves as rope, as a container, webbing for
other bundles, a shock-absorber for carrying objects on the
head, and shade.
African women, therefore, surround themselves with as
much material as possible. It forms a part of their riches and,
132
worn loosely, may shelter them from the heat. A few wear
simple dresses, of course, as Epis did, but that was because
she was ashamed of the old ways, just as she was embarrassed
by the tattooing on her forehead.
Albertville is built along the lake and consists chiefly of one
main street near the water, lined with hotels and shops and
bars. From one of these bars, called Cabaret Albert^ I heard
crashing music and went in. It was simply a large room with
many tables. People sat here listening to a record-player turned
on full volume, bathing their spirits in beer and throbbing
music.
It was the first of many such places I was to see. About all
that varied in them were the labels on the beer-bottles. Here
people drank Simba. Further north it was Stanor and Primus
(Queen of Beers). The music, generally Latin-American, is
enjoyed gluttonously and the louder it is the better. African
talent for music extends to listening to it, as well as playing it.
And if the visitor allows himself to get caught up in the spirit
he discovers that a single, banal record, played over and over,
acquires a complex tonality and rhythm that certainly was
never put there by the composer. For this reason it seems to
make very little difference what is playing as long as something
is, and the night-clubs of Stanleyville boom just as enthu-
siastically with recorded as with live music.
I sat down and ordered a Simba, attracting some attention
because I was the only non-African there. One of the few
pleasures to be salvaged from the separation of races is that a
person from the opposite side is always noticed. It is a great
luxury to have waiters, ticket-sellers, postmen, cab-drivers and
political leaders pay attention for once always provided they
don't do so in order to discriminate against you.
Over samba music I carried on a shouted conversation
in high-school French with a young man who worked as a
cashier in a bank. 1 asked if he could direct me to the White
Fathers* mission in Albertville. He replied that he could but as
it was Sunday it would be best to go in the afternoon. The
train didn't leave until evening and I promised to meet him
here again at five o'clock. Apparently he intended to stay in
the cabaret all day.
In wandering around the town I ran across an Italian who
invited me to a friend's house for a Sunday afternoon polenta
dinner. We rode out into the country in an old G.M. truck and
stopped at a place that seemed to be a combination farm and
machine shop, very badly run down. I was welcomed by the
other Italian and after several toasts in vermouth we went to
the table. A bottle of chianti was passed around as a senti-
mental reminder of the old country, but the polenta, as well as
their Italian, had acquired a Belgian accent. Neither had been
home for over thirty years.
They said, apparently without spite, that Africans were
untrustworthy, that they had no sense of time, were carefree,
warm and vain, and that they could never work on their own
initiative; everything, in short, that North Europeans and
Americans usually say about Italians when they are trying
to congratulate themselves on having survived the Industrial
Revolution.
But like those patronizing tourists who flock every summer
to the most backward parts of Italy, they could not hide a deep
nostalgia for the old, simple ways. African women, they said
contentedly, were a good deal finer and more sincere than
European ones. This fortunate state of affairs had been troubled
recently because the ladies were no longer content with small
presents. My two companions darkly hinted that this was the
fault of the Americans.
I asked how African women were finer. After long thought
the older one said that it was because "they were more con-
134
servative than European women. By this he explained that he
meant old-fashioned, not modest. They were at once more
female and less bold. They would not be likely to swear in
public, for instance, and when they made love they practised
few erotic refinements but were on the whole more passionate.
They also talked a good deal less than European women and
were not so nervqus. In his youth in Turin, he said, there
were still a few like that, but they were becoming very rare.
At this point the younger man began to get drank and I
persuaded him to drive me back to town before he passed out,
We were almost there before he confided to me that he had
no brakes.
At the White Fathers' mission I spoke to a priest from the
Veneto who said that here in the Congo, as in Tanganyika,
his society tried to stay on the side of genuine nationalist
movements. He added that in ten years fifty per cent of the
population would be literate and in another ten everyone could
expect the same education they might receive in Europe or
America. Therefore, he said, enormous changes are inevit-
able no matter what the policy of the government might be.
The society also published a number of papers here, the most
extreme of which was Temps Noweaux^ though it had a small
circulation.
That night, on the train bound for Kindu, on the Lualaba,
I shared a compartment with an elderly Indian who had re-
tired from active business in the Congo to play the stock
market. He made, he estimated, about four or five thousand
pounds a year on widely spread investments. In India he got
six or seven per cent and the Government paid his income tax
on all profits. He valued his wife, to whom he had been happily
married for forty years, now chiefly as a tax deduction on
other speculations. At bed-time he stripped off his pure white
outer suit and revealed an identical one beneath, which he slept
135
In. Before we dozed off he calculated that travel in Tanganyika
cost a shilling a mile while in the Congo it cost two shillings.
Unfortunately he had to travel a lot because he had interests
in Bombay, These were ... It was like being read to sleep with
The Times business section.
In the morning we woke stranded in the midst of a vast
forest. Something had gone wrong with the train and, at a
quarter to seven, the dining-car sat primly in the Jungle smell-
ing of fresh toast. Brilliant birds shrieked outside, and I
thought I heard a heavy body crashing through the under-
brush. The wife of the Belgian man in charge of the dining-car
was English and she made me a nice cup of tea as the sun rose
In a savage vermilion sky.
"We started again after breakfast and reached a town called
Kabalo. In the station, as usual, the efficiency and grace of the
women was most striking. One, a very tall person with a slim
neck adorned by a delicate, small face, carried a metal suitcase
on her head, another in her hand, a number of bundles and a
pineapple. She had to get this luggage and three children
packed into a third-class carriage and she did it smoothly, with
perfect confidence, and with never a sign of distress.
"We travelled north all day through a thicket-forest. The
occasional clearings were full of young, sweet, yellow-green
grass. There were many glades which would have been ideal
for picnics if one had been armed. Here and there ant hills
grew from the ground, like tumours, and dead, white wood
gleamed through the green shadows. It began to rain but the
light remained and coated the jungle with an eerie fluorescence,
as In a supermarket.
Occasionally we passed a village and in some of them one
could see that the only touch the inhabitants had with the
outside world was this train that whistled by twice a week.
Great, strapping men and women would stand by the tracks,
hands to their cheeks, naked and quivering with excitement
The children., believing the railroad to be something military,
stood at rigid attention.
The next morning we arrived in Kindu, which lies near the
third parallel south of the Equator. Down on the Lualaba a
small stern-wheeler was building up steam for the journey
north. I hurried over with my bag and got a cabin in what
turned out to be a floating Belgian boarding-house.
Most of the passengers in the upper section of the boat had
the relentless respectability of the continental middle class.
They were good-humoured people, the sort who do not stand
on ceremony and who look forward to dinner as the most
significant event of the day.
The English woman from the train dining-car came on
board to chat with the captain's wife. She introduced me to a
Yorkshireman who had taken a Belgian wife and now travelled
up and down the Lualaba repairing office machines. "Vous ave^
la mauvau compagniel" she said, forgetting for a moment that
I spoke English. "Est terrible^ ce type-la. Really, I mean it, he's
terrible: 3
The captain's wife, a fat, energetic woman of about thirty-
five broke into screaming laughter as the Yorkshireman tried
to hug her while she loaded the ice-box with butter. He was a
great favourite on board, especially with the ladies, not be-
cause of his scandalous behaviour, but because be was a little
boy at heart. On his arm a dagger was tattooed and across it
ran the words, True Love Mother/ He had a quick smile and
crimped, sandy hair resembling wool He told me that there
was always a good bunch riding up to Ponthierville.
He was surely right about that, though some people take to
ladies in print dresses and domesticated men addicted to horse-
play more easily than others. One of our passengers, for instance,
137
was an Arab in a long, blue kanzu carrying a mysterious
brass-bound chest and some tusks of ivory wrapped in dirty
canvas. He may not have understood all those screams of
laughter.
Below was the steerage, though not many were travelling
there. It was a small boat and much of the space was devoted
to cargo and to the logs which were used as fuel for the boilers.
A steel lighter was lashed to our port side with still more
wood. This was the old method of travelling on the Congo, as
wood could be cut at any point of the journey. Now most of
the vessels are diesel-powered.
The Africans who lived around here travelled on the river
in pirogues, long narrow craft hollowed out of logs. They are
very superior boats, can attain a great speed and will take
almost any kind of abuse. Later 3 on a more prosperous stretch
of the river, I saw some fitted with Evinrude motors that
could outrace anything on the water.
Looking out towards shore as we beat downstream I was
reminded that these people had been cannibals a short time
ago. Many of them denied this, even in Stanley's time, but
when people race out at you in pirogues, as they did at him, and
shout, "Meat, meat!" it is hard not to draw uncharitable con-
clusions* It therefore made me uneasy to see that many of the
villages along the river had large, black pots boiling merrily
in their squares; these were actually oil-drums and un-
doubtedly had some philanthropic function. Behind the villages
giant, red flowers nestled among the tree-tops and black
fishing birds floated above.
At lunch we had Brussels sprouts, and the captain's wife
directed the conversation. She seemed afraid of not having an
opinion about everything; small opinions, for the most part:
what was the best cut of veal, how to get children to go to
sleep, where to buy sheets. But sometimes her judgments
138
extended to other people's morals and she was particularly set
against unauthorized sexual activity. Her husband, a man with
little to say, looked like an ex-football hero run to fat. She her-
self was not attractive; such women often marry childishly
handsome men and spend the rest of their lives in terror of
losing them.
She was in the midst of telling a story of a family who went
thoughtlessly off to the movies and left their daughter and her
fiance at home alone together, when the Yorkshireman, who
had mischievously devoured all the bread and butter and all
the dessert, pushed back his plate and said, "Je riaipasfaim"
with a small boy's pout, so that no one but the Arab could
keep from laughing.
The captain's wife wasn't to be cheated of her indignation.
" TOILS les jours la meme chose. II est arrive che^ soi-meme etila
trouve deux hommes avec la file! Heinf Tons les jours
aurrhhh! Cest incroyaile!" Her voice had grown very high.
There was an embarrassed silence and an old lady sitting
next to me said, "Ah, nonf" That was all she ever said, except
once, that evening, when someone told her that she looked as
though she were dressed for a ball. She blushed prettily and
replied that she hadn't been to a ball for twenty years, casually
lopping off fifteen.
The captain's wife frequently dieted. For lunch she would
limit herself to one piece of toast spread with about a sixth of
a pound of butter, a boiled egg, and a bunch of bananas. As
her weight soared, she grew even more disapproving of un-
official love-making. She was only really at ease when talking
about small children who had not left the age of innocence.
Towards evening we passed a very large native town,
stretched out along the river for nearly a mile. At its beginning,
two young boys swam out and expertly caught on to the props
of the paddle-wheel as the boat passed. They hitched a ride to
139
the far end of the town where they dropped off and raced each
other back to shore. Stanley was perfectly right in comparing
this river to the Mississippi, and somewhere along it, perhaps
here, reincarnations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
must now be living.
The air was fragrant with rain. A wind had put a scruff on
the water and clouds gathered on the horizon. From time to
time they were cut by lightning, and a sweet, smoky, moulder-
ing odour rose from the expectant land. It was raining towards
the west and the sunset was blurred; though a storm was
clearly on the way, it was moving slowly.
As dusk deepened, sparks flew from our chimney like fire-
flies, and the sounds of the wind and our crashing stem-wheel
blended together. Still there was no rain and even the crimson
river seemed parched for it. Sparks were whipped across the
deck and, with them, the sharp taste of burning wood. Several
of the crew began unloading the lighter to keep the fuel dry.
A few big drops fell like coins and the air suddenly grew
gentle. Behind us, there was a pink band of unclouded sky,
some forty miles away. Then, with no more warning, the wind
slapped the little boat over at an angle and water fell so thickly
that the river's waves were beaten flat. It came warm at first,
as from a hose left in the sun, then colder and scented with
flowers and the freshly broken stems of leaves. Palms on the
shore waved their plumes In it and dead trees held up their
bony arms, while the comers of the forest grew silver with
fog. Clouds of rain raced across the river and sheet-lightning
threw a tungsten glare on the heaving forest as the sky went
from grey to black, the rain stopped, and the passionate wind
departed.
The following morning we passed a really elegant village
with a large council hut which would have served very well as a
movie house and perhaps was. These people had a Hue pot
140
boiling in their square, and seemed in every way superior*
They greeted us with drums but took no other notice.
We were due in Ponthierville that night, from which a train
was scheduled to take us to Stanleyville. I sipped coffee and
watched banks of fern, and trees festooned with creepers drift-
ing by. The engine of the boat was revved down and its noise
was like muffled sobbing in an adjacent room. That fitted the
mood of the river very well for the moment. The water was
red-brown and the forest a sullen green.
We arrived in Lowa an hour later and docked before the
A. Houdmont & W. Thuysbaert Company, whose great,
whitened concrete buildings bulked back into the forest. A
number of porters streamed on to the boat with bunches of
bananas and sugar cane, a mimeograph machine and a cash-
register. When they had delivered these they retired to the
shore with a buckt of banana beer, which they drank from
the rim.
The cash-register was for the Yorkshireman who imme-
diately began to strip it down. "This is one of yurrrs," he said
to me, indicating the American brand-name. He told me that
he had spent some time in Toledo, at the scale company there.
He had liked the United States but preferred Belgium. He
couldn't stand England. He gave a number of reasons for this,
but the real one was that he hated the British class system, or
hated being at the bottom of the British class system.
When I met him in Stanleyville a few days later and had a
glass of beer with him, I asked what were his relations with
the Africans. "Oh/' he said, airily, "I don't notice 'em. I just
look right through *em. You do, after a while." He wasn't
blinded only by their race. Different classes tend to see no one
but their own members. It is almost a matter of vision; they
will accurately describe what people in their own group are
wearing and hardly see others walking around naked. This
141
applies to higher classes as well as lower, though men strain
to look upward more than down. The Yorkshireman had been
looking up for a long time and it was naturally hard for him to
glance in other directions, even for a moment.
Ponthierville is a rail terminus of the line which runs up to
Stanleyville and by-passes the seven cataracts, which took such
a terrible toll of Stanley's expedition. The chief attractions of
the town itself are a bowling alley and a scrubby hotel which
has a bar and a game room with expiring philodendrons in
green-and-gold ceramic wall-vases. I waited for train-time in
a wicker chair staring at a false Egyptian tapestry on a baby-
blue stucco wall, listening to a malaguena being played on a
little lame phonograph.
The train rattled on all that night, across the Equator,
towards Stanleyville. Everyone has a place in the world he
believes to be his home, not necessarily one he admires or even
wishes to remain in. After nearly forty years I was ready to
see my own.
142
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HAMED BIN MOHAMED BIN JUNA was called Tippu Tib, men
said, because the name imitated the sound of spraying
bullets; but It also means 'gatherer of wealth/ and they were
simply confusing his means with his end. At the time Stanley
arrived on the Lualaba River in 1876 this remarkable man had
been established at Nyangwe for two years. That town was
to become the focus of Arab power in Central Africa, after
Tabora fell to the Germans* It is some miles up-stream from
present-day Kindu where the steamer leaves for Ponthierville.
Tippu Tib descended on his father's side from a line of rich
and influential merchants at Zanzibar. At an early age he went
into Africa to make his own fortune. Many other young Arabs
did the same, but few had his detached view of their work.
Slaving, he saw, is a difficult profession because people have
a congenital love of liberty. Therefore a good deal of killing
is necessary. But taking a man's life is one of the ultimate
demands one may make on him and nothing short of over-
whelmingly superior force can guarantee success. Such force,
Tippu Tib knew, could be supplied by modem weapons. He
armed a hundred fighting men with the best rifles he could find
and plunged into Africa for slaves and ivory.
He turned his profits into more arms and with these he took
more lives, more ivory and slaves. He began to penetrate
isolated regions where people were unsophisticated about the
uses of ivory. Some villages were partly constructed of it
pillars, fencing, etc. Others had heaps of tusks which had been
rotting for generations. A little guile, here, wouldn't have
exceeded the trade practices of most people, but Tippu was
143
also after slaves and more soldiers. Destruction ideally served
his purposes and he pillaged with murderous efficiency.
Yet he was not a bestial man, merely a logical one with no
pity, Stanley describes him as tall and black-bearded, with a
black skin and fine, intelligent features.
He was . . , straight, and quick in his movements, a picture of
energy and strength . , . neat In his person, his clothes were of a
spotless white, his fez-cap brand-new, his waist was encircled by
a rich dowle, his dagger was splendid with silver filigree, and his
tout ensemble was that of an Arab gentleman in very comfortable
circumstances.
He was one of those men, made for certain kinds of great-
nessj whom Stanley admired because he saw himself in their
eyes.
To achieve these comfortable circumstances Tippu Tib did
not always bludgeon helpless people himself. There were
other ways of encouraging disorder and misery. One of his
favourite tactics was to stir up local wars so as to come in on
the winning side and claim the spoils, including the persons of
the vanquished and even of the victors, if they had been
enough weakened.
Though he didn't like to take chances he was a courageous
man, and once* when his ammunition was low, he walked into
a strongly fortified town and declared that he was the king's
nephew, who had been taken In a slave raid some years before,
possibly one of his own. He then persuaded the ageing king to
abdicate in his favour.
Finding himself the acknowledged sovereign of thirty or
forty thousand souls he declared war on contiguous kingdoms
and soon was absolute master of the whole district* Opposing
chiefs sometimes tried to bribe him to treat them leniently
but he considered everything they owned to be his anyway,
Including their flesh.
144
At the height of his power in 1891 he controlled an area the
size of France and Germany combined, though it was sadly
depopulated. He achieved all of this through unashamed greed
and his rapaciousness was probably matched by only one other
man then living, Leopold II, King of the Belgians.
Tippu Tib was naturally a very popular man as well as a
rich one. He was surrounded by attendants and troops whose
fierce loyalty he could count on because they were afraid to
think of Mm as an enemy. He was eventually to meet men who
were not afraid, and his forces were finally routed though his
own person was never touched. The European army's victory
was gained by superior weapons, used in. accordance with his
own principles, and he was probably not at all surprised at his
defeat.
But if he had known in 1876 that Stanley was destined to
bring the Congo Free State into being, the rivalry which
would culminate in the Arab-European wars sixteen years
later might have begun with something more spirited than a
foot-race. In that race Tippu Tib beat Frank Pocock by fifteen
yards to win a silver goblet and a cup, which hardly consoled
him in his old age for the loss of an empire. Henry Stanley
should have run this race, not young Pocock. Tippu was ten -
years older than Stanley and the match would have been far
more sporting. But the leader was so muffled in a cloak of
paternal dignity that it would have been unthinkable for him
to play such games, though he considered them fine lessons
in manliness for the young. Both camps would have been
surprised to learn that he was only thirty-five years old. After
spending the first years of his life as a fatherless child he was
spending the last as a childless father.
The two men met near Kasongo, some miles up-stream
from Nyangwe. Tippu Tib had been out in the Maniema
country avenging the murder of one of his men by hostile
natives. In view of his own propensities this was more of a
routine police action than a show of indignation.
Stanley was anxious to know what obstacles there were to
a journey down-stream* He suspected that the greatest of these
was Tippu Tib himself. Though the Arabs had not yet pene-
trated the Congo they considered it their zone of influence and
did not like Europeans encroaching. Livingstone and, two
years before Stanley, a man named Cameron, had been held
up at Nyangwe and never got any farther down the Lualaba.
Why?
He learned that 'Daoud Liviston* had been refused boats by
the Arabs who said that the trip was so dangerous they didn't
want to be held responsible for his death by the British Consul
at Zanzibar. Also, the Doctor's own men balked, probably
incited by the Arabs, but all the more ready to do so when
they heard that the natives along the river were addicted to
human flesh. This had been enough to discourage Cameron
and, with Tippu Tib's paid help, he turned south-west and
went across the continent to Portuguese Angola.
"I suppose, Tippu Tib," Stanley said, "having offered the
other white man your assistance, you would have no objections
to offer it to me for the same sum?"
Tippu hedged, and pleaded that he lacked men. Besides, he
said, he didn't see why Stanley wanted to go down the river.
"If you white men are desirous of throwing away your lives,"
he said, "it is no reason we Arabs should. We travel little by
little to get ivory and slaves, and are years about it it is now
nine years since I left Zanzibar but you white men only look
for rivers and lakes and mountains, and you spend your lives
for no reason, and to no purpose."
Knowing his own motives so well, Tippu Tib simply
couldn't believe that the Europeans didn't have a more prac-
tical reason for making these trips. He was perfectly right, and
146
if he had followed his instinct to hold Stanley up, the centre
of Africa today might be occupied like the Sudan by a huge
Arab nation. But he also had an instinct for making money, and
when this rash young man offered him five thousand dollars
to take him sixty marches, in any direction Stanley chose, he
accepted. He foolishly agreed to forfeit his five thousand if he
gave up before he had made the full sixty marches through a
country said to be infested with boa-constrictors and leopards
and a kind of gorilla that would seize your hand and bite off the
fingers, one by one.
Stanley had entered into these negotiations without con-
sulting his own people. But the night before the contract was
signed he called Frank Pocock into his hut for pipes and
coffee. Stanley had become very fond of the boy and confided
in him in the manner of a scoutmaster with his favourite
eagle-scout. "Now, Frank, my son/* said this hoary thirty-
five-year-old, "sit down. I am about to have a long and serious
chat with you. Life and death yours as well as mine, and those
of all the Expedition hang on the decision I make tonight. 5 *
Their chat was serious and certainly it was long. Stanley
pointed out that both Livingstone and Cameron had been well
equipped to attempt the river the first by experience and the
second because he was very well armed. But they had both
been forced to turn back. There was no doubt that the trip
would be extremely dangerous. An alternative to making it
therefore, Stanley said, would be to head south to the Katanga;
another would be to go north-east and cut across Uganda.
To all of these suggestions Frank, whose vocabulary was
severely limited by the blameless, athletic life he had led,
replied, "That would be a fine job, sir!" or one-syllable words
to that effect.
Yet the river was tempting. Should they dare the Lualaba,
Stanley continued, and gain glory? The young man straggled
147
with an Idea. "I say, sir," he burst out at last, "let us toss up!
Best two out of three.'*
They took a rupee. "Heads for the north and the Lualaba;
tails for the south and Katanga/' Stanley said. Frank beamed
and threw.
"What is it?"
"Tails, sir!" Frank said, disappointed with fate for trying to
save his life.
"Toss again. 5 *
They tossed six times and tails always came up. Then they
drew straws, short ones for the south, long ones for the river,
and poor lucky Frank got a run of short ones*
At last Stanley threw away all the short straws and, with
them, Frank Pocock's last hope of getting home to Lower
Upnor.
"It is of no use, Frank. Well face our destiny, despite the
rupee and straws. With your help, my dear fellow, I will
follow the river/*
"Mr Stanley, have no fear of me. I shall stand by you. The
last words of my dear old father were, 'Stick by your master/ "
Reassured by this canine display of loyalty, Stanley signed
the contract with Tippu Tib the next day.
On October 24 they left for Nyangwe, which they reached in
three days. The Expedition was in remarkably good condition
considering that they had made the journey from Lake Tan-
ganyika in forty-three days. The Arabs generally took three
or four months to do it. Only Kalulu, the little page Stanley
brought from England, was ill. He had an accidental gunshot
wound and his master nursed him tenderly, in spite of the fact
that he had tried to run away some weeks before.
On November 5 they left Nyangwe behind, heading north
overland to by-pass the three falls that blocked them from the
lower reaches of the river. Tippu Tib accompanied them with
148
four hundred men, about half of whom Stanley was pledged
to support on the journey. The slaver had also brought along
the twenty women of his harem and about fifty boys between
the ages of ten and eighteen whom he was training to act as
servants, scouts, carpenters, blacksmiths and leaders of raiding
parties. One of these was Congo Lutete who, at the time of the
Arab-European wars, became Tippu's chief lieutenant in the
Maniema, and whose defection to the European side marked
the end of Arab dominance in Central Africa.
They plunged into thick forest which was sometimes so
dark Stanley couldn't see to write his notes. Within ten days
the porters were complaining loudly and even Tippu began
to grumble at the unexpected resistance of the land. When they
occasionally came out on a hill they could see nothing but
forest around them. They were also being harassed by pythons,
green vipers, puff-adders and large, howling baboons.
On the i6th Tippu Tib said he was quitting. "Look at it
how you may/* he argued, "those sixty camps will occupy us
at the rate we are travelling over a year, and it will take as
much time to return* I never was in this forest before, and I
had no idea there was such a place in the world. The air is
killing my people, it is insufferable. This country was not
made for travel; it was made for vile pagans, monkeys, and
wild beasts, I cannot go further."
Stanley talked him into coming twenty marches further, for
two thousand six hundred dollars, paying all expenses himself.
He did this not so much because he needed Tippu Tib's help
here in the jungle but because he wanted to get far enough
away from Nyangwe to be sure that his own men wouldn't
desert.
In the native villages they occasionally passed they saw a
great many skulls and other bones lying around cooking sites,
looking uncomfortably human. The residents swore that these
149
were the bones of delicious chimpanzees, but Stanley brought
two skulls back to England and Professor Huxley told him
they were of a higher order. These same people, when not
eating, made a kind of primitive furniture which would now
be in great demand by decorators.
Fourteen days out of Nyangwe they swung west and
reached the Lualaba again. Stanley decided to rechristen it the
Livingstone, Here they camped on the right bank. The leader
had his tent put up by the river, a mat spread on the ground
before it, and the tall reeds cut near the water's edge to give
him a better view.
He began to meditate, always a ponderous process with
Stanley. What of the future? What of the River?
Downward it flows to the unknown! to night-black clouds of
mystery and fable, mayhap past the lands of the anthropoids, the
pigmies, and the blanket-eared men ... I seek a road. Why, here
lies a broad water avenue cleaving the Unknown to some sea, like
a path of light! Here are woods all around, sufficient for a thousand
fleets of canoes. Why not build them?
He sprang up, told the drummer to call to muster, and
delivered one of his more tiresome speeches to people who
were already exhausted from a long march. The burden of
it was that the Voice of Fate had decreed that they should go
down this river.
"You who have followed me through Turu, and sailed
around the great lakes with me; you, who have followed me,
like children following their father, through Unyoro, and
down to Ujiji, and as far as this wild, wild land, will you
leave me here? Shall I and my white brother go alone?"
That was precisely what about three-quarters of his children
were thinking. They were frightened and they had good reason
to be. Of his one hundred and thirty-three men, ninety-five
made not a move when he called for volunteers. Stanley was a
150
bit shaken by this and said that there was no hurry about
deciding. Perhaps they would change their minds. Tippu Tib's
contract wasn't up yet and he hoped to be far along before
it was.
They launched the Lady Alice and, after a quarrel with a
local tribe, shifted the entire company to the west side of the
Lualaba. The bulk of the people proceeded northward along
the river by land, while about thirty travelled in the boat. The
inhabitants of the district were extremely hostile and frequently
attacked both the land and river parties. The men were sickened
by dysentery and smallpox, and thorns tore at their legs,
causing dreadful ulcers. Stanley found six leaky canoes that he
said had been abandoned. He lashed these together and made
a floating hospital.
Just below the site of present-day Kindu they came to the
first of the river's many unnavigable stretches. The great dis-
advantage to travelling by boat was that its occupants had to
carry it almost as often as it carried them. Tippu Tib was ready
to quit again at the sight of the rapids but Stanley dissuaded
him and manoeuvred the boats through the rough water.
On December 4 they came upon a huge canoe, very much
in need of repair. The men set to work on it day and night,
as it was needed to carry the increasing number of invalids.
Smallpox, dysentery, ulcers and pleurisy raged, and there were
some cases of typhoid. Every day several bodies were thrown
into the river. Seventy-two of their number had to be carried
in the boats.
Attacks from the natives were growing each day more
determined. When they reached Vinya-Njara, about two hun-
dred miles above Nyangwe, they had to hole-up in an aban-
doned village and fight for their lives. One reason for the per-
sistent enmity of the inhabitants of this region was that they
thought the expedition was a party of Arab slavers. They
151
knew enough about these Wasamlye, or uncircumcised, as
they called them, to hate them without being too afraid to
fight
In the midst of the battle Stanley organized a night raid, cut
loose most of the enemy's pirogues, and at last persuaded them
to discuss a truce. This was facilitated by a crude form of
miscegenation., frequently practised in primitive Africa, called
'Hood brotherhood. 5 The chiefs of the opposite parties cut
their arms and allowed their blood to mingle.
Tippu Tib's patience was exhausted. He was still eight
marches from fulfilling his revised contract but he told Stanley
very firmly that he was leaving. He demanded his full pay and
Stanley couldn't refuse because he knew that Tippu would take
more than half of the Expedition with him if he didn't get it.
So he agreed to give the Arab a draft for two thousand six
hundred dollars, a riding-ass, a trunk, a gold chain, a great
deal of cloth and beads and one thousand six hundred cowries.,
plus two hundred rounds of ammunition and fifty pounds of
brass wire if he would undertake to keep the men of the
Expedition from deserting.
That ended their association. Stanley's goal was entirely too
impractical to interest this pragmatic man. On the day after
Christmas 1876 Tippu Tib gave the Expedition a banquet of
rice, roasted sheep and palm wine. Then Stanley took his men,
augmented to one hundred and forty-nine by last-minute re-
cruiting, to a tiny island and built a separate camp.
He was elated; already he smelled the salt sea. But about
ninety of his men felt condemned, and the others couldn't have
failed to notice that their camp was very like a prison. Even
Frank Pocock was as downcast as his plucky nature would
permit, maybe because of the blanket-eared men.
He became relatively talkative. "Before we finally depart,
sir/' he said, "do you really believe, in your inmost soul, that
152
we shall succeed? I ask this because there are such odds against
us not that I for a moment think it would be best to return,
having proceeded so far. 5 '
Stanley replied at great length, resorting to that heavy-
handed optimism with which Victorian men and women so
frequently entered darkly pessimistic situations. "There is an
enormous risk/' he conceded, "but you know the adage,
'Nothing risked, nothing won/ " He was now fairly sure that
they were on the Congo and he promised that they would be
in the Atlantic Ocean by April 1877. He was only four months
out, but those four months were fatal to Frank. Just before
they went to bed Stanley cheered the boy up by saying,
"Good night! and may happy dreams of the sea, and ships,
and pleasure, and comfort, and success attend you in your
sleep! To-morrow, my lad, is the day we shall cry Victory
or death!"
Tippu Tib was sure that death would come to Stanley very
much sooner than victory and so left him with an untroubled
heart. But he had sown the seeds of a war that would destroy
his power sixteen years later.
153
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OTANLEY'S trip down the Lualaba, from Vinya-Njara past the
kj seven cataracts of Stanley Falls, was an unrelieved horror.
On the day they started out, 28 December 1876, Stanley gave
all hands one of his pep-talks, to which, he says with rare per-
ception, they responded wanly. "Lift up your heads and be
men. What is there to fear? All the world is smiling with joy.
Here we are all together like one family, with hearts united,
all strong with the purpose to reach our homes. See this river;
it is the road to Zanzibar!"
The very next day some people farther along the road to
Zanzibar tried to eat them, shouting Bo-bo-bo-o-o and re-
citing their favourite recipes as they circled the Expedition in
their canoes. Stanley, now travelling by water with all his men,
withheld fire for a while thinking that it was ridiculous to be
angry at people who regarded them simply as capons but was
at last forced to clear the river. The party picked up a number
of floating shields, which they fastened to their boats as
bulwarks.
On the joth they camped in a drenching rain at the present
site of the A. Houdmont & W. Thuysbaert Company, taking
no more comfort from that than the Dutchman who bought
Manhattan Island would have taken from sleeping on the site
of the Stock Exchange. Proceeding down the river, they were
attacked again on New Year's Day and four more times on
January 2.
One battle in the morning lasted for three hours; though no
one was killed and spears were no match for guns, the prospect
of going through this for many months to come was terribly
154
depressing. They were growing tired of being considered some-
one else's meat and being told in detail how they were to be
cooked.
Some of the tribes along the shore were more peaceful, or
at least not so uncompromisingly carnivorous. They traded
palm-wine, bananas, potatoes, cassava and an occasional dis-
gruntled chicken to the voyagers for beads and cowries. If
everyone along the route had been like this they might have
made the whole voyage to the Atlantic, counting portage at
the rapids, in a few months.
But some miles below these pleasant people another group
of culinary-minded natives came into view, painted half-red
and half-white, navigating monstrous pirogues. One of these,
which Stanley and his men captured, was eighty-five feet long,
They christened it the Great Eastern. The Expedition had
twenty-three other boats, most of them named after British
Cruisers familiar to the African East Coast. There were also the
Telegraph and the Herald^ the London Town and the America.
On the 5th, just above the first cataract of Stanley Falls, two
men were killed. They were now at the site of present-day
Ponthierville.
From here they had to haul their canoes two miles overland,
on a path fifteen feet wide which they cut through the bush
and forest. By January 8 they were in calm water again, only
to reach the second cataract by evening and to ran into more
hostile natives.
From this point Stanley began to display that amazing stub-
bornness and deep faith in himself that raises him far above the
ridiculous figure he so often cuts. Like many modern men, he
was unable to cross from absurdity to greatness except by a
leap. When things were absolutely hopeless he could reach
nobility, but only then. During the next four days he repelled
a great force of warlike natives, drove them from their villages,
155
then turned and cut a three-mile path through dense forest
round the cataract.
To do this he established six camps on the proposed route,
one at each half-mile. Then he formed pioneer battalions to work
day and night and applied cane, smeared with gum frankin-
cense, to the trees as torches to work by. They rushed from
camp to camp as the road was built, dragging their canoes,
while the rear-guard fought off the hordes of cannibals. These
marches were made with women, and even some children who
had been born on the trip. In the Africa of those days women
were not considered dispensable, even for short periods.
When enemy attacks threatened to halt road-building alto-
gether, Stanley turned and chased them deep into the jungle.
The battalions again took up their axes and, after seventy-
eight hours of almost constant work and fighting during which
Frank Pocock put every subsequent eagle-scout on earth to
shame, they were back in the water.
At the foot of these falls they were 13630 feet above sea-
level, a figure Stanley arrived at by measuring boiling-points.
The Expedition was just 270 geographical miles south of a spot
where the Nile was known to have an altitude of 1,525 feet.
A decline of 105 feet within that distance was easily possible
and Stanley wondered if they weren't on the Nile after all,
especially as they were still going North.
Between the fifth and sixth cataracts, where there Is a con-
siderable stretch of clear water, they camped one night on the
right bank and woke in the morning to find that a net had been
placed over them by enterprising natives. The paths around
them were planted with splinters which pierced to the bone.
These people were simply after meat and when Stanley's party
captured some, after breaking out of the net, they confessed
that they lived, whenever possible, oa old people and strangers.
The Expedition cut its way around die sixth cataract on
156
January 20, unaware that there was only one more ahead. They
were now exactly four miles north of the Equator. On the
24th they heard the booming of another stretch of rapids and
the whole company was in despair. This neighbourhood was
also populous and they could expect to fight every inch of the
way. The party's guns could usually cut the enemy to pieces,
but the natives' very ignorance of the effect of gunfire made
the situation more dangerous, not less.
The final falls in this series do not merely drop, they are
pushed downward by the force of the water. Stanley,, at this
point, again took the altitude and found that they were 1,511
feet above sea-level, so that there now could be little doubt
that they were on the Congo. This was dispiriting. If it had
been the Nile they could have expected some sort of aid within
a few weeks. Now they knew they had months more of travel
and perhaps hundreds of rapids to shoot.
But Stanley maintained his optimism. He took soundings of
the river and made sketches of the fish in its waters, in order
to enrich the world's knowledge of these parts. He also com-
piled a tiny lexicon of the local language, heavily loaded with
words like, 'foot,' 'arrow/ 'knife,' 'fire,' *food/ 'run,* 'canoe,*
'dead,' and 'darkness.'
Once he heard Frank singing, dolefully,
"The home land, the bright land,
My eyes are filled with tears,
Remembering all the happy band,
Passed from my sight for years."
Stanley reprimanded him and ordered him to sing something
more hopeful. With determined cheer and shining countenance
the boy sang,
"Brightly gleams our banner,
Pointing to the sky,
157
Waving wanderers onward
To their home on high."
Stanley explained that this smacked of another sort of
defeatism, however pious. "Sing, my dear Frank, your lest
song." Young Pocock rose to the occasion and made the
forest ring with,
"Onward, Christian soldiers.
Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before!"
At the end of the seventh falls they found many tall poles
placed in the river's channel, supporting woven baskets to
catch fish. Even now this structure is seen at the south-east end
of Stanleyville. On January 28 they cleared the last obstacle in
the river, while constantly attacked by savages. The Expedition
emerged exhausted into clear water, at the juncture of the
Tshopo River with the Congo. This is the present site of the
throbbing, vulgar, touching, frontier town that very properly
bears Henry Stanley's name.
158
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
v YT^ af rived in Stanleyville at dawn. It was raining heavily
\V and the railroad yard was grey and lonely. I stepped from
the train to a gleaming cinderbed and hurried across a sheaf of
tracks. The main part of town, 1 had heard, was over the river
and 1 would have to get a ferry. The fog was low here and it
was hard to tell which direction was north, but somehow, as
Melville said, one always knows where the water is.
The rain fell harder and there were comforting port smells
in the air creosote and honourably rusting metal which
make one long for a cup of coffee in a pallid all-night cafe.
Then the great, brown river showed itself. From here on, the
maps call it the Congo, but it had earned that muscular name
long before. It was very like the Mississippi, inexorable and
majestic, as no river in Europe knows how to be.
Coming closer to it, picking my way between abandoned
freight cars, I looked down and saw steel cranes standing on
the piers like praying mantises. Except for a person in the dis-
tance, riding a bicycle down a glossy cement walk, the entire
yard was deserted. The fog was lifting, though it still rained,
and faint outlines of buildings were visible across the river.
Black hand-cars on the sidings were filling with water and
looked like drinking-pans for forest monsters. Rain dripped
from the sides of a flat-car and blue-purple oil film swam on
the tracks. The spoor which industry leaves in the jungle
blends into it far more easily than do the smallest traces of our
domestic lives; so that a coal barge on this side of the Congo
lay patiently in the driving equatorial rain, practically indis-
tinguishable from its surroundings, but the little cans of the
Boulangerie FAvenir peddling liverwurst sandwiches on the
other side offended the wilderness by their very existence.
In any case it always leaves one a little sad to see Nature
so manhandled, whether by warehouses and slag-heaps or by
chunky modern buildings with air-conditioned doctors' offices.
It might have been better to leave it all as it was. Except that
this kind of nostalgia applies to any city, and a person who
says that Paris and London should have remained meadows
with rivers maundering through them may be right without
being particularly helpful Besides, there is a perverse beauty
in the artificial landscapes men create that God, in His classical
severity, can never quite bring off.
The one thing that doesn't change in Stanleyville is the
river. In this it is like all the other great rivers of the world.
They are indifferent to St Louis, or Aswan, or Omaha; they
would just as soon reek of naphtha and sewage as of mud and
rotting trees. Sooner or later they will carry all the forests and
cities on their banks off to the sea.
The person on the bicycle turned out to be the ferry pilot.
He directed me down a wooden ramp to a small motor-launch,
where I ducked Into the empty cabin, wet to the skin. He
followed slowly, ignoring the weather, and busied himself
checking gauges. I noticed that this young man was wearing
transparent plastic beach-sandals. These are ideal for Congo
weather and, I believe, are also considered smart. Many
Africans of the lvalue class wear them, and are especially
proud when the plastic turns a bilious yellow much as we
like hats to be a little stained. At six-thirty, sharp, he glanced
casually around the rail-yard and we roared away from the
wharf.
The boat headed diagonally upstream to compensate for the
current. Above and below us other boats skated across, packed
with people on their way to work. In three thousand miles the
160
river has no bridges and is so broad in most places that it
would be a massive engineering feat to build one. It stopped
raining and a few minutes later a powerful sun drew up the
last of the fog. Then it grew hot. Walking up from the opposite
embankment into town I nearly stepped on a beetle, about the
size of a dessert plate, which seemed to have been drowned in
the gutter.
I got breakfast in the Chutes Hotel^ where I had been advised
to stay. It was a comfortable place, though a bit expensive, and
was a splendid example of the success the Belgians are having
in their vast scheme for banalizing the Congo, though this is
as yet confined to the European quarters of their cities. Here
Belgian culture spreads like a benevolent sore, as supermarkets
and florist shops spring up filled with canned fruit and sickly*
north-European flowers. With any luck this land will become
a huge, comfortable, electrified suburb in fifty years. In this
the Belgians are much superior to the British who have never
quite managed to turn East Africa into a tea-garden, maybe
because their standards were impossibly high.
In order to encourage Africans in the Belgian way of life,
the authorities have established what are called centres extra-
coutumlers. These are groups of detribalized persons which
have formed around European settlements. Such people are
not lvalues in the strict sense of the word, though many
among them are. They simply have no common origin and
would be a disorganized mass without this recognition. The
Belgians have encouraged these centres, and the effect has been
to create a large population (more than three million now)
who can step into modern life without any of the handicaps
a person long nurtured within a tribe would suffer and,
naturally, with none of his safeguards.
In Stanleyville there are four centres extra-coutumiers^ cites
Beiges i and , Bruxelles^ and Mangobo* In these, especially in
161
the cites Beiges and Mangolo^ there is a good deal of public
housing: long rows of concrete huts, tin-roofed, each about
twelve feet wide and ten feet deep, having two rooms, public
water, and a lavatory for every two families. At least this
was the kind I became acquainted with. They offered a
minimum of comfort and cleanliness and were rented very
cheaply. The people who lived in them were pleased to be
there and would surely have said, if anyone had asked, that
banality was a very small price to pay for their homes.
I had stopped for a bottle of beer that morning in an African
bar near the market. Here a young man had promised to take
me to see one of the leading figures in cite Bruxelles^ a certain
Chief Sidanou. I returned that afternoon to the Cafe des Sports
on the rue du Marche^ but could not find him. The place wasn't
crowded at this hour and to pass the time I ordered another
beer at the bar and watched a man getting drunk at a near-by
table on a grim mixture of stout and Coca-Cola.
The girl behind the bar reversed a stack of records on the
cafe's poor, overworked machine and in this rare interval of
silence I asked her if anyone had left a message for me. The
music began again and she came down to my end.
"Ave^-yous un message pour moi?" I repeated, nearly shout-
ing, "f avals . . ."
The girl stopped me with a raised hand and spoke to the
stout-and-Coca-Cola man in Swahili, interlacing a few words
of French. She evidently found it difficult to understand me
and was asking for help. When she turned back I heard her
say, "I don't know. That's the truth/*
"Why didn't you tell me you spoke English?" I said, a bit
ruffled.
She shrugged and turned to arrange a box of bazooka
bubble-gum and a glass of dusty paper poppies before the
bar mirror. Without being at all taciturn, it was Epis's custom
162
never to speak If her meaning was already clear. I hadn't asked
if she spoke English.
"Will you have another Stanor?" she said, taking my empty
bottle.
I nodded and asked if she would have one with me.
She looked at the clock and shrugged again. "Yes, now I
take a Stanor, thank you. I don't take Primus, it makes me
drunken." As she went to get another glass I noticed that she
was very tall, nearly six feet in her flat slippers. Unlike most
of the other African women in Stanleyville she never wore
shawls, except in the house. She was dressed now in a cheap
red-on-white cotton print, held in at the waist with a red
leatherette belt. She was very slim, built on the lines of an
antelope, and had a calm, immobile face with a good strong
chin, which some anthropologist would be sure to call
prognathous.
She came back with two bottles of beer, both Stanor. I asked
if this was her regular work, as she seemed unlike the other
women one saw in these bars more withdrawn and inde-
pendent. The room rang with electric guitars playing a
cha-cha-cha.
She shook her head. "No I got to work at the tables. My
friend has this work and she is sick. But I can do it very well.
I tell you. No one can fool me."
I asked her name. She picked up a rag and wiped a ring off
the bar. "Epis," she said, looking towards the door. Whenever
she spoke she seemed on the point of leaving.
"Epis what?"
She looked around, apparently surprised to find me still
there. "What?"
I asked what her last name was.
She hesitated, then looked over my shoulder. "Noel," she
said. "Epis Noel"
163
Another customer came in and she went to him. She seemed
to have forgotten that I was there, except that her glass stood
beside mine, barely touched. At last I saw the young man who
was going to take me to Chief Sidanou in the cite Bruxelles.
He seemed unsure of himself now, and denied that he knew the
man. As I had come here on purpose to get the introduction
I was disappointed and a little angry. Then I saw that he was
drunk and went back to the bar.
Suddenly Epis was at my side. She picked up her glass and
sipped her beer. "I tell you something. These people around
here. You watch out. They just think you will buy them a
Stanor, That's true. I tell you 5 sir. And the girls. Some are not
clean."
The cha-cha-cha came on again. This particular record was
the rage of Stanleyville that week and before I left I heard it
many hundreds of times, I explained to Epis that I had been
trying to see a man in Bruxelles.
She turned half away and sipped her beer, saying nothing.
"Instead of telling me whom I should look out for/' I said,
"you could show me around yourself. Where do people go at
night? Is there any place for dancing and music?"
She looked at me and shook her head. "I cannot. I must go
home."
I tried to explain that I wanted her as a guide, mostly
because of her English, and that if she had anyone who would
object she could assure him . * *
"No, that's not it. I have no man who lives with me. You
mean to say that, don't you? I can do what I want. I tell you.
But I have my daughter." She glanced to a row of chairs along
one wall and I saw a fat little girl with a head of honey-blonde
curls sleeping blissfully through the clanging steel guitars.
Epis had gone again, but as her glass was still by mine, I
waited. It took a while to learn her rules of conduct. They
164
were, I discovered later, a bit like the rules of dancing
intricate steps and elaborate rhythms performed almost with-
out movement. The best dancers would hold themselves
within a circle no more than two feet in diameter.
She came back again. The bar was now growing crowded.
"Her name is Ann/ 3 she said, proudly. "Her father was an
Italian man." She pronounced both 'Ann 3 and 'man 3 with a
long 'A.* l
I asked if there was anyone at home to leave the child with,
promising to pay her for her time if she would come with
me as a guide. "Yes I have my sister, if she will be there.
But . . ." Suddenly her eyes caught mine, then she looked
away quickly.
"What?" I said.
She turned and arranged some cartons of Viceroy and Belga
cigarettes before the bar mirror. "That's all right, I go with
you. I know a nice place. Very nice music."
Then she turned and drank her beer indifferently. "I must
lock up at nine o'clock," she said, "you come then." With this
she picked up our glasses and took them to be washed.
When I came back for Epis she was carefully balancing out
her cash. There was no one there and she let me in at a side
door. The owners of the cafe lived next door. They were
Belgian. When she had counted her cash in a cigar-box and
snapped a rubber band round some papers^ she left her
daughter in my care and went to deliver them.
1 1 haven't tried to reproduce Epis's pronunciation because It is too much like the
burlesque speech ascribed to American Negroes. She very clearly said Mat* for "that"
and *das* for 'that's,* for instance. She also used "de* for 'the* and possibly *hab* for
"have,* though It sounded more like *haaav/ This would be offensive to many Ameri-
cans and probably to many citizens of the British Commonwealth, though dialect
English hasn't yet been made a crime, and what is good enough for Ronald Firbank
as far as the English language Is concerned should be good enough for anyone. But
many people are sensitive on that point and should not be forced to enrich our tongue
against their will.
165
The child and I stood beneath an arc light in the deserted
street We were not far from the centre of the European town,
but the rudimentary buildings were scattered among vacant,
weed-strewn lots and there was a feeling of despair about the
neighbourhood one finds at the outskirts of all cities that have
grown too fast. When Epis came back she perched the child,
who was about four years old and heavy as a dumpling, on her
hip and we walked away. She said she had a friend with a taxi
and asked me if I could afford a trip to Mangolo^ where she
lived.
The taxi had gone a number of miles into the country when
Epis told me that we would first stop at the home of another
friend of hers. This turned out to be a young woman with a
light complexion and large, vague eyes. As Epis said later,
"She is my best friend. You will dance with her, mmm? I will
thank you very much if you do. She is not very intelligent but
she is very good. Very nice. That's right/'
The young woman lived in a small, concrete hut, in Man-
gobo also, such as I have described. She was apparently sup-
ported by an evolve who was a government clerk. He lived
here most of the time, he said. The inside of the house was
dimly lit with kerosene lamps and contained a battered couch,
a table and several chairs. The walls were bare and the floor
was cold cement. A curtained doorway to the right led to a
tiny bedroom. There were now about six of us inside, includ-
ing the cab-driver.
People came and went, evidently with some purpose, though
I couldn't fathom it unless it was to see me. In the meantime
we sat about the table consuming Primus beer (though Epis
wouldn't touch any), looking like conspirators in the long-
shadowed light. Then we left together to go to a cabaret up
the road. Little Ann was temporarily put to bed in the other
room, in charge of a couple who were staying behind, though
166
they could probably be counted on for nothing but their
presence.
The lives of these young people had a certain aimlessness
that made one uneasy. Epis felt it also, and normally sat a little
apart from the others. But, as she told me later, they were her
only friends and she couldn't spend all of her time alone.
None of them, it seemed to me, had very serious Interests,
or even very frivolous ones. The conversation of the men
when they would speak French was spiritless and humdrum.
They seemed to want to do nothing but drink beer and, from
time to time, to make love.
Most of the women were wholly or partly kept, but this had
no especial significance. Only when everyone was dancing or
when music was playing did they seem to come together.
Otherwise the society was formless, a community of strangers
held together by money. It might have been one of the towns
in our own West just after the Civil War.
In fact, there is something extra-coutumier about many
Americans. Having left our tribes on other continents we are
more adaptable to change and social disorder. We are also
most at home in a world of plastic and flashing glass, though
hardly responsible for the fact that others imitate it. But there
is a danger. Unstable mixtures are explosive. The Belgians may
be making a mistake in deliberately fostering these settlements
of the dispossessed. The few riots which have erupted in the
Congo so far (especially in Leopoldville, where the extra-
coutumier settlements are oldest) seem to be parochial, without
national organization. But the pile is being set up and a reaction
will surely take place, whether or not it is controlled.
The cabaret was nothing but a large, floodlit cement floor
with tables set around and a record player booming the cha-
cha-cha. From time to time people got up to dance, not
necessarily in couples. The best and most serious dancing
167
was done alone, and sometimes the entire floor was filled
with people who were not touching or even looking at
each other. It then approached folk-dancing, and the per-
formers moved with great precision, staring down at their
feet as though they were playing difficult passages on the
piano.
At such moments I always sat down. Our table was littered
with bottles of Primus, though Epis had a Stanor to herself.
It was important for her not to be drunken. As always, she sat
apart. She was pleased to answer any questions I asked or pass
them on to others. She was never sullen or even ungracious,
but she remained detached from all that was going on.
Epis danced very little and when she did she barely moved
on the floor though she moved perfectly holding her long
body in rigid control. Even in this she managed to seem with-
drawn and danced by herself, for herself. I admired her, per-
haps especially because she often attained a motionless, obsi-
dian beauty that made one catch one's breath; but I was
beginning to think I had made a mistake in hiring her to guide
me. I had wanted someone typical of this place, and she seemed
more of a stranger to Stanleyville and even to Africa
than I.
Once, when a waltz came, I tried my luck with a large,
voluminously shawled lady who was brimful of beer but whose
balance was far better than mine. We hadn't made more than
four turns when she stopped and mutely drew my attention to
her bare feet.
Some time after midnight Epis and I walked back to her
friend's house, just ahead of the others. The road was lit by
nothing but moonlight and the night echoed a fading samba.
"Your taxi is gone," she said, at last.
"Oh? Can I get another?"
I could see her shake her head in the faint moonlight. She
168
walked very straight and, though I am tall, her eyes were always
opposite mine. "I think they make a joke at me."
"Why?"
"Well, they think . . . It's because I don't see these boys
much, you see. They leave you alone with me because I say
they must take you back to Stan. 55
"But I can get another car. There was one back there at the
cabaret." It wasn't pleasant to be left alone here in the Congo
night, four or five miles from town.
"No, they are going the other way. I ask them."
"Then . . . ?"
"You could stay with me but I don't want to be in the bed
with you. Do you see that?"
I said that I did, easily. I didn't particularly want to spend
the night in one of those huts. They were all very fine,
viewed as housing for others, but not as places one stayed
oneself,
Epis was silent for a while. From time to time the moon
passed under a cloud and then only the white of her dress
would be visible. "Yes, you would like it. I know, most men
do. And I don't mind. Sometimes. That's the truth. But I will
tell you something, sir. I am twenty years old. That is not old,
I tell you."
Behind us the voices of the others rose in laughter. They
were a bit drank. It was chilly,
"In the last five years I have birthed four children. You
believe that? Since I was fifteen. Now I have my daughter and
I got to work. I don't mind that, if I am free. It's not bad to
work. But when you birth children it make you tired. That's
right. So that Is why not now, maybe next year all right but
not now. You see, there is just one way not to have children/'
The moon came out and I saw that she was staring levelly
at me. "Stay away from the men," she said, and glanced
169
back at the others who were coming up to us. "Even the
boys. 55
We picked up her child at her friend's house and walked
about a mile down a dirt road until we came to some more files
of concrete huts. In almost total darkness she singled out one
from the others and we went in. I seemed to have caught cold
from my wetting that morning and was not very cheerful about
this adventure. Epis's sister was sitting with her friend at a table,
in a circle of kerosene light. A bottle of beer stood before them
and they were talking in low voices. He was a large, serious,
dull young man who worked in a hospital He wore an open
white shirt and plastic beach shoes. A few minutes later he rode
off on a bicycle, guiding himself by a flashlight. I gathered that
he stayed here some nights, but not always.
The other room, I found, was divided in half by a curtain.
In each section was a pallet. Epis put me on her own, and she,
her daughter and her sister slept together on the other. I was
nearest to the tiny sitting-room. The house was so small that
we could hear each other breathe in any part of it. But on the
whole I was comfortable, though the blanket smelled bitter and
the pillow was lumpy (the only other pillow was given to the
daughter, who had a cough). I fell asleep almost immediately.
During the night I woke with a fit of coughing. Then, as I
lay in the cold darkness, I heard a voice directly above me.
"Will you like some water now?" Epis said. "My daughter
want some too." I felt a glass placed in my hand and I took a
sip* "You are not afraid?" she said.
"No," I said. "Thank you thank you very much," but
Epis took the glass and left without speaking. In Swahili the
word for thank you is seldom used, as people are taught to be
generous enough not to need it.
When she pulled the curtain back a shaft of moonlight came
170
into my side of the room and I saw that she was naked, though
simple nudity had less significance for her than it had for me.
But I noticed that she did look like an antelope.
Just before I went to sleep again I heard some cats bounding
across the roof, as they frequently do during the night, but it
seemed to me that they had very large paws.
The next morning, as I was thrusting into my trousers, bal-
anced on one leg, Epis's sister walked briskly through the
curtain and said, "Bonjour^ M'sieu!" I fell back on the pallet
but she hurried through, and soon I heard her breaking wood
to build a fire. When I came into the other room I found that
Epis was up also and had been giving her child a wash behind
the house.
I mean houses, for no one's demesne could be defined. Long,
unbroken lines of identical structures sat on naked fields of red
earth, which still bore the scars of bull-dozing. Two files of
houses were separated by a dirt road, then came an interval of
forty or fifty yards and two more files. Some families in Epis's
row had tried to plant kitchen gardens, and across the way a
few had marked out front yards with tired bushes and
flowers, though these seemed intimidated by the trackless
Congo forests surrounding them.
Epis had been up before dawn, but everyone in the com-
munity began to stir when the first light came at five-thirty.
Here, near the Equator, the times of dawn and dusk don't vary
appreciably, and one can count on thirteen hours of light every
single day, all year long.
Epis came into the house, cleaning her teeth with the end of
a stick. We shook hands. "How do you do, sir. 1 think you are
not well all night, no?" She turned suddenly to her child who
was down on the floor following some kind of insect. "Nmti
Hapana-pana" The girl looked up and smiled with the
automatic sweetness which is children's weapon against their
parents. Her blonde ringlets were damp. Both she and Epis
were wearing clean wash-dresses, and Ann had little red shoes.
A woman passed the doorway and peered in. She was preg-
nant, and her brazen belly rode comfortably outside her shawls.
A small, naked boy followed her. Suddenly, across the road,
another woman began to scream. "That is nothing," Epis said,
seeing me start. "That man there he always beat his wife, every
morning. That's just like that. Every day. Most men they take
their wives in the bed or they go for a walk but not him! Don't
worry, she like that, maybe. Don't listen."
In trying not to listen I glanced at a calendar on the wall,
advertising beer with the smiling countenance of a fat, African
friar. Beneath each of the red figures on the face of the calendar
someone had written, 'happy days.' On a table near by were a
strapless Tissot lady's watch, a Swahili bible and some loose
cigarettes.
Epis's sister wandered into the room, hitching up her shawls
and combing her hair with a thick wooden comb shaped like a
fork. She sat on the stoop working pomade into her scalp and
humming South American songs. I wished I could have got
her to show me around. She seemed perfectly typical. Her
finger-nails and toe-nails were dyed flaming red and she was
afflicted with giggles. By contrast Epis was severe and regal.
She wore her hair in a neat cap on her head, about as deep as the
joint of a finger, and no ornament of any sort.
I had thought the sticks were being broken to make a fire for
breakfast, but when I wandered into the cubicle that served
as a kitchen, with a flue for an open fire, I noticed a pot of
greens just coming to a boil. There was a can of Danish crab
bisque on a shelf, and I was told that this was to be the sister's
friend's dinner. When the pot boiled the manioc leaves were
taken out and pounded together with hot peppers and leeks in
172
a mortar made from an up-ended log, with a pestle about the
size of an oar. These Ingredients were again cooked slightly and
mixed with palm oil. There was nothing else to eat in the
kitchen, not even fruit, and I was glad when Epis said she was
ready to go.
We walked slowly up the road, and I noticed that my colour
was attracting very much attention. This became more pro-
nounced when I offered to carry Epis's daughter (homesick for
my own), and the child, after riding on my hip and staring at
me deeply with her grey-green eyes, suddenly began to cry,
"Papa! Papa!" using the Italian inflexion. I asked Epis if it did
her reputation any good to be seen with me here, at this sus-
picious hour of the morning.
She took her child back. "I don't care what they say. I am
free, that's all. I have to work and I got my daughter. So if we
have a place to stay that's all I care. I tell you, that's like that/ 5
"Is that all you want? What about the child's father? Won't
you see him again?" We were coming into a main road now
and several hundred people were going in our direction, on
their way to work.
Epis looked straight ahead, expressionless. "No, I would not
go with him now. He is nothing to me. Not if he gave me two
thousand francs. Fuuiii!"
Two thousand francs were just forty dollars, and I wondered
why she was so specific about the amount.
"That's all right," she continued, relenting. "He wasn't a
bad man. He send money sometimes. Then he forget. I don't
care, just so I am free."
We were coming towards the highway, where there was a
bus-stop. There were now over a thousand people before and
behind us. Many of these were women, carrying bundles on
their heads for the market.
I asked about her other children. "Two are dead/' she said
173
unemotionally. "He's got one. The boy. He will put him in the
school, I think now in Ruanda. I take the girl. We have what
we need. Only, I just want . . ."
She turned suddenly to me. "There is that boy who run
away last night. If you like to go in the taxi back to the hotel
you just call him. Maybe you don't like us with you. That's all
right, I tell you," she said, not too sincerely, looking longingly
at the taxi. We hailed it and got in.
As she and her daughter were going to the market to buy
some fruit before she went to work (she had no regular sched-
ules for meals; her day was like a clock without a face) I said
that I would drop them off. Epis spent some time lecturing the
unrepentant taxi-driver, and finally sat back in the seat with a
sigh as we sped into town.
"What was it you said you wanted, back there on the road?
You said you had all you needed, only . . ."
She nodded. "That's just that,'* she said, looking boldly out
at the poor people who could not afford the bus to work, let
alone a taxi. "We got to get up very early. And then at night,
lots of times we walk home. One hour two hours, sometimes,
when I carry Ann. Nunuf Hapana-pana" Ann was sweetly
pulling the stuffing out of the back seat.
"Yes?"
"I saved something, just in four months. Maybe later, next
year we will have one. You can pay a little, and then some
every month. I have to work, so that's all right, I tell you. We
have the house, a hundred and fifty francs a month and I forget
how much the water. That's right, then we will be free all the
time. I tell you. Nuniif Hapana-pana" Ann was wetly kissing
my cheek.
We were in town now and coming around by the far side of
the market. "But what do you want?" I said, impatiently.
Epis picked up the handkerchief tied at four ends which she
174
used as a purse and prepared to get out of the car. She dragged
her amorous daughter out of my lap. "A bicycle/' she said,
quickly. '
I went, that afternoon, to citi Beige to visit Father Rommens,
a parish priest. I heard that he had been stationed here and in
other parts of the Congo for a long time, and a trip to his
parish offered a pleasant walk to the Tshopo Falls. On the way
out I passed several neighbourhoods that looked like cribs, in
the old Southern sense, except that the women lived in thatched
mud huts. I believe there wasn't anything official or even semi-
official about the district. It was a natural outgrowth of what
the Father spoke of several moments later, when I arrived at
his parish house.
"You see, there is a kind of slavery left here, 59 he said, puffing
on a curved Flemish pipe. "It's not all stamped out yet. The
women are slaves that's about all it is, slavery. Especially the
women of the evolues, or whatever you want to call them."
Father Rommens paused and offered me a cold drink. He was
a good-looking grey-haired man, just on the far side of middle-
age, but lean and active,
"It works like this. A man goes out in the bush or the forest
to a tribe, perhaps his own. There he arranges to purchase a
wife. He pays very little just a trifle to her family. Then she
comes with him, say here to Stanleyville. Well, your evolui
makes a great deal of money by her standards. (And starting
next year they will have equal pay with Belgian workers.) But
he doesn't tell her what he makes. He gives her just enough
money to buy food for herself and her children, when she has
them.
"For fifteen or twenty years she works for him, for nothing
. . . she and any number of others, whatever he can. afford.
Sometimes she can save enough out of the house money to go
*75
back to her parents. That's what she dreams of. But she must
leave her children behind. They are his property."
Father Rommens stood up and went to the window, where
he knocked his pipe out on the sill His parish house was
built right on the Tshopo River ? and was mostly sur-
rounded by high cane and grass. There was a small lawn
to the front.
"That doesn't make the women very moral, you know," he
said, sadly, but with no particular rancour. "Money to them
means freedom, that's all. They are right, there. Marriages like
that are just slavery,, you see. And, most of the time, the only
reason the men get legally married at all is to get the allocation
familiak. That means about seventy-five francs a month to
t }} em sometimes more." He sighed and came back to his seat.
"L y homme est toujours Ulre, Fm afraid. But what is bad is that
the women are slaves."
He pointed out that he was speaking generally. There were
many exceptions. I asked if he found the members of his parish
to be individually different from the members of a European
parish. He shook his head, again sadly. "I wish they were.
There are just about as many Christians here as in Europe, if
that's what you mean. They are better than some of the people
in &/ European countries and worse, maybe, than some of the
people in gwwf European countries." He seemed pleased to have
avoided a ten-letter word beginning with T/ "Some are very
good and some, Fm afraid, are not." Father Rommens heaved
a great sigh and quickly refilled his pipe.
"Sometimes it's not even the Christians who are fine. But we
try. We have only had trouble with two of the Command-
ments," he said, with fixed optimism. "The first and the sixth.
The first is not so badly broken, now. I really think we've
got graven images under control But.. ." He frowned and blew
out a great cloud of smoke. ". . . the sixth. Sometimes I think
176
it's hopeless." Then he brightened somewhat. "Even the
Protestants can't handle that one/'
When I returned to the hotel I began thinking of Epis. I had
promised to drop by the Cafe des Sports to pay her the money
I owed her, as I hadn't had change this morning. She made no
nonsense about not accepting the fee she was very glad to do
so. I was going to add something more for her hospitality and
leave it at that. I would find someone else to show me around.
She was just too serious and self-centred for me to handle, if I
was going to handle anything else.
The trouble was that I already knew Epis. I had recognized
her as soon as she began to speak. She was my grandmother.
Possibly she was yours, too. She had just the proud, awkward,
noble bearing of an ancestor, brought to indignant life from
the bottom of a chest in the attic. In their photographs such
women wear high-necked, ruffled dresses and they have a cool,
indomitable beauty.
"You wouldn't believe it to look at her/ 5 the descendant
says, turning the pages of the album, "but by the time she was
twenty -five she was supporting seven children with her pastry-
cooking while she put herself through college. She was really
a remarkable woman." It comes as no great surprise, then, to
learn that at the age of sixteen, when she and her husband went
to the Yukon, she killed a savage Kodiak bear with a kitchen
knife. One also expects to hear that she was dead-set against
profanity and alcohol, and that people complimented her right
up to the day she died on her tiny feet.
Though these women often attain awesome respectability
they do not hesitate to defy convention. They may brave the
jeers of the crowd in picket lines or uphold the right to free
love, if not the practice. Their chief qualities are strength
and courage, and what they want most in the world what
they will have if it kills them is freedom. They want to be
177
emancipated, with honour, and a country that has a few millions
of them, as the United States had at the close of the last century,
is headed for revolution. I went to the hotel desk and checked
out, leaving my bag behind. If only Epis hadn't mentioned
that bicycle . . .
On the Avenue du Marche the cha-cha-cha was going full
blast. Epis noticed me the moment I entered the cafe, but I had
to go through the elaborate ritual of greeting. I sat at the end
of the bar and looked around, keeping her always in the corner
of my eye. She seemed to ignore me completely, even when her
work brought her to within a few feet of me. Then, just as I
was getting impatient and was about to call her, she appeared
beside me holding out her hand. I shook it.
"Are you well, sir? I think you probably don't come. My
daughter ask and I say he probably stay away. Will you like
a Stanor?"
I nodded and she left again. Ann was wandering around the
room, looking for something to eat, to take apart or to be fond
of. She came to me and put her arm around my leg. "Papa/'
she said, contentedly.
When Epis returned, I explained my plan, quite certain that
she would agree. I hadn't much money left, but if she could put
me up, charging what the hotel charged, and worked for me
from time to time as a guide and translator, she would have
earned enough in the few days before my boat left to buy a
bicycle.
"What does one cost, by the way?"
"Two thousand francs," she said quickly, wheels gleaming
in her eyes.
I told her that I had seen a very high English lady's bicycle
for considerably less than that, though it was a bit old-
fashioned.
"That isn't a good kind," she said, wiping the bar nervously.
Two thousand francs was about what she would have, but it
did seem silly for her not to keep something aside, if she could,
and I advised her to get the English one. Also, I thought she
would look splendidly Edwardian on one, but Epis understood
such antiquarian sentimentality no more than my grandmother
would have.
She was desperate. She stared past me towards the vacant lot
across the street. When you long for something really yearn
for it it is better not to have it at all than to have an inferior
substitute. She shook her head, stubbornly. "I cannot do that,
sir. The Belgian bicycle is what I must have." She paused and
added, ". . . because if it is broken I always have the pieces to
put into it. But not if it is English, sir. Then I have no pieces.
That is the truth, I tell you." There was silence, while she
searched for a better argument. At last she nodded quickly and
said, "I tell you, everyone in Stan got the Belgian bicycle. So if
I sold it, it would have to be Belgian or no one would buy. You
see that? It's like money in the bank!"
This clinched it for both of us. It is better to have good
reasons for doing what you intend to do anyway. She told me
to come back at closing time and returned to her work, main-
taining, probably with difficulty, an air of total indifference.
That night we went to another cabaret, after leaving Ann
with Epis's sister. This time we were alone. The place was like
an old-time frontier dance-hall. We might have been in Chey-
enne or Albuquerque in the yo's, if one can imagine those
places made still more raucous by electric guitars. Here there
was a live orchestra which sometimes played along with the
records, sometimes against them and sometimes alone. Among
the instruments was an old piano, its wires prepared with bits
of string, pencil and tape. There were also some horns, and
some drums tuned like a harpsichord.
179
Frequently the music was as good as anything you may find
in the States. Once or twice it was much better. But I heard
another band like this some time later in Leopoldville and the
music in each case was generally not up to good American jazz,
simply because it lacked coherence. The individual perform-
ances were expert and sometimes amazing, but after a few
minutes the group would coast on its own momentum. What
they wanted was a conscious tradition, and in this they
were like all the other extm-coutumier people I had seen* They
seemed to lack any organization or purpose.
The dance floor it was all dance floor and people even
danced outside was packed so tight you could hardly move.
Thousands of bottles of Stanor and Primus were being shoved
across the bar at the rear, and here I saw a pair of demure
mulatto whores seated at a tiny table fanning themselves with
snakeskin purses. They were dressed in identical skirts and
boleros cut from a material of stars and sickle moons and other
appropriately celestial motives, and they were exquisitely
bored. Standing at the bar was a young woman who would
have answered to the name of Lil in any dance-hall on earth.
She was jet black, dressed entirely in white organdie, and wore
a giant rhinestone butterfly clipped into her hair at the back
of the head.
Seeing her, I must have made some move to rise because
Epis put a hand on my arm and said, "No. I don't do that, I
think. You would not be wise. I tell you, that's like that. She is
a friend of a very big man.'* It wasn't clear whether she meant
big physically or big with influence, but there was a note of
urgency in her voice and I sat down.
Epis herself wore her usual wash-dress, but this gave her a
certain distinction. Any person out for the evening who can
look poised and splendid in a threadbare rag, with no cosmetic
or ornament, may safely go anywhere in the world smart
1 80
people gather to intimidate each other. She could have managed
as well on Manhattan's East Side or in Mayfair. Epis had a
number of friends of both sexes milling around the cabaret, but
she seemed not particularly close to any of them. When they
broke into laughter she would look away and wait for them to
stop.
We danced once or twice, but I decided, at last, to give
up this form of entertainment, being too far outclassed. The
people here took to dancing with a seriousness and a devotion
which few other races of the world can know anything about.
It was not wild, ever, and even the most uninhabited drunks
applied themselves to the intricate movements with miraculous
severity and control. Everyone worked at it. Dancing was less
a thing to enjoy than to live, and when a squad of soldiers came
in they barely paused to order a few bottles of Primus before
they got up to dance, each alone, staring down at clumsy boots
as they caught on to the music and grew light as the ringing
air.
At last Epis leaned over to me and said, "You like to go, I
think." That was exactly what I had been thinking, and I was
surprised that she was so observant of me. She rose quietly and
walked towards the door, holding her fine head a good six
feet high.
We stumbled home down a rutted road, occasionally lit
by a clouded moon. I asked Epis if she intended, ever, to get
married and saw her nod quickly. She had evidently thought
about this before.
"Oh yes, I think I will. That's right. Only, I tell you some-
thing, I got to see him first. " She turned to me and I could just
make out her face as she put one finger to her eye. "You believe
me. I tell you, I got to see him. I got to know what he like.
That's all. I got to see him very, very good before I marry him,
I tell you. That's just like that. I don't stay in the house when
181
he goes out, no sir, I don't do that, I don't got to be grateful if
he give me a bite to eat, you see.
"I don't mind to work. Only it is hard to have children,
that's all, when you got to work. Then you want a husband/ 5
She guided me past a ditch. "There are good ones and bad ones,
I tell yon. I don't want the one who think he own me just
because we married. I got to see him first, before I marry him.
That's all."
Just before we reached home she reminded me again, in case
my new status had caused me to forget, that she did not expect
to occupy the pallet with me. I protested my innocence, but
she seemed not to notice it (chiefly, as I saw with some shock,
because it had ceased to exist). She fell into a long silence and
then, just before her door she turned and said, "I will have it
on the back, I think."
"What on the back?"
"The chair for my daughter, sir. I can have it on the front or
the back, but the back is best."
"Are you speaking of your bicycle? 5 * I said, a bit dryly.
"Yes, sir. On the back is best." We went in.
That night the heavy cats ran up and down the roof and I
didn't sleep at all well
The next day Epis had a half happy-day, so that we were
able to avoid the great crowds going to work in the early morn-
ing. After that first rush Mangolo remained fairly quiet. Even
the wife-beater had apparently gone for a walk. As Epis and
Ann and I walked towards the bus she told me how she had
come down from Uganda with her sister. This was a bit con-
fusing because apparently the word 'sister* meant to her any
female relative of approximately her age. It was not the sister
/ knew but another she had come with. Also, her family had
not looked on European borders with the proper gravity, and
182
often did not know whether they had been living in British
or Belgian territory. However, Epis had gone six years to a
British Protestant school and had come out neither very British
nor very much of a Christian, though in every other way
excellent.
She had been here in Stanleyville a little more than a year,
she said, and had been ill for a while. This was after the birth
and death of her last child. She had come into the Congo with
her daughter because she had relatives here and because she
had heard that one could earn a living. In the beginning she had
been afraid, especially during one terrible period when she had
been left alone and had been continually sick.
"Not to work I wasn't afraid," she said, "only to be sick.
That is very bad. I tell you."
While checking my bag at the hotel I had taken with me
Colette's La Vagabonds. I took it from my pocket now and
read,
Vivre seule, on s*en tire y on s^y fait; mats languir seule etfievreuse,
tousser dans la nuh interminable, attelndre y sur des Janets defaillants,
lafenetre aux vitres battues de pluie^ puis revenir a une couche froissee
et molle, settle, seule, seule! . . .
Epis's French was better than mine, but Colette isn't always
easy and she took the book from my hands and had me point
out the passage to her. Ann had wandered into a ditch and a
great red sun was beating down on the scraped earth of
Mangobo.
At last she looked up. "How he know that?'*
I explained that Colette was a woman.
"How he know that," Epis went on, paying no attention.
"That's the truth, I tell you. Just like that. When you sick then
you just can't be alone. I tell you, sir. That's just the truth!"
It is a consistent fault of young people to believe that no one
in the world has ever learned anything but themselves. The
183
circumstances of Epis's upbringing and education made her
even more provincial in this respect. I read her other parts of
the book, there in the merciless sun, not to further her know-
Iedge 3 merely indignant that she should think she was the only
person in the world who had ever felt different from her
fellows.
But then I began to realize that in this story of a woman
freeing herself from domestic slavery fifty years ago in France,
Epis saw herself quite clearly; and that it was probably written
more for her than for me. She especially liked the description
of marriage as, l noue-tnoi ma cravate, prepare-moi un lavement^
veille a ma cotelette^ mils ma mauvalse humeur et mes trakisom?
She borrowed the book and stuffed it in her handkerchief
before she went to pull Ann out of a puddle of mud-
Late that morning we went down to the last of the Stanley
Falls, just to the east of town. Here the Wagenia fisheries stand
below the rapids as Stanley first saw them, after his harrow-
ing ride from Vinya-Njara. We had bought some fruit in the
market and, in a picnic mood, had hired a dugout canoe to take
us across to an island in the boiling river. Epis sat in front, very
straight and tall, looking particularly ancestral. I, too, felt the
generations drop away. She should have been wearing a large
hat and a veil and I badly wanted muttonchop whiskers. Our
boatman, however,, an emphatically coutumier member of the
Wagenia Tribe, was a few hundred years behind us and grim-
aced fearfully through filed teeth because Epis had knocked
down his fare by half.
Later we returned to town, as she had to go to work at noon.
To pass a half-hour we went down to the river again and sat
on the wall before the Belgian Congo Bank. We stayed about
three or four feet apart as she didn't like us to be seen too much
together in white neighbourhoods. There was, of course, no
law against this, but it was a question of class to some extent
184
as well as colour. These things are so difficult to explain just
because they make so little sense. I believe Epis also did not
want the owner of her cafe to get word of our friendship.
That about describes the feeling we had for each other- We
had become rather close but not exactly as a man and a woman
in spite of my near-lapse the previous evening. That was
hardly to be wondered at. It is really quite difficult to sustain
libidinous feelings for one's grandmother, even when she is
young enough to be one's daughter. But we were close. We
had learned the habit of each other's thoughts and our conver-
sation had become a series of silences punctuated by remarks
which would make less than complete sense to others.
The river was a tawny red, and at this point about a mile
wide. It had the uncanny flatness of fresh water and today
insistently reminded me of American rivers. I remarked how
beautiful it was. Epis nodded absent-mindedly and I could
tell that she was thinking about herself. A few delicate fishing
birds floated in a porphyry sky. Ann was eating a liverwurst
sandwich.
"You know the ocean? 5 * Epis said, at last.
"Yes, pretty well. But I know more about rivers like this. 1 '
Two little wren-like birds with scarlet heads hopped on the
wall beside us.
"Where you live, people wear little tight dresses to bathe
themselves in the water, don't they?"
I said that they did.
Epis nodded. "Where you live does the ocean come into the
town?" She looked down at Ann. "Nunuf Usiwe mbaya! 9
"No but it's near by."
"How would I be if I went to your ocean in a little tight
dress? What do everybody think?"
"You would probably cause a riot," I said, sincerely, look-
ing at two faint, tattooed lines on her forehead.
185
"Ah, I know. You have big fights with African people,
don't you?"
I stared out at the flat, sombre river, "That wasn't exactly
the kind of riot I meant.*'
She looked at me curiously for a moment and then slid down
from the wall, adjusting her dress around her long legs. She
took up her handkerchief-purse and called her child. If Epis
didn't Immediately understand what one was saying she didn't
bother to pry. It was one of her most restful characteristics.
"I got to go now. You will pass me tonight? Ann! Njoo/"
That afternoon I bought a Congo colonist's magazine called
Pourquoi Pas? and settled at a table outside the Chutes Hotel
to read an article called M. Rosebud Decouvre Le Congo. It was
about an American who had risen above the handicap of his
name to become one of our nation's crack political reporters,
chiefly by making a good thing out of anti-colonialism. He
rode to fame on the backs of the poor colonists of Indonesia
and Indo-China and cynically took the part of the indigenes.
Now he was turning on the Congo.
Rosebud arrives with a bandolier of cameras slung across his
sports shirt, and his third wife, who clutches a box holding all
the jewels she hasn't been able to pile on her person. He is
irritated not to find an army of photographers but (Helas!} he
has forgotten to inform them of his arrival. At a dinner that
night Mme Rosebud Is In very bad humour because she has
been served in a perfume store near their hotel (6 horreur!} after
a Negress. Rosebud makes a particularly fuzzy-headed and
tasteless speech and asks questions about the Congolese parlia-
ment. This is awkward because he apparently is not aware that
there isn't any. He also asks what names the Republican and
Democratic parties have in the Congo and what is the native's
favourite comic strip.
186
Rosebud (his pink complexion comes either from drinking
whisky before his meals or milk during them) buys a copy of
Gunther's Inside Africa and goes off to see the country. He is
particularly worried about the strides Communism is making
in this land because he sees an ice cream called Sputnik and an
omelette mysteriously called Siberian. Flying home. Rosebud
notices that his wife is depressed.
"What are you thinking about, dear?"
"About that Negress who was served before I was. 3 '
"Bah! Don't give it another thought. Well take two weeks'
vacation at your sister's In Arkansas. You can be sure that
nothing like that will happen there!"
No doubt this is a wildly accurate description of some Wash-
ington reporter-columnist except for the part about his wife
not getting on all her jewels. But the interest of the piece lies in
the anger of the author, so out of proportion to the provoca-
tion. Or it would be out of proportion, if the character of
Rosebud were not supposed to represent the United States,
We are, for the moment, so enveloping that Belgians, as well
as many other Europeans, must have the feeling that we are
about to colonize them (Helas!}. Then they, in turn, would
become indigenes and would be forced to accept Mr Rosebud's
bumptious support.
I had been hoping to meet the owner of the Cafe des Sports^
and that evening the opportunity came. I arrived at about clos-
ing time to pick up Epis and found all the lights still on and a
Belgian policeman speaking to several of the patrons. There
was abnormal tension In the room the atmosphere of a com-
mand post before zero hour which became Incomprehensible
when I was told the reason for it. A number of boys had been
throwing stones at the windows. This, of course, is serious for
the one who has to pay for the windows. But in this case
nothing had actually been broken and the situation hardly
seemed to warrant the grim deportment of the Belgian officer,
or even, so trivial was the offence, his presence.
Epis kept as far away from these inquiries as possible and
went about her accounts as though no one were there. She
spoke only a word or two to me.
The owner of the cafe then appeared, a fat, infantine man of
about thirty-five. His face was charged with the helpless rage
of those whose natures are both limited and violent. One could
see that, for him, it was intolerable that the boys had not suc-
ceeded in breaking anything. Now he was left with his anger
and no place to spend it; he was suffering the pangs of frus-
trated hatred, which are worse than those of frustrated love.
At this moment, from the dark street, two African policemen
appeared, escorting three handcuffed boys. I had expected that
they would be teen-agers, but their combined ages didn't
reach that of any adult in the room. The youngest was eight,
maybe seven, the oldest no more than twelve. One frequently
says that boys of that age should be locked up and only half
in joke but it is at first ludicrous and then enraging to see it
actually done. Handcuffs pushed all the way up to the last
notch on unformed wrists are a great deal more degrading to
the policeman than the criminal.
The owner of the cafe stepped forward and hit one of the
boys so hard on the side of the head that he would have been
knocked down if he hadn't been chained to the others. The
child did not cry, and there was nothing frustrated about the
hatred in his eyes. The assailant's large and well-upholstered
mother had come out in the meantime and was looking on with
the brutal righteousness of those who normally feel themselves
to be inferior perhaps with reason. The scene was a little too
much, and I entered into an argument with the cafe owner and
was soon being closely questioned by the Belgian policeman.
188
This was a dry and schoolmasterish man, in no way cruel
or even unkind. Such people are especially useful in giving
maniacal situations the stamp of humdrum sanity. Looking at
the world through dun-coloured glasses they cannot tell blood
from dish-water. This otherwise normal man was going to put
three small children in jail all night, presumably without in-
forming their parents, because they had been accused, without
proof, of trying to do something not, in any case, very
serious that they hadn't succeeded in doing.
In fact he told me, with no sense of mental unbalance, that
the children would be perfectly safe in jail and that they would
be well-treated. There was a certain North-European hyper-
legality about this that was chilling. It seemed to occur to no
one that the boys should be soundly whipped and sent to bed.
In the midst of this disturbance, however, I began to be
aware that Epis wished desperately that I would shut my
mouth and leave. As there was nothing else to do anyway,
without landing in jail myself, I stepped away as the boys were
triumphantly led off and the cafe-owner and his mother went
back into their house.
Epis delivered the accounts to them, and a few moments
later we were walking down the dark street. I asked if she
hadn't been angered by what had happened, but she shrugged
and said it was none of her business. She was exclusively con-
cerned with her own affairs, and the one time I asked about her
political opinions she didn't even bother to answer.
The following days fell into a pattern. I would see Epis to
work in the morning and call for her at night. We knew each
other quite well, and knew that we might know each other
better, but did not make the effort. Again, this was more or less
the feeling of people who are compatibly related. Nothing
more.
Once, however, when Epis came to meet me in the European
189
quarter of town I saw her from a distance walking down the
street holding her daughter's hand, stopping to stare in win-
dows and moving aimlessly through busy crowds. It was dusk
and the two of them seemed especially forlorn and somehow
symbolic, like a shot from an old Charlie Chaplin film. But
making symbols of people is one way of withholding friend-
ship, no matter how much honour it does them. Epis would
surely not have appreciated it. She was too frail for such a
burden, though a great many mothers and their children have
been even more so. It is no comfort to remember that the
strongest people in the world those who undertake to repre-
sent human solidarity to us are not always the most robust.
Before I left, I saw Chief Sidanou. He was an old magistrate
in the cite Bruxelles^ and was considered the leading political
figure of the centres extra-coutumters of Stanleyville, perhaps
because he was about the only one. Belgian control of extra-
coutumier political life was nearly complete. There were chiefs
and native Consultative Councils, but these were hand-picked.
The Belgians argue that complete democracy would not only
be silly but disastrous and that is probably true. But there are
many degrees short of complete, and when they accuse the
Africans of being impatient they are, as the White Father's paper
Temps Nouveaux puts it, trying to break down an open door.
Chief Sidanou was personally as well as politically toothless
and his breath stank. He seemed a garrulous and mendacious
old man, but there were sparks of life in him. When I men-
tioned the three boys who had been arrested his eyes twinkled,
and he told me not to worry unduly about such things. I pro-
tested until I saw that he had not meant to be callous. He meant
that the administration's legal decisions were strongly tem-
pered in practice. I gathered that the boys had been sent home
the night they were arrested, to parental discipline a good deal
more severe and less eerie than anything they had expected.
190
As my boat was to leave on a Wednesday morning and I had
many last-minute things to do, I arranged to stay with Epis
only through Monday night. We spent that evening with her
sister and the burly young hospital-attendant until I grew bored
and suggested to Epis that we go for a walk. She seemed dis-
turbed and said, as soon as we were outside:
"I think you will cry when you leave, is that true?"
"You mean will I be sorry to go?"
"Yes."
"I may be sorry but I won't cry. It has been very pleasant,
here."
"All right. I will tell you something, Thomas. I like to talk
to you, that is true. But I don't mind that you go. If I have to
work and can be with my daughter I don't care. If I have the
bicycle I can sleep at morning and that is very good for me.
But . . ."
"Yes?" The moon had been shrinking the last few days and
I could not see her at all, walking beside me.
"It will rain tomorrow," she remarked.
"You were saying?" I stumbled in a rut.
Her voice came from just ahead of me. "When you go down
to Leo you will send me a telegram, I ask you that. From down
there. Just before you go away you send a telegram to me.
When I have it I won't think of you again. You see that? Just
a telegram when you go from Leo. That means you are gone*
I like to know."
It was the closest thing to sentiment I had ever heard from
her and I asked why.
"That's just like that. I don't mind. I just like to know when
you leave Leo. Then I don't think of you again, Thomas. You
see that?"
"Yes, I see," I said to the black night. "That is very kind."
She didn't answer, and I might have been absolutely alone
191
until I returned to the house, except that from time to time she
guided me. We found the sister's friend preparing to leave, and
as the kerosene in the lamp was drying out there was nothing
else for us all to do but go to bed.
One undertakes, writing of oneself, to hold to matters which
are likely to interest other people. If I therefore say that I
awoke that night to find Epis on my pallet, sobbing, it is my
duty to point out that she was not doing so because I was leav-
ing however flattering that would be to me but because
she was being left. It is bad enough to lose a friend, but gener-
ally one can bear it. Loneliness is quite another thing, and she
might have said with the grief of Colette's Rene Nere, "Tout
le monde me laisse! . . . Je suis toute seule! ..." For all I know,
that's what she was saying, in a language I didn't understand.
In any case, at such moments one becomes strangely imper-
sonal and does whatever one can to help.
I drew her close, and when my hands touched two lines of
erotic tattooing on her back she recoiled as though I were rub-
bing in an irritant, as her mother had done, a few years ago, to
bring the marks out.
"You will like a cup of tea?" she said the next morning. I
awoke and saw her standing over me, holding a steaming cup.
No breakfast was ever made here and I accepted this as a
special going-away present though Epis acted as distant and
as unconcerned as usual.
Though It was raining hard we made a final visit to a
bicycle-store. In the last few days we had gone to a number of
these but the machine she wanted had to be ordered. It had not
yet come and I gave her the money for it now, which she put at
the bottom of her handkerchief. Later that day, however, find-
ing that I hadn't enough for my ticket down-river and being
too late for the bank, I went to the Cafe des Sports and took
192
most of the money back again. Epis lent it with grace and with
only a momentary tremor of doubt.
That night we went to another cabaret, having nothing else
to do, and not wishing to be alone. She was looking even more
like grandmother Stanley than usual She seemed to be craning
her neck for a posed photograph, glancing out of the corner of
her eye at the man with the black cloth over his head. She sat
with her long, fine-boned hands folded in her lap, listening
calmly to the wild music. I had always wondered what had
been going on in my grandmother's mind as she sat there in her
stiff chair so many years ago, waiting for the shutter to click.
I looked again at Epis. She was thinking of her bicycle.
I saw her home in her friend's taxi and said good-bye at the
door, where she shook my hand. "Good night, Thomas. I see
you tomorrow, before you go." She turned and went into the
house.
I came to the Cafe des Sports the next morning, as soon as I
had been to the bank. It was about nine o'clock and my boat
left in an hour. Ann greeted me with a moist kiss, and Epis
nodded to me curtly, though there was no one else in the cafe.
She asked if I wanted anything to drink and I ordered a stout.
"So you leave me, eh?" she said, without a trace of coquetry.
We all deplore sentimentality in our friends, but are discon-
certed when they don't show it.
"Yes, Fm afraid so," I said, handing her the money I owed.
"Why you afraid?" She went to the record player and put
on a whitened stack of sambas and mambos and cha-cha-chas.
Looking up, I saw a little sign over the bar which read,
'Demain on loitpour rien* evidently a reply to those who asked
for credit. We spoke casually for a while and at last I got up
and started to say good-bye.
Epis anticipated me and came around the bar. She held out
her hand. "Good-bye, Thomas. I know I must say thank you
193
very much. I like you to remember me. Please, you will tele-
gram me from Leo that you go. Good-bye, Thomas." She
shook my hand as though I were a delegate to an insurance
convention and turned back to her work. I had now learned
enough to do the same, but it was difficult. I walked out of the
cafe and went up the street, looking back only once.
194
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TANLEY didn't stop at the site of his city on his first trip
down. It became a terminal later, when steamers began to
ply the Congo. From the foot of Stanley Falls all the way to
Stanley Pool, where Leopoldville is now situated, there is an
unobstructed stretch of river nearly a thousand miles long.
The present trip takes only five days in a steamer, but even the
very first stern-wheelers could make it in a little over a week.
It took Stanley's party almost a month and a half to travel this
route, though they were obstructed only by the men who
lived along it.
In this consistent, armed opposition the savages were being
merely prescient. If someone had succeeded in picking Stanley
off, literally millions of people would have been given an
indefinite reprieve from the most appalling deaths imaginable
during the next thirty years. Furthermore, if the struggle for
power in the Congo had come a few years later, England,
France, Germany and Egypt would probably have divided it
between themselves. Then the King of the Belgians would
never have acquired this vast land as a private park and, for
a great many, the reprieve would have become a pardon.
Speaking actuarially, therefore, it's a pity someone didn't get
Stanley.
He was saved by his luck as well as by his courage and skill
From Nyangwe to the bottom of Stanley Falls he had fought
twenty-one times with hostile tribes along the river. From the
present site of Stanleyville to the mouth of the Aruwimi River,
a distance of about a hundred miles, they endured eight more
195
battles, and once Frank Pocock, game as ever, was almost
skewered on a spear-blade.
The party had only forty-three guns left, pitifully Inade-
quate to repel thousands of warriors attacking in mass. They
were probably saved as much by the noise of their gunfire as
by its effect. They had also collected sixty-five great shields
which the women, children and non-combatants held up as
bulwarks along their canoes.
But their secret weapon was Stanley himself. He held them
firmly together and sometimes would turn his guns on his
own men and threaten to fire when they were ready to scatter.
He also knew, more than any of them, the logic of despair.
When there was nothing else to do but fight he fought with
all his heart; it was useless to retreat. Probably none of the
others, European or African, had begun life in the black
mental misery he had known, unlightened by hope or even
fantasy. Over and over again in his later life Henry Stanley
collected indemnities on the lacerated spirit of young John
Rowland.
The constant fighting wearied and embittered Stanley's
men. They often had no more than three hours of peace a day.
What was also maddening, the river offered clear sailing and
they should have been able, riding with the current, to make
hundreds of miles a week. On i February 1877, at the con-
fluence of the Arawimi, they were attacked once more by a
great fleet of war-canoes. There were fifty-four of these mon-
strous boats and each one carried eighty oarsmen and had a
bow-platform crowded with warriors.
Stanley managed to drive them off, mostly because of
superior discipline. Then he turned around and attacked their
village which contained a temple made of ivory and an idol
painted with bright vermilion camwood. They sacked the
town, taking away wedges for splitting logs, war-horns,
196
pestles for pounding food, armlets, and mallets to beat fig-bark
Into cloth, all fashioned of ivory.
Stanley returned to this district ten years later, in 1887, on
his way to rescue Emm Pasha. He went up the Aruwimi and
established a base camp about sixty miles north of what was
already known as Stanley Falls Station, and would one day be
Stanleyville. On this expedition he forswore both debauched
seamen and clean-living youngsters and took along a group of
army officers and gentlemen. He went from his base camp, up
the Aruwimi and across to Lake Albert on the border of
present-day Uganda, leaving behind half his force to follow
at a slower pace. This rear column was placed under the com-
mand of Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, of the Seventh
Fusiliers. As assistants, the major had William Bonny, an army
surgeon, and Mr James S. Jameson, who had travelled in
Mashonaland and Matabeleland studying birds.
Tippu Tib had promised them extra porters for their vast
supplies, though Stanley was sceptical and advised Barttelot to
come ahead in relays if the porters didn't show up in a reason-
able time. This, of course, required further palavers down at
the Falls with the old slave trader, whom Stanley had made
governor of the district before he left.
The Arabs were well established on this part of the river
now and had brought along, as usual, all the amenities of home.
The trouble was that some of these amenities were exceedingly
rare in the major's home; the traditional role of the English-
woman being less temptress than goad. Barttelot felt duty-
bound, therefore, to make every effort to get the porters
Tippu Tib had promised, even though it meant months of
delay and a great many trips to the Falls Station.
The months stretched to a year and the conscientious major
never did get started. He was shot, at last, by a native, for no
197
very good reason, though the argument appeared to have
something to do with the native's wife. No doubt Tippu Tib
was actively responsible for this delay, both by withholding
porters and putting the venereal facilities of his Station at
Barttelot's disposal He was flatly opposed to any further
European penetration of his district.
Of course the major was an old campaigner and he shouldn't
have been held up for zyear, so it is likely that his dalliance
merely contributed to a fatal relaxation of discipline as any
Englishwoman could have told him. In a year the base camp
lost about three-quarters of its supplies and half its men,
without ever moving from the spot. It was probably here, or
somewhere near Stanley Falls, that Kurtz, in Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, lived. He enjoyed the pleasures of being a God, not
a rake, but the end was so similar fpr both men they might
have been trying for the same prize.
Tippu Tib had probably tried this ruse on Stanley, with
disappointing results. The Arabs at Tabora had done the job
better with food. How was Tippu to know, after all, that the
only woman in Stanley's life was to be a respectable English
girl named Dorothy? With her he would spend his declining
years at Furze Hill, his estate at Pirbright, thirty miles from
London. There he would pretend that his fields, a wood, a
quiet lake fed by a little stream, were places he knew in Africa.
He called the lake Stanley Pool and the wood the Aruwimi
Forest; the stream, of course, was the Congo. No African
Arab, however wily, would offer, or would ever think to
offer, this.
As a result of Barttelot's splendidly military defeat, Stanley
had to come all the way back from Lake Albert through
hundreds of miles of dense jungle where food was almost
impossible to find, to rescue what was left of his own rear
column. It took him three months to reach his base camp,
198
after meeting, and then leaving, Emin Pasha. He found the
camp in the charge of William Bonny, who seemed less fond
than the others of soldierly excursions to the Falls. Jameson,
the bird-watcher, was there at the moment.
In this final expedition Stanley was once again searching for
someone, and as he describes that search some of the old excite-
ment of the Livingstone expedition comes back to him. To
celebrate his success with the Pasha he carried five bottles of
champagne wrapped in old stockings.
In spite of his Arabian Nights name Emin Pasha was a
handsome, studious German Jew from Silesia born Eduard
Schnitzer. On graduating from medical school at the age of
twenty-four, he went to Albania and had a love-affair with
the Turkish Governor's wife. This, for some reason, endeared
him to the Governor who gave him a series of important posts
in the Near East. Following these, he was stationed in Trieste,
then Cairo and Khartoum. He wandered about Africa for a
number of years, becoming a legendary figure, elegantly
bearded, wearing a fez and the gold-rimmed lozenge-glasses
of a scholar. He was at last appointed Governor of Equatoria
in the Sudan by General Charles Gordon.
When Gordon was killed in Khartoum by the Mahdi's
dervishes in 1885, Equatoria was cut off from the civilized
world, and a cry went up, especially in Britain, to save the
solitary and mysterious man who controlled the last vestiges
of European power in the Sudan. Stanley was chosen as his
deliverer and once again set out to rescue a man who didn't
really want to be rescued.
At the end, after going back across the Aruwimi Forest in
the winter of 1888 with the remnants of his rear-column,
Stanley dragged Emin Pasha and six hundred of his followers
to safety practically at gun-point. The two men were not each
other's cups of tea or even champagne.
199
To placate the Pasha on the overland trip south, past Lake
Victoria, into Tanganyika and so to Zanzibar, Stanley appointed
him naturalist and meteorologist of the Expedition. This was an
astute move. Emin was passionately scientific and set about
stuffing birds and collecting insects, preferring their company
to Stanley's. The latter had outgrown his father-finding pro-
clivities and simply loathed his guest.
He delivered Emin and his little half-Abyssinian daughter
Ferida to the German authorities at Bagamoyo, opposite
Zanzibar, and then looked on in disgust as a banquet was
organized, champagne toasts were drunk, the Pasha got
blind and fell off a roof, and the object of three years' back-
breaking work and physical horrors nearly died of a fractured
skull.
These events were all seminal, as was practically every
incident involving Europeans in Africa during the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. Emin Pasha's dislike of Stanley
caused him to go to work for the Germans instead of the
British in the scramble for East Africa. Two years later, when
Lord Lugard was trying to sign a treaty with the Kabaka of
Uganda, he found himself hard-pressed by Emin and other
representatives of the expanding German Empire as well as
by the French.
It is a testament to the superb eccentricity of a good Eng-
lish education 1 that Lugard was unwilling to open one of the
Pasha's private letters which may have had a crucial bearing
on his work, but he did not hesitate to open fire on the French
Catholic party of Uganda when they opposed his assumption
of power. Of course, they were about to fire on him, and the
Wa-Ingleza and the Wa-Fransa, as they were called by the
1 At this very moment, Sir Alfred Moloney, Governor of Lagos on the Guinea
coast called the white man's grave was demonstrating his own regard for the
important things of life by publishing an article entitled 'Butterflies and Moths of
Yoruba/
200
natives of that country, had been doing this sort of thing
regularly since the battle of Hastings.
The affair caused a fuss in France, though, because Lugard's
decisive weapon was a Maxim automatic and it seemed to the
logical French mind too much of a coincidence that it should
just be there without the connivance of the British Govern-
ment. Nor did they care for the explanation that Stanley had
dragged this gun into the centre of the continent on his way
to rescue Erain Pasha. Clearly Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy was
involved, even if Stanley was an American, which no one be-
lieved for a minute.
But these events came at the end of Stanley's career in
Africa. In 1877, when he was going down the Congo for the
first time, he was thirty-six years old and at the height of his
powers. This was fortunate for him; probably no one else
in the world, and not even he a few years later, could have
managed it.
Aside from the physical hardship involved, his position
itself was enormously dispiriting. He was nearly certain, for
instance, that he was on the Congo. This meant that he could
calculate with fair accuracy the minimum distance he would
have to travel to that river's known mouth. On February 3
their latitude north of the Equator was i 29' and their longi-
tude was about 23 east, so that even if the river went straight
southwest towards its mouth they could not have less than a
thousand miles to go. But they were headed nortkwtst,
Also, they were approximately one thousand five hundred
feet above sea level; that meant one thousand five hundred
feet of falls, somewhere. He could only hope that these would
come all at once, so that he could get them over with. It was
like being given a choice between fifteen or twenty ordinary
201
accidents and one big-smash up. He had little hope of coming
out alive in any case.
In the meantime, they were harried by warlike, hungry
savages. He wrote:
Livingstone called floating down the Lualaba a foolhardy feat.
So it has proved, indeed, and I pen these lines with half a feeling
that they will never be read by any man; still, as we persist in floating
down according to our destiny, I persist in writing, leaving events
to an all-gracious Providence. Day and night we are stunned with
the dreadful drumming which announces our arrival and presence
on their waters. Either bank is equally powerful. To go from the
right bank to the left bank is like jumping from the frying-pan into
the fire. As we row down amongst these islands, between the savage
countries on either side of us, it may well be said that we are
'running the gauntlet/
At last, on 8 February 1877, Stanley's party was driven by
want of food to force their friendship on one of the tribes., at
the risk of becoming a source of food themselves- They offered
so many shiny gifts and conducted themselves so peacefully
that they were allowed to contract blood-brotherhood with
the chief, who then sold them supplies. They asked the name of
the river. "Ikutuya Kongo/ 7 ' the chief said. Stanley now knew
past all doubt where he was going if he could make it.
At this place, also, the party discovered that there were four
ancient Portuguese muskets. For hundreds of years these guns
had been coming up-river by means of trade and war. The men
were delighted to see them because it proved that the river led
to civilization. They forgot that this was a mixed blessing;
from here on more and more of the natives were armed, obey-
ing the rule that says that men become deadlier as they grow
less savage. As yet, none of their enemy had got past the
fifteenth century and their weapons discharged slugs of metal
which would not penetrate their shield-bulwarks except at
close range.
202
On February 18 they were on the Equator again, just below
the present city of Coquilhatville. They were headed due
southwest at last, having travelled in a great loop through
eight degrees of equatorial longitude and six of latitude, or
roughly the distance from Budapest to London via Copen-
hagen. They hadn't eaten since the loth and were starving.
Just below the Equator, at the confluence of the Ubangi River,
they bought food from two drunken chiefs. From here they
drifted down in comparative peace. The Expedition stopped
nine days in a friendly village to recuperate, then continued,
arriving at a great lake in the river on March 12, which Frank
dutifully suggested be named Stanley Pool.
In these days motor-ferries scoot across this plain of water
from Leopoldville to Brazzaville and back, joining Belgian
and French Africa. It is a natural site for cities, lying at the
lower end of the long, clear stretch of the river, above two
hundred miles of intermittent rapids between it and the sea.
Both ends of the navigable Congo, therefore, celebrate Stanley.
Nearly three months later and only one hundred miles farther
down-river, Frank Pocock was to have a pool of his own, and a
suitable woodcut in Stanley's book reading,
203
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
T the Stanleyville dock there were many African women
waving good-bye to their friends with festive handker-
chiefs. I stood at the rail of the boat for a while and then went
to my cabin, very much resenting the knowledge that I would
not see Epis again.
Towards evening familiar night odours began to rise off
the river, and the green forests on the shore filled with shadow.
We were now travelling almost due west and the sun went
down in the water, leaving a bright orange stain which faded
off near the boat in metallic blues. There were twists of silver
clouds in the sky, like the tortured paths of worms in old
wood, and violet banks of rain piled up on the horizon. Then
there seemed to be a radio chattering deep in the jungle and
some boys called to each other across the water.
At this point the language of the Congo changes from
Swahili to Lingala, roughly dividing the eastern half of Central
Africa from the west. Both are Bantu, but the former is strongly
modified by Arabic and its name is derived from a word mean-
ing coasts, as it originated near Zanzibar and Mombasa on the
east coast. It has now spread over a great part of Central
Africa and is one of the twelve major languages of the world.
Lately Swahili has shown signs of disintegration because it
is so badly spoken by Europeans; their numbers are insig-
nificant but they are economically powerful enough, still, to
enforce their own standards, good and bad. The same thing
would probably happen to modern English or French if the
situation were reversed.
This five-day journey down the Congo was a measure of
204
the enormous changes which have taken place here since
Stanley's time. It was as monotonous as an ocean voyage and
produced a lethargy which passed for rest. The interminable
forest slipped by, trees occasionally marked with river-traffic
signals. Safe channels in the river were indicated by buoys,
and now and then we passed an industrial town where self-
confident young evolues in beach shoes shifted our cargo with
the aid of giant cranes called les Titans Anversois. Sometimes
the smaller boats were lifted wholly out of the water by these
cranes so as to move their goods faster. Little tugs, operated
by rakishly nautical crews of Africans, roared back and forth
across the river. Here, also, one began to see dug-outs powered
by outboard motors.
In the small towns along the river there seemed to be less
racial tension than in the cities, maybe because of the many
Portuguese living in them. These people are more at home
in Africa than any other Europeans. They are industrious,
prosperous traders and they carry racial tolerance to its logical
conclusion which is, as racists never tire repeating as though it
were an argument against it, miscegenation.
In Bumba, for instance, a couple of hundred miles down
from Stanleyville, one may see white women with coloured
children; this is not unheard-of elsewhere, but the surprising
thing about it here is that the women are so conventional
the sort who go to bed in cotton nightgowns and consider talk
about sex and psychiatry to be in bad taste, I saw one woman,
who looked as though she made wonderful pies, dividing
chocolate between her two sons. The boys had evidently had
different fathers, one white and one black, but they displayed
no more than the usual amount of sibling rivalry.
Often the river broadened into a lake, patched with islands,
black as rubbed ebony, reflecting trees. And when the sun
set, the forest seemed curtained with green velvet, like a
205
tremendous theatre. There were occasional, lonely villages on
the island shores with fishing pirogues drawn up, and women
lounging in doorways. It was like Louisiana tayou country,
heavy with vegetation and silent with life.
Though the forest was usually a solid mass near the water's
edge, there were clearings behind, in which one could occasion-
ally see patches of orange flowers. The sky, except at sunrise
and sunset, was pearl grey and looked like the underside of a
huge bird's wing. Our toat pushed stolidly through the water,
hour after hour, and the river gathered in wrinkles behind us
like the skin of hot milk.
From time to time, towards evening., we were besieged by
butterflies, especially where the river was very broad and
unobstructed by islands. They were trapped by the night
winds and blown too far out over the water to make land. For
some of them the boat was a haven and they would drop
exhausted to the deck, flexing their tattered beige-and-black
wings. But for every one that found temporary safety, hun-
dreds more fell into the water. This was particularly agonizing
when they flew to us with all their strength and fell short, a few
inches from the deck's edge. They dropped behind, struggling
to rise, as the engine pounded on to the rhythm of a cha-cha-
cha.
I remembered one day in Stanleyville, waiting for Epis
before a hotel It was very hot and as she wasn't due to come for
another tea or fifteen minutes I ducked inside. The place had a
cabaret for Europeans, and as it was then about n a.m. the
bar was deserted and the little stage looked like an unmade
bed.
To the rear a man was playing Mozart on a grand piano, and
just before the open door of the veranda another man rehearsed
passages on a guitar. They were Europeans and had the un-
mistakable air of professional entertainers. A well-built woman
206
in black slacks, plump with approaching middle-age, finished a
tomato-juice cocktail at the bar and strolled over to them, if
one can be said to stroll in bedroom slippers. Clearly she was
used to high, silver heels.
The three of them gathered round the piano and discussed
an arrangement. They had the child-like sweetness of people
who stay up all night and sleep all morning. They also looked a
little strained, probably from too much dieting, not all of it
voluntary.
There are hundreds of these people, perhaps thousands, in
Southern Asia, the Middle East and in Africa. They have no
particular nationality and no hope for one. They are dancers,
musicians, acrobats, clowns and torch-singers. They worry
about their costumes, their weight, their bookings and notices,
and above all their health. They hold hands at motion
pictures in the early afternoons and give each other surprises
of fruit and sometimes candy. They seldom drink or even
smoke and they live together, two, three, and four in a hotel
room, often sleeping in the same bed to save money and lying
with arms curled round each other, chaste as babies. They are
very like butterflies and most of them fall into the water.
Our boat was called the Baron Lielrechts, a name which
seemed familiar. Unlike the middle-class boarding-house that
churned down the Lualaba, this diesel monster recalled a
second-rate hotel Not third, second. It was thoroughly Bel-
gian and operated with great efficiency. It had only first-
class cabins and luxe first-class cabins, which meant that the
first was really second. It also had a great barge lashed to its
flat bow which contained other, lower classes, for Africans.
This was owned by an African concessionaire who paid the
shipping company a fee for the privilege of tying on.
That didn't mean that Africans were barred from the
207
Baron Liebrechts. A Portuguese man with two extremely
dark children was travelling luxe. The classic Anglo-Saxon
approach to the matter, which we define as separate-but-equal,
is replaced in other parts of Europe by a simpler philosophy
of economic-togetherness. It is as brutally superior to our
method as their metric system to foot-yard measurement,
replacing illogical with logical discrimination.
However, most of the passengers were Belgian. Many of
these, especially the younger ones, resembled Americans and
wore brush-cut blonde hair and tropical shirts. I think the
similarity was mostly external; older men tended to be more
formal and to look as though they were working in banks
or shipping offices, even when they were eating. The women
were softer and more permissive than Americans, and dressed
in quiet bad taste. This made some of them attractive, but
others merely looked as though they had been drinking
bechamel
At table people followed the north European practice of
buttering a whole slice of bread and cutting it in half to make a
little sandwich. These were always micrometrically neat, and
were consumed in great quantities* Two priests opposite me
went through ten slices of bread in a few seconds, using
them as soppers. They were both good men and looked like
old Flemish portraits, but one felt that the most difficult thing
about joining their order would not be taking a vow of celi-
bacy but enduring three times a day the official licentiousness
of the refectory.
One of these men had a great, broad face, a cast in one eye
and a white goatee. He was going home to Holland after
twenty-six years in the Congo because his spine had begun to
decalcify. He said that when he reached the coast he would
take a very slow boat back. He felt that he was going to his
death. But it was not only at table he was valiant. He smoked
208
smelly cigars, gleefully read an obscene book, and went every
morning before breakfast to the African barge to hold
mass.
His companion was an older man, not, I believe, a simple
priest, and was travelling luxe. The Dutchman teased him
about this and promised to stop only if the other bought him a
bottle of wine. He hadn't any right to do this, as the old fellow
was the head of a group of schools with a total registration of
over fourteen thousand and his position and years of service
gave him the right to such a simple luxury. He was much
disturbed, however, and spent several sleepless nights on his
extra-comfortable bed before he paid up.
On board I got to know a Belgian psychiatrist and his wife.
Dr Vyncke was on his way to a psychiatric congress in Brazza-
ville. He was a fat man, getting fatter, and wore an uneven,
tooth-brush moustache that begged to be straightened, like a
picture on a wall. He had charge of a mental hospital, or
department of a hospital, in Usumbura. The doctor was
thoroughly devoted to his work and consequently neglected
his wife. She was inclined to be a nervous woman, anyway,
and was easily driven to drink.
All of us, except for the very good and very evil, seem
ridiculous when viewed dispassionately, so I must add that Dr
and Mme Vyncke are my firm friends. If he neglects her she
isn't unable to see the reason for it or above reminding him
of it sharply from time to time. She sometimes suffers, but a
great many tortured men and women benefit from that; and if
enough people in the world are well-shod it is often worth
being a shoemaker's child or even his wife.
Mme Vyncke sometimes sat with me while the doctor
pored over his Psychoses et nevroses en Afrique centrale* which
he was going to present to the congress. She herself came from
South Africa and spoke English, though after many years
209
here some of it was beginning to go. As she explained, it had
been tinged with French from the beginning., as that was her
mother's nationality.
"I met my husband in a psychiatric hospital," she said one
afternoon., running her finger round the rim of her glass.
"That's where I worked too, during the war. Now we are here
ever since, in the Congo. He likes work very much here.
Can you see? I mean he studies, studies,, studies and I never get
to see him any more, and now in a few years even my children
will grow up. Then they will go away/' Mme Vyncke took
up a fresh cigarette with slightly trembling fingers and glanced
across the bar, near which her husband was sitting silently, at a
table full of papers. He looked wonderfully like a psychiatrist.
"I sent them ... my children ... to the inter-racial school
at Usumbura, but I had to take them out. You see, when they
have a vacation time, the black children go to very poor homes
where they all sleep in one room and there they learn too much
about some things. Then they come back and tell my children
and there are just some things I don't want them to know yet."
She sighed and called for another jigger-bottle of Johnnie
Walker.
"Aad now 111 tell you. I was ashamed to keep them in that
school because, you see, they were always behind, Oh, they
are not stupid boys, believe me, but those black ones are
picked" Mme Vyncke glanced at me with watery defiance. "I
mean., only the smartest ones go there out of maybe five
million. What chance have my boys got? They were always
last. The others said they held everyone back. Maybe they
could have studied harder, maybe it was good for them that's
what my husband says but I took them out anyway."
She leaned towards me and lowered her voice. "Once my
child said to his friend, *J*ai soif,' you know, Tm thirsty,'
and the other boy said, 'Why don't you go home and suck your
210
mother's . . .' You see what I mean? God knows what else he's
told him. Not that my boy didn't know that, but you just
don't talk that way, do you?" She sat back and emptied her
glass. "The trouble with that school is that you learn too
much. Have you finished your beer? Have another one with
me, and then I can have some more* God, it's hard to be a
good mother in Africa."
A few rounds later Dr Vyncke packed up his papers and
joined us. He had the disconcerting frankness of a man who has
spent too many hours in the consulting-room ever to treat
personal matters personally again. "She has been telling you
her troubles?" he said, settling into a chair. "She says I work
too much and neglect her, I know. I tell her I can't help doing
my work the best way I know how. There's just too much of
it. She ought to have something to do, I say, but she can't be
a nurse any more because of the children. She tried painting
once and gave that up and she won't do social work for some
reason."
"No I won't," Mme Vyncke said, stubbornly, twisting her
glass on the table.
The doctor sent her down to their state-room to get some
books. He wasn't being peremptory, merely kind. She really
liked to do things and was feeling lost, away from her home.
"She says she wants to go back to South Africa but I don't
think she'd be able to get along there any more. Things have
changed. Will you have another bottle of beer?"
I had been keeping up with Mme Vyncke and had to refuse.
"You must not misunderstand," he said, signalling to the waiter.
"It isn't always as bad down there as people say it is. I am
Flemish but I'm not talking like an Afrikaaner now, believe
me. After all, Africans still slip into that country clandestinely,
for the higher wages. No place is ever all good or all
bad."
211
The doctor gave his order. "You should see this from the
African point of view as well as the European. Do yon think
that they notice as much difference between South Africa and
the Congo, for instance, as we do? Some of them, of course.
The evotues are more or less accepted here, though perhaps they
pay for that in other ways mental stability, for one thing.
You see, when it conies to racial discrimination there is only
one European country in Africa that doesn't practise it. That is
Portugal Ml the rest of us do, even when we say we don't,
and all of us are heading for trouble/ 1
His beer came and he drank off half his glass at once, after
which he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. "Speaking
as a doctor, I can tell you there is only one solution to this
problem miscegenation. It's the simplest, safest, most reliable
way to reconcile men to each other that was ever invented
it was the first and it will be the last. When people of different
races intermarry they do away with mass neuroses and settle
down to individual ones." He smiled triumphantly, his
spectacles gleaming purple in the late afternoon light.
"And I can tell you that the individual psychoses here are
just exactly what you will find in Europe and in America, of
course," he added hastily, as though afraid of offending me.
"So that husbands and wives in mixed marriages will have
exactly the same battles they have everywhere else,"
Dr Vyncke beamed, managing to look like a mad scientist
crossed with Oliver Hardy. He finished off his beer. "I must
lend you my book. I'm going to present it to the congress. It
may cause quite a flurry. People used to say that Africans didn't
ever have true schizophrenia. Imagine! Fve got some really
classic cases. And manic depressives too, of course/' he added,
proudly.
Mme Vyncke came back and sat quietly at the other side
of the table. The doctor glanced at her professionally, then
212
ordered a drink for everyone. He began to speak of a trip he
and Ms wife had taken to the United States, for another con-
gress. Several times he referred to coloured Americans as
'natives/ When I corrected him he explained that he hadn't
wanted to use the word 'Negro,' because, in Africa, it is not
considered polite. Both he and Mme Vyncke appeared to have
been terrified by America and still half-believed it to be a
savage country. Many times, while they were there, they had
longed for the safety and civilization of Usumbura.
To begin with, they had had a cold reception in New York
when they arrived with a Belgian professor friend at the St
Regis Hotel wearing rucksacks. Fortunately they had reserva-
tions and got safely to their rooms. Then they put on street
clothes and went to what had been described to them as a real
French restaurant in the west Fifties. Having completed that
ordeal they came out into the street and the men of the party
were accosted by a lady of the evening. Dr Vyncke's objection
here was that they were approached in mixed company. He
had been in Africa since the early 30*5 and was used to more
conservative behaviour.
In New York, also, which they had really expected to be
quite civilized, they saw a man being choked in the street
a native, as it happened. " Tm getting cold, I'm getting cold,*
the man said. At least I think he said that," the doctor added.
"I wanted to help but the friend we were with an American
told us to come away. I didn't know. I thought perhaps that
happened all the time and we were in danger, you see. Other-
wise . . ."
The Vynckes then went out in the bush, to Detroit. There
two men asked the doctor for a hand-out and when he didn't
give it to them they threatened to beat him up. "I ran. Just ran
up the street, you know. It wasn't really very dignified. I saw
a policeman and went to him, but he did nothing." He paused.
213
"The men just walked away. I expect they were desperate for
money," he added, charitably.
But the couple's nerve was beginning to give, and in a
middle-western state they had been told was dry (after learning
with wonder that there were states that were wet) they went
into a cafe and found the patrons blind-drunk,, half of them
lying on the floor in their own filth. That did it, and as soon as
the congress was over they ran back to the Congo. Speaking
of the drunks in the dry cafe, Dr Vyncke said, trying to draw
a medical moral, "Probably they were people without social
roots, like our evolues* They seemed to lack emotional
stability."
That evening I took a copy of Psychoses et nevroses en
Afrique centrale to bed with me. Most psychiatric case-histories
have a family likeness. Obs. No. 43-6 Bernadette age thirty
years, might just as well have been made in Poland or France
as in Ruanda-Urundi. Bernadette had been abandoned by her
husband at the time of a new infant's death, leaving her desti-
tute with five other children. Her mother and father had also
died, some time before. "All of them killed by God," the girl
said, lapsing into prayer. "God pardon me, what have I done?
Now God is silent he is going to judge me. God took my
child and he had committed no sin. When I am dead I can rest
a little. He will take my heart and close my nostrils." No doubt
that is a case of melancholia, but it is anybody's.
The more serious histories, the schizophrenic and paranoic
psychoses, are so often beyond our ken that they at first seem
less touching than odd. A boy named Dahana killed his
mother because she reproached him for being lazy. When he
was arrested the authorities asked:
"Have you any brothers?"
"I had, but they all disappeared when they were young.
214
We slept together, and the next morning I found the bed
empty/'
"What was that tree you were speaking about?"
'That was my mother, my real mother, who begot me with
my father and he is my size and my age."
"Who brought you before the judge?"
"Those who want to eat. But I no longer know any of
them."
" Those who want to eat/ What does that mean?"
"Evidently the husband of the woman who is my father."
It is probable that he is deadly serious and that the world he
lives in has even more agonies than ours.
But the most interesting cases are just a little sick, like the
rest of us. They are sometimes so familiar that we would swear
they weren't sick at all. For instance, a man of forty-five named
Bid said, "I never throw off my clothes and I never insult
anyone, my intelligence is normal. My neighbours treat me as
though Fm mad but the doctor will show them it is not so.
The only sickness, which I have during the month of Ramadan,
is that I sometimes see my mother's ghost, who wishes to kill
me . . ." (at the sight of her he would run through the forest
shouting senseless words) ". . . but now I am completely
normal."
There was also a poor man who was treated for a minor
ailment by his native doctor. Shortly after, he began to feel
intense pains in his back and chest and at last jumped out of his
bed and, for three days without stopping, ran screaming
through the forest. Then he returned home and went to bed
but couldn't sleep. So he called for medical help again and the
doctor prepared the same medicine he'd given him the last
time. The sick man had a sudden stroke of common-sense and
jumped out of bed, and tried to kill the healer. Then he went
back to sleep and woke up feeling fine.
215
These men stood well within the border of sanity, as did the
man whose second wife said she would put something in his
food to make him impotent and did. (Cure: narco-suggestion
You are not impotent.) Also uninhibitedly sane was the
woman who ran a cabaret in a centre extra-coutumier. She had
cashed a counterfeit thousand-franc note for a customer and
when he was finally arrested her right hand, with which she had
counted out the change, began to dance for joy. (Diagnosis:
conversion-hysteria.)
And one final case, perhaps more typically African than the
others, is really only an example of robust refusal to adjust to
dementia. A mentally ill man committed a crime and was put in
jail. He escaped, was captured again, and escaped again. In a
short while he had broken out of every major prison in the
Congo, in spite of handcuffs and strait-jackets and solitary
cells. He was at last shipped to Dr Vyncke's clinic as hopeless.
There he was given an unlocked room and stayed docilely until
he could be cured.
Europeans and inhabitants of the centres extra-coutumiers
appear to be most frequently afflicted by mental diseases, and
both for the same reason because they have been uprooted.
Dr Vyncke is severely impartial in his clinic and keeps black,
white, cases of worms and malaria, cases of anxiety-reaction
and depression, all together in the main waiting-room. Looking
around, you never know if your neighbour has liver trouble
or if he is just crazy.
At Coquilhatville I got off to mail a letter. It is a large town,
though smaller than Stanleyville. It used to be called Equator
Station and, as the name suggests, is terribly hot. I wandered
around for a while^ liking the place very much for a certain
dreary, incomplete urbanity a quality it shares with Stanley-
ville. Unable to find the post office, and seeing no European, I
216
walked up to a wonderfully barbaric man with bright orange
polish on his toenails and the lithe stance of a warrior or a
basketball player and said, "Oi est laposte^ sil vous plait?"
He smiled, "Je ne sais pas, msieu. Je suis etr anger icL"
He suggested that it might be down a certain road which
seemed to be the main one, and there I found it. "When I came
back to the boat I found the Dutch priest on deck speaking to
the psychiatrist in Flemish.
Vyncke turned to me at last. "We were talking about the old
days. I was telling him that I once had the complete records of a
station here on the Congo, before 1909, you know. But there
were orders from the government to burn them, so I did. Fm
sorry now; I suppose they would be very valuable."
The doctor didn't mean that he could get money for them,
though perhaps he could. He meant simply that there are few
sources of information covering the period of the Congo Free
State any more. Their scarcity is deliberate, though some
reports have slipped through the net.
I turned and looked at the bridge of our boat as the warning
whistle blew, remembering, at last, who Baron Liebrechts was.
As we edged out into the current the water churned up behind
us, red as crude-oil. A man on the wharf was selling spear-
heads stamped directly out of sheet-steel in curious flat, bar-
oque designs. The baron was one of the King of Belgium's
three principal Congo secretaries at the turn of the century.
The name Liebrechts, therefore, is ignominiously tied to that of
one of the greatest monsters to have lived.
217
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
i LDERLY people in Europe still remember the days when
Hi Leopold II was called the King of Maxim's, and when the
Mediterranean coast of France, particularly at Cap Ferrat, was
largely supported by his munificence. Most of us now do not
like to think too ill of such a person, as many didn't in those
days. He was an old reprobate a skirt-chaser; a clever
financier; a cynical, sophisticated, handsome, vigorous man
with a great, big, beautiful beard and a healthy, sensual
appetite. We live too greyly these days to do without at least
the memory of such a frank hedonist.
Also, we are tempted to feel that a man who has so many
obvious vices is fundamentally at peace with the world and
therefore needs to be no worse than he seems. He liked women
and he was tremendously rich; it seems to us grandly nine-
teenth-century that he should combine the one with the other.
So his memory is protected, along with the era in which he
lived, in a swathing of sentiment born of our small frustrations.
That's as it should be, surely, if that were all But on the day
people begin to refer to Hermann Goering as an incor-
rigible old rascal, someone in the name of all the decent
scoundrels and reprobates in the world should bring up the
facts.
In September 1876, three and a half months before Stanley
and Tippu Tib parted on the Lualaba, Leopold II called to-
gether representatives of various nations for a conference on
Africa deceptively named Conference Geographique de Bruxelles.
From this was created the 'African International Association 5
which was vaguely committed to establish bases in that con-
218
tlnent to help explorers on their lonely way, and to fight
slavery.
At this distance Leopold II looks extremely embarrassed as
an abolitionist. In his lifetime he induced by the most brutal
methods imaginable about twenty million people to work for
him almost without wages, and when he died in 1909, from five
to eight millions of them had preceded him unnaturally,
In comparison, it is refreshing to hear a man like Lord
Lugard say in 1895 and this is from the lion's mouth "It is
essential to bear in mind that this annexation of Africa by the
white races was no outcome of missionary or philanthropic
zeal. It was the natural outflow of the nations of Europe into
the waste places of the earth, following the law which has
guided and, indeed, formed the history of the earth . . . Settlers
driven to seek their fortunes in new Colonies ... do not
embark for Africa with the primary object of benefiting the
natives, but of benefiting themselves . . ."
If the air at the Brussels Conference had been cleared by a
statement like that no doubt a great many lives would have
been saved. As it was, Leopold was able to control the Associa-
tion by playing off the rivalries of each participating nation,
while hiding his own ambitions under the guise of sweet
philanthropy.
When Stanley returned, triumphant, in January 1878 he was
met at Marseilles by a representative of the Belgian king, and
in June of that year he agreed to return to the Congo as agent
for the Comite d* Etudes du Haul-Congo^ another euphemistic
organization, designed to attract venture capital for Leopold's
schemes. Stanley headed an expedition from the west coast of
Africa this time. He established Leopoldville at Stanley Pool
and made treaties with all the natives he could find farther up
the river.
The Comite Etudes du Haul-Congo dissolved in turn and
219
became the 'Congo International Association/ This was get-
ting closer. All Leopold had to do now was to persuade people
to drop the words International' and 'Association.' He could
not, of course, have aspired to anything like that if the great
powers around him hadn't agreed that he should.
They did so precisely because he was politically weak and
could be expected to hold the territory neutral while they
fought it out among themselves. At a conference in Berlin in
1885 the International Association was confirmed sovereign of
the Congo basin and Leopold, who owned the Associations
was made King of the Congo Free State a name which had
not yet acquired a grisly irony. He was the first ruler of that
land since the seventeenth century, when the four-hundred-
year-old Bakongo Empire dissolved. The delegates to the Con-
ference were near tears as they contemplated the 'humane and
civilizing work of His Majesty the King of the Belgians/ One
by one they delivered panegyrics and encomiums on this awful
sovereign,
Leopold had control of the Congo at last but he couldn't
begin to consolidate his realm until it was cleared of Arabs. He
was very much beholden to the European powers in the begin-
ning and needed their approval. Therefore he took up the
cause of anti-slavery, an acceptable tactic, even a laudable one
if one discounts the Arab point of view, and a rudimentary
respect for honesty. On the strength of his crusade, and of his
promise to will them the Congo after his death, the Belgian
Government gave him a twenty-five million franc, interest-
free loan; it was followed by another six and a quarter million
francs a few years later.
The anti-slavery societies of Britain and France (the latter
guided by Cardinal Lavigerie, founder of the White Fathers)
had Become the spearheads of Colonialism in their two
countries, for the most part unintentionally. The governments
220
simply found them convenient for whipping up sentiment, and
Leopold's use of them was similar, but with a new twist. If the
anti-slavery, anti-alcohol groups could be enlisted on his side
he knew they would fight off their own governments for him
and confirm him in a position which was still very shaky.
He was successful at this. But he was one man, not a nation
and could not practise the saving deceit that comes naturally to
large political bodies. In Britain and France foreign policy
might make use of anti-slavery sentiment, but this sentiment
remained as a constant check to any individual's ambition. As
Leopold's critics later pointed out, when responsible public
opinion can be marshalled for or against a policy, that policy
has to be temperate. The king was his own law.
In 1886 the Stanley Falls Station, now Stanleyville, on the
upper Congo was attacked by Tippu Tib's men. His power had
increased enormously in recent years and he was acknowledged
as chief of all the Arabs and their forces in Africa. He saw the
purpose of all these conferences and committees and associa-
tions, if no one in Europe did, and this attack was his answer.
But things had not yet come to open warfare, and when
Stanley returned to the Congo once again in 1887 to rescue
Emin Pasha, and incidentally to strengthen the claims of the
Free State to land in the northeast, he was forced to make
Tippu Tib governor of Stanley Falls, under the King of
Belgium. This was a dangerously strategic position and Tippu
was subsequently replaced by a Belgian officer and a small
armed force, but by that time he had built up a great deal of
support in the district and continued to do so until the war.
In 1890 and 1891 the lines of battle were drawn. European
steamers could now go up the Congo from Leopoldville in the
southwest, to Stanleyville in the northeast. They could also go
southward down the River Kwa. Therefore the fighting would
surely take place in the Maniema country. The Arabs* objectives
221
were first to destroy the State forces and then the Stanley Falls
Station. From there they could come down the river to wipe
out the European garrison at Leopoldville and take over the
State themselves.
One speaks of Europeans and Arabs in this war, but both
sides fought almost exclusively with African auxiliaries. As most
of these were at least part-time cannibals a great many battles
were literally fought for food. The slain would be dragged off
and eaten. It was even worse to be captured. The men of the
Bangala tribe, for instance, had a tradition that game was
tenderer if it was allowed to suffer. This applied to all fauna,
including men. Three days before a war-prisoner or a slave was
to be eaten, his arms and legs were broken and he was placed
in a stream chin-deep, with his head tied to a stick to prevent
him from committing suicide or simply drowning.
The Europeans tried to control this in their camps, as prob-
ably the Arabs did also. But they couldn't stop their troops
from eating those slain in battle, and often they didn't want to.
There was not much else to eat, and this kind of scavenging
prevented epidemics.
The reason cannibalism was so widespread in the Congo
was hunger. Except in its symbolic, religious aspects it was
simply another one of the masks of poverty, as was savagery
itself. Such poverty may be borne by men in fairly well-
organized societies, where the rich are always ready to help
them bear it, but when people live in an untamed land, bat-
tered by wars, weather and disease, and when they are further
demoralized by the institution of slavery, then slavery itself
becomes an enormous temptation for them to turn on their
own natures, and to destroy their sense of identity with fellow-
beings. This is a sense man shares with most lower animals
and it is truly a frightful aberration when he loses it, as Euro-
peans have seen in the most recent war.
222
There were degrees of this. Eating a man who has died a
violent death in battle, even if that violence was your own, is
perhaps not as dreadful as it is unappetizing. But killing a slave
to cook (human flesh was never eaten raw) is dreadful, almost
as much for the eater as for the eaten. The next logical step
would be to roast your own hand.
There were children in the Congo who ate their aged
parents, and no doubt parents who ate their children. A great
many people, especially during wartime, thought of everyone
they saw as a possible dinner. On one occasion two members
of a squad of soldiers who were down with fever were cut up
and smoked by their companions, as provisions for a march.
And there were villages where everyone was young and
vigorous and able to defend himself. The old, the cripples and
the timid had been devoured, and it is terrible to think
how lonely, as well as frightened, the survivors must have
been.
This complete and conscious cannibalism, as distinguished
from battle-scavenging, occurred more frequently among
peoples with a high social development. Most Europeans
acquainted with the subject, including that wonderfully gar-
rulous old man, Trader Horn, agreed that cannibal villages
were cleaner, more orderly and a good deal pleasanter than
non-cannibal villages.
Captain Hinde, who was with the Belgian expedition of
Baron Dhanis during the Arab Wars, mentions that the
Maniema people seemed to be superior in everything but their
avowed cannibalism. They even had recipes for cooking
human flesh a heart chopped up with goat meat, or a hash
prepared with bananas. This meat had the advantage, they
said, of being a bit salty, so that no other condiment was
needed, and some grew so addicted to it that they would eat
nothing else. During the war Hinde found a volunteer
223
drummer-boy in a hut, with the half-consumed body of an
enemy at his side, dead from over-eating.
The war actually began when Congo Lutete, one of the
Arabs 5 most important African allies and a former protege of
Tippu Tib, lost an engagement with Baron Dhanis and decided
to change sides. The Arabs were enraged. They retaliated by
murdering several Europeans in the Maniema at the time, one
of whom was Emin Pasha, the man Stanley had gone to such
pains to rescue.
The Arabs then organized a large army, numbering about
ten thousand, armed with guns and swords, marched westward
from the Lualaba River to attack Baron Dhanis and a few
hundred troops. They were led by Tippu Tib's son, Sefu, and
they demanded, literally, Gongo Lutete's head. The Baron
brought along all of Gongo instead, with his men. Just before
a skirmish on the Lomani River, it rained, and the caps of the
Arab's guns were wet. Nearly helpless against the Europeans
and Lutete's people, they panicked and about three thousand of
them were killed. What was more important, the victors gained
many new allies.
Successive victories gave them still more strength, and at
last Commandant Dhanis felt able to attack Nyangwe, which
he took in March 1893. Here the Arabs practised a sort of germ
warfare by sending people with smallpox into their midst. A
short while later Dhanis marched against Tippu Tib's son at
Kasongo, up-river from Nyangwe, and captured the city im-
mediately. The Arabs had withdrawn all of their goods to this
town and the State troops slept on silk and satin mattresses and
rejoiced in shower baths and other luxuries they had nearly
forgotten.
In another battle, some months later, Sefu was killed and a
strong Arab force from Ujiji was routed. Tippu Tib himself
was apparently on his way back to Zanzibar at this time.
224
The war was now almost over and the Europeans, with their
usual thoroughness, executed their faithful ally, Congo Lutete,
for suspected disloyalty. This had repercussions among his
own people, who were without protection and therefore eli-
gible for anybody's pot. Probably the allies of the defeated
Arabs were in the same fix.
Surely, no Africans won that war. The two barely human
creatures who had started it were destined to live out their
nearly identical lifespans in egregious peace and luxury, one in
Zanzibar and one in Brussels. For all the difference it made in
their personal lives few could have noticed that Leopold II had
gained an empire and Tippu Tib had lost one.
Leopold probably meant hu rule of the Congo to be more
enlightened, though he clearly never intended putting it on the
rarefied moral plane his missionary supporters expected. Very
likely he said to himself that if the pious frauds in the world
were going around talking about the white man's burden he
could do the same and do it better. Why should they grab all
the choice plots with their hypocrisies?
For sixteen years, until his death in 1909, Leopold was as
piously fraudulent as any man has succeeded in being before or
since. He tirelessly rode the hobby of philanthropy, and when
accused of personal ambitions he was a model of wounded
dignity, and quickly got his side of the story to his supporters.
He was probably the first man to set up an information bureau,
on modern lines, to distribute misinformation.
His real trouble was money. Though the king was a rich
man, and had made a fortune in Suez Canal shares, he wasn't
rich enough for such an enormous undertaking. The Congo
could be expected to pay for itself in time, and possibly a good
deal extra. But, as France and England and Germany were dis-
covering, a large initial investment had to be made and had
225
to be supplemented for many years before a colony became
even self-supporting. These countries had the money to put
up, when pressed; Leopold hadn't. Therefore, when normal
methods of exploitation were insufficient the king resorted to
abnormal ones.
Reports of atrocities had begun to reach Europe from the
period directly following the Arab Wars, and as early as 1897
a recommendation was made in Britain's parliament for an
International Conference to discuss the administration of the
Congo. This was not necessarily presumptuous of the British,
as they were one of the fourteen signatory powers of the
Berlin Conference giving Leopold control of this territory,
and a review of his administration should have been
automatic.
Obviously the king was informed of this and any competent
ruler would have checked into the charges carefully, if only to
have the means to defend himself. There is now incontestable
evidence that organized atrocities occurred on a frightful scale
for at least fifteen years, and one must conclude that the King
of Belgium deliberately and coldly killed millions of people for
his personal profit. The Congo, at the beginning of his reign,
had about twenty million inhabitants. There are now a few
more than twelve million living there, seventy-five years
later.
When rumours about the misgovernment of the Congo
began to spread, missionary groups, both Protestant and
Catholic, jumped to defend Leopold. He may have foreseen
that they would prefer to spread the error themselves to facing
the truth. It was certainly sinful that these normally warring
factions of the Christian Church missed such a perfect chance
for disagreement.
Their odious concord persisted until 1903, though appalling
reports had been coming into the Home Executives of the
226
societies for years. In those early days only one religious man,
braving imprisonment, dared to confront Leopold's agents
in the Congo and Leopold himself. He was a Swede named
Sjoblom, and his courage and high spirit adorn his sect, which
was American Baptist.
As the Protestants had less stake in the Congo than the
Catholics, it is not surprising that they were the first to turn on
Leopold, though their protest came so late that it did them
little honour. The Catholics continued to support the king
until 1905, when the report of a Belgian Commission of
Inquiry was published and proved beyond all doubt that the
charges were true. "When one remembers that many Catholic
missionaries had been sending in regular reports of these hor-
rors for years, Roman timidity appears truly shameful.
Part of Leopold's success in perverting the Catholic Church
in the Congo for so long was due to his insistence that priests
sent there be Belgian. These were more subject to his control,
as were their home societies. When, in 1903, the British Prot-
estants began to reveal some of the things that were hap-
pening, Leopold suggested to the Roman Church that this was
simply a religious attack on them. And so, at last, the Christian
factions fell out just at the moment they should have been
falling in.
Leopold also charged that Britain was preparing to take over
the Congo. This may have been true. Surely it was so in 1908
and 1909. But the British were not the only ones spreading
these reports, though the king managed to keep most of the
others suppressed. French, Americans, Swiss, Danes and Ger-
mans had been saying the same things.
Even the Italians, a nation devoted neither to disinterested
philanthropy nor to Great Britain, had begun to make semi-
official protests. Of all the Europeans stationed in the Congo
Leopold had hired army officers of other nations for his own
227
service the Italians probably acted with the greatest personal
bravery and sense of honour. Captain Baccari, a navy surgeon
and royal Italian envoy to the Congo said that Italian officers in
Leopold's private army were persecuted because they couldn't
stomach what was going on. 'We have all the ghastly scenes of
the slave trade/ he wrote, 'the collar, the lash, and press-gang. 5
A young Italian lieutenant, who joined the king's army
without knowing the nature of his work, wrote:
The caravan road between Kasongo and Tanganyika is strewn
with corpses of carriers, exactly as in the time of the Arab slave
trade. The carriers, weakened, ill, insufficiently fed, fall literally
by hundreds; and in the evening, when there happens to be a little
wind, the odour of bodies in decomposition is everywhere notice-
able, to such an extent, indeed, that the Italian officers have given
it a name 'Maniema perfume/
The protests of these officers grew so strong that the Italian
Government was at last moved to forbid all further recruit-
ment, even among officers on the retired list. This should have
refuted Leopold's habitual defence, that all attacks against him
were made by sentimental grandmothers. No grandmothers on
earth can be so mordantly unsentimental as the Italian ones.
Stanley, who for a while worked devotedly for Leopold as
a sort of exalted publicist, called him a 'dreamer of dreams/
without ever mentioning what else he might dream. Leopold
had big plans. For one thing, he wanted to conquer the Sudan,
a land almost as vast as the Congo. He was nearly successful in
this and was only stopped by the mutiny of one of his armies.
He had little hope of keeping the Sudan, but he might have
presided over its division between France and England and
wrung concessions from both.
His real work was the Congo. A secret decree, dated 21 Sep-
tember 1891, was the turning-point of his policy. It laid down,
228
as the paramount duty of the officials of the Free State, the
collection of revenue. That wasn't exactly the way to start
a philanthropic enterprise and this violation of his mandate as
Head of State bore the seeds of the trouble to follow. The
decree was followed by a series of regulations forbidding the
natives to sell ivory and rubber to free European merchants and
threatening the latter with prosecution if they bought them.
With the market sewed up, the king's agents were instructed
to buy as cheaply as possible. A letter to Governor General
Wahis, dated 20 June 1892, coming from Leopold's Secretary
of State, offered up to fifty per cent bonus on the price of
rubber, gum, copal and ivory if government agents could
persuade natives to sell their goods at half-price. There was
also a sliding scale given, with the bonus growing smaller as
the cost of these articles went up. This was a direct incitement
to robbery and violence, especially as the salaries of the agents
were kept deliberately low.
But, so far, this was merely vicious commercial practice and
a great many people in the last few years of the nineteenth
century were doing the same.
Real trouble began when the Government's policies had the
opposite effect to what was intended. Coercive methods pro-
duced indifferent and even rebellious workers. This was par-
ticularly true with rubber collections. Natives reacted to the
lowered prices by adulterating the latex they brought in or
by openly resisting requisitions. There was simultaneously a
slump on the world rubber-market, and the Government, see-
ing revenues fall, demanded still more rubber at lower prices.
The pressure naturally increased as it descended the chain
of command. A letter from the Governor General to Com-
mandant Verstraeten in charge of the Rubi Welle zone read:
I close by advising you that the Government firmly hopes . . .
you will exhibit a fresh proof of your activity and devotion, by
229
making the district you command produce the maximum of re-
sources which can be drawn from it.
Commandant Verstraeten, who knew perfectly well what
was required of him, wrote to his subordinates:
I have the honour to inform you that from i Jan., 1899, you
must succeed in furnishing 4,000 kilos of rubber every month. To
this effect I give you carte blanche. You have, therefore, two months
in which to work your people. Employ gentleness first, and if they
persist in not accepting the imposition of the State employ force of
arms.
At still a lower level of command this became a licence to
murder. Armed bands of native troops were sent out to punish
rebellious tribes. The Government was, as usual, methodical
about this. They suspected, probably with reason, that the
African troops were going into the forest, firing off cartridges,
or, better yet, selling them, and coming back with tales of their
own valour. Most stations therefore established the policy that
expended bullets had to be accounted for by some part of the
body of the victim, usually the right hand.
The logic was faultless except that less and less rubber came
in and still greater pressure had to be applied as districts began
to lose their population. Also, hands began to grow scarce and
the troops turned on the women and small children. Roger
Casement, the British Consul whose report rocked Leopold's
empire at the end of 1903, collected photographs of little hands
and feet in the lake district just below the present site of
Coquilhatville.
These trophies were presumably taken from corpses, adults
and children, but many people survived handless. From the
Domalne de la Couronne^ Leopold's private fief within his own
state, Joseph Clark, an American, wrote in 1895:
The scenes I have witnessed while unable to help the oppressed
have been almost enough to make me wish I were dead. The soldiers
230
are themselves savages, some even cannibals, trained to use rifles
. . Imagine them returning from fighting .some rebels (?) see on
the bow of the canoe is a pole, and a bundle of something on it.
These are the hands (right hands) of sixteen warriors they have
slain. * Warriors !' Don't you see among them the hands of little
children and girls? I have seen them. I have seen where the trophy
has been cut off, while the poor heart beat strongly enough to
shoot the blood from the cut arteries at a distance of fully four feet.
At last, whole districts were almost deserted. In spite of the
fact that it had been made a crime to run away, death put the
workers out of the State's reach. Villages which once had
thousands of inhabitants were left with a pitiful few hundred
who were nevertheless expected to collect the rubber quota
assigned on the basis of the original population. The policy of
taking hostages was also established, so that a man could buy
back his wife or child only by collecting a specified amount of
rubber. These hostages were kept at Government stations in
miserable conditions and a great percentage of them died.
Mr E, J. Glave, a friend of Stanley's, published the following
account in the Century magazine in 1896:
In stations in charge of white men. Government officers, one sees
strings of poor, emaciated old women, some of them mere skeletons,
working from ten to six tramping about in gangs with a rope around
their necks and connected by a rope one and a half yards apart.
They are 'prisoners of war' . . . War has been waged all through the
district of the Equator, and thousands of people have been killed
and twenty-one heads were brought tq Stanley Falls, and have been
used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower-bed in front of
his house.
Sjoblom, the Swedish missionary, wrote:
If the rubber does not reach the full amount required the sentries
attack the natives. They kill some and bring the hands to the
Commissioner. That was about the time I saw the native killed
before my own eyes. The soldier said, "Don't take this to heart so
much, They kill us if we don't bring the rubber. The Commissioner
has promised us if we have plenty of hands he will shorten our
service/* [These were often smoked to preserve them until they
could be shown to the European officer.]
The Government stations wanted food for themselves as
well as rubber and would lay a tax on the district's remaining
inhabitants for it. So many chickens every week, so many kilos
of manioc flour, vegetables, etc- The State soldiers had already
despoiled the districts, however, and there was frequently no
food of any kind to be had. This was not accepted as an excuse
and the natives had to go many miles to buy articles, much
more luxurious than they would think of eating themselves, to
bring back to the stations* The demand naturally sent the prices
up, and frequently they could only pay by selling members
of their families into slavery, in order to save the rest.
There can be no doubt at all that the European officers were
aware of what was going on and that their superiors were also
aware. By 1905, when the official Commission of Inquiry con-
firmed the atrocities, a great many reports had come back to
Europe and were pressed on people of influence in Brussels,
who were urged to get to the king.
The generous assumption was that he knew nothing of what
was going on. But even after the report of the Commission of
Inquiry was issued greatly abridged the horrors continued
and even increased and Leopold worked with more diligence
to supress all reports from the Congo except those made by his
own agents. In the words of Sir Harry Johnston, an explorer
and advocate of colonial ventures in East Africa, he seemed,
"indurated against the terror of an immortality of bad renown/'
In 1905 an American named Kirby wrote;
The further away from publicity the greater the atrocities, I have
heard much. I could tell much, but you know enough. A white
232
officer forcing a native to drink from the water closet; shooting
down handcuffed men; the employment of fierce cannibal soldiers
that terrorise the people; shooting down twenty men to pay for a
lost dog.
Some of these white officers were in as much of a trap as the
natives. A man wasn't allowed to quit until his service was up
and, as an Italian Officer said, "If he Insists, and leaves his
station, he can he prosecuted for desertion, and, in any case,
will probably never get out of the country alive, for the routes
of communication, victualling stations, etc., are in the hands of
the Administration, and escape in a native canoe is out of the
question every native canoe, if its destination be not known
and its movements chronicled in advance from post to post, is
at once liable to be stopped, for the natives are not allowed to
move freely about the controlled water-ways/'
Nevertheless, human courage is, by definition, ready to rise
to occasions that demand it. A number of officers in Leopold's
army would not consent to follow the orders they were given.
Among these was Commandant Scardino who mulishly in-
sisted on running the district of Upoto in a business-like
manner, keeping taxes down to the point where people could
pay them and even lowering some in depressed areas. He also
refused to terrorize the population and displayed his incom-
petence to serve the State in many other refreshing ways.
Standing with him in spirit are a Belgian captain, a Danish
Lieutenant and a man called Dooms, who appears to have been
killed by a hippopotamus.
Since 1900 Leopold had been defending himself from the
growing number of attacks, especially in England, by pointing
out that before the Congo had started to be profitable no one
had said anything about atrocities and that people were trying
cynically to take his prize from him. It is even possible that his
indignation at other people's cynicism was genuine. He may
233
have begun to believe the stories his own press bureau was
spreading.
As in most controversies, the clamour of battle often
obscured the events. Only gradually did the facts come clear,
or nearly so. A number of people before 1905 some of them
obviously disinterested were ready to swear (and to have
their statements circulated by the king's press bureau) that
nothing at all unusual was happening in the Congo. One would
probably have to discount pronouncements by the king him-
self and his Governor General, Baron Wahis. There was also
a captain in Leopold's army named Guy Burrows whose
intrepid defence of his employer might easily have been in
the line of duty. Even Henry Stanley, though perfectly incor-
ruptible, is only muddling the issue when he comes to Leo-
pold's aid by saying that if these charges had any foundation
his majesty would have done something about them.
But there is other testimony less easy to discount that of
Mr Mohun, the American consul, Sir Harry Johnston (though
he had changed sides by 1903), Mr Grey, an English engineer
in Katanga, and the Reverend Verner, of the American Pres-
byterian Congo Mission, Mr Grey, for instance, said in the
Morning Post in January I9O3: 1
For myself, I am convinced that during these last two years, at least
in the Katanga districts, the European agents treated Central African
natives justly and kindly, whenever possible.
The Reverend Verner said, in January 1899, also in the
Morning Post:
I believe that the Congo administration is in general as well-
intentioned and active as the means at the disposition of the govern-
1 This, however, is a rough translation from the French, itself a translation from
English. I have taken this quotation in defence of the Congo Free State Administration,
and the other two which follow from a pro-Leopold book published in Brussels
in 1903 by J. Lebegue & Cie. Bringing out such a work at that time was a little like
praising Caesar in Rome and it is difficult to see why the author should have signed
himself, timidly, *a Belgian/
234
ment permit. There have evidently been some isolated cases of
reprehensible conduct and unpardonable methods used by govern-
ment officers . . . but I do not believe that the central administration
at Boma or at Brussels was the instigator of these acts.
And, most impressive of all, a certain Belgian Captain
Lemaire, a man whose support was claimed by both pro- and
anti-Leopold forces, says in The Times in 1901:
I am sceptical that there have been frequent and continual atroci-
ties in the Congo . . . Strict orders have been given to responsible
agents to inflict severe punishment for mistreatment of the natives
and these orders are regularly carried out, but who can restrain the
excesses of brute nature? All of the contracts with the natives,
whether Congolese or of other tribes, are subjected to minute
examination and often Europeans complain that the law shows more
solicitude for the natives than for the whites.
By 1905 the Commission of Inquiry had confirmed many
of the charges against Leopold, and the Belgian Parliament
was asking very embarrassing questions of its constitutional
sovereign. But the really damning report was made in 1903 by
Roger Casement, the British Consul In a sense, he was an
ideal person to undertake an investigation of a subject which
so deeply concerned the British. He was an ardent Irish
nationalist, and probably no other high official has identified
himself less with the government he represented. If his report
served British acquisitive interests it is only because it also
served the interests of humanity. Thirteen years later he proved
his lack of partiality for the British by opposing them in
Ireland so vigorously that he was hanged.
In view of Roger Casement's end, therefore, it would be
extremely difficult to throw any doubt on his Congo report,
which he presented to the government in London on n
December 1903. Furthermore, his observations are con-
firmed in his diaries which were long unavailable because they
235
contained such detailed revelations of his mauve love-life.
These reinforce his report, first because they were obviously
never intended to be published, and second because a man who
can invent his politics still cannot invent his sexual habits and
the two, in his diaries, are intertwined.
Unlike most other visitors to the Congo, Casement had a
great deal of previous experience there, going back as early as
1884. He had also worked for a while for the Free State and had
spent most of his subsequent life in Africa. He chose to in-
vestigate the Equator District, near present-day Coquilhat-
ville, because it was the most productive and because he had
visited the area in 1887.
One of the first things he noticed was the enormous popu-
lation decrease. Tribes which had numbered forty or fifty
thousand had shrunk to seven or eight thousand; villages which
had formerly held six thousand people were reduced to a few
hundred.
Casement took long statements from the natives wherever
he went. When one reads them now the voices blend, and it is
impossible to doubt that they are telling the truth.
"I ran away and left my mother and went with two old people
who were running away, but we were caught, and the old people
were killed, and the soldiers made me carry the baskets with the
things these dead people had and the hands they cut off ... They
got my little sister and killed her and threw her into a house and
set fire to the house . . ." Signed R. R.
After she had been a little while in the house with her little
brother and sister she heard the firing of guns. When she heard that
she took up her little sister and a big basket with a lot of native
money in it, but she could not manage both, so she left the basket
behind ... the little boy ran away by himself. S. S. was . . . trying
to make her sister walk, as she was very tired, but the little sister
could not run away through weakness. While they were standing
outside the soldiers came upon them and took them both. One of
236
the soldiers said: "We might keep them both. The little one is not
bad looking," but the others said: "No, we are not going to carry
her all the way, we must kill the younger girl." So they put a knife
through the child's stomach, and left the body lying there where
they had killed it ... At this town she found that they had caught
three people, and among them was a very old woman, and the can-
nibal soldiers asked C. D. to give them the old woman to eat and
C. D. told them to take her. Those soldiers took the woman and cut
her throat, and they divided her and ate her. S. S. saw all this
done . . . They cut the hands off those they had killed, and brought
them to C. D.; they spread out the hands in a row for C. D. to
see ... The hands they had cut off they left lying, because the
white man had seen them . . . S. S.'s mother was killed by soldiers,
and her father died of starvation, or rather he refused to eat because
he was bereaved of his wife and all the children. Signed S. S.
"Then my eldest sister called me: *U. U., come here.* I went.
She said: 'Let us run away because we have not anyone to take care
of us . . .* When we were going on the way they killed ten children,
because they were very small; they killed them in the water. Then
they killed a lot of people, and they cut off their hands and put
them into baskets and took them to the white man. He counted out
the hands 200 in all; they left the hands lying. The white man's
name was C. D. . . . On our way, when we were coming to P . . .,
the soldiers saw a little child, and when they went to kill it, the
child laughed, so the soldier took the butt of a gun and struck the
child with it, and then cut off its head. One day they killed my half-
sister and cut off her head, hands and feet because she had on rings.
Her name was Q. Q. Q." Signed U. U.
In trying to check these stories Casement interviewed the
chiefs of a great many villages, though the people often ran
away at his approach. The consul himself found a young man,
both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of
rifles against a tree and another boy of eleven or twelve whose
right hand was cut off at the wrist. Mutilation of hands had
never been a custom in the country and was surely imported
by the Europeans. The boy who lost his hand had been
237
wounded in a fight and said that while lying on the ground he
had been
perfectly sensible of the severing of his wrist, but lay still fearing
that if he moved he would be killed. In both these cases the
Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers
whose names were given to me.
Though these atrocities are all very similar, the repetition of
them adds a sickening dimension. There was a deliberate plan
behind it all.
The soldiers took prisoner all the men left in the town, and tied
them up. Their hands were tied very tight with native rope, and
they were tied up outside in the open; and as it was raining very
hard and they were in the rain all the time and all the night, their
hands swelled, because the thongs contracted. V. V.'s hands had
swollen terribly in the morning, and the thongs had cut into the
bone . . . The soldiers seeing this, and that the thongs had cut into
the bone, beat his hands against a tree with their rifles, and he was
released. The white man, T. U. . . . was drinking palm wine while
the soldiers beat his hands with their rifle butts against the tree.
His hands subsequently fell off ...
This old woman (whose name was V. W.) had fled with her son,
when he fell shot dead, and she herself fell down beside him she
supposed she fainted. She then felt her hand being cut off, but
made no sign. ... Of the fact of this mutilation and the causes
inducing it there can be no shadow of doubt. It was not a native
custom [before] it was the deliberate act of the soldiers of a
European administration, and these men themselves never made
any concealment that in committing these acts they were but obey-
ing the positive orders of their superiors.
This was nearly the first appearance in the world of a social
institution we have come to know as forced-labour. It is to the
twentieth century what slavery was to the nineteenth, and one
of the most interesting things about it was this psychotic pre-
occupation with hands, which are the labourer's basic tool.
238
What is more, the hands were lifted without regard to sex or
age matters of great importance during the era of slavery.
They were just working hands.
Policy in the Congo was made by Leopold and his gov-
ernors, never by the Belgian Government or by the Belgian
people. Since 1909 the administration of this land by the elected
government has been as exemplary as it was once infamous.
Opinion is nearly unanimous and anyone there can see for
himself that the Belgians run the country with great skill,
energy, and forbearance. They appear to be doing everything
possible to wipe out the memory of the Free State. It is sur-
prising, therefore, to see decent Belgians even today defend a
king who was himself of another nationality (he was a German?
related to both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert), and had
very little contact with this democratic, industrious little
country except to use it as a bank.
When Leopold got his twenty-five million francs from the
Belgian Government he probably never intended to fulfil his
part of the bargain and will the Congo to them. Soon after this,
for instance, he established the Domaine de la Couronne y an area
five times the size of Belgium, in the centre of the Congo; and
after long denying that it existed he sought to have his rights
there recognized as inalienable.
The king also divided the rest of the Congo into sections,
for the purpose of classifying revenue. One part he set aside to
pay administrative expenses, construct public works, etc. This
was called the Domaine PrivL Other parts vast tracts of land
to the south, the north and the far-east he leased to eight
Congo companies, or trusts, which had been floated on the
Belgian stock exchange and in which he had fifty per cent of
the shares.
Of these companies, three were gigantic. In six years his
2 39
Income from the ABIR Trust was estimated at nearly ten million
francs. In another company his shares alone were worth
thirty-two million francs. In still another, twelve and a half
million; and in this company he also took fifteen per cent of the
profits after they had reached a fixed point
But Leopold's greatest financial innovation was forced-
labour itself. This is essentially a method of levying taxes on
people who have nothing, and it has come about In our
century whenever large, undeveloped areas have been forced
to bear immediate fruit, or when retarded economies have been
brought suddenly into world competition. As the king
philanthropically put it, *Il leur faut soumettre ks populations
a des lots nouvdhs dont la plus imperieuse comme la plus satutalre
est assurement cetle du travail'
This forced-labour was most profitable when it was used to
cut rubber and it was therefore the rubber-producing areas that
were hardest hit. The Belgian Commission of Inquiry described
the process:
In the majority of cases he [the native] must, every fortnight, go
one or two days' journey, and sometimes more, to reach the place
in the forest where he can find in fair abundance the rubber vine.
There the gatherer passes some days in a miserable existence. . .
He must take his harvest to the station of the Government or the
company and it is only after that he returns to his village, where he
can barely reside two or three days before a new demand is upon
him.
A man had to devote about three hundred days a year paying
taxes in this manner.
This system is more efficient in many ways than slavery
because it becomes the worker's responsibility to feed and
house himself; it abstracts from him only his time and his
liberty. One wonders why it wasn't tried before. It depends to
a great extent on modern communications and on methods of
240
mass-extermination, and probably our world will see a great
deal more of it, now that we have become so proficient at
both.
The profits from the Congo were tremendous. In reporting
receipts and expenditures, the king confined himself to the
Domaine Prive and proudly showed, over fifteen years, a loss
of about one million seven hundred and fifty thousand francs
a year. This allowed him to claim, with royal modesty, 'con-
siderable personal sacrifice/
That was a He. Sales estimates on the Antwerp market
showed a net profit from the Domaine Prive alone of consider-
ably more than fifty million francs during that period. What
was more, in one decade the king was known to have taken
ninety million francs out of the Domaine de la Couronne.
When one adds the income from his company shares and the
value of the shares themselves plus his indebtedness to the
Belgian State, which reached two hundred and ninety-five
million francs by 1904 and admittedly yielded by reinvestment
another eighty million francs, one begins to have an idea of the
size of his fortune. What is more, all these figures were con-
servative, because nothing else could be proved. He surely
became one of the richest men in the world.
Perhaps feeling the weight of this he offered a thousand
pounds to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and, in
a royal manifesto dated June 1906, a year after the Belgian
Commission of Inquiry had made its report, he offered to
spend twelve thousand pounds to fight sleeping sickness.
If God gives me that satisfaction [victory over sleeping sickness]
I shall be able to present myself before His judgment-seat with the
credit of having performed one of the finest acts of the century,
and a legion of rescued beings will call down upon me His grace.
It is likely that a legion of beings was calling down on him
241
something a good deal more tangible than grace. Even the
Belgians themselves were beginning to be frightened as he
invested his profits in their land. As one commentator said,
when some of his domestic transactions were revealed, it looked
"as if King Leopold aimed at using the proceeds of the Congo
for turning Belgium into his private estate." At the same time,
he was putting money into other promising estates, San
Domingo, Bolivia, China and Persia.
Stanley was sincerely and typically dense when he chided a
British audience for a latent scepticism and lack of sentiment
towards Leopold and his projects. They could not, he told
them, "appreciate rightly, because there are no dividends
attached to it, this restless, ardent, vivifying and expansive
sentiment which seeks to extend civilizing influence among the
dark places of sad-browed Africa."
With all the respect one must have for Henry Stanley, it
really is a shame that good, kind, unassuming Frank Pocock
should have drowned below Stanley Pool while this well-
intentioned sentimentalist survived.
242
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TT was possibly during his journey to the sea from Stanley
1 Pool that the leaderof thefirst expedition to travel the length
of the Congo acquired the name Bula Maiari, which means
rock-breaker and, by modern extension, the Government
Along this stretch of water to the sea Stanley showed his usual
tenacity and resolve. He knew that he was only a few hun-
dred miles from the coast but the altitude measurement was
1,147 ^ eet * At Nyangwe it has been 2,077 feet, which meant that
they had lost only 930 feet since they had taken to the river.
It also meant that there must be falls far worse than anything
they had yet seen just below them.
The Expedition no longer had to worry about the tribes
along their way. These were used to trade, and on the whole
they were peaceful. But the great central plateau here drops off
through sheer rock to the coastal plain. As the river courses
over these terraces it creates a long series of falls, rapids and
cataracts, which are completely unnavigable. The Congo itself
had now become their bitterest enemy.
They developed a system of leashing their boats with rattan
hawsers and holding them back from the rapids as they walked
along the shore. This worked well enough on the smallest
stretches of rough water but at many points they had to pull
the boats out and carry them overland. At one of these
cataracts the river fell from one immense trough to another, at
times dashing up twenty or thirty feet straight into the air.
Stanley described it:
If I looked up or down along this angry scene, every interval of
50 or 100 yards of it was marked by wave-towers their collapse
243
into foam and spray, the mad clash of watery hills, bounding
mounds and heaving billows, while the base of either bank, consist-
ing of a long line of piled boulders of massive size, was buried in
the tempestuous surf. The roar was tremendous and deafening. I
can only compare it to the thunder of an express train through a
rock tunnel. To speak to my neighbour, I had to bawl in his ear.
In one bad piece of river they lost their best canoe, a seventy-
five foot dug-out called the London Town. The water tore it
from the hands of fifty men and swept it away. Along the shore
they were often impeded by the rock, and several of them had
bad falls, including Stanley, who nearly broke a couple of ribs.
They now had seventeen canoes. The river at this point was
not more than four hundred and fifty yards wide but even very
close to the shore it was one hundred and thirty-eight feet deep.
At the falls which came inevitably at the foot of this silent
stretch of water eight men were caught by the current and
drowned. One of these was Kalulu, the slave boy Stanley had
brought to America and, later, put to school in England. He
named these falls after him and was very grieved.
On 3 April 1877, a canoe was upset and they lost fifty tusks
of ivory and some trading beads. Four men were saved from
drowning by Uledi, and Stanley himself was almost carried
down-river by the current. They were making progress, how-
ever slow, but their supplies were dwindling so fast that they
could not expect to reach the sea without starving to death
unless every person worked as hard as possible every daylight
hour.
Then, on April 12 the Expedition's European boat, the Lady
Alice*, containing most of their wealth and the leader himself,
tore loose from its cables and spun through rapids for several
miles before it was shunted miraculously into calm water and
they were saved. The other members of the party had run
after them but for several hours they feared that Stanley was
244
lost. They were overjoyed to find him. These men had been
living together for almost three years and many of them were
genuinely fond of each other.
They
rushed up one after another with their exuberant welcome to life
which gushed out of them in gesture, feature, and voice. And
Frank, my amiable and trusty Frank, was neither last nor least in
his professions of love and sympathy, and gratitude to Him who
had saved us from a watery grave.
On April 13 Uledi the coxwain saved still another man from
drowning. He was becoming the most valuable member of the
Expedition. By the list they were still only thirty-four miles
below Stanley Pool, though they had been travelling five
weeks. A few days later they came upon a great falls which
plunged through a chasm and was absolutely impassable. What
was worse, the banks rose steeply on either side and they, too,
were impassable. Stanley decided to drag his canoes over a
mountain, one thousand two hundred feet high.
Several of their boats were seventy feet long, carved out of
teak, so that they weighed over* three tons. Stanley needed
help for the portage but he could not convince the natives of
the neighbourhood that the job could be done until he and his
men cut a path and hauled some of the smaller boats up them-
selves. When this was accomplished the chiefs were full of
admiration and agreed to lend him six hundred men to help
him with the big canoes.
The latter were moved over the mountain at a rate of five
hundred to eight hundred yards a day. In the meantime Stanley
established a camp below the falls and hollowed out two
enormous trees to replace the canoes that had been lost. These
craft were called the Livingstone and the Stanley and were ideal,
in calm water, for taking up bold postures in their prows>
245
staring resolutely into the unknown, and imagining the wood-
cuts in the book one would write.
They had now come into the territory of the Babwende, who
were most friendly. These people had many guns and plenty
of gunpowder. They also had Delft ware, British crockery,
galvanized iron spoons, Birmingham cutlery, glassware and
European salt. All of this had come from the coast, though no
one among these people had ever seen a European. They
simply bought what the tribes directly below had for sale.
These articles were fairly abundant and even cheap.
Food prices went way up. They could no longer buy a
chicken with cloth because the natives had so many trading
goods themselves. Frank and Stanley, therefore, had to give up
anything resembling European victuals and they lived entirely
on the provisions normally consumed by the -rest of the cara-
van. What was worse, for Stanley, was that they had run out
of tea. He could hardly bear to do without it and used to dream
of three tins he had left behind at Nyangwe.
In the midst of their troubles the leader found time to
rebuke his young assistant for frequently appearing In camp
barefoot.
I would reprove him for shamelessly exposing his white feet to
the vulgar gaze of the aborigines! In Europe this would not be
considered indelicate, but in barbarous Africa the feet should be
covered as much as the body; for there is a small modicum of
superiority shown even in clothing the feet.
Good Frank was indifferent to this modicum, after having
lived so long with these men. But Stanley was inadvertently
right, as he was so often. From about this time the boy began
to develop ulcers on his feet and this was the indirect reason
for his death a month later. They were all nearly starving, now,
and many of the men were plagued by ulcers, dysentery and
fever. They ate mostly dried cassava and peanuts.
246
Stanley, whose sensual life was primarily digestive, pre-
pared a kind of green porridge of manioc tops, much as Epis's
sister had. To this he added crushed nuts, salt and palm wine.
The mixture was fried and served on the only Delft plate the
beleaguered Expedition had left. Both Frank and Stanley said
grace before they ate it.
On May 25, Stanley was standing above a short stretch of
rapids,
pondering unspeakable things, as I listened to the moan and plaint
of the tortured river, when Frank came down in the Lady Alice
and nearly wrecked her on a rock. "Ah, Frank! Frank! Frank!"
I cried, "my boat, my poor boat, after so many thousands of miles,
so many cataracts, to receive such a blow as this, on a contemptible
bit of rapids like the Upper Mowa!" I could have wept aloud; but
the leader of an Expedition had but little leisure for tears, or senti-
ment, so I turned to repair her.
Frank Pocock seemed to be going the way of all Stanley's
companions. In spite of his formidable resistance he was
becoming, at last, a physical, if not a moral wreck. This was
especially serious for the boy, who had few other resources; he
did not live much in the world of the mind and had probably
never pondered an unspeakable thing. He was already con-
fined to the boat; his ulcers had grown so severe that he could
walk only with difficulty and his control was slipping fast.
At this time an event occurred which shook Stanley. His
Victorian standards were as incomprehensible to the men of the
Expedition except Frank as though he had come from the
moon. Uledi had, by that time, saved thirteen persons from
drowning.
He was not a tall man; he was short, and of compact frame; but
every ounce of his strength he devoted to my service ... He was
a devotee to his duty, and as such he was ennobled; he was affection-
ately obedient, as such he was beloved; he had risked his life
many times for creatures who would never have risked their own for
247
his, as such he was honoured. Yet this ennobled, beloved and
honoured servant ah! I regret to speak of him in such terms
robbed me.
There was a great fuss about this and a public trial followed
at which others put themselves forward to take Uledi's punish-
ment. In the end everyone was forgiven and the entire camp
retired ? not quite sure what standards were being applied to
them but perfectly certain that some were and maybe even com-
forted by that. They were all so near death, anyway, it was
good to have something to think about.
In this district the natives once observed Stanley writing in
his notebook and became justifiably alarmed. Warriors were
immediately called to arms. The leader bravely approached
them and asked what was the matter. One of the chiefs said,
"Our people saw you yesterday make marks on some tara-
tara [paper]. This is very bad. Our country will waste, our
goats will die, our bananas will rot and our women will dry up.
What have we done to you that you should wish to kill us?"
This was very prophetic; the people naturally demanded that
Stanley burn his notebook. If he did not, they said, they would
fight him. The leader thought quickly and went back to his
tent, where he found a copy of Shakespeare (Chandos edition),
brought it back and offered it up to the fire. To anyone who
has ever read Through the Dark Continent, or The Sources of the
Nile Around The Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down
the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean, this will seem one
of the most unfair acts of barter ever practised by a European
on gullible aborigines.
On the night of June 2, Frank came to Stanley's tent, as was
his custom. He was now almost completely crippled by his
ulcers and could do no other work than sewing up bead-bags
and patching tents. He maintained his cheerful attitude, pos-
sibly because it was the only one he had. While at work,
248
his fine voice broke out into song, or some hymn such as he was
accustomed to stng in Rochester Church. Joyous and light-hearted
as a linnet, Frank indulged forever in song, and this night the
crippled man sang his best, raising his sweet voice in melody,
lightening my heart, and for the time dispelling my anxieties.
The next day he drowned.
Frank died because he had been left behind as a cripple, to
be carried overland past a set of rapids in a hammock. This
affront to his manliness was more than his stout heart could
bear and, after Stanley had gone on ahead, he insisted on
travelling the dangerous stretch of water with Uledi and
several of the other men. He was, as Stanley said, 'a capital
swimmer' besides being an English boatman of good character.
Obviously a fellow who could handle the Medway or Thames
wouldn't let the Congo scare him. So he ordered the boat on,
over the rapids and to his death, though Uledi and most of the
others escaped.
He had probably become unhinged. Frank had very few
hinges anyway, and one of these was his robust health. He
didn't know how to be a cripple and his life was so simple that
it was also immutable. Eagle scouts are in this sense like
angels. They cannot be devious or sly; they cannot, in the end,
be anything but eagle scouts or angels. So poor Frank was
drowned in a sea of his own virtue, which was appropriately
called Pocock Basin. His body was found some days later and
Stanley was grief-stricken.
"Shall you see him again?" one of the head men of a local
tribe asked Stanley.
"I hope to."
"Where?"
"Above, I hope."
Frank's loss was not only a blow to Stanley but to all the
249
other men. They were not just being sentimental they had
got to depend on the two Europeans and didn't want to do
without them, at least until they reached the coast. Now that
the boy was drowned they felt that much closer to death
themselves. It took Stanley almost two weeks to get them
started again.
He, too, was greatly depressed; he had been deeply fond of
Frank. But the more they lingered here the greater was the
danger for all of them. Supplies were rapidly giving out.
When he tried to push his people forward they threatened
mutiny. Once, when he saw a group of them moving about
languidly he asked what was the matter.
One fellow, remarkable for nothing but his great size and
strength, turned round and said, sharply, "We are tired, and that's
what's die matter."
Thirty-one of the party deserted, but Stanley put so many
obstacles in their path instructing chiefs not to give them
food, etc. that they returned in a few days and went back to
work, having really no alternative. At this point the chief
carpenter, Salaam Allah, was swept over another falls in one
of the new canoes and the whole camp was thrown into deep
gloom, sensing the approach of death.
At the end of June, at another stretch of rapids, Stanley's
boat again broke loose and was spun downstream out of sight.
The men of the Expedition were sure that he was lost this time
and they didn't much care, believing that they were all bound to
follow him anyway. But when he came back along the shore,
some of them argued that God was watching over this aggres-
sive little man after all, and that they might just make it if they
stuck with him. Stanley won most of his battles with such
perseverance. It may even be that God, in His wisdom, had
intended him to go the way of poor Frank Pocock; the leader
simply outwaited Him.
250
By July 7 they were in truly desperate circumstances. The
men had been stealing in the villages along the way, and when
they were caught the Expedition had to ransom them or they
would be sold into slavery. At last their supplies were so
reduced that Stanley announced that anyone else caught
stealing would be abandoned. Two people died at this time,
one of suppurating ulcers and the other of dysentery, a disease
that was beginning to attack large numbers of them.
They met some people whose complexions and features
were faintly European and who were probably mixed with
the Portuguese who had been on this coast since the latter
part of the fifteenth century. These people, having a genetical
knowledge of the matter, did not welcome a white man
in their country. They said that they had never known a
place that wasn't injured by the presence of people with light
skins.
On July 20 and 24 two more of the party were caught
stealing and now the expedition had to abandon them because
they did not have supplies enough for ransom. Also, the next
day, one of the men went insane and ran off into the forest, but
Stanley could not stop even a day to search for him because
they were all in immediate danger of starvation. On the 28th
three more men were caught stealing food and were abandoned.
One of these men, Ali Koboga, later escaped and made his way
to the coast where he hitched rides all the way around Africa,
home to Zanzibar.
At the end of July they decided to abandon the boats and
strike out overland for the port of Embomma, where there
were Portuguese traders. Stanley divided up his remaining
stores among the men so that they could purchase food, but
they got very little for their money because the prices were so
inflated near the coast. Only rum and guns were considered
valuable, and in another few days they were so weak from lack
251
of food that It seemed that they would never reach the sea,
though help was now only a few miles away.
Finally Stanley persuaded a chief to carry a letter forward.
After a dinner of three fried bananas, twenty roasted peanuts
and a cup of muddy water, he wrote the following letter by
the light of a lamp made of rotted sheeting dipped in palm-
butter:
Village of Nsanda, August 4, 1877
To any Gentleman who speaks English at Embomma
Dear Sir,
I have arrived at this place from Zanzibar with 115 souls, men,
women, and children. We are now in a state of imminent starvation.
We can buy nothing from the natives, for they laugh at our kinds
of cloth, beads, and wire. There are no provisions in the country
that may be purchased, except on market days, and starving people
cannot afford to wait for these markets ... I am told there is an
Englishman at Embomma, and as you are a Christian and a gentle-
man, I beg you not to disregard my request ... [I want] fifteen
man-loads of rice or grain to fill their pinched bellies immediately
. . . The supplies must arrive within two days, or I may have a
fearful time of it among the dying. Of course I hold myself respon-
sible for any expense you may incur in this business . . . For myself,
if you have such little luxuries as tea, coffee, sugar, and biscuits
by you, such as one man can easily carry, I beg you on my own
behalf that you will send a small supply ... I beg you to believe
me,
Yours sincerely,
H. M. Stanley,
Commanding Anglo-American
Expedition for Exploration
of Africa.
P.S. You may not know me by name; therefore I add, I am the
person that discovered Livingstone in 1871, H.M.S.
On August 6 a reply came back.
252
6:30 A.M.,
Boma, 6th August 1877
Embomma,
English Factory.
H. M. Stanley, Esq.
Dear Sir,
Your welcome letter came to hand yesterday at 7 P.M. As soon
as its contents were understood, we immediately arranged to des-
patch to you such articles as you requested . . . The carriers are all
paid, so that you need not trouble yourself about them. That is
all we need say about business. We are exceedingly sorry to hear
that you have arrived in such piteous condition, but we send our
warmest congratulations to you, and hope that you will soon arrive
in Boma (this place is called Boma by us, though on the map it is
Em-bomma). Again hoping that you will soon arrive, and that you
are not suffering in health,
Believe us to remain,
Your sincere friends,
Hatton & Cookson.
A. Da Motta Veiga.
J. W. Harrison.
That was about all. When Stanley approached Boma he
was greeted by Mr A. da Motta Veiga, Senhores Luiz Pinto
Marco, Joao Chaves, Henrique Germano Faro, and Mr J. F.
Muller. These gentlemen persuaded him to ride the last bit in a
hammock, which the Leader at first declined to do, until he
was assured that It was a Portuguese custom. He arrived in the
town on August 9 and reached the Atlantic ocean on the nth.
Here Stanley turned back and looked at the mighty river
on whose brown bosom we had endured so greatly ... I felt my
heart suffused with purest gratitude to Him whose hand had pro-
tected us, and who had enabled us to pierce the Dark Continent
from east to west, and to trace its mightiest River to its Ocean
bourne.
The one hundred and fifteen persons, including thirteen
2 53
women, who had survived with him were just looking forward,
unable to believe their good luck. But of course they were not
planning to write a best-selling book about their experiences
one thousand and eighty-eight pages long.
254
CHAPTER TWENTY
business quarter of Leopoldville, capital of the Belgian
JL Congo, is a big, insipid, glass-fronted, many-storied Euro-
pean city. All the stores along the main avenue look like airline
offices and many are. Their murals and receptionists seem cut
from the same sheet of plastic. Native handicraft is exhibited
with self-conscious taste and the furniture is designed to meet
the standards of a century which expects to be the world's last.
Everything lacks weight and yet manages to be terribly heavy*
Nothing is light though it looks as if it were about to slide off
into space. It is like every other city built in the last quarter-
century, practically anywhere on this planet, and it really
wouldn't be fair to blame it all on the Belgians.
Outside of the business quarter there are masses of Africans,
drifting. They stand further from their origins and are not
so simple as their countrymen in Stanleyville or Albertville.
Even the tribes they claim to represent, in anarchic nostalgia
for order, were strangers to Stanley Pool until recently. In
Stanley's time this site was dotted with villages of the Bateke.
The present inhabitants claim descent from the Bakongo and
the Bangala tribes and war among themselves when they are
not demonstrating against the Europeans. To make matters
more confused a number of recent manifestos urging inde-
pendence were probably written or largely inspired by a group
of Belgian Catholic professors at the University of Lovanium,
near Leopoldville. In short, one finds the fascinating confusion
endemic to all large cities.
But this great pack of cement is not yet perfectly at ease here
on the south bank of Stanley Pool. Squalls of rain still come
255
down from the hills and race over the water, streaking the air
silver and purple. The sun still dies a pink death over French
Africa in the west, and snow-white birds glide a few feet above
the water with their black-fringed tails trailing downward like
fans, as they did thousands of years before the motor launches
came to frighten the fish. The battle isn't won yet and the
jungle may have some surprises. All one can ask is that Nature
hold out long enough until we do a little better. Here par-
ticularly, there is always a hope a faint hope that the
Africans will find a way, and that when they put down a pave-
ment from Lake Chad to Katanga it will be worthy of the land
they tear up, and of themselves.
The morning after we arrived I saw Epis's daughter. I had
gone directly to the post office. It wasn't yet open and I had
coffee in a bakery, where I met Ann twenty years from now.
She was a large, quiet, voluptuous girl who did light dusting
and occasionally handled the cash with soft sensuality. She
was very fat and moved like a fully freighted ship bound for
some leisurely port. I think Epis would have been happy to
see her, though the figure she cut was less noble than con-
tented.
Epis hadketn noble, and because of that it was a temptation
to think that she represented a mass of African men and women;
but probably she represented no one but herself. Few people
can do much more, or even much less. Of course, she was
passionately engaged in her fight for freedom in her own
way and for her particular ends and surely a great many
in her land have the same feeling, but this is no more revealing
than to say that she was breathing. Apparently none of us is
typical except when we are seen from a great distance. That
complicates matters hopelessly, but at least one finally knows
what Africans are really like. They are variations of oneself.
That hardly simplifies, of course, but it makes questions
256
more familiar and puts the answers to hand. When I took my
change from the young woman in the bakery I smiled and Ann
smiled back, languidly.
I sent a telegram from the post office, as I had promised. It
reached Epis safely, I learned from a letter she wrote later. 1
Stanleyville already seemed very far away and I could only
faintly hear the clang of electric guitars.
Late that night, walking back to the hotel, I saw the rear
yard of a house brilliantly lit on an otherwise dark street.
Going part way up the drive to the house one could see to the
back. I did this because it had seemed from a distance that a
number of naked men were prancing around before a few fully
dressed women seated in wicker chairs.
When I came closer the men proved to have on little flesh-
coloured tights. They were flexing their muscles with great
ostentation and occasionally they picked up large weights
and raised them above their heads. The women said little
and seemed very bored. I supposed it was ladies' night in
some sort of male health club. All the men were luminously
white.
Then another pedestrian appeared at my side. He was an
African, well-dressed but without a tie, as it was very hot. He,
too, watched the muscular men for a while then said, half
under his breath:
"Formidable!"
<c /\ *
Uui.
"On fait le Tar^an^ nest-ce pas?"
"Old."
1 Dear Thomas
How are you on this many days that I do not see you I my self I am very well
thanks How do you do? Thanks so very much for your telegram from Leo I
was very glad to see telegram from you Happy xmas and new years Good Bye
I have a Belgian bicycle Epis
257
He turned to me and nodded, just slightly.
"Bon soir^ msieu"
"Bon soir."
He "went down the street, talking to himself.
THOMAS STERLING
Born in Colorado in 1921, Thomas
Sterling spent the greater part of his
childhood in Nebraska. When he was
thirteen, he moved with his mother to
New York City, where they made
their home. He has lived in Rome for
the past nine years with his wife Claire
(who is Mediterranean correspondent
for the Reporter magazine) and two
children, next to their neighboring
continent of Africa, where he says he
feels "very much at home." His fas-
cination with that continent began in
1956, when as a tourist he traveled
through the Sudan. After his next
trip, into Central Africa, he began
writing the first part vi Stanley s Way.
Mr. Sterling has published five books,
including Silent Slren y The Evil of the
Day and Strangers and Afraid.
(continued pom front flap)
the warmth and dignity of- the African
character.
Stanley's Way Is a various book a jour-
nal of exploration of past and present, a
story of romance fulfilled, a memorial to
a man who has commanded the imagina-
tion of generations. Above all, it Is the
work of a novelist who is also a superb
reporter, and he provides an experience
as arresting as It Is unusual.
Born in Colorado in 1921, Thomas
Sterling spent the 'greater pan of bis
childhood in Nebraska. When he was
thirteen, he moved with his mother to
New York City. He has lived in Rome
for the past nine years with his wife
Claire (who is Mediterranean corre-
spondent for THE REPORTER magazine)
and two children. Here be has easy ac-
cess to the neighboring continent of
Africa, where, he says, he feels "very
much at home." His fascination with
that continent began in boyhood. In
1-956- be traveled as a tourist through the
Sudan. After his next trip, into Central
Africa, he began writing the first part of
STANLEY'S WAY. Mr. Sterling has pub-
lished five novels, including SILENT
SIREN, THE EVIL OF THE DAY and
STRANGERS-' AND' AFRAID,
1 34 977
