Into Darkest Africa
The untold story of Henry Morton Stanley.
Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer, Faber and Faber, 2007, 570 pp, £25.00.
Along with Richard Burton, John Speke, Samuel Baker, and David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley was one of the greatest Victorian explorers of Africa. He was the youngest of this group, and it was he who finally assembled the scattered and uncertain knowledge of central Africa into a coherent geography. He explored the great lakes of the region and the sources of the Nile, was the first to trace the Congo river from the continent’s interior all the way to the sea, and helped open Africa for trade with Europe.
Stanley’s reputation was controversial even in his lifetime, and 1990s biographies by Frank McLynn and John Bierman savaged him. He was accused—and still is—of brutality, casual killing, and duping 300 Congo tribal chiefs into handing over their land. He was portrayed as an accomplice of Leopold II’s ruthless exploitation of the Congo, was blamed for abuses committed by some of his officers in the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, and was described as motivated by a “volcanic rage against the world.” Some even claimed he was a closet homosexual with a sham marriage. In short, Stanley came to be seen as embodying the worst aspects of the Victorian era and European imperialism.
It turns out that scholars have erred. His descendants made Stanley’s personal papers inaccessible until 2002, and they tell a different story. This major biography by Tim Jeal, the first to benefit from access to these papers, is a welcome correction. The Stanley he uncovers is different both from those of earlier biographies, and from that of Stanley’s own puffed-up accounts of his expeditions. . . .
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