by Tim Jeal
I found this book in our library catalog when I was trying to find the location of a former village along Henry Morgan Stanley's route along the Lualaba River for First Daughter's study guide for A Book of Discovery. (I have made the study guide available in the Mater Amabilis™ Facebook group.) It has excellent and informative maps at the beginning of the book.
Intrigued by the snippets I read, I packed it for our camping trip to the Rocky Mountains despite its heft at over 500 pages.
Tim Jeal has written an exhaustive biography of Stanley, drawing extensively on personal letters and diaries not available to earlier biographers. Stanley's often bewildering behavior as an explorer and writer come into better focus with a deeper understanding of his early life.
The author also addresses the kinds of qualms modern readers have when confronted with the events and actions of European explorers in Africa.
The sensitivity of the early twenty-first-century observer to racial questions makes judging the actions of nineteenth-century explorers with objectivity and fairness extremely difficult.He goes on to place some of the violence of Stanley and other Europeans in context. Not that we should dismiss those actions as less appalling than they were, but that we should understand how they viewed those actions and how the Africans may have viewed them. Stanley himself saw clearly the chief problem with the entire situation, as quoted by Jeal:
Yet Stanley also put his finger on the central weakness of his own position. 'We went into the heart of Africa self-invited -- therein lies our fault.'One of the main themes of the book deals with the question of Stanley's involvement in the beginning of the disastrous Belgium occupation of the Congo. Teal persuasively shows Stanley's ignorance of King Leopold II's plans for the Congo. Throughout his time in Africa, his actions were focused on a effort to convince Britain to restrict the Arab slave trade, which started much earlier than the Atlantic trade and continued for much longer.
Of course, the argument that the slave trade could only be tackled if Africa were to be colonized offered a convenient justification for the politicians, businessmen and adventurers engaged in the 'Scramble for Africa' for purposes of prestige and financial gain. But Stanley's desire to destroy the slave trade was not a cynical stratagem.Later, Teal writes about Stanley's involvement in political pressure to maintain and increase British investment in Uganda to support missionaries and protect the African people there from a vicious threat from another group.
Few people can claim that events they have set in train have helped transform a great political party and changed their nation's intentions towards a whole continent, but from 1892 the workhouse boy could do just that, as could the self-made shipping tycoon. [Mackinnon, a friend of Stanley]I'm currently listening to one of The Great Courses on audiobook, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, in which Professor Patrick Allitt argues that despite atrocities and disasters within the British colonies in Africa, there were also benefits. I would say the eventual end of the Arab slave trade in eastern Africa is one of those.
With the benefit of hindsight, we know that colonialism had some disastrous consequences: the millions who died in Leopold's Congo, the badly drawn borders causing future conflicts, the German massacre of the Hereros, the Italian genocide in Libya, and British crimes committed while suppressing the Kenyan Mau Mau insurrection. So we virtuously condemn those who did not see these things coming many decades before they actually came to pass.I found this book a fantastic help in understanding better what really happened in Africa during the time of European exploration. After reading in our school books like A Book of Discovery about people like Stanley, I appreciated being able to put those stories in historical and cultural perspective, especially in a way that allowed me to continue to appreciate the strength and courage of a man like Stanley, even if his way of life would no longer be tenable in a modern world.
This is a long book, probably too long for most high schoolers as a supplement to the Mater Amabilis™ Level 5 Geography course on Africa. Very interested students may find it fascinating, however. In addition to the expected references to violent and disturbing acts, Tim Jeal unashamedly discusses extra-marital and other unconventional relationships, some coerced or enslaved. Violence is an inherent part of Stanley's life in Africa, but these and other incidents are described in circumspect and dignified ways; this isn't a lurid biography and, in some ways, counteracts the effects of earlier attempts to associate Stanley with those kinds of anecdotes.
I have received nothing in exchange for this post, which contains only my honest opinions. Links to Amazon are affiliate links.
