Stanley in Africa

“It is specially with a view to rouse the spirit of trade that I dilate upon the advantages possessed by the Congo basin, and not as a field for the pauper immigrant. There are over 40,000,000 of native paupers within the area described, who are poor and degraded already, merely because they are compassed round by hostile forces of nature and man, denying them contact and intercourse with the elements which might have ameliorated the unhappiness of their condition. European pauperism planted amongst them would soon degenerate to the low level of aboriginal degradation. It is a cautious trader who advances, not without the means of retreat; the enterprising mercantile factor who with one hand receives the raw produce from the native, in exchange for the finished product of the manufacturer’s loom – the European middleman who has his home in Europe but his heart in Africa – is the man who is wanted. These are they who can direct and teach the black pauper what to gather of the multitude of things around him and in his neighborhood. They are the missionaries of commerce, adapted for nowhere so well as for the Congo basin, where are so many idle hands, and such abundant opportunities all within a natural “ring fence.” Those entirely weak-minded, irresolute and servile people who profess scepticism, and project it before them always as a shield to hide their own cowardice from general observation, it is not my purpose to attempt to interest in Africa. Of the 325,000,000 of people in civilized Europe, there must be some surely to whom the gospel of enterprise I preach will present a few items of fact worthy of retention in the memory, and capable of inspiring a certain amount of action. I am encouraged in this belief by the rapid absorption of several ideas which I have promulgated during the last few years respecting the Dark Continent. Pious missionaries have set forth devotedly to instil in the dull mindless tribes the sacred germs of religion; but their material difficulties are so great that the progress they have made bears no proportion to the courage and zeal they have exhibited. I now turn to the worldly wise traders for whose benefit and convenience a railway must be constructed.”

THE WHITE MAN IN AFRICA

On the bright, accessible side of Africa the Pharaohs built their temples, obelisks, pyramids and sphinxes. When history dawned the seats of Egyptian learning and splendor were already in decay. In her conquest and plunder of a thousand years, victorious Rome met her most valiant antagonists in Africa, and African warriors carried their standards to the very gates of the capitol on the Tiber. In later days the Italian republics which dotted the northern coasts of the Mediterranean found their commercial enterprise and their ascendency on the sea challenged by the Moorish States which comprised the Barbary coast. Still later, when Spain was intent on conquest in America, and the establishment of colonies which would insure the spread of the Catholic religion, Portugal, in a kindred spirit, was pushing her way down the western coast of Africa, acquiring titles by virtue of discovery, establishing empires of unknown extent, founding Catholic missions and churches, striving for commercial exaltation, till her mariners rounded the Cape of Good Hope, turned northward on the eastern shores, and again took up the work of colonizing, from Mozambique to the outlet of the Red Sea.

We never tire of reading the old stories of Portuguese discovery and colonization, and our sympathies are aroused for a people who struggled so heroically to open a new world to the civilization of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But Portuguese effort came to naught, when measured by any modern standard of success. It was baffled by a thousand undreamt of forces. Its failure, however, rendered conspicuous the problem, now more pressing than ever: has the white man a natural mission in Africa? Has not God designed it as the natural home of the dark race? Are not all our visions of conquest and permanent redemption, through and by means of the white races, but idle outcrops of the imagination, or worse, but figments born of our desire to subdue and appropriate? Can compensation come, in the form of commercial, moral or spiritual advantage, adequate to the great sacrifice to be entailed on humanity by substitution of white energy for that which is native to African soil and climate?

It is not worth while to try to answer these questions in the affirmative by appeals to old historic Egypt, to Greek or Roman occupancy, to Arab and Mohammedan ascendancy, to Portuguese conquest and missionary enterprise, to the weird adventures and sad fates of the school of intrepid explorers which preceded and followed the redoubtable Scotchman, Mungo Park, nor to the long role of efforts and enterprises made by the respective nations of Europe to acquire rich slices of African territory, after Portugal began to lose her commercial grip, and after foreign colonization became a European ambition. No, for as yet nothing appears to show that the white man had a mission in Africa, except to gratify his home ambitions, cater to his European pride, satisfy his desire to pilfer, burn and murder. There is no thought yet manifest that the redemption of Africa involved more than the subjugation of her people and the forcible turning to foreign account of her resources. The question has not as yet been asked by the ethnologist, by the grave student of causes and effects, nor even by the calculating adventurer, – “Is there an African destiny which admits the white races as fair and permanent participants, or one which implies universal good when the seeming laws of God respecting the home of nations are reversed?”

Nor does an affirmative answer to any of the above questions arise out of England’s theft of the Cape of Good Hope, and of that sovereignty she now maintains over the Kimberly diamond diggings and the Vaal river sections. National greed or political finesse may excuse much, as the dark science of diplomacy goes, but they do not make clear how far the natural order of things can be changed with benefit to all concerned. This section of Africa is, however, below the tropics, and perhaps does not involve the problem of races so deeply as the equatorial regions.

Let us therefore turn to the real Africa, for further inquiry – that Africa against which Islamism has dashed itself so repeatedly in its efforts to reach the Equator; that Africa whose climate has beaten back Christianity for three centuries; that Africa amid which science has reveled, but before which legitimate trade has stood appalled – the tropical, the new Africa.

In this connection we come upon an order of events, not to say an era, which favors an affirmative answer to the above questions, which plainly point, not to white encroachment, but to white existence and possibilities in the very midst of a continent apparently destined for other purposes. The very fact that new discoveries in Central Africa have revealed vast populations untouched by civilization has opened the eyes of the world to the usual processes of nation-making afresh. Have any people ever risen out of barbarism without external help? What is civilized Europe to-day but a grand intermingling of Greek, Roman, Vandal, Hun, Goth, Celt, and Saracen? Had even North African influence, in some of its better moods, succeeded in crossing the Equator, who knows whether the savagery of the tropics might not have been extinct to-day, or at least wholly different from what it is?

Again, the order of events have brought forth whole masses of data for comparison, for experiment, for substantial knowledge. Who could separate fiction from fact when running over the old, fantastic chronicles? Until within the last fifty years the light of true scientific knowledge and of keener commercial knowledge had not been shed on the Central African situation. It began to dawn when Laird, in 1841, came home to England from the Niger, more of an adventurer than any predecessor, yet with no wild, discrepant tales, but only hard, practical truths, which commerce welcomed and business enterprise could rely on. Legitimate traffic sprang into line, and British trading houses, doing business on honorable terms and for cash values, planted their agents on the Gambia, the Roquelle, the Gold Coast, the Oil Rivers, at Gaboon and Kabinda, along thousands of miles of coast. German houses sprang up, in honorable rivalry, throughout the same extent, and Hamburg and Bremen steamers fairly outstripped those of Liverpool and Glasgow. France, too, came into competition, took permanent hold of territory, cultivated reciprocity with the natives, studied tribal characteristics, encouraged agential responsibility, and brought quite to the surface the problem of white occupancy and development.

Out of all this has grown something which is better than theory respecting the destiny of the respective races in Africa, superior far to all former strifes at mere land-grabbing, and empire building, and sovereignty enrichments. European commerce with the west and southern coast of Africa is now carried on by several regular lines of steamers, besides those owned by numerous large trading firms. The British and African Steam Navigation Company is a modern corporation, and employs 22 steamers. Its older rival, the West African Steamship Company, employs 9 steamers. They dispatch at least one ship a week from Liverpool to West African ports. The Woerman line of steamers runs regularly from Hamburg, the Portuguese line from Lisbon, and the French line from Havre. Then there are two London lines – the Union and Donald Curry. These lines go out heavily freighted with miscellaneous merchandise suitable for the African peoples, among which is, unfortunately, a large per cent. of gin and other intoxicants, and their return cargoes consist of rubber, gum copal, palm-oil, palm kernels, ivory, ground-nuts, beeswax, cocoa, coffee, dye-woods, mahogany, etc., gathered up at their various stopping points. All these are indigenous African products, but it will be observed that those which spring from a cultivated soil figure as next to nothing in the list.

Side by side with these practical sea-going and commercial movements went the unfolding of the interior by those indomitable men who sacrificed personal comfort and risked life that inner Africa might be brought to outer view. This volume is, in part, a record of their adventures and pioneering efforts. Their names – the Bakers, Barths, Schweinfurths, Spekes, Grants, Du Chaillus, Pintos, Livingstones, Stanleys, and others – form a roll which for honor outranks that of the world’s greatest generals. They have built for themselves monuments which shall outlast those dedicated to military conquest, because on them the epitaphs will speak of unselfish endeavor in the name of a common humanity.

What immense problems they had in hand! How heroically they struggled with them, through tangled jungle, dark forest, dense swamps, over plain and mountain, up, down and across unknown lakes and rivers, amid beasts of prey and hostile peoples, in the face of rain, wind and unkind climates! And all the while that they were toiling and dying, what weird and wonderful revelations came, now from the Nile, with its impenetrable sudds, its strange animal life, its teeming populations; now from the magnificent plateaus of the centre with their mighty and enchanting lakes, filled with strange fishes, on whose banks reveled peoples keen for trade or war, happy, if left alone, in smiling gardens and comfortable homes; now from the swift rolling Zambesi, shaded with mighty forests alive with troops of monkeys, vocal with bird songs, swarming with beasts, whose waters dashed here against curved and rocky banks, and there headlong over rocks higher than Niagara, bearing everywhere a burden of life in the shape of savage crocodiles, bellowing hippopotami and ponderous rhinoceri; now from Kalihari, the great desert of the south which balances that of the north, with stunted yet energetic populations, its troops of zebras, ostriches, giraffes, buffaloes, elephants, lions, leopards, making a paradise for hunters, with its salt pans, its strange grasses and incomprehensible geology; now from the great plain regions between the lakes and the water system of the western ocean, where are prairies that vie in extent and fertility with those of the Mississippi valley, where the numerous Dinkas dwell, brave in chase, rich in splendid herds of cattle, with cosy homes, surrounded by plantations of maize and sorghum and bananas; where also the Niam-Niams dwell, equally brave and rich and kind, yet savage when stirred, and formidable with their home-made iron spears and bright battle axes and swords; where too the Monbuttus dwell, rivals of their northern neighbors in agriculture, architecture and art, rich in corn and cattle, protected from intruders by a standing army of agile dwarfs, who know no fear and who make unerring use of their poisoned arrows in cunning ambuscade and in open fields; and now from the Congo itself, stream of African streams, island variegated in one stretch, cataract angered in another, draped with forest foliage everywhere, bounded by fertile shores backed by endless plains, pouring along through riches of gum, dyes, hard-woods such as would enrich kingdoms, supporting a water life as varied and gigantic as any other African lake or river, sustaining a population of incomputable numbers, opening a water way into the very heart of the continent for steamers, inviting the civilized world to come and go, partake and enjoy.

As all these surprising revelations were given to the outer world, by the pioneers of civilization who were struggling within Africa, we began to get new conceptions of situations whose existence never dawned on those who were skimming the ocean’s shores and fighting the battles of commerce. A new world had been brought to light, not only geographically, but as to its soil, water, vegetation, animals, people, climate, and every physical aspect. It was a world to be envied, possessed and reclaimed, because it was one which could be made to contribute to the wealth and happiness of all outside of it. Moreover, it was one to which all could contribute, not only of their better material things, but of their better social and moral things. Commerce decided at once that there was a demand for Africa. Politics cried out for its possession. Humanity and Christianity found a new and solemn duty in Africa.

It was not the province of the first traveler and explorer to argue questions which belong to others and to the future. He could state what he saw and felt – how hot the sun was, what the rain-fall, the quantity and nature of the resources. But when he revealed and mapped a new world, and created a desire for its possession and civilization by others, there was no fighting shy of the problems involved in the proposed new destiny. A thousand and one things would come up which had never arisen before. Many of these problems are of minor moment, many momentous. Some involve others, some are sweeping. There is one which overshadows all. Some would ask, “How shall we go about colonizing and civilizing Africa?” This question is the rind of an apple. At the core is another. Can the proposed colonizers and civilizers exist in Africa? After that is determined, we shall know pretty well how to do the rest.

Of all African explorers, Stanley has made this vital question the most conspicuous, because he, almost alone, has coupled pioneering effort with state building and the colonizing and civilizing process. He has been forced to face the climatic situation since it came squarely across his industrial and commercial plans and involved the question of capital, which is far more sensitive and cowardly than even human life.

Stanley’s personal career in Africa, as well as his extensive experience with others, goes far to establish the fact that the white race cannot transfer itself bodily and permanently to tropical African soil, with the hope of survival. The difficulty is not because it is white, but because its customs and environment are at variance with those which perpetuate life and conduce to labor under the Equator.

In the north temperate zone a man may believe himself capable of persistent effort and heroic work. He may think he has intelligence, valor and strength sufficient to sustain him under the greatest privations. But land him in Africa and he is both witless and nerveless. He has never learned the art of living the life that is required there. He is not the same being he was when he started out so hopefully and valorously. He finds he lacks equipment for his new existence, mental, moral and physical. A sacrifice is demanded. It is the sacrifice of an almost perfect transformation, or else the confession of failure must conclude his career.

Stanley’s most melancholy chapters are those which narrate the oozing out of ambitions, the confessions of cowardice, and the shirking away of his white companions, on the discovery that their civilized lives had been no school of preparation for healthful, energetic and useful existence in Equatorial Africa. It was a painful study to note how in the face of tropical realities, the fervid imaginations and exaggerated anticipations which had led them heroically on took flight, leaving them hapless malingerers, hopeless despondents, and unfit for anything but retreat. He had no fault to find where brave men fell through actual physical weakness, but the general fault, the grave, almost unpardonable mistake, was the terrible one of not knowing what they were at home and what they were to be in Africa. He says: – “The influence of the wine or beer, which at the first offset from Europe had acted on their impulses like the effect of quinine on weakened nerves, soon evaporated in a wineless land, and with their general ignorance of adaptation to foreign circumstances, and a steady need of the exhilarating influence of customary stimulants, an unconquerable depression usurped the high-blown courage it inspired, which some called nostalgia (home-sickness) and some hypochondria. Many had also, as they themselves confessed, come out merely to see the great river. Their imaginations had run riot amid herds of destructive elephants, rapacious lions, charging buffaloes, bellowing hippopotami, and repugnant rhinoceri, while the tall lithe-necked giraffe and the graceful zebra occupied the foreground of those most unreal pictures. Their senses had also been fired by the looks of love and admiration cast on them by their sweethearts, as they declared their intention to ‘go out to the Congo regions,’ while many a pleasant hour must have been spent together as they examined the strange equipments, the elephant-rifles, the penetrative ‘Express,’ and described in glowing terms their life in the far off palmy lands watered by the winding Ikelemba or the mighty Congo. Thus they had deluded themselves as well as the International Committee, whose members looked with eyes of commendation as the inspired heroes delivered with bated breath their unalterable resolution to ‘do or die.’

“But death was slow to attack the valorous braves while the doable lay largely extended before them. The latter was always present with its exasperating plainness, its undeniable imperativeness which affronted their ‘susceptibilities,’ and ignored their titles and rights to distinction. The stern every-day reality, the meagre diet and forbidding aspect, humbled their presumption. When they hear that in this land there is neither wine nor beer, as they have known them, nor comfortable cognac to relieve the gnawing, distressful hankering they suffered for their usual beverages, their hearts beat more feebly. They begin to see that those bright African images and beautiful dreams of tropical scenery and excitement are replaced by unknown breadths of woodless regions, exuberant only with tall spear grass and jungly scrub. The hot sun dares them to the trial of forcing a way through such scarcely penetrable growth. Distance and fatigue, seeming to be immense beyond any former conception, masters their resolution; and, alas! and alas! there are no fair maidens with golden hair to admire their noble efforts at doing and dying.

“Conscience, or the prickings of shame, may whisper to a few not quite lost in despondency, that there is brave work to be performed, and that they may experience the colonist’s pleasure of seeing the vegetables, fruit-trees and plants grow instead of that cane-grass and jungle now covering the broad acreage. But some answer, ‘Bah! I did not come to work; I came to hunt, to play, to eat, and to receive a big salary from the Commission.’

“‘Do you feel fatigued? Try some hot tea or coffee.’

“‘What!’ shriek they. ‘Try Congo water! No, thank you; my stomach was made for something better than to become a nest for young crocodiles.’”

In all the foregoing Stanley speaks of the white help that was furnished him for his mission to found the Congo Free State. The help was of a high grade, being composed of men who came recommended to the Commission. They were selected for their valor and skill at home and for their professed willingness to brave African climate and all the dangers of exploration and colonization. They were for the most part educated men and well qualified to engineer roads, build comfortable homes, establish trading and military stations, carry on just commerce and exercise wise government over consenting tribes and contiguous territories. They were young, ambitious men, who had their fames and fortunes to make and to whom failure at home would have been a misfortune and disgrace. Indeed, if one had been going to pick out a body of men for the express purpose of testing the question whether it is possible for the white races to exist and thrive in tropical Africa, establish civilized governments, cultivate the soil, carry on manufactures and commerce, redeem the natives, and introduce institutions such as are found at home, these would have been the men.

But let us see how they fared. Stanley takes one as a sample – he does not fail to make honorable exceptions of those who behaved differently, – and this one perhaps, the loudest professor, at the start, of heroic zeal in his undertaking. He is conducted to the site of a newly established station and endowed with full authority. He is given an army of forty disciplined blacks, and two or three of his own color are left with him as companion and assistants. He is made a rich banker for the surrounding tribes by heaps of cloth bales, bags of beads, and bundles of brass-rods, the bank notes of the country, with full liberty to circulate them to the best advantage. The river at his feet swarms with fish of edible varieties, which he may catch in plenty, if he chooses to imitate the industry and ingenuity of the natives. The surrounding villages are full of fowls, and eggs are plenty. Sheep and goats can always be had, if the slightest attention is paid to their grazing and to their protection against wild beasts. In the west, goat’s milk, and in the centre and east, cow’s milk, can be had with little trouble. The natives, almost everywhere, raise sweet potatoes in abundance and sell them cheaply. Most villages have their fields of cassava, whose root yields a wholesome food, which can be prepared in a variety of agreeable ways. All of the ordinary garden vegetables, as tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, and onions can be grown with easy tillage. In his commissariat are stores of rice, canned vegetables, wheat flour, fish, meats, and soups from Europe, together with tea, coffee, butter, jam, condensed-milk, and in fact everything to tempt a palled palate or a weak stomach. The question of food is therefore settled in such a manner as to require very little exertion or sacrifice to make the supply permanent, varied and wholesome.

What else is required? A strong block house is built, and this is surrounded by a comfortable dwelling, erected after the manner of the neatly thatched huts of the natives, or even after the more approved architecture of civilization, if time permits and the proper materials are at hand. A palaver is called and whites and natives put themselves on political and also commercial equality, with as much of social relationship as suits the tastes of either party. The solemn treaty is approved and promulgated, and the commandant of the station, governor of a province, official of a great state, arbiter of the destiny of tribes, custodian of the welfare of peoples, minister, judge, doctor, commercial agent, the man to whom civilization is looking as founder, teacher and exemplar; this wonderful man, so full of pride and responsibility, so exalted with a sense of duty, so endowed with grand opportunity, is ready for his instructions and commission. His domain is pointed out and the fact is impressed on him that it has been acquired with the sanction of the civilized world and that of the only parties on African soil capable of giving consent. He is left as master and sole arbiter of all questions that may arise, and only asked by the power that institutes him to be just in his dealings with the peoples he is to govern, to extend kindness to those for whom he has been made a protector, to prove that the authority imposed has not been misplaced. He is furnished with a written draft of instructions which is to be his code of laws, his state constitution, his plan for founding and developing his little empire. Could anything be more flattering to one’s ambitions? What greater inducement could one want to exercise every latent energy, to found deeply, build well and rule wisely? Visions of a future state, crowded with obedient, industrious subjects, crowned with wealth and prosperity, shedding lustre on its ruler, proclaiming to the world the success of a first and glorious experiment, ought to stimulate even the most indifferent to sublime endeavor.