Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart Read online

  The Congo’s status as Portugal’s greatest discovery did not last long. Less than a decade after Cão reached the Congo River, another Portuguese mariner, Bartolomeu Dias, went ever further south to discover the first sea route from Europe to the Indies by rounding the heel of Africa. Dias encountered such rough weather that he called it the Cape of Storms, but the Portuguese authorities soon changed the name to reflect the great economic opportunity it represented. They called it the Cape of Good Hope, close to where Cape Town stands today. The Congo’s output of the occasional shipment of ivory or raffia could not compete with the huge volume of silks and spices available in Asia and, in the face of commercial competition, the Portuguese soon found another asset they could take from the Congo – slaves.

  Slavery was a long-established practice among African tribes. Any raiding party that successfully attacked a neighbour would expect to return with slaves. But what made the Portuguese demand for slaves different was its scale. The simultaneous discovery of the Americas by European explorers created an apparently limitless demand for labour to work on the plantations of the New World, and in Europe’s African toeholds slavery was turned overnight from a cottage industry into a major, global concern.

  The effect on the Congo was devastating. The plunder of people started out on a small scale in the early 1500s, with Portuguese traders paying Congolese warriors for the occasional slave they brought back with them from raids. But as the market value of slaves soared, the whole economic dynamic changed. Raiding parties would set off inland just to fill ships that were sent from Portugal to transport slaves across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World.

  The ManiKongo’s realm felt the impact immediately. Junior chiefs arranged deals directly with Portuguese middlemen, in exchange for arms and money, and within a short time the king’s traditional power base was undermined. The Congolese royal family had done everything asked of them by the Portuguese, adopting the religion of the visitors and signing peace treaties, but suddenly they found the influence of their foreign allies was destroying their society from within. John, the first ManiKongo to be baptised a Christian, had been succeeded by a son who was even more enthusiastic about the Portuguese. He had taken the name Affonso, learned fluent Portuguese and adopted European customs with zeal, even arranging for his own son, Henrique, to travel from the Congo to Rome where he was installed as the first black bishop. It would be hundreds of years before the second.

  Educated and literate, Affonso wrote letter after letter to the royal family in Lisbon begging them to bring a halt to the chaos caused by the slavers. The letters were often intercepted by slavers and not delivered. But even in the face of growing evidence of Portuguese duplicity, Affonso refused to give up his faith in the common Christian decency of the outsiders. In 1526 he wrote again to the Portuguese monarch:

  The excessive freedom given by your factors and officials to the men and merchants who are allowed to come to this Kingdom … is such … that many of our vassals do not comply. We can not reckon how great the damage is, since the above-mentioned merchants daily seize our subjects, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen and vassals and relatives … Thieves and men of evil conscience take them because they wish to possess the things and wares of this Kingdom … They grab them and cause them to be sold; and so great, Sir, is their corruption and licentiousness that our country is being utterly depopulated … to avoid this, we need from your Kingdoms no other than priests and people to teach in schools, and not other goods but wine and flour for the holy sacrament … It is our will that in these kingdoms there should not be any trader in slaves nor market for slaves.

  Affonso’s forlorn plea, couched in the language taught by the outsider and invoking the spiritual decency demanded by the outsider, was in vain. By the time he died in the late sixteenth century his kingdom was close to collapse, and the region around the mouth of the Congo River turned into a wasteland, plundered by slavers and their ruthless, well-armed African agents. The Portuguese had been followed by slavers from other European nations, including Britain and Holland, who roamed up and down the coastline of west Africa filling the holds of their ships with human cargo. Between the late sixteenth century when the transatlantic slave trade began and the late nineteenth century when European nations finally banned it, the best estimate is that twelve million Africans were forced on board ships and the Congo River mouth was, throughout that entire period, one of the principal sources of slaves.

  Centuries after it all began, when I visited Sierra Leone, I found evidence of the dominant role played by the Congo in the slave trade. Sierra Leone lies on Africa’s western coast, more than 1,000 kilometres north of the Congo River mouth. It was created in the early nineteenth century by Britain after it banned slavery, and was largely populated by slaves freed by the British after they were intercepted by the Royal Navy while being shipped across the Atlantic. In the twenty-first century the locals in Sierra Leone use only one name for the slaves who were brought to the country. They are known as the Congo people.

  The secret of ‘the river that swallows all rivers’ remained hidden throughout this turbulent period. In the brief Golden Age, Portugal launched a few small expeditions inland from the mouth of the river, but they all failed to make any significant progress and most were lost without being heard of again. In the era of industrial slavery, the only Europeans who reached the Congo were not interested in exploring as long as the coastal African leaders kept up the flow of slaves. To solve the mystery of the Congo, geographical science would have to wait almost four centuries, until the late nineteenth century and the wave of mainly British explorers sent from London by the African Association, the body that later became the Royal Geographical Society.

  African exploration was the Final Frontier of this age, attracting chancers, heroes and eccentrics on journeys that promised fame and danger in equal measure. In 1816 an officer of the Royal Navy, Captain James Kingston Tuckey, tried to unlock the Congo by sailing up the river from the Atlantic. He hoped not just to chart the lower, navigable stretch, but to push on overland beyond the cataracts first recorded by the Portuguese. His expedition was a disaster. After mooring his two ships near the lowest reach of the rapids, he continued on foot, barely making it halfway along the 300-kilometre stretch of cataracts before disease and malnutrition ravaged his expedition. Only twenty-seven of the fifty-one-member expedition survived and the charts that the survivors brought back to London were inaccurate and confused.

  The focus shifted to the other side of the continent, to the island of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, which lay just a few kilometres off the coast of East Africa, but which was claimed by Arabs. Originally from Oman, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Arab sailors had been probing down the east coast of Africa at about the same time the Portuguese had been probing down the west. Like the Portuguese, these Arab outsiders settled on slaves as the most valuable commodity offered by the African territories, so the Arabs had started to capture and trade slaves, before shipping them back to Oman and other Arab city states in the Gulf.

  But there was one big difference with the Portuguese slavers – the Arabs actually went on the slaving expeditions themselves. On their safe island fortress of Zanzibar, they would assemble armed expeditions before crossing to the African mainland and heading inland. It took more than a century, but as they emptied the coastal plains of potential slaves they probed deeper and deeper, setting up a network of footpaths and trading stations that eventually reached halfway across the continent.

  Stories of immense inland lakes, snow-capped mountains and huge rivers filtered back through this network to Zanzibar and from there, via visiting British seamen, to London and the Royal Geographical Society. Its members sent a series of expeditions to the island with the deliberate intention of piggybacking on the Arab network of tracks and trading stations across Africa. One by one, the mysteries of African geography were being solved by expeditions launched from Zanzibar. The source of the Nile was traced; the Great
Lakes were charted; and the first contacts were made with the tribal kingdoms of central Africa. Early Victorian explorers, such as Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, turned Zanzibar into the Cape Canaveral of its day, a launch pad for numerous expeditions into the unknown heart of Africa. These explorers became so famous that when one of them, Livingstone, went missing in the late 1860s, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the populist American newspaper The New York Herald, spotted the potential for a journalistic coup. Stanley had worked for Bennett for several years, establishing himself as the newspaper’s best foreign correspondent. Stanley later described the briefing he received from his editor:

  Draw a thousand pounds now; and when you have gone through that, draw another thousand, and when that is spent, draw another thousand, and when you have finished that, draw another thousand, and so on; but FIND LIVINGSTONE!

  Born a bastard in the Welsh market town of Denbigh, Stanley was a cocky chancer. Biographies have made flamboyant claims: that he was a fantasist incapable of telling truth from fiction, or a masochistic homosexual who pleasured in the hardships of African travel, or a sadistic racist. I have come to see him in more simplistic terms, a man from a wretched background who sought wealth and status through one of the most high-profile, lucrative, but risky career paths of his time, African exploration.

  He was born on 28 January 1841 and christened John Rowlands after the father he never met, an alcoholic farmhand who drank himself to death. His mother, Elizabeth Parry, was an unmarried, eighteen-year-old housemaid at the time of his birth, who left her new baby in the care of her father and fled to work in London. After a childhood being bounced between the care of relatives, foster homes and the workhouse, in the late 1850s he worked his passage across the Atlantic on board the Windermere, a coastal packet ship, to New Orleans, where he charmed his way into the household of a local businessman, Henry Hope Stanley. The businessman effectively adopted the Welshman, providing him with a job and home. As a tribute to his benefactor, the young man took a new name, Henry Stanley, adding the middle name Morton some years later.

  Stanley fought for both sides in the American Civil War. He started as a soldier in the Confederate army from the south, but after being taken prisoner by the Yankees he did what was then quite common and promised to fight for the northern army in exchange for his freedom. With the war over, he began a career as a journalist covering the wars of the late 1860s between Native Americans and the early American pioneers pushing westwards. This was the height of the Wild West era, and Stanley contributed a key part to its mythology after he met James Hickok, a tracker and frontiersman. The profile he wrote of ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok added significantly to one of the iconic names of the era.

  His reports earned him a place with the Herald as a war correspondent. His first major commission from the paper took him to Africa, as a correspondent attached to a British expeditionary force deployed to Abyssinia. En route to the frontline, his ship stopped in Suez, where he made a point of befriending the officer in charge of the city’s only telegraph link to western Europe. Money changed hands in what turned out to be the most prescient of bribes. On the way back from the frontline, Stanley had a copy of his report smuggled to the officer in Suez, who duly telegraphed it back to the London offices of the Herald. The line then stopped working for five days, with the result that Stanley had scooped not just his colleagues, but the British Army as well. The official military dispatches had not yet been sent, meaning that the civil servants of the War Office in Whitehall first learned of the outcome of the Abyssinian campaign from Stanley’s account, printed in an American newspaper.

  Stanley had to show the same chutzpah on his 1871–2 expedition to find Livingstone. The Royal Geographical Society had already sent a number of unsuccessful relief missions to try to find Livingstone, but nothing had been heard from him since 1866. Stanley followed the established explorer’s route to Zanzibar, but as he assembled an expedition party there he concealed the real motive of his trip. The RGS had many friends in Zanzibar and they would have sought to block any freelance attempt to track their man.

  Stanley was right to be suspicious of some of the stuffier attitudes within the RGS. After finding Livingstone in November 1871 at the small settlement of Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where the ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’ greeting scene was played out, the two men spent four months together. But Stanley could not persuade Livingstone to return to Zanzibar. So he returned by himself, carrying a bundle of thirty letters and a journal written by Livingstone as proof that he had found the explorer. This was not enough to silence the sniping from many senior members of the RGS. They leaked stories to the press demanding that handwriting experts analyse the letters Stanley ‘claimed’ to have been written by Livingstone and sneered that Stanley was just a newspaperman, not a professional explorer.

  ‘There is something of the comic,’ ran a piece in The Spectator, ‘in the newspaper correspondent who, in the regular exercise of his profession, moved neither by pity, nor love of knowledge, nor by desire of adventure, but by an order from Mr Bennett, coolly plunges into the unknown continent to interview a lost geographer.’ But the thing that appeared to gall the British explorers’ elite most was that Livingstone had been found not by a British rescue party, but by an American one. The nationalistic chauvinism was captured perfectly by a Punch cartoon from August 1872, showing Livingstone comfortably reclining over a map of Africa in a hammock made from the Stars and Stripes.

  All this delighted Stanley’s employers at the Herald. It printed every detail of Stanley’s trip, crowing at the achievement of the American mission and pouring scorn on various failed attempts by rival British missions. Stanley’s fame mushroomed, with British publishers Sampson Low, Marston & Company paying him an advance of £50,000 – a record sum for a travel book – for his 700-page account of the trip, and after his return to London he was summoned to a personal audience with Queen Victoria. When the book came out it broke all existing sales records and Stanley crossed the Atlantic to give a series of lectures, which exploited unashamedly all the public prejudices about Africa. One of the lecture advertisements boasted:

  Costumed, armed and equipped as he was when pursuing his arduous journey into Africa and accompanied by the little native African – Kalulu! He will also display the flags, spears and other accoutrements worn by natives of Central Africa who formed part of his expedition.

  Even though Stanley was now richer and more famous than he could ever have imagined possible, the sniping of his critics unsettled him. One of the most difficult trials for a journalist is how to follow success. The pressure and expectation to match previous achievements is huge, and for Stanley there was only one possible goal that could outshine his Livingstone coup: Stanley would map the Congo.

  Livingstone never returned to Britain after his famous encounter with Stanley, instead continuing to explore the malarial marshlands that straddle what is today the border between Zambia and the Congo. Years of African exploration had weakened his body’s defences and in May 1873, his sixty-year-old body racked by disease and hunger, Livingstone died in an African hut on the swampy shore of Lake Bengwelu. He was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, his coffin carried by eight pallbearers led by Stanley. The next day, Stanley approached the editor of the Telegraph with his idea.

  His primary employer, James Gordon Bennett at the Herald, had begun to show signs of jealousy at Stanley’s fame after the Livingstone scoop, and commissions for work from his American employer had started to dry up. Artfully playing one paper off against another, Stanley approached the Telegraph with his plan to complete the map of Africa, framing it as a mission to finish Livingstone’s work. He called into the paper’s Fleet Street offices and asked to speak with the editor, Sir Edwin Arnold. It must have been quite a moment for the editor to have the greatest media celebrity of the age walk in off the street to suggest a story idea. I can imagine the excitement in the office as word spread among the clerk
s, reporters and secretaries that the man who scooped the world over Livingstone was inside the editor’s office.

  Stanley later described the exchange he had with Sir Edwin.

  ‘Could you, and would you, complete the work? And what is there to do?’

  ‘The western half of the African continent is still a white blank.’

  ‘Do you think you can settle all this, if we commission you?’

  ‘While I live, there will be something done. If I survive the time required to perform all the work, all shall be done.’

  Livingstone had left Stanley one important clue. The Victorian explorers starting out from Zanzibar had mapped much of Africa’s eastern half, but had barely touched on the western half of the continent, the catchment area for the Congo River system. Livingstone himself had come closest to solving the mystery while trekking through the bush savannah to the west of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. As with the other Western explorers, he was mainly following trails blazed by Arab slavers from Zanzibar, but unlike other Westerners who stopped at the lake, he went beyond, eventually coming across a huge river running northwards. Known by the local tribesmen as the Lualaba, it was plausible that this was connected to the Congo River, which, Livingstone knew from the Portuguese maps, joined the Atlantic thousands of kilometres away to the north and west.

  Livingstone was sceptical about the Congo connection. The upper Lualaba was as far as the Arab slavers had ventured from Zanzibar in a westerly direction and they knew nothing about where the river ended up. The Arabs reported that the river tribes were particularly vicious and hostile, and various attempts by the slavers to journey down the river had failed. Livingstone was the first white man to see the Lualaba, but its northward trajectory convinced him it could not be connected to the Congo River and he concluded that it must be a previously unknown tributary of the Nile.

  Livingstone had spoken at length with Stanley about the Lualaba during the four months they spent together back in 1871. As he prepared to venture into the ‘white blank’ west of Lake Tanganyika, Stanley knew that exploring this river would be the key to the success of his expedition and, in honour of his old patron, he started to refer to it not as the Lualaba, but as the Livingstone River.