Biography Henry Morton Stanley was the journalist sent in 1869 by the New York Herald to find David Livingstone in the midst of Africa.
Their meeting at Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, made Stanley's name and fortune, securing him a lucrative contract with King Leopold II of Belgium to establish trading stations along the Congo River. The terms of the meeting with the great British missionary ("Dr Livingstone, I presume?") and the charnel house that was Leopold's Congo have become the stuff of myth, accepted as fact everywhere.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that in Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer Tim Jeal should have turned that myth on its head. Here is a picture not of duplicitous brutality, as we had known before, but of an unlucky victim of his own attempts to adhere to Victorian proprieties. Instead of being the man whom Leopold needed to bamboozle Congolese chiefs out of land, Stanley is one of the few protectors of Africans from white (and black) brutalities.
Born "John Rowlands, Bastard" in Denbigh, Wales, in 1841, Stanley had an adventurous life long before he set foot in Africa. After being abandoned by his mother to a workhouse childhood he ran away to sea, eventually jumping ship in New Orleans. This was the beginning of a long series of deceptions and fallings off, chief of which was his assumption of the name Stanley from a prosperous local merchant, who has been assumed to be the explorer's adoptive father, an impression Stanley did nothing to gainsay.
In fact, as Jeal shows, the truth is much more complex. So is the real story behind Stanley's joining of the Confederate army during the American civil war, his switching to the Federal side, and desertion from there and later the US navy. At this point, perhaps at all points in his life, he seemed like a man who always stood on uncertain ground: he always had to pretend he was an American citizen but it is never clear he became one.
AFTER VARIOUS DISASTROUS ventures, he made a modest success of himself as a freelance journalist, eventually securing the commission to find Livingstone.
One of the many ironies of Stanley's life, says Jeal, "was the fact that he had done more than any living man to create the myth of saintly Dr Livingstone, only to suffer for it ever afterwards by being adversely compared with the good doctor". For a brief moment, though, when they were together in Africa, it seems Stanley had found the father figure he was looking for. But Livingstone died soon afterwards, and by 1874 Stanley was unpicking one of the geographical mysteries the missionary had left behind - involving the relationship between the source of the Nile, the Congo and the central African lakes - by crossing the continent in his greatest ever expedition.
In 1878, by now world famous, Stanley signed the fateful contract with Leopold, its purpose to establish his Africa "state". As Jeal shows, Stanley had much less to do with Leopold than previous biographies (and their reviewers, including this one) have proposed. The same is true of the portrayal of Stanley in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, seminal as that book remains.
In search of profits from first ivory and then rubber, Leopold (who ran the country as a personal fiefdom) sanctioned the deaths of between five and eight million Africans; and for many of these Stanley seems to have been held responsible by posterity. Jeal also reveals the shocking extent of the East African-Arab slave trade (as opposed to the West African-American slave trade): "During the 19th century some 2 million slaves were estimated to have sailed from Africa's eastern shores or been taken overland to Egypt, Arabia and the Gulf by trans-Saharan routes."
Using a vast trove of papers that only became available in 2002, Jeal shows how, far from perpetrating such atrocities in person, for which Stanley has been held tokenistically responsible in toto, he actually stood up against them. Hunger, illness, infighting among bad colleagues and attacks from local inhabitants explain most of the personal charges against him: except, of course, the principal one - that no one invited him to the Congo in the first place.
IT WAS STANLEY'S next trip, to rescue Emin Pasha (a German lieutenant of Gordon of Khartoum) in 1886, which really got him into hot water. The expedition, from western Congo to Uganda, was a farce in which many people died, some at the hands of two brutal officers Stanley had ill-advisedly chosen. One, James Jameson (an heir of the whiskey family), purchased an 11-year-old girl in Stanley's absence and gave her to cannibals so he could make sketches of her being stabbed to death, dismembered, cooked and eaten.
In 1891, after marriage to a Lady Macbeth figure with whom he found some happiness, Stanley broke a leg while larking about in the Alps. But it was becoming a British MP, on his wife's insistence and after some jiggery-pokery by the Home Secretary with the US nationality all thought he had, which really did for him. He died in 1904, becoming the scapegoat of colonial and post-colonial guilt for generations since. This important book shows that blame can't be sloughed onto Stanley quite so easily.
Giles Foden is the author of a number of books including the novel The Last King of Scotland, the film of which is currently on release. He lives in London and West Cork
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer By Tim Jeal Faber & Faber, 545pp. £17.99
