As Stanley and his men steamed towards Aden, the Suez Canal, Alexandria and Gibraltar before turning south into the Atlantic, Count Brazza was writing to the government of the French Republic:
The mouth of the Congo does not belong to any other European power. A little way beyond is the Portuguese colony of Angola and to the north the French colony of Gabon. . . . French explorers have already planted the national flag on two affluents of the river where it flows to the east of Gabon. Struck by the commercial advantages this great artery presents, various nations are seeking to take possession of it. The Belgian government, in particular, have just sent Stanley there with considerable equipment and unlimited resources. Alone, France, whose rights are greater than those of any other power . . . cannot keep aloof from this pacific contest. To reserve our rights and without prejudice to the future, it would suffice to go and hoist the French flag at Stanley Pool before the Belgian expedition can get there. That would be possible. While Stanley is forced to clear a way for himself through difficult country, slowed down by equipment and numerous obstacles, Brazza, who knows the country, can set out from the French colony without baggage and arrive above the falls after a rapid march. . . . This mission must be kept secret and put into execution in the event of its arriving before Stanley. In the opposite case, it would appear simply to be engaged in geographical exploration.
The French Republic agreed that their honour was at stake and authorised Brazza to waste no time in leaving for Gabon with the sole purpose of unfurling the Tricolor over Stanley Pool and claiming as much of the Congo as possible for France.
Stanley was unaware of it, but the race for Africa was under way.
On 15 August 1879, Stanley’s ship reached the Congo estuary. He wrote: ‘Two years have passed since I was here before, after my descent of the great river in 1877. Now, having been the first to explore it, I am to be the first who shall prove its utility to the world. I now debark my 70 Zanzibaris and Somalis for the purpose of beginning to civilise the Congo Basin.’
The entire force making their way up the Congo in steamers brought from Belgium now consisted of 210 natives selected by Stanley and 14 Europeans appointed by Strauch. Within a week of arriving, they were making their way 110 miles upriver past trading posts that had been operating for years to Vivi, where the first station was to be established. The first of scores of treaties with local chiefs was settled easily; for the ceremony Chief Mavungu donned ‘a blue lackey’s coat, a knit Phrygian cap of vari-coloured cotton’ while the sub-chiefs clothed themselves in a combination of second-hand military tunics, hats and coats obtained at trading posts downriver. Stanley wore clothes of his own design which had been custom-made by a first-class London tailor – a high-buttoned Ruritanian-style grey tunic with decorative piping on the front and sleeves, topped with a matching peaked cap with studded air holes around the crown and a linen handkerchief at the back to protect his neck from the sun.
Native chiefs and Europeans were invited to a banquet under the stars at which the first toast was to ‘His Majesty the King of the Belgians, the prime mover and best supporter of the Expedition du Haut Congo’. The next was to ‘Her Majesty Queen Victoria and the President of the United States’ and the last to ‘the contributors who have supported the expedition’. Stanley noted that the natives seemed to appreciate fine European wines – but ensured that discreet control was kept over the bottles.
Stanley’s American friend in Zanzibar, Augustus Sparhawk, who had run an import–export agency on the island and rendered assistance to the explorer before and after previous expeditions, was appointed head of the first station at Vivi. Sparhawk understood Africa and Africans and spoke Kiswahili. His job would be to receive all goods and mail sent to Vivi from Europe, dispatch them to new stations scheduled to be opened further upriver, organise caravans and generally supervise future expedition networks.
British-built prefabricated wooden huts were pieced together for the station buildings, a road was laid, fruit trees planted and everything went according to plan. Only Stanley and the men who had travelled with him down the Congo in the opposite direction knew what lay ahead – a high plateau of rapids, rocks, marshes, ravines over which the men would have to carry the four boats before the second station could be established at Isangila 52 miles away. Boat interiors had to be gutted, engines and boilers removed and carried separately over steep terrain using manpower and wagons.
In March 1880, Stanley wrote to Strauch and his fellow bureaucrats in Brussels – none of whom ventured outside Europe – attempting to explain the magnitude of the undertaking ahead of them.
As our task is to establish stations and means of communication between them, the difficult task must be performed. First, we have to make a road, then to return to Vivi to haul the Royal overland 52 miles with its boiler and machinery. Third to return with the wagons to Vivi and haul the steamer En Avant, boiler and machinery. Fourth, return to Vivi with the three wagons to haul the boats and heavy impedimenta. Fifth, to return to Vivi for the stores up river. The total mileage of all these journeys will be 520 English miles, exclusive of the journey cutting a road. All this distance and long mileage only covers our progress to Isangila.
At this rate it would take months to reach Stanley Pool.
In his reply, Strauch urged Stanley ‘to act quickly regardless of all other considerations’. Leopold’s spies had been keeping a close eye on Brazza’s movements and had seen a copy of a letter from the Count to the Societé de Géographique of Paris confirming that he was now rushing down one of the Congo’s tributaries towards the great river and Stanley Pool to claim it for France. The King told Stanley: ‘The interest of the enterprise demands that you should not tarry in your first station. Rivals whom we cannot disregard threaten, in fact, to forestall us on the Upper Congo. Monsieur Brazza will try to follow the Alima down to its junction with the Congo, where he hopes to arrive before us. We have no time to lose.’
Count Brazza was making excellent progress on his commando assault towards Stanley Pool. In another dispatch intercepted by Leopold’s spies, Brazza boasted that ‘Stanley, I am told, at the present moment, [has] come up against obstacles I anticipated.’ These included uncooperative tribes unwilling to trade at any price, difficulty in recruiting extra porterage along the route and tough terrain to be traversed by men hauling heavy loads that slowed down the journey. Brazza’s intelligence was good. He reported that two of Stanley’s Europeans had died and a third sent back to Banana, too ill to travel further.
Stanley replied stiffly:
I beg leave to say that I am not a party in a race for the Stanley Pool, as I have already been in that locality just two and a half years ago and I do not intend to visit it again until I can arrive with my 50 tons of goods, boats and other property and after finishing the second station. If my mission simply consisted of marching to Stanley Pool, I might reach it in 15 days, but what would be the benefit for the expedition or the mission that I have undertaken? . . . Double our power and we will double our speed; treble the working power and our progress will be three times quicker. With sufficient men we could be at Stanley Pool within one month.
Instead of sending funds to pay for extra natives capable of building roads and carrying heavy loads through the gorges and precipices which passed the cataracts, Leopold sent four Belgians – an engineer and three officers – and instructions to Colonel Strauch to ‘see from Stanley what’s wanted. It would be a mistake to be stingy. We must equip Stanley from top to toe and give him staff and supplies in abundance, otherwise we are lost.’ There was talk of buying scores of mules from Spain to help carry the loads, but Stanley calculated that he would need hundreds to do the job properly. Talk then shifted to sending out a large party of Chinese coolies to work as labourers, but nothing came of donkeys or Chinamen and Stanley’s men continued the Herculean task of blasting through boulders and building their road through hostile terrain.
Occasionally Stanley would notice men who seemed unsure how to handle their tools properly. He would stop what he was doing to instruct them until he was satisfied they knew how to use the equipment correctly. The Zanzibaris were astonished by his energy and the way he demonstrated pickaxe, sledgehammer and ‘fire sticks’ (dynamite) to smash and blast his way through solid rock walls. As a mark of their admiration, they gave ‘Stamlee’ a new name – ‘Bula Matari’ or ‘the breaker of rocks’. Stanley was delighted with his new name. He wrote: ‘The name is merely a distinctive title, having no privileges to boast of – but the “friend” or “son” or “brother” of Bula Matari will not be unkindly treated and that is something surely . . . ?’
The way to Isangila continued. Surviving on a diet of beans, goat’s meat and sodden bananas, the men built three bridges, filled ravines and gorges with rock and earth and surveyed mountains. Still more cataracts and mountains lay ahead. And then one evening when work on the Isangila road had ended for the day and the men were ready to eat their meal, one of Stanley’s assistants ran into camp waving a piece of paper. Stanley saw the signature at the foot of the page – ‘Le Comte Savorgnan Brazza, Enseigne de Vaisseau’.
Stanley asked the assistant who had given him the paper and was told that a ‘Francess’ (Frenchman), a little distance away in the forest, had written words on the paper and told him to take it to his master. Moments later, a dignified white man wearing the blue uniform of a French naval officer and accompanied by a handful of Senegalese soldiers and interpreters, walked into camp, marched up to Stanley’s tent and introduced himself as Count Brazza.
‘At that time I may well be pardoned if I did not appreciate rightly the position of this gentleman,’ Stanley recalled. ‘When I departed for Africa in 1874 I had never heard of him, and in 1878, during all my travels in Europe, it had only been intimated to me in a casual manner that he had accompanied an earlier expedition to the region.’ Acting as though he met French naval officers in the middle of the jungle every day, Stanley offered him a seat, gave him dinner and listened to the story of Brazza’s earlier attempt to locate the Congo. Stanley admitted that he ‘spoke French abominably and his [Brazza’s] English is not of the best, but between us we contrived to understand each other’. Stanley learned that Brazza was making his way back to the Atlantic coast after visiting Stanley Pool, where he had established a guard post on the northern banks, under which the French flag now fluttered in the breeze. He had left the station in charge of Sergeant Malamine Kamara and two sailors and was on his way back to France – mission completed.
The Count failed to inform Stanley that he had entered into a treaty with King Makoko, whose territory covered the northern part of Stanley Pool. He had passed French flags to sub-chiefs at local settlements and ordered them to be flown from the highest point at each village in recognition of his possession of their territory in the name of France. Five local chiefs had made their mark on the treaty, signifying that they had ceded their territory in return for protection and assistance.
Stanley hosted Brazza for two days before his unexpected guest announced he had to leave. He wished Stanley ‘bonne chance’ and then glanced at the 1,500ft hurdle of quartz and sandstone rock confronting the road builders and said: ‘It will take you six months to pass that mountain with those wagons. Your force is far too weak for such work as you are engaged in; you should have at least 500 men.’ Stanley could only agree, but he swallowed his pride and smiled. His men had not called him Bula Matari for nothing and seven weeks later they had ploughed a wide furrow up the side of the mountain, across the top and down the opposite side. The road along the river was taking shape.
In February 1881, one year after leaving Vivi, the expedition opened the second station at Isangila after forging agreements with local chiefs. In total, going backwards and forwards to Vivi to fetch and carry equipment and supplies, they had covered a distance of 2,300 miles in order to lay 53 miles of road. By now 6 Europeans and 22 Africans had died and a further 13 Europeans had been struck by tropical fever and returned to the coast. There was still another 140 miles of roadway to construct before they reached Stanley Pool and the workforce now consisted of 110 men, transporting 50 tons of boats, equipment and supplies.
In response to a letter from Strauch asking why his men could not work faster, Stanley replied: ‘I beg to inform you that if the whole talent and genius of Belgium were here to assist my progress with their advice, they would not increase my working force, but they might add to my burdens and sick list.’ He said that his men performed their duties well ‘and to expect they should do more would be criminal ingratitude in me’.
The road gang arrived at a river section that would allow them to float boats on the water for the next 88 miles. While one of Stanley’s Europeans supervised building the Isangila station, ‘Bula Matari’ sailed upriver with a handpicked team of Europeans to prepare tribes for their arrival, hoping to come to some agreement for construction of a third station at Manyanga.
There was no trace of life anywhere on its banks, apart from empty and deserted settlements. The reason soon became clear. First one of Stanley’s men came down with a fever, then others followed. After a few days, only Stanley and one other man were well enough to look after the remaining sick men. One of them, an engineer called Paul Neve, wrote to his parents saying that Stanley had taken great care of him ‘during these bad days. He brought to bear the sort of care a blacksmith applies to repair an implement that is most essential and that has broken down through too rough usage, one he is in dread of losing; teeth clenched in anger, he smites it again and again on the anvil, wondering whether he will have to scrap it or whether he will yet be able to use it as before.’ Neve died at Isangila a few weeks later.
The sick were brought to Isangila to recover – and then Stanley recognised symptoms of malaria in his own body, and knew there was little he could do apart from take a dose of the same medicine he prescribed for his men – 60 grains of quinine, a few minims of hydrobromic acid in an ounce of Madeira wine. He passed in and out of consciousness for ten days. On one occasion he called his Europeans and Zanzibaris together and told them he was about to die. He bade each farewell and instructed one of his officers to inform Leopold ‘that my strength has played me false and that I am sorry not to have been able to carry out to a finish the mission he entrusted to me’. He gave instructions that work constructing the road and stations should continue following his death. He then fell back into his coma, waking twenty-four hours later feeling ‘a miserable, helpless wretch as though I was pressed down by a crate. The lower part of my back seemed to be palsied; large tumours and bed sores afflicted me. . . .’
Stanley did not die. He took days to recover and while he regained his strength, he read letters from Strauch demanding to know what was going on. He replied that ‘despite minor setbacks’, all was progressing well. Strauch asked for clarification about punishments meted out to Africans working on the road gang, especially those recruited locally. Stanley replied that it took a year to drill and discipline ‘a body of raw negroes’. He said that punishment took two forms: the whip and irons.
The first is repulsive if inflicted with severity; it wounds, disfigures and renders disgusting the very person in whom you wish to plant self-respect and invest with a certain dignity and for whom you desire to entertain a certain degree of liking. . . . The best punishment is that of irons, because without wounding, disfiguring or torturing the body, it inflicts shame and discomfort. . . . The West Coast natives gave me great troubles the first year. They entered the stores at night, they killed all our chickens, they entered native villages and committed great depredations at night, they violated native women, even small children they attacked, they deserted by fours, sixes and tens. . . . I wish to adopt the most humane method – the least hurtful to the body, but which is a preventive without barbarity, which is a security against repeating abominable crimes against desertion . . . I want a method which will enable me to prove that though I am resolved to repress crime and desertion, the offender may perceive that I entertain no hate towards him.
Stanley’s frustration came boiling to the surface in a letter to the Colonel in which he confessed that his health was ‘so fearfully battered with the endless, wearisome tedious work, never forward – but it is much backward’. He complained that with every new delivery of mail he was expected to take on additional responsibilities, change plans, deal with the arrival of new and inexperienced officers, who
absolutely know nothing of practical life – who appear even never to have been instructed in the simplest camp duties, who are always weak and ailing in health, who have to be carried about and instructed like little children, but who have never-the-less stomachs to feed and are encumbered with baggage, who are jealous of their rank and each of whom wants a separate station, or post, or duties, apart from another’s influence. All these tasks so utterly at variance with what should be my simple duty supplemented by entreaties that I should hurry to Stanley Pool, beat Brazza in speed and astonish the world by miracles as though I had 1,000 Zanzibaris to assist me in performing these marvellous feats. . . . The truth is – pardon me for saying so – that you do not comprehend the position here, and that my letters are misunderstood. . . .
In July 1881 Stanley returned to the place Frank Pocock had named in his honour – Stanley Pool. There he learned that Brazza had entered into a treaty with native chiefs on the northern shore and that villages in the district were now considered French protectorates, supervised by ‘a Governor’ appointed by Brazza to oversee matters until a formal delegation arrived from France. ‘The Governor’ was Sergeant Malamine Kamara, a simple but shrewd Senegalese sailor, now living in a wretched hut with nothing better to do than fend for himself and two colleagues until relieved from his post by the French. Hearing that Stanley’s men were in the vicinity, he instructed the paramount chief, Makoko, to forbid other chiefs to provide ‘Bula Matari’ and his men with supplies ‘or let intruders install themselves in their country’.
Fresh meat was scarce and Stanley’s workers needed decent fare to generate enough energy to continue building their road under the burning sun. To get around the problem, Stanley made friends with Ngalyema, King of Ntamo who had resisted all overtures from Brazza to forfeit his territory and thus turn the whole of Stanley Pool over to France, closing the area to other nations.
Ngalyema told Stanley that Brazza had threatened to have him executed when he returned to Stanley Pool. To put Ngalyema into a good frame of mind, Stanley presented him with a pair of asses and a big black dog. In return, Stanley received gifts of pigs, goats, 200 rations of cassava bread and five gourds of palm wine. Over the next few weeks, Ngalyema turned hot and cold towards ‘Bula Matari’ but a deal was finally struck when Stanley agreed to write to Brussels requesting a circular sheet iron box be sent, painted black, ‘something like a large and deep sponge bath with cover’ which the King of Ntamo intended for use as his coffin. Stanley acceded to the request, allowing him to ask any favour from Ngalyema and his tribes in return. On this basis, the fourth station at Stanley Pool was built and ‘Bula Matari’ gained control of an area covering 400 square miles of the southern portion of Stanley Pool. He named the station Leopoldville in honour of the monarch in whose service he was employed. It included a block house, impregnable against gunfire, a village for his natives, each house complete with a garden for vegetables and bananas, with a main street running through the centre and a waterfront promenade where he imagined that Europeans would one day take Sunday strolls ‘to survey the noble prospect of river, cataract, forests and mountain’.
Orders to buy or trade for ivory to export to Belgium for sale on the open market frequently appeared in Strauch’s letters. Leopold instructed Stanley: ‘I am desirous to see you purchase all the ivory which is to be found on the Congo, and let Colonel Strauch know the goods which he has to forward to you in order to pay for it and when.’ Stanley protested that he could only purchase ivory if he was furnished with advance funds; the only goods he had to trade with were used on food. A letter dated 25 March 1882 stated that 50 tusks were at the station at Stanley Pool worth £1,125 in England with another 150 readily available from tribal chiefs. Natives demanded payment in the form of 2,500lb of brass wire, which Stanley estimated would cost £83, turning in a nice profit for Leopold. Later letters confirm that tens of thousands of pounds worth of ivory were eventually purchased for Leopold and exported to Belgium for sale.
Stanley’s communications with Leopold and Strauch make frequent reference to who should take over his work once his contract came to an end. Neither the King nor the Colonel chose to comment on these remarks, urging Stanley to move ever onwards, buy more ivory and grab more land. Secretly Stanley was afraid that he would return home, his work incomplete or that he would be replaced by an inexperienced Belgian incapable of taking on the mantle of ‘Bula Matari’. He confessed to Leopold: ‘If I leave Africa dissatisfied with myself and my work, the approval of others will be worthless. I am like a cabinetmaker expected to make a splendid work for an Exposition Universelle but my tools break in my hands, are faithless, and I give up work in disgust. Were I to abandon your work today with no man fit to undertake it here, I should expect and deserve and obtain your contempt and entire condemnation.’
Finding a site for the fifth station was relatively easy. Stanley took one of his steamers upriver and located a likely spot at Mswata, a settlement flying the French flag. Stanley won the confidence of the local chief, became his blood brother and tore down the Tricolor flying over his village. Within days he sailed further upriver to procure a location for a sixth station, where, in a Congo tributary, a large open stretch of water was discovered which Stanley named Lake Leopold II.
Fever crept up on Stanley again, and he was brought back to Leopoldville unconscious. His European officers decided he should return to Europe. He was too ill to argue and was sent downriver, passing other stations he had created during the previous three years.
On hearing that Stanley was returning to Europe for rest and recuperation, Leopold told Strauch: ‘I think it essential to send Stanley a letter of three or four lines stating, “In the event – which I hope will not arise – of Mr. Stanley’s health obliging him to stay away from the Congo, he is authorised to pick an acting substitute from the personnel of his enterprise”.’
When Brazza returned to Paris after claiming the northern shore of Stanley Pool for the French Republic, he had expected a hero’s welcome. Instead, he had to remind people who he was and what he had achieved in the name of France. During two visits of exploration to Africa he had discovered the source of an important river, collected vital information on East Africa’s mineral wealth, hoisted the Tricolor over the northern shore of Stanley Pool and proved that the area could be reached by routes other than along the Congo – the river he had narrowly missed discovering himself.
He arrived in France emaciated by fever. When he announced his return and achievements, French government ministers could not have been more uninterested. Brazza hoped for recognition and a grant allowing him to return to Africa to claim more land for France, but no one was prepared to listen. He complained to French geographers that Stanley had been employed for Belgium and Britain and together they planned to gobble up as much of Africa as they could hoist their flags over.
The King of the Belgians, however, felt he needed Brazza on his side as part of his Congo venture. He secretly invited Brazza to Brussels to assess his interest and assure him that the road-building project supervised by Stanley was not an exercise in land grabbing but ‘an international humanitarian’ project. Brazza rejected Leopold’s advances, despite being offered an attractive salary to mastermind the construction of a railway around Stanley Pool to be built and operated by a French company.
Stanley arrived in Brussels to learn that the Comité d’Etudes de Haut-Congo no longer existed but had been replaced by a new organisation, the Association Internationale du Congo, with just one member – King Leopold. The King failed to admit that the change was for political reasons, disingenuously insisting that greater work could be performed under the banner of an international organisation.
Strauch was told that Stanley’s successor, whoever that might be, must give the railway priority; a fast and effective transport system was the only way the expanding stations could communicate with each other. Strauch’s surprised reaction was to enquire exactly what Stanley meant by ‘a successor’, reminding him that he had a five-year contract which still had two years left to run. With the possibility of Brazza returning to Africa, he was needed back in the Congo immediately. Stanley was under the impression that his contract had been renegotiated with the CEHC and besides, doctors had warned that it would be folly to return to the tropics, his health was in danger of collapsing and his workload too great for someone in his physical condition. Moreover, the CEHC no longer existed.
The information was conveyed to Leopold who expressed disappointment and asked: ‘Surely, Mr Stanley, you cannot think of leaving me now, just when I most need you?’ With that remark Stanley’s powers of resistance failed ‘and in a weak moment I assented to depart once more for the Congo, on or about November 1’.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Brazza was using every opportunity openly to denounce Stanley and bring the French government round to his way of thinking. In the pages of Le Temps, Le Petit Journal and Voltaire, he accused Stanley of having ‘American designs’ on Africa, claiming that the only countries equipped to govern Africa were France, Britain and Portugal. He wrote:
I never was in the habit of travelling on African soil in martial array like Mr. Stanley, always accompanied by a legion of armed men, and I never needed to resort to barter, because travelling as a friend – not as a conqueror – I everywhere found hospitable people. Mr. Stanley had adopted the practice of making himself respected by dint of gunfire; I myself travelled as a friend and not as a belligerent. That is why I was able to make this pacific conquest which has so surprised the American explorer in the service of the King of the Belgians.
Brazza’s statements annoyed Leopold, who preferred not to comment on his true intentions for Africa. Stanley was outraged by the accusation that he had made ‘himself respectable by dint of gunfire’. His last three years in Africa had been essentially peaceful and care was taken not to mistreat natives or spill blood, which Stanley claimed ‘would be a bar to future peace and commerce. It would spread everywhere and disturb Africa and Europe.’ Stanley also had Parisian newspaper friends and wrote articles addressing Brazza’s accusations, pointing out that despite his claims of securing territory for the French Republic, the land in question was just 9 miles long, and hardly worth worrying about.
The New York Herald’s Paris bureau chief had formed an organisation called the Stanley Club and arranged a banquet in honour of its former star reporter scheduled to take place on 20 October. Stanley planned to use the occasion to state that Brazza’s ‘so-called treaty’ with Makoko was not worth the paper it was written on and that France had no claim on land north of Stanley Pool. Although never proved, legend has it that on the day of the banquet Stanley met Brazza on a Paris boulevard and told him: ‘Brazza, I am going to have the pleasure of giving you a bit of a mauling this evening.’
The banquet was a sell-out. Included among the guests were French, American and British correspondents who listened to Stanley accuse Brazza of failing to tell Makoko the significance of the scrap of paper containing words in a language the African king did not understand. He said that if Brazza succeeded in getting his government to put its seal to the deeds, Makoko would be in for a surprise when he learned what it meant to sign away his country to a foreign power. He claimed that Africa’s people attached no more importance to the French flag than to an ordinary piece of cloth from which to make a waistcoat. Stanley spoke of his own African achievements, the continent’s great future and closed by saying he could ‘not join the chorus of the apostle Brazza, who has introduced an immoral diplomacy into a virgin continent. It is true that I have been and still am temporarily in the service of the Association Internationale Africaine; but I am an American, therefore free of all political leanings and interested in Africa solely as an unhappy continent. My only ambition is to leave there lasting traces of my work.’
On that note, the doors of the banqueting room burst open – and in strode Brazza. The room fell silent and the uninvited guest was offered a seat. He walked up to Stanley, shook his hand and in fractured English is reported to have said:
I felt bound to appear publicly among those who thus welcome him [Stanley], for it behoves me to declare that I see in Mr. Stanley not an antagonist, but simply a labourer in the same field. Although we represent different interests, we converge towards the same goal; the advance of civilisation in Africa. I am glad today that Mr. Stanley’s expedition through the dark continent imposed on me, through painful and perhaps inevitable circumstances, the duty of myself setting to work in these regions. The flags which I distributed everywhere as a symbol of peace and friendship are borne from tribe to tribe and proclaim that a new era has begun for these populations. Gentlemen, I am French and a naval officer and I drink to the civilisation of Africa by the simultaneous efforts of all nations, each under its own flag.
Newspaper coverage of Brazza’s dramatic entry into the banquet won him new friends in France. He was invited to address the Sorbonne and Société Historique to urge official ratification of his treaty, which was accepted by the French government the following month, along with the allocation of funds for a new expedition allowing him to consolidate France’s new little empire on the banks of Stanley Pool. The encounter did Stanley no harm, either. The men were seen to shake hands and agree that they were brother explorers with a single objective in mind. A truce between the two men was declared, bringing public bickering to an end and the start of a strange friendship between the suave French naval officer and the former workhouse boy.
Stanley had been away from the Congo for just one month when Leopold wrote to Strauch: ‘It is clear that things at Vivi are going badly.’ In Stanley’s absence, his duties had, rather bizarrely, been assigned to a German naturalist and geologist called Dr Peschuel-Loesche who spent most of his time examining Africa’s plant life and rock formations instead of making sure that all was in order at the stations, where discipline had become lax, supplies were not forwarded and work on the road had ground to a halt. Dr Peschuel-Loesche soon fell out with his subordinates and Strauch rapidly dispatched the Herr Doktor back to Berlin. A group of Stanley’s more capable men then took control but innumerable cracks began to appear in the staffing and day-to-day operations at the stations. They managed to upset local tribespeople, several villages were razed to the ground, fourteen natives were killed, with others taken prisoner and punished, leaving a chain of resentment and revenge from Vivi to beyond Stanley Pool.
Before returning to Africa in December 1882, Stanley made major demands on Leopold and Strauch – he wanted more Zanzibaris to help with the work, a better quality of European to run the stations (including British officers) to replace inexperienced ‘flighty headed youngsters’ on whom he had hitherto been obliged to rely, better weapons and more equipment to build stations and infrastructure surrounding them. ‘Bula Matari’ got everything he had asked for.
On his return journey upriver to Stanley Pool, he passed a mournful succession of neglected and blighted stations; Leopoldville, which he had left as a busy and thriving township, was now an overgrown, hungry waste. He spent the first few months plastering the administrative cracks that had appeared, restoring the network of stations to working order and making plans to open new ones upriver.
By the following October, Stanley was in command of 100 Europeans, 600 natives and a fleet of 8 steamers. To protect his men, Stanley was supplied with state-of-the-art Krupp guns to be mounted on the steamers, machine guns, 1,000 quick-firing rifles and 2 million cartridges. For the next eighteen months he would negotiate treaties with the chiefs, giving Leopold – and ultimately Belgium – political jurisdiction over the territory. It was not always easy to win over the natives and Stanley had to use all his powers of patience, tact and gentleness to accomplish his task. Assurances were given that full recompense would be made to native settlements and that their surrounding land and property rights would be respected. Over 400 chiefs were dealt with in this fashion, laying the foundations of what would become the Congo Free State. Many chiefs remembered Stanley from his previous visit to their district and their own first encounter with a white man, travelling with large canoes and a mixed group of men, women and children travelling in the opposite direction. Now he was back with strange-looking ‘canoes’ which belched black smoke into the humid air. They traded as they had done before – cloth, beads, brass wire and shells – but on this return visit they also become blood brothers with the man named ‘Bula Matari’.
Further upriver, the steamers passed what had once been a large riverside settlement, which had been torched and abandoned, its crops destroyed, trees felled and livestock slaughtered. There was an eerie silence along the riverbank. Stanley ordered his steamers to steer to the bank, where they disembarked to investigate further. Later they came across 200 starving people huddled together. They had witnessed something terrible – and feared that the perpetrators had returned to dish out more of the same. Assurances were given that they came in peace. Through interpreters the party learned that the village had been attacked by Arab slavers only days before. They had carried off the strongest men, women and children and slaughtered the rest. The people said their village was one of hundreds visited by slavers and that thousands had been taken away – and thousands more slain or left to die along the riverbank. The people now cowering in fear were those who had managed to escape or had been away from the village when the raiders arrived.
Several miles further along the river, Stanley’s flotilla encountered the Arab raiding party and witnessed hundreds of desolate captives ‘in a state of utter and supreme wretchedness’ chained together in groups of twenty, guarded, starving and lying in their own filth. He recalled that his first impulse was to turn the Krupp guns on the Arabs and liberate the slaves, feeling ‘an almost overpowering urge to avenge these devastations and massacres of people’. But he would not take the law into his own hands ‘and mete out retribution . . . because I represented no constituted government, nor had I the shadow of authority to assume the role of censor, judge and executioner’.
He was greeted warmly by the slavers and learned that in less than a year they had plundered 35,000 square miles of territory. Other slaves were being marched either west, where they would be shipped by Portuguese traders to the Caribbean, or east for the long journey to Oman’s slave markets. The slavers were part of a large and powerful group, but Stanley’s party was similarly powerful thanks to their weapons and could easily have overpowered the Arabs with their firepower and liberated the slaves. But to do so would have triggered war with thousands of slavers operating over the full width of Central Africa, which would have put his stations, men and thousands of innocent people in danger. So he sailed onwards the following day ‘being in a hurry to leave such scenes’ in the direction of the Stanley Falls where another station was built and eventually became the town of Stanleyville.
In the summer of 1884, work on founding the new State of the Congo was virtually complete and a worthy successor was needed to carry on where Stanley would eventually leave off when he returned home. A main contender was General Charles Gordon, who as ‘Gordon Pasha’ would later become the Mahdi’s slaughtered martyr at Khartoum, and who was prepared to give up his Sudan posting to become Governor of the Lower Congo. Gordon had distinguished himself in China, Egypt and India and was as keen to destroy the slave trade as Livingstone and Stanley. He accepted the position but the Egyptian government refused to release Gordon at any price and two years later he was murdered trying to defend Khartoum. Instead, the job went to Englishman Sir Francis de Winton, who was given the title of Administrator General on 8 June 1884 – the same day that Stanley sailed from Vivi to the sea to embark for his return to Europe.
He said farewell to his officers. Some were sorry to see him go, many were glad to know that he would not be returning. As for ‘Bula Matari’ himself, he would write: ‘I know that many of my officers were inclined to regard me as “hard”. I may now and then have deserved that character, but then it was only when nought but hardness availed. When I meet chronic stupidity, laziness and utter indifference to duty, expostulation ceases and coercion or hardness begins.’
Stanley travelled to Belgium to present his final report to Leopold. He estimated that it had cost 37 million gold francs to create the Congo Free State. In five years he had opened 22 stations along the river, supervised the building of 235 miles of road through some of the dark continent’s most hostile terrain, put steamboats on the river, secured treaties with 450 independent tribal chiefs along the length of the Congo and its tributaries, created opportunities for commercial trading and provided a firm foundation on which the fledgling country could build its future.
The United States was the first nation to recognise the new country – officially renamed the Congo Free State – following a major conference in Berlin held between November 1884 and February 1885 to discuss commercial freedom to trade in Africa. Stanley was appointed technical adviser to the American delegation headed by General Sandford, a former US Ambassador to Belgium.
It was while working with the Americans that Stanley quietly brought up the subject of his nationality. He confessed to Sandford that he was not the all-American citizen everyone supposed, but a British subject who for the last few years had been travelling on a diplomatic passport endorsed by Belgium. On his return to Washington, Sandford promised to put wheels in motion for official recognition of Stanley as an American citizen, which he finally became on 15 May 1885, twenty-six years after walking down the Windermere’s gangplank in New Orleans, penniless, unknown and alone in the world.
Other countries were quick to follow suit; among those to recognise the new country were Britain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain. In April 1885, Leopold, with the approval of his country’s parliament, was pronounced Sovereign of the Congo Free State. It was made clear that the link between Belgium, its ruler and the new African nation was strictly personal and did not involve the small European country in any way.
As the Congo Free State began to win international recognition, Brazza was appointed Governor General of the French Congo in 1886 and spent the next decade establishing schools, clinics and job-training programmes. He insisted that European traders pay fair wages to African employees. He was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his achievements, but disparagingly labelled a ‘foreign negrophile’ in some quarters. Brazza learned of his own dismissal as Governor General of the French Congo in 1898 when he read about it in a newspaper. Six years later he returned to Africa to lead an investigation into the execution of two soldiers accused of inflicting torture on natives. He discovered the entire Congo territory was riddled with corruption, with natives living in appalling conditions. As investigations continued, Brazza’s health deteriorated. He died in Dakar, was given a full state funeral in Paris – and his report suppressed because it placed the French government in an embarrassing light. Brazza was a ‘peaceful conqueror’, an idealist and a man who admired Stanley, but viewed him as a colonial rival. The Congo metropolis of Brazzaville is one of only a few African cities still retaining its colonial name out of respect for the man.
In 1908, a year before his death, King Leopold was forced to sell the Congo to the Belgian state following Europe-wide indignation over the treatment of Congolese by his colonial regime. He never once visited his African kingdom. In the twenty years following Stanley’s return to Europe, the Congo’s population declined from 20 million to 8 million people. Congolese were murdered and forced into labour by Belgium’s colonial military personnel. Lashings and the taking of hostages were techniques used to ‘encourage’ villages failing to meet their rubber or palm oil production quotas. Women were raped, hands were cut off for minor offences, settlements looted, villages burned and rebellions repressed in a period of history in which the fate of the Belgian-administered Congolese can be compared to that of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and to passages from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Belgium’s colonial past still remains a skeleton in its cupboard. Following independence in 1960, the Belgian Congo endured political upheavals and civil wars, causing its economy to collapse and making the Democratic Republic of Congo, as it is known today, one of the world’s most politically unstable nations with one of Africa’s highest crime rates. The civil war currently raging through the country has claimed tens of thousands of lives and shows little sign of ending.