Stanley's Africa Then and Now

THE tenth of November, 1871, is the most notable day in the history of Equatorial Africa. For on that day took place the meeting between two men, Livingstone and Stanley, on which depended the future of that vast region: whether it should remain, as it ever had been, “ Darkest Africa,” or whether the light of civilization should dawn upon its night. To have seen the two, one would never have dreamed that the fate of millions hung upon their meeting. Livingstone was a prematurely old man, so nearly worn out by the hardships of a most strenuous life that in a few months his faithful followers would find “ the great master,” as they called him, kneeling at the side of his bed, dead. Stanley was a young man of thirty, whose sole aim in the meeting was to get material for the newspapers of which he was the correspondent. But his previous career was such as to render him capable of any task which required simply resourcefulness, energy, and faithfulness to duty.

His father having died in Stanley’s infancy, and his mother having cast him off, he was brought up in a Welsh workhouse. Inhuman cruelty caused him, a boy of fifteen, to flee from the “ house of torture,” as he calls it in his recently published Autobiography,¹ and soon after to ship as cabin-boy on a vessel bound from Liverpool to New Orleans. His treatment here was such as to cause him to desert from “ the floating hell,” it having been the frequent custom in those days for shipmasters to treat their boys with such brutality that they would desert on reaching port and so forfeit their wages. The next few years were spent in stores, on plantations, and on a Mississippi flatboat.

At the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the 6th Arkansas Regiment, was taken prisoner at Shiloh, and carried to Camp Douglas, Chicago. His sufferings were such in this “ prisonpen,” that, to secure his release, his sympathies also now being entirely with the North, he enrolled himself in the United States Artillery service. But after a few days the prison-disease laid him prostrate, and he was carried to a hospital and soon after discharged, a ” wreck.” Two years later he enlisted in our navy as ” ship’s writer,” and served f ill the end of the war. Being present at the capture of Fort Fisher, his graphic account of the bombardment was published in the newspapers, and a career as correspondent opened before him.

Next we find him in Asia Minor, where he is taken prisoner by a horde of Turkomans, severely beaten, and robbed of all his money. Then he accompanies General Hancock in his bloodless campaign against the Comanches, and Lord Napier in the English Abyssinian expedition. After other varied experiences in Spain, Egypt, Turkey, and Persia, we find him at last on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, successful in his search for the great missionary explorer.

For four months the two men were together, and the affection of the youthful adventurer for his companion became so great that on their parting, he writes, “ I was so affected that I sobbed, as one only can in uncommon grief. . . . For a time I was as a sensitive child of eight or so, and yielded to such bursts of tears as only such a scene as this could have forced.” The nature of the change wrought in him by Livingstone’s influence can be learned from this extract from his diary, written on the day he received the news of his death. “ Dear Livingstone! Another sacrifice to Africa! His mission, however, must not be allowed to cease; others must go forward and fill the gap. ‘ Close up, boys! Close up! Death must find us everywhere.’ May I be selected to succeed him in opening up Africa to the light of Christianity! . . . May Livingstone’s God be with me, as He was with Livingstone in all his loneliness. May God direct me as He wills. I can only vow to be obedient, and not to slacken.”

This was not a mere passing impression, for in less than a year, November 12,1874, he is again on the East African coast, ready to take up Livingstone’s unfinished work. Equatorial Africa was a region of over two million square miles in extent, at that time practically unknown except in the parts adjacent to the sea. A few Europeans had reached the lakes from the east; one had ascended to them by the Nile; and another had traced the course of the Congo for a distance of between one and two hundred miles. The only contact which this vast territory, twothirds as large as Europe, then had with the outside world was through the ivory and slave trade. In the eastern part gangs of natives, 240,000 in number, every year as late as 1892, men, women, children, taken captive for the purpose by the Arab traders, brought the ivory down to the coast. The caravan routes were strewn with dead bodies, for barely one in six who started reached the coast alive. Those who did were shipped as slaves to Arabia, Persia, and Egypt. Two children out of three of every family of the coast-natives were also taken as slaves by the Arabs. The western region bordering on the Atlantic had been for four centuries simply a hunting-ground for slaves.

Stanley’s previous experiences in this region had shown him the physical difficulties which confronted the intending traveler. For when the question presents itself to him, “Shall I attempt to solve its mysteries? ” he writes: “ The torrid heat, the miasma exhaled from the soil, the noisome vapors enveloping every path, the gigantic cane-grass suffocating the wayfarer, the rabid fury of the native guarding every entry and exit, the unspeakable misery of the life within the wild continent, the utter absence of every comfort, the bitterness which each day heaps on the poor white man’s head, in that land of blackness, the sombrous solemnity pervading every feature of it, and the little — too little— promise of success which one feels on entering it. But, never mind, I will try it!”

His first work of exploration in the interior was the circumnavigation of the Victoria Nyanza, to find out whether it was really one lake or a cluster of shallow lakes or marshes. On the north shore he was met by a flotilla of war-canoes sent by the King of Uganda to greet the white man and beg him to come and see him. Stanley accepted the invitation and for three months was the guest of Mtesa. The thing which most impressed him was the anxiety of the king and his chiefs to learn about the stranger’s country. At one interview, many chiefs being present, the subject of the white man’s faith was broached. With keen regret that Livingstone was not there, Stanley did his best to give some rudimentary facts. “ As I expounded,” so he writes in an article,² “ I observed fixed attention on the part of the king and courtiers such as I had not noticed before. The rule had been understood by all that talk should be brief and various, but now it became animated and continuous. Gestures, exclamations, and answers followed one another rapidly, and every face was lighted up by intense interest. When we finally adjourned, the subject was not exhausted, greater cordiality was in the hand-shakes at parting, and Mtesa urged that we should continue the discussion on the next day. And so we did for several days. It seemed that the comparisons of Mohammed with Jesus Christ were infinitely more fascinating than the most lively sketches of Europe, with its wonders and customs; and truly the description of the accusation of Christ, his judgment by Pilate, and the last scene on Calvary, was the means of rousing such emotions that I saw my powers of discerning character had been extremely immature and defective.”

On the happy suggestion that he should leave behind some souvenir of his visit, he began, with the help of the king’s drummer and one of his own boys, to write upon thin and polished boards of whitewood, about sixteen by twelve inches, some of the things he had told them. At the end of his stay ” the translations which we made from the Gospels were very copious, and the principal events from the creation to the crucifixion were also fairly written out, forming a bulky library of boards. When the work was finished, it was solemnly announced in full court that for the future Uganda would be Christian and not Mohammedan.”

On his telling the king that he must leave him, Mtesa exclaimed, “ What is the use, then, of your coming to Uganda to disturb our minds, if, as soon as we are convinced that what you have said has right and reason in it, you go away before we are fully instructed? ” He explained that he was not an instructor in religion, he was simply a pioneer of civilization, but that if the king really wished for instructors he would write to the people of England to that effect, and he was sure they would send proper men. “ Then write, Stamlee, and say to the white people that I am like a child sitting in darkness, and cannot see until I am taught the right way.”

Stanley did write immediately, and gave his letter to one of General Gordon’s stafff who had come to the country on a political mission. Colonel Linant was killed on his way back to Khartum, but the letter was found on his dead body and given to Gordon, who sent it to England, where it was published, November 5, 1875, in the London Daily Telegraph. On the evening of that day the Church Missionary Society received twenty-five thousand dollars from an anonymous giver, and in a short time one hundred and twentyfive thousand dollars had been contributed to the Uganda fund. When, a year later, the first missionaries reached the country, they were received with great public demonstrations of joy. On their return to their tents after their welcome, a messenger came, saying that the king wished to see them privately. Upon their being ushered into his presence the first question Mtesa asked was, “ Have you brought the book? ”

After leaving Uganda, Stanley went to the headwaters of the Congo and followed the river in its downward course, until, three years after leaving the Indian Ocean, he gazed upon the Atlantic. His work of exploration was done; now for the harder task, civilization. “ That was henceforth the main purpose and passion of his life,” writes Lady Stanley. “ For him, the quest of wider knowledge meant a stage toward the betterment of mankind. He had laid open a tract comparable in extent and resources to the basin of the Amazon, or the Mississippi. What his vision saw, what his supreme effort was given to, was the transformation of its millions of people from barbarism, oppressed by all the ills of ignorance, superstition, and cruelty, into happy and virtuous men and women. His aim was as pure and high as Livingstone’s. But as a means, he looked not alone to the efforts of isolated missionaries, but to the influx of great tides of beneficent activities.”

At first he had hoped that the English people would seize the grand opportunity which had come within their grasp. He spoke in all the great commercial centres of the kingdom, setting forth the immense advantages to trade in the opening of this magnificent country with its well-watered soil, now neglected, but richer than any in the Mississippi Valley. But the government and the people turned a deaf ear to his appeals, and he was obliged to accept the offers of King Leopold of Belgium, who had become deeply interested in African possibilities. Stanley’s work as founder of the Congo State, the greatest single enterprise of his life, occupied five and a half years, January, 1879, to June, 1884. Twelve months alone were spent in building a road over mountains and along precipices around the succession of cataracts and rapids which separate the navigable part of the river from the sea. Hammer and drill in his hand, he showed his men how to use their tools, and they called him Bula Matari, “ breaker of rocks" a name which has been graven on his tomb as most fitly characterizing “ his central quality — concentrated energy victoriously battling with the hardest that earth could offer, all to make earth goodly and accessible to man.” During a year and a half he negotiated treaties with over four hundred chiefs, established stations for a thousand miles along the Upper Congo, and did his best to abolish the slave-trade and put an end to the intertribal wars, two evils which cost Africa annually a million lives. In this work he was promised the aid of “ Gordon Pasha,” who had arranged to take the governorship of the Lower Congo, under Stanley, who was to govern the Upper Congo; and, together, they were to destroy the slavetrade at its roots. General Gordon wrote a letter to him in which he said that he should be happy to serve under him and work according to his ideas. But the call of the Sudan came just at this time, and the new state was deprived of the services of one who might possibly have changed for the better the whole course of its history.

What is the present condition of that part of Africa which Stanley, more than any one man, has opened to the outside world? The most graphic idea of the marvelous change is to be obtained by comparing a map of this region published thirty years ago with one of the present day. In the old one, except on the coasts, there is little except a great blank. In the new one the natural features, mountains, rivers, lakes, are delineated with greater minuteness and accuracy than on maps of some parts of South America, and the blank space is dotted over with towns and stations. The political relations of the country are shown by the coloration, for the whole of the two million square miles has been appropriated by the great powers of Europe, — England, Germany, France, and Belgium.

The isolation of the interior, Stanley felt, was its curse. What has been done to remedy that evil? According to the latest statistics at hand, there are twelve hundred miles of railway in operation, and a thousand more are in process of construction. The Victoria Nyanza is reached by one railroad, and the journey which it took Stanley one hundred and four days to accomplish, and which cost him the lives of twenty of his followers, can now be made in three days and as safely as in England. A railway has been built around the Congo rapids, and a connection is to be made between its head of navigation and the Rhodesian railway system, which will soon enable travelers to go from the Cape to the mouth of the Congo, some six or seven thousand miles, by rail and steamer. For there are lines of steamers on the river, as well as on the lakes, and on the Nile to the northern border of Uganda. There are five thousand miles of telegraph, and the post-offices in the Congo State and British East Africa alone transmitted in 1907 three million letters, papers, and packets. The foreign commerce in the same year, of the whole region, was valued at over sixty million dollars, borne on vessels of 5,535,000 total tonnage.

The best impression of the progress made, however, can be obtained from a brief summary of what has been accomplished in each separate country. On the east coast the German Protectorate extends over nearly 400,000 square miles of territory, with a population estimated at seven millions. In the course of its quarter-century of occupation two principal aims on the part of the government are evident: the creation of adequate means of transportation and communication, and the education of the natives. Two railways, aggregating over two hundred miles, have been built, connecting two of the ports with the interior. At the terminus of one of them there are four motor carriages for the transport of passengers and freight to and from another town farther inland. Wide, well-kept roads — on some of which rest-houses and stores are provided — run all through the colony. A telegraph line connects Ujiji, the place of the meeting of Livingstone and Stanley, with the rest of the world; and in the whole colony there were a year ago thirty-five post-offices and twenty-three telegraph-stations.

To aid in developing the natural resources of the land, the government has created several experimental stations for tropical culture and cattle-rearing, and there are also plantations of cocoa-palms, coffee, vanilla, tobacco, rubber, cacao, sugar, tea, cotton, cardamom, cinchona, and fibre plants. The value of the exports —mainly of these products — in 1907 was over three million dollars, the leading articles being sisal and rubber. The educational work is done by thirty-one government schools, including four for instruction in handicrafts, and the schools of eight missionary societies; the whole number of pupils being over twenty thousand. In order to gain such a scientific knowledge of the natives as will enable their German rulers to govern them wisely and use intelligently the means to civilize them, a special commission has been appointed to study the natives’ physical and mental capacities, and is probably now on the field. So impressed was Mr. Roosevelt with what had been accomplished that he sent a telegram a year ago to Emperor William expressing his “ admiration for the wonderful development and growth of German commercial and colonial interests in East Africa.”

Progress has not been so marked in British East Africa, the territory lying directly to the north of the German colony. The conditions are different both as regards the natural features of the land and the character of its population; but the real reason lies in the fact that it was taken possession of mainly to secure safe and rapid communication between Uganda and the ocean, and therefore there has been comparatively little interest felt in its development. But the most serious barrier to the introduction of western civilization, the supremacy of the Masai, a nomadic tribe of warriors who destroyed or drove away all other tribes, leaving an extensive tract practically a wilderness, the home of countless herds of wild animals, has been broken down. Their depredations have been stopped, and they are gradually settling down as cultivators of the land. The railroad has been built to the Victoria Nyanza, and its central station, Nairobi, more than three hundred miles from the sea, is a town, to quote from a recent traveler and sportsman, Dr. W. S. Rainsford, in his Land of the Lion,³with a “ fine broad well-metaled main street that runs for more than a mile straight from the railroad depot to the Norfolk Hotel.”On the roadway there may be seen farmers, Boers, civil officers (for it is the headquarters of the government of the Protectorate), soldiers very smartly dressed, Arab and Somali traders, Hindu merchants, and Englishwomen, all of whom,“ on every sort of‘mount,’ — pony, mule, donkey, bicycle, in ’rickshaw or wagon, motorcar or camel cart, — pass ceaselessly up and down.”

More than three thousand square miles of rich farming and pasture land have been allotted to actual or intending settlers, and there are more than four hundred European farmers and fifty thousand natives in the immediate neighborhood of the capital. The education of the natives seems to be mainly in the elementary schools attached to the stations of the different missionary societies, British, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and American. The foreign trade two years ago amounted to over seven million dollars, the principal exports being hides and skins, ivory, grain, and rubber. As compared with the trade in 1900 it shows a threefold growth, the exports alone having increased from less than half a million dollars to more than two and a half millions.

The Uganda Protectorate, consisting of five provinces, is the smallest of all the colonies, but some of its people, the Baganda, have attained by themselves a higher level of civilization than any other African race. While the supreme rule is vested in Great Britain, the native kings or chiefs, whose rights are in most cases regulated by treaties, are encouraged to conduct the government of their own subjects. The province of Uganda is recognized as a native kingdom and is governed by a regency of three chiefs assisted by a native assembly, the king, Daudi, grandson of Mtesa, being a minor. The material growth of the Protectorate since Stanley’s visit has not been great, for various reasons, principally its isolation, internal wars, and, at the present time, the destructive plague of the sleeping-sickness. But in other directions it has grown marvelously. The Baganda have acquired a written language and literature, and the products of the native press are numerous and of a high character. Two years ago there were 433 schools with native teachers, the whole number of pupils, including those in the mission schools, being over 28,000. At the same time there were 1870 Christian church buildings, and a noble cathedral at the capital, Mengo, built wholly by the natives, of brick, and capable of seating four thousand people. There are steamers on the Nile and the two great lakes, Victoria and Albert; telegraph-lines to the coast and to Cairo; and a mail service by relays of runners, with money and postal orders and parcel-post exchange systems. The native Protestant church is now self-supporting, and does foreign missionary work among the contiguous pagan tribes.

The reports in regard to the Congo Free State, now the “ Congo Belge,” are so conflicting that it is difficult to give a correct impression of its present condition. But there can be no question that some of the elements of civilization have been successfully introduced. Lines of steamers run upon the river for over twelve hundred miles of its course, and transportation by rail is possible for nearly five hundred miles in different parts of the country. Numerous stations have been established, some of which are certainly centres of healthy influence upon the natives, while others are merely trading-posts and the headquarters of the native troops, who collect, mainly by force, the rubber tribute demanded by the government, or the company to whom the territory has been ceded. The foreign commerce has increased from about nine million dollars in value in 1895 to forty millions in 1907, the exports being almost wholly rubber and ivory. Of the imports, it is not surprising, but it is disheartening, to see that that which ranked fourth in value was the present curse of western Africa, spirituous liquors. Education is principally in the hands of the nearly six hundred missionaries, at about one hundred and fifty stations. The government, however, is not wholly inactive, for there are three agricultural colonies where children are collected and taught, and there are also governmental rubber and coffee plantations.

But the conditions at the best are far from being those which Stanley dreamed of and worked for during the best years of his life. From his Auto-biography we learn that his interest in the country never flagged, and that the late King Leopold evidently appreciated what he had done and often asked him to go back to the Congo. “ But to go back,” he writes, “ would be to see mistakes consummated, to be tortured daily by seeing the effects of an erring and ignorant policy. I would be tempted to reconstitute a great part, of the governmental machine, and this would be to disturb a moral malaria injurious to the reorganizer. We have become used to call vast, deep layers of filth ‘Augean stables’; what shall we call years of stupid government, mischievous encroachment on the executive, years of cumbersome administration, years of neglect at every station, years of confusion and waste in every office? ”

There is little information to be given in relation to the last of the five colonies into which the Africa of Stanley has been divided, the French Congo, the great region lying between the Free State and the German Kamerun Protectorate. Its development has been checked largely by the lack of means of communication with the interior, and also, it is to be feared, by the misgovernment of the natives. But it has great natural wealth, as is shown by the fact that the value of its foreign commerce two years ago was over seven million dollars, which is more than double what it was four years before. The educational work seems to be entirely in the hands of the missionaries, who maintain over fifty schools, ten of which are for girls, with about thirtysix hundred pupils.

To forecast the future of this vast and most interesting part of the Dark Continent is extremely difficult. For there is every reason to believe that the progress by 1940 will have been greater than that of the past thirty years. Of one thing there can be very little doubt, and that is, that immense tracts of what are now forest and jungle will then be cultivated, and the wealth of the world will have been greatly increased. Great quantities of all the products of the tropics will be raised and carried to the markets of the world; while the wants of the now civilized native, who will also be vastly greater in numbers, will have to be supplied from the mills of Europe and America. There is no part of the earth of equal extent which has such great undeveloped natural wealth, and this consists of things in rapidly growing demand, as rubber, cotton, sugar, and coffee, to say nothing of the incalculable store of valuable wood in the forests, and the iron and copper, of which large deposits have been found. And, it should be noted, there will be no difficulty in bringing these things to the world-markets, for there is practically no part of the Belgian and French territories which does not have a navigable river. In the three eastern colonies good roads and railways will connect the plantations and mines of the interior with the principal ports.

But who is to develop this untold wealth, and enrich the world by the products of intelligent industry? There can be but one answer to this question. It is preëminently the black man’s country. With the exception of a small tract on the east coast, it is a land in which no white man can live for any length of time and retain his faculties in a normal condition. There can be no doubt that much of the misgovernment of the Congo native is due to the terrible influence upon the Belgian official of the climate and the unnatural surroundings. More than one traveler has called attention to the fact that some of the officials in the isolated stations are practically insane. The African then will change this wilderness into a highly cultivated and densely populated land, and his rulers will be of his own people, and doubtless chosen by him. For it is now more and more the policy and avowed aim of some of the great Christian powers so to govern subject peoples of a lower grade of civilization that in time they will be able to govern themselves righteously. To secure this great end the missionary is a most cordial co-worker, and in the coming years there will be a great increase in the number of well-manned stations, and no part of the continent will be neglected.

One of the lights on the dark cloud that has hung over the Congo State since its creation is the fact that the interest of the Western world has been drawn to it to such an extent that a reform of the abuses of administration is certain to come within a short time. Another encouraging fact is the growing conviction that the education of the African should be, not simply that of the “ three R’s ” as in the past, but largely industrial, as Dr. Rainsford has so forcibly shown from his recent experiences in East Africa. I myself am strongly inclined to believe that the corps of foreign educators will be greatly reinforced by men from Uganda. If in the time of their infancy as a Christian people, they carried the Gospel to their heathen neighbors, will they not now do still more to lift them to their own level? It may be quixotic in the extreme, but I look forward with much confidence to a day when there will be a union of the independent Equatorial African States, the capital and administrative centre of which shall be on the Uganda shore of the great Victoria Nyanza. But the one thing about which there can be no uncertainty is that in thirty years the one supreme aim of Livingstone and Stanley will have been accomplished, the civilization of Europe will have been poured into the barbarism of Africa.