Stanley, I Presume
By PAUL THEROUX
A review by New York Times

The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
By Tim Jeal.
Illustrated. 570 pp. Yale University Press. $38

Poor Africa, the happy hunting ground of the mythomaniac, the rock star buffing up his or her image, the missionary with a faith to sell, the child buyer, the retailer of dirty drugs or toxic cigarettes, the editor in search of a scoop, the empire builder, the aid worker, the tycoon wishing to rid himself of his millions, the school builder with a bucket of patronage, the experimenting economist, the diamond merchant, the oil executive, the explorer, the slave trader, the eco-tourist, the adventure traveler, the bird watcher, the travel writer, the escapee, the colonial and his crapulosities, the banker, the busybody, the Mandela-sniffer, the political fantasist, the buccaneer and your cousin the Peace Corps Volunteer. Oh, and the atoner, of whom Thoreau observed in a skeptical essay: “Now, if anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions ... if he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.” Thoreau, who had Africa specifically in mind, added, “Do you hear it, ye Wolofs?”

These people have been in and out of the continent since the beginning of the 19th century, much earlier if we include the Arab slave traders and the tourist Herodotus. A common denominator in this assortment of foreign visitors — high-minded pests and exploiters alike — is their wish to transform themselves while claiming they want to change Africa.

Henry Morton Stanley is a classic case. “We went into the heart of Africa self-invited — therein lies our fault,” Stanley confided to his diary. The words are quoted in this magnificent new life of the man, by Tim Jeal, a biography that has many echoes for our own time.

Burton and Speke poked at the edges of Lake Victoria, and Livingstone walked in circles around Lake Bangweulu speculating on the source of the Nile, pretending to be a missionary. Jeal was the first to reveal in his 1973 life of Livingstone that the melancholy Scot had made just one Christian convert (who later lapsed). Even the Arab slave traders stayed away from l’Afrique profonde. But on his second African journey, a few years after finding Livingstone, Stanley thrust his way through the midsection of Africa from east to west, and later from west to east. His journeys were valiant, well organized, and the man was a hero. But he was also prone to exaggeration in reporting the events of his travels, and he had many personal secrets.

“Yet despite the pain and weakness of his physical body,” Jeal writes of Stanley’s exhaustion after the first traverse of Africa, an almost unthinkable 7,000-mile journey to crack the secrets of the central African watershed, “Henry pulsed with almost mystical self-belief: ‘For my real self lay darkly encased, & was ever too haughty & soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.’ ”

This “real self” is the one that Jeal gets to grips with. Most of what we have been told of Stanley, and much of which he wrote himself, is wrong. Jeal nails the falsehoods as “misguided lies.” For one thing his name was not Henry Morton Stanley. He was not, as he claimed, an American from New Orleans. He had not been adopted. It was not The New York Herald’s idea for him to find Livingstone, and the Livingstone he found was not, as he claimed, a saintly figure devoted to the uplift of Africa. He did not utter the words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” He was not the violent hanger and flogger he was reputed to be, nor was he a willing cat’s-paw for King Leopold’s infernalities. But, as this book demonstrates in a way that makes it a superb adventure story as well as a feat of advocacy, Stanley was probably the greatest explorer ever to set foot in Africa.

The man we know as Stanley was born John Rowlands in North Wales to a dissolute mother, and at the age of 6 was confined to the misery of a workhouse. He escaped once but was sent back by ashamed and indifferent relatives. He was discharged from this semi-prison at 15, got a job on an American ship, which he jumped in New Orleans. He worked awhile there, experimented with a new name and identity and joined the Confederate Army, in a local regiment, the Dixie Grays, in 1861. He fought at the battle of Shiloh, was captured by a Union patrol, clapped into prison at Camp Douglas and given the choice of fighting for the North or rotting. He changed sides, marched under a Union flag, then deserted and sailed to Wales, where he was again rejected by his mother: “Never come back to me again unless you are in far better circumstances than you seem to be in now.”

“Unloved and deeply sensitive, but angry, too,” Jeal writes, Stanley searched for a way to prove himself. In being rejected he had also been liberated, and his reading (especially travel books) was another liberation. He made a disastrous journey to Turkey and was for a while a war correspondent, reporting on the massacre of American Indians in Iowa and Ethiopians in Magdala. Then, at 31, he persuaded James Gordon Bennett Jr. of The New York Herald that he could make headlines finding David Livingstone, who was not exactly lost but who hadn’t been heard from for a while and was fading from the public memory.

The success of this African trip from the coast to Livingstone’s hut near the shores of Lake Tanganyika was a great coup and a bold headline, and it had the effect of transforming the fortunes of both men. Stanley proved himself a more than able explorer — he was a real leader and he had stamina. His account of the trip showed him to be a persuasive writer, though in his wish to justify the effort, he over-egged his descriptions of Livingstone and thus canonized him, obscuring the man’s oddities and failures. In Livingstone, the fatherless Stanley found a powerful (and idealized) father figure, whose stated mission to explore and improve Africa could be his own. Importantly (and this is one of the many modern dimensions of Jeal’s book) he found a continent where he could transform himself. Africa gave a man who had experimented with multiple identities a name, a face, notoriety, a mission, problems to solve, and it confirmed his greatness as an explorer.

One of the enduring but creepier features of the emotional life of the British is envy. I see it as arising out of the rigidity of the class system. Jeal anatomizes this corrosive quality in describing how throughout Stanley’s life the British press, the big bugs in the Royal Geographical Society, statesmen and rival adventurers spent much of their time making sport of the shy man, trying to tear him down and belittle his achievements. By inventing and improving his past, Stanley gave them lots of ammo. A self-made man in every sense, he had concealed or prettified so much of his early life that he never seemed anything but dubious — there were always whispers and there were often attacks on his character. Nor did his tendency to exaggerate help him in his quest for respectability. Even in Africa, when he efficiently managed to fight off the spears and arrows of an onslaught of attackers, with a small loss of life, he increased the death tolls, overcolored the encounters, made them emphatically incarnadine and portrayed himself as a battler. No one quite knew who he was, and he didn’t want anyone to know. Jeal movingly describes how even at the end of his life, wishing to write his autobiography, Stanley wandered the streets and cemeteries of New Orleans looking for a plausible family history, “all because he could not endure the thought of admitting that his adoption had never happened.”

Yet look what he achieved. The driven workhouse boy dreaming of fame broke free of his class and his country, Americanized himself (he cultivated the accent and the brashness) and became a world-renowned reporter. He single-handedly created the myth of the saintly Livingstone. He then set forth, and in an epic three-year journey he established “the true parent of the Victoria Nile” and followed the Congo River to the Atlantic. Recrossing Africa, he rescued the elusive Emin Pasha (Eduard Schnitzer, a slippery fez-wearing German who was ambivalent about being rescued) and — duped by King Leopold, believing that he was civilizing the Congo — established trading posts as far as Stanley Falls. Five years later, Captain Korzeniowski would steam upriver in the Roi des Belges and identify the area as the Inner Station, the Heart of Darkness.

The irony was that in spite of his idealism, his boldness in opening the heart of Africa to the world, he was (Jeal writes) “one of the unwitting begetters of the historical process that led to the terrible exploitation and crimes against humanity on the Congo.”

But Africa was the backdrop for Stanley’s real life. “I was not sent into the world to be happy,” he wrote. “I was sent for special work.” The epitome of his work, as he saw it, was an ordeal. He was most at ease with Africans and Englishmen from humble backgrounds like his. The well-born white officers who wished themselves upon his expeditions were usually a source of pain and scandal.

Adventure travelers in Africa are nothing new. In the late 19th century they took the form of wealthy young men who bought their way onto a journey. They were the feckless and disobedient officers in Stanley’s Rear Column who caused the great scandal that dogged Stanley’s reputation. Take the abominations of James Jameson, the Irish whiskey heir, who stayed behind while Stanley went on searching for the reluctant Schnitzer. “Fascinated by the subject of cannibalism” and something of an amateur sketcher, Jameson bought an 11-year-old girl while bivouacked on the Congo and handed her over to a group of Africans; and while they stabbed her, dismembered her, cooked her and ate her, Jameson did drawings of the whole hideous business.

Stanley’s nickname was Bula Matari — “the breaker of rocks” — in Africa, but he was shy everywhere else, and diffident when pursuing a woman. His love affairs were all failures. He was wooed by a woman who insisted on his marrying her, and she stifled him, refused to allow him to return to Africa, got him to run for Parliament, which he detested, and sent him to exile in an English country house and death at the age of 63. Because he had been scapegoated so often he was refused a burial in Westminster Abbey.

Stanley’s life speaks to our time, throwing light on the nannying ambitions that outsiders still wish upon Africa. Among other things it is a chronicle of the last years of the Arab-Swahili slave trade, which was fairly vigorous as little as a hundred years ago, and which Stanley opposed. What would have happened if the Arab-Swahili slavers had remained unopposed throughout Africa? “Darfur provides a clue,” Jeal muses.

There have been many biographies of Stanley, but Jeal’s is the most felicitous, the best informed, the most complete and readable and exhaustive, profiting from his access to an immense new trove of Stanley material. In its progress from workhouse to mud hut to baronial mansion, it is like the most vivid sort of Victorian novel, that of a tough little man battling against the odds and ahead of his time in seeing the Congo clearly, its history (in his words) “two centuries of pitiless persecution of black men by sordid whites.”

***Paul Theroux has been writing about Africa and traveling there for more than 40 years. His collection of novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” has just been published.