Into Africa Page 21

  He was sent to Camp Douglas, a prison camp just outside Chicago. Fleas, ticks, and lice raged through the hovels in which men were forced to sleep. The open sewers bred dysentery and cholera. Rations were minimal. Starvation was rampant. When Union officials offered Stanley freedom in exchange for renouncing the Southern cause, he refused. Six weeks later, after watching thousands die and comprehending that Camp Douglas was a death sentence, Stanley changed his mind. In June of 1862, just two months after Shiloh, he became a member of the Illinois Light Artillery. He was shipped to Virginia to fight for the United States of America.

  If it was odd that a man could skip sides so easily, the events that followed for Henry Stanley were more incredible. Within three days of being sent to Virginia he was felled by dysentery, sent to a military hospital for four days, then discharged from the service for being too weak to perform his duties. Without a dime in his pockets, owning nothing but the clothes on his back, the former POW was cast out to wander the back roads of West Virginia. “The seeds of the disease were still in me. I could not walk three hundred yards without stopping to gasp for breath,” he wrote.

  Stanley collapsed along a country lane. He would have died if a family hadn't taken him in. Over the next two months the Bakers nourished Stanley back to health, gave him clean clothes, and purchased a train ticket to Baltimore so he could start all over again in the big city. By New Year's 1863, Stanley was in New York for the first time in his life. After a year working odd jobs, Stanley decided it was time to try his hand at the Civil War again. On July 19, 1864, he enlisted in the Union Navy for a three-year hitch. Stanley was made a ship's writer, a petty officer position responsible for keeping the ship's log. He served aboard the USS Minnesota as it bombarded Fort Fisher, North Carolina, in the winter of 1864 and 1865. On a whim, he wrote a story about the experience and sent it to a number of newspapers and magazines. Some bought and ran it, marking the beginning of Stanley's journalism career.

  One story in particular that fascinated Stanley was that of David Livingstone. He told friends that his ambition was to go to Africa one day and make his fortune. Neither Livingstone nor the call to Africa, however, led him to desert from the navy in February 1865. Just boredom. When the Minnesota docked in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the restless ship's writer jumped ship with a teenaged shipmate named Lewis Noe. They soon parted ways, and Stanley fled to the American West. He wangled a job as a stringer for the Missouri Democrat, then began the year of traveling that culminated with his arrival in Central City in January 1866. Five months later he quit his job at the Miner's Daily Register and took the stagecoach to Denver with Cook on May 6 of that year.

  It was upon arriving back in America after the ill-fated journey to Turkey that Stanley devoted himself to journalism. He thought it a gallant, romantic profession. “The more daunting the assignment, the better,” he later wrote of journalism. “The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom. The flying journalist or roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom.”

  Journalism was also the first thing in his life that Stanley had ever been good at. Until that time, Stanley had displayed a singular knack for failure—as a soldier, sailor, merchant, lover, traveler, butcher's delivery boy, and deckhand. He had failed so completely, so many times, in so many arenas, that Stanley had taken to embellishing his accomplishments. But with journalism he shone, and he drove himself harder to make a name for himself.

  When Bennett finally summoned him to Paris in October 1869, there was no doubt Henry Morton Stanley was the ideal man to find David Livingstone. His whole life had pointed to that moment. His reinventions—name, country, career—gave him the flexibility to adapt and persevere. Travel across Abyssinia taught him the inner politics of travel with a large party, and to be comfortable sleeping outdoors. From the army he learned the power of a gun, marching, the need for organization. And reaching back into childhood, Stanley knew that failure was not a temporary setback, but a calamitous turn of events. He didn't want to fail again.

  Never having known his own father, Stanley had attached himself to a number of older men through his life. At St. Asaph's he was the pet of the one-handed headmaster, James Francis. He had fallen prey to Hardinge, the captain of Windermere. He pined for Henry Hope Stanley and their brief father-son flirtation. He idolized Hancock, Sheridan, Sherman, and the other U.S. generals during the Plains War so much that he memorized one of Sherman's speeches to the Indians verbatim. And his entire journey in search of Livingstone had been salvaged through the largesse of American Consul Francis Webb—ten years Stanley's senior.

  To find Livingstone—whose worldwide reputation was that of a man kindly and paternal—would be to find the ultimate father figure: older, wise, brave, accomplished, and even beloved by an entire nation. The possibility of acceptance was counterbalanced by the realization that rejection would have a crushing finality. The rebirth engendered by Africa's austerity and trial was weeding out the insecurity that had governed Stanley since birth.

  No longer was he scared of Africa. In fact, with every obstacle overcome, Stanley—the man who'd never had a home—was beginning to feel as if he belonged there, just like Livingstone. “My black followers might have discerned, had they been capable of reflection,” Stanley wrote, “that Africa was changing me.”

  And even as he suffered through the Marenga Mkali, unconscious and carried, Stanley was growing stronger. His fever broke during the night. At 3 A.M. he asked to be booted and spurred, so he could ride the last miles of the Marenga Mkali. Soon darkness gave way to light. By dawn the waterless passage was done. So complete was Stanley's relief to have survived the crossing that his writings compared himself with Moses. What the rest of the massive caravan saw was the region of Ugogo, with its baobob trees and green hills. But Stanley, whose pre-journey perceptions about Africa produced nightmares, saw “this Promised Land.”

  Stanley bore little similarity to Moses. However, his actions and predicament bore a great similarity to the heroine of a children's book that had just been published in England. Her name was Alice, and she stepped through a looking glass into a surreal, fantastic wonderland. Everything in that world was off-kilter. Stanley, whose malaria rallied again as he finished crossing the Marenga Mkali, had just stepped through a looking glass of his very own. He was about to enter the surreal world of Ugogo.

  • CHAPTER 23 •

  Into the Fire

  June 1, 1871

  Ugogo

  500 Miles to Livingstone

  Out of the frying pan into the fire. Stanley had heard horror stories about Ugogo from the moment he began purchasing supplies back in Zanzibar, but nothing had truly prepared him for the first day of June 1871, as the New York Herald expedition entered the most bizarre section of its journey. On a map—if Stanley had been carrying one—there was nothing auspicious about Ugogo. It was a hundred-mile-wide interlude between the vast emptiness of the Marenga Mkali and the abundance of Tabora.

  The inhabitants of Ugogo were the Wagogo, a group of tribes infamous for rudeness and extortion. The Wagogo were greatly feared by the Arabs, and caravans approached Ugogo with trepidation. Supplies and water were limited in the region, and the Wagogo extracted a series of tolls—known as tribute—for permission to pass through and obtain use of their resources. Those refusing to pay were ambushed and murdered. It was a queer place, where the weak were strong, a man had to watch his back at all times, and an item that cost one doti in one village cost ten times as much in the next village over.

  One well-known story among Arab caravans was the brave trader who made it his mission to subdue the Wagogo, once and for all. His plan was to fight his way through Ugogo without paying tribute. He set off from Tabora with a caravan nine-hundred strong, making no secret of his intentions.

  The Wagogo never even attempted to fight. Instead, they buried their wells, burned their houses and crops, then retreated to the jungle until the Arabs arrived. The enormous caravan was
able to pass through the region for free, with no opposition, but there was also no food or water. Seven hundred of the Arabs died. The remainder slinked back to Tabora or tried to push across to Mpapwa. Only ten of the nine hundred original men survived that passage.

  Not only were the Wagogo savvy, but they possessed an eccentric quality that was easily visible to the human eye. Their villages were the usual collection of mud and wattle homes with a single low doorway and a conical roof of sticks and straw. They ate the same diet of corn and cassava found in other tribes. They raised cattle and goats, just like other tribes. However, unlike any tribe Stanley had seen, the Wagogo were fond of decorating their bodies. Most noticeable, they pierced their ears and then enlarged the lobes by forcing strips of wood or wire into the opening. Once the ear stretched all the way down to the shoulder it became the Wagogo equivalent of a pocket: gourds carrying personal belongings or snuff were placed inside. A Wagogo could walk from village to village, wearing almost nothing as per custom, but with massive gourds or ornaments in their ears. If the lobe ever tore, another hole was opened and the process was begun all over again.

  The Wagogo also had a fondness for their hair. Some twisted it into spikes, some adorned their heads with brightly polished shanks of copper, some shaved the very top of their heads and let the sides grow long enough to be shaped into a tail. The Wagogo enhanced their singular appearance by smearing their bodies with red clay, and, for an olfactory element, they also lubricated their skin with animal fats and oils.

  The peculiarity of the tribes' physical image and rank aroma was counterbalanced by the heft of their armament. The Wagogo were fiends for weapons. They favored double-edged knives, long spears, bows and arrows, curved Arab-style knives, and a war club known as a knobstick. Their shields were made of buffalo hide scraped smooth of hair, the taut surfaces painted in bright yellows, reds, and whites.

  Although Stanley entered Ugogo battling a severe attack of malaria, the surrealism of the region would have existed without his malarial dementia. Fortunately for Stanley, the Anopheles mosquito that had infected him as he marched into his Promised Land of Ugogo had not transferred the most deadly strain of the disease. A mosquito bite in Africa could be equated to Russian Roulette. There are three thousand different types of mosquito, yet only one carries malaria. There are one hundred and fifty-six strains of malaria injected by that one breed of mosquito, yet only four cause malaria in humans. Of those four strains, only one leads to death. And while these odds sound favorable, malaria has hovered near epidemic levels in Africa for millennia.

  Stanley's case, though not fatal, was debilitating nonetheless. Even his habit of dosing himself with large amounts of quinine did nothing to control it. His misery was obvious. “The first evil results experienced from the presence of malaria are confined bowels and an oppressive languor, excessive drowsiness, and a constant disposition to yawn,” he wrote of his experiences with the disease. “The tongue assumes a yellowish sickly hue, colored almost to blackness. Even the teeth become yellow, and are coated with an offensive matter. The eyes of the patient sparkle lustrously and are suffused with water. These are sure symptoms of the incipient fever which shortly will rage through the system, laying the sufferer prostrate and quivering with agony.”

  Unfortunately, the sickness came at a time when Stanley needed his wits about him more than ever. If the predictions of the sheiks in charge of the Arab caravans were correct, the pace was about to accelerate to almost twice their current daily average. The Arabs were emboldened by the presence of Stanley's firepower in their midst, and believed they could therefore proceed rapidly through dreaded Ugogo. In fact, they were wrong. Ugogo was such a hostile, unpredictable land, that not even Stanley's guns could guarantee a smooth passage.

  In Ugogo, the Wagogo tribal chiefs, known by one and all as sultans, did as they pleased. The tributes they demanded were nebulous, and payable on the whim of each sultan. In some cases, even those who paid were then ambushed. “The Wagogo are the Irish of America,” Stanley observed. “Clannish and full of fight. To the Wagogo all caravans must pay tribute, the refusal of which is met by an immediate declaration of hostilities.”

  As difficult as it was for outsiders to accept, the Wagogo controlled trade in East Africa. Stanley was armed with the document Sultan Barghash had bestowed upon him back in Zanzibar, guaranteeing unhindered passage to Ujiji across the land he believed he ruled (between Zanzibar and Lake Tanganyika). In Ugogo, however, this scrap of paper was meaningless. The façade Webb and Kirk were battling to uphold, that America and Britain controlled African trade, was a myth here.

  On June 1 Stanley and the Arab caravans encountered their first Wagogo. It was just after eight in the morning. The dew was just drying on the tall matama stalks. Scores of titanic boulders lined the approach to Mvumi, the first village of Ugogo. All went well at first. But the villagers had already heard about the approaching white man, and soon hundreds clogged the red dirt path. Dazzled by Stanley's strange hair and clothing, and the alternately milky and mahogany hue of skin, they pressed forward to touch him. The Wagogo fought one another, yelled at one another, jumped up and down for a better view. At first Stanley found the moment triumphant, but soon he was scared by its intensity.

  The Wagogo weren't being respectful of his white skin, as Stanley initially supposed. They were laughing at him. To the Wagogo, everything about Stanley was odd: He was haggard, drawn, and testy. He was obviously irritated by so many people pushing up against him. He was feeble from illness, with his beard extending in long brown tufts from his cheeks. Stanley's safari outfit was of bright white flannel, a color that reflected some of the sun's heat, but that could also be seen from miles away against the brick-red soil. Even his rifle and sidearm, which Stanley assumed gave him an aura of power, weren't so impressive. He felt like a monkey in the Central Park Zoo, he wrote, “whose funny antics elicit such bursts of laughter from young New Yorkers.”

  No sooner had he passed through town than the fever attacked again. Stanley spent the rest of the day burning and shivering, battling delusions, dosing himself with quinine.

  As if part of some malarial nightmare, the abuse continued the next day, when the Great Sultan of Mvumi refused to accept the paltry six doti Stanley offered as tribute. Instead, came word to Stanley's camp, the sultan required an outrageous sixty doti in exchange for passage. Stanley was furious. He felt humiliated. He confided to the Arabs that he was tempted to fight his way through Ugogo. Instead of paying tribute, Bombay and his soldiers would blaze a trail all the way to Tabora with guns and bullets.

  The Arab answer was wise and paternal in the midst of Stanley's naïveté. “If you preferred war,” they calmly counseled, “your pagazis would all desert, and leave you and your cloth to the small mercy of the Wagogo.” Put that way, Stanley, a man who was infuriated any time someone got the best of him, couldn't help but agree. He swallowed his pride and paid the tribute.

  The impotence felt by Stanley continued with the Sultan of Matamburu, a few days later. Not only did he allow his people to emit “peals of laughter” at Stanley's appearance, but the sultan also professed an abiding friendship with the Arab caravans. They weren't forced to pay any tribute at all. Stanley on the other hand, had to pay four doti.

  Learning his lesson, Stanley bit his tongue, knowing that an altercation with the Wagogo could be fatal. “The traveler has to exercise great prudence, discretion, and judgment,” Stanley wrote. “The strength and power of the Wagogo are derived from their numbers.”

  The next day the caravan pushed through a thick wood of gum trees and thorns, then lumbered across a barren, burning plain. There was no water. Elephant footprints were everywhere. The hills were steep and the sun “waxed hotter and hotter as it drew near the meridian, until it seemed to scorch all vitality from inanimate nature, while the view was one white blaze, unbearable to the pained sight.”

  In the middle of that burning plain, there was another demand for tribute. The
Sultan of Bihawana, whose subjects were infamous for being thieves and murderers, surprised Stanley by asking for only three doti. However, Stanley was alarmed to learn that his fourth caravan, traveling ahead of Stanley by a few days, had engaged in a gun battle with would-be hijackers. Two of the assailants had been killed as they were being driven off.

  A few days later, as Stanley was battling malaria yet again, it was the Sultan of Kididimo's turn to demand tribute. His was a foul kingdom, by all accounts. The water tasted of “warm horse urine,” the locals complained of recurring stomach upset, and two more of the New York Herald expedition's donkeys died. Yet the sultan, whose ego was inflated by the presence of a white visitor, still demanded ten doti to pass.

  Stanley was too sick to care. “I was not in a humor—being feeble, and almost nerveless,” he wrote of the malaria's effects, “to dispute the sum. Consequently it was paid without many words.”

  The summation of Stanley's surreal malarial journey through Ugogo came in the village of Nyambwa, where yet another crowd ogled the white men. “Well, I declare,” Shaw sneered as they marched through the village, with its square huts and tobacco drying on thatched roofs. He and Stanley had maintained a truce since Farquhar was left behind. Being the only two white men for hundreds of miles in any direction allowed them the slightest sense of fraternity. “They must be genuine Ugogians, for they stare and stare,” Shaw said. “My God, there is no end to their staring. In fact, I'm almost tempted to slap them in the face.”

  Just then, a local warrior tested Stanley. He drew near and taunted the journalist. On another day, perhaps when malaria and dehydration were not making his life a series of miseries and delusions, Stanley might have ignored the young man. But the humiliation of paying tribute finally got the best of his temper. Stanley snatched at the man, grabbing him by the neck and holding tight. The crowd looked on in disbelief, then pressed in closer to intimidate the explorer. Stanley, much to their surprise, didn't let go.