Into Africa Page 23
The housewarming was complete when the Arabs sent over a mini-caravan from town, laden with bowls of curried chicken, rice, more pancakes, pomegranates, and lemons. Then came more slaves, leading five oxen for slaughter, twelve chickens for plucking, and a bowl of a dozen fresh eggs. “This was real, practical, noble courtesy,” Stanley wrote of his Arab hosts. “Which took my gratitude quite by storm.”
Stanley admired the Arabs' looks, their character, their polish. They were mostly from Oman, he noticed, and handsome. Since Bagamoyo, Stanley had strived to keep his mind free from impure thoughts, in keeping with his focus on self-improvement. But the chance to step away from the trail for a while and lower his hardened façade led him to be titillated by the Arabs' practice of keeping concubines. Stanley's normally chaste journal entries spoke of lust and want. He burned with desire for the local women, finding them far more attractive than white women, something he'd once thought himself incapable of. “The eye that at first despised the unclassic face of the black woman of Africa soon loses its regard for fine lines and mellow pale color. It finds itself ere long lingering wantonly over the inharmonious and heavy curves of a Negroid form, and looking lovingly on the broad unintellectual face, and into jet eyes that never flash with the dazzling love lights that makes poor humanity beautiful.”
If Stanley took his sexual fantasies a step further, he didn't mention it in his journal. Regardless, a seduction of sorts was taking place—and Stanley was the man being seduced. The highest-ranking Arabs of Tabora traveled over a dusty, rutted road to pay Stanley a visit, treating the journalist like royalty. When they spoke of their loyalty and attachment to this white stranger, Stanley took their words at face value. They asked about his health and congratulated him on his travels, impressing Stanley with their hospitality and etiquette. It seemed a fine reward for three months of deprivation since Bagamoyo.
The reason for the courtship became clear four days after Stanley's arrival. Stanley's hosts invited him to a luncheon feast. At the appointed time, he rode into town escorted by eighteen soldiers. The first stop was for a palate-tantalizing light entree at the home of Sultan bin Ali, a colonel in Tabora's army. “From here,” wrote Stanley, “after being presented with mocha coffee and some sherbet, we directed our steps to Khamis bin Abdullah's house, who had, in anticipation of my coming, prepared a feast to which he had invited his friends and neighbors. The group of stately Arabs in their long white dresses, and jaunty caps, also of a snowy white, who stood ready to welcome me to Tabora, produced quite an effect on my mind.”
The Arabs had made a desired impression on Stanley. They were not actually holding a dinner for him, they were holding a war council. Their goal was to convince Stanley to join them in fighting Mirambo. The infidel was the biggest threat to Tabora's wealth they had ever known, and the evening was aptly filled with stories about the warrior-king's arrogance, and their desire to put him in his place once and for all. Stanley was told of Mirambo's bloodthirstiness and love of war. The Arabs spoke in outraged tones about Mirambo halting a caravan bound for Ujiji, then demanding gunpowder, guns, and cloth in exchange for passage. When the caravan paid, Mirambo accepted the loot, then ordered them at gunpoint to turn around and go back to Tabora.
The Arabs wanted Stanley to know that the governor, sitting on a pillow on the floor, was a peace-loving man and had tried every means possible to appease Mirambo, but war was the only solution. Speech after speech followed, talking of the Arab right to control the trade routes and lamenting the days when a man could walk along with his caravan, using just a walking stick for protection.
“Mirambo,” raged the group's bravest man, Khamis bin Abdullah, “shall not stop until every Arab is driven from Unyayembe, and he rules over this country in place of Mkasiwa. Children of Oman, shall it be so?”
Stanley listened quietly, knowing he should stay away from a conflict that wasn't his own. He knew in his heart that war was imminent, and Stanley wanted no part of war. His time wearing Confederate gray had shown him the stupidity of fighting to defend someone else's cause.
But the search for Livingstone could not proceed until Mirambo was stopped. Hoping that the Arab prediction of a short war was correct, Stanley rationalized that he could expedite the victory, and thus resume the race to Ujiji. He volunteered himself and his men to join the Arab army. “The Arabs were sanguine of victory and I noted their enthusiasm,” he observed as great platters of rice, curry, and roast chicken were served.
Then Stanley was struck by a terrible thought. What if Livingstone were on his way to Tabora from Ujiji? What then? Was Livingstone prepared for war?
The thoughts of Livingstone's vulnerability were set aside as the party moved to a third house. But as Stanley began walking back to his house outside town, thoughts of Livingstone and the palpable evidence of his need for relief were graphically juxtaposed on the streets of Tabora. For there, in the heart of town, was Kirk's relief caravan. Despite what Kirk was writing the RGS, the caravan had never proceeded to Ujiji. Stanley was furious. It was Mirambo's war that was preventing the caravan from getting through, but Stanley vented his wrath at the acting British Consul. For if the supplies had left Bagamoyo during November instead of February the war wouldn't be a factor—the relief supplies would have preceded Mirambo's uprising, and would already be in Ujiji.
Fuming, Stanley ordered the caravan to place itself under his command. Livingstone's supplies and mail—neither of which had been plundered on the journey to Tabora—would travel with the New York Herald expedition to Ujiji. “Poor Livingstone! Who knows but he may be suffering for want of these very supplies that have been detained so long within easy reach of the British Consulate,” Stanley wrote.
Before Tabora, Livingstone had been a distant apparition to Stanley. But the closer he came, and the more he heard the Arabs talk of Ujiji as if it were just an incidental one-month journey, the more the search for Livingstone crept into Stanley's thoughts. His journalistic instincts rekindled, he sat down on the Fourth of July to write his first dispatch to the New York Herald. It was written in the form of a letter to James Gordon Bennett, Jr., and ran almost five thousand words—enough to fill the entire front page of the Herald. Stanley's first paragraphs were a justification for all the money he'd spent, reminding Bennett of his specific commands to go find Livingstone without care for cost. “I was too far from the telegraph to notify you of such an expense or to receive further orders from you,” Stanley apologized, choosing words that would ensure Bennett paid the bill when presented. “Eight thousand dollars were expended in purchasing the cloth, beads, and wire necessary in my dealing with the savages of the territories through which I would have to traverse.”
Then, his anxieties committed to paper, Stanley moved on to describing the heart of his journey. His travelogue of life in Africa was thorough and complex, speaking to the average reader instead of Bennett. He spoke of his fears and hopes, and even his contemplation of suicide. Farquhar's death was barely mentioned. Shaw was portrayed as lazy and insolent. And Selim was praised for being worthy and hardworking. The reader learned that Stanley's caravan was moving twice as fast as Burton and Speke's, and made it to Tabora at a pace almost as fast as the speediest Arabs. “I should like to enter into more minute details respecting this new land,” he wrote, “which is almost unknown, but the very nature of my mission, requiring speed and all my energy, precludes it. Some day, perhaps, the Herald will permit me to describe more minutely the experiences of the long march, with all its vicissitudes and pleasures, in its columns, and I can assure your readers beforehand that they will be not quite devoid of interest. But now my whole time is occupied in the march, and the direction of the expedition, the neglect of which in any one point would be productive of disastrous results.”
Stanley saved the information his audience wanted most for the final few pages. Livingstone, he told them, had gained quite a bit of weight. He was also being described by the Arabs who'd seen him as “very old,” with a lo
ng white beard. Most important, he was alleged to be on his way to Ujiji. “Until I hear more of him or see the long absent old man face-to-face, I bid you a farewell,” he signed off. “But wherever he is, be sure I shall not give up the chase. If alive you shall hear what he has to say. If dead I will find him and bring his bones to you.”
• CHAPTER 26 •
Father Figure
July 7, 1871
Tabora
450 Miles to Livingstone
The roads leading back to Bagamoyo were still open. Stanley sent his Herald dispatch with a caravan going east. It would be hand-carried by two messengers, men named Ferrajjii and Cowpereh, directly to the American Consul, who would then send it along to New York on one of the Salem merchant ships. Then Stanley, his professional duties temporarily done and the road to Ujiji blocked, allowed himself the luxury of rest. For the next three afternoons he indulged in relaxation on his warm porch, dreaming of Livingstone. The view outside was of hills shaped like lions' paws, mango trees, sycamores, and a dried streambed. It was secluded and quiet, perfect for napping.
On the hot afternoon of July 7, Stanley sat in the shade as drowsiness washed over him like a drug. He didn't sleep, but found himself wandering through the many rooms of his subconscious. “The brain was busy. All my life seemed passing in review before me,” he wrote. “Reminisces of yet a young life's battles and hard struggles came surging into the mind in quick succession, events of boyhood, of youth, and manhood. Perils, travels, scenes, joys, and sorrows; loves and hates, friendships and indifferences. My mind followed the various and rapid transition of my life's passages. It drew the lengthy, erratic, sinuous lines of travel my footsteps had passed over.”
Then the orphan dreamed of a father, and remembered the man whose name he'd taken. “The loveliest feature of all to me was of a noble and true man who called me son.”
Stanley floated through memories of the Mississippi, boat men, Spain, Indians, gold fields, and wandering through Asia Minor en route to Africa. The purge was thorough and unrestricted, a catharsis Stanley didn't expect, but embraced. In his thirty years of life he had been beaten down time and again. But against all odds Stanley was leading a column of men into the heart of Africa, poised to take a flying leap at glory should he find Livingstone and return to tell the tale. He was beginning to think once again of traveling the length of the Nile, making his triumphant return to civilization in Cairo, as Speke and Grant had done. After a “hot fitful life,” Africa had become Stanley's playground, a continent he wandered at will, overcoming all obstacles through the judicious exercise of perseverance and a Winchester. No man was his boss. No man stood in judgment.
Stanley's intense visions that day welled up to touch him and remind him of emotions he'd long forgotten—“when these retrospective scenes became serious, I looked serious; when they were sorrowful I wept hysterically; when they were joyous I laughed loudly.” In fact, Stanley's visions signaled something even more telling. He was suffering from dementia brought on by a potentially fatal case of cerebral malaria.
• CHAPTER 27 •
The Massacre
July 15, 1871
Nyangwe
The middle of the equatorial summer saw Livingstone anxious to leave Nyangwe. He was “reduced to beggary,” for the small amount of goods he possessed were back in Ujiji. The people of Nyangwe continued to refuse to rent him a canoe. But finally, many of his questions about what lay farther downstream were answered when an Arab trader and his men attempted to paddle north up the Lualaba in search of ivory, along the route Livingstone wanted to follow. Livingstone was in Nyangwe when the news came back that the Arab trader died four days' paddle downriver, drowned when his canoe got sucked into a rocky, slender rapid. “Hassani's canoe party in the river were foiled in the narrows after they had gone down four days,” Livingstone wrote of the tragedy. “Rocks jut out on both sides, not opposite, but alternate, to each other. And the vast mass of water of the great river jammed in, rushes round one promontory to another, and a frightful whirlpool is formed, in which the first canoe went and was overturned, and five lives lost.” Upon further reflection, Livingstone came to the conclusion that his inability to rent a canoe was divinely inspired. “In answer to my prayers for preservation I was prevented from going down the narrows,” he wrote.
Livingstone changed his plans accordingly. Possessing no beads or cloth in Nyangwe, but hearing reports from the Arabs that a fresh batch of supplies might have made it overland to Ujiji from Zanzibar, Livingstone gambled. Instead of following the Lualaba through the rapids, he would follow it by land. He made one of the Arab slavers a desperate all-or-nothing proposal: A caravan would take Livingstone across the Lualaba to Katanga, which Livingstone believed to be the home of the fountains; in return, Livingstone would sign over his four hundred pounds worth of food, medicine, and cloth thought to be waiting in Ujiji.
The trader's name was Dugumbe bin Habib. The leader of a large group of slavers camping along the Lualaba, he had virtually held Livingstone hostage since the explorer's arrival in Nyangwe. Livingstone had been given food and a house was built for him. But his mail wasn't sent and the simplest of necessities—such as a canoe to cross the quarter-mile-wide river to continue his exploration—had been denied. Bin Habib didn't want Livingstone wandering back to civilization to tell about life inside the slave trade, but the offer of such a lucrative quantity of supplies was hard for a businessman like bin Habib to turn down. He had asked Livingstone for time to think it over.
On July 15, 1871, Livingstone took his usual seat in the shade to observe the marketplace. There was controversy as the market opened that afternoon. All morning long Livingstone had heard the sounds of gunshots from the far side of the Lualaba, and could see the smoke of huts being set afire as Arabs burned, enslaved, and murdered. As he hobbled into the marketplace he noticed that only about fifteen hundred people had come that day. He blamed it on the fires, remembering that many of those who normally came to market lived in those villages.
At the time, Livingstone didn't look anything like the man Murchison and England knew. In addition to being toothless and bearded, a combination of inactivity and the food provided by the Arabs had made Livingstone chunky and round. His clothes barely fit. The Arabs marveled that Livingstone could eat a pot of rice and saucer of butter and still have room for a pot of porridge. The weight would come off as soon as he began traveling again, but in the meantime, Livingstone's gait was a slow waddle and he had trouble breathing. He settled his weary frame in the shade to watch people and write in his journal.
Livingstone had observed many things from that perch over the previous months. The locals had grown so accustomed to his presence that they paid little attention to Livingstone or to the Arabs mingling among them. It was understood that the slavers would not raid Nyangwe, but instead use it as a base to raid other villages. The only rule was that guns were not allowed in the marketplace.
Even as the citizens and Arabs mingled in the market square, the subtle awareness that the Arabs had the power to enslave them added a palpable distance between the two groups. The Arabs contributed to the feeling. Despite having mingled with the African populace for centuries, Arabs still held themselves apart from Africans and viewed the people with disdain.
“It was a hot sultry day,” Livingstone wrote later. “And when I went into the market I saw Adie and Manilla, and three of the men who had lately come with Dugumbe. I was surprised to see the three with their guns, and felt inclined to reprove them, as one of my men did, for bringing weapons into the market.”
Livingstone chalked up the newcomers' faux pas to ignorance of local customs, and got up to leave. He noticed two of the Arabs haggling with a vendor over a chicken, then trying to grab it without paying. The market was always a frantic place, with raised voices and misunderstandings common. For two men and a vendor to disagree was nothing unusual.
But in the next instant, Livingstone's opinion of the slavers changed foreve
r. “The discharge of two guns in the middle of the crowd told me the slaughter had begun: crowds dashed off from the place, and threw down their wares in confusion, and ran. At the same time the three men opened fire on the mass of people near the upper end of the marketplace, volleys were discharged from a party down near the creek on the panic-stricken women who dashed at the canoes. These, some fifty or more, were jammed in the creek and the men forgot their paddles in the terror that seized all.”
Though the Lualaba was broad, the creek feeding into it where the canoes were kept was thin and slow. The mass of people rushing to the boats clogged the narrow outlet, allowing the Arabs to conduct target practice on the men, women, and children of Nyangwe. “Wounded by balls,” Livingstone wrote, they “poured into them and leaped and scrambled into the water shrieking.”
As the Arabs stood along the river bank, calmly aiming and firing, then reloading quickly so as not to miss the opportunity to kill again, the locals left their canoes behind. Splashing into the Lualaba, they began swimming for the far shore. The game became a test of skill for the Arabs; instead of shooting legs and torsos, they had only heads sticking above the water to aim at. The sun glinted off the languid green river, silhouetting those heads, making them appear as bobbing melons. “It was the heads above water showed the long lines of those that would inevitably perish,” Livingstone wrote. He had run out of paper, and was penning his journal on any scrap he could find—old checks, magazine pages. Livingstone's supply of ink was done, too. He had made a new batch by pressing roots until a red dye oozed forth. Its color brought a ghostly realism to the tales of murder.
“Shot after shot continued to be fired on the helpless and perishing. Some of the long line of heads disappeared quietly, whilst other poor creatures threw their arms high, as if appealing to the great Father above, and sank.”