Into Africa Page 24

  The carnage was relentless and began taking on the chaos of a battlefield. The wounded who managed to make it across wailed in agony on the far bank. In midstream, one native who'd gotten a canoe out into the river attempted to save others, while another who'd gotten a canoe fled alone. The local women knew the river well from their years diving for oysters. Many of them were able to hold their breath long enough to ride the current downstream underwater, resurfacing for a quick snatch of air, then submerging until they were out of rifle range. Then, on the far bank of the Lualaba, a place where Livingstone would never dare to explore, the women slipped ashore into the jungle. Some never made it far, though, as the abundant population of crocodiles was picking them off one by one.

  The shooting and burning continued for twenty-four hours. As the Arabs were setting fire to the grass-roofed huts and sending canoes of their own into the river to enslave the stragglers, they learned they had killed two of their own in addition to almost four hundred locals. Another slaver was drowned on the river, done in by his own greed when his boat capsized.

  Throughout the carnage Livingstone was impotent, enraged. What began as a commonplace market dispute over a chicken had become a catastrophic display of Arab brutality. The attack had not been planned, and there was no greater Arab objective, which made the slayings all the more senseless. A righteous rage coursed through him, but there was nothing Livingstone could do to stop the slaughter. The British in him convinced Livingstone he was somehow in charge, however, and cried out for propriety. From his cargo he extracted the Union Jack he was entitled to carry as a British Consul. He sent his men forth showing the flag, demanding a cease-fire. Only then did Dugumbe get a grip on his men. The shooting stopped temporarily, and in the eerie aftermath the only sounds were the wounded begging for help.

  Livingstone pulled his pistol and advanced on the killers, prepared to do something he had never contemplated—commit murder. He never even came close. Dugumbe stepped forward to stop him, well aware that his renegade employees wouldn't hesitate to shoot the chubby old man. All Livingstone could do to vent his anger was to retreat into his journal and rededicate himself to the antislavery cause. For almost five years he had looked the other way, compromising his principles for the sake of exploration and the comforts provided by his Arab hosts. It was as if he had sold a part of his soul in the name of ambition. And what had he accomplished? He was sicker than ever, impoverished, and had no hard evidence that his theories about the Nile's source were accurate. True, he had some very good ideas and a vast amount of circumstantial evidence backing it up, but the source was as elusive now in the summer of 1871 as it had been the day of the Nile Duel.

  “As I write I hear the loud wails on the left bank over those who are there slain, ignorant of their many friends who are now in the depths of the Lualaba. Oh, let Thy kingdom come!” his words cried to God. “No one will ever know the exact loss on this bright sultry morning. It gave me the impression of being in hell.”

  Livingstone spent the rest of that day helping the survivors find their spouses. Later, when the instigators had the gall to blame the slaughter on Livingstone, the explorer knew it was time to leave. Forsaking thoughts of crossing the river to find Herodotus's fountains, he decided to return to Ujiji. The local chiefs, who had secretly thought Livingstone a slaver, were so impressed by his intercession during the massacre that they begged him to stay and help them consolidate several of their villages into a Manyuema nation, of which Livingstone would be ruler. “But I told them I was so ashamed by the company in which I found myself that I could scarcely look the Manyuema in the face. They had believed that I wished to kill them—what did they think now? I could not remain among bloody companions, and would flee away.” He would return to Ujiji and claim the supplies that should be waiting. Then he would hire new men and search anew for the fountains.

  Even as Livingstone prepared to leave, the stress caused his health to worsen. His bowels loosened and he lost a serious amount of fluid and blood. “I was laid up all morning with the depression the bloodshed made—it filled me with unspeakable horror,” he wrote. “‘Don't go away,' said the Manyuema chiefs to me, but I cannot stay here in agony.”

  Livingstone fled Nyangwe a few mornings after the massacre, once the dysentery had passed. Just to show there were no hard feelings the Arabs came to see him off. They had, however, little hope Livingstone would accomplish the three-month march to Ujiji safely. Hostilities between the Arabs and local tribes were now at a fever pitch. Livingstone had no Arab guns or numbers to protect him. A tribe would be just as likely to kill Livingstone—a man known to travel in the company of Arabs—as let him pass.

  Making matters more dangerous, the path Livingstone would follow to Ujiji was one he'd never traveled before, through virgin jungle and country populated by cannibals. The bright red waistcoat he was wearing was cut like the Arab garments, in honor of his hosts. It did not occur to him that the natives might think he was one of them.

  Livingstone's journey went well for five days. He, Chuma, Susi, and a handful of porters walked carefully, trying to make time and avoid attention. On the sixth day of travel, Livingstone came over a ridge and saw a most beautiful green countryside below. Trudging through it, he saw the land was devoid of people. The Arabs had taken them all hostage. All that was left were the burned-out remains of their villages. Livingstone was outraged, thinking it an act of “sheer wantonness.” There seemed to be nothing he could do to protect Africa from the slave trade. When, a few days later, a second group of African porters asked if they might travel with him, he readily agreed. They were headed for Ujiji, too. His group now numbered almost eighty. After helplessly watching the destruction of the Nyangwe massacre, and then witnessing the ghostly sight of villages emptied by the slave trade, Livingstone was actually finding a way to preserve African lives—even if the potential killers were other Africans. He reveled in the added safety the new men provided as they traveled “among the justly irritated” local tribes.

  Two weeks into the journey, Livingstone and his men walked through more burned-out villages. They slept in the remains of one village, protected by a fence of sharpened sticks. Livingstone was sick in the morning but he pressed on. At the next village the people took note of his red jacket. Until this moment he had still been unaware of its implications. “The people all ran away and appeared in the distance armed and refused to come near,” he wrote of the villagers. “They threw stones at us and tried to kill those who went for water.”

  That night, Livingstone slept in a small hut, protected within the cocoon of mosquito netting he traveled with at all times. But with the locals more and more sure Livingstone and his men were slavers, Livingstone tossed and turned with worry, despite his sickness. Unlike in Nyangwe, the cannibals of this new region of Manyuema considered Livingstone an enemy. Not only would they relish killing him, but, like all enemies killed in battle, the cannibals would happily soak Livingstone's body in water until tender, then make a meal of Britain's brave, beloved, overdue explorer.

  The next morning Livingstone's foreboding was justified. While marching through a jungle trail so narrow that leaves brushed against his face, Livingstone's group was stopped abruptly by a blockade of felled trees. The vegetation was thick to the point of being impenetrable on either side, and triple-canopy deep overhead. Livingstone had been in Africa long enough to spot an ambush, and when he peered up into the trees he saw black shapes poised to pounce.

  Hemmed in on the sides, watched from above, unable to turn around, Livingstone and his small caravan were easy targets as they climbed over the logs. Livingstone went last. “I was behind the main body, and all were allowed to pass till I, the leader, who was believed to be Mohamed Bogharib,” Livingstone wrote of the moment he was trapped. “A red jacket they had formerly seen me wearing was proof to them that I was the same that sent Bin Juma to kill five of their men, capture eleven women and children, and twenty-five goats.”

  Without war
ning, spears rained down from the trees and from out of the dense foliage along the trail. Livingstone's caravan had been funneled into the ideal killing zone. “Another spear was thrown at me by an unseen assailant, and it missed me by about a foot in front,” Livingstone wrote. “Guns were fired into the dense mass of forest, but with no effect, for nothing could be seen. But we heard the men jeering and denouncing us close by.” As Livingstone hastened forward down the trail with all the speed he could muster, he walked past two porters, spears jutting from their dead bodies.

  For five long hours, Livingstone and his men scampered down the trail, constantly under attack. The unseen enemies mocked him from above. “I can say this devoutly now, but in running the gauntlet for five weary hours among furies all eager to signalize themselves by slaying one they sincerely believed to have been guilty of a horrid outrage, no elevated sentiments entered the mind,” he wrote later. “The excitement gave way to overpowering weariness, and I felt as I suppose soldiers do on the field of battle—not courageous, but perfectly indifferent to whether I were killed or not.”

  At one point Livingstone thought he was safe, only to stumble into another ingenious killing zone. “Coming to a part of the forest cleared for cultivation, I noticed a gigantic tree, made still taller by growing on an anthill twenty feet high. It had fire applied near its roots,” Livingstone wrote. The massive tree, the base of its trunk weakened by fire, was perfectly positioned to fall down on the trail and crush him and his men. Livingstone, however, “felt no alarm.”

  In that instant, Livingstone's unseen tormentors toppled the tree. The trunk suddenly snapped. In the silence of the jungle the sound was like the crack of a rifle salvo. Livingstone looked up in horror as the tree came straight down toward him, unsure which way to run. With its thick trunk and profusion of branches, the tree would crush a wide area of the trail when it landed. “I ran a few paces back and down it came to the ground one yard behind me and, breaking into several lengths, it covered me with a cloud of dust. Had not the branches been previously rotted off, I could scarcely have escaped.”

  At the end of the day, Livingstone crossed a small river known as the Liya and entered a section of land cleared for cultivation. He entered a farming village known as Monanbundwa, where he was welcomed, and lay down to rest. The chief came to his side, unarmed. Livingstone explained the mistake about his identity, ensuring the chief that he was not the slaver named Mohamed Bogharib, and that he had no wish to kill men. The chief was reassured, and allowed them to stay the night. Livingstone, to prevent further animosity, temporarily stopped wearing the offending jacket.

  Without his knowing, Livingstone had seen the first stage of a full-scale native revolt against the Arabs from the citizens to the west of Lake Tanganyika—a revolt coincidental to Mirambo's, but having nothing to do with it. The Manyuema set Arab encampments ablaze in the months that followed, and the slavers' people were fired upon. Using bows and arrows judiciously, the Manyuema could fire and reload faster than the Arabs with their archaic single-shot muskets. “This is the beginning of the end,” Livingstone wrote, “which will exclude Arab traders from the country.”

  As Livingstone trekked from the heart of cannibal country, the stress of the day he had endured under attack had frazzled Livingstone's immune system. The dysentery returned. He lost his appetite. Dust got in his eyes, making him temporarily blind. Even in the dangerous country, he was forced to rest most days. On the days he marched it was through mountainous wilderness, in a thick equatorial heat. His French-made shoes were too tight because his feet had swollen. The soles were falling apart and the uppers were rotting. Worse, the trail crossed a mountain path of sharp quartz. “The mind acted on the body,” he wrote. “And it is no overstatement to say that every step of the way between four hundred and five hundred miles was in pain.”

  • CHAPTER 28 •

  More War

  July 21, 1871

  350 Miles to Livingstone

  Shaw was standing over Stanley as the malarial journey through his subconscious came to an end. Two weeks had passed, Shaw told his incredulous boss. The journalist had been sick in bed the entire time. Ominously, it was cerebral malaria this time—Plasmodium falciparum—and Stanley had almost died. But Shaw nursed him back to health. He had fed Stanley gruel and forced him to sip brandy. Stanley remembered nothing of it. Just the emotions and memories, surging through him, reminding him where he'd come from and preparing him for the battle ahead. “I remembered the battlefields of America,” he wrote, “and the stormy scenes of rampant war.”

  A new set of stormy scenes was added to those over the next six weeks. Flying the American flag, Stanley marched his men into battle against Mirambo, alongside the Arabs. The warfare was unlike the disciplined marches of the Confederates marching on Shiloh, or even the British Army's determined assault on Magdala. Rather, Arab sultans trekked into the bush hunting their enemy. Their slaves—men without any training in military tactics—were forced to fight their fellow Africans because their owners commanded it. Mirambo, however, foresaw the attack. He had cleverly concealed his forces in the woods and tall grasses. Stanley, meanwhile, marveled at the military tactics of the uneducated chief. He found them genius—and savage. He even wrote a dispatch to the Herald calling Mirambo “the African Bonaparte.”

  On the morning of August 4, the men daubed their bodies with a combination of flour and herb juice that they believed would protect them in battle. Stanley's malaria was flaring again, shooting fever and weakness through his veins. Fear of the battle added to his miseries, and he was experiencing serious misgivings about the terms of his alliance with the Arabs. Instead of commanding his own men, Stanley and his group would march into battle under the leadership of the fiery Khamis bin Abdullah, who was serving as the campaign's de facto commander in chief. Just before noon the Arab force of almost twenty-five hundred surrounded the wooden fence of Mirambo's village and prepared to attack. “Khamis bin Abdullah crept through the forest to the west of the village,” Stanley wrote. “Suddenly a volley opened on us as we emerged from the forest.”

  To Stanley, the battle was comical. The Arabs and their slaves had no concept of taking cover or advancing on the enemy under fire. Instead, they lay in the grass to load their guns, then leapt up and fired, then jumped into the grass again and again. “Forward, then backward, with the agility of hopping frogs.”

  Despite their inadequacies, the Arabs routed Mirambo's forces with ease. When the Arabs finally took the village the only things left behind were ivory tusks, slaves, piles of grain, and twenty dead bodies. The Arabs set fire to the village so Mirambo and his men would have no refuge, then set fire to two neighboring villages and the surrounding grasslands for good measure. When one of Mirambo's men was caught sleeping in the forest, he was grabbed by the hair, had his neck stretched as far back as it would go, then his throat was slashed clean through to his spine.

  Stanley had been an active participant in the first battle, but two days later a relapse of his malaria prevented him from accompanying the Arabs as they pressed forth the manhunt for Mirambo. He stayed behind in the war camp, shivering under a blanket on the morning of August 6. Half of his men had left for the day to join the forces of a fiery Arab, Soud bin Sayd. The Arabs were determined to exterminate Mirambo once and for all, making him an example for future generations of potential rebels. It was obvious from the Arabs' easy victories that Mirambo wasn't the military genius of his reputation.

  Just as the sun was setting, the first stragglers of the battle returned. Stanley was sleeping under a pile of blankets, tying to sweat out his fever, when he learned that Soud bin Sayd had been killed in an ambush, along with five of Stanley's sepoys. Mirambo had allowed Soud bin Sayd to take the village of Wilyankuru, pretending to flee. However, as the Arab forces marched back to their camp laden with tusks, hundreds of slaves, and sixty bales of cloth, Mirambo and his men sprang from the tall grass along the road. Soud bin Sayd was reloading his shotgun when a
spear pierced him “through and through.” Every Arab member of his convoy was captured and killed in the same manner.

  “The effect of this defeat is indescribable,” Stanley wrote. “It was impossible to sleep, from the shrieks of women whose husbands had fallen. All night they howled through their lamentations, and sometime might be heard the groans of the wounded who had contrived to crawl through the grass unperceived by the enemy. Fugitives were continually coming in through the night, but none of my men who were reported to be dead were ever heard of again.”

  That single defeat crushed the Arab resolve. The morning of August 7 was spent bickering with one another, pointing the finger of blame. Khamis bin Abdullah raged that his compatriots were cowards, and preferred peace and subjugation to seeing their mission carried out in its entirety. The screams and rants from the tent where they held the latest war council was hardly soundproof, and soon everyone in camp was privy to the accusations. Stanley, saddened by his men's deaths and more sure than ever about the folly of fighting the Arabs' war, went back to bed in another attempt to overcome his malaria.

  But Mirambo was not resting. He pressed forth his advantage. At one-thirty in the afternoon, Selim shook Stanley from his malarial daze. It was imperative, Selim shouted, that Stanley get up. The camp was being evacuated. Mirambo was on his way. Even Khamis bin Abdullah was running, with no intention of stopping to help Stanley. “With the aid of Selim I dressed myself and staggered toward the door,” Stanley wrote. He saw the Arabs and their slaves retreating in terror. There was no order, simply pandemonium. Worse, except for Bombay and three of his soldiers, Stanley's men were fleeing—including Shaw, who “was saddling his donkey with my own saddle, preparatory to giving me the slip and leaving me in the lurch to the tender mercies of Mirambo.”

  Stanley ordered Shaw to give him back his saddle. Then Stanley organized his men into a single unit and led them in a disciplined military retreat. For eleven long hours, well into the night, they stayed together as they fled Mirambo and his men. Finally, just after midnight, he rendezvoused with the Arab forces.