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For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials—human bodies and elephant tusks.
the Dark Continent.
Within a few years, however, he began using the first and last name of the merchant who had given him his job.
And so the boy who had entered the St. Asaph Union Workhouse as John Rowlands became the man who would soon be known worldwide as Henry Morton Stanley.
but he created journal entries about a dramatic shipwreck and other adventures that never happened.
Stanley’s horror at the idea of finding himself so close to a woman.
Stanley joined the Confederate Army, and in April 1862
was to enlist in the Union Army, which he promptly did,
James Gordon Bennett, Jr.,
hired Stanley
Abyssinia.
In a Europe confidently entering the industrial age, brimming with the sense of power given it by the railroad and the oceangoing steamship, there now arose a new type of hero: the African explorer.
Richard Burton
From Africa’s west coast, the Frenchman Paul Belloni Du Chaillu brought back the skins and skeletons of gorillas, and told riveted audiences how the great hairy beasts abducted women to their jungle lairs for purposes too vile to be spoken of.
Underlying much of Europe’s excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe’s earlier dealings with Africa.
1838
abolished
Instead, righteous denunciations poured down on a distant, weak, and safely nonwhite target: the so-called Arab slave-traders raiding Africa from the east.
For Europeans, here was an ideal target for disapproval: one “uncivilised” race enslaving another.
All these European impulses toward Africa—antislavery zeal, the search for raw materials, Christian evangelism, and sheer curiosity—were embodied in one man, David Livingstone.
How I Found Livingstone,
“be sure I shall not give up the chase. If alive, you shall hear what he has to say; if dead I will find and bring his bones to you.”
The man whose future empire would be intertwined with the twentieth-century multinational corporation began by studying the records of the conquistadors.
whose small size had not prevented it from acquiring lucrative colonies.
J.W.B. Money.
the Argentine
of Entre Rios
Martin ...
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Uruguay and the...
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Leopold’s letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary.
“It’s a taste we have got to make her learn.”
size of the profit.
Someone once tried to compliment Leopold by saying that he would make “an excellent president of a republic.” Scornfully, he turned to his faithful court physician, Jules Thiriar, and asked, “What would you say, Doctor, if someone greeted you as ‘a great veterinarian’?” The ruler of a colony would have no parliament to worry about.
Verney Lovett Cameron,
was reported in 1875 to be running out of money, Leopold swiftly offered a contribution of 100,000 francs.
Henry Morton Stanley
As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits.
explorer Cameron, recently returned from crossing Africa, and grills him about his travels.
“The names must be spelled just as I have written them. G.C.B. means Grand Cross of Bath. F.R.G.S. means Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. K.C.B. means Knight Commander of the Bath. . . . These letters must be written after the names.”
Almost the only notable European concerned with Africa who was not there was Stanley,
“the greatest humanitarian work of this time.”
He has a special kind of capital: the great public relations power of the throne itself.
He has a script: the dream of a colony that had been running through his head since he was a teenager.
But he has as yet no stag...
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He never bothered to count the dead that the expedition left behind it, but the number must have been in the hundreds.
“We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages,” he wrote in his journal.
“shoots negroes as if they were monkeys,” commented the explorer and writer Richard Burton.
“the howling dervishes of civilization . . . safe in London . . . the philanthropists . . . [whose] impractical view is that a leader . . . should permit his men to be slaughtered by the natives and should be slaughtered himself and let discovery go to the dogs, but should never pull a trigger against this species of human vermin.”
“Honor and respect kings, for they are the envoys of God.”
“was sentenced to 200 lashes
