[TheMercenary]

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.

A few pictures on the original site:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/bo...Theroux-t.html