Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost
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A journalist, [Morton] Stanley wrote with the self-importance that had now become part of his public persona, is “like a gladiator in the arena … Any flinching, any cowardice, and he is lost. The gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom – the … roving correspondent meets the command that may send him to his doom.” He dashed to Paris to meet his publisher at the Grand Hotel. There, a dramatic conversation about Livingstone climaxed with Bennett’s saying, “I mean that you shall go, and find him wherever you may hear he is, and to get what news you can of him, and perhaps … the old man may be in want: – take enough with you to help him should her require it … do what you think best – BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE!”
This scene provided a splendid introduction for Stanley’s first book, How I Found Livingstone … but nothing like this conversation seems to have happened.…
However inflated, Stanley’s story of Bennett’s dramatic summons to Paris sold plenty of books, and to Stanley that mattered. He was after more than fame as an explorer; his melodramatic flair made him, as one historian has remarked, “the progenitor of all the subsequent professional travel writers.” … With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.
-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)
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“What means have I to convey my heart’s load of love to you,” Stanley had written Alice Pike from the middle of the continent, “but this letter which must go through a thousand miles of savages, exposed to all dangers of flood and fire and battle until it reaches the sea? … Grant then that my love towards you is unchanged, that you are in my dream, my stay and my hope, and my beacon, and believe that I shall still cherish you in this light until I meet you.”
When he brought his remaining porters and soldiers by sea back to their jumping-off point in Zanzibar, Stanley had a shock. Amid two years’ worth of mail waiting for him was a newspaper clipping eighteen months old, announcing that Alice Pike had married an Ohio railway heir named Albert Barney. Stanley fell into a deep depression and never saw her again. The explorer never knew that, as she watched his fame grow, the new Mrs. Barney spent much of her life regretting that she had not become Mrs. Stanley. Long after his death, in a highly romanticized unpublished novel-memoir, she claimed credit for his great Congo journey: “She made it possible for him. Without her spirit animating him, he would never have accomplished it, not even had the desire to penetrate those abysmal darknesses again. … ‘Lady Alice’ had conquered Africa!”
-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)
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Except for [Stanislaus] Lefranc, few Europeans working for the regime left records of their shock at the sight of officially sanctioned terror. The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. “Monsters exist,” wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschswitz. “But they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are … the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)
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There were years when, to the distress of many a young male European, Europe was at peace. For a young man looking for battle, especially battle against a poorly armed enemy, the Congo was the place to go. For a white man, the Congo was also a place to get rich and to wield power. As a district commissioner, you might be running a district as big as all of Holland or Belgium. As a station chief, you might be a hundred miles away from the next white official; you could levy whatever taxes you chose in labor, ivory, or anything else, collect them however you wanted, and impose whatever punishments you liked. If you got carried away, the penalty, if any, was a slap on the wrist. A station chief at Manyanga, on the big rapids, who beat two of his personal servants to death in 1890 was only fined five hundred francs. What mattered was keeping the ivory flowing back to Belgium. The more you sent, the more you earned. “Vive le Congo, there is no place like it!” one young officer wrote to his family in 1894, “We have liberty, independence, and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society … Here one is everything! Warrior, diplomat, trader!! Why not!” For such people, just as for the humbly born Stanley, the Congo offered a chance for a great rise in status. Someone fated for a life as a small-town bank clerk or plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, ivory merchant, big game hunter, and possessor of a harem.
-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)
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Whether [the inference that Stanley was impotent] is right or wrong, the inhibitions that caused Stanley so much pain are a reminder that the explorers and soldiers who carried out the European seizure of Africa were often not the bold, bluff, hardy men of legend, but restless, unhappy, driven men, in flight from something in their past or in themselves. The economic explanations of imperial expansion – the search for raw materials, labor, and markets – are all valid but there was psychological fuel as well. Like any system that gives some human beings total power over others, slavery in Africa could be vicious. … In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system European would soon establish in the New World. … Nonetheless, the fact that trading in human beings existed in any form turned out to be catastrophic for Africa, for when Europeans showed up, ready to buy endless shiploads of slaves, they found African chiefs willing to sell.
-- by Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost(1999)
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