Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (53 page)

At any time, de Brazza could have resorted to force, but given Swinburne’s British nationality and his popularity with local Africans the political risks had scared the Frenchman. If Swinburne were to die in an exchange of fire, then Britain might be drawn into the Congo as an active participant in the struggle for domination. This was the last thing de Brazza and
his countrymen wanted to happen. By bravely refusing to back off when the better-armed French party advanced on Kinshasa, Swinburne had saved the Congo for Leopold and thwarted the French. But his courage would have a disastrous outcome since it made possible King Leopold’s later exploitation and rape of the Congo – perhaps the most tragic indirect consequence of the Nile quest. During a brief visit to Europe in 1882, Stanley had spoken condescendingly about de Brazza at a banquet in Paris. After Swinburne’s ‘insult’ to France, the French press angrily condemned this new mockery of a national hero by another arrogant ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

Months before Stanley had made his injudicious speech in Paris a more significant event had damaged Anglo-French relations. The background to this was the bankruptcy of the
khedive
of Egypt in 1876, after which Britain and France – the owners of the fifteen-year-old Suez Canal – had assumed financial control over the country. In 1882 this European takeover provoked a group of Egyptian army officers to seize power in a nationalist
coup.
France was paralysed by internal politics at the time, so Britain acted alone. Believing that the route to India via Suez was threatened, the British government sent an army commanded by General Sir Garnet Wolseley to take on Colonel Arabi and his officers. The result was a crushing military defeat for Arabi’s forces at Tel-el-Kebir in September 1882, and the installation of the British as the
de facto
rulers of Egypt. After de Brazza’s defeat on the Congo, less than two years later, this was more cause for French anger. From now onwards the gratifying idea became widespread that France might one day link its West African colonies with Sudan and the River Nile. This ‘bridge across Africa’ became an emotive national preoccupation, seeming to offer compensation for Britain’s ‘theft’ of Egypt, among ‘perfidious Albion’s’ other misdeeds.
⁶

In 1884, at the Berlin Conference, the greater part of the Congo was awarded to Leopold, with the French, to their mortification (thanks to German and British pressure), receiving the smaller northern region of that vast country. The ‘Scramble for Africa’
now began in earnest. Due directly to French and British advances in Africa, Germany claimed Togoland, Kamerun and South-West Africa. In Bismarck’s opinion, Britain and France had already been too well rewarded in the ‘Dark Continent’. Now it was Germany’s turn – and the vast area that most interested the Iron Chancellor lay not in West Africa, but inland from Zanzibar, where it extended as far west as the great lakes. This was the region which the Arabs had kept to themselves, but which Livingstone, Stanley, Burton, Speke and Grant had opened to the eyes of the world.
⁷

TWENTY-NINE

An Arabian Princess and a German Battle Squadron

In January 1887, after leaving King Leopold’s employment, Stanley stood ready to risk his life in re-supplying Emin Pasha, the embattled Governor of Equatoria, and then in aiding the Scottish missionaries and their converts in Buganda. Lord Salisbury’s cabinet had concluded that the remoteness of Emin Pasha’s tropical location and the military strength of the Mahdists made a government rescue too dangerous to attempt.
¹
But Stanley and his philanthropic friend William Mackinnon had drawn up plans to act independently. They wished to re-supply Emin and save Mackay, but also to advance Mackinnon’s African trading interests and, above all, to stop the Germans snatching Tanganyika, Uganda and the Nile’s source.
²

The German Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, had recently revealed that by virtue of several treaties ‘negotiated’ with Tanganyikan chiefs by Dr Karl Peters – a bespectacled young German philosopher and explorer – an imperial charter or
Schutzbrief
had been granted to Dr Peters’s colonising company, authorising him to establish a German protectorate over the territory extending from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika.
³
To ensure that the Sultan of Zanzibar accepted this high-handed confiscation of his inland empire, in August 1885 the Iron Chancellor sent a squadron of five German warships to the island.

The Germans, however, possessed a weapon subtler than brute force. On board one of these vessels was an extraordinary duo: a naturalised German woman of Arab extraction, and her son, Rudolph. They were
extraordinary
because nineteen years earlier, Rudolf’s mother – who had been born Princess Salme bint Said ibn Sultan al-Busaidi and was a sister of Sultan Barghash of
Zanzibar – had had an affair with a German businessman called Heinrich Ruete resulting in her becoming pregnant.
⁴
It was a tragic situation since the appropriate punishment under Sharia law was that both lovers be killed, with Princess Salme being stoned to death. Ruete managed to escape, but when Princess Salme, ‘a beautiful girl of about twenty-five’, tried to stow away on one of the ships owned by her lover’s company, she was betrayed by a servant and confined to her house by her brother.
⁵

A senior officer in the Royal Navy’s East African Anti-Slave Trade Squadron, Captain Thomas Malcolm Sabine Pasley,
⁶
was told by Dr John Kirk (at the time British Vice-Consul) that if Princess Salme remained on Zanzibar she would ‘be killed sooner or later’. Taking pity on her, Captain Pasley planned a rescue, which he timed to take place on 26 August 1866, the day of a local religious festival when pious Muslims were required to go down to the sea and wash. A ship’s cutter, manned by sailors from Pasley’s frigate, HMS
Highflyer,
was despatched to a prearranged spot on the beach with orders to collect the princess and her servants. Pasley stood in close to the shore in the captain’s gig (a smaller ship’s boat) in order to be on hand should the rescue be opposed.

Dr Kirk wrote to his fiancée after it was all over:

[The princess had] got down all her boxes of [Maria Theresa] dollars safely and sprang into the boat although manned by infidels. Her two servants who knew nothing of the whole [affair] screamed, howled and roared as women will; but a bluejacket covered the mouth of one with his hand and lifted her in, nolens volens, to follow her mistress. The other unluckily got off clean away, bellowing up the street … Some blame the English consulate – as if the ships of war were under us … Oh! If you had seen the Europeans next day. Were they not in a funk … As to Ruete, the German, he is a fool; in more regular countries he’d get a good horse-whipping … It was hard to think that a girl was to suffer while he escaped, so I am right glad she is off.
⁷

Pasley and his crew carried the princess and her servants by sea to the safety of the British colony of Aden. To ensure that no Muslim revenge attacks were made on Zanzibar’s European
population, the Admiralty arranged for a British warship to be stationed in the harbour for several months. Princess Salme wrote to Captain Pasley the following summer, enclosing her photograph and telling him that she had received Christian instruction and been baptised in Aden, and, prior to her marriage to Ruete, given the Christian name of Emily. Her letter ended sadly. She had been ‘very much afflicted by the loss of little Henry [her baby], between Lyons and Paris’ on the way to Hamburg. But in that city, Herr and Frau Ruete would soon be the proud parents of a son, Rudolph, and two daughters, none of whom would have existed unless Captain Pasley had saved their mother’s life.
⁸
From the time of the incident, the German government had recognised that the Ruete family might one day be of use and therefore made sure that Rudolph was suitably educated and that his family received support, especially after his father, Heinrich Ruete, was killed by a tram in Hamburg in 1870.

SMS
Adler
.

Almost two decades after Emily’s rescue, she and the fifteen-year-old Rudolph were conveyed to Zanzibar (as already mentioned) on board the German warship, the
Adler,
which
was escorted by four equally imposing cruisers, including the
Gneisenau
and
Prinz Adalbert.
Rudolph’s presence in the harbour enabled Bismarck to warn the new Sultan that if he refused to cede his mainland empire – with the exception of a narrow coastal fringe – Germany would replace him with his sister’s son. So a British naval officer’s chivalrous act had inadvertently helped Germany to put pressure on his own country to yield the lion’s share of East Africa. But Captain Pasley (who, by chance, is my maternal great-grandfather) was spared the embarrassment of seeing this happen. In 1870, when recently returned to Britain from the Indian Ocean, he died from the after effects of malaria contracted during the years when he had been chasing slave dhows among the maze of coastal mangrove swamps and creeks between Kismayu and Kilwa. (During the nineteenth century, 17,000 members of the Royal Navy died as a result of their service with the West and East African Anti-Slave Trade Squadrons.)
⁹

Due to the threat to replace him with his half-German nephew, Sultan Barghash felt unable to oppose the German demand for a mainland protectorate. So the German battle squadron stood down its gun crews. Emily went ashore and asked to meet her brother, only to be told: ‘I have no sister, she died many years ago.’
¹⁰
So, on 24 September, mission accomplished, the
Adler
and its escorting vessels raised steam in the harbour and very soon had dwindled to specks on the horizon.

Where Stanley and Mackinnon had failed to persuade successive British governments to pursue a forward policy in East Africa, Karl Peters, Prince Bismarck, and indirectly young Rudolf Ruete, succeeded in propelling Britain into agreeing in October 1886, at Germany’s suggestion, that their two countries divide the mainland into two ‘spheres of influence’, with Germany taking the larger southern portion of the Sultan’s empire. This extended west from Usambara, just south of Mombasa, to Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika, and south to Lake Nyasa and the Rovuma. Britain took the northern sector, which stretched
as far to the west as the eastern shore of Lake Victoria. This Anglo-German agreement was made almost exactly a year after the five German warships had sailed away. Uganda, ‘the pearl of Africa’, and Equatoria, had not been included in this Anglo-German agreement. So Stanley and Mackinnon still feared that Peters might try to sign a treaty with Mwanga of Buganda before any British representative was in a position to do so. And if Peters reached Emin Pasha before Stanley, he might end up adding Equatoria, and not just Uganda, to his country’s already substantial East African portfolio.
¹¹

Bismarck’s acquisition of the huge country that would become Tanganyika (modern Tanzania) horrified Mackinnon, who in the same year failed to persuade the British government to back his project of building a railway from Tanga on the coast to Mount Kilimanjaro. But, in May 1886, the Prime Minister approved the granting of a royal charter to Mackinnon’s Imperial British East Africa Company, in line with the government’s policy of ‘encouraging private enterprise to peg out claims in regions of East Africa where the Germans were likely to be active’.
¹²
But the self-made shipping millionaire was not deterred by his knowledge that he was being used. This former grocer’s boy was a Scottish Presbyterian idealist, whose yacht, grouse moors and famous friends did not give him nearly as much pleasure as the prospect of saving Equatoria and Uganda for Christianity, free trade and British rule.

Mackinnon and Stanley felt passionately about Uganda because of Britain’s long association with that country, firstly through Speke and Grant and then through Stanley himself and Mackay. Furthermore, Bishop Hannington had been martyred trying to open the direct road from the coast, and a young British explorer, Joseph Thomson, had subsequently pioneered it. The two friends felt the same way about Equatoria, which had been given its name by Baker and then administered by Gordon and later by Emin Pasha, who though German had been employed by Britain and Egypt. If Germany’s explorers had done as much as Britain’s to explore the Nile and reveal its mysteries, then Stanley
and Mackinnon might not have felt betrayed. But betrayed or not, Stanley was prepared to cancel an American lecture series and lose £10,000 thereby in order to lead the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition.
¹³