Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (55 page)

Stanley reached the Aruwimi after two months and found to his horror that the Rear Column had only managed to drag itself to Banlaya, a mere ninety-five miles to the east of Yambuya, before finally collapsing. But where were all the men he had last seen in June 1887? The only people he could see walking about, or lying on the ground, resembled living skeletons. Some were also suffering from ulcers the size of plates. Of the original officers, not one was here to greet him, only Sergeant Bonny, the column’s medical orderly. Within half-an-hour Bonny had revealed to Stanley ‘one of the most harrowing chapters of disastrous and fatal incidents that I ever heard attending the movements of an expedition in Africa’.
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Less than a hundred of the 271 people who had been left behind at Yambuya were still alive. Stanley scribbled into his diary some of the unbelievable things which Bonny told him:

The major caused John Henry, a mission boy, to be flogged 300 lashes. He died that night. Ward [another officer] caused a mutineer to be flogged at Bolobo so severely that he also died within a few hours … The major kicked his little boy Sudi – a boy of 13 years old – in the shin with an ulcer 2 by 3 inches unable to move. The major caused a Sudanese to be shot by a platoon of his comrades for stealing a piece of meat. William Bonny relates that the least thing caused the major to behave like a fiend. He had a steel pointed cypress walking staff with which he dealt severe wounds. One man, a Manyema, he stabbed 17 times with the steel point … The major would walk up and down the
camp with his large white teeth set firm & exposed … At such times he would dash at people right & left – as though he were running amuck.
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It came as little surprise to Stanley to learn that Major Barrtelot had eventually been murdered by a Manyema porter. He was angry and bewildered that Barttelot’s officers had not stood up to him when he had ordered the execution of a hungry man for stealing a piece of meat; and it appalled him that none had objected to a sentence of 300 lashes with a whip of twisted hippopotamus hide for an equally trivial ‘crime’. A man would be insensible after fifty strokes and rarely lived through more than a hundred. Stanley nursed the boy, Sudi, in his own tent until his death six days later.
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Most of the Wangwana who had died had been starved to death or poisoned. Yambuya was rich in nutritive manioc tubers, but Barttelot had worked the Wangwana so hard that they had never had time to soak the tubers in water and then leave them in the sun for several days in order to leech out the natural cyanide. In consequence, ‘to satisfy their raging hunger they ate the raw poisonous stuff’. In Stanley’s eyes this failure to care for the Wangwana was murder. Yet even this was not the most grotesque crime he heard about.

Bonny informed him that Jameson, the whiskey heir, while on his way to Kasongo, had purchased an eleven-year-old girl and given her to cannibals so that he could watch her being stabbed to death, cut up, cooked in a pot and eaten, while he made sketches of the whole grisly process.
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According to Bonny, Jameson had gone downriver and would soon be returning. In fact he had died of fever on the day Stanley reached Banlaya. One of the other officers had been invalided home and another had chosen to station himself 600 miles downstream on the Congo. Bonny did not tell Stanley that he and all the other officers had purchased slave women from the local Arab slave traders. ‘Our cannibal concubines’, he called them in his diary.
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The moral collapse of the Rear Column’s officers and the deaths at Yambuya would haunt Stanley for the rest of his life. He knew that people back in England would assume that Barttelot and Jameson had been:

… originally wicked … They will not reflect that circumstances changed them … At home these men had no cause to show their natural savagery … They were suddenly transplanted to Africa and its miseries. They were deprived of butcher’s meat & bread & wine, books, newspapers, the society & influence of their friends. Fever seized them, wrecked minds and bodies. Good nature was banished by anxiety. Pleasantness was eliminated by toil. Cheerfulness yielded to internal anguish … until they became but shadows, morally & physically of what they had been in English society.
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Yet Stanley could not afford to surrender to despair. Karl Peters might already be on his way to Lake Victoria and the Pasha’s men had to be there ahead of him, so Stanley gave the half-starved survivors of Banlaya ten days in which to recuperate, before leaving Banlaya on 30 August 1888. Back at the lake, he was appalled to find that Emin Pasha had not yet returned from the north after consulting his men about their relocation.
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Then Stanley received the shocking news that Emin was being held captive by mutineers from one of his own regiments. The Pasha’s life seemed to be hanging by a thread. Plainly all hope that he would take his men to north-eastern Uganda had gone. At best, it appeared that Stanley would now be taking a small number of Emin’s loyal soldiery to the coast
en route
to Egypt. By failing to be honest about his true situation, Emin had turned a difficult situation into a disastrous one.
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Now, Equatoria would probably be overrun by the
jihadists
with the connivance of Emin’s men, and Uganda would become a German colony. Stanley’s officers felt great bitterness towards the Pasha. ‘We were led,’ said one, ‘to place our trust in people who were utterly unworthy of our confidence and help.’
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At the end of December, Emin and a handful of loyal officers and soldiers arrived at Tunguro on Lake Albert, having been released unharmed from involuntary detention at Dufile, 140 miles to the north on the Nile. Although Emin claimed that a thousand men were still loyal to him, on 10 April 1889, the agreed date of departure for the coast, only 126 officers and men assembled in Stanley’s camp, along with about 350 servants, wives, concubines, children, clerks and officials. To bring away
these people, described by one of Stanley’s officers as ‘the dregs of Cairo & Alexandria’, had to date cost Stanley about 400 lives, and had put back by months the date on which he could expect to reach Alexander Mackay and his missionaries and converts in Buganda. Fortunately, Stanley would soon learn that these much-persecuted people had managed to escape from Buganda to Usambiro, on the southern shores of Lake Victoria.

On arriving at the lake Stanley was moved to tears by the 32-year-old Mackay’s courage. The diminutive and dapper missionary had only left Buganda with his converts when certain that they would otherwise have been killed. Mackay warned Stanley that Karl Peters was already fighting his way through Masailand. Furthermore, the Germans had recently moved inland in large numbers into their East African ‘sphere of influence’.
En route
to Lake Victoria from Lake Albert, Stanley had undergone several blood brotherhood ceremonies with chiefs, and now decided to represent these to the British government as ‘verbal treaties’ which might possibly be used in negotiations to prevent western Uganda falling into German hands.
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According to Mackay, Peters was closing in on Buganda itself, leaving a trail of burned villages and murdered Masai warriors behind him.
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But Stanley was in no position to try to reach Buganda ahead of him. With only 215 members of his own expedition to call upon, and handicapped by having to supervise Emin’s straggling column of 300 enfeebled men, women and children, his column had to concentrate on its own survival. Any attempt to do more would end in disaster.

As Stanley came to the sun-bleached borders of Masailand and saw stretching ahead of him the parched, acacia-studded plain which he remembered so well from his Livingstone search, he could just discern a caravan approaching through the quivering haze. It was led by a young German officer, and Stanley was disconcerted to be hailed ‘with a perfect volley of “Guten Morgens”‘ from the Nyamwezi porters.
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Despite Stanley’s belief that the Pasha would accompany him to Europe, Emin had secretly resolved never to leave Africa. In
1875, on his last visit to his native Germany, he had abandoned his former Turkish mistress, Madame Hakki, and had fled to Egypt, taking her jewels and money with him. She had obtained a judgment for 10,000 marks after his disappearance, leaving Emin in no doubt about her determination to put him behind bars should he ever return to German or Turkish jurisdiction.
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Not until reaching Cairo would Stanley learn about the scandal of Emin’s Turkish mistress and her lawsuit. He buried the information in his diary and never breathed a word to anyone, knowing that Emin’s criminal treatment of his mistress, if it were ever made public, would cause a storm of anger that good lives should have been lost to rescue an immoral cad.
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At the coastal town of Bagamoyo in early December 1889, the short-sighted Emin fell from a balcony during a celebratory dinner and gashed his head. The German officers who had organised the dinner spirited him away to their military hospital and Stanley never saw him again. A month later, Emin announced that he intended to work for Germany, and in April 1890 he marched out of Bagamoyo at the head of a well-equipped expedition. He hoped to recruit his old Sudanese soldiers, who had been left behind on the shores of Lake Albert, and with their help to claim Equatoria for Germany. But he would soon discover that his former officers had remained loyal to Egypt and Britain. So Emin vanished into the interior on a mysterious mission of his own, which ended with his capture by Kibonge, an Arab-Swahili warlord and slave trader, somewhere south of Stanley Falls on the Congo. Emin Pasha was arrested and beheaded on the orders of Kibonge. ‘The very day he was kissed by his countrymen he was doomed,’ remarked Stanley, drily.
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Emin’s ingratitude underlined the complete failure of Stanley’s expedition to achieve what he and Mackinnon had most wanted to do: namely strengthen Britain’s strategic position in East and Central Africa. Whether Britain, Germany, or even France, was going to emerge as the guardian of the source of the Nile and its upper reaches still remained an open question.

THIRTY-ONE

The Prime Minister’s Protectorate

Dr Karl Peters, the slender and scholarly German explorer with a taste for shooting Africans and decapitating their corpses, had hoped to join forces with Emin Pasha in his advance on Buganda and Equatoria; but after the Pasha vanished into the interior, Peters had been obliged to act alone. Supreme gambler that he was, the bespectacled German pushed on with only sixty men, and -after stealing a march on the British traveller, Frederick Jackson, whom Mackinnon had sent in a desperate last minute effort to intercept him – arrived at Mwanga’s court and persuaded the
kabaka
to sign a treaty. This
coup
was achieved with the support of the French priests, who knew that if Mackinnon triumphed, the British missionaries would be favoured in the kingdom to their detriment. The Germans, they fondly hoped, would be neutral.
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But just when Germany seemed to have triumphed, Lord Salisbury unexpectedly decided that vital British interests were involved after all.

And what had caused the Prime Minister’s eleventh hour
volte face?
The answer was his recognition that a seismic shift was taking place in the broader region. While the Mahdist fundamentalists had remained in uncontested control of the Sudan and the Upper Nile, Lord Salisbury had been confident that the ruling Caliphate could not dam or interrupt the river’s flow because it lacked western-trained engineers. But when in 1889 an Italian army advanced into Abyssinia and declared it a protectorate, Salisbury informed them very publicly that Britain would bar their troops and those of all other nations from approaching the Nile itself.

In June of the same year, Count Hatzfeld-Wildenburg, the German ambassador in London, took the hint and assured
Salisbury that all places north and east of Lake Victoria were ‘outside the sphere of German colonisation’. So it had been obvious to Lord Salisbury that Prince Bismarck no longer supported Karl Peters’s colonial schemes. But Bismarck was dismissed in March 1890, and Salisbury was at once warned by the German Secretary of State, Baron von Marschall that no understanding existed between Germany and Great Britain about the territories to the west of Lake Victoria – the region in which Stanley had supposedly made his ‘verbal agreements’.
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Only a general European settlement in East Africa now seemed to hold out any prospect of discouraging German adventurers like Dr Peters from advancing towards the Nile through Equatoria.

On first hearing about Peters’s vexing treaty with Mwanga, Salisbury knew it would take a masterstroke to snatch back Uganda and the Nile’s sources. So, as if plucking a rabbit from his hat, he produced the island of Heligoland and offered it to the delighted German Emperor. Count Hatzfeld-Wildenburg, the Kaiser’s negotiator, was informed by his master that this barren island in the North Sea, which had been captured by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, was vital for the future defence of Hamburg and the Kiel Canal.
Nothing
must be done that could jeopardise its acquisition. So Peters’s treaty was revoked, and Buganda – incorporating wider Uganda and Equatoria -once again seemed destined to become a British protectorate. Nor was that all. The Ruwenzori Mountains, along with half of Lake Albert, the whole of Lake George and the hinterland to the west of Lake Victoria, as far south as the Kagera river, would no longer be claimed by Germany as part of Tanganyika. So Stanley’s ‘blood-brotherhood treaties’ were not to be thrown away. Lord Salisbury also negotiated an extension of coastal land at Witu on the Indian Ocean to seal off the Upper Nile from possible German forays.
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