Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (30 page)

Unfortunately, the sickness came at a time when Stanley needed his wits about him more than ever. The sheikhs in charge of the Arab caravans, emboldened by the presence of Stanley’s fire-power in their midst, believed they could proceed rapidly through dreaded Ugogo and predicted a doubling of pace. But they were wrong. Ugogo was a hostile, unpredictable land, and not even Stanley’s guns could guarantee a smooth passage.

In Ugogo, the Wagogo tribal chiefs, known by one and all as sultans, did as they pleased. The tributes they demanded were nebulous, and payable on the whim of each sultan. In some cases, even those who paid were then ambushed. ‘The Wagogo are the Irish of America,’ Stanley observed. ‘Clannish and full of fight. To the Wagogo all caravans must pay tribute, the refusal of which is met by an immediate declaration of hostilities.’

As difficult as it was for outsiders to accept, the Wagogo controlled trade in East Africa. Stanley was armed with the document Sultan Barghash had bestowed upon him back in Zanzibar, guaranteeing unhindered passage to Ujiji across the land he believed he ruled (between Zanzibar and Lake Tanganyika). In Ugogo, however, this scrap of paper was meaningless. The facade Webb and Kirk were battling to uphold, that America and Britain controlled African trade, was a myth here.

On 1 June Stanley and the Arab caravans encountered their first Wagogo. It was just after eight in the morning. The hot morning sun was drying the dew on the tall matama stalks as the caravans passed scores of titanic boulders lining the approach to Mvumi, the first village of Ugogo. Initially, all went well. But the villagers had already heard about the approaching white man, and soon hundreds clogged the red dirt path. Dazzled by Stanley’s strange hair and clothing, and the varying milky and mahogany hues of his unevenly tanned skin, they pressed forward to touch him. The Wagogo fought one another, yelled at one another, jumped up and down for a better view. At first Stanley found the moment triumphant, but soon he was scared by its intensity.

The Wagogo weren’t being respectful of his white skin, as Stanley initially supposed. They were laughing at him. To the Wagogo, everything about Stanley was odd: he was haggard, drawn and testy. He was obviously irritated by so many people pushing up against him. He was feeble from illness, with his beard extending in long brown tufts from his cheeks. Stanley’s safari outfit was of bright white flannel, a colour which reflected some of the sun’s heat, but which could also be seen from miles away against the brick-red soil. Even his rifle and sidearm, which Stanley assumed gave him an aura of power, weren’t so impressive. He felt like a monkey in the Central Park zoo, he wrote, ‘whose funny antics elicit such bursts of laughter from young New Yorkers’.

No sooner had he passed through town than the fever attacked again. Stanley spent the rest of the day burning and shivering, battling delusions, dosing himself with quinine.

As if part of some continuing malarial nightmare, the next day the Great Sultan of Mvumi refused to accept the paltry six doti Stanley offered as tribute. Instead, came word to Stanley’s camp, the Sultan required sixty doti in exchange for passage. Stanley was furious. He felt humiliated. He confided to the Arabs that he was tempted to fight his way through Ugogo. Instead of paying tribute, Bombay and his soldiers would blaze a trail all the way to Tabora with guns and bullets.

The Arab answer was wise and paternal. ‘If you preferred war,’ they calmly counselled, ‘your pagazis would all desert, and leave you and your cloth to the small mercy of the Wagogo.’ Put that way, Stanley, a man who was infuriated any time someone got the better of him, couldn’t help but agree. He swallowed his pride and paid the tribute.

The impotence felt by Stanley continued with the Sultan of Matamburu, a few days later. Not only did he allow his people to emit ‘peals of laughter’ at Stanley’s appearance, but the Sultan also professed an abiding friendship with the Arab caravans. They weren’t forced to pay any tribute
at all. Stanley, on the other hand, had to pay four doti. Learning his lesson, Stanley bit his tongue, knowing that an altercation with the Wagogo could be fatal. ‘The traveller has to exercise great prudence, discretion and judgement,’ Stanley wrote. ‘The strength and power of the Wagogo are derived from their numbers.’

The next day the caravan pushed through a thick wood of gum trees and thorns, then lumbered across a barren, burning plain. There was no water. Elephant footprints were everywhere. The hills were steep and the sun ‘waxed hotter and hotter as it drew near the meridian, until it seemed to scorch all vitality from inanimate nature, while the view was one white blaze, unbearable to the pained sight’.

In the middle of that burning plain, there was another demand for tribute. The Sultan of Bihawana, whose subjects were infamous for being thieves and murderers, surprised Stanley by asking for only three doti. However, Stanley was alarmed to learn that his fourth caravan, travelling ahead of Stanley by a few days, had engaged in a gun battle with would-be hijackers. Two of the assailants had been killed as they were being driven off.

A few days later, as Stanley was battling malaria yet again, it was the Sultan of Kididimo’s turn to demand tribute. His was a foul kingdom, by all accounts. The water tasted of ‘warm horse urine’, the locals complained of recurring stomach upset, and two more of the New York
Herald
expedition’s donkeys died. Yet the Sultan, whose ego was inflated by the presence of a white visitor, still demanded ten doti to pass. Stanley was too sick to care. ‘I was not in a humour — being feeble, and almost nerveless’, he wrote of the malaria’s effects, ‘to dispute the sum. Consequently it was paid without many words.’

The summation of Stanley’s surreal malarial journey through Ugogo came in the village of Nyambwa, where yet another crowd ogled the white men. ‘Well, I declare,’ Shaw sneered as they marched through the village, with its square huts and tobacco drying on thatched roofs. He and Stanley had maintained a truce since Farquhar had been
left behind. Being the only two white men for hundreds of miles in any direction allowed them the slightest sense of fraternity. ‘They must be genuine Ugogians, for they stare and stare,’ Shaw said. ‘My God, there is no end to their staring. In fact, I’m almost tempted to slap them in the face.’

Just then, a local warrior tested Stanley. He drew near and taunted the journalist. On another day, perhaps when malaria and dehydration were not making his life a series of miseries and delusions, Stanley might have ignored the young man. But the humiliation of paying tribute finally got the best of his temper. Stanley was in no mood to be trifled with, so he snatched at the man, grabbing him by the neck and holding tight. The crowd looked on in disbelief, then pressed in closer to intimidate the explorer. Stanley, much to their surprise, didn’t let go. Instead he reached for his dog whip. Stanley thrashed the man severely then cast him to the ground.

The crowd pressed in against Stanley and Shaw, making a threatening guttural noise that sounded like a man preparing to spit. Earlier in the trip Stanley might have been cowed or even shown fear. But he was too sick and exhausted and fed up to care. He brandished his whip like a weapon, threatening all who came too close. ‘A little manliness and show of power was something the Wagogo long needed, and in this instance it relieved me of annoyance,’ Stanley wrote of using the whip. ‘When they pressed on me, barely allowing me to proceed, a few vigorous and rapid slashes right and left with my serviceable thong soon cleared the track.’

The next night, as they camped in a grove of palm trees adjacent, Stanley was even able to convince his fellow travellers to take a day’s rest so he could dose himself with quinine. He was reluctant to stop when Shaw or the pagazis were the ones suffering from illness, but ignored that policy when he was sick. ‘Sometimes,’ he theorized about malaria, ‘fever is preceded by a violent shaking fit, during which period blankets may be heaped on the patient’s form.’ The blankets didn’t always work, Stanley
went on to write, and he would be forced to lie there in agony while his head throbbed as if someone was beating on his skull from the inside with a hammer. His spine and genitals would ache, and even his shoulder blades would become a source of pain.

Since Stanley had little other hope for recovery, he took some medicine and went to bed. Starting just before dawn, when the caravan should have been assembling for the march, Stanley began ingesting the bitter quinine crystals, extracted from cinchona bark. The doses continued for the next seven hours, when his fever began to break. Huddled under a layer of blankets as the temperature outside peaked well over one hundred degrees, the flap to his tent closed, Stanley sweated with a torrential intensity, soaking his clothing and bedding. Hallucinations set in, an assortment of odd shapes and sensations floating about the room. ‘Before the darkened vision of the suffering man, floating in a seething atmosphere, figures of created and uncreated reptiles, which are metamorphosed into every shape and design, growing every moment more confused, more complicated, more hideous and terrible,’ he wrote later. ‘Unable to bear the distracting scene, he makes an effort and opens his eyes, and dissolves the delirious dream, only, however, to glide again unconsciously into another dreamland where another inferno is dioramically revealed, and new agonies suffered.’

By noon, sleep and medicine were doing the trick. The malaria that had manifested itself in his body for fourteen days, with its delusions and chills and fevers, was finally leaving. He clumsily extricated himself from his hammock and groped around the darkened tent, trying to get his bearings. Suddenly, the tent flap whooshed open. A painfully bright shaft of light jabbed Stanley in the eyes. When Stanley looked over, there stood the Sultan of Mizanza, having come to collect his tribute in person. The Sultan stepped inside the tent as if he owned it himself, and dropped the cloth covering his loins. He wore nothing underneath. Tall, aged, regal, the Sultan had once been powerfully built.

Stanley stood mute. He gazed at ‘the sad and towering wreck of what must have been a towering form’, but didn’t signal acceptance. So with a bemused giggle, the Sultan pulled his cloth on again. He stayed a while longer as if nothing had happened, inspecting the inside of Stanley’s tent — the portmanteau where Stanley kept his clothes and the night-stand with its books were particular fascinations — firing his Winchester, and wondering aloud about the extent of Stanley’s wealth. Then he left. Later that afternoon, having waived demand for tribute, the Sultan sent Stanley a sheep.

The next morning, Stanley and the other caravans fled the Sultan’s domain. The tributes and vagaries of Ugogo were becoming a source of irritation for everyone, and it was time to leave the surrealism of the region behind. ‘We had entered Ugogo full of hopes, believing it a most pleasant land — a land of milk and honey. We had been grievously disappointed. It proved to be a land of gall and bitterness, full of trouble and vexation of spirit, where we were exposed to the caprice of inebriated sultans,’ Stanley wrote. ‘The wilderness of Africa proves to be, in many instances, more friendly than the populate country.’

Two weeks later, after marching 178 miles in sixteen gruelling days, the caravan reached Tabora. It was 23 June, almost three months to the day since Stanley left Bagamoyo. He had walked 525 (and a half) miles in 84 days — Burton and Speke had taken 134 days to cover the same distance. The second leg of Stanley’s march was done.

Stanley threw a party for the men, roasting a bull and providing the banana beer. For the porters, their journey had reached its end. Afterwards, they were paid off and released. For Stanley, it was time to hire new porters and begin the final leg of his Homeric voyage. It was time to make the push to Ujiji, where, hopefully, David Livingstone waited. Even slowing his pace, Stanley knew he could make Ujiji before September — unless, of course, some incredible catastrophe forced him to turn around and go home.

AT SIXTY-ONE, GENTLE
and urbane Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson had led a fascinating life. He had served in the army in India, deciphered ancient cuneiform tablets in Persia that told of Darius the Great’s rise to power in 519 BC, been a political agent at Kandahar in Afghanistan and served as the British Consul to Baghdad. His knowledge of Persian and Oriental languages was matched by few Englishmen. It was only late in life that he abandoned adventure and intrigue and returned to Britain to settle down and start a family.

It was Rawlinson whom Murchison hand-picked as his successor after the stroke. He was the sort of globetrotter and intellectual the RGS presidency demanded, able to see the world beyond Britain as a three-dimensional realm of scientific possibility. The transition was awkward because of Murchison’s partial paralysis. The frail former geologist and Livingstone apologist was making a miraculous recovery from his stroke, but he was incapable of running the RGS. Hence, the time had come to make a change. Rawlinson, who enjoyed sitting his children on his knee
to tell them stories of tigers in India, was two decades younger than Murchison. The world was still fresh in his mind, unlike Murchison, who had been unable to travel abroad for some time. Clearly, the RGS needed Rawlinson.