Shakespeare in Swahililand: Adventures with the Ever-Living Poet. Edward Wilson-Lee

greatest Shakespeare expeditionary stories of all, however, come from Henry Morton Stanley, the man who had led the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. In Stanley’s defence it should be mentioned that all of the atrocities recorded on that expedition took place while he was away from the main party leading a scouting mission, though Stanley did not manage to keep his hands entirely clean during his long and extraordinary career. The man who would become ‘Africa’s Most Famous Explorer’ was born out of wedlock as plain John Rowlands, and spent much of his youth in a Welsh workhouse; Rowlands invented ‘Henry Morton Stanley’ during his early manhood in the United States, where he lived in New Orleans and fought in the American Civil War (on both sides).21 This new identity came complete with a fantastically rich and loving family, and Stanley never gave it up even long after the truth became common knowledge in the Victorian rumour mill. He rose to prominence as a result of his 1871–2 expedition, which found the celebrated missionary David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika after contact with him had been lost for more than a year, though there are doubts now that his famously nonchalant greeting (‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’) was actually spoken and not cooked up later to add charm to the story. Stanley found, however, that his celebrity was a mixed blessing. He was never forgiven by the members of the Royal Geographical Society for his vulgarity in undertaking the Livingstone rescue on a newspaper’s dime and (more gallingly, one suspects) for having beaten the Royal Geographical Society at their own game. And though Stanley escaped much of the public opprobrium visited on other members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, his reputation has been indelibly tarnished by his late-life association with Leopold II of Belgium’s Association Internationale Africaine, an organization typical in its muddling of philanthropy with exploitation but extraordinary in the level of the atrocities it committed – atrocities to which attention was drawn back in Europe by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899). Having pioneered a route up the Congo from the west coast of Africa for the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Stanley would later put his expertise at Leopold’s disposal and set in motion the execrable history of the Belgian Congo.

      One of Stanley’s main tasks was to negotiate with local chieftains treaties of mutual understanding that would allow Leopold’s Association to plant trading stations on their lands (and, perhaps more importantly, to prevent the French from doing the same). These stations would set a precedent for the regions being within the Belgian ‘sphere of influence’, a type of de facto power which Belgium and other powers later asserted as de jure political control using spurious legal logic and adding many forged treaties to those actually signed in Africa. Stanley was not above using literary magic to get these treaties signed, as he did on one occasion in the late 1880s. A local chief, Ngaliema, furious that Stanley had made agreements which undercut his power, approached Stanley’s camp with a view to scaring him off; but Stanley, forewarned of the attack, sat calmly in his tent porch with a gong, all the while placidly ‘reading the complete works of Shakespeare’. The chief was unnerved by Stanley’s calm demeanour, and demanded that Stanley strike the gong, undeterred by Stanley’s warnings that this was a dangerous request. Stanley finally obliged; at the sound of the gong, a multitude of armed men leapt out from where they had been hiding, convincing Ngaliema of Stanley’s sorcery.22

      Stanley’s little stage trick not only featured a volume of Shakespeare, but also has the feel of being borrowed from it, drawing both on the foliage-camouflaged army which brings Birnam Wood to Dunsinane to defeat Macbeth and on the ‘strange and solemn music’ through which the wizard Prospero controls both spirits and his adversaries in The Tempest. (Birnam Wood, as we shall see, later made its way into the folklore of the region.) If Stanley was taking his cue from Shakespeare, this would not have been the first time. An expedition which Stanley led in 1877 to see if the Lualaba River might have a claim to be the most southerly source of the Nile ended in a nightmarish descent of the Congo when the Lualaba drained into that river instead. From Loanda on the west coast of Africa Stanley sent a report to his employers at the New York Herald of an incident that had happened in the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo:

      Loanda, West Coast of Africa

      Sept 5, 1877

      … A terrible crime in the eyes of many natives below the confluence of the Kwango and the Congo was taking notes. Six or seven tribes confederated together one day to destroy us, because I was ‘bad, very bad.’ I had been seen making medicine on paper – writing. Such a thing had never been heard of by the oldest inhabitant. It, therefore, must be witchcraft, and witchcraft must be punished with death. The white chief must instantly deliver his notebook (his medicine) to be burned, or there would be war on the instant.

      My notebook was too valuable; it had cost too many lives and sacrifices to be consumed at the caprice of savages. What was to be done? I had a small volume of Shakespeare, Chandos edition. It had been read and reread a dozen times, it had crossed Africa, it had been my solace many a tedious hour, but it must be sacrificed. It was delivered, exposed to the view of the savage warriors. ‘Is it this you want?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is this the medicine that you are afraid of?’ ‘Yes, burn it, burn it. It is bad, very bad; burn it.’

      ‘Oh, my Shakespeare,’ I said, ‘farewell!’ and poor Shakespeare was burnt. What a change took place in the faces of those angry, sullen natives! For a time it was like another jubilee. The country was saved; their women and little ones would not be visited by calamity. ‘Ah, the white chief was so good, the embodiment of goodness, the best of all men.’23

      Stanley certainly succeeds in reproducing the conventions which were by then becoming established: here is the small but well-thumbed volume of Shakespeare, here is the ‘caprice of savages’ and their slightly ungrammatical language, here are the serious-joking words about the magic Shakespearean totem – it is ‘medicine’, it must be ‘sacrificed’. Stanley repeated a condensed version of the story in his book of the expedition, Through the Dark Continent, in which he elaborates on his feelings at the moment of sacrifice:

      We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretful farewell to my genial companion, which during many weary hours of night had assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, and then gravely consigned the innocent Shakespeare to the flames, heaping the brush-fuel over it with ceremonious care.24

      This account figures Shakespeare, the Man who is also Word, becoming Christ-like as he enters the inferno, guiltless but enough to sate the devils.

      Stanley in later life, here with the members of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Stanley is seated in the centre with Emin Pasha to his left, and Dr Parke is seated second from left. (Photo by De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images)

      The sting in the tail of Stanley’s story is that, like so much else in his life, it was a fabrication. As the modern editor of his Herald despatches notes, the account of this episode in his expedition diary has Stanley handing over no more to satisfy the furious natives than a sheet of paper upon which he had scribbled; this detail was subsequently revised for the newspaper account.25 Stanley’s instincts as a storyteller, as well as his finely honed sense of what he needed to do to fit in, told him that the mythic balance of the tale required the sacrificial victim to be Shakespeare. And the story itself is eerily reminiscent of the episode in Shakespeare’s Tempest in which the savage Caliban plots to overthrow the magician Prospero with a band of drunken accomplices:

      CALIBAN:

      Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him

      I’th’ afternoon to sleep. There thou mayst brain him,

      Having first seized his books; or with a log

      Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,

      Or cut his weasand with thy knife. Remember

      First