EP 05 - Dr Livingstone, I presume?

Dr Livingstone, I presume?

- Episode 05 -

Stanley never got the joke

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#77 Stanley never got the joke

Friday 28 October 2022

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Illustration of the mummified body of Livingstone being carried to Zanzibar by his friends/ employees. International Mission Photography Archive

Some time around the beginning of May 1873 Dr David Livingstone died in a remote village in what is now Zambia. He had, in truth, achieved very little, and, so far as he could see, nothing at all toward ending the slave trade, which had been his greatest hope. What finally made Livingstone into a lasting legend was what happened after he died.

Livingstone’s African companions carried his mummified body to Zanzibar to avoid any suspicion, among the white authorities, of foul play. They probably also hoped to receive the pay they were owed for the years they had served Livingstone. The acting British consul at Zanzibar did his best to pay the men off (from his own pocket) and sent the news of his death along his newly installed new telegraph wire to Aden, where it was forwarded to London.

But the telegram was intercepted by a Reuters agent and sent on to the London papers and from there spread immediately across the country. It was an unmissable excuse for pages and pages of popular pathos.

Livingstone’s remains had been carried hundreds of miles to the coast by his faithful followers. It was almost too good to be true. The doctor had definitely now begun his final transfiguration into a legend and a plaything of the popular press.

The papers found they could keep the story alive as the body made its painfully slow way to England. Was it really Livingstone’s mortal remains? What would a post-mortem discover? How had he actually died?

This monumental bronze entitled "Livingstone and the Lion" is at at the David Livingstone Centre, Blantyre, Scotland. The statue was designed and modelled in wax by Ray Harryhausen and Gareth Knowles created the bronze.

Once the body reached the Royal Geographical Society, it was subjected to a post mortem by a prestigious surgeon, Sir William Furguson. He reported that the remains were unrecognisable, but that one discovery put the matter to rest.

Where the left deltoid joined the humerus, Ferguson discovered a badly set fracture. It was the mark of the famous attack by the lion and cause of Livingstone’s almost useless left arm. Yes, everyone could at last be reassured that the Africans had been telling the truth. This was the body of David Livingstone.

Now the press turned from questioning the Africans’ reliability to asking whether they could or would ever have achieved such a feat as carrying the body a thousand miles without European help. Abdullah Susi and James Chuma, who had first joined Livingstone ten years before, in 1863, and carried his body to Zanzibar, were in Africa and could not answer for themselves.

David Livingstone’s son Thomas found himself in a bitter newspaper battle to defend the Africans’ honour. He quoted his father’s journal. To doubt the Africans, the doctor had written, was ‘nothing but the most pitiable puerility.’

#77 Stanley never got the joke
Ep 5 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
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Stanley initially replaced Livingstone in the popularity stakes. At a 'Stanley and Africa Exhibition' in 1890 Livingstone was represented only by a couple of teaspoons. But Stanley was eventually unmasked as the scoundrel he was.

Placing flowers on Livingstone's coffin, at Southampton pier. Crowds lined the one mile route from the docks to the railway station.

The mayor of Southampton had put on an impressive welcome for Livingstone's coffin. He'd wagered, successfully, that the press attention would enable him to keep in with prestigious P&O ferries who were threatening to take their trade away from Southampton. Since a P&O ship was bringing the body on the last part of its journey, it was too good an opportunity to miss.

But once the body had reached London, it was a very different scenario. The orphaned Livingstone children were paupers and nobody else was interested in funding a funeral. The Dean of Westminster Abbey came forward with a proposal that Livingstone be buried there. But nobody – including even the Abbey - would stump up the £37 it would cost. It could not have been clearer that Livingstone had outstayed his welcome with the movers and shakers.

A black gravestone was eventually paid for by a well-wisher. It included what were supposedly the last words Livingstone wrote, referring to the end of enslavement ‘all I can add in my solitude is, may heaven’s rich blessing some down on every one, American, English or Turk, who will help heal this sore of the world’.

As the editor of Livingstone’s diaries pointed out, the words in fact came from a letter that Stanley had produced, addressed to the editor of the New York Herald. Its odd ‘American, English or Turk’ adds to the suspicion that it was Stanley and not Livingstone who had in fact written it.

But it was the same editor, the Revd Horace Waller, who had apparently invented the famous scene of Livingstone dying on his knees at prayer. The real Dr Livingstone had been buried as much metaphorically under layers of myth as under a broad black stone.

#Livingstone #VictoriaFalls #HenryMortonStanley #WalimaKalusa #ThomasFowellBuxton #exploration #NewYorkHerald #GordonBennett #DailyTelegraph #slavetrade #MissionaryTravels #LondonMissionarySociety #royalgeographicalsociety #AdrianWisnicki #meganward #FelixDriver #P&OFerries #Westminsterabbey #Livingstonefuneral

Sir Henry Morton Stanley, wife Lady Dorothy neé Tennant, and a servant they called 'Sali' in 1890. Dorothy was attracted to his brutish fame and loved to call him by his African nickname Bula Matari, breaker of rocks.

The events that followed Livingstone’s funeral are perhaps important for the light they shed on everything that Livingstone was not.

Having declared that he would complete what Livingstone had begun, Stanley undertook what historical geographer Felix Driver describes as three more ‘momentous’ journeys.

He crossed the continent from East to West, traced the length of the Congo and established the Congo free state under the morally dubious patronage of King Leopold II of Belgium. The new Belgian Congo quickly earned a reputation for shocking atrocity.

Stanley smashed and bullied his way through what he openly called ‘darkest Africa’, even carrying one of Hiram Maxim’s new machine guns on his final trip, and leaving a shocking trail of cruelty. His brazen, bullying style earned him the African nickname Bula Matari, breaker of rocks.

Whatever the cover stories he created, Stanley’s expeditions were intended to grab and occupy African lands, sometimes through fake treaties Stanley claimed to have signed with African leaders.

One result was the wholesale mapping of central Africa. The other, after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, was to inspire the wholesale partition of Africa by the European powers – what we now know as ‘the scramble for Africa’. This created the murderous map of western-style states, completely ill-fitted to African society, under which so many still suffer and die.

Stanley, the puffed-up self-publicist, was more at home in Parliament, where he was elected in 1890, soon after returning from his final expedition, and where the doorman greeted him, predictably, with ‘Mr Stanley I presume.’ Stanley, apparently, never got the joke.

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