Brian Murray

Tim Jeal
Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
Faber, 2007
608 pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0571221028

…

The recent controversy surrounding Tintin’s allegedly racist adventures in the Congo – which led to the book being removed from the children’s section of many bookshops – indicates how far we have come from the era of high colonialism.  The adventures of African explorers, stories of brave men in pith helmets civilising (and occasionally slaughtering) savages were, for the Victorians, the staple of children’s adventure stories and adult magazines alike.  Throughout the twentieth century, the figure of the African explorer has suffered a dramatic decline in status.  Once the pioneer of progress and the beacon of civilisation, he is now more often presented as a ruthless treasure hunter, the leader of the scramble for Africa, the instigator of Europe’s brutal colonial subjugation of the “dark continent”.  From Conrad’s Kurtz to Herzog’s Aguirre we’ve come to accept explorers as morally suspect figures, representatives of the corrupted ideals of civilisation.

The reputation of Henry Morton Stanley has suffered more than most in our post-colonial revision of the age of exploration.  A controversial figure even in his time, Florence Nightingale and William Morris were among the eminent Victorians who openly criticised his violent escapades.  Modern historians and biographers have labelled Stanley a butcher and a publicity hound.  In Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer Tim Jeal’s aim is to salvage Stanley’s reputation from, what he labels, “the post-colonial guilt of successive generations”.  In so doing he reveals the truly fascinating Victorian fairytale that was Stanley’s life.

Born John Rowlands in the village of Denbigh in North Wales, he was the illegitimate child of publican mother.  Stanley was abandoned by his family at an early age and left in the care of a local workhouse.  At the age of seventeen he was employed by a merchant vessel at Liverpool, which took him to New Orleans where he immediately jumped ship and set off in search of a new life and a new identity.  While working as a shop boy he concocted a story that he would uphold for the rest of his life. Rowlands claimed that he had been befriended by Henry Stanley, a wealthy businessman, who had adopted and re-christened him with his own name.  Stanley began to conceal his Welsh background – even when he had achieved world fame he would maintain he was born in Missouri.  After New Orleans he moved west to Arkansas, where he worked at a remote general store.  Stanley soon adjusted to the conventions of frontier life, purchasing a Smith and Wesson and practising his aim on tin cans until he became crack shot.  When Civil War broke out, he enlisted with the Confederates and was captured by the Union Army at the Battle of Shiloh.  He then went on to serve in the Union army and later the navy before deserting from both.

After the war Stanley found his calling as a journalist, covering the Indian wars in the American West and Britain’s 1868 campaign against Ethiopia before convincing the editor of the New York Herald to fund an expedition to Central Africa in search of the famous explorer and missionary David Livingstone.  Stanley’s inexperience as an explorer made the success of this expedition all the more impressive.  He found Livingstone at the Arab settlement of Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where, dressed in a new flannel suit for the occasion, he shared a bottle of champagne with the missionary.  The famous meeting would stand as Stanley’s greatest scoop, his own book length account of the journey How I Found Livingstone (18720 would become a bestseller, and Stanley would be kept busy retelling the story at public lectures for years to come.

In Britain, however Stanley, was snubbed by the Royal Geographical Society – the organisation that had honoured all the great African explorers.  Stanley had beaten the official British relief expedition to Ujiji, and the officers and scientists of the Royal society were slow to admit that a lowly American journalist had outstripped them.  Stanley’s remarkable ability for self-promotion, however, meant that he did not need the endorsement of the Geographical establishment.  His three subsequent journeys to Africa would clear up the last mysteries of Central African Geography (most importantly the “Source of the Nile” debate), and each of his expeditions were followed by a successful book and lecture tour.  After his final African expedition to relieve to Emin Pasha, the besieged Egyptian of Equatoria in the Sudan, Stanley would spend a mere 50 days writing his two-volume epic In Darkest Africa, which was the most popular publication of 1890, selling 150,000 copies in that year alone. On his return to Britain, the establishment could no longer ignore the hype.  Stanley was invited to address the Royal Geographical Society, and there was such a demand for seats that the lecture was moved to the Royal Albert Hall.

The greatest cloud hanging over Stanley’s reputation is his pioneering work in the founding of the Congo Free State, the old stomping ground of Tintin, for King Leopold of Belgium.  The atrocities that would later come to light in Roger Casement’s famous report on the Congo rubber trade shocked the world and led to international condemnation of the colony Stanley had established.  In his new book, Jeal argues convincingly that Stanley embarked upon the Congo project with altruistic intentions, convinced, like many of his contemporaries (including Livingstone), that “opening the continent to European influence” was “imperative on humanitarian grounds”.  European trade and customs were meant to wipe out the Arab slave trade that still terrorised Africa in the late-nineteenth century, and the continent and its people would be exposed to the enlightening influences of European education and Christian faith.  Like all of his projects, Stanley leapt into the Congo scheme with unmatchable zeal.  His reputation for leading by example earned him the Swahili nickname “Bula Matari” – the Breaker of Rocks – as he ploughed a narrow path of European influence through the dense jungle of the Congo basin.  If Stanley was guilty of anything during his time in the Congo it was political naivety.  He was effectively duped by the King into believing that a profitable Belgian colony would benefit, rather than enslave, the native population.  Stanley accrued little or no material gain from his time in the Congo and when he began to question the altruism of Leopold’s colonial endeavour he was abruptly dropped from his service and replaced by less idealistic Belgian officers.

The Congo controversy is just one example of many instances in which Jeal convincingly revises the accepted opinion of Stanley’s colonial endeavours.  Jeal knows his subject well.  He is a biographer of Livingstone and Baden-Powell and is the first researcher to have had access to a massive archive of Stanley’s papers in Brussels.  His painstaking research has led to many revelations.  The project to restore Stanley’s reputation begins with a touching portrayal of his early years of wandering and his repeated rejections by his mother.  When a 21-year-old Stanley made a lengthy and expensive trip back to Wales, he was bluntly told by his mother never to call again until he was in “far better circumstances” than he presently appeared to be. Jeal, however, somewhat overstretches the significance of Stanley’s troubled childhood by attempting to explain all of Stanley ethical faults and misjudgements in light of his social insecurity and humble origins.

On the sensitive topic of Stanley’s violence, Jeal contends that the explorer was not excessive, but rather on a par with his contemporaries.  He flogged his carriers for misconduct, occasionally stole from natives and shot Africans who threatened the progress of his expeditions but so had most other explorers, including Livingstone who, partly thanks to Stanley’s writings, had an impeccable reputation in Britain. Stanley’s real fault, according to Jeal, was bragging about it.  Most travellers judiciously censored their accounts of violence.  As General Gordon would put it:  “These things may be done but not advertised”.  Stanley, however, with a journalist’s instinct for sensationalism, frequently exaggerated both the frequency of his battles with natives and the body-count of his victims.

Jeal, however, plays down the fact that through the years Stanley’s expeditions became undeniably militaristic in nature.  The Europeans who accompanied the explorer on his first two expeditions were navvies and fishermen.  On the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Stanley enlisted the aide of five British officers to lead a well-equipped private army, which frequently resorted to the pillaging and burning of villages for supplies.  The worst excesses of the expedition were committed by two of these officers, who had been left in command of a rear column as Stanley advanced through the Congolese rainforests.  Major Barttelot and James Jameson, both from wealthy families, purchased sex slaves, beat African carriers to death and effectively drove their troops to a mutiny that would end in the murder of Barttelot.  Though Stanley was appalled by their behaviour, he must also bear a large part of the responsibility for leading a group of men into an unmapped and hostile forest where their survival depended on murder and theft.  Throughout his career he would never opt for the easiest route to a destination and he privately expressed contempt for explorers who stuck to established Arab trade routes and were transported across the continent by “Arab parcel post”.

Though Jeal is right to contextualise Stanley’s violence in this way, his constant and unfaltering defence of his subject’s frequently brutal and unethical actions become increasingly untenable as the narrative progresses.  Stanley’s collaboration with Arab slave traders is justified by the claim that slave owners “treated their personal slaves better than British factory owners treated their ‘free’ workers”, the kind of specious argument that should have died out with abolition.  Jeal even condones Stanley’s execution of two carriers for theft and desertion, an act of outrageous hypocrisy given Stanley’s own repeated desertions during the Civil War.  It takes a particularly inhuman level of objectivity to accept Jeal’s astonishing conclusion that the loss of approximately one thousand lives during the Emin Pasha Expedition was an acceptable sacrifice in the name of Geography, a sacrifice that “looks modest when placed in a wider African context”.  Since Stanley’s violent reputation is largely derived form his own accounts we must either accept Stanley’s version of events and call him a brute, or deny them and call him a liar.  Jeal commits to neither.  He rubbishes Stanley’s accounts when they expose his cruelty but accepts them as gospel when they portray his restraint.  Though he complains throughout of the oversimplified demonisation of Stanley by post-colonial historians, it is his own revisionist polemical stance that detracts from what might otherwise have been an authoritative, if not definitive, biography of Africa’s greatest explorer.

Brian Murray is an MSt student in English Literature at University College, Oxford. He is working on the literature of exploration in nineteenth-century Britain.

]]> http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/revisiting-darkest-africa/feed/ 0 http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-images-of-conscience/ http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-images-of-conscience/#comments Thu, 15 Jun 2006 12:00:26 +0000 Joshua Billings http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/?p=149 Will Norman

Caché (Hidden)
Directed by Michael Haneke
France, 2005

Munich
Directed by Steven Spielberg
USA, 2005

Austrian director Michael Haneke has been making feature films for almost twenty years and yet only recently has he been recognised as one of the most challenging and compelling filmmakers in Europe. Having produced most of his early work for Austrian television during the eighties and nineties, Haneke came to broader public attention after directing La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher) in 2001, which won him three awards at Cannes. His most recent offering, Hidden, is set to bring him deserved critical acclaim. This unsettling film clothed as a psychological thriller poses some urgent questions which extend beyond the confines of its genre and encompass our very modes of seeing and interpreting.

Georges (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a bourgeois intellectual couple living in Paris with their son. The film opens with an uncomfortably long, silent shot of their house, filmed from the street. This is only the first of numerous moments during which the audience is left uncertain of exactly what, or who, lies behind this camera-eye—and whose perspective it shares. In this case it transpires that we are watching, together with Georges and Anne, a video posted through their own door, precipitating fears of a mysterious voyeur. The plot is thus driven by their own descent into paranoia as more videos and sinister drawings follow. Similarities with the opening of David Lynch’s Lost Highway quickly dissipate as, rather than becoming entangled in a confusion of contiguous postmodern worlds, Georges gradually becomes convinced of the origins of the tapes in his own troubled history. The voyeur, he believes, is an Algerian farmhand who worked for his parents in his boyhood, and whose parents were killed in racist riots during the 1960s. Georges’s own lies and deception led to the boy being taken away from his home and into care. The campaign of voyeuristic tapes and drawings are thus, Georges reasons, an act of blackmail and revenge.

It is at this point that the film’s real subject begins to emerge. Haneke’s strategy comprises of a coldly distant, non-intrusive direction which allows the audience to form their own alliances and judgements in the accusations which accompany the disappearance of the couple’s son, and Georges’s subsequent confrontation of their supposed tormentor. The question which plagues viewers as they shuffle confusedly from the cinema following the film’s devastating conclusion is the extent to which their own prejudices have been revealed to them by this mirror-like quality in Haneke’s direction. The passivity and distance imposed by the camera and narrative structure has to be filled by the viewer’s own ideology, a troubling prospect for the white middle-class intellectuals who formed the majority of the Oxford audience watching this with me.

Hidden presents a bigger story than its plot suggests. Implicit in its tragic narrative is France’s brutal colonial history—a ghost that refuses to be exorcised as the rioting in its deprived and forgotten banlieues only last year demonstrated. More than this, though, the filmgoers of any nation which has colonised and oppressed, which has exploited and looked down upon its immigrants, will feel the quiet power of this movie. I say quiet, because the real stories in Hidden are the ones happening off camera, in the minds of its viewers. These are the stories of the immigrants who live, die and are judged without their voices being heard. In one harrowing, single-angle scene, the Algerian boy is dragged from Georges’ parents’ farmhouse into the back of a car. In attempting to escape he runs away from the authorities, off-camera. The steadiness of this shot, its refusal to slavishly follow its subject, its oblique depiction of the boy’s guardians turning away and retreat into the security of their house, is the perfect embodiment of Haneke’s professed credo:

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.

*

Steven Spielberg’s latest blockbuster, Munich, provides an ideal contrast to Haneke’s aesthetics and the ideal object of his polemic. His film, ‘based on real events,’ stars Eric Bana (fresh from his virtuoso performances in The Hulk (2003) and Troy (2004)) as Avner, the idealistic Mossad agent chosen to lead a group of assassins in killing men suspected of involvement in the terrorist murders at the Munich Olympics of 1972. The title of the film proves to be slightly misleading, as, despite the dramatic action sequence which opens the film, and the subsequent flashbacks (apparently haunting the mind of our hero, although he wasn’t actually there), the events in Munich function simply as a way to kick-start the plot. Predictably, the Jewish agents engaged in their cold-blooded task form a neatly diverse selection of moral stances to the job they have been assigned, ranging from ‘let’s shoot the bastards and enjoy it’ to the dawning revelation that ‘maybe we’re no better than they were.’ Tormented by moral scruples and the suspicion that killing people doesn’t really help much, Avner eventually breaks with his Mossad boss (a mercifully good performance by Geoffrey Rush) and returns to domestic bliss with gorgeous but curiously mute wife and newborn baby.

Fortunately for a film that clocks in at two-and-a-half hours, Spielberg is a master of the action/suspense genre. Deploying skills honed in films like Saving Private Ryan rather than Schindler’s List, he endows Munich with some genuinely high-quality scenes, pulling out all the stops in drawing the audience into high octane gun battles and heart-stopping suspense. Occasional excesses, such as an overdone orchestral soundtrack, mar the moments in which, it seems, we are expected to feel sorrow or pity. There is even the odd echo of Spielberg’s finest moments from the ‘Indiana Jones trilogy,’ in which brief flashes of ironic machismo humour penetrate the moral searchings of the protagonists. The only problem is the apparent demand of the film to be taken seriously.

As is usually the case with historical films, Munich’s ideological encounter takes place in the present rather than in the past it depicts. It doesn’t take Spielberg’s self-conscious placement of the twin towers in the final frame of the film to tell us that what is really at stake is the West’s and specifically America’s response to September 11. The necessity of maintaining some kind of moral high-ground in the response to these attacks, and the acknowledgement that a violent response will not prevent further violence but only increase its likelihood, has occurred to most (several governments notwithstanding, admittedly), without having it patiently dramatised for us at the cinema. It is precisely the events in Munich, in the quiet bits between the bomb blasts and flying bullets, which reveal its weaknesses. In the one clumsy attempt at giving an authentic voice to a Palestianian militant, Avner (implausibly posing as a Soviet agent) conveniently discusses the Israel-Palestine conflict with a PLO member. Unlike Haneke’s Hidden, Munich relies almost exclusively on words to signal interpretative potential. This set-piece jars as the inevitable deadlock of two earnestly given view-points is dutifully expressed. In Hidden, words are always lies, attempts, as Harold Pinter has memorably put it, at ‘continual evasion.’ The title of Heneke’s film comes to refer to that which the bourgeois intelligentsia has buried or obscured in language. There is something, Haneke seems to be saying, which film can do that other media cannot. The bare image, carefully chosen, and recorded unblinkingly, can act as something like a conscience. The space and freedom to discover this yourself is clearly not an option offered by Spielberg.

Will Norman is a DPhil student in English Literature at New College.

Jean-Christophe Rufin
Rouge Brésil
Prix Goncourt, 2001
550 pages

As he himself confesses, Jean-Christophe Rufin finds a particular interest in the moment of first encounter between two civilisations, which he defines as ‘an instant of discovery containing the seeds of future passions and misunderstandings’. An historical novel, Rouge Brésil brings us back to an extraordinary yet often forgotten episode of the French Renaissance: France’s attempt to compete with Portugal in the colonisation of Brazil.

In 1555, an expedition sent by Henri II and led by the Chevalier de Villegagnon leaves France in order to create a ‘France Antarctique’ in Brazil. In this period of humanism already shadowed by religious divisions — from Luther and Calvin’s ideas for Church reform spreading in Europe and leading to the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in 1559 in England — the New World was considered a land cursed by God and therefore to be conquered and ruled by faithful crusaders.

Two children, Just and Colombe, are forced to embark on this expedition to be used as interpreters with the Indians. Through their eyes, readers discover a new world. The wild bay of Rio, peopled with cannibal Indians, is progressively tamed and transformed into a fortress by Villegagnon. But beyond this small world, the forest and its wild precincts appeal to the innermost essence of human nature and offer a space of escape for those who reject Villegagnon’s increasing megalomania.

In this exotic, dangerous microcosm, the quest for their missing father leads Just and Colombe to solve the mystery of their origins and to grow up under the guidance of their respective spiritual parents, Villegagnon for Just, and the maternal forest and the Indians for Colombe. The confrontation of these two worlds leads to the colonists’ obvious domination of the Indians in the form of slavery and prostitution. The equation is further complicated by the arrival of Protestants in the island, called by Villegagnon in the hope of reviving religious feelings among his decadent troops.

The members of the Reformed Church, supposedly opened to reason and tolerance, appear to be as fanatic as their Catholic persecutors in France, and the uncompromising stubbornness of both factions leads to anticipated Religious Wars. The effect rendered is that of a progressive evolution from Villegagnon’s idealistic humanism, his belief in reason and virtue tinged by chivalrous reminiscences and his faith in God, to pure hatred and self-destructive divisions and rivalries. Hence, nothing but the return to France or even better, the return to the original state of nature, can purge the colonists.

Thus, in the subtle antithesis embodied by Just – following Villegagnon’s enthusiasm towards civilisation — and Colombe — discovering her femininity in the pleasure of wild life with the Indians — Rufin unfolds the vanity of the former’s dreams, and the precariousness of the latter’s.

Through language that recovers a sixteenth-century accent, Rufin draws a vivid picture of this multi-coloured world. The disfigured island, masculine, monumental, and soiled, symbolizes of the foolishness of man. The forest, feminine, virgin, protective, suggests the possibility of reaching a form of wisdom and casts the shadow of cannibalism and other bestial impulses.

The historicity of the novel is ingeniously intertwined with the dramatization of Just and Colombe’s fates as individuals, but we could justly reproach the author for offering caricatures in place of characters: Villegagnon’s sudden change from a passionate lover of humanity into the cruel Huguenot-murderer he historically appears to be, is scarcely realistic.

The ‘fictional’ part concerning Just and Colombe also lacks originality. Readers may easily recognize the story of human beings searching for their roots. Here, two children haunted by the absence of the father find parental substitutes to complete their education and eventually discover the truth about their origins, all in an exotic locale calculated to titillate more than to provide a point of contact with the average reader..

The final impression one has when closing the book is that of a deeply interesting and intelligent novel that successfully fictionalises an eventful and culturally dense period of the Renaissance. However, Rufin does not offer the reader enough to sustain the suspense. Each episode is programmed and easily predictable. This must be attributed to an inner weakness of the genre of the historical novel. By definition, such pieces recount an event that has already happened.

The greatest satisfaction one can draw from the reading of such a story may be the ability to appreciate the variety and richness of the multiple—literary, religious, historical—references that punctuate the text.

*

TRANSLATION

Is it possible that a land could have remained hidden in biblical times, unknown to Alexander and Jesus Christ, to Virgil as well as Attila, and that the cause for such a banishment could have been a serious curse?

On the deck of the caravels, minds were haunted by this question. A surprising horror invaded those who most desired to see the land again when the black mass of the relief appeared in the West, tinted with the blue cold of the morning.

The sea, which they had first feared so much, had progressively become a protective shell. The mountain finger that slowly parted the smooth valves of the sky and of the waters announced a huge encounter, from which they did not know what to expect. For some, it was hope: always fond of cataclysms, the Anabaptists were dancing on the upper deck, looking forward to the eruptions to come, in the fires of which the old world they loathed would burn. The simple soldiers, fed by popular convictions inferred from Ptolemy, were moaning at the thought that they were going to pay for audaciously wanting to reach the edge of the world. The figures of giant monks or warriors in chasuble, outlined yet scarcely visible, as they approached the coast, certainly were those of executioners summoned by God to hurl them down into the void.

Others, better armed with religion, thought they were reaching either Hell, or Paradise, according to their natural optimism and their merits. (…)

As for Colombe and Just, they did not know what to think. For their own sake, they were evoking aloud the fabulous discoveries of King Arthur’s time, the islands peopled with faceless knights. But they could hardly believe in these stories. The long journey had left their bodies almost intact but had touched the soul’s invisible muscle that allows it to spring out of the tangible world. The only knights in which they now believed were no longer faceless: they were Villegagnon’s companions, with their thug faces, their swords eaten by salt by their sides, and the Maltese cross on their chests. Thus, they idealized the shore only to spare each other the cruel certainty that it really belonged to the ordinary world.

*

Céline Vacher is a visiting student from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. She studies English literature and is presently working on Jane Austen and the theory of interpretation.