Mea culpa time, I guess. A reader writes in from Pretoria (of all benighted places) to advise me to check my facts before putting my big mouth into gear and letting rip. Mary Moffat Livingstone did not pine herself to a gin-soaked death in Kuruman, the reader says, but joined her husband on his safaris into the African hinterland and died of fever on the banks of the Zambezi.
Well, she might have died on the banks of the Zambezi, but she certainly wasn’t with the good, proselytising quack for most of his explorations. She spent a good part of her time rearing their children (they had six of the things in rapid succession, which says a lot for how varied and entertaining life could be in Africa before the advent of television. Yon wee doctor turns out to have been quite a little rabbit of a chap, behind that frowning gaze that he kept for the mass media.)
For many of his exploring years, Mary even had to withdraw with her brood to the safety of England, since grumpy Boers had burned down Livingstone’s mission station up there in Zambia, and were threatening the life and welfare of the man and his family. Yes, the Boeremag and the loony white fringe have always been with us out here in Africa.
This reader from Pretoria also says that Henry Morton Stanley was not a ‘pompous Englishmanâ€, as I describe him, but a brash American. This is a matter of splitting hairs. Stanley (born John Rowland, illegitimate outcome of a hasty fumble in the dark) was born in Wales and was brought up in an Oliver Twist-style workhouse there. When he was 17, he found himself a berth on a ship and worked his way across the Atlantic as a cabin boy, eventually ending up in New Orleans. It is here, on the threshold of adulthood, that he changed his name and took on his American identity.
But he had a magpie identity all his life. He was American when it suited him, but also famously became an agent for King Leopold of the Belgians, in whose name he mapped out and founded the sprawling, murderous Congo Free State. In later years he retired to England and became an MP. So he died a pukkah English wallah, after all. So there.
Whatever the case, Livingstone and Stanley were undoubtedly the forerunners of the European imperial thrust into Africa. Make no mistake, African leaders put up a fierce resistance. But it was tech-nology that was bound to finally win the day. Technology, perfidious politics, mumbo jumbo, smoke and mirrors — these were the Livingstone-Stanley axis’s stock in trade, against which (especially the lying part) the darkies had precious little defence.
What is interesting, reading deeper into the story, is that these cats were prepared to lie to everybody if the occasion demanded it. So Livingstone, on his sporadic visits to London, would give heart-rending accounts of the horrrors of the slave trade, emphasising the evil role of the Arabs raiding deep into the continent. The name ‘Tippu Tip†would come up again and again as the Prime Evil at work among the hapless, helpless natives, capturing and selling thousands of them each year through the East African ports of Bagamoyo and Zanzibar.
Back on the ground, both Livingstone and Stanley had no compunction about calling on the assistance of the very same Tippu Tip when they needed it. Tippu escorted Livingstone on various journeys around Lake Tanganyika, saving his life more than once, and was instrumental in guiding Stanley through uncharted Central Africa on his mission to reach the Atlantic coast and chart the course of the mighty River Congo in the process.
So all is not as it seems. The school textbooks teach us to demonise certain characters and turn others into saints and idols. The truth of human intercourse and its intricate ebbs and flows falls through the cracks.
Tippu Tip was renowned as an Arab slave trader, but he was as black as your hat. His grandmother was a black African woman. His Arab and Swahili co-religionists never held this against him. Colour consciousness was something that was brought into the picture by white Americans, fresh out of their land-clearing massacres of the Red Indians, and northern Europeans, anxious to find justifi-cation for an imperial agenda based on racial superiority.
For them, Tippu Tip was an enigma. But he was nevertheless indispensible.
So here we have a black-skinned Arab slave trader trading in black slaves and white ivory.
For the benefit of a news-reading public back home, this Tippu Tip man was repeatedly demonised as being nothing more than a bloodthirsty Mohammedan trading in human flesh. For local consumption, it suited Tippu Tip to be a redeemer of another sort — someone who only captured and chained for sale the lowest of the low tribes, especially those with filed teeth, which indicated that they were cannibals.
When it suited them, the pious British missionary/explorers played along. Tippu Tip was almost as good as a white chap at times.
But it was an extraordinary time. Nobody could have forseen what was to come just a few years down the line. Queen Victoria was on her throne, and her unlicenced explorers out in the field had no hesitation in naming chunks of unsuspecting Negro real estate after her: Lake Victoria, Victoria Falls, and so on.
The Sultan of Zanzibar, on the other hand, thought he was in as strong a position as the Queen of England in his wide open fastness on the exotic spice island just off the East African mainland. A paradise without end.
But it all fell apart in a matter of days.
Tune in next week for the final chapter