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Elikia M’Bokolo, a renowned Congolese historian, has written passionately about this international crime from the perspective of an African:
The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth). Then more than four centuries (from the end of the fifteenth to the nineteenth) of a regular slave trade to build the Americas and the prosperity of the Christian states of Europe. The figures, even where hotly disputed, make your head spin. Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.7
Even by the end of the nineteenth century, an estimated fifty thousand slaves still passed through the slave-trading center of Zanzibar every year; from here, they were bound for the markets of Turkey, Arabia, India, and Persia. The Arab traders in East Africa had a reputation for being more brutal than the Europeans and made less effort to keep their slaves from dying. It has been estimated that for every five Africans taken prisoner in the continental interior, perhaps only one reached the slave markets in the Middle East, while the rest died en route. Nor could the Arab slave traders have been quite so successful without the assistance of the Africans themselves. Since it was easier to buy slaves brought to the coast than to hunt them down and capture them inland, the Arabs relied heavily on Africans, and especially the Kamba people, who lived between the coast and the central highlands in Kenya, to act as middlemen and organize huge caravans to bring slaves and ivory from the interior.8
The Luhya people of western Kenya also helped the traders. Their leader, Nabong’o Shiundu, was particularly keen to find allies who could help him build his power in the region, and he became notorious for capturing other Africans, including Luo, and selling them to the Arab slave traders.9 The island of Zanzibar and the nearby port of Kilwa on the mainland became the largest African shipping points for the trade, and as demand continued, Arab slavers penetrated farther and farther inland, even as far as Uganda and Congo, in search of new sources of slaves. Eventually in 1873 the British forced the ruler of Zanzibar to close his slave market and to forbid the export of slaves from the regions under his control. (Enforcing this rule was not easy, and even as late as the 1970s the United Nations received complaints of a thriving trade in black slaves from East Africa.)
Leo Odera described some of the personal encounters that his Luo ancestors had with the slave traders:
It used to be very common in this part of the world. It caused chaos and whole families would move on to evade the traders. Many years back when my family was still in Busoga in Uganda, the slave traders took many people, including Chwanya, one of my ancestors. The family did not expect him to return and they even held a mock funeral to mourn his passing. However, his son Onyango Rabala followed the Arabs. Onyango found them feasting by the lake and with the slaves in chains in a dhow. The slavers were cooking a long way from the water because of the danger from crocodiles, so Onyango swam up to the boat and pushed it into the lake—and it had all their weapons on board too! In Dholuo, we have a saying: rieko lo teko—brain is mightier than brawn. The Arabs ran away too frightened to retaliate, and Onyango rescued his father and two other slaves chained to him. When he returned, there was a great taboo because he had been mourned as dead and there were many rituals to be performed. He had to sleep in the granary for three days and eventually his second wife took him back.
Meanwhile, David Livingstone was still on his quest to find the source of the White Nile; however, by 1870 his reports back to London had ceased and the journalist Henry Morton Stanley was sent by the New York Herald newspaper to find the missing explorer; he arrived in Zanzibar in March 1871. Stanley was a Welshman, born in Denbigh; his father was either John Rowlands, the town drunk, who later died from delirium tremens, or James Vaughan, a married lawyer from London and a regular customer of Stanley’s mother—a nineteen-year-old prostitute. The baby’s name was entered into the birth register of St. Hilary’s Church as “John Rowlands, bastard,” and Stanley spent his life trying to live down the shame of being born illegitimate. As a five-year-old, he was given up to a workhouse; when he was released at seventeen, he fled Wales for America, where he changed his name in an attempt to erase his past. Stanley landed in New Orleans in 1858, and during the American Civil War he fought for the Confederacy before being taken prisoner, whereupon he changed sides and fought for the Union. He covered the Indian Wars as a journalist and gained a reputation for taking on risky assignments, but the thought of going to Africa terrified him. He called it an “eternal, feverish region” and had nightmares about what he might experience—even contemplating suicide.
Nevertheless, he assembled one of the biggest expeditions ever to set out from Zanzibar; his party was so large that he divided it into five separate caravans and staggered their departure to avoid attack and robbery. Hearing rumors in Zanzibar that a white man had been seen in the region of Ujiji, about 750 miles inland, he set off for the interior at the end of March with some 190 men, armed guards, and a guide carrying the American flag. On July 4, 1871, Stanley sent his first dispatch back to New York from Unyanyembe district, in modern-day Tanzania, in the form of a five-thousand-word letter. The resulting piece, which filled the front page of the Herald, quoted Stanley’s letter extensively, and ended with a promise from the journalist:
Our explorer says (July 4):—“If the Doctor is at Ujiji, in one month more and I will see him, then the race for home will begin”; but that “until I hear more of him, or see the long-absent old man face to face, I bid farewell. But wherever he is be sure I shall not give up on the chase.” Good words these from a trusty man.10
In one of the great encounters in history, Stanley found Livingstone in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, on November 10, 1871. Stanley greeted the explorer with the now famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” to which Livingstone apparently responded, “Yes, and I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.” There is no direct record of this exchange—Stanley tore the pages describing this encounter out of his diary, and Livingstone does not mention these words in his own account. However, they do appear in the first description of the meeting, published in the New York Times, dated July 2, 1872:
I noticed in the center of a group of Arabs, strongly contrasting their sun-burned faces, a hale-looking, gray-bearded white man, wearing a naval cap, with a faded gold band, and a red woolen shirt, preserving a calmness of exterior before the Arabs. I enquired, “DR. LIVINGSTONE, I presume?”
He, smiling, answered yes.11
Stanley urged the missionary to return to the coast with him, but Livingstone was determined not to leave until his task—that of finding the source of the Nile—was complete. However, it was not to be; Livingstone died in Zambia, in the village of Ilala, on May 1, 1873, from a combination of malaria and internal bleeding caused by dysentery. Two of Livingstone’s loyal servants buried his heart at the foot of a nearby tree. Then they dried and wrapped his body and carried it back with his papers and instruments to the island of Zanzibar—a trip that took them nine months to complete. In April 1874 Livingstone’s remains reached England by ship, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London.
Henry Stanley was inspired by the expeditions of Livingstone and others, and in 1874 the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London partnered to finance a return trip. He had several objectives: first, to circumnavigate Lake Victoria and confirm Speke’s claim that it was a single body of water and the source of the White Nile; second, to finish Livingstone’s work of mapping the Lualaba River, which Livingstone thought might be the Nile itself; and finally and most ambitiously of all, to traverse the continent from east to west and thereby trace the course of the
river Congo to the Atlantic. In circumnavigating Lake Victoria, he almost certainly became the first European to make direct contact with the Luo of western Kenya.
The challenge that Stanley set himself can hardly be overstated, even considering the extraordinary precedents set by other explorers. His preparations back in England for the expedition were hopelessly rushed, and he later wrote: “Two weeks were allowed me for purchasing boats—a yawl, a gig, and a barge—for giving orders for pontoons, and purchasing equipment, guns, ammunition, rope, saddles, medical stores, and provisions; for making investments in gifts for native chiefs; for obtaining scientific instruments, stationery, &c., &c.”12 Stanley left for Zanzibar on September 21, 1874.
By this time, the Luo had long finished their great migration. Rapidly increasing their population throughout the nineteenth century, the clans had spread both north and south of the Winam Gulf. Although other tribes lived in the area, the Luo were the dominant group, having very effectively assimilated many of the indigenous people into their tribe. In Alego, to the north of the Gulf, the descendants of the great leaders Owiny and Kishodi were still living in K’ogelo; Obong’o, (3) great-grandfather to President Obama, had left Alego some forty years before to establish a new subclan in the less crowded Kendu Bay area of south Nyanza. By 1874 his three sons, Obama, Opiyo, and Aguk, were in their prime and their families were well established on the southern shore of Winam Gulf.
Back on the coast, Stanley left Zanzibar on November 12, 1874, for the mainland and began his remarkable trek across Africa, with his porters carrying his boats in sections overland to Lake Victoria. This first stage of his expedition took 103 days and his pedometer recorded a distance of 715 miles through dense equatorial jungle. When the expedition eventually reached Kagehyi on the southeastern shore of Lake Victoria, their first task was to assemble their boats. The biggest vessel in his fleet was a steam-powered sailing sloop, the Lady Alice, which had been carried from Zanzibar in four parts. On March 8, 1875, Stanley wrote in his diary:
At 1 p.m. after vainly endeavouring to persuade Kaduma Chief of Kagehyi to accompany me as a guide as far as Ururi, I sailed from Kagehyi with 10 stout sailors of the Expedition in the Lady Alice, a cedar boat 24 feet long and 6 feet wide which we have carried in sections from the Coast for the purpose of exploring the Lakes of Central Africa. The men were rather downhearted and rowed reluctantly, as we have had many a grievous prophecy that we shall all drown in the Lake, or die at the hands of some of the ferocious people living on the shores of the Nyanza.13
In little more than two weeks, the expedition had sailed up the east coast of the lake and Stanley was approaching Luoland. At this point, his main concern was hippos in the water—they are still considered to be one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. On March 22, he stopped at what he called Bridge Island and wrote:
The island is covered with mangrove trees, whose branches extend far into the water, under which our boat might be screened by their deep shade.… From the summit of the island which is easy of access we obtained a fine view of lofty Ugingo Island and the tall steep mountains of Ugeyeya with the level plain of Wagansu and Wigassi.
From this point onward, Stanley was off the coast of Nyanza—Luoland. He wanted to go ashore to learn the names of some of the villages, but a large gathering of men carrying spears caused him to think better of it. A small, unpopulated island a safe distance away seemed a wiser choice to spend the night. Two days later, on March 24, the group landed at a place Stanley called Muiwanda, and he negotiated with the people to bring food to them:
We anchored within an arrow’s flight from the shore and began to persuade the natives to bring food to us, by holding out a bunch of beads.… Finally trade was opened, and while trading for food I found the people very friendly and disposed to answer all my questions. They spoke the language of Usoga with a slight dialectic difference. Neither men nor women wore anything, save a kirtle of grass, or plantain leaves which the latter wore. Men had extracted two front teeth of lower jaw, had bracelets of iron rings, rings above elbows and in ears. Shaved their heads in eccentric fashion …
The Usoga people (now known as the Wasoga) result from intermarriage between the Luo and the Luhya. (The Luhya remove two lower teeth as an initiation, unlike the Luo’s six.)
Stanley’s map of Lake Victoria shows that he completely missed the extent of Winam Gulf, assuming instead that the narrow entrance to this large bay was only the mouth of a small river. Three days later, on March 27, Stanley made contact with another group, this time on the northern side of Winam Gulf:
They came to repeat the request of Kamoydah, the King [to come ashore], but we begged to be excused from moving from our present safe anchorage, the waves were rough, the wind was strong. They begged, they implored and all but threatened. Three more canoes now came up loaded with men, and these added their united voices to invite us on the part of the King to his shore. Finding us still obstinate, they laid hands on the boat, and their insolence increased almost to fighting pitch.
The following day, they had another couple of unsettling encounters with the locals:
In the morning while sailing close to the shore we were stoned by the people. Two great rocks came near to crushing the boat’s sides, but a few revolver shots stopped that game. Arriving between the islands of Bugeyeya and Uvuma, we had the misfortune to come across a nest of Lake pirates who make navigation impossible for the Waganda. Ignorant of their character we allowed 13 canoes to range alongside and commenced a friendly conversation with them, but I was soon informed of their character when they made an indiscriminate rush upon the boat. Again I beat them off with my revolver, and having got them a little distance off opened fire with my elephant rifle—with which I smashed three canoes, and killed four men. We continued on our way hence immediately to the Napoleon Channel, and after a look at the great river outflowing northward [the Victoria Nile at the Ripon Falls], sailed to Marida where we rested secure and comfortable.
Stanley’s violent confrontation with the locals was an inauspicious start to British involvement in western Kenya, and back in Britain, people were beginning to be outspokenly critical of his actions. In his later years, Stanley was obliged to defend himself against the charge that his African expeditions had been marked by cruelty and gratuitous violence; he argued that “the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision.”14 In many ways, Henry Stanley was an enigma. From his writings, it is clear that he had a benevolent attitude toward many of the Africans he traveled with, to whom he owed both his success and survival on the continent. This included Kalulu, his boy servant who loyally stayed with Stanley from 1882 to 1887—Stanley even wrote a children’s book about Kalulu’s life, and dedicated it to the end of slavery.15 On the other hand, he was capable of using excessive violence, racial abuse, and condescending language toward Africans. He was, essentially, a man of his time.
Stanley succeeded in circumnavigating Lake Victoria, a voyage that took him two months, before heading west to trace the course of the river Congo to the Atlantic. He eventually reached a Portuguese outpost at the mouth of the river in August 1877, 999 days after leaving Zanzibar. Crossing central Africa was a remarkable feat, and of the 359 people who started on the expedition, only 108 survived. Stanley’s three British companions, Frederick Barker and Francis and Edward Pocock, all died during the expedition, as did his trusted servant, Kalulu.
Stanley’s expedition resolved the long-standing question of whether Lake Victoria really was the source of the Nile (something the Arabs had long known); the lake is clearly shown on a twelfth-century map drawn by the cartographer Al Idrisi. (Strictly speaking, Lake Victoria is only a feeder lake to the Nile; the true source of the Nile is the Luvironza [or Ruvyironza], which is the longest river to flow into Lake Victoria, and which bubbles up from high ground in the mountains of Burundi.) Although the lake is not quite as impressive as depicted on the “slug map,” it is still a vast body of water with a surface area of 26,60
0 square miles—making it bigger than the state of West Virginia and the second-largest freshwater lake in the world, after Lake Superior.
By 1880 a new imperialism was beginning to emerge among the industrialized nations. Germany, the United States, Belgium, Italy, and, for the first time, an Asian power, Japan, were all beginning to compete for what little “unclaimed space” remained in the world. As the rivalry among colonizing nations reached new heights, the nations with established empires—primarily Great Britain and France—consolidated their territorial gains. Technology too began to have an effect: the Suez Canal was now open and modern steamships could sail from Europe to East Africa in a fraction of the time previously required to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. The railway and the telegraph were revolutionizing transport and communication on land, and new advances in medicines to treat tropical diseases—especially quinine as an effective treatment for malaria—now allowed vast regions of the tropics to be accessed more safely by Europeans. The time was ripe for the biggest land grab in history.
The division of Africa—the last continent to be carved up by the European nations—was essentially a product of this “new imperialism.” Prior to 1880, the colonial possessions of European nations in Africa were relatively modest and were mainly limited to the coastal areas, leaving almost all the interior still independent. By 1900, almost all of Africa had been placed under the administration of various European nations.
Colonial powers had been particularly slow to establish a real presence in East Africa, which is no surprise considering the privations experienced by the early missionaries and explorers and the lack of easy river access to the interior. Furthermore, the reports of Krapf and Burton suggested that the East African region consisting of modern Kenya and northern Tanzania was ill-suited to peaceful infiltration, since this was the province of the Maasai and other warring tribes, through whose land even the armed caravans of the Arab traders feared to travel.