Missions Resources - Bibliography
Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone
Authors: Martin Dugard
ISBN: 0767910745
Publisher: Broadway Books
Number of pages: 368
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
by Paul Grant
“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”
Thus concluded a two year journey through jungles, deserts and battlefields in east Africa in 1871. In a different way, that famous greeting concluded an era of African history, and marked the beginning of the period of European colonialism. It’s a neat fulcrum in geopolitical history, but its immediate significance to the Arab and African witnesses was mostly seeing two white men in the same village.
Henry Morton Stanley’s greeting of the long-lost British explorer David Livingstone changed European thinking about Africa. What was once the land of impossible danger now became the land of opportunity. Stanley’s American flag also stirred the pot of European tribal jealousies, leading to a competitive atmosphere among the kings and princes in Europe.
Even at the height of the slave trade, Europeans rarely ventured into the African back-country, preferring instead to buy slaves right on the coast. All the same, the slave trade was a social earthquake throughout Africa. The crack cocaine of its day, slave-trading brought incredible sums of money for very little work to minor kings and chiefs in the backcountry, and over the course of a few centuries, entire civilizations were depopulated of their brightest and best.
Stanley and Livingstone were not entering territory untouched by Europeans; they were merely the first whites to actually step foot in the area. But the villages were already inextricably locked in the globalized economy dominated by European slave-trading. The standard currency of the region, for instance, was reams of cloth. A chief would demand so-and-so many yards of cloth as tribute from passing caravans. Merchants on the coasts bought their slaves with the same reams of cloth. Henry Stanley financed his trip with American-made cloth - which is to say, with cloth made from slave-grown cotton.
Stanley and Livingstone saw the effects of the slave trade first hand, and were horrified. They had never realized how awful the system was, not just for the individual slave, but for the entire society. Just as any abstract injustice becomes more significant through relationships, Stanley and Livingstone’s eye-witness reports finally flushed slavery out of European imagination.
But not before the damage was done. After a few centuries of bleeding, Africa was given no time to recover. Entering the interior at the moment of African civilizations’ greatest weakness, the European explorers saw only weakness and helplessness amid endless and unexploited natural riches. It was only a decade after Stanley’s triumphal return to England that the colonial period began in earnest.
Into Africa tells the story of Stanley’s quest to find Livingstone.
It was the most famous story of its day, but the details have been largely
forgotten today. But author Martin Dugard doesn’t put two white actors
against a backdrop of mute and stupid black extras. He places them into a living,
breathing world of real people – fighters and lovers, scoundrels and
saints. It’s a great read and an eye-opening story.
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