Stanley is a murderer. His reliance on violence in the acquisition food as he travels in the heat of the Congo's jungle, for example, results in the murder, writes Sven Lindqvist, Swedish historian of literature, of "defenseless people on their way to market." Many are shot dead, "unarmed men" because Stanley was in need of canoes.
Talk about Black lives not mattering one bit!
In order to reach his destination and fulfill his dream of "saving" yet another human, as he did Livingstone, he becomes a murderer. He leaves "heaps of corpses in his wake." Just like the wizards over in what becomes Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). With a wave of a capitalist's wand, it's one big coating of white supremacy flowing freely over the African savanna, desert, villages, cities. Over the minds of the African people.
But not all. Always, not all.
In the Congo, Stanley has a boy bearer hanged for "desertion." The pleas of the people surrounding the boy bounce off Stanley's tin heart. "Relentless" in his pursuit of Stanley's dream, he's fulfilling Europe's dream of conquering Africa. So "he could not afford, he thought, to show the slightest sign of weakness now." The first Africans arriving on these US shores would have been familiar with Stanley. All the Stanleys of the Western world.
George Floyd knew one, for sure.
And I have to say here this isn't the Stanley, of the Stanley and Livingston team, taught to me by the white nuns in grammar school. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was taught that the team consisted of two good guys and loyal, no-deserting African helpers. The Africans were happy to be civilized. All of Africa welcomed the saviors. No one said anything about the murdering of Africans. Even a white man was happy to swing on African trees.
Deliberately, Stanley puts "himself in a situation in which killing was the only way out," writes Lindqvist. Stanley is Joseph Conrad's model for Kurtz, the white man in the "heart of darkness." Or, rather, is he, Stanley/Kurtz, the "heart of darkness" in Africa?
Conrad travels to Stanley's Africa, arriving at Stanleyville. The writer would have read Stanley's In Darkest Africa published in 1890. However, as Lindqvist suggests, "during his eight months in Africa, Conrad found that reality differed glaringly from the grandiose speeches he had heard before his departure."
So on his return to London the following year, Conrad, writes Lindqvist is "disillusioned."
No wonder there's no one to be saved in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except for Kurtz. But who can save Kurtz? "The monster is Kurtz" who resembles Stanley," writes Lindqvist.
"When Marlow lies to Kurtz's "intended" at the end of Conrad's story, he not only does what Stanley himself did, but also what official Britain and the general public were doing while Conrad was writing the story. They were lying."
And then Congo became known as Belgium's King Leopold I I's Congo. But that, too, was a lie.
**
This past June, 2020, the current king of Belgium, King Philippe was watching on his television as streets in the US filled with Americans, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and white. They were chanting, Black lives matter ! Black lives matter !
Contrary to Trump's depiction of African countries, the people in the Republic of the Congo have televisions too. And the people of the Congo know their lives matter, too!
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