Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley

John Bierman, Dark Safari: The Life Behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991.

Hard cover, dustwrapper, 401 pages, illustrations.

Very slight creasing to dustwrapper. Very good, clean condition.

African exploration, to the Victorians, was an adventure analogous to space travel in our own timea risky undertaking by a handful of intrepid individuals extending civilised man's knowledge of the universe while confirming his confidence in his ability to overcome all physical obstacles. Henry Morton Stanley was the supreme exemplar of that earlier age of exploration, a self-made man who, imbued with the triumphalism of the culture from which he sprang, conquered a continent through grit, resource and sheer bloody-mindedness.

Today, Stanley enjoys a wry immortality not by reason of his prodigious feats in Africa but because of the classically fatuous phrase with which he greeted his fellow explorer, David Livingstone, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. But there was a lot more to Stanley than Dr Livingstone, I presume. Other considerations apart, he led two further African expeditions of far greater scope and scientific importance than his search for the elusive doctor and, in what was perhaps the nineteenth century's greatest act of geopolitical piracy, literally created the so-called Congo Free State (present-day Zaire) for his patron, King Leopold II of the Belgians.

Such feats alone, reassessed in the light of post-colonial realities, make Stanley's life one of the great adventure stories of all time. But there is an adventure no less intriguing, and no less disturbing, in penetrating the heart of darkness that was Stanley's inner life. In Dark Safari John Berman leads us into the interior of both the man and the vast landmass he tamed. It is a region which, as Graham Greene has said, remains in many ways what it was to the Victorians, the blank unexplored continent the shape of the human heart.