Williams, Sel

Henry Morton Stanley’s popular fame is based on the words which he claims to have uttered on finding the long-lost explorer: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”. As with much of what Stanley wrote, the veracity of this claim is questionable.

For five years Stanley was king Leopold II of Belgium’s main man in the Congo. The colonisation, pillaging of ivory and rubber, atrocities and genocide under Leopold amount to Africa’s “hidden holocaust” (see King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild…