Part Two: Henry Morton Stanley: The Explorer Who Shot His Way Through Africa

Robert is joined again by Soren Bowie to continue discussing explorer, Henry Morton Stanley.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
What, I don't know. Fuck it, We're still out of introductions.
The shipments are still coming. We've been told the supply
lines are holding out, but they have not been trucked
into us yet. So you know, Um, we will see
at some point this introduction shortage will end. I will
promise you, my fellow Americans, that, but it just hasn't yet.

(00:23):
We're still out of intros, but we're not out of
sore and bowies. We are flush and so boys, I
would dare say, lousy with sores, Yeah, filthy with So
this is the most we've ever had in this podcast
at least um and tied for the most that I've
ever had during that ten year period where we work together. Yes,

(00:45):
and I'll say completely useless during a disaster. You don't
want these. They can't help you. Now, that's not true,
because one of the things sore and you're you're a
number of things. You are currently a writer for the
TV show American Dad. You're formerly my coworker at Cracked.
You are a host of the co host of the
podcast Quick Question with my friend Daniel O'Brien. Uh, and

(01:06):
you have also helped discover a lost city in the
desert and I'm not gonna give any more detail to
my audience than that. But that's not a joke. That's
just a thing Sore and did one time, which he
has in common with our our host today. Kind of
not really. Yeah, you know you'll find along the way
that there are a lot of things he and I
have in common. You have discovered a city, and again

(01:29):
no more detail will be given, so off we go
into the tail. So um, I think it's it's hard
to adequately convey to people what Africa. Also, this is
behind the Bastards. You probably knew that because this is
part two in the episode thank you. Uh, It's hard
to adequately convey to people today like what African explorers
were to Europeans in the mid eighteen hundreds in late

(01:51):
eighteen hundreds, Like the closest thing we have today would
be like a cross between a major YouTube star and
a pop musician. Like you have to think about these
guys kind of the way people think of Beyonce and
Rihanna today, Like they are that level of worshiped and
adored um by a lot of people, which is hard
to get your head around because they're all like Stanley

(02:12):
um so as Stanley stared out towards Africa. You know,
at this point in his career aged seven. Uh. Two
of the most famous explorers in the world, where Richard
Burton and John Speck. They just finished their epic journey
from Africa's east coast to Lake Tanga Yika, which is
the longest freshwater lake on Earth. And they had quote
unquote discovered Lake Victoria, the largest body of water in Africa,
during this trip. It was considered to be like this

(02:34):
huge deal. Everybody who was very excited. People couldn't shut
the funk up about Lake Victoria and about Burton and
spec and Americans were obsessed with them too. Now, one
of the most famous explorers of this day was David Livingstone.
He was a physician and a Christian evangelist from Scotland. Now, Uh,
Livingstone was an abolitionist and his focus was on ending

(02:55):
what is often referred to as the Arab slave trade
in Africa. And you hear about the Arab slave trade
in Africa today usually when people are explaining how the
Confederacy wasn't all that bad because Arabs were the real
villains of the slave trade. Uh yeah, and it's yeah,
so uh Livingstone the Arab slave trade was a real thing,

(03:19):
but it's probably wrong to call it the Arab slave trade.
A decent number of the people who were running the
trade were Arabs, but they were North African Arabs, and
a lot of them weren't Arabs, like a lot of
a lot of people are Swihelian stuff like that. These
are people from like North Africa. Some of them are Arabs,
some of them aren't. It gets reduced to being the
Arab slave trades, that people can blame Arabs. Um, but

(03:39):
it's you know, it's it's a bunch of people from
one part of Africa enslaving, enslaving people from another part
of Africa and selling them somewhere. It's a bad thing,
but it's not quite the way it's it's portrayed today. Um.
So Livingstone was committed to in this kind of slavery. Um.
I didn't hear much about him on the Civil War.
I think he probably was anti confederacy in this, but

(04:02):
England itself wasn't necessarily in any way. We'll move on. Uh.
He was convinced that the answer. He was committed to
ending slavery in Africa. Um he was committed to ending
slavery in Africa, and he was convinced that the answer
to doing so was what he called legitimate trade. Uh.
Livingstone was a believer in Christianity, commerce and civilization. Those

(04:22):
that was one of his like catchphrases uh, saying that Christianity,
commerce and civilization would free black Africans from slavery. Um
that the violent colonial domination of millions of people was
the only way to achieve This was not something that
Livingston ever really said, but it was the inevitable result
of his beliefs. Um. So it's cool. Yeah, when you're

(04:42):
trying to build a utopia, you gotta break a few
eggs man. Yeah. And Livingston felt a powerful desire to
connect the different villages, towns, and ports of Central Africa
in order to facilitate easier trade and allow missionaries to
move around more easily and christianize the continent. Um. He
wanted to was the many lakes and rivers of Central
Africa as highways to facilitate this trade. But in order

(05:05):
to do that, he had to map them uh. And
that's just what Livingston set out to do. He started
mapping out the Congo River and he had a series
of daring adventures on the way. For one example, at
one point he was he agreed to help a village
by trying to kill a lion that was hunting them. Um,
and he hit the lion, but like the eye and
still attacked him and his arm was horribly mald So
he's like, he's the kind of things this guy gets
up to, and he gets very He writes books which

(05:27):
are very popular, and he's he becomes, you know, moderately famous.
He's not the most popular explorer, but he's up there.
Um and Stanley reads one of his books and he's enthralled. Now.
The height of Livingston's fame came in the late eighteen fifties,
when he succeeded in convincing a series of backers to
fund his effort to map the Zambezi River so that
he could create a major artery through which he could

(05:47):
pump Christianity and capitalism into the heart of Africa. He
succeeded in working at a deal with the London Missionary Society,
but sort of misled them about the extent to which
the government supported his efforts. The result of which of
this is that he brought a shipload of missionaries into
a place that was extremely dangerous and a bunch of
them and more importantly, their young children died horribly. Uh,

(06:07):
this disaster was not good for Livingstone's pr in By
eighteen sixty six, he was seen as something of a
has been. You would say he's like the Jeremy Renner
of guys who explore Africa in this period. Now I'm
curious when he's like when his goal is to uh
find out where like this, find this river and explore
this river so that he can pump Christianity into that area.

(06:30):
Yeah my phrasing. Yeah, Yeah, I'm curious, like how that
what that looks like? Logistically? Like I can get that
you would important export stuff, but something as nebulous as
a religion. Are you just pumping a bunch of white
Christians into that area and being like, eventually this will
take root? Yeah, Basically you're sending a lot of them
there to form little communities, to have businesses and also

(06:51):
to to to witness to people. And kind of the
assumption I think Livingstone makes is that the benefits of
white Christian civilization will just be so vious that eventually
this will take root and take over, you know the
way things had been. He wants he wants what you'd
call a soft genocide. He doesn't want to kill any
of the people. That's not the kind of guy Livingston is.

(07:12):
But he wants to completely change every aspect of their
old life and destroy the old culture because his is better.
So like like a soft genocide. Again, the English were
the slow Nazis, Like that's the way to look at
the Uh. Yeah, and they have a way higher death
told than the Nazis because being slow lets you do that.

(07:33):
But anyway, uh so yeah, he uh it's cool. So
in eighteen sixty six, uh, sort of disgraced Jeremy Renner
type David Livingstone sets off on another one of his
adventures to find the source of the Nile. Uh. He
went missing, and for years very little was heard from
the doctor. By eighteen sixty eight, all of Europe was
in an uproar over the fate of David Livingstone. Within

(07:53):
several English social clubs, gears began charning to raise money
for an expedition to rescue the good Doctor or to
find evidence of his demise. But sitting over in the
United States keeping an eye on the news, Henry Morton
Stanley was able to see something important in the disappearance
of David Livingstone an opportunity for Henry Morton Stanley. Yes,
ye to Africa now, Henry, Yeah, if he could somehow

(08:17):
convince his new employer to send him to Africa and
then track down Livingston himself, he would have the biggest
scoop in all of journalism. It would be the kind
of story that would not just make his career but
make him into a global celebrity. And there was nothing
Henry Morton Stanley wanted more. He spent quite a lot
of time trying to convince the publisher of The New
York Harold to fund his expedition. He succeeded once, but
then Livingstone turned up briefly again, and Stanley put it

(08:40):
around the Middle East, you know, doing that sort of
journalism instead. It took until eighteen sixty nine for things
to really start to happen with this story. So like
four years after Livingston goes missing. Uh, and Stanley's version
of the story of how he got approval to do
this as a lie, but it's also the most coherent
version of the tale. So we're gonna start here. I'm
gonna quote Adam hoss Child's right up of In eighteen

(09:01):
sixty nine, Stanley received an urgent telegram from Bennett, his boss,
come to Paris on important business at journalists. Stanley wrote,
with the self importance that had now become part of
his public PERSONA is like a gladiator in the arena,
and he flinching any cowardice, and he has lost. The
gladiator meets the sword that is sharpened for his bosom.
The roving correspondent meets the command that may send him
to his doom. He dashed off to Paris to meet

(09:23):
his publisher at the Grand Hotel. They're a dramatic conversation
about Livingstone climax, with Bennett saying, I mean that you
shall go and find him wherever you may hear that
he is, and to get what news you can of him.
And perhaps the old man may be in want taken
up with you to help him if he should require it.
But do what you think is best. But find Livingstone.
Now none of this actually happened. Uh. It's a lie

(09:45):
that Stanley cooked up because it made a good introduction
for the book. He eventually wrote about his expedition, and
he tore up the pages of his diary from those days.
So we will never know what actually went down, Umney journey, No, no, no,
just the whole story of how he can inst his
boss to send him um The real story seems to
basically be that he got approval because it was a

(10:06):
big story, and then his boss backed out a bunch
of times, and eventually Stanley kind of conned his way
into pulling out of money out of the company accounts
and then disappearing in Africa. And when he reappeared with
the story, his boss agreed to pretend that nothing bad
had happened. You know, that's kind of the gist of it.
I think it's a weird story. Say, there's nothing you
want more in a journalist than a really good liar,

(10:28):
And that's that's exactly what he was. And I'm sure
his plan was to go there and be like, it
does not matter if I find him or not. The
story will be good. I will tell people I found him.
Word we live in eighteen sixty nobody knows. Yeah, if
I can get there, I will make a fucking story
out of this. I just need the money to get

(10:49):
to Africa and hire a bunch of people to help
me not die. Um. So, he finally begins his journey
into the interior of Africa in March eighteen seventy one.
The trip started out well if you believe Stanley, and
he found himself falling in love with the native fauna
and flora of Africa. He wrote that he felt like
an English nobleman in a massive private park quote, I

(11:09):
felt momentarily proud that I owned such a vast domain
inhabited by such noble beasts, the pride of the African forests.
So he is one thing you can say about Stanley.
He is the most fucking pedal to the fucking metal colonialist.
Like there's not not even a second that it takes
him to be like, yeah, this, this is this feels

(11:30):
like mine. Yeah, I feel like Africa's mine. He's so
obsessed with being a nobleman that he even in Africa,
he's like this, this feels like it, right, this is
what it's like. This is what it's like, squint, These
look like my more's that I'm out wandering around on
my horse path on it rules. So for a little

(11:52):
while Stanley was in Paradise, he was followed, as always
by much younger men whose job it was to see
to his every need and to adore him. His translator,
Salim fit this bill to a t, as did Kolulu,
the young slave that he had bought and made into
a butler. So he owns a slave, um and as
has to do a lot of He's got to do

(12:14):
a lot of groundwork to try to turn this one around. Sorry,
I'm very serious about his acrobatics. It is hard to
turn a slave owner in the not a racist, but
Jeal gives it the old college. Try, yes, he describes.
Jell describes Kolulu as quote the slave boy whom he
would free by purchase to be his butler, and valet

(12:37):
Henry would be reminded of the boys at the workhouse
who had been his de facto family during his adolescence.
Not that his affection for them would stop him from
beating both Salim and Kolulu for crimes such as stealing
food and breaking things. So the way that he describes
he washes it away as he's like he has an

(12:59):
affinity for him because he reminds him of the slaves
at the workhouse. He still beats the ship out of
this slave, Don't get me wrong, beats the ship out
of this slave. It's also worth noting and gil Kind
of brushes over this that Stanley doesn't like Kalulu's original
name and he just changes it. Nice, he just gives
him a new name. It's a better name for you,

(13:21):
stan relationship, Yeah, Stanley from now on? Who again? Jail
repeatedly points out what an anti slavery crusader Stanley is
owns a slave whose name that he changes and whom
he beats, and this is different from slavery for a
variety of reasons that neither Gil nor I have the
time to get into right now, so we change. Um

(13:43):
oh boy, yeah, it's it's it's somewhere in here. Oh man,
I hope it's like I hope he needed him, like Karen,
just like no, no, no, no, Kalulu is the name.
He changes it too, and it's what Kolulu goes by
for the rest of his life. Um or what the
kid goes by for the rest of his life, like
Stanley brings him back to England and stuff like, I
don't know. It is one of those things, you know,
a lot of times people will defend these guys, will

(14:04):
pointing out that like these people who they very clearly
abused and owned, like liked them and spoke pleasantly about
them the rest of their days, and like that's really
not the point. Like there's a lot of former terrorists
like kidnapping victims and fucking Stockholm or whatever. You know,
Um will speak fondly of them. It's yeah. Yeah. He

(14:25):
wrote a book about Kolulu years later called Mike Kalulu Prince,
King and Slave, which he called a romance for boys.
So that's that's not great either, Um, Henry deal with
her sexuality? Man? Yeah? Yeah, And he renamed him from
Kalulu's real name was Gudu Mahali, which means my brother's wealth.

(14:49):
Uh yeah, and yeah, he renamed him Kolulu, which means
a young male antelope, and then made him carry his gun.
That was Kalulu's big gig um, So that's cool, uh doog,
that's yeah, Mahali. He changed his name and turned him
into a gun rack, which is not racist. And you

(15:12):
know what else is not racists or in Abraham Lincoln
he was profoundly racist, but he gets a partial pass
for destroying the Confederacy. I would say partial, Yeah, Okay,
what's not what's not racist? A haircut? A haircut? I mean, actually,

(15:35):
there's a lot of politics around haircuts that could go
badly as well as as well. Oranges not racist, incapable
of racism by dint of being a fruit. So this
podcast is supported by Orange is the Fruit that Hates Racism.

(16:01):
We're back. Oh my gosh, So boy howdy. So Stanley
uh sets off on this exhibition to find Dr Livingston,
and at the time, Dr Livingston is okay, is probably strong.
He was broken, abandoned in Central Africa and was regularly
terribly ill. But he was also like just kind of
hanging out in a house in a village as the
local white guy. And he wasn't in more danger than

(16:23):
like any given white dude. Wasn't a place where they
had no natural immunity to all these different horrible diseases
that were flopping around in the flies and stuff. You know.
So this isn't like a Heart of Darkness situation where
he's gone down there and become a god in some
remote you know. He just kind of lives there and
they're like, Yeah, that's that's the white guy. We got
we got one. We got one. All the other villages,

(16:46):
we got one. Yeah. Startying in eighteen sixties, seven Livingstone's
own followers had stolen so much for him that he'd
been forced to travel with Arab Swahili slave caravans for safety.
While like hating these people in the Arab slave trade.
Um and while he ascribes all this, our buddy Tim
Jeal hat thinks that you the reader need to know
that even this kind of slavery wasn't super bad for

(17:07):
black people. Um And I'm gonna give you more a
Tim right now, who is broadly becoming the real bastard
of the story. Livingston could endure his humiliating dependence on
many considered evildoers largely because he made a distinction between
Arab slavery as an institution, the treatment and possession of
domestic slaves, and the cruel process by which Africans were
torn from their homes. The slaves journey by land and

(17:29):
sea was appallingly cruel, but on arrival in Arabia they
were usually treated better than many British factory workers. Oh okay,
thank you, Tim Jeal didn't need that defensive slavery not
necessary to tell the story. Actually, Tim is quickly working

(17:51):
his way up to having his own episode. Yeah, this
is basically the Tim Gel episode. Stanley has the defense
of growing up in a time when almost everyone was
some kind of monster. Um so Stanley. As Stanley got
deeper into Africa, problems began to surface. Some of his
men expressed displeasure under his leadership, and Stanley generally responded

(18:11):
to this by flogging them. When they were a hundred
and twenty five miles inland, Stanley flogged his cook for incorrigible,
dishonesty and waste, which I think was just like wasting food. Um.
He fired the cook and told him to leave. But
when the cook left, Stanley called him a deserter and
sent soldiers out to bring him back. Jeal says this
shows his steely determination. Throughout this adventure, Stanley would send

(18:31):
his soldiers out after disorders and order men beaten and
chained for not wanting to work. This is again different
from slavery, because, of course, Henry Morton Stanley was an abolitionist.
Um so that's good. Um so yeah. Livingstone had two
white guys with him on this journey. When one of
the two of them got sick, he abandoned him to
die in a village and continued on. Stanley had very

(18:54):
little sympathy for people whose illness rendered them unable to
work for days, even though he was himself frequently and
horrifically ill on these journeys. Uh Tim Jeal unbiased biographer
wants you to know that while he tromped through other
people's land, Stanley was a pretty good guest of the
Africans great quote. Though impatient with white colleagues, he showed

(19:15):
commendable restraint with Africans. The Wagogo, whose territory lay midway
between the coast and Lake Tanganyika, were, in Stanley's words,
clannish and full of fight, and their young warriors repeatedly
rushed up to within a few feet of him and
shouted in his face before moving closer to inspect his clothes.
The Traveler and Rogogo Territory wrote Henry was tempted a
score of times each day to draw a bead with

(19:36):
his rifle, but such an outburst of anger would be
bitterly regretted afterwards. Stanley was ill with fever at the time,
and on two occasions lashed out with a whip. But
he paid these people generously for the right of passage
through their territory, the equivalent of a hundred seventy dollars
in gold, so he went with them sometimes for asking
what was up, but he paid them. Yeah, I also
like picturing this man in a pith helmet, like feverishly

(20:00):
hallucinating and whipping people throughout the jungle, and Tim Jill
being like basically a good guest. What's the problem he was?
I would I would criticize him more for this, but
I have lost count of the number of people that
I have whipped in their own homes for unclear reasons
while feverish, So I'm not going to give Stanley too

(20:21):
much pain. It happens. You know, we've all whipped a
few people we wish we hadn't whipped when we had
a fever and wound up in their house. Somehow, you don't, Yeah,
you don't throw stones if you live in whip houses exactly.
And every house is a whip house. When you bring
a whip into every house, you winter always. So Stanley

(20:44):
did succeed eventually in his goal of tracking David Livingston down.
He found him in the village of Jig in November
of eighteen seventy one. The moment the two met is
one of the most famous stories in all of journalism.
Stanley and Livingston, the two only white men around for miles,
surrounded by black and air observants and soldiers walk up
to one another, and Stanley dryly asks Dr Livingston, I presume.

(21:06):
And the joke here is that Livingston is the only
other white guy for like the fucking length of multiple states.
Of course it's Dr Livingston. Um. And for his part,
Jels thinks this was a lie. Um, like that this
recitation events was a lie, and that Stanley's real introduction
was like, Hi, Dr Livingston, my name is Stanley. You know,
it was a normal thing that a person would say. Uh, Dr,

(21:29):
let me say, my name is John. No, I'm sorry,
yeah shit, I meant that to be so much better
his actual notes. Uh. Stanley's actual notes about their moment
of meeting were again destroyed, so uh and Livingston died
a year later before ever returning to Europe, so there
was never anyone to question Stanley's recitation of events, or

(21:49):
never anyone white and no other white person at the
time was going to ask, like a black dude, what
had really happened? Uh? So yep, so we don't never
know the Dr Livingston and I presume is just something
he might probably made up after he made up because
it sounded better, Um dick. Yeah, and it's really funny
because Jel is more concerned, like the honest documentarian in

(22:10):
him means he needs to let people know that Stanley's
most famous line was a lie. But he he is.
He loves Henry Morton Stanley so much that he spends
more time defending him about this than he does for
owning a human being. Yes, it's awesome get twisted into
these weird priorities. I can't get my image of this
guy together in my head, um, but he writes. I

(22:33):
hope this will not affect Stanley's public fame. It seems
to me that his invention of an adoptive father and
his setting himself the task of finding Dr Livingstone were
remarkable enough in their own right to mearrit remembrance. To
go on from there to invent a greeting so memorable
that it would be recognized by millions over a century
and a quarter later places him in a class all
his own. Yes, it does, a very specific class. Yeah,

(22:59):
not a good one. Now. Livingston and Stanley spent four
months together, which were probably the happiest four months of
Stanley's life, and it does seem that the two men
grew very close in Livingston, who was sixty, acted as
a sort of father figure to Stanley. They explored together
for a little while, but then Stanley had to go.
He had a story to file, and Livingston wasn't ready

(23:20):
to go back to to England or whatever. Now the
story was a massive hit. It was the biggest news
item in the world, and one fell swoop. Stanley became
among the most famous people on the planet. He wrote
a book to go with his articles, How I Found Livingstone,
And in doing this he's sort of invented an entire genre.
One historian notes that he's the progenitor of all the
subsequent professional travel writers. Like Stanley kind of innvinced the

(23:43):
discipline of travel writing, as he's not like the very
first person to do it, but he like he nails
it for the first time in a way that's like
really echoes throughout history. Um Adam hoss Child writes his articles, books,
and speaking tours bought him greater riches than any other
travel writer of his time and probably the century as well.
In eighteen seventy four, the Herald paid for him to

(24:04):
go on another adventure. This time, Stanley traced the course
of a river named the Lua Laba, and in the
process he discovered the origin of the Congo River. Uh.
He started this journey with two and twenty eight people,
and over the course of seven thousand miles, more than
half of them died as the corpses piled up people
attempted to dessert. Stanley responded to this by capturing and

(24:24):
chaining those people up. Gel notes that Stanley preferred chaining
people up because it was nicer than beating them. Our
hero uh so cool. Stanley also continued his marked preference
of having adoring white, uh younger men accompany him on

(24:46):
his journey. And yeah, exactly, but unfortunately all three of
them die, and they die. They die just horribly, like
the worst the worst deaths you can imagine. That's bay Sically,
all the white guys Stanley ever goes on trips with
die the worst death's human beings can die. They're all
Red Shirts. And then Stanley gets to lie about them,

(25:12):
which they're all pieces of ship too, like I'm not
gonna you know whatever. So Stanley gets back from his
journey in August of eighteen seventy seven and publishes his
book on it in eighteen seventy eight through the Dark Continent,
and Henry Morton Stanley is generally credited as being the
man who popularized that term, and he may even have
invented it. Um. So he's like, he's the guy who

(25:32):
makes Dark Continent a household name for Africa. Uh. And
that is there's huge consequences to that, like to the intent,
like he contributes to the death of tens of millions
as a result of this um. True to form, Stanley
exaggerated every single number he could in this book, claiming
his expedition had a hundred more members than it really did,

(25:52):
exaggerating the number of natives, has men killed in gunfights,
and all every number is a lie. Basically in one
key story, this is like, this is lying in the
wrong direction to a t. Yeah, I was responsible for
more dead men that I got, so many more people killed.
In one key story, his own notes record six kills

(26:14):
during a firefight, but his book claims thirty five. Um.
And again this is a firefight because he like barged
into some people's land and started stealing ship and they
got angry, So it's like I had no choice but
to shoot them. And also true to form, tim Geo
uses the fact that Stanley lied about how many people
he killed as a basis for a lot of his

(26:35):
argument that Stanley was has been unfairly treated by history
and was a good dude. He frames this as Stanley
just being very insecure because of his childhood in the workhouse.
What a kindred spirit, Sley. That's so good. If if
Jeal had been alive during this time, he absolutely would

(26:57):
have gotten hired to follow Stanley on a journey and
he would have died the most unimaginably painful death there.
He would have been eaten by fire ants and Jell
would have like lied and said that he started one
of the many gunfights he had with natives. Yeah, he
would have that the natives natural attraction to Jeal it

(27:17):
was to kill all of them. Yeah. Again, this is
a guy whose stores, whose careers and adventurers start, starts
with getting a young boy who adores him raped with
knives and then stealing that kid's money. He's such a
piece of ship. So uh yeah, now his acknowledgment of

(27:39):
of yes, it's it's great. So Stanley and his men
try to buy passage and pay for food when possible
on their journeys. But they also were very perfectly happy
to kill people and wage war when local people didn't
want to sell them those things. Gel writes quote his
obsession had been whether to take food by force or
risk marching on in the hope of obtaining food at

(27:59):
the next village. On many occasions he was obliged by
destitution to throw himself on the mercy of the Arabs
Wahii slave traders and asked them to feed him and
his followers. During my first visit to Belgium, I read
a very significant passage in one of Stanley's diaries which
I have never seen quoted in any book, And this
entry Stanley showed that he had recognized the fundamental moral
problem facing all European travelers. We went into the heart

(28:20):
of Africa self invited, he wrote, therein lies our fault,
but it was not so grave that our lives, when threatened,
should be forfeited. So Stanley, Stanley knows it's fucked up
to just barge into someone's home and then take their
ship at gunpoint and kill them when they say. He knows,
I'm invading people's homes and murdering them for food, and

(28:40):
that's not good but he also argues that because I'm starving,
it's okay for me to do this. Right, What other
choice do I have? What other You cannot be an
Africa dude, No, not be reasonable, grow up? What other
choice do I have? You can just not do this.
Millions of people around the world managed to not do

(29:01):
this during the same period that could have been you, Buddy,
Moon stands Henry Morton Stanley. Yeah. Now, this reasoning is
due being enough on its own, but Stanley's contribution to
death and destruction in Africa went far beyond a few
hundred bullets fired, or even beyond the three of his
own men that he hanged. I'm gonna quote now from

(29:22):
a write up titled Henry Morton Stanley and his critics
from the Oxford University Press people, He, of course sorry,
And you're not gonna go on journeys through the heart
of Africa and not hanging some of the people that
you can't chain or whip into submission. Yeah that's fair, Yeah,
of course. Quote. On his death in nineteen o four,

(29:43):
Sydney Lowe claimed that the Map of Africa is a
monument to Stanley. Such an epitaph draws our attention not
only to Stanley's contributions to geographical science arising from various
African expeditions between eighteen seventy one and eighteen ninety, but
also to his role as an agent of European colonial influence.
For Stanley was a tireless advocate of commercial and political
intervention in Africa. Indeed, to describe him as the Napoleon

(30:05):
of African travelers seems particularly appropriate in view of both
the scale of his ambitions and the links he was
prepared to go in order to realize them. His career
as an explorer Bridges would have sometimes referred to as
the Golden Age of African exploration eighteen fifty one eighteen
seventy eight and the era of the Scramble for Africa
eighteen eighty four to ninety one. The eighteen seventies were
indeed a critical turning point in the history of European

(30:26):
involvement in Africa. Then Stanley himself played a significant role
in the transition to new forms of imperialism in the
closing decades of the nineteenth century see and this is critical.
There was colonialism in Africa before Stanley, but what we
think of as colonialism in Africa was invented in a
lot of ways by Henry Morton Stanley. Most of Africa
wasn't quote unquote owned by European powers when he gets

(30:48):
there and his work helps inspire the political changes that
leads to that changing, he sparks was known as the
Scramble for Africa, and he's some of this was deliberate.
It was part of a plot by King Leopold to
get control of the Congo. We'll talk a little bit
more about that later. Um I'm talking about Stanley's specific
contribution though, to like the evolution of colonialism, because he's
critical in the whole worldwide thing. So he believed, like

(31:11):
Livingston did, that slavery was the ultimate evil and had
to be fought by sending Europeans in to facilitate trade.
Sometimes that process meant chaining or whipping or beating or
executing Africans who didn't play along with this trade. If so, yeah,
we're owning slaves. If so, this was all the regrettable
necessity of freeing people. Now I love that he always

(31:34):
my hands are tied, and it's crazy how this never changes.
And you have literal reports from the US military in
Vietnam that are like we had to burn down the
village to save it. Like this, this is always the
logic of this sort of thing, but Stanley helps develop
this language of of justifying the most violent kind of imperialism.

(31:55):
So at one point, while sailing through Lake tangan Yika,
Stanley writes, quote, the beach was routed with infuriates and mockers.
These are like local Africans who are just kind of
like hooting and hollering and yelling at him because they
don't want him in their area. We perceived we were
followed by several canoes and some of which we saw
spears shaking at us. I opened on them with the
Winchester repeating rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient

(32:16):
to quiet the mocking. So they made fun of me.
So I killed for man, there wasnt yeah. I walked
into their home. They laughed at me, and so I
murdered four of them, and then they stuff laughing. Are
you trying to tell me I'm not a hero for that?

(32:36):
Don't try to tell Tim Geal that he will get
fucking angry. So Stanley was not the first of the
only white man to stumble into Africa with a pile
of guns and the desire to own things. But he
was one of the most influential, and his writings in
this period helped to inspire countless millions of white folks
around the world to embrace the conquest of Africa. Quote
his writings represented Central Africa as a primeval place, untouched

(32:58):
by history, yet full of possibility. They were far from
unique in this respect, of course. In the period between
the publication of Stanley's Through the Dark Continent eighteen seventy
eight and Conrad's Heart of Darkness nineteen o three, the
vision of darkest Africa appears to have gained an ever
more powerful hold in the minds of Europeans. As Patrick
Brantlinger observes, Africa grew dark as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and

(33:18):
scientists flooded it with light a solid turn of phrase.
The peculiar power of this myth of the dark Continent
lay in its fusion of a complex of images of race, science,
and religion. The iconography of light and darkness thus represented
European penetration of Africa simultaneously a process of domination, enlightenment,
and emancipation. Although Stanley did not create this myth, his

(33:39):
writings popularized existing stereotypes, combining the symbolism of darkest Africa
with an unshakable faith and the potential for European mastery
over the entire continent. His mission, as it was described
in eighteen eighty four, was to strike a white line
across the dark continent. Ah yikes, Boe hatty Man. Now

(34:02):
Tim Geal greatest biographer of all time. Let's get that
out of the way right away. Tim Gel tries to
patch over the kind of fundamental racism of what Stanley
is doing by just sort of sharing individual stories about
times when he wasn't shitty to individual African people. Uh. Yeah,
when you're not the time and he's your person. Yeah.

(34:23):
He He includes a lot of lines that's like, you know,
Stanley would like meet a specific tribe and describe them
all as attractive and intelligent and kind. And Deeal is like,
what a racist? Right this? Did you know that Hitler
had a dog? Yeah? And in doing this, Gel ignores
lines from Stanley's journal like this, the black has given
immense amount of trouble. They are too ungrateful for my fancy. Now.

(34:47):
Gel highlights that Stanley wrote of being prepared to admit
any black man possessing the attributes of true manhood or
any good qualities to a brotherhood with myself. But number
one ignores how racist this line is, but also ignores
other lines lie the savage only respects force, power, boldness,
and decision, And perhaps most racist of all, this line
about Afro Arab people from non racist Henry Morton Stanley

(35:11):
quote for the half cast, I have great contempt. They
are neither black nor white, neither good nor bad, neither
to be admired nor hated. They are all things at
all times. If I saw a miserable, half starved negro,
I was always sure to be told he belonged to
a half cast. Cringing and hypocritical, cowardly and debased, treacherous
and means the syphilitic, blear eyed, palid skined abortion of
an Africanized Arab. So shit, Henry, Yeah, yeah, let us

(35:35):
Tim gel is I I'm gonna look up one of
the times he doesn't use the word racism often in
his book, Like he defends him from racism, but he
really there's seven matches in the entire book, and I
want to read one quote from uh oh, sorry this
is We're not even at a we're not even at
okay before I get into something Geo wrote. This is

(35:56):
one of the book quotes about Jeal's book by Jane
Ridley of Spectator magazine when she put it on their
Books of the Year list. In Spectators like a right
wing news website, Why is fair and deeply researched, Jeal's
book sets the record straight on the great Victorian explorer,
exonerating him from allegations of racism, brutality, and suppressed homosexuality. Really,

(36:17):
not only is like racism and murder are the same
as being gay, but also he wasn't any of those things. Meanwhile,
Tim Geo repeatedly talks about whim whipping people. That's wonderful.
He had to. He had to because they weren't. They didn't,
they weren't right, they weren't working hard enough. Anyway, Here's

(36:39):
the line from Tim Geal, I wanted to read you today.
A vivid and uniquely adventurous life like Stanley's, challenges our
ability to be just an objective both about his story
and about the vices and virtues of his contemporaries worldviews worldview.
His absence of racism was all the more remarkable for
him having lived in the Deep South, perfect his absence

(37:02):
of racism. It's complete absence. Nothing about the Confederacy washed
off at all on this man who fought for the
Confederacy and then it helped enslave Africa. Not a single thing.
He didn't know what he was fighting for. Everyone, It's
fine now. Likewise, when Jill is forced to deal with

(37:24):
Stanley's dark side, he tends to make very quick, vague
references to unfortunate floggings and beatings. He generally neglects to
site for us what Stanley wrote in his own notebook
when he was flogging people, and thus excludes lines like
when mud and wet sapped the physical energy of the
lazily inclined, a dog whip became their backs, restoring them
to sound, sometimes to an extravagant activity. Yeah. Well you

(37:48):
when they start to to wane, you gotta whip them
back into shape. You gotta whip him back into shape.
There's not racist. A whip only black people is fine.
A lot of not racist people whip only one specific
type of people. They are lucky to be whipped. When
all of his white counterparts were eaten by fire ants
and died in quicksand I mean, hey, the least we

(38:08):
can say for Hitler is he mostly whipped I think
actually only whipped white people. So Hitler's whip was woker
than Stanley's, if you needed to to to categorize those two.
So Stanley considered Africa to be an unpeopled country and

(38:29):
his dream was very clearly to see it colonized with
white folks, just like North America. He didn't want all
the black people killed, but he kind of assumed that
a lot of them would die out and be marginalized
during you know, the spread of white people all over Africa. Uh,
he wrote, quote, there are plenty of pilgrim fathers among
the Anglo Saxon race. Yet, and when America is filled

(38:51):
up with their descendants, who shall say that Africa should
not be their next resting place? And true to his convictions,
Henry Morton, Stanley's next great career move would do he
thought was the best thing he could do to open
Africa to further white exploitation. He took a gig with
King Leopold the Second of Belgium. Now we're not going
to get into crazy to tale about this, because we
do in our two part or on Leopold. The short

(39:12):
of it is that the King of Belgium sneakily convinced
Europe that his country owned Central Africa, and then he
killed half the people there by working them to death
to produce rubber. Stanley was a key part of that,
and it's easy to see why I work with the
King of Belgium on this project would have appealed to him.
Outside of financial incentives, Stanley's life outside of exploring was
a little bit of a disaster. He'd been engaged to
a woman named Katie gal Roberts before he set off

(39:34):
for the Congo, but she left him for an architect
while he was there, and he like discovered that she
had gotten married to someone else when he got back.
This isn't like the first time something like this happens
to him either. Um, Like, he's just got this thing
of falling in love with girls, promising himself to them,
and then going to Africa for multiple years and then
he comes back and he's like, that woman wasn't loyal. Yeah,

(39:57):
I will probably die where I go. That I will
be on the verge of death the entire time. Everyone
around me will die. But wait for me, don't fuck,
I hope you want stale fucking so uh yeah. So
his likewise, his fame and his wealth had not translated

(40:19):
to very much respect by the actual English high society.
Um like the actual fancy explorers clubs didn't like him
very much, and the issue was his unspeakable brutality. In
eighteen seventy six, explorer Richard Burton wrote a letter to
the console of Zanzibar complaining that Stanley quote shoots Negroes
as if they were monkeys, and Richard Burton is a
guy who killed a funkload of innocent black people, like

(40:41):
and he's like this dude, is this guy like fuck, man,
you gotta It's like it's like having my namesake producer
Robert Evans sit you down to talk about your coke problem. Yeah,
the guy who's already famously terrible. Listen, this is too much.

(41:05):
You cannot kill them like their animals. Yeah. Yeah. So
this became a big topic of controversy within English society,
and the specific clash that Burton was piste about was
a firefight with a tribe called the Bambira who stole
or who Henry Morton Stanley claims stole from him? In
his periodic dispatches from the Congo, Stanley had bragged about

(41:27):
the quote fourteen dead and wounded with ball and buckshot, which,
although I should consider to be a very dear payment
for the robbery of eight ash oars and a drum,
was barely equivalent in fair estimation to the intended massacre
of ourselves. So this was what he writes in one
of his public documents. We killed fourteen of them because
they stole some oars. Yeah, and like it wasn't a

(41:48):
totally fair exchange because those were nice ores. But you know,
more or less, and we killed them. And yes, that
is it's a steep price to pay. But isn't their
death worth less than my death? Yeah? So for Stanley,
killing all these people wasn't enough. He took his two
eighty man force, armed with muskets and spears, waving American

(42:08):
in British flags, and then slaughtered forty two Bambira that
he tricked into believing he wanted to talk. The Saturday
Review wrote this in London quote, he has no concern
with justice, no right to administer it. He comes with
no sanction, no authority, no jurisdiction, nothing but explosive bullets
and a copy of the Daily Telegraph who's writing for
at the time. So it is important to note that like,

(42:29):
while all of the worst parts of colonialism are going on,
kind of like while all the worst crimes of our
own error are going on, there's a lot of people
in England who are like, it seems really fucked up
what we're doing. Hey, guys, this is bad, this is bad,
and just as now, they don't stop any of it
from happening, but they are there and they're pissed. So
well that's comfort, yeah, I guess ish. Yeah. So there

(42:56):
was a lot of outrage over Stanley's behavior, but he
has we're all familiar with today. Public outrage never stopped
anyone from staying rich and famous. So, if you'll recall,
King Leopold's grand scheme was to give him self access
to the Congo by conning the international community into believing
that he was going to open it up to free
trade for everybody and the what what happened on paper
is that all these tribes in Central Africa signed contracts

(43:19):
giving up their sovereignty to a new state called the
Congo Free State, which was in theory a nation of
theirs and Belgium was going to help them by providing
the core of their military and like helping them organize
and become a real nation to join the Community of Nations. Uh,
none of this was really true. None of the people
who signed these contracts really knew what they were doing,

(43:39):
and it was all just to provide Leopold with a
legal justification for other Europeans so that he could rule
the Congo. And Stanley is the guy who got him
these justifications. He was hired by Leopold for five years
to act is basically a secret agent, traveling to Africa
under an assumed name and making a series of treaty
deals with different tribal chiefs. Now, depending on who you read,

(44:00):
Stanley signed somewhere between three hundred and four hundred and
fifty of these treaties, and the gist of them all
was that these tribes would hand over their sovereignty and
ownership of their land and exchange for scraps of cloth
and vaguely defined trade benefits. And Gel disagrees with academic
consensus here. Most historians, Yeah, most historians will argue that
Stanley basically knew what he was doing with Leopold Gield

(44:21):
claims that with some evidence that Stanley didn't intend to
get these tribes to sign away their sovereignty totally or forever,
and that Leopold tricked him and destroyed some of the
original treaties and replaced them. That's totally possible, because King
Leopold was a piece of ship and would have had
no issue with lying to Stanley because he was a
way smarter liar than Henry Morton Stanley. But also Lee
Stanley knew, if not every detail of what he was doing.

(44:42):
He knew the broad strokes, you know, that's really what matters.
And he contributed massively to the deaths of ten to
thirteen million people in the Congo Free State um and
of course the establishment of the Free State. The fact
that Belgium had suddenly wound up with basically all of
Central Africa helped to spark came to be known as
the Scramble for Africa when all of Europe's powers startled

(45:03):
by the fact that you know that, when they all
started filling Africa up with colonies and and conquering it
and killing people and laying the groundwork for the Rwanda
genocide and all sorts of novel awful stuff. Now, the
justification used for all of this was the need to
destroy the Arab slave trade and replace it with legitimate commerce,
with free trade. Right, that's the justification for all of this.

(45:26):
It's the same as Stanley's personal justification. We've gotta stop slavery,
and the only way to do that is for us
to own these people. Now, under such justifications, Africa wasn't
changed by Europe. By eighteen ninety, the situation and justification
for domination had gotten so absurd that Scottish explorer Joseph
Thompson dismissed the term legitimate commerce as quote magic words

(45:48):
which give such an attractive glamour to whatever can creep
under their shelter, words which have too often blinded a
gullible public to the most shameful and criminal transaction. Yeah words, Yep,
not wrong, Joseph Thompson. You know what else it is
not wrong, Robert. The products and services that support this podcast, Yes,

(46:10):
none of them have sparked the scramble for Africa. Well,
well we're back. Good ads. I particularly like the ad
for conquering Africa and murdering millions of people. There really

(46:35):
a good way to end slavery. They made it, They
made the case it was. I was hesitant at first,
I'll be honest, and then hearing their position on it
in the thirty second spot, I realized I was wrong. Yeah,
I was the wrong. Weird that they got Bill Murray
to voice it. Yeah, yeah, good pitchman. But I wouldn't
have called it. I mean now, certainly a different second

(46:56):
act than I anticipated from him. Yeah yeah, yeah now
uh In eight seven Stanley Department and what will become
his final trip from Africa, the Immin Pasha Relief Expedition.
Pasha was an Eastern European blowhard and a pseudo grifter
who ennobled himself to the English people by resisting the
followers of the Mahdi in southern Sudan. And this is

(47:17):
most similar in modern things because we really don't have
time to get into this very complicated story. It was
kind of like this air is equivalent of isis this
guy rises up, he like beats a European army and
it's this like real shocking uh move, and like he's
he's raises up his own Islamic kingdom. It's this like
it's a big deal. At the time, they would they
treated him like isis Like, I'm not gonna say that

(47:38):
he was he was actually because Isis sucked ass. I
don't know if the Mahdi did or not. I don't
know enough, but that's the way they talk about him, right.
Um So, Pasha wound up surrounded and cut off by
the forces of the Mahdi, and Stanley was dispatched to
relieve him, and the whole operation was a ship show. Again,
all of Stanley's white colleagues died, so he was able
to blame sundry failures and massacres committed by his execution

(48:00):
on dead men, which is very handy for Stanley. Uh
because this expedition massacres so many fucking people. Um Now,
they didn't make it hard for him to look bad.
One of his white companions who didn't survive was James Jamieson,
the heir to the Jamison Whiskey family. He died on
Stanley's second trip, but not before buying a young girl

(48:20):
from a slave trader and paying cannibals to let him
watch them eat her. Um Now, Jamison was known as
Cannibal Whiskey by many for years later. And this might
not be true. A lot of people will say it's
not a lot of people who have no interest in
defending Jamison's because there's just a lot of fucking stories. Right, Um,
I don't know the truth. This is a story people

(48:41):
tell about this, this expedition. Um. The trip was a
massive ship show and a lot of people died, and
at the end of it, Immin Pasha didn't really wind
up wanting or needing rescue, so Stanley took him along
to Zanzibar Anyway, where Pasha attempted to commit suicide. Um.
After all this, it seems Henry Morton Stanley had finally
had enough of adventuring. He retired to England and lost

(49:03):
his taste for that. Yeah he did here. Yeah, he
retired in England. He married a Welsh artist named Dorothy Tennant,
and kind of to his credit, he adopts a Welsh
a band a bastard child like he He finds like
a poor abandoned kid who's like he was, and he
adopts him and loves him. So that's that's good, because
he's in need of a boy. Yeah, he needed a boy.

(49:23):
He got himself another boy. He's always got a boy,
and this one finally didn't die immediately, so that's good.
That's wonderful for Henry. A happy ending for Henry. In
eighteen ninety nine, Stanley became a Knight of the Order
of Bath. He settled into a dignified retirement, with both

(49:46):
US and in in Britain proudly claiming him as their son.
He became a Liberal Member of Parliament in eighteen and
he died in nineteen o four. The stigma that remained
around all of his murders stopped him from winning a
Westminster Abbey burial, but he did receive a nice memorial.
The epitaph reads Bulamatari, the Breaker of Stones. This was
a nickname he'd been given by Africans who were like,

(50:07):
this guy is such a brutal piece of shit, Like
that's the kind of guy he is, Like he's fucking
hard enough to break stones, right whatever, Um, yeah, But
Stanley actually really liked this nickname, which is why you
should never fucking give a piece of shit a nickname
that sounds cool, Like call him fart master, you know something, something,

(50:29):
something he's not gonna put on his his grave. I'm
gonna quote from Oxford University Press again. He gloried in
the name Bulamatari, the Breaker of rocks portraying the story
of African exploration is a quest for mastery of the Earth.
Stanley's geography was ever a militant and manly science dedicated
to the subjugation of wild nature. It's books and maps
were weapons of conquest rather than objects of contemplation. The

(50:52):
study of geography, he proclaimed in eighteen eighty five, ought
to lead us to something higher than collecting maps and
books of travel and afterwards shelving them as of no
for their use. Why traveler, you're not going to conquer? Wow,
he's a bad tourist. So for most of the last
hundred years in change, a consensus is evolved that Stanley
was a real big piece of ship. And this has
been mostly universally, even among his biographers, until Tim Geal

(51:16):
came around and published Stanley Africa's Greatest Explorer, and him
saved him from the evils of history, because as we know,
history is written by the victims. Yeah, and I will
I will give I will give Geal this. This is
probably the most impressively researched justification for mass murder that

(51:36):
I've ever read. I've never read anyone's put his much
work into defending a guy who killed an enslaved people
for his own benefit, Like he really, he fucking puts
in the legwork to defend this monster. It's almost sort
of inspiring. I kind of wish, I kind of hope
that when if there's ever a biography written about me,
someone like Gel writes it and they can they can frame. Yeah,

(51:59):
they again frame moment. It's like Robert had no choice
but to vomit on the sushi of that Ukrainian couple
out for a nice night at the restaurant. What were
his other options to vanish? To vomit on the people
next to them? The puke was going somewhere, and he
made the only call he good at the time, the
most heroic choice. I would say, Yeah, Jesus, you really

(52:23):
do Everybody should have a deal in their life. Yeah,
I I want to have. I I kind of want
to hear Jeil do Hitler. I know, I know he
wants to. Deep down, I kind of what to hear?
Is Hitler man his Andrew Jackson? I want to Oh, yeah,
he's he. I don't think he would actually do Hitler,
but he would totally do Jackson. Yeah, now, Jell, we've

(52:48):
given I think a well deserved drubbing in this episode.
What he did didn't happen in a vacuum. And I
think I need to close this out by quoting from
a very important book called The Imperial History Wars debating
the British Empire, and it explains the context that this
biography we've been talking shit about came out in quote.
By two thousand twelve, a new documentary series about Britain's
imperial past was being aired on British TV. This one

(53:10):
a BBC production with Newsnight interviewer Jeremy Packsman, who guided
his viewers through amazing stories of adventure. It's nothing short
of a scandal. Packsman scolded that this history is not
taught in schools. The purpose of the series, he explained,
was to refute the conventional view that the British Empire
was a thoroughly bad thing. The TV person the TV personality,

(53:33):
this is where people are going to be bummed. The
TV personality and naturalist Sir David Attenborough apparently did not
get the memo. He complained that Pacsman was far too
negative about the British Empire. Other figures who felt that yeah, yeah, yeah.
Other prominent figures who felt that the public needed to
be re educated about the virtues of the British Empire
and the achievements of its heroes. Were the popular historians

(53:53):
Andrew Roberts, Lawrence James, and Max Hastings. The biographer Tim
Gale wrote a book about Henry Morton Stanley that declared
her to be a his greatest explorer and dismisscharges that
he had massacred Africans during his expeditions and that he
bore any respect We all know. Jill yeah Uh Stanley
became one of the leading proponents of a controversial campaign
to erect a statue honoring Stanley at his place of birth,
the Welsh town of Dinbai. As Jill saw it, the

(54:15):
time had come to dispense with post imperial guilt. For
Jill and those who share his views, this call to
arms was fueled in part by resentment is what he
dismissed as the moral brownie points politicians and others sought
to a crew by well publicized apologies for crimes committed
by earlier generations. He was no doubt alluding to Tony
Blair's apologies for Britain's role in the African slave trade

(54:37):
in the Irish potato famine, Gordon Brown's role in the
export of child migrants to Australia and other colonies, and
David Cameron's apology for the Bloody Sunday massacre and dairy
they call it London dairy, but yeah it's During a
visit to India, Cameron also conceded that the British boars
some blame for the conflict over kashmure An expressed regret

(54:57):
with the Washington Post called a near apology over the
Amritsar massacre of nineteen nineteen. Uh So maybe has very
little to do with Henry Morton Stanley. Then jail is
just like trying to defend himself so badly and like, yeah,
that's that's all these guys are doing that right at
the end of the day. They're defending themselves as heirs
to the British Empire, which is important to them. You know,

(55:19):
when we come from a culture that was built and attained,
you know what would would be called greatness, at least
in sort of the a moral sense, just in the objective,
Like the British Empire was great in the same way
that like a fucking a boxer can be great, even
if they're a piece of sh it. It's just a
term of relative you know, power and influence. Uh, people

(55:41):
who come from those cultures, which is most people at
one point or another. If you dig back long enough,
you have to decide what do you how do you
how do you deal with that? You know? Do you
do you come up with justifications for all your ancestors
tod horrible things? Um? Or do you like? I think
it's often wrongly written as like the options are either

(56:01):
take pride in it or feel ashamed. And it's shitty
to want people to feel ashamed for things they didn't do.
And it's not that at all. I don't feel any
shame personal shame for like slavery. It's just like, yeah, people,
it's a horrible thing that people in the past did.
I didn't do it, but I'm not going to pretend
it wasn't a nightmarish evil that persists to this day
and a lot of its harms on society and that

(56:23):
still has not been made close to right. Uh. It's
not a it's this this attitude that like you have
two options, which is like, feel horrible as a human
being for this or pretend it was fine and you
don't you have the option. Yeah, you don't have to
be one of those in one of those cancer you
can and you're absolutely right, Like you you can acknowledge

(56:45):
that this was something horrible, it existed in history and
that you still benefit from today, and you think about
ways in which you can try and write it within
your own life. But you weren't the one who was
actually killing people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure there's Well
I don't know, like my I I don't know enough
of my genealogy to know if the Scramble for Africa
had any of my relatives in it, But there's a

(57:06):
decent chance and like, yeah, the Scramble for Africa, like
all all of colonialism in Africa, was a history of
unspeakable historic grade war crimes, um. And that's bullshit. And
there's a lot that we should be doing to write it,
including like reparations to just fucking to nations in Africa.

(57:27):
There's a whole lot that needs to be done. And
it's a very complicated discussion. And you don't have to
like beat yourself up about it because you didn't do
anything about it to not be like, but that was
fucked up, and we should do something about that, right, like, yeah, yeah,
we should we should do something here. Huh. I think
what we should probably do is I mean there that

(57:48):
we've done so much damage to the entire continent that
we send Yeah, yeah, maybe if we're just to send
a bunch of you know, civilized people like us, eight options,
we withdraw basically what I would call a white line
through the continent. Yeah, we can establish these little these
little communities in there that can let us like travel

(58:09):
through it, and we can facilitate order and a sar.
And we did it. We invented colonialism again, Jesus, I
see how easy it is to fall into that trap
of inventing colonialism. Had really oh boy, you know, now
that we've had this experience, I think I'm going to
write an eighteen hundred page book about how King Leopold
had no other option to do what he did. We

(58:31):
need rubber, Everyone needs rubber. Have you seen glashes? They're amazing?
What was he to do? His hands were tied I
mean not literally like his slaves, but figuratively, I mean
he actually did still have hands, which is much. Oh,
it's a nightmare, oh sor and how does this compare

(58:53):
to what you'd expected for the tale of Henry Morton Stanley.
He did a lot more terrible things than I anticipated.
She sure did. He was as he man, but I
do I'm very charmed by his lying. It's incredible. I'm
charmed by how much how invested he was in making
himself seem like a badass, to the point where like
he lost track of his lies and then just started inventing.

(59:14):
Any time that he needed a number, it was just
like a bigger number, regardless of whether it was a
good or bad thing. This is a key story for
all grifters. You have to be very whatever thing it
is you do that makes you great, um, you have
to be perfectly consistent about it. Stanley's whole thing is
he lied about stuff to make a more exciting story
so that he would be famous, and he never stopped.

(59:36):
He was unbearably consistent in his lying, and it's why
he was great. It's like how l Ron Hubbard was
incredibly consistent in his lying and so he was able
to die worth seven million dollars being worshiped as a god.
It's like how Donald Trump has done nothing but lie
his entire life and is the president of the United States.
They're all the same guy at a certain level, even

(59:59):
if they didn't. Yes, absolutely, they're all fundamentally, at their
heart of hearts the same individual. They share a soul
and that soul sucks so hard. Well, this has been
a lot of fun, good good story. You want to

(01:00:21):
plug anything, you plug this new idea to establish a
series of trading posts throughout Africa. And I'm look, I
think I still need to bounce some ideas around before
I really lay it on the world, because I'm sensing
that they might have a couple of holes. Yeah, well,
I know one thing, which is that I'm going to
hire a small child to hold my guns. That that

(01:00:44):
seems like a thing worth doing. It goes without saying
that you bring somebody with you to witness all of
your greatness. Yeah, good god. Oh that's the story of
Henry Morton Stanley. You can find the story of us
on our website behind the Bastards dot com. You can
buy t shirts on the t public. You can continue

(01:01:06):
do you want me to do? It's fine? I feel
like you like it now, Sophie. I feel like now
you're angry when I do that because you do it
not as good. I don't I should just do it. Yes,
you want to give a shot. Yeah, I don't know
what we're doing, but I'm gonna try it. Okay, just
do something. Yeah, you're allowed to get all We got
all kinds of merch out there, ladies and gentlemen. Go

(01:01:27):
to tea public and get our shirts if you guys
Anderson on some of our shirts and we got behind
the bastards on others. Were also got a Patreon that
you can donate to, and we've got okay, no Patreon.
Take that way that you would have halfway there you were.
You're really great, much better than Robert. Actually nailed it.
That's all we need to do. So colonize your own.

(01:01:50):
Don't do anything living rooms, I don't I don't know,
I don't know. Just stay the fuck indoors or go
on a run. Yeah, tell the truth, don't I about
how many people use social distance from be honest about
the number of people. It's about seven billion. That's the episode. Yeah,

(01:02:16):
h