5 - COORDINATED DESTRUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Summary
Destruction as Conquest
Welsh-born adventurer John Rowlands created a new life and identity for himself as Henry Morton Stanley, American explorer and self-dramatizing rescuer of Dr. Livingstone. In August 1877, Stanley completed the first European expedition from Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa, to the Congo River's mouth, on the west. He had started that journey down the Congo with 356 people and more than eight tons of weapons, equipment, and trading goods. For Stanley,
continual combat was always part of exploring. He never bothered to count the dead that the expedition left behind it, but the number must have been in the hundreds. Stanley's party carried the latest rifles and an elephant gun with exploding bullets; the unlucky people they fought had spears, bows and arrows, or, at best, ancient muskets bought from slave-traders. “We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages,” he wrote in his journal. … As he piloted the Lady Alice toward a spot on Lake Tanganyika, for instance, “the beach was crowded with infuriates and mockers … we perceived that we were followed by several canoes in some of which we saw spears shaken at us … I opened on them with the Winchester Repeating Rifle. Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.”
(Hochschild 1998: 49)Like many another European colonialist and many an American Indian fighter, the Welsh-American explorer deployed vindictive violence as a matter of right and pride.
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- The Politics of Collective Violence , pp. 102 - 129Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003