‘Niama! Niama!’ (‘Meat! Meat!’)
The excited cry of cannibals on the Congo river when they saw Stanley’s expedition approaching (p.197)
Jeal’s exemplary and hugely researched biography (winner of the Sunday Times Biography of the Year award 2007) takes 570 pages (including notes, index etc) to given an immensely detailed narrative of the life of Henry Morton Stanley, widely acknowledged to be the greatest European explorer of Africa. There’s a huge amount about his disastrous childhood, his adventures as a young man, his numerous romantic attachments ie the various engagements which collapsed because he kept on disappearing off to Africa for years , speculation about his psychological profile and needs (an orphan in search of a father who created surrogate families of younger men on his various expeditions).
What interested me more was the general light Jeal’s book shed on the Africa of the 1870s. The French owned Algeria and had…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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