Few figures in the history of African exploration are as controversial or as consequential as Henry Morton Stanley. Born John Rowlands in Wales in 1841, Stanley reinvented himself from workhouse child to internationally famous explorer, journalist, and colonial agent. His expeditions through central and eastern Africa in the 1870s and 1880s directly shaped the geopolitical destiny of what would become Uganda, opening the region to European missionary activity, trade, and ultimately colonisation.
Early life and the Livingstone mission
John Rowlands spent his early childhood in a Welsh workhouse — an experience of institutionalised poverty that shaped his fierce ambition. After emigrating to the United States and fighting in the Civil War, he reinvented himself as journalist Henry Morton Stanley. His 1871 assignment from the New York Herald to locate the missing missionary David Livingstone succeeded, culminating in the famous greeting “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika — making Stanley the most famous explorer in the English-speaking world.
The circumnavigation of Lake Victoria and Buganda
Between 1874 and 1877, Stanley traversed the African continent from east to west — a journey of over 11,000 kilometres. The first phase included a circumnavigation of Lake Victoria in 1875 — the first complete circuit by a European — confirming it as a single body of water. He visited the Buganda kingdom at Rubaga and was received by Kabaka Mutesa I with sophisticated diplomatic ceremony. Stanley’s letter to the New York Herald calling for Christian missionaries to come to Buganda, published in 1875, directly prompted the Church Missionary Society to despatch its first missionaries — initiating the sequence of events that led to Uganda’s religious wars, the Uganda Martyrs’ martyrdom of 1886, and ultimately British colonisation.
Stanley’s methods and the violence question
Any honest assessment of Stanley’s expeditions must engage with the violence that characterised his passage through the continent. Stanley used armed force against African peoples who resisted with a frequency that distinguished him even from other nineteenth-century explorers. The term “bula matari” — “he who breaks rocks” in Kikongo — was applied to him by communities along the Congo River. Scholars have estimated that hundreds of Africans were killed in clashes initiated or escalated by Stanley’s party. By contrast, his interactions with the established kingdoms of the Great Lakes — Buganda, Bunyoro — were characterised by diplomatic negotiation, revealing a calculating rather than indiscriminately violent approach.
The Congo Free State and lasting legacy
After his trans-Africa expedition, Stanley was commissioned by King Leopold II of Belgium to secure treaties in the Congo that formed the legal foundation of the Congo Free State — Leopold’s personal colonial territory in which one of history’s most brutal colonial regimes would be exercised. His final major expedition, the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1887–1889, passed through what would become Uganda and contributed to the scramble for influence in the Great Lakes region. The reassessment of Stanley’s legacy has accelerated in recent decades; his statue in his home town of Denbigh, Wales was vandalised during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. For visitors to Uganda today, his expeditions represent one thread in the complex historical tapestry of the country they are visiting — a history worth engaging with honestly, including its darkest chapters.
