I am currently reading this book by Henry Morton Stanley after whom the Stanley hotel in Nairobi is named. He was one of the greatest explorers of 'equatorial Africa" in the 1800s. The book has very interesting perspectives on how Africa was before colonisation. I am currently reading volume 1 where he documents his travels from zanzibar to bagamoyo (mainland) to dodoma then to shores of lake victoria then to Kabaka Mtesas kingdom in Uganda.

Am just surprised that before colonisation East Africa was in turmoil with tribes againt each other....and arab slave traders....before colonisation brought order to the region.

H.M Stanley wasn't a great explorer, he was a spy sent by Leopold and C.

And that book is a rationalization of the Colonialist's intentions to partition and commit the atrocities they accomplished.

Like corrupting your mind into thinking that now there's more order in Africa because we wear trousers and eat sardines.

Stanley's work was simple, to write a book that

1. Would show the continent's plenty,

2. Justify the European urge for our resources by showing that we had no significant ideas as to their value

3. Provide a basis of European understanding of the African mind and

4. Establish a world that would among other things, raise his stature in a world that had seemingly granted him low status.

But this book gets juicier once we take this into consideration.

Did he set off a genre that was taken in and furthered by preceding writers? I suspect so!

Read "King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild to get a better understanding of who Stanley really was.

Of course there were no country boundaries then but rather each tribe had its won territory ruled by tribal chiefs. And the relations between tribes weren't always rosy (just like we see today between some tribes eg pokot/turkana/samburu etc).

His book is based on his expedition which was financed by the Ney York Herald and Britains Daily Telegraph whic wanted him to finish the mapping of east african lakes and finding the source of the nile which had been earlier undertaken by David Livingstone. Of course the king of Belgium noted his work and further funded him to map the congo and carve out territory along the congo river for the king. Interestingly the belgian king and the germans (tanganyika) were more interested in acquiring territory in equitorial africa territory than the british, and the british came in late taking territory north of the german tanganyika and west of the sultan of zanzibars lands which included zanzibar and islands mpaka lamu and the 10 mile coastal strip.