
When news emerged that Emin Pasha, one of Egypt’s provincial administrators, had become trapped in central Africa, a small group of commercial men conceived a bold plan for him to be rescued by the world’s most famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, but the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (EPRE as it came to be known) would descend into disaster. That did not stop him from proclaiming himself its hero, battling against malign fate, vicious natives, disobendient subordinates and base ingratitude from the men he rescued.
Although Stanley promised that the expedition would cost no more than £20,000, the sum was still rather more than his sponsor Sir William MacKinnon was willing to raise personally with friends and family, so it was not until the Egyptian Government (Emin was technically an employee) was permitted by the British Government to commit to 50% of the cost, that preparation could begin. Stanley recruited seven white officers in London - Lt William Stairs, Robert Nelson, J Rose Troup, Major Edmund Barttelot, William Bonny, Arthur Mounteney Jephson and James Jameson, and MacKinnon's agent in Zanzibar hired 600 slave porters to carry the expedition's supplies, guns and ammunition up to Emin's province. Two other white officers, Dr Thomas Parke and Herbert Ward joined the expedition in Africa. Stanley was travelling with his personal valet William Hoffman whom nobody counted among the officers.
They made their way to Zanzibar where they picked up the 600 porters and were joined by notorious ivory and slave trader Tippu Tib and his retinue of fellow Arabs, wives, children and slaves before sailing round to the mouth of the Congo. At every stage in its journey the expedition suffered from transportation problems and Stanley was forced to divide his forces a number of times, most notoriously at the village of Yambuya on the Aruwimi River which was a tributary of the Congo flowing down from the unexplored regions that the expedition would have to cross. It was here that Stanley left the Rear Column under the command of Major Barttelot and Jameson (and Bonny, Troup and Ward when they caught up), while he and his officers Parke, Stairs, Mounteney Jephson and Nelson took an Advance Column towards Lake Albert where it eventually met up with Emin Pasha after an absolutely appalling journey through almost impenetrable jungle.

In 1888 Stanley returned to the Aruwimi to find out what had happened to the Rear Column, only to discover that of the five officers stationed at Yambuya (Barttelot, Jameson, Bonny, Troup and Ward) just one remained. Troup had been invalided home; Ward sent down the Congo to obtain instructions from London; Major Barttelot had been shot dead and although he assumed he had merely gone AWOL, Jameson was within hours of dying of fever. The force of porters and soldiers left at Yambuya over a year earlier had almost been wiped out by disease, starvation and cruel punishments.
Stanley gathered up the remnants of the Rear Column and rejoined Emin at Lake Albert before the entire expedition made its way slowly back through East Africa to the coastal town of Bagamoyo, arriving there in the last days of 1890. In a final twist to the story, at the celebratory dinner hosted by his German compatriots, Emin fell out of a window and injured himself, thus giving him the perfect excuse to avoid being taken back to Europe as the main exhibit to Stanley's heroic return.

prevented Emin from accompanying Stanley back to Europe. He
fell out of the window at the top of the stairs and tumbled to the
ground but despite reports, was unlikley to have been badly hurt.
The expedition, which was meant to have taken no more than 12 months ended up taking three times as long and exceeding the initial budget twice over. Of the 600 porters who had left Zanzibar three years earlier, fewer than 180 made it home and as the expedition crossed Africa, Stanley and his men slaughtered hundreds of natives and by burning their villages, destroying their crops and stealing their livestock and food, caused the death by starvation and disease of many thousands more.
Any modern reader of Stanley's book will notice that the part of the expedition with him in charge is presented as brave, determined and successful while the part left in the charge of his young officers as morally flawed, irresolute and unsuccessful, despite the fact that the day-to-day experiences of hunger, harsh discipline, sickness and death in each part of the expedition were not so very different. However, it was Stanley’s progress that had the most traumatic effect on the local African population.
It is striking that he lavished praise on the companions who travelled with him on the Advance Column and that they in turn chose not to throw doubt on his version of events, despite the fact that in the privacy of their diaries each was highly critical of him and detailed the most awful brutalities which he had gone out of his way to conceal. Stanley's fiercest criticism was reserved for all members of the Rear Column and when the expedition was over, they tried to take his leadership to task when he blamed them for its collapse.
Stanley's management of the expedition was widely criticised at the time, but nothing sufficiently damning could be pinned on him even though he had - by his own account - slaughtered his way across Africa. He became a reluctant MP and remained an honorary member of the “Establishment” right up until his death.
He candidly admitted that he had witheld much from his published account and modern scholarship has established that he was a prolific liar throughout his life, yet too many people still unquestioningly accept his version of events.
This struck me as being very curious, and I wondered how fair it was to the young, dead, companions whose reputations he had trashed.
A SHORT WORD OF EXPLANATION ABOUT "ARABS" IN THE CONTEXT OF EAST AFRICA
In every book about East African exploration in the 19th century, reference is made to "the Arabs" who operated and controlled the trade routes down to the coast, and the most famous of these was Hamed bin Mohammed al-Murjabi, better know then and now as Tippu Tib (and spelling variants).
Sailors from Oman have been collecting ivory, spices, mangrove poles and other commerce from the east coast of Africa for centuries and they started to settle there from about the 14th century. The ruins of their trading centres (like Gedi in Kenya or Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania) still stand as testament to the level of civilisation that came with them.

They also brought two things that radically changed the whole of tropical Africa - their religion - Islam - and their language - Arabic. The former gave the practice of slavery, which was endemic throughout Africa, Koranic acceptance, and the language formed one of the backbones of Kiswahili, now widely spoken throughout the region. These Omanis stayed and settled, intermarrying with native Africans and fathering many children. Although culturally they saw themselves as more Arabic than African, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish them and since even the children of slaves were routinely accepted into the family, they often became powerful traders in their turn.

Over course of time, they followed their market and set up trading posts inland all the way up to the Lakes region around Lake Victoria. When the first white explorers reached the Kingdom of Buganda, Arab traders were already there, impressing the natives with the fire power of their ancient guns - at least until the Europeans displayed their own superior weaponry - and introducing a market for slaves.

There were tribes further inland that did not welcome the Arab traders and engaged in bloody battles with them, but others joined with the Arabs in the suppression of rival tribes and clans, particularly those from the region the Europeans knew as "Manyema" (see my Map 2). As far as the Europeans were concerned, the term "Arabs" was used to cover not just the mixed generations of Omani traders, but also the mercenary Africans who joined them, even though they may not have had a drop of "arabic" blood in their veins. I have reluctantly used the same term to distinguish all non white marauders who ravaged the coutryside under the banner of Arabic overlords, but it should be understood that this is only a shorthand.