The ‘Contact Zones’ of Climate

Henry Morton Stanley sought to restore his honour by revisiting Africa in 1874, after doubts arose about his discovery of the ‘lost’ David Livingstone. The foregoing meditation on ‘Fatal Africa!’, inspired by Livingstone's death, concludes with Stanley's renewed commitment to carry on the great ‘work’ of African exploration. The passage illustrates Stanley's bravery in endeavouring to ‘enter’ Africa and discover its ‘secrets’. The furious native is only one of the many challenges Stanley expects to face – all the rest stem from the African environment. According to the theory that influences of the environment can lead to disease, the ‘torrid heat’, ‘miasma exhaled from the soil’, ‘noisome vapors’ and ‘giant cane-grass’ are not only annoying but threatening and potentially fatal to the intrepid explorer. If one's body was predisposed to illness due to intemperance, anxiety or constitutional weakness, Stanley and many of his contemporaries believed that any subsequent challenge of climate could cause heatstroke, malaria or other ‘tropical’ diseases. Stanley's characterisation of climate may be paraphrased thus: ‘the African environment is fatal for many whites, but I am man enough to make the attempt’. This passage is a retrospective addition to his autobiography. In the original narrative of his 1874 travels, Through the Dark Continent (1878), Stanley simply states that the news of Livingstone death ‘fire[s]’ him with ‘resolution’ to complete Livingstone's ‘work’ and to be, ‘if God willed it, the next martyr to geographical science’ (1878: 1).