Witness for the prosecution

This is a humdinger of a tale. You might have thought that journeys into the heart of the Dark Continent with David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and the likes of Richard Burton had already inspired so vast and breathless a literature that there were few surprises left to report. But that’s the miracle of this story. Alastair Hazell’s genius has been to plough through the huge and well-documented archive, follow his nose, and tell a tale from an entirely new perspective: the life of Dr John Kirk, an early companion to Dr Livingstone, and afterwards a humble Scottish medical officer and Acting British Consul in Zanzibar. In doing so he turns several accounts on their heads, rectifies a seriously skewed picture, rescues a reputation — and on every page enthralls his readers.

Three men stand indicted by this account: Livingstone himself, the journalist Stanley, and the felicitously named Sir Bartle Frere: the grandstanding opportunist who took credit for the ending of a colossal trade in slaves from Africa that continued — unbelievably — into my grandmother’s lifetime. The charges against these three are not new and nor, I shall submit, finally destructive. But, by golly, woven in a single narrative, they take your breath away.

As a young doctor-botanist on Livingstone’s idiotic Zambesi expeditions, Kirk, the most faithful and tenacious of all the missionary’s companions, began what became a lifetime’s study of the Arab-run and (often) Indian-financed slave trade which, centred upon the British-allied sultanate of Zanzibar, had flourished uninterrupted by the British-led abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1871, for instance, Kirk calculated that some 23,400 slaves had been ‘processed’ through Zanzibar (an offshore island controlling key hinterland on the East African coast) en route eastwards, some ten per cent dying on the way. The semi-autonomous India Office wanted nothing to do with interference in this; the Foreign Office had agonised for years; the British public, stirred to indignation by reports from men like Livingstone, were fitfully outraged; and the politicians dithered.