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This British raid was covered by an American journalist who chronicled the predations of British soldiers, but now fell in love with Africa and came to personify the spirit of European adventure and exploitation: Henry Morton Stanley. In fact he was neither American nor called Stanley; he was born John Rowlands, an illegitimate Welsh boy, abandoned by his mother and raised in workhouses. At eighteen, he sailed for America, adopted a new name, worked on Mississippi riverboats, fought for both the Confederacy and the Union, then, embracing sensationalist war journalism, was hired by the New York Herald to cover Napier’s little African war.

Stanley ignored African history and culture, calling it ‘unpeopled country’ and seeing it as a blank canvas, a commercial opportunity, a fantastical arena for this mendacious and indefatigable adventurer to display Victorian machismo and defy ‘that shallow life which thousands lead in England where a man isn’t permitted to be real and natural’. Now he needed a greater story.

His famous contemporary, the indomitable missionary Dr David Livingstone, was lost, feared dead. Stanley, still in his late twenties, proposed to his editor-proprietor in New York City to manufacture his own newspaper sensation: by finding Livingstone.

Livingstone was already celebrated for a different approach to Africa, where he had led a typically Victorian mission to spread Christianity, destroy east African slave lords and find the origins of the Zambezi and Nile. He too was an attention-seeker, a humourless and obsessional self-made man, a working-class Glaswegian, now a father of five who was bored at home and craved the solitary, righteous drama of his missions. Starting as a missionary in South Africa aged twenty-seven, he was restless and tireless, becoming the ‘explorer’ who travelled across the continent (a feat hailed in the British press, though two slave-trading pombeiros had crossed Africa in 1806). Seething within Livingstone was a Victorian cult of death: ‘Am I to be a martyr to my own cause?’ The booming newspapers of London and New York followed his exploits, the ladies attended his lectures. His abolitionist passion was noble and genuine but it was linked to his own vanity and his conviction that opening Africa to ‘commerce’ – British business – was the best antidote to slavery.

Many of the African ‘adventurers’, mostly British and French, believed in a ‘civilizing mission’ based on racist views of African inferiority; and even before the states arrived, it was hard to differentiate between Christian missionaries, scientific-geographic explorers and empire builders, mercantile adventurers, predatory mercenaries and sex tourists – but they were all risk-takers. Their journeys were often lethal. When Stanley later crossed Africa from the Indian Ocean to the Congo, some 7,000 miles, every white member of his party (except himself) and 173 Africans perished.

In 1866, Livingstone set off from the east African coast with just thirty-five bearers to find the source of the Nile, but found himself in an imbroglio of war and slave hunting in which his men died or deserted. He was driven by his Nilotic obsession: ‘The Nile sources are valuable only as a means to enable me to open my mouth with power among men … to remedy an enormous evil.’ At the mercy of slave lords, almost out of supplies, he somehow survived, although suffering dysentery. The news of his vanishing fascinated the world.

In March 1871 Stanley set off to ‘rescue’ Livingstone, accompanied by columns of African bearers and a formidable arsenal, as he played the warlord, fighting his way through conflicts between African and Arab slavers, picking off passing Africans with his rifle. At last, in November, he found the lost explorer in a setpiece of myth-making imperial adventure. ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ said Stanley, initiating this encounter of noble mission and shameless hucksterism. Toothless and emaciated, Livingstone was by then ‘just a ruckle of bones’. Stanley rushed back to file his story, and Livingstone, characteristically, insisted on pushing on towards the Nilotic source, dying of dysentery.

Yet Stanley’s story made him world famous. More importantly it publicized the ‘great human woe’ of east Africa’s slave trade, leading the British public to demand its abolition, a campaign that would – along with imperial ambition – draw in the European powers. London sent the navy to intercept slave traders and forced Sultan Bargush of Zanzibar to cease the trade.