Through the Dark Continent by Henry M. Stanley

Through the Dark Continent is a book I wish I’d had a chance to read before I reviewed Tim Butcher’s Blood River. Butcher’s book recounts his adventures crossing the Congo in the footsteps of Stanley, and although I’d read Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone, I hadn’t read his book on the Congo.

Through the Dark Continent is a substantial work: 800 pages long in the two-volume Dover edition. Like other Dover books, this one is a photoreproduction of a 19th century original, and the antique type and engravings add to the pleasure of the text. Having set type by hand in the past, I noticed the increase in typographical errors in the second volume as the typesetters grew weary (and perhaps, according to stereotype, drunk).

The first volume is devoted to Stanley’s explorations around the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, including a visit to the emperor of Uganda. It is not until the second volume that he sets out on the Congo River, which he refers to throughout as the Livingstone — a name that didn’t stick.

Several times during his journey, Stanley found villages decorated with skulls that he was puzzled to identify. Some he believed were human, left over from cannibal feasts, but others he was told belonged to an ape called the “soko.” Sometimes he thought he heard this creature: “The grey parrots with crimson tails here also first began to abound, and the hoarse growl of the fierce and shy ‘soko’ (gorilla?) was first heard” (p. 60).

In a village called Kampunzu (p. 111) he found “two rows of skulls, ten feet apart, running along the entire length of the village, imbedded about two inches deep in the ground, the ‘cerebral hemispheres’ uppermost, bleached, and glistening white from weather.” The skulls looked human to him, though with “unusually low and retreating” frontal bones. He asked the villagers what they were.

“They replied, ‘sokos’ — chimpanzees (?).”

By now Stanley had apparently decided that chimpanzees were what the locals meant by sokos — but if these skulls were large enough to be mistaken for human, then they were probably not those of chimpanzees. He pressed for a description.

“It is about the size of this boy,” pointing to Mabruki, my gun-bearer, who was 4 feet 10 inches in height. “He walks like a man, and goes about with a stick, with which he beats the trees in the forest, and makes hideous noises. The Nyama eat our bananas, and we hunt them, kill them, and eat them.”

The description would seem to fit a large chimp or a small gorilla — but when Stanley took two soko skulls to England and showed them to Professor Huxley (presumably Thomas Henry Huxley, the Darwinian) he was told they were human.

Perhaps Huxley was right, or perhaps he was not familiar enough with gorillas to tell the difference. It was only about twenty years before that Paul du Chaillu, author of the neglected Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, was apparently the first Western to see gorillas in the wild.

Discouraged workers

Rather than add to the chorus of despair over the current financial crisis, I’ve been trying to feature the encouraging words of people like John Bogle and Warren Buffett. But the phenomenon of discouraged workers, which the Times noted on December 5, deserves more attention. In short, 6% unemployment doesn’t mean that 94% of workers are working. The situation is much worse.

According to the Labor Department, the number of unemployed workers rose by 251,000 in November. But the number of people who were outside of the labor force — that is, neither working nor looking for work — rose by much more: 637,000. These people aren’t counted as unemployed in the government’s statistics, because they are not looking for work. Many of them, presumably, have stopped looking for work because they didn’t think they could find a good job.

If you take a broader measure — one that tries to account for them — you see a darker picture of the labor market. The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s. The share of women with jobs has fallen almost two percentage points from the peak it reached in 2000; at no other point in the past 50 years has the share of employed women has fallen so much from its peak.

New reviews on Africa and the Caribbean

More of my book reviews on African and Caribbean topics are now available on this site (thanks, Jenn!)

Africa
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild
GraceLand by Chris Abani
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
Instruments of Darkness by Robert Wilson
The Seventh Heaven by Naguib Mahfouz
Zarafa by Michael Allin

Caribbean
Quitting America by Randall Robinson

The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument

November 15 was gray and rainy, but the rain held off long enough for the rededication of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Fort Greene Park. The original eagles have been restored to the corners of the square that surrounds Stanford White’s Doric column, and at the climax of the ceremony an electric light was turned on to illuminate the urn at the top of the column — a somewhat underwhelming substitute for the original eternal flame.

The monument, dedicated one hundred years before, was built to honor more than 11,500 American rebels who died on British prison ships in Wallabout Bay, where the Brooklyn Navy Yard was later built. More soldiers and sailors died of starvation, dysentery, and ill treatment on these ships than were killed in all the battles of the Revolution combined.

As historian Edwin Burroughs described it at the ceremony, a dozen or more prisoners might die each day on a ship like the infamous Jersey. Their bodies would be unceremoniously carried to a wharf, loaded onto wheelbarrows, and dumped in shallow water. For years the bones washed up on the shore, and as Burroughs quoted one source, the skulls were “as thick as pumpkins in an autumn cornfield.”

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles R. Morris

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown has been making the rounds at the mutual fund company where I work. It’s not surprising — this is a timely, hard-hitting, and opinionated look at the global financial crisis we find ourselves in. If you want a deeper understanding of what’s going on, but without reading a massive tome, this is the book for you.

That doesn’t mean it makes easy reading, though. Morris has followed Einstein’s advice by making his explanation as simple as possible — but not simpler. He is evenhanded but not wishy-washy. The Republican cult of deregulation comes in for severe criticism, but so does what he sees as the failure of liberal Keynesianism that preceded it. Morris shows in painful detail how much havoc the exotic derivatives created in recent years have caused, but he also believes that some of these were useful and ingenious inventions.

Contrary to those who maintain that the “free market” will magically correct all excesses, Morris thinks that each financial innovation will almost inevitably be pushed to its limit until it crashes. Only then will we know its limitations, and how to regulate it. But in a globalized, computerized world, dangerous financial innovations can spread faster and wider than ever before. Dodgy credit becomes marbled through our institutions like fat in a steak, to use his colorful analogy.

Colorful analogies are, in fact, one of Morris’s strengths. Here’s another:

According to the Financial Times, in October 2007 several big banks were negotiating discounted lending terms to vulture funds, firms that specialize in distressed debt, on the condition that they use the money to buy the banks’ deal-related leveraged loans. This is a snake fighting starvation by eating its tail.

The credit crisis isn’t just about bad mortgages, this books makes plain. It’s not about any single type of asset, and that is what makes it harder to cope with than the bubbles of the past.

Overpriced assets are like poison mushrooms. You eat them, you get sick, you learn to avoid them.

A credit bubble is different. Credit is the air that financial markets breathe, and when the air is poisoned, there’s no place to hide.

Like Paul Krugman and other critics, Morris names former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan as one of the key culprits. It’s ironic that Greenspan is so well known for his warning of “irrational exuberance,” because Morris cites many examples to show that Greenspan was better at inflating bubbles than letting the air out of them. I was pleased to see that Morris singles out an example that struck me at the time. “I’m sure Mr. Greenspan is a very smart guy,” I remember thinking then, “but this makes no sense to me.”

In 2004, when families had a historic chance to lock in long-term fixed-rate mortgages at only 5.5 percent, Greenspan said they were losing “tens of thousands of dollars” by not grabbing one-year ARMs, then at teaser rates of only 3.25 percent. In any scrapbook of bad advice from economic gurus, that should be near the top of the list.