/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/BOOKS-U.S.: Little-Known Black Explorer Finally Gets His Due

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sonya Rhee

NEW YORK, Mar 12 2002 (IPS) - Novelist Pagan Kennedy knew that the dramatic story of William Sheppard, a little-known African- American missionary and explorer who traveled to the Belgian Congo in 1890, had to be told; she just wasn’t sure if she should be the one to tell it.

As a white woman, Kennedy worried that she would lack the insight needed to portray his story. But her enduring fascination and curiosity – as well as an ancestral connection – eventually overcame Kennedy’s hesitation and ‘Black Livingstone: A True Tale in the Nineteenth Century Congo’ (Viking, 2002) is the result.

William Henry Sheppard was born in the US state of Virginia in 1865, near the end of the Civil War, and grew up in the era of Jim Crow racial segregation. Young William contributed to the family income by toting packages, hay or anything else he could find, and at the age of 11 moved in with a white family to work as a stable boy.

As a child, Sheppard probably heard about the famous adventures of Henry Morton Stanley, who in 1871 uttered his famous words (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume”) to the explorer and missionary Dr. Stanley Livingstone.

Like most others in the Western world, Sheppard likely knew little else about the “dark continent.” For profit-hungry Europeans, including Belgium’s King Leopold, Africa was the place to seek fame and fortune. As a missionary, Sheppard saw Africa as a place to perform God’s work – but that wouldn’t stop him from seeking glory as well.

Sheppard had already displayed ambition and a quick intelligence before his adventures in the Congo. He was a member of the first graduating class at Booker T. Washington’s Hampton Institute and later studied for the ministry at Tuscaloosa Theological Institute (now Stillman College). Sheppard toiled in the work-study program at Hampton, labouring on a farm 10 hours a day and then attending classes for another two hours.

At Hampton, Sheppard was among equals, but in the rest of the South, a near apartheid reigned. Sheppard recalls in his memoirs that when he traveled from his home in Virginia to Alabama to attend Tuscaloosa, he constantly struggled to find a place to sleep or eat, since most places would refuse to serve dark- skinned people.

Sheppard pressed the Southern Presbyterian Church to send him to Africa, but officials told him that until a white man could be found to lead the mission, Sheppard would have to wait.

In February 1890, Sheppard sailed as one-half – unequal at best – of the church’s first mission to Africa. His companion, Samuel Lapsley, a 23-year-old white minister from Alabama, was officially head of the mission but it was Sheppard who soon took charge.

Lapsley, often ill, swaddled in blankets and carried on the backs of native villagers, was poorly suited for the hardships of missionary life in Africa and died shortly after his arrival.

But Sheppard thrived in Africa, and it was he who finally led the mission into the depths of the Congo, killed hippos (he claims 36) and learned the languages of the villagers.

One of Sheppard’s greatest feats was to find his way into the forbidden city of the Kuba kingdom. For nine years, Europeans had unsuccessfully sought this great city, which was rumoured to be filled with riches.

Sheppard’s unrelenting will and clever tactics, besides his mastering of the Kuba language, made him the first Westerner to step into the Kuba city. He emerged not just unharmed, but having been declared the reincarnation of “Bope Mekabe,” an ancestral king.

Sheppard insisted that a mistake had been made, but the king replied that after such a long journey, naturally, he would have forgotten his true identity. This event is one of the most engaging parts of the book and explains the unique position that Sheppard held as the ghost of a returning son, the “black white man.”

As an American missionary, he was part of the colonising majority. But as a Southern black man, he was not accepted by his own church, or country, as an equal. He was able to see the situation in the Congo with the sober eyes of an outsider among the Westerners.

It was with this perspective that he began to expose the brutal cost of colonialism in the Congo. His reports were published around the world and also used by the famed American novelist Mark Twain as a reference for his satirical book, “King Leopold’s Soliloquy.”

Sheppard later stood trial for his comments in the infamously corrupt Free State court where he was acquitted of all charges and emerged a human rights hero.

For all his accomplishments, which are too many to list, Sheppard was forgotten and scarcely mentioned in history books. More than a century after his adventures, “Black Livingstone” places Sheppard firmly in the historical record.