He was born John Rowlands in a small North Wales town, grew up in a workhouse, reinvented himself in America, and became the most famous explorer of his age. He also built the Congo Free State for King Leopold II, a colony whose rule killed people on a scale that still shocks. His statue in Denbigh is one of the most argued-over monuments in Wales.
Few lives show the reach of Victorian Britain into Africa as clearly as Stanley's. A child nobody wanted, from one of the poorest corners of Wales, became a household name on three continents. To his admirers he was the ultimate self-made man. To the Congolese he was Bula Matari, "Breaker of Rocks", the man who cleared the road for Leopold II. Historians have spent a century arguing over which was the real Stanley. The honest answer is both.
John Rowlands was born in Denbigh on 28 January 1841. His mother, Elizabeth Parry, was young and unmarried and soon left for work in London. The church register recorded the baby as "John Rowlands, Bastard", a label he never forgot. He was passed between relatives, and at about six he was put into the St Asaph Union Workhouse, a few miles away. The building later became the H. M. Stanley Hospital.
Stanley later described brutal treatment there, but historians think he exaggerated. The workhouse also gave him a decent education, and he became a voracious reader. One painful detail is well documented: when his mother and two half-siblings were briefly admitted to the same workhouse, he did not recognise her until the master told him who she was. He left in his mid-teens.
For more North Wales history, see our sister site Wales Britain Adventures, and on the slavery fortune just along the coast, Penrhyn Castle, built on Jamaican slavery.
In 1859, aged eighteen, Rowlands worked his passage to New Orleans. There a merchant, Henry Hope Stanley, gave him work and, in Stanley's own telling, something like a father's care. The young Welshman took his name, and added "Morton" later. In the American Civil War he fought for the Confederacy, was captured at Shiloh in 1862, and then switched sides. He later served in the Union navy, and deserted from both.
After the war he found his true trade: journalism. As a roving reporter he covered the wars against the Plains peoples in the American West and the British invasion of Ethiopia in 1868 for the New York Herald, often beating official dispatches to the news. That British expedition ended with the looting of Maqdala, a story touched on in our page on African treasures in British museums.
The Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone had not been heard from for years. The New York Herald's owner, James Gordon Bennett Jr., sent Stanley to find him. Stanley set out from Zanzibar in March 1871 with a large caravan of porters and guards, most of them East Africans whose names rarely appear in his books. In November 1871 he found Livingstone at Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in today's Tanzania.
The famous line, "Dr Livingstone, I presume?", made his name. Whether he actually said it is doubtful. The page of his diary for that day was torn out, and many historians think he polished the phrase afterwards. Either way, his account of the search, How I Found Livingstone (1872), was a best-seller. When Livingstone died in 1873, his African companions Chuma and Susi carried his body to the coast, and it was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1874. Stanley was one of the pallbearers.
Stanley's second expedition was larger and more violent. Starting from Zanzibar in 1874, he circled Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, then followed the Lualaba River north and west. He proved it was the upper Congo, not the Nile, and followed it all the way to the Atlantic at Boma in August 1877. It took nearly three years. Most of his companions died, among them all three of his European assistants and a great many of the African porters, soldiers and their families.
His own writings record repeated battles with communities along the route, many of which he provoked, and he described punishing villages in terms that shocked even some readers at the time. In Britain he was criticised for his methods. In Africa the costs were counted in burned villages and dead people whose names no one wrote down. His book Through the Dark Continent (1878) helped fix the image of a "dark" Africa waiting for Europeans to open it up.
Stanley tried first to interest Britain in the Congo basin, and failed. King Leopold II of the Belgians was very interested. Behind a front of "international" scientific and humanitarian associations, Leopold wanted a colony of his own. From 1879 to 1884 Stanley worked as his agent. He built a road around the rapids of the lower Congo, launched steamers on the river above them, founded stations including Vivi and Léopoldville (today's Kinshasa), and collected hundreds of "treaties" from chiefs who could not have understood that they were signing away their land.
In 1885 the Berlin Conference recognised Leopold's personal rule over the "Congo Free State". What followed was one of the worst colonial regimes in history: forced labour to harvest wild rubber, hostages, mutilations and mass death. The atrocities peaked after Stanley's time there, and his defenders stress that point. But he built the structure, praised the king publicly, and never spoke out against what happened.
Stanley's last great expedition was meant to "rescue" Emin Pasha, the German-born governor of Equatoria in the southern Sudan, who had been cut off by the Mahdist uprising. Leopold insisted on a route up the Congo. Stanley pushed ahead through the Ituri rainforest and left a rear column at Yambuya. Under its British officers, the rear column fell apart in disease, starvation, killings and cruelty. Its story became one of the scandals of the age, and the Congo journeys of these years fed into Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Emin, as it turned out, did not especially want rescuing. Stanley brought him and his people out to Bagamoyo on the East African coast at the end of 1889. On the way, the expedition reached the Rwenzori mountains, the "Mountains of the Moon" on today's Uganda–Congo border, and Lake Edward. Hundreds of the expedition's African members died along the way.
In 1890 Stanley married the painter Dorothy Tennant at Westminster Abbey. He became a British subject again, sat as Liberal Unionist MP for North Lambeth from 1895 to 1900, and was knighted in 1899. He died in London on 10 May 1904. He had wanted to be buried beside Livingstone in Westminster Abbey, but the dean refused. Instead he lies in the churchyard of St Michael's, Pirbright, Surrey, under a huge rough granite monolith.
His papers and collections ended up in the AfricaMuseum at Tervuren near Brussels, the museum Leopold II built to celebrate his colony. It has since been completely reinterpreted to confront that colonial past.
In 2011 Denbigh Town Council unveiled a bronze statue of Stanley by the North Wales artist Nick Elphick, outside the town library, with one hand held out to shake. It was controversial from the start. A group of writers and campaigners, including the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, had called for it to be abandoned. After the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, petitions to remove it gathered thousands of signatures, and a counter-petition defended it. In June 2020 the town council voted 6–5 to keep it pending public consultation. Nearby St Asaph also debated its own memorial to Stanley.
A public vote was finally held on 15–16 October 2021. Around 600 residents voted, roughly four in five of them to keep the statue, and it stays where it is. Supporters see a local boy who achieved extraordinary things from nothing. Opponents see a public honour for a man whose work made the Congo Free State possible.
Whatever you think, the best thing to do at the statue is what this page tries to do: tell the whole story, not just the handshake.
Denbigh is easiest to reach by car or by train to Rhyl and then a bus. For North Wales castles and towns, start at Wales Britain Adventures.
Our tour partner offers tours across the UK, and on the African side, tours in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where Stanley's East African journeys began. Entrance fees are included in the tour price where a tour visits paying sites. Tips are not included but are always welcome.
The Liverpool shipping line that carried Leopold's Congo trade, and the clerk who exposed it.
Another empire builder, another statue, another argument.
North Wales and the fortune made from Jamaican slavery.
The kingdom Stanley visited and Britain later took over.
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