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African American
William Sheppard’s Congo adventures
BY JOHN FREEMAN

Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo
By Pagan Kennedy. Viking, 255 pages, $24.95.


Throughout its long, sad history, the African republic of the Congo has seen few saints and many villains, from King Leopold of Belgium to Mobutu Sese Seko. In her fascinating new book, however, Cambridge novelist Pagan Kennedy decides to home in on one of the country’s rare benefactors, Presbyterian missionary William Henry Sheppard, a man whose dashing adventures and amazing good fortune overshadowed his pivotal role in bringing to light the atrocities of King Leopold’s colonial government.

Sheppard’s journey to international fame and a role as a grudging human-rights advocate was a long and uniquely American one. It all began in a tiny whistle-stop town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where the African-American Sheppard grew up the son of a barber during the decade following the Civil War — a time so brief and suddenly favorable to newly freed slaves, it was dubbed " the improbable years. "

Sheppard seems to have known this peaceful time wouldn’t last, for he worked hard and took advantage of what breaks he could get. It was this resilience that made him an ideal candidate for the Presbyterian Church’s fledgling African missionary. Since most missionaries were white, the 24-year-old man of God had to ship out of New York, in 1890, with a companion, Samuel Lapsley, an Alabama man who had grown up on a plantation.

In spite of the divide of race, Lapsley and Sheppard became fast friends who complemented each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Sheppard’s charm and physical charisma earned the trust of the Africans while Lapsley was worrying over how to convert them. In Kennedy’s lively account, they resemble a humorous odd couple, with Sheppard departing on hippo-hunting expeditions while Lapsley stays behind to chaperone young couples.

Yet Black Livingstone reveals that there was more to Sheppard than hunting game and exploring lost rivers. A year after their arrival, Lapsley died of blackwater fever, and Sheppard became the head of the Southern Presbyterian Mission. Rather than concentrate on the tribe he’d already befriended, he pushed farther into the heart of the country in search of the Koba, a people so rarefied they kept their location a secret.

Thanks to clever ruses and dogged persistence, Sheppard tracked down this ancient people and their beautiful city, and it was every bit the Shangri-La Africans had claimed: wide, clean streets, ornately decorated houses, and the Koba themselves, a noble, beautiful tribe of men and women. Within a few days, the shape-shifting missionary had ensconced himself among their royalty as a reincarnated ruler.

Here, Kennedy claims, is what drew Sheppard and so many other traders and debtors and evangelists to Africa: the ability to reinvent oneself anew. " You went to Africa to escape your last name, your poverty, or your color — to make yourself into a myth. " Yet real life would catch up with Sheppard quickly. After a year with the Koba, he returned to America to fetch his wife and travel the lecture circuit in order to raise money for the mission. By the time he returned to the Congo, the situation had worsened considerably. King Leopold had begun to pit tribes against one another in an effort to corner the rubber trade. The genocide he unleashed was so horrific that not even Sheppard — a black American who knew better than to rock the boat — could keep from speaking out.

Although Black Livingstone is her first book of non-fiction, Kennedy displays a sure touch, weaving key moments from Sheppard’s life into a larger historical context. Even as the story races toward a courtroom climax in which Sheppard must defend himself against libel charges leveled by a multi-national rubber corporation, she highlights telling ironies — key among them the fact that though Sheppard could be a spokesman for human rights in Africa, back in America he was directed to ride among the farm animals when he boarded a train.

In the end it’s this disparity that gives Sheppard’s eventual expulsion from the mission a tragic bite. Although he returned to the South and became an effective minister for a church in Louisiana, his days of swashbuckling heroism were over. Black Livingstone brings those days back to life with authority and loving care.

Issue Date: April 18 - 25, 2002
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