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Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

REDIRECT ALERT! (Scroll down past this mess if you're trying to read an archived post. Thanks. No, really, thanks.)

Due to my inability to control my temper and complacently accept continued silliness with not-quite-as-reliable-as-it-ought-to-be Blogger/Blogspot, your beloved Possumblog will now waddle across the Information Dirt Road and park its prehensile tail at http://possumblog.mu.nu.

This site will remain in place as a backup in case Munuvia gets hit by a bus or something, but I don't think they have as much trouble with this as some places do. ::cough::blogspot::cough:: So click here and adjust your links. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it's one of those things.

Tuesday, April 09, 2002

The Black Livingstone
Interesting review of Pagan Kennedy's book, Black Livingstone A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo.

[...] William Henry Sheppard was born in 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 [sic, David] 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, laboring on a farm 10 hours a day and then attending classes for another two hours.

[...] 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 rumored 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 visit the Kuba city. He emerged not just unharmed, but was 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.”

posted by Terry at 10:50:00 AM

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