Exploring Heroic ‘Territory’

Docudrama, I presume?

Here’s the rundown: In mid-Victorian times, kick-butt reporter Henry Morton Stanley is off to Africa in search of a saintly Christian missionary-explorer, Dr. David Livingstone, finding there redemption and release from his personal demons while a good-looking babe pines for him back home. It’s family values nearly at first sight out in the grungy bush, moreover. While tenaciously snooping around for the origin of the Nile, Livingstone dotes on Stanley as a surrogate for his dead son, and Stanley embraces Livingstone as a substitute for his absentee father.

That’s capsulese for ABC’s “Forbidden Territory: Stanley’s Search for Livingstone,” Sunday at 9 p.m., an attractively mounted account of Stanley and Livingstone, names in history as inextricably bonded (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) as Masters and Johnson.

Capsules can be as misleading as TV histories, of course. In this case, there are also things to admire in “Forbidden Territory,” such as its striking looks (especially those fabulous Kenya sights), its “dark continent” texture under Simon Langton’s fluid direction and its able performances by Nigel Hawthorne as the Scottish Livingstone and Aidan Quinn as the Welsh-born American Stanley. The latter is seen here as a layered protagonist of seething contradictions, a welcome retreat from the paste-on historical figures usually found on TV.

Yet John Pielmeier’s teleplay ultimately capitulates to that common affliction of TV biographies known as “herofication,” a glorious anointing more befitting Livingstone, apparently, than Stanley.

Faced with the daunting challenge of portraying history without rendering the “Baywatch” crowd comatose, filmmakers are fond of surrendering objective truth in the service of a good story, their fallback being that the spirit of the truth is just as good.

The distinction between genuine and inflated heroes is important, however, not just on principle but as a practical matter. As you have read here many times, TV has enormous potential to shape our perceptions of the past as well as those of our own age. Even more than theatrical movies, television is the nation’s pop historian--those images on the small screen looming largest and most vividly as we examine the past in hopes of decoding the present. And if those images are less than truthful?

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In that regard, the intersecting stories of Stanley and Livingstone, far from being an isolated gathering of pith helmets under the boiling sun, are another window through which to observe Africa evolving under the European heel, and to better understand antagonisms about colonialism that endure there today. To say nothing of attitudes that linger in some print histories, where 19th century white explorers are credited with “discovering” rivers and regions in Africa, as if they didn’t exist prior to being encountered by non-Africans.

“Forbidden Territory” opens with the cynical, tabloid-minded chief of the New York Herald dispatching the fearless Stanley to Africa to find and rescue “from the mouths of cannibals” the celebrated Livingstone, who a few years earlier had disappeared into the continent’s interior while embarking on another of his missions of exploration and conversion. He also crusaded against the region’s Muslim slave traders.

Well before disease and attacks from the locals stall Stanley’s caravan in the African countryside, this story gets bogged in his dull romance with a woman (Fay Masterson) to whom he will write intimate letters (with no way to post them) throughout his search for Livingstone.

The Livingstone whom Stanley finally locates two tortuous years later, in 1871, is aging and ailing, but no less obsessed with saving African souls, finding the source of the Nile and abolishing slavers. A few months later, after failing to persuade Livingstone to accompany him to England, Stanley returns without the missionary, bearing Livingstone’s journal as evidence of their meeting.

Despite his Victorian paternalism toward Africans, Livingstone is widely admired by many historians as someone who amassed much knowledge about the “dark continent,” and is lauded in the Encyclopedia Britannica as being “a forerunner not only of European imperialism in Africa but also of African nationalism.”

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You would think from “Forbidden Territory” that Stanley had also earned a spot on that pedestal. During much of this story, Livingstone plays good cop to Stanley’s bad cop, his goodness ultimately rubbing off on the younger man, whose darker side is, indeed, a focus here. He is tormented by memories of his tortured childhood and service in the Civil War, and during the bulk of this account is clearly a cruel disciplinarian and bigot who sees Africans as almost monolithically sub-human.

By story’s end, however, the epiphany has set in, and Stanley is an apparent egalitarian, in one scene pointedly putting down some sniffy Brits as being “inferior” to the African youth whom he has brought to England after acquiring him from a slaver. Thus does “Forbidden Territory” appear to exonerate Stanley by reinventing him as reborn. And no wonder, for ABC says its drama is “inspired by . . . Stanley’s own accounts of his ordeal and eventual triumph.” Triumph over his dark side, apparently. So roll credits and applaud.

“Forbidden Territory” ends its story, however, just prior to Stanley leading an expedition into the Congo territory on behalf of Belgium’s King Leopold II, which indirectly led to the establishment of the Congo Free State under Leopold’s sovereignty. “Free” for some, not for others--for the Belgians would turn out to be among the most brutal of European colonizers.

“Stanley was an unqualified promoter of colonialism,” Pulitzer Prize-winning Rutgers historian David Levering Lewis said from his New Brunswick, N.J., office Wednesday.

“He came straight off the Livingstone encounter into the service of the Belgians, who killed thousands and thousands of people,” added Lewis, whose 1995 book, “The Race to Fashoda,” relies substantially on black African documents to examine 19th century white colonialism in Africa and resistance to it.

Isn’t it true, though, that Stanley did join Livingstone in opposing the slave trade? Lewis: “What Stanley was responsible for doing was interfering with the Muslim slave trade so that the Belgians could replace the Swahilis [the traders], one form of slavery replacing another.”

So Stanley wasn’t heroic? “He was a heroic figure in the sense of the physical things that he did,” Lewis said. “But he wasn’t a nice guy.”

As “Forbidden Territory” depicts so memorably, in fact, Stanley did slog through treacherous terrain and overcome ambushes, alligators and infinite other perils to reach Livingstone and get his story--affirming that they don’t make reporters like they used to.

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* “Forbidden Territory: Stanley’s Search for Livingstone” airs 9-11 p.m. Sunday on ABC (Channel 7). The network has rated it TV-14-V (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14; contains intense violence).