Charles Stokes

Charles Henry Stokes (Dublin, 1852 – near the Lindi River (Congo), 1895) was an Irish missionary turned trader who lived much of his life in Africa and was the centre of the Stokes Affair between the United Kingdom and Congo Free State. Life Charles was born in Dublin and went to school in Enniskillen before his father died when Charles was twenty. When this happened, he went with his mother to Liverpool, where he found work as a clerk for the Church Missionary Society. He decided to seek new horizons and trained as a lay evangelist with the Society in Reading. In May 1878 he arrived in Zanzibar. His first act was to set up a 300-strong vehicle caravan to the Great Lakes, because he wanted to Christianise Buganda. He was a skilled organizer and increasingly undertook expeditions. In January 1883 he married in the Cathedral of Zanzibar with Ellen Sherratt, one of the nurses who were sent to him by the mission. She gave birth to their daughter Ellen Louise in March 1884, but died a week later. The following year Stokes married again, to an African woman named Limi relative of the chief of the Wanyamwesi, a tribe that supplied many of the bearers in his caravans. This was highly unusual at the time. He also had two African concubines, Nanjala and Zaria, with whom he had two children. He was excommunicated by the Protestant Church and became a trader around central Africa, selling goods such as ivory. Stokes was on good terms with the Arabo-Swahili and the British, and since 1890 with the Germans, trading with all of them. In 1894 he went for the first time with a large expedition to north-eastern Congo, with thousands of carriers and large quantities of guns and ivory. The Arabo-Swahili who he was trading with were at war with the Congo Free State at the time and desperately needed weapons.