Kalulu the African boy servant

Kalulu the African boy servant

The boy pictured below was Kalulu, a 12-year-old enslaved African who drowned in Livingstone Falls in the Congo while working as a porter for British explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who also appears in one of the photos.

Kalulu, originally named Ndugu Mhali, was sold to Stanley by an Arab merchant in Zanzibar. Stanley disliked his original name and christened him Kalulu.

From 1872 to 1873, Kalulu accompanied Stanley across Europe and America, posing for a wax model later installed at Madame Tussaud’s museum in London. Stanley briefly enrolled him at a school in Wandsworth, South West London, where the headmaster noted that Kalulu was “clever and progressing in English.”

After Dr. David Livingstone’s death in Zambia in 1874, Stanley, eager to continue Livingstone’s exploration, withdrew Kalulu from school and they returned to Africa.

In 1877, while serving as Stanley’s servant, Kalulu joined an expedition in the Congo to find the source of the Nile. Tragically, during this trip, Kalulu died in an accident when his canoe plunged down a waterfall on the Congo River, later named ‘Kalulu Falls’ in his honor.