Edward Berenson, Professor of History at New York University, comes to Africa from the European past and French Studies in particular. Leaving aside the customary battalion-length list of thanks, tributes, and acknowledgements one associates with North American books, this is an utterly enthralling and elegantly-crafted work which grips from its arresting opening sentence. On the opening page of the author's introduction to his Heroes of Africa, we learn that ‘in March 1896, while France and Britain dickered over who would control Western and Central Africa, the government in Paris took a bold, if reckless, step. It sent a young army captain, Jean-Baptiste Marchand, up the Congo River and across the forbidding, malarial landscape of Central Africa, tugging a dismantled steamboat all the way’ (p. 1).

Professor Berenson's legendary imperial heroes are the vaulting characters whose perceived charisma and heart-stopping colonial exploits earned them good press at a time when the penny dreadfuls of the ‘new journalism’ were becoming increasingly widespread and sensationalist. Indeed, the ravenous role of the new popular press in egging on grand African colonial conquests is one of the central arguments of this study of several of the major figures who embodied the dynamics of the era of European ‘new imperialism’. As the author sets out to demonstrate, the ‘aura’ of their beavering presence in a varied and testing African environment helped to lay on a thick ‘emotional’ gloss to the imperial enterprise and to ensure that the national hopes and anxieties of ‘a broad public’ would come to be ‘invested’ in imperial success (p. 21).

The core of this impressively researched and probing study consists of seven finely crafted chapters, topped and tailed by a conceptually informative introduction and a crisp and sober epilogue. Following an opening, partly historiographical section on approaches to the culture of empire, to empire as compensation for one or other kind of national deficit, and to sociological and psychological notions of charisma in the larger-than-life colonial figure, Edward Berenson picks away at five anointed African imperial heroes, characters ‘who gave imperialism a recognizable, human face’ (p. 2). While these are, by and large, the usual suspects (with the absence of Rhodes a merciful relief), here they are depicted and evaluated in some fresh and intriguing ways, through analytical prisms which include manliness and gender, and celebrity and charisma.

The first two men made by Africa, who both get a couple of chapters, are Henry Morton Stanley and another figure who fell into sniffing about the Congo, the Italian-born French explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, whose pushiness in equatorial Africa provided a triumphal sideshow to smooth over the ruffled self-image of France's Third Republic. Then there is the saintly British General, Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon, the knightly Christian hero-martyr felled by the rampaging Islamists of Khartoum. The fourth colonial personality is Jean-Baptiste Marchand, whose trampings about the Upper Nile and expeditionary encounter with the British at Fashoda served as an Egyptian antidote to the domestic political mess of the Dreyfus affair. The last biographical assessment is that of another florid Frenchman, the aristocratic Hubert Lyautey, for whom national regeneration lay in nabbing Morocco through the protectorate ideal of pacific conquest.

In a book strong on mixed personal and national initiatives and their muddled African legacies, the author ends on a deliciously sober overall note. His ‘charismatic heroes and exemplars of empire’ (p. 263) all lived on long after the end of their careers and lives; even when their exploits and expeditions were contaminated by irrefutable cruelty and gratuitous violence – as in the case of Stanley – they still enjoyed an enduring after-life of famous or ‘celebrity’ status.

Or, they can become reinvented and raised anew, as in the example of Brazza, whose cultivated memory once served political ends in France. In the early years of the present century, with the Republic of the Congo stuck in its neo-colonial bind of European economic domination, poverty, inter-ethnic violence, and corrosive corruption, Brazza reared his head again, but this time as a Congolese Lazarus. The 2005 centennial of his death would have been too politically indigestible for any official commemoration in France. Brazzaville, however, was more consenting, as Congo-Brazzaville leaders aided by French hangers-on raised a monument in homage to the explorer's anti-slavery instincts and stature as a powerful outsider, a magnetic bridge between the destiny of Africa and the destiny of Europe, ‘implicated in none of the Congo's ethnic and ideological conflicts’ (p. 285) and thus a wishfully pristine symbol of peace.

Edward Berenson is anything but rosy-eyed on such matters, viewing it correctly as rhetorical cloud cover for the largely predatory interests of a narrow political and economic elite. But he is equally clear that ordinary Africans – here, the Congolese – are not dupes always to be led by the nose. The Brazza charismatic myth can also be seen as an expression of the everyday desire of common inhabitants ‘to connect to a developed world governed by the rule of law’, an alluring world they ‘never enjoy themselves’ (p. 286). Written in limpid prose and presenting a complex picture of the interplay of European nationalist impulses, imperial popular culture, emotional projections and giddy male hero-worship, Professor Berenson keeps in sight the hub upon which everything turns, the byzantine challenges and complexities of the Africa which so gripped his heroes. His book is considerably more than its dust jacket description as the first comparative history of colonial heroes in Britain and France.