Setting the Captives Free

“He has sent me … to proclaim liberty to the captives.” — from Isaiah 61

In December 1856 David came home to Britain. His children hardly knew him, and his father had died that year, before David could tell him about his journey.

Now David was famous. At Cambridge University in 1857, he told the students that people talked about the sacrifice he had made. “It is emphatically no sacrifice,” he said. “Say rather it is a privilege.” And he said, “I never made a sacrifice.” But Mary and the children, who had waited so long, had given up a great deal. David asked the students to carry on the work in Africa.

In 1858 David went back to lead a big expedition up the Zambezi. But rapids that he had walked round before blocked the river, and no boat could pass. So he went up another river, and in 1859 he reached a huge lake, Lake Nyasa, now called Lake Malawi. Around it, he found, ran one of the main roads of the slave trade.

One day in July 1861, at the village of a chief named Mbame, a long line of captured people came walking in. The men had heavy forked sticks fastened round their necks, and the women and children were tied together with ropes. When the men driving them saw David and his friends, they ran away.

David and his friends cut the ropes and sawed through the heavy sticks. The people knelt and clapped their hands to say thank you. There were eighty-four of them, most of them women and children, and now they were free! Among the children set free in those weeks, as the story is usually told, was a boy of about ten or eleven named Chuma. He will be one of the great heroes of this story.

Jesus came to set people free. God cares about people who are treated cruelly, and he wants us to care about them too, and to stand up for them.

Dear Jesus, thank you that you came to set people free. Please help everyone who is treated cruelly today, and show me how I can help too. Amen.