Shupanga

“Jehovah is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, And saveth such as are of a contrite spirit.” — Psalm 34:18 (ASV)

Blocked at Kebrabasa, Livingstone turned up the Shire River. Above it he found cool, fertile highlands and, in 1859, the great Lake Nyasa, now Lake Malawi. Local people and traders had long known it; he was the first to report it to the wider world. He also found one of the main slave routes of East Africa running right through it.

In 1861 the new Universities’ Mission arrived, led by a cheerful, brave young bishop named Charles Mackenzie. In July, walking into the highlands with him, Livingstone’s party reached the village of a chief named Mbame. A long line of captives came in: men with their necks locked in heavy forked sticks, women and children roped together. When the drivers saw the Englishmen, they ran. The party cut the ropes and sawed through the sticks. Eighty-four people, most of them women and children, were told they were free. They described the march: a woman killed because she couldn’t carry both her load and her baby, and the baby killed with her.

Among the children freed in those weeks, by the usual account, was a Yao boy of about ten named Chuma. Remember his name.

Jesus began his ministry reading Isaiah’s words about “liberty to the captives.” At Mbame’s village, for once, freedom from sin and freedom from chains didn’t have to be argued about. It was both.

Then things turned dark. Yao groups, themselves driven from their homes, were raiding the local Mang’anja villages for captives. Days later Livingstone’s party clashed with a raiding band and several raiders were killed. It was the first time he had led men into a fight where people died, and it troubled him deeply. Then he went back to the river. Mackenzie, left among people being killed and enslaved, went with Mang’anja forces against the raiders. People in Britain were outraged that a bishop had gone to war. It is hard to judge either man. Doing nothing wasn’t innocent either.

Livingstone arranged to meet Mackenzie at the mouth of the Ruo River in January 1862, and didn’t make it; his boat ran aground. Mackenzie waited on an island in the rainy season, his medicines lost when his canoe overturned. He died of fever on 31 January. Some never forgave Livingstone. He said he couldn’t help it. Both were true.

Mary arrived at the end of January 1862. She had left the children, including baby Anna Mary, in Scotland and come because she couldn’t bear being apart any longer. She was no frail visitor: she was a missionary’s daughter who had grown up among the Batswana, spoke Setswana from childhood, ran schools, nursed the sick and crossed the desert twice while pregnant. People called her Ma-Robert, mother of Robert.

For a few weeks at Shupanga, beside the Zambezi, they were together. In April she caught fever. The usual treatments failed. On 27 April 1862, with her husband beside her, she died. She was forty-one. They buried her under a great baobab tree.

Livingstone was shattered. His journal, as his biographer printed it, said it was the first heavy blow he had suffered, and that it took away all his strength. He had loved her when he married her, he wrote, and loved her more the longer they lived together. For the first time in his life, he felt willing to die.

Some of his letters defended him: she had insisted on coming. Others let something else slip through: she came because he had left her alone so long. It would be cruel to blame him for malaria. It would be dishonest not to say that the shape of her lonely married life came from his choices.

The psalm says God is near the broken-hearted and saves the contrite, people whose grief sees their own part in the wound. There are hints of that in his journal. Within days, though, he was back at work.

One thing to do this week: if you have hurt someone close to you, don’t only feel bad about it. Tell God plainly what your part was, then tell the person.