The Sentence of Death

“By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.” — Hebrews 11:8 (ASV)

When Livingstone went back up the Shire at the end of 1862, the valley he had praised as the most promising place in Central Africa had become a graveyard. Drought had destroyed the harvests, and slave raiders had burned the villages and carried off thousands of people. Bodies floated past the steamer every day. The drought and raids had their own causes, but the valley he had hoped to save was ruined within a few years.

In 1863 the government recalled the expedition. As far as they could see, it had produced a blocked river, a dead bishop, a failed mission and a string of resignations. Livingstone accepted it, deeply hurt.

He wouldn’t sell the small steamer he had paid for where it might be used in the slave trade, so in 1864 he sailed it across the Indian Ocean to Bombay, two and a half thousand miles, in a river boat never meant for the open sea, with a crew that included young African men who had never been to sea, among them Chuma. It was brave, and reckless with other people’s lives.

In London he heard about his eldest son. Robert, eighteen, angry and resentful of his absent father, had gone to America and joined the Union army in the Civil War under a false name, so as not to shame his family. He was captured and died in a prison camp in North Carolina in December 1864. Livingstone wrote his children loving letters, but he was rarely there, and stern when he was. Paul wrote, “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.” Robert was provoked. His father seems to have blamed Robert more than himself.

In 1865 his mother died, and in August he left Britain for the last time. The Royal Geographical Society wanted him to settle the source of the Nile. He agreed on one condition: he would go as a missionary, and do geography on the way. He also meant to see the slave routes and expose them.

In 1866 he landed on the coast of what is now Tanzania. Among his party were Susi, a man from Shupanga who had worked on the Zambezi, and Chuma and his friend Wikatani, the two boys freed in the Shire Highlands, now young men.

The road inland was a slave road. Day after day he wrote down what he saw: a woman tied by the neck to a tree and left dead, people killed when they couldn’t keep up. He wrote it plainly, as evidence, so Britain would act.

Near Lake Nyasa, Wikatani found relatives he thought were lost, and stayed with them. Then a group of the party deserted out of fear and, to excuse themselves, told the authorities at Zanzibar that Livingstone had been killed. Obituaries appeared in Britain before a search party proved the story false.

On 20 January 1867 two porters ran off with his medicine chest, including the quinine that kept him alive. He wrote that he felt he had received the sentence of death, as Bishop Mackenzie had. It was nearly true. Fever attacked him again and again.

He didn’t turn back. Without medicine, money or enough men, he could only survive by travelling with the Arab-Swahili caravans from Zanzibar that dealt in ivory and slaves, among them the trader later called Tippu Tip. He ate their food and accepted their protection, while writing down what they did. The man who freed captives at Mbame’s now depended on slavers to stay alive. He wasn’t part of their trade. But he knew how it looked.

He reached Lake Tanganyika, Lake Mweru and then Lake Bangweulu, which no European had described before, and became convinced the rivers there fed the Nile. He was wrong; they fed the Congo.

Abraham went out “not knowing whither he went.” Livingstone didn’t know whether he would live, or whether anyone knew he was still alive. He went on anyway.

One thing to do this week: write a real letter or message to a parent or someone older in your family, saying one thing you are grateful for and one thing you wish you could talk about. Send it, or pray about whether to.