How Long?

“O Jehovah, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? I cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save.” — Habakkuk 1:2 (ASV)

West of Lake Tanganyika lay Manyema, the new frontier of the ivory and slave trade. Its people had no guns, and the traders took ivory by trade where they could and by force where they couldn’t. Livingstone liked the people and wrote about their gardens, markets and courtesy. He didn’t doubt that they had done nothing to deserve what was being done to them.

These were the most miserable years of his life. In 1870 his feet broke out in ulcers that ate into the flesh, and he was laid up for months in a hut. Most of his porters deserted. For a time only three people stayed: Susi, Chuma, and a young man named Gardner, who nursed him and found him food. With nothing else to read, he read the Bible through four times.

In March 1871 he reached Nyangwe, a market town on the great river he believed was the Nile. On 15 July he went to the market as usual. Hundreds of people had come to buy and sell, most of them women. A quarrel broke out. Then the armed men of a trader named Dugumbe opened fire into the crowd. People ran for the river; canoes overturned in the crush; the gunmen kept shooting at people in the water, then crossed and burned the villages on the far side. Livingstone estimated three or four hundred dead, most of them women.

He could do nothing. He wrote what he saw, heard the wailing from across the river, and wrote a short prayer for God’s kingdom to come. It is the Lord’s Prayer, prayed as a cry of protest.

Habakkuk cried the same thing: how long? He got no explanation, only a promise that the earth would one day be filled with the knowledge of God’s glory. Livingstone got no explanation either. But his account reached Britain in 1872, shocked the public, and added to the pressure that closed the great slave market at Zanzibar.

There is a harder part. In our own century, scholars used special imaging to read his faded original diary from 1871, written on scraps of newspaper. It shows that before the massacre he had been living under the protection of traders, including men linked to Dugumbe, and that his own hired men had been violent towards local people. The published version made him a purely horrified onlooker. He didn’t lie about the massacre, and he didn’t cause it. But the story was shaped to put more distance between him and the traders than there really was. That’s very human. It isn’t the whole truth.

He turned back to Ujiji, sick and broken. He reached it in late October 1871, by his own confused reckoning, and found the supplies left for him had been sold off.

Then Susi came running. He had seen an Englishman. Henry Morton Stanley, a journalist sent by a New York newspaper, marched in with a large caravan. In his own account, Stanley walked up, took off his hat, and said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Those words come from Stanley alone. The pages of his diary for those days are missing, his versions differ, and even the date is uncertain. What is certain is that they met, and the meeting saved Livingstone’s life.

Stanley brought food, medicine and letters, and begged him to come home. Livingstone refused; he had to finish. Stanley left in March 1872, weeping. That year Livingstone wrote a prayer for Heaven’s blessing on anyone, of any nation, who would help “to heal this open sore of the world.” On his fifty-ninth birthday he wrote: “Birthday. My Jesus, my king, my life, my all; I again dedicate my whole self to Thee.” He asked God to let him finish his task.

In August 1872 men arrived to join him, among them Jacob Wainwright, about twenty, a Yao by birth who had been freed from slave traders as a boy and educated in India.

One thing to do this week: when you see news of violence that makes you feel helpless, don’t scroll past. Pray Habakkuk’s honest “how long?” and then do one small thing: give, write, or speak up.