The Lion at Mabotsa

“But the Lord stood by me, and strengthened me; that through me the message might be fully proclaimed, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.” — 2 Timothy 4:17 (ASV)

In 1839 war between Britain and China, over Britain’s opium trade, closed China to him. In London he met Robert Moffat, the most famous missionary in Britain, who had worked for years at Kuruman in southern Africa. Moffat later remembered telling him not to settle at an old station but to push north, where he had seen the smoke of a thousand villages with no missionary. That phrase comes from Moffat’s memory years afterwards, so hold it lightly. What is certain is that Moffat pointed him north, and he went.

On his last morning at home in 1840, David read Psalm 121 at family worship. His father walked with him to Glasgow. They never saw each other again. He was ordained, sailed in December, learned to fix his position by the stars from the ship’s captain, and in July 1841 reached Kuruman.

He was disappointed. Fewer people lived there than he had imagined, and he thought too many missionaries were crowded in the south. It was a typical judgement: partly right, partly unfair. He didn’t see what twenty years of work had cost. He saw what hadn’t been done.

So he went north. He spent about six months living among the Bakwena people, hearing no English, so that he would have to learn Setswana properly. He treated the sick, helped dig a water channel, and listened. Out of this came one of his best ideas: that Africa would be reached with the gospel mainly by African Christians, not by a few foreigners. History proved him right. He didn’t always act on it, and his books gave too little credit to the African Christians who did much of the work.

He liked the people he met. He wrote, against fashionable racist theories, that Africans were in no way inferior to Europeans in natural ability. But he saw almost nothing good in their religion or customs, and he assumed that becoming Christian meant living like a Scottish working family. He saw people more clearly than most Europeans of his time. Not as clearly as he thought.

In 1843 he helped start a station at Mabotsa, among the Bakgatla people. Lions were killing their cattle. In February 1844 he went out with the men to hunt one. He fired both barrels into a lion and was reloading when he heard a shout. “Starting, and looking half round,” he wrote, “I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me.” It caught him by the shoulder and shook him like a terrier with a rat. Strangely, he said, he felt no pain or terror, only a kind of dreaminess.

Then the lion turned. A Christian teacher from Kuruman named Mebalwe had run up and fired at it. Both barrels of his gun failed. The lion sprang on Mebalwe and bit him in the thigh. Another man ran at it with a spear and was mauled too. Then the lion dropped dead from Livingstone’s earlier shots.

Notice whose courage saved his life. Mebalwe ran towards a lion with a gun that didn’t work. In the old retellings he is often left out. This will happen again and again in this story: Livingstone survived because of Africans whose names his books barely mention.

His arm was crushed, set badly by his own directions, and never healed straight. He went to Kuruman to recover. The Moffats were back from Britain, with their eldest daughter, Mary, twenty-three, who had grown up in Africa and spoke Setswana from childhood. In January 1845 they married.

Paul said God rescued him “out of the mouth of the lion” so that the message could be preached. Livingstone believed he had been spared for a purpose. That belief carried him through many dangers. At times it also made him reckless.

One thing to do this week: think of someone whose help made a difference to you but who never got any credit. Thank them, by name, this week.