Sechele

“And Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest? And he said, How can I, except some one shall guide me? And he besought Philip to come up and sit with him.” — Acts 8:30-31 (ASV)

Livingstone quarrelled with Rogers Edwards, the older missionary at Mabotsa. Rather than keep fighting, he gave up the house he had built and in 1845 moved with Mary to Chonuane, the town of the Bakwena and their chief, Sechele, who had asked him to come.

Sechele was about Livingstone’s age: tall, clever, forceful. His father had been murdered when he was a boy, and he had grown up a refugee before winning back his place as chief. He was a hunter, a politician and, by custom, a rainmaker, responsible for bringing the rain everyone depended on. He had several wives, as chiefs did, and through them alliances with leading families.

He learned the alphabet on the first day. Soon he was reading the Bible hungrily. His favourite book was Isaiah; Isaiah, he said, was a fine man who knew how to speak. He sat so long over his books that, Livingstone noted with amusement, he grew stout.

Sechele asked hard questions. Hearing about the coming judgement, he said, “You startle me: these words make all my bones to shake.” Then he asked why, if Livingstone’s ancestors had known these things, they had not sent word sooner. His own ancestors, he said, had all passed into darkness without knowing where they were going. Livingstone had no satisfying answer. There isn’t one that removes the force of that question. It was grief for his own people, and a rebuke to a church that took eighteen centuries to reach the Bakwena.

Sechele thought like a chief. Once he believed, he offered to call his headmen with their whips of rhinoceros hide and make everyone believe together. Livingstone refused, and he was right: faith can’t be beaten into anyone. But Sechele was also telling him something true. Among the Bakwena, a chief’s religion was never private. If he changed, everything changed.

In 1847 the town moved to Kolobeng, by a river. Then the rains failed, year after year. The river dried up. Many Bakwena drew the obvious conclusion: their chief had dropped the rain rites for the missionary’s religion, and the rain had stopped. Livingstone later wrote an imagined debate between a doctor and a rain doctor, and let the rain doctor have some of the best lines.

Sechele asked to be baptised. The mission would not baptise a man with more than one wife. Sechele understood the cost far better than Livingstone did. These women were his wives by his people’s law, the mothers of his children, the daughters of powerful families. In the end he kept his first wife and sent the others home with their goods and a message that he had nothing against them; he was following God’s word. He was baptised on 1 October 1848. The town was dismayed. Nobody asked the women.

Early in 1849 it came out that one of his former wives was pregnant by him. Livingstone suspended him from communion. As far as we know, Sechele is the only African Livingstone ever baptised.

But that isn’t the end. Sechele didn’t give up his faith. He kept reading the Bible, held worship for his people, invited other missionaries, and preached himself until he died in 1892. The Bakwena became Christian largely through him. The man Livingstone suspended became the evangelist of his own people.

In Acts, after the baptism, Philip disappears and the African official goes home rejoicing, to do what Philip never could. It was the same with Sechele. Livingstone left thinking he had failed. He was wrong.

You might think one stumble means someone is finished, or that you are. God doesn’t write people off that fast.

One thing to do this week: write down one hard question about God that you have never said aloud. Bring it to God honestly in prayer, and if you can, to a Christian you trust.