Without Water

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.” — Isaiah 35:1 (ASV)

North of Kolobeng lay the Kalahari, the dry country the Batswana called the thirstland. African hunters and travellers had crossed it for generations, and the San and Bakgalagadi peoples lived in it. Beyond it, people said, was a great lake, and beyond that the kingdom of Sebetwane, leader of the Makololo, who had once helped Sechele win back his chieftaincy.

In 1849 Livingstone crossed the desert with two English hunters, guided by Ramotobi, a Bakwena man Sechele sent. They reached Lake Ngami. The people living beside it had known it all their lives, but in London it counted as a discovery, and Livingstone won a geography prize. It was the beginning of a change in how he saw his work.

In 1850 he took his family: Mary, who was pregnant, and their three small children. The children caught fever and they turned back. Soon afterwards Mary gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, who lived about six weeks. Mary was left partly paralysed in her face and worn out.

Her mother, Mary Moffat, heard that Livingstone meant to take her daughter north again, pregnant again, in 1851. She wrote him a fierce letter about his recklessness with his wife and children. Nothing in it was unfair. He went anyway.

On that journey their guide, a San man named Shobo, lost the way. For four days there was no water. Livingstone feared the children would die of thirst in front of them. He wrote that it would almost have been a relief to be blamed, but Mary said not a word of reproach, though her eyes showed her agony. On the fifth day some of the men found water. The children lived.

That is the most honest thing he ever wrote about his marriage. He knew he was to blame. He knew she knew. He was grateful she didn’t say so. And he didn’t change course. You might ask whether her silence was strength, or just exhaustion.

In June 1851 they reached the Makololo on the Chobe River. Sebetwane, who had fought his way north across the Kalahari decades before and built a kingdom of many peoples, welcomed them warmly. Livingstone called him the finest African chief he had ever met. Two weeks later Sebetwane died of a chest illness. His son Sekeletu, about eighteen, took his place.

Then Livingstone reached a great river, the upper Zambezi, flowing far into the middle of Africa. He began to dream of it as a highway. And he saw something that changed his life. Traders from the west coast were buying captives from the Makololo with guns and cloth, to sell on. For the first time he was looking at the slave trade. He decided that if honest traders could buy ivory and other goods instead, the market for human beings would collapse. It was a sincere idea, born of what he saw. Later, other people would use it for very different ends.

He could not take his family into the fever country, and he would not give up the north. So in April 1852 he put Mary and their four children on a ship to Britain. He would not see them for four and a half years.

Isaiah pictures a highway through the desert for God’s people coming home, and the desert bursting into flower. Livingstone saw himself as a road-builder for God. But the prophet’s highway is God’s, not ours. On the way to building his road, Livingstone left his family by the side of it. The desert hadn’t blossomed for Mary. It had nearly killed her children.

Big dreams can be good. But a dream that costs the people closest to you everything, without asking them, needs a second look.

One thing to do this week: ask someone in your family what one of your plans or habits costs them. Listen without defending yourself. Then decide whether anything should change.