Twenty-Seven Men

“In whose eyes a reprobate is despised, But who honoreth them that fear Jehovah; He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” — Psalm 15:4 (ASV)

On 11 November 1853, Livingstone left Linyanti for the Atlantic coast with twenty-seven men. They weren’t his servants. Sekeletu chose them from the many peoples of his kingdom, and they went because their chief sent them and because they hoped to open a trade route to the sea. Their leader was a man named Pitsane. This is often called Livingstone’s journey. It was theirs as much as his. Without them he wouldn’t have got a hundred miles.

He took almost nothing: a few clothes, a small tent, a gun, beads to pay for food, a sextant, a Bible, and a magic lantern, an early projector with painted glass slides of Bible stories. He depended on the goodwill of the people whose land he passed through.

The rains came. The paths flooded and the party was soaked day and night. Livingstone had fever after fever, and grew so weak he could barely sit on his riding ox.

Among the Lunda peoples they met a young woman chief named Manenko, a niece of the great chief Shinte. She overruled Livingstone’s plans, insisted on escorting them to her uncle herself, and marched at the head of the column through pouring rain faster than the men could keep up. Livingstone was annoyed and impressed. For those few days, he wasn’t the main character in the story. She was.

Further west, near the Kasai River, the Chiboque surrounded the party and demanded a man, an ox, a gun or a tusk as the price of passage. A man meant one of his companions, to be sold as a slave. Livingstone sat on his camp stool with his gun across his knees, his men pressed close around him, and refused to hand over anyone. In the end he gave an ox, and no blood was shed. Another time some of his own exhausted men nearly mutinied, and he ran out of his tent with a pistol and threatened the ringleader. He was a leader who could frighten as well as inspire.

At the Kwango River, a Portuguese militia sergeant named Cypriano di Abreu, whose mother was African, helped them across and fed them generously. On 31 May 1854 they walked into Luanda, capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola. Livingstone could barely stand.

The men had never seen the sea. Livingstone recorded what they said: they had always believed what the old people told them, that the world had no end, but now the world had told them it was finished, and there was no more of it.

Luanda had been one of the biggest slave ports in the world for over two centuries. Livingstone looked at its fine houses and knew what had paid for them. A British official, Edmund Gabriel, nursed him through months of illness. The men earned money unloading coal from ships.

Then came a choice. British naval officers offered Livingstone a passage home to England. He hadn’t seen his family in over two years. He was ill and worn out, and he had done what he came to do. Nobody would have blamed him.

He refused. He had promised Sekeletu he would bring the men home. They didn’t know the way back, and the country was full of slave traders who would happily seize an unprotected group. He believed that if he left, they would never see the Zambezi again. The ship he would have sailed on sank off Madeira, with his journal and maps aboard.

Psalm 15 describes the person God welcomes as someone who “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not”: who keeps a promise even when it costs. Livingstone kept this one at the cost of two more years in Africa. It is one of the finest things he ever did.

It’s uncomfortable, though. The man who wouldn’t abandon twenty-seven men on a strange coast had left his wife alone in English lodgings. Keep both facts. Don’t smooth either away.

One thing to do this week: think of a promise you’ve made that has become inconvenient to keep. Keep it this week, even if it costs you something.