Preface

“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth!”

— Isaiah 52:7, ASV

The earlier volumes of this series have told of a Chinese church leader who died in a Communist labour camp, an American who prayed his way through the villages of the Punjab, a Dutch watchmaker who hid Jews behind a false wall, a Scottish mill girl who went alone up the rivers of Calabar, an African bishop who had once been sold as a slave, an Indian widow who built a home for thousands of outcast women, an Oxford don who was found by God against his will, a young widow who walked into the Ecuadorian forest to live among the people who had killed her husband, and an Irish missionary who made a home at Dohnavur, in South India, for children rescued from temple service. This tenth volume tells the story of a man whose name, for a hundred years, was almost a synonym for the word “missionary,” and whose life, looked at closely, fits that word less neatly than his admirers liked to think.

David Livingstone was born in 1813 in a single room in a tenement at a cotton mill on the Clyde, and he went to work in the mill at the age of ten. He made himself a doctor and a minister, sailed for southern Africa in 1840 for the London Missionary Society, and spent most of the remaining thirty-two years of his life on that continent. He walked across it from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. He led a government expedition up the Zambezi that ended in failure and in the death of his wife. He spent his last seven years wandering, ill and often lost, in search of the sources of the Nile, and he died in 1873 in a village near the swamps of Lake Bangweulu, in what is now Zambia. The men and women who had travelled with him buried his heart there and carried his body to the coast, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Mary Slessor, whose story was told in the fourth volume, offered herself as a missionary when the news of his death reached Dundee. She was one of many. For two generations Livingstone’s name sent young people to Africa, raised money for missions, and stood in sermons and Sunday-school prizes for everything that was brave and selfless in the Christian life. It was also used, by people who cared little for his faith, to justify the conquest of the continent he loved.

Why Courage?

His physical courage needs no defending. He was mauled by a lion and set his own arm, badly, so that it never healed straight. He crossed country no European had mapped, often with nothing but a few beads, a sextant and the goodwill of the people whose land he was passing through. He faced down armed men more than once, and he went on travelling for years with fever, dysentery and bleeding that would have sent most people home.

But that is not the courage this book most wants to examine. Livingstone spent his life doing things that did not work. In more than thirty years in Africa he baptised one African convert whom we know of, a chief named Sechele, and he soon suspended him from communion. His great river was blocked by rapids he had not seen. The mission he called for on the Shire Highlands buried its bishop within a year. The family he loved paid for his journeys with years of poverty and separation, and his wife died beside him on the Zambezi. He quarrelled with colleagues, misjudged people, and sometimes told the story of his own failures more kindly than the facts allowed. And yet he kept going, not always wisely, in the conviction that God had given him a work to do and that its results belonged to God.

There is a harder kind of courage in that than in facing a lion. It is the courage to go on believing that faithfulness matters when success has failed to come, and to keep praying for the ending of an evil that you can see no way to end. Livingstone’s campaign against the slave trade in East and Central Africa was the steadiest thing in his unsteady life, and his last years were spent among slave traders whose cruelty he could neither stop nor escape. He died before the great Zanzibar slave market was closed, a month after his death. He never knew.

How This Book Is Written

Like the earlier volumes, this book tries to be honest about its sources.

Livingstone was a prolific writer, and nearly everything he published is now in the public domain. His Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), the Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (1865), which he wrote with his brother Charles, and The Last Journals of David Livingstone, edited by his friend Horace Waller in 1874, let him speak for himself, and he is quoted from them throughout. So is the first full biography, W. G. Blaikie’s The Personal Life of David Livingstone (1880), which printed many of his private letters and journal entries, and Henry Morton Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone (1872).

None of these is a neutral witness. Livingstone wrote his books to be read, to raise support and to sway the government, and he left things out. Waller edited the last journals with a reverence that softened some passages. Blaikie wrote, with the family’s help, the life of a saint. Stanley was a journalist who needed a story. Modern historians, working from Livingstone’s manuscripts, his field notebooks and the letters of the people around him, have corrected much of the Victorian picture, and this book has learned from them, though it does not quote them.

Two further cautions belong here. The first is that Livingstone lived at the beginning of the age of European empire in Africa, and his life cannot be told apart from it. He wanted Britain to come to Africa, though not in the way it eventually came. A Christian biography should say so plainly. The second is that the language used about Africans in his time, his own included, was often contemptuous. This book quotes it only where it is needed to understand him, marks it when it does, and does not adopt it. It also tries to give the African men and women of his story their due, as people who made choices of their own: Sechele, who argued theology with him and evangelised his own people long after Livingstone had left; the Makololo who walked with him to the Atlantic and back; Susi, Chuma, Jacob Wainwright and the others who brought him home.

Scripture in This Book

As in the earlier volumes, all Scripture quotations are from the American Standard Version of 1901, which is in the public domain. Each chapter opens with a passage that carries its theme. Where Livingstone himself quotes the Bible, he quotes the King James Version, and his words are left as he wrote them.

The verse at the head of this preface is Isaiah’s, about the messenger whose feet bring good news across the mountains. Livingstone’s feet crossed more mountains than almost any messenger of his century. Whether he always brought good news is a question this book will keep asking. He would not have minded the question. Near the end of his life, ill and alone in the heart of the continent, he wrote in his journal that he had dedicated his whole self again to Christ, and asked only that he might be allowed to finish his task. The story that follows is about that self, and that task, and what God made of both.