Across the Thirstland

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”

— Isaiah 35:1, ASV

The Lake Beyond the Desert

To the north of Kolobeng lay the Kalahari, the great dry country of sand and scrub that the Batswana called the thirstland. For generations, African travellers and hunters had crossed it by routes they knew, and the San and Bakgalagadi peoples lived in it, finding water where Europeans saw none. Beyond it, travellers said, there was a large lake, and beyond the lake rivers and a populous country ruled by Sebetwane, the Makololo chief who had once helped Sechele regain his throne. No European had reached it.

Livingstone wanted to go. Part of his reason was missionary: if there were large populations to the north, the gospel should go to them, and the drought and disappointment at Kolobeng made him feel that his work among the Bakwena had reached a dead end. Part of his reason was curiosity, and part was ambition. He did not separate the three, then or ever.

In June 1849 he set out with two English travellers, William Cotton Oswell and Mungo Murray, wealthy hunters who paid most of the costs of the expedition. Sechele, who wanted to send a message to Sebetwane, provided a guide, a Bakwena man named Ramotobi who knew the route. The party crossed the desert with ox-wagons, digging for water in dry riverbeds and losing oxen to thirst. On 1 August 1849 they reached Lake Ngami.

It was a shallow lake, much smaller than the stories had made it, and the Batawana people who lived beside it had known it all their lives. But to the Royal Geographical Society in London it was a discovery, and the Society awarded Livingstone part of its annual prize for geographical exploration. It was the first public recognition of his travels. It was also the beginning of a change in how the London Missionary Society’s directors, and Livingstone himself, thought about what he was doing.

The Batawana chief would not let him go on to Sebetwane, and Livingstone turned back. But he had seen something on the way that excited him more than the lake. The rivers flowing into Ngami came from the north, and they were full of water even in the dry season. The country to the north, he concluded, was not desert at all. It was well watered and full of people.

A Family on the Road

He went again in 1850, and this time he took his family: Mary, who was pregnant, and their three small children, Robert, Agnes and Thomas. Sechele went with them. Livingstone believed that a missionary should travel as a family, and that a man arriving with his wife and children would be trusted as a man of peace. He also did not want to leave them behind. They reached Lake Ngami again, but the children fell ill with fever, and there was no way north. They turned back to Kolobeng.

In August 1850, soon after their return, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. The baby lived about six weeks. Livingstone wrote of her death with simple grief. Mary herself was left partly paralysed on one side of her face by the illness that followed the birth, and she was worn out.

Her mother, Mary Moffat, was appalled to learn that her son-in-law intended to take her daughter north again, pregnant once more, in 1851. She wrote him a letter of fierce protest, rebuking him for his recklessness with his wife and children. It was a brave letter from a mother-in-law to a son-in-law, and nothing in it was unfair. Livingstone went anyway.

Without Water

The 1851 journey, again with Oswell, took the family on a new route across the north of the Kalahari, guided by a San man called Shobo. Shobo lost the way. For four days the party had no water, and the children, Livingstone wrote, were in danger of dying of thirst before their parents’ eyes. The water in the wagons ran down to almost nothing, and Livingstone feared the worst. He recorded what he felt with unusual openness. It would almost have been a relief, he wrote, to have been blamed as the cause of the catastrophe, but their mother spoke not a word of reproach, though her tearful eyes showed the agony within.

On the fifth day some of the men found water and brought it back. The children lived.

That passage about Mary is the most honest thing Livingstone wrote about his marriage in any of his books. He knew that he was to blame. He knew that his wife knew it. He was grateful that she did not say so. He did not, then or later, change course. A modern reader who is moved by her silence will also want to ask whether her silence was strength or exhaustion, and what it cost her to keep it.

Sebetwane

In June 1851 they reached the Chobe River and the country of the Makololo, and Sebetwane came to meet them. He was the most remarkable African ruler Livingstone had met. As a young man, decades earlier, he had led a band of Sotho-speaking people out of the wars that convulsed the interior of southern Africa in the 1820s, fought his way across the Kalahari, and conquered the peoples of the upper Zambezi, building a kingdom of many peoples in the river valleys. He was a warrior and a conqueror, and he was also, by Livingstone’s account, generous, frank and wise, with a great curiosity about the wider world. He welcomed the missionary with delight. Livingstone wrote that he was the finest African chief he had ever met.

He was also ill. An old wound had left him with weak lungs, and soon after Livingstone’s arrival he fell sick with an inflammation of the chest. Livingstone, as a doctor, was afraid to treat him, knowing that if he died under a foreign doctor’s care the doctor would be blamed. He visited him and spoke to him of Christ. On 7 July 1851, two weeks after their meeting, Sebetwane died. Livingstone wrote of him with real sorrow. He had hoped that Sebetwane would open his kingdom to the gospel, and he wondered, in his journal, where the chief’s soul had gone, and grieved that he had been able to say so little to him.

Sebetwane’s son Sekeletu, a young man of about eighteen, succeeded him. He too welcomed Livingstone.

The Zambezi

At the beginning of August, Livingstone and Oswell rode north-east from the Chobe and came, on 4 August 1851, to a great river at Sesheke. It was the upper Zambezi, and no European had known that it flowed so far into the centre of the continent. Livingstone stood on its bank and began to dream. If this river ran to the sea, as he believed it did, then it might be a highway into the heart of Africa, along which missionaries and traders could travel.

He saw something else there that changed his life. Among the Makololo were traders from the west coast, known as Mambari, who were buying captives from Sekeletu’s people in exchange for guns and cloth, to sell to the Portuguese. The Makololo had begun to sell people from the subject peoples they ruled. It was the first time Livingstone had seen the slave trade with his own eyes, and he resolved that the way to end it was to give the people something else to sell. If honest traders could reach the Makololo with the goods they wanted, paying for ivory and other produce, the market for human beings would collapse. He needed a route to the coast.

This was the origin of the conviction he would hold for the rest of his life: that Christianity and legitimate commerce, together, could heal Africa of the slave trade. It was a sincere idea, born of what he had seen. It would also prove to be one of the most dangerous ideas of the century, when other people took it up for other ends.

The Decision

He could not take his family into the swamps and fevers of the Zambezi valley. He could not leave them at Kolobeng, where the drought continued and the Boers to the east were growing hostile. And he would not give up the north. On the way back south, in September 1851, Mary gave birth to another son, William Oswell, named after their companion, on the banks of the Zouga River.

Livingstone made his decision. He would send Mary and the four children to Britain, where they would be safe and the children could be educated, and he would go north alone to look for a route from the Makololo country to the sea. He told the directors of the Society what he intended, and made it plain that he would find a path between the interior and the coast whatever it cost. The cost would be paid, in large part, by his wife and children.

In April 1852, at Cape Town, he put them on a ship for England. He would not see them again for four and a half years.

Blossoming Deserts

Isaiah’s vision of the desert rejoicing and blossoming is a promise about the return of God’s people from exile, along a highway through the wilderness: “And a highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness” (Isaiah 35:8, ASV). Livingstone loved this kind of passage. He saw himself as a road-maker for God, opening a highway into Africa along which the gospel could travel, and he believed that the dry places would blossom when it came.

But the prophet’s highway is God’s, not man’s. It is built for “the redeemed,” who return to Zion “with singing.” Livingstone was building something else as well, a road for traders and, though he did not intend it, for empires. And on the way to building it, he left his family by the side of the road. The desert had not yet blossomed for Mary Livingstone. It had nearly killed her children.