Kolobeng Plundered

“God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble.”

— Psalm 46:1, ASV

The Boers

To the east of Kolobeng lay the country that would become the Transvaal. In the late 1830s and 1840s, thousands of Afrikaner farmers, the Boers, had left the British-ruled Cape Colony and moved north across the Vaal River, setting up republics of their own. They took land from the African peoples who lived there, and they required labour from them. Missionaries and some British officials accused them of taking African children as so-called apprentices, who were in practice little different from slaves. The Boers, for their part, distrusted the missionaries, and especially those of the London Missionary Society, whom they regarded as meddlers who armed Africans against them.

Livingstone detested the Boers, and said so loudly. He was right about the injustice they inflicted, though his language about them was often as sweeping as theirs about Africans. He was also not entirely innocent of their accusation. The Bakwena under Sechele had acquired guns through traders, and Livingstone had helped, believing that a people who could defend themselves would not be enslaved. He had repaired guns for Sechele and kept ammunition at Kolobeng. In 1852 the British government signed the Sand River Convention with the Boers, recognising their independence north of the Vaal and agreeing that neither side would sell arms to the Africans in the region. The Bakwena were left to face the Boers alone.

Dimawe

In late August 1852, while Livingstone was still on his way north from the Cape, delayed at Kuruman by repairs to his wagon, a Boer commando attacked the Bakwena. The pretext was that Sechele had sheltered Mosielele, the Bakgatla chief of Mabotsa, who was wanted by the Boers. Sechele had refused to hand him over, saying, according to a well-known account, that whoever wanted Mosielele could come and take him out of his stomach. The commando attacked Sechele’s people at their stronghold on the hill of Dimawe. The battle lasted several days. Livingstone reported that some sixty Bakwena were killed and that more than two hundred women and children were carried off. The Bakwena, who were well armed, killed a considerable number of the attackers, and they later counted the battle as a victory, because they had not been destroyed. But their town was burned.

The commando also went to Kolobeng. Livingstone’s house was broken into and plundered. His books were torn up and their pages scattered, his medicine bottles smashed, and his furniture, clothing and stores carried off. The Boers said they found a workshop for repairing guns, which confirmed, to them, everything they suspected about him. Livingstone, when he heard the news on his way north at Kuruman, was furious. He wrote angry letters to the Cape newspapers and to the Society. He set out his losses carefully, as a Scottish workman would.

But the house mattered less than what happened to the people. Sechele had lost his town, his cattle, many of his men, and many of his people’s women and children. In 1853 he set out to go to England and appeal to Queen Victoria in person for protection. He got as far as Cape Town, where he made sworn statements about the attack, before his money ran out. The Society would not pay his passage. The colonial authorities were bound by their new treaty with the Boers, and offered no more than polite protests. Sechele went home, rebuilt his town in a new place, and over the following years made his peace with the Boers and became one of the most powerful chiefs in the region. He did not get his help from London. He got it from his own skill and the resilience of his people.

A Very Present Help

The psalm at the head of this chapter was written, it seems, in a time of war, when the city of God was threatened by enemies and the earth itself seemed to shake. “God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear, though the earth do change, And though the mountains be shaken into the heart of the seas” (Psalm 46:1-2, ASV). The psalm does not promise that the city will not be attacked. It promises that God is present in the attack.

Livingstone was not at Kolobeng when it was plundered. Sechele and his people were at Dimawe. It was their trouble more than his, and the psalm belongs to them first. For Livingstone, the destruction of his station had a different meaning. It cut his last tie with the south. He had no home to go back to, no station, no family in Africa. The road ahead was all that remained, and he took it.

Mary in Britain

Meanwhile Mary and the four children had arrived in Britain in the summer of 1852 with almost no money and nowhere to live. She had grown up in Africa and had few friends in Britain. They went first to Livingstone’s parents in Hamilton, but the arrangement did not work. Mary and her husband’s family did not get on, and there were quarrels whose rights and wrongs are still disputed. Mary moved out.

For the next four years she wandered from one set of lodgings to another, in Hackney, in Manchester, in Kendal, in Epsom, living on a small allowance from the Missionary Society. A Quaker family in Kendal took her in for a time. She was often ill, often lonely, and often without enough money. She wrote to the Society for help and sometimes received it. Her letters to her husband took many months to reach him, when they reached him at all, and his to her were few, because he was in the interior with no way of sending them.

Some of her friends and relatives believed, then and later, that Mary began to drink heavily in these years, and modern biographers have taken the evidence seriously. It cannot now be proved one way or the other, and it should not be stated as a certainty. What is clear is that she was profoundly unhappy, that her health and spirits suffered, and that she felt herself abandoned. There are hints in later letters that her faith itself was shaken. She had married a missionary, expecting to share his work. She found herself a single mother in a strange country, dependent on charity, while her husband became famous for journeys that she had been sent away from.

It is important to say this clearly, because the Victorian biographies did not. Blaikie, writing with the family’s help, passed over these years quickly. The children, too, paid a price. Robert, the eldest, grew up angry and unsettled, and the rest grew up without a father. Paul wrote that a man who does not provide for his own household “hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8, ASV). Livingstone did not intend to neglect his family. He sent them to safety. But he left them without the means to live in safety, and without himself, and he did it for a journey that he could have postponed. A Christian biography cannot call that courage without also calling it a failure.

Linyanti

Livingstone went north from Kuruman late in 1852, and after a slow and difficult journey he reached the Makololo town of Linyanti, on the Chobe River, in May 1853. Sekeletu received him warmly. The young chief gave him hospitality, men, oxen and gifts, and over the following months the two men became friends of a sort.

Livingstone wanted to find a healthy site for a mission among the Makololo, somewhere high and free of the fever that killed Europeans in the river valleys. He travelled up the Zambezi into the Barotse valley looking for one, and found none. Everywhere was low, wet and malarial. He himself suffered repeated attacks of fever. Many of the Makololo, too, suffered from it, because they had come from the dry south. The idea of a mission among them, which he had promised the Society, began to look impossible.

He preached regularly to the Makololo, and they listened politely, but there was no response like Sechele’s. Sekeletu was frank about why. Livingstone recorded that the young chief did not wish to learn to read the Bible, because he was afraid that it might change his heart and make him content with only one wife, like Sechele. The story of the Bakwena had travelled north. The price of baptism was known, and Sekeletu was not willing to pay it.

No Value on Anything

In these years Livingstone wrote in his journal one of the resolutions for which he is best remembered. Blaikie printed it, and it has been quoted ever since, with small variations. He resolved to place no value on anything he had or might possess except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. He went on to say that anything that would advance that kingdom should be given away or kept, only as giving or keeping it would best promote the glory of God, to whom he owed all his hopes in time and eternity.

It is a noble resolution, and he lived much of it. He spent little on himself, gave away his possessions freely, and cared nothing for comfort. The question this chapter raises is whether his wife and children counted, in his mind, among the things he possessed, to be given away for the kingdom. He would have been horrified at the suggestion. But it is hard to read his letters from these years without feeling that, in practice, they did. He had laid them on the altar along with his books and his furniture. Jesus said that whoever left house, or wife, or children “for the kingdom of God’s sake” would receive many times more (Luke 18:29-30, ASV). He did not say that the wife and children would be asked whether they agreed.

Livingstone was now alone, at the edge of the known world, with a chief who had given him men and a problem he could not solve. If there was no healthy place for a mission in the Makololo country, then perhaps the answer was a road: a route to the coast along which missionaries and traders could come and go, staying only in the healthy season. He decided to find one. In November 1853 he set out for the Atlantic.