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

The Company

On 11 November 1853, Livingstone left Linyanti for the west coast with twenty-seven men. They were not his servants. They were Sekeletu’s men, chosen by the chief from among the many peoples of his kingdom, and they went because their chief had sent them and because they hoped to open a trade route to the sea for him. Some were Makololo, but most were from the subject peoples of the upper Zambezi. Their leader was a man named Pitsane, and Livingstone came to rely on him heavily. The journey that followed is often described as Livingstone’s journey. It was theirs as much as his. Without them he would not have gone a hundred miles.

The equipment was very small. Livingstone took a few spare clothes, some tea, coffee and sugar, a small tent, a gun and some ammunition, a supply of beads to pay for food and passage, a sextant, a chronometer watch, a thermometer and compasses, a Bible, a nautical almanac and a book of mathematical tables for his calculations, and a magic lantern, a projector with painted glass slides of Bible scenes, which he used to show and explain the gospel stories in the villages. He had very little to trade and almost nothing to give. He was depending, as he would on all his great journeys, on the goodwill of the people through whose land he passed.

Up the River

They went north by canoe up the Zambezi, through the Barotse valley, and then struck north-west overland into the country of the Lunda peoples, towards the watershed where the rivers begin to flow west to the Atlantic. The rains had begun. The country was flooded, the paths were deep in water, and the party was soaked day and night. Livingstone had attack after attack of fever. He grew so weak that he could hardly sit on his riding ox.

The Lunda chiefs received them in various ways. The most memorable was a young woman chief named Manenko, a niece of the great chief Shinte, who insisted on escorting the party to her uncle’s town herself, overruled Livingstone’s own plans, and marched at the head of the column through pouring rain at a pace the men could hardly match, unbothered by the cold they complained of. Livingstone was both exasperated and impressed, and his account of her is one of the liveliest passages in his book. She was not a figure in his story. He was, for those few days, a figure in hers.

Shinte himself received them with great ceremony and real kindness. At his town Livingstone showed his lantern pictures. When the slide of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac was shown, he recorded, the women watching thought the knife was about to come out of the picture at them, and fled. He laughed at the story, and so did they afterwards. It is worth noticing which Bible story he chose to show first: a father, called by God, about to give up his son.

The Chiboque

Further west, the country changed. Here the people had been in contact with the slave traders of the coast for generations, and they had learned to demand payment from every traveller who passed. The Chiboque, a people near the Kasai River, surrounded Livingstone’s party and demanded a man, an ox, a gun or a tusk as the price of passage, saying that the party had insulted them. They did not want beads. Livingstone understood that a man meant one of his companions, to be sold as a slave.

He sat on his camp stool with his gun across his knees, facing the Chiboque headman, while his men drew close around him and the Chiboque warriors pressed in with spears and guns. He refused to give up a man. He offered a shirt, then beads, then other things. The tension rose, and for a time it seemed that there would be bloodshed. In the end he gave an ox, and they let him go. He was proud afterwards that no blood had been shed. His men had been ready to fight, and he had held them back.

On another occasion, his own men nearly mutinied. Tired, hungry and frightened, some of them refused to go on and became insolent. Livingstone, by his own account, rushed out of his tent with a pistol and threatened to shoot the ringleader. The mutiny collapsed. He believed that discipline had to be kept or the whole party would be lost, and he was probably right. It is also a reminder that he was a leader who could frighten as well as inspire.

The Edge of the World

At the Kwango River, the eastern border of Portuguese influence, a hostile chief demanded more tribute than they could pay. A Portuguese militia sergeant named Cypriano di Abreu, the son of a Portuguese father and an African mother, came to their help, took them across the river, and fed them generously at his home. Livingstone was moved by his kindness. From there the way to the coast lay through territory controlled by the Portuguese, with forts and traders, and on 31 May 1854 the party walked into Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola. Livingstone was so ill that he could barely stand.

The men from the Zambezi had never seen the sea. Livingstone recorded what they said when they first looked at it, and it is one of the most quoted passages in his book. They had marched along with their father, they said, believing what the old people had always told them, that the world had no end; but all at once the world had said to them that it was finished, and there was no more of it. They called Livingstone father, and they had followed him to the end of the world.

Mr Gabriel

At Luanda there was one Englishman, Edmund Gabriel, the British commissioner for the suppression of the slave trade. Gabriel took Livingstone into his house, put him to bed, and nursed him through months of fever and dysentery. Livingstone wrote of the pleasure of lying in a real English bed after six months of sleeping on the ground. When he recovered, he took his men to see the city, the ships in the harbour and the churches. The officers of a British naval squadron showed them over a warship. To earn money, the men found work unloading coal from ships in the port, and they bought cloth and beads to take home.

Luanda itself was a reminder of why Livingstone had come. For more than two centuries it had been one of the greatest slave ports in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people from the interior of Angola and beyond had been marched to its harbour and shipped across the Atlantic, most of them to Brazil. Brazil had stopped importing enslaved Africans only in 1850, under heavy British pressure, and the British squadron whose officers entertained Livingstone was there to stop the trade from reviving. Inland, slavery and forced labour continued, and the traders whose demands had troubled the party at the Kasai were part of the same system. Livingstone looked at the cathedral and the fine houses of the old city and knew what had paid for them.

The naval officers offered Livingstone a passage home to England. His family was there, and he had not seen them for more than two years. He was ill and exhausted, and he had done what he had set out to do: he had reached the coast. He could have sailed, and sent the men home by another route with the help of the Portuguese. No one would have blamed him.

He refused. He had promised Sekeletu that he would bring the men back, and he would not break his word. They did not know the way home, and the country they had come through was dangerous, full of slave traders who would have been glad to seize a party of unprotected men. Livingstone believed that if he left them, they would never see the Zambezi again.

It was a costly decision, and it may well have saved their lives. It also, as it turned out, saved his own. The ship on which he would have sailed, HMS Forerunner, sank off Madeira on her voyage home. Livingstone had sent his journal, maps and letters on her. They went to the bottom, and he had to write them all again.

He That Sweareth to His Own Hurt

Psalm 15 asks who may dwell on God’s holy hill, and answers with a portrait of an honest man: one who walks uprightly, speaks truth in his heart, does not slander his neighbour, and “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” That is, he keeps his promises even when keeping them costs him.

Livingstone kept his promise to the twenty-seven men. It cost him another two years in Africa, months of fever and danger, and the pain of continued separation from his family. He did it because he had given his word to a chief and to the men themselves, and because the old Highland precept of his family, “Be honest,” meant more to him than his own comfort. It is one of the finest things he ever did, and it is worth setting beside the harder judgements this book has to make. The man who could leave his wife to wander through English lodging-houses would not leave twenty-seven African men on a strange coast.

There is something uncomfortable in that comparison, and it should not be smoothed away. But neither should the decision at Luanda be belittled. It was the act of a man who saw his African companions as people to whom he owed a debt of honour, at a time when many Europeans would have seen them as hired hands to be paid off and left. The men knew it. On the long road home they would show him the same loyalty.

On 20 September 1854, Livingstone and the twenty-seven left Luanda and turned back east, into the interior.