“I Never Made a Sacrifice”

“For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to us-ward.”

— Romans 8:18, ASV

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Livingstone landed in England in December 1856 and was reunited with Mary after four and a half years. She had written a poem of welcome for him, which survives, full of love and of the pain of waiting. The children hardly knew him. Robert was ten, Agnes nine, Thomas seven, and William Oswell, whom he had last seen as a baby, was five. His father had died that February, and when Livingstone went to Hamilton to see his mother and sisters, it was to a house in mourning.

He was famous at once. Reports of his crossing of Africa had been reaching Britain for two years, and the public had followed them with excitement. Within days of his arrival he was received at a special meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, which had already awarded him its gold medal, and at a meeting of the London Missionary Society. Over the following months he was given an honorary degree by Oxford and honours by other universities, the freedom of several cities, and an audience with Queen Victoria. He was invited to speak everywhere, and crowds came to see him. He disliked the attention and was a poor speaker, reading his addresses awkwardly in his strong Scottish accent. It made no difference. People wanted to see the man who had walked across Africa.

Missionary Travels

The publisher John Murray persuaded him to write a book, and he spent most of 1857 writing it, in rented rooms in London, with Mary and the children around him. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa appeared in November 1857. It was a long, dense book, full of natural history and geography as well as adventure, and it sold some seventy thousand copies, an extraordinary number for the time. For the first time in his life, Livingstone had money. He used much of it to provide for his family and to pay for his next journey.

The book made his reputation, and it also made his message. Its pages argued that the interior of Africa was not a desert but a rich, populous, well-watered country, healthy on its high plateaus, full of people who wanted to trade and were willing to hear the gospel. The great obstacle, he argued, was the slave trade, which set people against each other and made all travel dangerous. The answer was to open the country to legitimate commerce by way of the great rivers, especially the Zambezi, so that Africans could sell cotton, ivory and other produce instead of people. Missionaries would follow the traders, and Christianity and civilisation would spread together.

Leaving the Society

Not everyone was delighted. The directors of the London Missionary Society had watched his travels with growing unease. They were a missionary society, supported by the gifts of churchgoers for the preaching of the gospel, and their missionary had spent years exploring rather than preaching. In a letter that reached Livingstone on his way home, the Society’s secretary had written that the directors were restricted in their power to support plans only remotely connected with the spreading of the gospel. Livingstone was deeply offended. He believed that everything he had done was connected with the spread of the gospel, because it was opening a way for it.

The Society was willing, in fact, to support a mission to the Makololo, which he had promised, and it went ahead with one. But Livingstone was ready to move on. The government, impressed by his journeys and attracted by the idea of opening the Zambezi to British trade, offered him an appointment as consul at Quelimane, with responsibility for the east coast and the independent districts of the interior, and the leadership of an official expedition up the Zambezi. He accepted, and in 1857 he resigned from the London Missionary Society.

He insisted that he had not stopped being a missionary. He wrote to friends that he was serving Christ as much in exploring as in preaching, and that a man could be a missionary in many ways. There was truth in that. There was also a change of direction that he did not fully admit, even to himself. From now on he would be paid by the British government, accountable to the Foreign Office, and committed to an expedition whose goals were commercial and scientific as well as Christian. He would never again work for a missionary society.

The Senate House

On 4 December 1857, Livingstone spoke in the Senate House at Cambridge, to a packed audience of students and dons. It was the most important speech of his life, and it was printed soon afterwards. He spoke about Africa, its people, its resources, and its need, and about the slave trade. Then he turned to the subject of sacrifice.

“For my own part,” he said, “I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?” He went on: “It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall hereafter be revealed in, and for, us. I never made a sacrifice.”

And he ended with an appeal. He asked his hearers to turn their attention to Africa. He expected, he said, to be cut off in that country within a few years, and he begged them not to let it be shut again now that it was open. “I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity,” he said, and he asked them to carry on the work he had begun, and left it with them.

A Privilege

The Cambridge speech had an immediate effect. Students and graduates of Cambridge and Oxford, with support from Durham and Dublin, founded the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, which would send its first party to the Zambezi in 1861. It was the most direct fruit of Livingstone’s appeal, and in time it became one of the great Anglican missions of East and Central Africa, with a long history of African clergy and churches. Its beginnings, as a later chapter will show, were tragic.

The words about sacrifice have been quoted in thousands of sermons. They deserve to be, because they express something true about the Christian life. Paul wrote, in the verse at the head of this chapter, that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory to come, and Livingstone was echoing him almost word for word. To serve Christ at a cost is not a loss, when it is set against what Christ has given and what he will give. The missionary who thinks of himself as a martyr has misunderstood the gospel. Livingstone had not.

And yet the words need to be heard alongside the story of the previous four years. Livingstone had not made a sacrifice, he said. Mary had. Her years in English lodgings, alone with four children, were a sacrifice, and she had not chosen them. The children’s years without a father were a sacrifice. Sekwebu, drowned off Mauritius, had made one. The speech was true of Livingstone’s own heart, and it was spoken with real humility. It was not the whole truth about the cost of his calling, because much of that cost had been paid by others.

Commerce and Christianity

The last sentences of the speech have been quoted almost as often as the passage on sacrifice, and they have been criticised more. “I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity.” In later years Livingstone’s phrase was turned into a slogan, “Christianity, commerce and civilisation,” and used by many who had no interest in Christianity at all to justify the European takeover of Africa. Traders, settlers and governments followed the paths he opened, and they did not always come in the spirit he hoped.

It is fair to ask what Livingstone himself meant. He did not mean conquest. He believed that Africans should own their own land and govern themselves, and he was a fierce critic of the Boers and later of the Portuguese for taking African land and labour. What he wanted was trade: British merchants buying cotton and ivory from African producers, paying fair prices, and so giving African communities an alternative to selling people. He believed that this would make the slave trade unprofitable and would bring Africans into contact with Christian civilisation, which he assumed would be good for them.

There was real compassion in this, and real naivety. Livingstone believed that British commerce was, at heart, a Christian thing, honest and beneficial, and he underestimated how easily trade becomes exploitation when one side has guns and ships and the other does not. He also assumed, as most Victorians did, that what he called civilisation, meaning British customs and institutions, was the natural companion of the gospel. The history of the next century would show how dangerous that assumption was. Jesus warned, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24, ASV). Livingstone did not think he was serving mammon. He thought he was harnessing it. It is not a thing that can easily be done.

In March 1858 he sailed from Liverpool for the Zambezi, at the head of a government expedition, with a paddle steamer in pieces in the hold and Mary and their youngest son beside him. He was forty-five, the most famous missionary in the world, and no longer a missionary of any society. He was going back, as he had promised, to make an open path.