Kebrabasa

“A man’s heart deviseth his way; But Jehovah directeth his steps.”

— Proverbs 16:9, ASV

The Expedition

The Zambezi Expedition sailed from Liverpool on 10 March 1858 in the steamer Pearl. In its hold, in three sections, was a small paddle steamer for use on the river, named Ma-Robert, after the name by which Mary Livingstone was known among the Batswana, “mother of Robert.” The expedition had a government grant, a set of official instructions, and a staff of six Europeans besides Livingstone himself: his brother Charles, who had come back from America to serve as general assistant; John Kirk, a young Edinburgh doctor and botanist; Richard Thornton, a geologist of twenty; Thomas Baines, an artist and storekeeper who had experience of southern Africa; Norman Bedingfeld, a naval officer, to command the vessels; and George Rae, a ship’s engineer from Blantyre.

Its aims, set out in the Foreign Office instructions, were to explore the Zambezi and its resources, to open it to British trade, to encourage the people to grow cotton and other crops for export, and to discourage the slave trade. Livingstone also intended to take the Makololo men home from Tete, as he had promised, and to prepare the way for missions on the healthy highlands he had seen.

Mary and their youngest son, Oswell, sailed with them. But on the voyage it became clear that she was pregnant again, and at Cape Town it was decided that she could not go on to the fever-ridden Zambezi delta. She went north to her parents at Kuruman, and there, on 16 November 1858, she gave birth to a daughter, Anna Mary. Livingstone would not see the child until she was five. The other children were in Britain. Mary, once more, was separated from them and from him.

A Leaking Launch

The expedition went wrong almost from the start. The Ma-Robert had been built cheaply, of a new kind of steel plate, and it was badly designed for the river. It burned enormous quantities of wood, so that the crew spent much of each day cutting fuel, and it was so underpowered that canoes paddled past it. Its plates soon began to corrode and leak. The crew nicknamed it the Asthmatic. Livingstone blamed the builder, and with reason.

He also quarrelled almost at once with Bedingfeld, the naval officer, over who commanded the vessels. Bedingfeld resigned and went home within a few months. Livingstone had never commanded Europeans before, apart from his short partnership with Rogers Edwards, and he did not do it well. He gave few clear instructions, expected his men to work as hard as he did without being told, and took any disagreement as disloyalty. He relied heavily on his brother Charles, who was unpopular with the others and whose reports of their failings Livingstone tended to believe.

The delta of the Zambezi was a maze of channels, and it took weeks to find a navigable one. Everyone suffered from malaria. Livingstone had worked out a treatment for fever, a combination of quinine with purgatives, which he called his rousers, and it saved many lives, including his own. It was one of his real contributions to tropical medicine. But it could not keep a party of Europeans healthy in the delta in the rainy season.

The Makololo at Tete

In September 1858 the expedition reached Tete, and Livingstone met the Makololo men he had left there two and a half years before. They were overjoyed to see him. Some of them had died while he was away, and some had settled, married and made new lives at Tete. The rest wanted to go home, and he renewed his promise to take them. It was a promise he kept, in 1860, though by then many more had chosen to stay. The Makololo at Tete were the one part of the expedition’s first year that went as he had hoped.

Kebrabasa

Above Tete lay the gorge of Kebrabasa, the stretch of the Zambezi he had bypassed on his way down in 1856. He had assumed that the rapids there could be passed by a steamer. In November 1858 he went to see them, first in the Ma-Robert, which could not get far, and then on foot, scrambling over the hot black rocks of the gorge with Kirk and a few of the Makololo.

What they found was a narrow channel through which the whole river forced its way between cliffs, in a series of rapids and falls, the worst of them a cataract called Morumbwa. No steamer could pass it. Kirk saw this at once. Livingstone would not accept it. He wrote to the government that a more powerful steamer, at the height of the flood, might pass the rapids, and he asked for a new vessel. Kirk, in his private journal, began to record doubts about his leader’s judgement that would grow sharper as the years went on.

It was the moment when the great plan collapsed. Livingstone had told the British public and government that the Zambezi was a highway into the interior, leading to healthy highlands where missionaries and traders could settle. The highway was blocked, a few hundred miles from the sea, by an obstacle he had not seen because he had walked round it. His whole reputation, and the government’s money, rested on a mistake.

The Heart Deviseth

The proverb at the head of this chapter is one of the wisest in the Bible about planning. “A man’s heart deviseth his way; But Jehovah directeth his steps.” It does not say that planning is wrong. It says that our plans are not the last word. God directs the steps, and sometimes he directs them where we did not intend to go.

Livingstone was a great deviser of ways. His plan for the Zambezi was bold, generous and, in its way, visionary. It was also built on a hasty assumption, and when the assumption proved false he could not let it go. That is the shadow side of the perseverance that this book has praised. The same stubbornness that carried him across Africa made it almost impossible for him to admit that he had been wrong. He did not abandon his plan; he looked for a way round it. Sometimes that is faith. Sometimes it is only pride.

And yet the proverb also suggests something more hopeful. Livingstone’s steps were directed, in the end, somewhere he had not planned to go. Unable to go up the Zambezi, he turned north, up its tributary the Shire River. What he found there would shape the history of a whole country.

The Shire

In January 1859 the expedition steamed up the Shire, a river no European had explored, into a valley of rich farmland and large villages. The Mang’anja people who lived there were at first suspicious, gathering on the banks with bows and poisoned arrows, but they were won over by patient explanation that the strangers came in peace and were not slave traders. Some way upstream, the river was blocked by a series of cataracts, which Livingstone named the Murchison Cataracts after his friend Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographical Society.

Above the cataracts was high country. In April 1859, Livingstone and Kirk walked up into the highlands and reached Lake Shirwa, a large lake that had not been recorded by Europeans. They saw a cool, fertile plateau with many people, the place, Livingstone thought, for the healthy missionary settlement he had imagined on the Batoka plateau. And they heard of a much larger lake farther north.

In September 1859 they reached it. Lake Nyasa, now Lake Malawi, is one of the great lakes of Africa, some three hundred and sixty miles long. Livingstone and his party were the first Europeans to report it to the world, though Portuguese and Arab-Swahili traders knew of it, and a Portuguese traveller may have reached it earlier. It was a real discovery in the sense that mattered to the British public, and Livingstone presented it as a triumph. It was the most important achievement of the expedition.

It came with a terrible discovery. Along the shores of the lake and in the highlands around it ran one of the main routes of the East African slave trade. Caravans from the lake carried captives east to the coast, to be shipped to Zanzibar and the markets of Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The people of the Shire Highlands lived in fear of raiders, both slave traders from the coast and Yao groups who were themselves moving into the region. Livingstone had found the healthy highlands. He had also found the open sore.

Dismissals

Within the expedition, relations went from bad to worse. In 1859 Livingstone dismissed Richard Thornton, the young geologist, for what he considered idleness. He also dismissed Thomas Baines, the artist, after Charles accused him of stealing expedition stores and giving them away. Baines denied it to the end of his life, and later historians have generally believed him and blamed Charles. Livingstone gave him no real hearing. He sent Baines home in disgrace and refused to retract the charge.

Thornton later rejoined the expedition on his own account and died of fever in Africa in 1863. Baines went on to a long career as an artist and explorer in southern Africa, and his paintings of the Zambezi and the Victoria Falls are among the finest records of the region. Neither man ever received an apology.

It is painful to set these episodes beside the Livingstone of Luanda, who would not abandon twenty-seven African men. The same man who kept his word to Africans at great cost to himself could be unjust and unforgiving to the Europeans who served under him. Part of the reason may be that he expected nothing of Africans that he did not expect of himself, while he expected of his European colleagues everything that he expected of himself, and was angry when they fell short. Part of it was simply that he was not a good leader of men who were not willing to follow him without question. He knew how to persevere. He did not know how to share command.