Graves at Linyanti

“whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For ye are a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”

— James 4:14, ASV

A Promise Kept

In May 1860, Livingstone set out from Tete to take the Makololo home. He had promised Sekeletu, when he set out for the east in 1855, that he would bring them back, and he had promised the men themselves. It was a journey of some six hundred miles upriver, on foot, and it delayed the expedition’s other work by most of a year. Kirk and Charles went with him. Many of the men no longer wanted to go. They had lived at Tete for four years. Some had married local women and had children, some had found work, and some had simply come to prefer the life there. Livingstone did not force them. The party that set out was smaller than the one that had come down, and more men slipped away on the road.

It was characteristic of him that he went at all. The expedition’s instructions did not require it, and the Foreign Office would hardly have noticed if he had sent the men home under an escort. But he had given his word, and he would not delegate it. On the way he passed the Victoria Falls again, and this time he and Charles measured them, dropping a weighted line into the chasm and making careful notes.

The men who stayed behind made their own choices, and some of them made a mark on history that Livingstone could not have foreseen. A group of the Makololo who had served the expedition later settled in the lower Shire valley, in what is now southern Malawi. Armed with the guns the expedition left them and respected for their connection with the Europeans, they gathered followers among the local people and the refugees from the slave raids, and two of them, Ramakukane and Kasisi, became chiefs whose descendants ruled there for generations. They were not Livingstone’s converts or his servants. They were men from the upper Zambezi who saw an opportunity in a disordered land and took it, sometimes protecting the people around them and sometimes ruling them harshly. They belong in this story as reminders that the Africans who travelled with Livingstone were not extras in his drama. They had their own lives, and they lived them.

What He Found

When they reached Sesheke, on the upper Zambezi, in August 1860, Livingstone found the Makololo kingdom in decline. Sekeletu was ill with a disfiguring skin disease, which his people believed had been caused by witchcraft, and he had shut himself away from his subjects. He was suspicious and harsh, and many of his people were afraid of him. The young chief who had befriended Livingstone in 1853 had become, in a few years, a sick and bitter man. Livingstone treated him, with some success, but he could see that the Makololo state, which Sebetwane had built by conquest, was beginning to fall apart. Within a short time of Sekeletu’s death a few years later, the subject peoples rose against the Makololo and destroyed their rule.

He also found out what had happened to the missionaries.

The Makololo Mission

In 1857, after Livingstone’s return to Britain, the London Missionary Society had decided to send missions to two of the peoples he had described: the Matabele in the south, and the Makololo on the Zambezi. Livingstone had urged both. For the Makololo mission the Society chose Holloway Helmore, an experienced missionary who had served for many years among the Batswana, and Roger Price, a young man newly arrived from Britain. They travelled north across the Kalahari with their wives and children, by ox-wagon, a journey of many months, and arrived at Linyanti in February 1860.

Linyanti was low, marshy and full of fever, and they arrived in the rainy season. Within weeks the party was dying. On 7 March, Helmore’s three-year-old son Henry died. Price’s baby daughter died soon after, and so did another of the Helmore children. On 12 March, Anne Helmore died. Holloway Helmore himself died on 21 April. Several of the African wagon drivers and servants who had come with them also died. Price, ill himself, with his wife and the two surviving Helmore children, was allowed by the Makololo to leave, but stripped of many of his goods. On the journey south, Isabella Price died too. Price and the two children were eventually found and brought to safety by another missionary, John Mackenzie.

Of the nine Europeans who had set out for Linyanti, six were dead: Holloway and Anne Helmore, two of their four children, and Roger Price’s wife and baby daughter. The mission was over. It had lasted a few months.

Who Was to Blame?

The disaster caused bitter recriminations, and some of them fell on Livingstone. Roger Price believed that the Makololo had poisoned the party, and some of the Batswana long held the same belief. Livingstone was sure that they had died of malaria, and modern opinion largely agrees with him. But others asked why the missionaries had gone to Linyanti at all, and why they had gone in the wet season, and why Livingstone, who had urged the mission and knew the country, had not been there to meet them, as many believed he had promised.

Livingstone denied that he had made any firm promise to meet them, and pointed out that the expedition had delayed him. He blamed the missionaries for going to the low country rather than looking for the higher ground he had recommended, and for not treating the fever in the way he had found effective. Some of what he said was fair. He had told the Society that the Makololo wanted to move to a healthier place, and that the mission should go with them. He had not told the missionaries to wait at Linyanti in the rainy season.

But it was also true that his own books had painted the country in brighter colours than it deserved, that his own enthusiasm had driven the mission, and that his promise to come to the Makololo, whatever its exact terms, had been part of the reason the Society chose that field. He did not, in his letters, show much sense of his own share in the tragedy. He defended himself, as he usually did, by explaining why others had been wrong. It is a pattern this book has seen before and will see again. Livingstone could bear almost any suffering of his own. He found it very hard to bear the thought that he had caused suffering to others.

A Vapour

The verse at the head of this chapter is from James’s warning to merchants who plan their year: today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and spend a year there, and trade, and make a profit. “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. What is your life? For ye are a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” James goes on: “For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that” (James 4:15, ASV).

The Helmores and the Prices went to Linyanti because they believed God had called them there. They planned carefully and travelled far. They did not know what would happen on the morrow. Their lives were indeed a vapour, and it vanished in a few weeks. Christians have always found such deaths hard to understand, and it is right that they should. There is no tidy explanation, and James does not offer one. He offers only humility: the reminder that our plans, however good, are held in God’s hand and not our own.

It is also worth remembering the dead whose names were not recorded. The African wagon drivers and servants who came north with the Helmores and the Prices, men from the mission stations of the south, died at Linyanti too, and the histories of the mission rarely name them. They had their own families and their own reasons for making the journey, and they paid the same price. The church has sometimes kept a list of its missionary martyrs that included only the Europeans. God keeps a fuller one.

That humility was what Livingstone most lacked in these years. He planned for continents. He spoke of the Zambezi, the Shire Highlands and the healthy plateaus as though he could see what would happen on them for a generation to come. He was right about some of it, and the missions that eventually took root in the Shire Highlands bore out part of his vision. But the graves at Linyanti were a warning that Africa did not bend to anyone’s plans, and that the cost of being wrong was paid in the lives of others. Livingstone does not seem to have heard the warning. The worst cost of his plans was still to come.

The Way Back

He left Sekeletu’s country in September 1860 and went back down the Zambezi to Tete. In the Kebrabasa gorge, where he insisted on taking canoes through the rapids, Kirk’s canoe overturned and Kirk lost his notes and much of his equipment, narrowly escaping with his life. Livingstone was not discouraged. At the end of 1860, at the mouth of the river, the Ma-Robert, which had been leaking for two years, finally sank in a sandbank. A new steamer, the Pioneer, sent out by the government at Livingstone’s request, arrived early in 1861. With it came the first party of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, led by its new bishop, Charles Frederick Mackenzie.

The young men of Cambridge and Oxford had answered Livingstone’s appeal. They had come to do the work he had begun.