Magomero

“The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon me; because Jehovah hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”

— Isaiah 61:1, ASV

The Bishop

Charles Frederick Mackenzie was thirty-five, a Cambridge mathematician who had served as a clergyman in Natal and had been consecrated in Cape Town as the first bishop of the Universities’ Mission. He was cheerful, brave, humble and devout, and he admired Livingstone enormously. With him came a small party of clergy and laymen, among them Henry Burrup, Lovell Procter, Henry Rowley, Henry Scudamore, a doctor named John Dickinson, and a lay superintendent named Horace Waller, who would become one of Livingstone’s closest friends. They arrived at the mouth of the Zambezi early in 1861, expecting to be led to the healthy highlands Livingstone had described.

Livingstone did not take them there at once. He had become anxious to find a route into the interior that did not pass through Portuguese territory, where officials were involved in the slave trade and suspicious of British intentions. He insisted on first trying the Rovuma River, far to the north. The Pioneer went a short way up it and found it too shallow. Months were lost. Only in the middle of 1861 did the mission party reach the Shire Highlands, by the familiar route up the Shire.

The Slave Party at Mbame’s

In the middle of July 1861, as the expedition and the missionaries were walking up into the highlands, they arrived at the village of a chief named Mbame. As they rested there, a long line of captives came into the village: men, women and children, the men fastened by the neck in heavy forked sticks, the women and children tied together with ropes, driven by armed men who were blowing horns as if in triumph. When the drivers saw the Englishmen, they fled. Livingstone recognised one of them as a man who had belonged to a former Portuguese commandant of Tete.

The captives were released. The Englishmen cut the ropes and sawed through the slave-sticks, and the people, who had been expecting to be sold, were told that they were free. The Narrative describes how the captives knelt and clapped their hands in thanks. They told what had happened on the march. A woman, they said, had been killed because she could not carry both her load and her baby, and the baby had been killed with her. A man who had collapsed from exhaustion had been killed with an axe and left by the path. There were eighty-four of them, most of them women and children.

Among the children freed in these weeks, by the usual account, was a Yao boy of about ten or eleven named Chuma, who had been taken from his home and family by raiders. He was put into the care of the mission. Thirteen years later, he would help carry Livingstone’s body to the sea.

Liberty to the Captives

Jesus began his ministry in the synagogue at Nazareth by reading from the scroll of Isaiah the passage at the head of this chapter, and saying, “To-day hath this scripture been fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21, ASV). In Luke’s version, the words are “to proclaim release to the captives … to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18, ASV). Christians have argued for centuries about how literally to take them. Is Jesus speaking of freedom from sin, or freedom from chains?

At Mbame’s village, for once, the answer was both, and there was no need to choose. Eighty-four people who had been bound were set free, and the men who freed them did it in the name of Christ. It is one of the clearest moments in Livingstone’s life, and one of the few in which his campaign against the slave trade bore immediate, visible fruit. It was also, as the following weeks showed, the beginning of a terrible entanglement.

Fighting

The freed captives became the nucleus of the mission’s first settlement, at a place called Magomero, where a Mang’anja chief named Chigunda welcomed the missionaries. But the Shire Highlands were in turmoil. Groups of Yao people, themselves displaced by wars and famine to the east, were moving into the highlands, raiding Mang’anja villages and selling captives to the coastal traders. The Mang’anja were defenceless against them.

A few days after the release at Mbame’s, Livingstone, Mackenzie and their party came upon a Yao raiding band that had just burned a village. Livingstone tried to talk to them. The Yao, according to his account, opened fire, and the expedition fired back. Several of the raiders were killed. It was the first time that Livingstone had led men into a fight in which people were killed, and he was deeply troubled by it. He had always said that a missionary should never use force. Now he had.

He advised Mackenzie not to become involved in the fighting between the Yao and the Mang’anja. Then he went back to the river, to continue exploring Lake Nyasa. Mackenzie, left among people who begged him to protect them and who were being killed and enslaved before his eyes, decided that he could not stand by. He accompanied Mang’anja forces on several armed expeditions against Yao raiders, and freed more captives. A bishop of the Church of England had gone to war.

When the news reached Britain, there was outrage. Some blamed Mackenzie for betraying his calling. Some blamed Livingstone, who had led the first fight and then left the bishop to face its consequences. Livingstone, characteristically, defended his own conduct and was cautious in defending Mackenzie’s. It is hard, at this distance, to judge either man. They were trying to protect people from being enslaved, in a country without law, with no help from any government. Most Christians would not want to say that they should have done nothing. Most would also want to say that the consequences of using force were unpredictable and grave, and that the mission paid for them.

The Island at the Ruo

At the end of 1861, Livingstone arranged with Mackenzie to meet him in January at the point where the Ruo River joins the Shire, on a certain date. Mackenzie was expecting his sister and the wife of Henry Burrup to arrive from Britain, and Livingstone was going down to the coast to bring them up, together with Mary Livingstone and the sections of a new steamer, the Lady Nyassa, which Livingstone had paid for himself.

Livingstone did not keep the appointment. The Pioneer was delayed, and then went aground on sandbanks in the lower Shire. Mackenzie and Burrup, meanwhile, set out down the river by canoe to meet him. Their canoe overturned, and they lost their medicines. They waited on an island near the mouth of the Ruo, in the rainy season, without quinine. Both fell ill with fever. Mackenzie died on 31 January 1862. Burrup, who struggled back to Magomero, died soon after.

Livingstone heard the news when the Pioneer finally reached the Ruo. Mary was with him, and so were Miss Mackenzie and Mrs Burrup, who had come all the way from England to join their brother and husband and now learned that they were dead. Livingstone wrote in his journal that the death of Mackenzie would hurt the mission terribly, and that he feared it would hurt his own cause too. Some of the missionaries never forgave him for not keeping the appointment. He said that he could not help it. Both things were true.

Waller

The mission did not die at once, but it never recovered. More of its members died in the following year, including Scudamore and Dickinson. In 1863 a new bishop, William Tozer, arrived, decided that the Shire Highlands were impossible, and withdrew the mission first to a mountain station and then, in 1864, to Zanzibar. Livingstone was bitter about the retreat, and said so. In Zanzibar, the Universities’ Mission began again, among freed slaves and on the mainland opposite, and from there, over the next century, it built churches across what are now Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, with African priests and bishops. It returned to Lake Nyasa in the 1880s. The tragedy at Magomero was not the end of the story.

Horace Waller stayed until the end. When the mission withdrew, he refused to abandon the freed captives who had been in its care, and he took a number of them south to the Cape, where he found homes and work for them. He was a big, warm, practical man, and he and Livingstone formed a friendship that lasted the rest of Livingstone’s life. It was Waller who would edit Livingstone’s last journals, and who would sit with Chuma and Susi in England, writing down their account of his death.

Two of the freed boys stayed with Livingstone himself. Chuma and another boy, Wikatani, travelled with the expedition for the rest of its time on the Zambezi and the Shire, and became part of his household. Livingstone was fond of them both, and they of him. Their story, and Chuma’s especially, runs through the rest of this book. It is worth noticing that the most lasting fruit of the Magomero mission was not a church building or a station, but a handful of freed children who grew up into men and women of their own.

Isaiah’s great passage about liberty to the captives goes on to promise that those who were freed will “build the old wastes” and “raise up the former desolations” (Isaiah 61:4, ASV). The people freed at Mbame’s did not build the Shire Highlands. Many of them died, in the famine and fighting of the following years. But one of them, the boy Chuma, would live to carry the man who freed him a thousand miles through Africa. The prophet’s promise was kept, in a way the prophet’s readers would not have predicted.