Shupanga

“Jehovah is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, And saveth such as are of a contrite spirit.”

— Psalm 34:18, ASV

Ma-Robert

This book has said a good deal about what Mary Livingstone suffered. It should also say who she was, because the story of her marriage has usually been told from her husband’s side, and she has too often appeared in it only as the woman who waited.

She was the daughter of missionaries and had grown up among the Batswana. She spoke Setswana from childhood, as her husband never quite did. At Mabotsa, Chonuane and Kolobeng she ran the infant school, taught sewing, made soap and candles and clothes, kept a household going in a country where every necessity had to be made by hand or carried hundreds of miles, and nursed the sick. She bore five children in less than six years, in mud-walled houses and ox-wagons, one of them on the bank of a river in the bush, and a sixth some years later. She went with her husband across the thirstland in 1850 and again in 1851, pregnant both times. The Batswana called her Ma-Robert, mother of Robert, in the respectful way of the country, and the people of Kolobeng remembered her with affection. She was not a frail Victorian lady dragged unwillingly into Africa. She was an African missionary’s daughter, tough and capable, who knew exactly what the life involved.

What broke her was not Africa. It was separation: the years in Britain without her husband, and then, after 1858, the years at Kuruman and in Scotland, away from him again, with her children divided between continents. In the letters of these years there are signs of depression, of anger, and of a faith that had grown dark. Those who saw her in Scotland in 1860 and 1861 found her unhappy and restless. She was determined to rejoin her husband. She left her children with relatives and friends in Scotland, among them her baby Anna Mary, and sailed for the Zambezi.

The Arrival

She arrived at the mouth of the Zambezi at the end of January 1862, on the brig Hetty Ellen, together with the sections of the Lady Nyassa, the steamer Livingstone had paid for out of the profits of his book to carry on Lake Nyasa, and with Miss Mackenzie and Mrs Burrup, who were coming to join the bishop and his colleague. With them, too, was a young Scottish minister, James Stewart, who had come to see whether the Free Church of Scotland should start a mission in the region.

It was the worst possible time. The rainy season had begun. The Pioneer, laden with the women, their baggage and part of the steamer, struggled for weeks up the Zambezi and the Shire against the shallows. When at last they reached the Ruo, they learned that Mackenzie and Burrup were dead. The two women went back down to the coast and home. Mary stayed.

The Lady Nyassa had to be assembled before it could be used, and Livingstone decided to put it together at Shupanga, on the south bank of the lower Zambezi, where there was an old Portuguese house and a good landing place. For three months the expedition worked there, in the heat and the rain, bolting together the iron hull. Mary lived in the house at Shupanga with her husband. For a few weeks, after so many years, they were together.

27 April 1862

Around the middle of April, Mary fell ill with fever. At first it seemed like the many fevers she had survived before. Then it grew worse. She became delirious, and the treatments that usually worked, Livingstone’s own quinine and purgatives, had no effect. Kirk, who was with them, did what he could. On 27 April 1862, in the evening, she died, with her husband beside her. She was forty-one.

She was buried the next day under a great baobab tree near the house at Shupanga, after a short service. A stone was later put up to mark the place.

The First Heavy Stroke

Livingstone was devastated. He had seen death all his life, as a doctor and a traveller, and he had lost his baby daughter Elizabeth at Kolobeng. But nothing had prepared him for this. His journal, as Blaikie printed it, records his grief with a simplicity that is more moving than any eloquence. What follows gives its substance closely, though not word for word.

He wrote that this was the first heavy blow he had suffered, and that it took away all his strength. He had wept over her, he wrote, and she deserved many tears. He had loved her when he married her, and the longer he lived with her the more he loved her. He thought of the children, who had all been tenderly attached to her, and asked God to pity them. He himself, he wrote, was left alone in the world by one whom he had felt to be a part of himself.

A few days later he wrote again, addressing her as though she could hear him. He remembered how often they had longed for a quiet home, since they had been cast adrift at Kolobeng. And he wrote a sentence that tells us more about him than any account of his journeys: for the first time in his life, he said, he felt willing to die.

The verse at the head of this chapter promises that God is near to the broken-hearted. Livingstone’s heart was broken at Shupanga, perhaps more completely than at any other time in his life. He did not lose his faith. His journal entries are full of prayer, of hope for heaven, of trust that Mary had gone a little before him. But they are also full of a grief that does not hurry to be comforted, and they show a man who had suddenly, too late, seen what his marriage had cost.

Regret

He wrote to Mary’s mother, and to his children, and to friends. In some of these letters he defended himself, saying that Mary had insisted on coming, as she had, and that he could not have prevented it. In others the defence slips, and something else comes through: the knowledge that she had come because he had left her alone so long that she could not bear it, and that she had died in the country he had brought her to, in the service of plans that had already gone wrong.

It would be cruel to blame him for her death. Malaria killed thousands of Europeans and countless Africans in the Zambezi valley, and there was no reliable protection against it. Mary chose to come, against advice, because she wanted to be with her husband. But it would be dishonest not to say that the shape of her whole married life, its separations and wanderings and loneliness, was given to it by his choices, and that those choices were made with too little thought for her. Livingstone knew that, at Shupanga. Whether he ever said it plainly, even to God, we cannot know. Grief and guilt are often too tangled for anyone to separate.

The psalm promises more than God’s nearness to the broken-hearted. It says that he “saveth such as are of a contrite spirit.” Contrition is grief that sees its own share in the wound. There are hints of contrition in Livingstone’s journal after Mary’s death. There is not much of it in the rest of his life. He went back to work, as he always did, and work was both his comfort and his escape.

The Grave Under the Baobab

Mary Livingstone was not the only person to die at Shupanga. The Zambezi valley in those years was full of graves, of missionaries and sailors and expedition members, and of the African people of the river, who died of fever, famine and the slave raids in far greater numbers. Mary’s grave was marked, and visited, and remembered. Most of the others were not.

But her grave deserves its marker. She was a missionary in her own right, born to the work and faithful in it for most of her life. She endured more than most of the heroes of the missionary movement, and she has been remembered less. Victorian accounts made her a footnote to her husband. Some later accounts made her a victim, or a problem. She was a woman who loved a difficult man and the Africa in which she had been born, who suffered greatly, whose faith wavered and, as far as we can tell, held, and who died where she had wanted to be, beside him.

Paul writes of believers “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things” (2 Corinthians 6:10, ASV). It is a fair epitaph for Mary Moffat Livingstone. She had very little in this world. She gave a great deal. The church has been slow to say so.

Back to Work

Within days of the funeral, Livingstone was at work again on the Lady Nyassa. The steamer was launched in June 1862. But the river had fallen, and it could not be taken up the Shire until the rains returned at the end of the year. Livingstone went off to try the Rovuma again, hoping still for a route to Lake Nyasa outside Portuguese control. The expedition, which had lost its purpose at Kebrabasa, was now losing its members and its credit with the government at home. It had perhaps a year left to run, and the worst of that year would fall not on its members but on the people of the Shire valley.