The Sentence of Death

“By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.”

— Hebrews 11:8, ASV

The Last Party

Livingstone left Zanzibar in March 1866 and landed near the mouth of the Rovuma River, on the mainland coast of what is now southern Tanzania. His party was an odd one. There were thirteen sepoys, Indian soldiers from the Bombay Marine Battalion, lent by the government of Bombay. There were ten men from the island of Anjouan in the Comoros, known as the Johanna men, under a headman named Musa, who had served on the Zambezi. There were nine African youths from a mission school at Nasik, in western India, run by the Church Missionary Society for children freed from slave ships. There were two men from Shupanga on the Zambezi, one of whom was Susi, who had worked for the expedition as a woodcutter and had sailed with Livingstone to Bombay. And there were the two Yao boys freed in the Shire Highlands, Chuma and Wikatani, now young men, who had come back from their school in Bombay to join him. With them came camels, buffaloes, mules and donkeys, which Livingstone wanted to test against the tsetse fly.

The animals died within months, of tsetse and of neglect. The sepoys, who had no wish to be in Africa and found the work hard, quarrelled with the others, mistreated the animals, lagged behind, and were eventually sent back to the coast. Livingstone was not a good manager of a mixed and unwilling party, and he admitted as much in his journal.

The Road of the Slaves

The route inland from the Rovuma to Lake Nyasa was one of the main slave roads of East Africa. Livingstone had come to see it, and he saw it. His journal records, day after day, the evidence along the path: a woman tied by the neck to a tree and left dead; others shot or stabbed and lying in the path; people who had collapsed under their loads and been killed, or simply abandoned to starve. He was told that the traders killed those who could not keep up, in anger at losing the money they had paid for them, and to frighten the others into marching faster. The country was depopulated. Villages had been burned, fields abandoned, and those who remained lived in fear.

He wrote it all down, without rhetoric, as evidence. He meant his journal to be read, and he meant it to make Britain act. In the years that followed, these plain entries did more for the campaign against the East African slave trade than any speech he made.

Wikatani and Musa

In August 1866, near the southern end of Lake Nyasa, Wikatani found his own people. He had been taken from this region as a child, and now he met relatives he had thought were lost to him. He asked to stay with them, and Livingstone let him go, with some sadness and with gifts. It was the kind of ending Livingstone had hoped the gospel might bring to freed captives: a return home, with something learned and nothing lost. We do not know what became of Wikatani afterwards.

A month later, Musa and the Johanna men deserted. They had heard rumours that the country ahead was being raided by the Ngoni, a militarised people who had moved north from southern Africa a generation before, and they were afraid. When Livingstone insisted on going on, they turned back. To excuse their desertion, they told the authorities at Zanzibar that Livingstone had been killed by the Ngoni, and they gave a detailed description of his death. The story was believed. Obituaries were published in Britain. The Royal Geographical Society sent out a small expedition under E. D. Young, a naval officer who had served on the Zambezi, which went up the Shire to Lake Nyasa in 1867 and found evidence that Livingstone had passed safely and that Musa had lied. By then Livingstone was hundreds of miles away.

The Medicine Chest

The party, now small, pressed north-west into the high country between Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika. It was the rainy season. Food was scarce, because the slave raids had destroyed the harvests, and they were often hungry. Christmas 1866 was spent with almost nothing to eat. Livingstone grew thin and weak.

Then, on 20 January 1867, two porters who had joined the party on the way ran off in the night. They took with them, among other things, the box that held all of Livingstone’s medicines, including the quinine on which his life depended. He wrote in his journal that he felt as though he had now received the sentence of death, as poor Bishop Mackenzie had.

It was very nearly true. From that day, Livingstone had no defence against malaria, and it attacked him again and again. In the following months he suffered severe fevers, and on one occasion he lost consciousness and fell, waking to find that he could not remember what had happened. He was fifty-three, worn by twenty-five years of African travel, and he had just lost the means of keeping himself alive.

He did not turn back. He went on, with Susi, Chuma, the Nasik youths and whatever porters he could find, towards the great lakes of the interior. The verse at the head of this chapter describes Abraham, who went out “not knowing whither he went.” Livingstone knew, in one sense, exactly where he was going: north, to the watershed, to find the source of the Nile. In another sense he had no idea. He did not know if he would live. He did not know whether anyone at home knew that he was alive. He went on, he believed, because God had called him, and because the slave trade had to be seen and written down.

With the Traders

Here the story takes a turn that the Victorian biographies passed over quickly, and that modern historians have rightly emphasised. Without medicines, without money, without enough men or goods to pay his way, Livingstone could not travel alone in the interior. The only people who could protect and feed him were the very people he had come to expose: the Arab-Swahili traders from Zanzibar who dealt in ivory and slaves.

From 1867 onwards, he travelled for long periods with their caravans, ate their food, accepted their help and their hospitality, and depended on their goodwill. One of them was a powerful young trader named Hamed bin Muhammed, later famous under the name Tippu Tip, who would become the most powerful man in the eastern Congo. Livingstone found many of the traders courteous and generous to him personally, and he wrote of their kindness. He also watched what they did to the people of the country, and recorded it.

It was a terrible position for a man whose life’s cause was the destruction of the slave trade. He could not stop what he saw. He could only write it down, and accept the protection of those who did it. He was not complicit in their trade. But he was dependent on it, and he knew it. The man who had set captives free at Mbame’s village now ate at the table of the slavers, because otherwise he would die.

Lakes

In April 1867 he reached the southern end of Lake Tanganyika. In November he reached Lake Mweru, to the west, and visited the capital of the Lunda king Kazembe, a powerful ruler whose court had been visited by Portuguese travellers decades before. In July 1868 he reached Lake Bangweulu, a vast shallow lake surrounded by swamps, the farthest south of the great lakes of the region. He was the first European to describe it. He did not know that he would die near its shores five years later.

He was now convinced that the rivers flowing out of this region, through Lake Bangweulu and Lake Mweru and northward as the great river called the Lualaba, were the true sources of the Nile. He was wrong. The Lualaba flows into the Congo, not the Nile, as Stanley would prove a decade later. But Livingstone could not know that, and the hope that he was following the Nile to its fountains became, in his last years, almost an obsession. He wrote about the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who had recorded a story of fountains of the Nile, and he hoped to find them and so to confirm the truth of an ancient record. His geography and his faith became oddly entangled. To find the sources, he thought, would give him the fame and influence to end the slave trade.

Ujiji

At the end of 1868 he set out for Ujiji, the main trading town on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where he had arranged for supplies to be sent from Zanzibar. He fell desperately ill on the way with pneumonia, coughing blood, unable to walk. A trader carried him in a litter part of the way, and then by canoe across the lake. He reached Ujiji on 14 March 1869, near death.

The supplies he had been counting on had been plundered. Most of the goods sent for him had been stolen or used up by those who carried them, and the letters he had been longing for were not there. He was nursed back to health, slowly, by Susi and Chuma and the others who were still with him. Then, as soon as he could walk, he set out again, westward, across the lake into the country called Manyema, to follow the Lualaba north.

Abraham, Hebrews says, “looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10, ASV). He never found it in his lifetime. He lived as a stranger in tents, and died, with the others of his kind, “not having received the promises, but having seen them and greeted them from afar” (Hebrews 11:13, ASV). Livingstone was not looking for a heavenly city. He was looking for the fountains of the Nile, and they did not exist where he sought them. But underneath the geographical obsession there was something else, a longing for the end of the slave trade and the coming of the kingdom of God to Africa, and that longing was of Abraham’s kind. He would not see it either. He would greet it from afar.