Nyangwe

“O Jehovah, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? I cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save.”

— Habakkuk 1:2, ASV

Manyema

The country west of Lake Tanganyika, which the traders called Manyema, was in 1869 the new frontier of the ivory and slave trade. The Arab-Swahili traders from Zanzibar had only recently pushed into it, and they were taking ivory by trade where they could and by force where they could not. The people of Manyema, who had no guns, were raided, robbed and enslaved. Livingstone went into this country in the second half of 1869, with a handful of followers, in the company of traders, looking for the Lualaba.

He liked many of the people he met there, and his journal records their gardens, their markets, their crafts and their courtesy, as well as the fear in which they lived. The traders told lurid stories about the Manyema to justify how they treated them, and Livingstone sometimes repeated those stories and sometimes doubted them. What he did not doubt was that the people had done nothing to deserve what was being done to them.

It was the most miserable period of his life. He was ill again and again. In 1870, at a place called Bambarre, his feet broke out in ulcers that ate into the flesh, so that he could not walk, and he was laid up for months in a hut. Most of the porters who had come with him had deserted. For a time only three of his followers stayed with him: Susi, Chuma, and a young man from the Nasik school called Gardner. They nursed him, foraged for food, and kept him alive.

In those months of illness, with nothing else to read, he read the Bible through four times. His journal records the readings, and the thoughts they prompted. It was the longest sustained reading of Scripture in his life, and it was done in a hut in Manyema, by a lame and lonely man who had no idea whether anyone outside Africa knew he was alive.

Men From Zanzibar

Early in 1871 a party of men arrived from Zanzibar to join him. They had been hired by an Indian merchant on behalf of the British consulate, where Livingstone’s old colleague John Kirk was now the consul. They were slaves of Indian merchants, hired out by their owners, and they had no wish to go into the interior with a sick old man. They were insubordinate from the start, refused to go where he wanted, and stirred up trouble with the people of the country. Livingstone came to believe that Kirk had sent him bad men deliberately, or at least carelessly, and his letters from this time are full of bitter accusations against his former friend. They were unfair. Kirk had done what he could from Zanzibar. But Livingstone was ill, isolated and suspicious, and the old pattern of blaming others was stronger than ever.

With these men, in March 1871, he reached Nyangwe, a large market town on the bank of the Lualaba. The river was wide and flowed north. Livingstone was sure that it was the Nile. He needed canoes to follow it, and he spent months trying to buy them, without success. The traders did not want him to go further, and the people of the town, who were afraid of everyone from the east, would not sell to him.

15 July 1871

Nyangwe held a great market every few days, to which hundreds of people, most of them women, came from the surrounding country to buy and sell food, pottery, cloth and other goods. On 15 July 1871 Livingstone went to the market as usual. By his published account, a quarrel broke out over a fowl. Then the men of a trader named Dugumbe, who had recently arrived at Nyangwe with a large armed following, opened fire on the crowd.

The massacre that followed was the most terrible thing Livingstone ever saw. The gunmen fired into the market and along the river bank. People fled to the river and tried to escape in canoes, which overturned in the crush, and many who could not swim were drowned. The gunmen went on firing at those in the water. Then Dugumbe’s men crossed the river and burned the villages on the other side. Livingstone estimated that between three and four hundred people were killed, most of them women. Others have given different numbers. Whatever the count, it was a slaughter of unarmed people on a market day.

His published journal records his horror and his grief, his conviction that he had witnessed something from hell, and his prayer. As he wrote, he could hear the wailing for the dead from across the river. He wrote a short prayer that God’s kingdom would come. It is the petition of the Lord’s Prayer, but it comes here as a cry, almost a protest: a man who had spent his life asking God to bring his kingdom to Africa, watching the opposite of the kingdom come in front of him, and crying out for God to act.

How Long?

The prophet Habakkuk began his book with the same cry. “O Jehovah, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? I cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save.” Habakkuk had seen injustice in his own people, and then he was told that God was sending the Babylonians, a people more violent still. He did not understand. He stood on his watchtower and waited for an answer, and the answer he was given was not an explanation, but a promise: “the righteous shall live by his faith,” and “the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:4, 14, ASV).

Livingstone was given no explanation for Nyangwe either. He could do nothing for the dead. He could not stop Dugumbe. He could only write what he had seen, and send it to the world, and pray. He did all three. His account of the massacre reached Britain in 1872 and was printed widely. It shocked the public and strengthened the campaign that was already gathering in Parliament against the East African slave trade, and it contributed to the pressure that led, in 1873, to the closing of the great slave market at Zanzibar. It was, in the end, perhaps the most effective thing he ever wrote.

What the Field Diary Showed

For more than a century, Livingstone’s account of Nyangwe was known only from the Last Journals, edited by Waller from the large journal that Livingstone wrote up from his pocket notebooks. In the early twenty-first century, scholars working on the Livingstone Online project used spectral imaging to read his original field diary for 1871, written in improvised ink on scraps of newspaper and faded almost to nothing. What they found complicated the story.

The field diary, written day by day, shows that the situation at Nyangwe before the massacre was more tangled than the published version suggests. Livingstone had been travelling and living under the protection of traders, including men associated with Dugumbe. The men from Zanzibar who were supposed to be his own followers had been involved in violence against local people in the weeks before. He seems to have feared, in the days after the massacre, that he himself would be associated with what had happened, and that the people of the country would see him as one of the traders. The later journal, written up with more care, gives a clearer and more morally straightforward account, in which Livingstone is purely a horrified observer.

The historians who studied the diary did not conclude that Livingstone had lied about the massacre, which certainly happened as a massacre, or that he bore responsibility for it. They did conclude that the published account was shaped, by Livingstone and then by Waller, to present him as more separate from the traders than he really was. It is a sobering finding. It is also, in a way, a very human one. A man who has seen something terrible, and has been closer to it than he wishes, will often tell the story in a way that puts more distance between himself and the evil. That is not the same as lying. But it is not the whole truth either, and a biography that wants the whole truth has to say so.

The Way Back

After the massacre Livingstone could not stay at Nyangwe. He would not travel with Dugumbe’s men, and without them he could not go north. He turned back towards Ujiji, sick and broken in spirit. On the way, in August 1871, his party was ambushed in the forest by people who took them for slave traders, and he narrowly escaped death three times in a single day: a spear thrown at him missed him by inches, another passed close behind him, and a great tree, set on fire and cut nearly through, crashed down a yard from where he walked. He recorded each escape in his journal, and thanked God.

He reached Ujiji in late October 1871, according to his own reckoning, which by then had gone astray by several weeks. He was a skeleton. He found that the goods that had been sent there for him had been sold off by the man left in charge of them, who had assumed that he was dead. He had almost nothing left. He sat down in his house at Ujiji, among the few faithful men who had brought him back, and wondered how he would live.

He did not know that a young American journalist, with a large, well-supplied caravan, was marching towards Ujiji at that moment, looking for him.