Chitambo’s Village

“Precious in the sight of Jehovah Is the death of his saints.”

— Psalm 116:15, ASV

The Company

On 25 August 1872, Livingstone left Unyanyembe for the last time. His plan was to go south along the eastern side of Lake Tanganyika, then round the southern end of Lake Bangweulu, and then north-west to the Lualaba, to trace the fountains that he still believed fed the Nile. He reckoned that it would take a few months.

His company numbered something over sixty people. At its heart were the men who had been with him for years: Susi, who had joined him on the Zambezi; Chuma, freed as a boy in the Shire Highlands; and a few others who had come back with him from Manyema. With them were the young men from Nasik, among them Jacob Wainwright, Carus Farrar and Matthew Wellington. There was a boy named Majwara, who served Livingstone personally and slept at the door of his hut. There were women too, the wives of some of the men, among them Halima, the wife of one of the Shupanga men, who cooked for Livingstone and whom he valued highly, and a young woman called Ntaoeka. And there were the porters hired at the coast. These people are named here because, in the next nine months, they would decide what happened to David Livingstone, living and dead.

The Swamps

The journey went badly from the start. Livingstone’s geography was confused; his calculations of position had gone wrong, and he thought Lake Bangweulu lay farther east than it did. The party went too far east and found itself, when the rains came at the end of 1872, approaching the lake from the wrong side, in a vast country of swamps and flooded grassland.

From January to April 1873 they waded. For days on end the path lay through water, sometimes knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep, sometimes up to the chest, with the rain falling on them and leeches in the water. They crossed rivers by canoe when they could find canoes, and by wading when they could not. The local people were often unwilling to help, and sometimes hostile, because they had suffered from slave raiders. Food was scarce. The porters grew sullen and some deserted. And Livingstone was dying.

He had suffered for years from dysentery, and now he began to bleed heavily from the bowels. He grew weaker and weaker from loss of blood. He could no longer walk far. By April he could not walk at all, and the men carried him in a litter, a kitanda, made of a framework of poles with grass and a blanket, slung between two men. Even that jolting was agony. His journal entries, which had always been full and careful, grow shorter and shorter, and the handwriting falters.

On 19 March 1873 he turned sixty, in the swamps. He wrote a few lines of thanks to God for sparing him so far on the journey of life, wondered whether he could still hope for success when so many obstacles had arisen, and prayed that Satan would not prevail over him. Even now, his mind was on finishing the work.

The Last Entries

On 21 April he tried to ride a donkey, but was forced to lie down, and was carried back to the village exhausted. On 27 April he wrote his last entry. It begins, “Knocked up quite, and remain—recover—sent to buy milch-goats,” and notes that they were on the banks of the Molilamo. After that, nothing. The notebook, in Waller’s phrase, dropped from his hand.

On 29 April the men carried him across the Molilamo River and to the village of a chief named Chitambo, in a district called Ilala, south of Lake Bangweulu in what is now Zambia. They built him a hut, and laid him in it on a bed of sticks and grass. Chitambo came to visit him on 30 April, but Livingstone was too ill to talk, and asked him to come back the next day.

The Last Night

What we know of that night comes from the men who were there, as they later told it to Horace Waller in England, and as he printed it in the Last Journals. Their account is the source of everything that follows. It was given by men who loved Livingstone and who had every reason to remember him well, and it was shaped by Waller, who loved him too. It is not a record taken at the time. It is testimony, and it should be read as testimony: precious, and not beyond question.

About eleven o’clock at night, Susi said, Livingstone called him, and asked him about the noise he could hear in the village, which was the people shouting to scare buffaloes away from their crops. A little later he asked whether this was the Luapula River, and Susi told him that they were in Chitambo’s village, near the Molilamo. He asked how many days it was to the Luapula, and Susi said he thought three days. Livingstone sighed and seemed to fall asleep. Around midnight he called Susi again, asked for hot water and for his medicine chest, and with great difficulty chose a dose of calomel. Then, in Susi’s memory, he told Susi that all was well and that he could go out now. Those were the last words anyone heard him say.

4 a.m.

The boy Majwara was sleeping at the door of the hut, as he always did. Some time before dawn he woke and saw his master kneeling by the bed. He thought Livingstone was praying, and did not disturb him. Later he looked again, and saw that he had not moved. Frightened, he went and woke Susi, Chuma and some of the others. He told them, in the words Waller recorded, that when he had lain down Livingstone had been just as he was now, and that it was because he did not move that he feared he was dead.

The men came to the hut and looked in. Livingstone was kneeling by the side of the bed, his body stretched forward, his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. For a minute they watched him, and saw no sign of breathing. Then Matthew Wellington went softly forward and laid his hands on Livingstone’s cheeks. The face was cold. He had been dead for some time.

The Date

The date of his death is not certain. Waller, working from the men’s account and the last journal entries, gave it as 1 May 1873, and that is the date on his grave in Westminster Abbey and in most books. But the men themselves, when they carved an inscription on a tree at Chitambo’s village a few days later, gave the date as 4 May, and some of the early reports from the coast gave that date too. Livingstone’s own dating had been unreliable for years, and the men were keeping their own count. Most historians accept 1 May, but the disagreement cannot now be settled, and it is a small sign of how much of this last scene rests on the memories of people who had other things on their minds than calendars.

On His Knees

The picture of Livingstone dying on his knees in prayer became the most famous image of his life. It was painted, engraved, preached on and printed in countless books. It made him, for the Victorian public, the perfect missionary saint: a man who had given everything, and who died in the act of prayer, alone in the heart of Africa.

It is right to hold the picture carefully. It comes from the testimony of Majwara, Susi, Chuma and Matthew, filtered through Waller. Some modern writers have suggested that a man bleeding to death from dysentery might have knelt by the bed for other reasons, or simply collapsed. We cannot know. What we can say is that the men who found him believed that he had died praying, and that this belief fits everything they knew of him. He had prayed every day of his life. He had knelt by his bed every night that he could. If he knelt there that night, in his last weakness, it would have been in character. If he died there, it was in a posture he had taken ten thousand times before.

The psalm at the head of this chapter says that the death of God’s saints is precious in his sight. The psalmist was not saying that their deaths are beautiful, or that they come without pain. He was saying that God notices, and cares, and counts them costly. Livingstone died in a grass hut, in a swamp, far from his family, of a slow and painful disease, with his work unfinished and his great geographical theory wrong. By the measure of the world, it was a miserable end. By the measure of the psalm, it was precious. God was not absent from Chitambo’s village. He was present in the faith of a dying man, whatever his posture, and in the love of the people who sat with him.

The Watchers

That is the last thing to notice about this night. Livingstone did not die alone. The legend of the lonely hero in the heart of Africa forgets that there were sixty people around him, and that a handful of them had stayed with him for years, through famine and fever and the swamps, when they could easily have gone home. A boy slept at his door. A man answered his call at midnight and helped him find his medicine. A young man from Nasik laid his hands gently on his face. They were his family at the end, in a way his own children could not be.

In the morning, the men gathered outside the hut and talked about what to do. They were hundreds of miles from the coast, in hostile country, with a dead white man who was famous, as they knew, in a world they had only glimpsed. Some of the Nasik men could read and write; most of the others could not. No one would have blamed them if they had buried him there and gone home. What they decided to do instead is one of the great stories of loyalty in the history of Africa, and it is theirs, not his.