Faithful Hands

“And devout men buried Stephen, and made great lamentation over him.”

— Acts 8:2, ASV

The Council

The men who gathered outside the hut at Chitambo’s village on the morning of Livingstone’s death had several choices. They could bury him where he lay, as Africans and Europeans alike were usually buried in the interior, and go home. They could leave his body and his papers with the chief and walk away. Or they could try to take him to the coast, more than a thousand miles away, through country that was often hostile, where the carrying of a corpse would arouse fear and suspicion in every village they passed.

They decided to take him home. According to the account they later gave Waller, they met together and agreed to put themselves under the leadership of Susi and Chuma, the two men who had been with Livingstone longest, and to obey them as they had obeyed him. They agreed that the body would be preserved and carried to Zanzibar, together with his papers, instruments and belongings, so that his people could bury him in his own country and his work would not be lost. Nobody ordered them to do it. There was no one to order them. They chose it.

It is impossible to know all their reasons. They loved him; that much is clear from everything they said and did. Some of them also understood that he was an important man in the British world, and that it would go hard with them if they returned to Zanzibar without his body and his papers, and were suspected of having harmed him. Both motives may have been at work. Neither diminishes what they did.

The Heart in Africa

At first they kept the death secret from the people of the village, fearing that the chief would impose heavy fines or that the villagers would be alarmed by a death among strangers. When Chitambo learned of it, however, he behaved with great courtesy. He came with his people to mourn, with drums and the firing of guns, in the manner of the country, and he allowed the men to build a separate enclosure outside the village where the body could be prepared.

The men had no embalmer. One of them, Farijala, had worked for a doctor in Zanzibar and had watched him at work. With the help of Carus Farrar, he opened the body and removed the heart and other internal organs. These were placed in a tin box and buried in the earth beneath a large mpundu tree near the hut. A short service was read over them; Jacob Wainwright, who could read English, is said to have read the burial service from the Book of Common Prayer. Then Jacob carved an inscription in the bark of the tree, giving Livingstone’s name and the date of his death, as the men reckoned it, 4 May 1873, together with some words of their own.

The body was filled with salt and laid out to dry in the sun for about two weeks. Then it was wrapped in calico, enclosed in a cylinder of bark, sewn up in sailcloth, tarred against the weather, and lashed to a pole so that two men could carry it. His papers, journals, maps, instruments and the rest of his belongings were packed into loads.

The burial of his heart in Africa has become one of the best-loved details of his story, and it is often said that his African friends buried it there because his heart belonged to Africa. The Royal Geographical Society, which still holds the section of the tree with Jacob’s inscription, records that this is what his companions said. It may also have been a practical necessity of preserving the body. Both things can be true. It is fitting, whatever the reason, that the heart of the man who loved Africa, and whose love was often clumsy and costly, should lie in African earth, buried by African hands.

A Thousand Miles

The journey to the coast took about five months. The company went north-east, back past Lake Bangweulu, across the high country towards Lake Tanganyika, and then east towards Unyanyembe. They suffered illness, hunger and hostility. Several of them died on the way. In some places the people would not let them pass with a corpse, and the men resorted to a stratagem: they made up a bundle that looked like a body, sent it back along the path as if returning it for burial, and disguised the real body as an ordinary bale of goods. At least once they had to fight their way through a village.

In October 1873, near Unyanyembe, they met an English expedition under a naval officer named Verney Lovett Cameron, which the Royal Geographical Society had sent out to relieve Livingstone. Cameron and his companions learned from Susi and Chuma that the man they had come to help was dead. Cameron advised them to bury the body there, saying that it would be safer and simpler. The men refused. They had carried him this far, and they would carry him to the sea. Cameron took some of Livingstone’s instruments, and the men went on.

They reached the coast at Bagamoyo, opposite Zanzibar, in February 1874, nine months after his death. They handed the body and the papers over to the acting British consul. A British warship took the body across to Zanzibar.

Devout Men

The verse at the head of this chapter records the burial of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, stoned to death in Jerusalem. It is a single sentence in the book of Acts, and it is one of the tenderest in the New Testament. “And devout men buried Stephen, and made great lamentation over him.” Luke does not name them. We do not know who they were, whether apostles or ordinary believers, or how they recovered the body. We know only that they loved him and grieved for him and buried him with honour, at some risk to themselves.

The men and women who carried Livingstone to the coast were not all Christians, though several of them were or would become so. They were, in the sense that matters here, devout: devoted to the man they had followed and to the duty they had taken on. Unlike the men who buried Stephen, many of them can be named, and they should be. Susi and Chuma led them. Jacob Wainwright, Carus Farrar and Matthew Wellington were among the young men from Nasik. Majwara was the boy at the door. Halima cooked for the company, as she had for Livingstone. Farijala prepared the body. There were dozens of others whose names are in the lists that Waller compiled and that later scholars have gathered, and some whose names are lost.

The inscription on Livingstone’s grave in Westminster Abbey begins, “Brought by faithful hands over land and sea.” The hands over land were theirs.

England

When the body reached Zanzibar, the British authorities paid off most of the men and sent them home. They were given their wages and a few gifts. Very few of them were taken to England for the funeral. Only Jacob Wainwright went with the body, on the ship that carried it to Southampton. Many people have since thought it a shameful thing that the men who had carried Livingstone a thousand miles were left at Zanzibar while British dignitaries carried him the last few hundred yards. It was.

The body reached Southampton in April 1874 and was taken by special train to London, where it lay at the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society. There it was examined by the surgeon Sir William Fergusson and others, in the presence of friends who had known Livingstone, among them his father-in-law, Robert Moffat. They found in the upper left arm the false joint left by the lion at Mabotsa thirty years before, and were satisfied that the body was his. The men who had carried it had never doubted it.

The funeral took place on 18 April 1874. Jacob Wainwright walked among the eight pallbearers, the only African among them, beside Stanley and old friends and companions of Livingstone’s travels. The Abbey records that he threw a palm branch into the grave. A choirboy who was present is said to have remembered, years later, seeing Stanley restrain him at the graveside, overcome with grief.

Susi and Chuma came to Britain some weeks later, after the funeral, through the efforts of Livingstone’s friends. They visited his family, met many of those who had known him, and spent time with Horace Waller at Newstead Abbey, helping him to sort Livingstone’s papers and telling him, day after day, the story of the last months and the long journey. Waller wrote it down, and it became the closing chapters of the Last Journals. Almost everything we know of Livingstone’s death and of the journey to the coast comes from their memories.

What Became of Them

Chuma went back to Zanzibar and worked for the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, the mission whose first bishop had died at the Ruo in 1862, and later led caravans for other expeditions into the interior. He died of tuberculosis in Zanzibar in 1882, still a young man. Susi also returned to Zanzibar and worked for the same mission, as a trusted helper of its bishops on their journeys. In 1886, after years of instruction, he was baptised, and he took the name David, after his old master. He died in 1891. Jacob Wainwright returned to East Africa and worked with the Church Missionary Society; he died in 1892.

Their later lives were not famous. They were faithful. In that, they were more like the real Livingstone than the legend ever was.