A Grain of Wheat

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.”

— John 12:24, ASV

The Market Closed

On 5 June 1873, about a month after Livingstone’s death at Chitambo’s village, and long before anyone outside the interior knew of it, the Sultan of Zanzibar, Barghash bin Said, signed a treaty with Britain. It made the export of slaves by sea from his mainland territories illegal, and it closed the great public slave market of Zanzibar, through which tens of thousands of people from the interior had passed every year. The treaty was the work of many hands: a British government mission led by Sir Bartle Frere, the persistent pressure of the consul at Zanzibar, John Kirk, Livingstone’s old colleague, and years of campaigning in Britain. The campaign had been fed, more than by anything else, by Livingstone’s letters and journals, and especially by his account of the massacre at Nyangwe. He did not live to know of it.

The treaty did not end the slave trade in East Africa. The overland trade went on for years, and slavery itself continued on the island and the coast until the end of the century and beyond. But it was the beginning of the end, and it came because people in Britain had been made to see what Livingstone had seen. All he could add in his solitude, he had written, was a prayer for blessing on anyone who would help heal the open sore. The prayer was being answered while he was dying.

In September 1873 the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa bought the site of the old market, and on Christmas Day that year the foundation stone of a church was laid there. Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar, stands on the place where people were bought and sold. Tradition says that its altar stands where the whipping post once stood. Whether or not that is exact, the building is a sermon in stone, and it was built by the mission that Livingstone’s Cambridge lecture had called into being.

The Missions

His death did what his life had not. The news of how he had died, and of how his men had carried him home, moved British Christians as nothing else could have done. Within a few years, missions were founded in the regions he had explored. In 1875 the Free Church of Scotland established a mission on Lake Nyasa, named Livingstonia, which under the leadership of Robert Laws became a great centre of education, training African teachers, ministers, doctors and craftsmen for half a century. In 1876 the Church of Scotland founded a mission in the Shire Highlands and called it Blantyre, after his birthplace; the town that grew up around it is now one of the principal cities of Malawi. The Universities’ Mission returned to Lake Nyasa in the 1880s. The London Missionary Society sent missionaries to Lake Tanganyika. Others followed.

These missions had their own failures, and their own entanglement with what came after. But out of them grew churches that are now among the largest and most vigorous in Africa, led by African ministers and bishops, worshipping in African languages, and sending out their own missionaries. It is worth saying again what this book has said several times: those churches were built mostly by African evangelists, teachers and catechists, men and women whose names are not in the history books, carrying the gospel to their own people in ways that no foreign missionary could. Livingstone had argued, in his first years at Kuruman, that this was how Africa would be evangelised. He was right. He did not live to see it, and it did not happen through him. It happened through the kind of people who carried him to the coast.

The Shadow of Empire

His death also did something he would not have wanted. In the 1880s the European powers divided Africa among themselves, in what came to be called the Scramble for Africa. Livingstone’s name was used, over and over again, to justify British claims. In the Shire Highlands, the Scottish missionaries and their supporters lobbied the British government to take the region under its protection, to keep it from the Portuguese and to stop the slave raids. In 1891 Britain declared a protectorate over the region, later called Nyasaland. The country north of the Zambezi, where Livingstone had walked and died, was taken over by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company and became Northern Rhodesia. The phrase “Christianity, commerce and civilisation” became a slogan of empire.

Colonial rule brought some of the things Livingstone had hoped for: the end of the slave trade, roads, schools, hospitals. It also brought much that he had opposed all his life: the taking of African land by European settlers and companies, forced labour, heavy taxes, racial discrimination, and the denial of self-government. In 1915, in Nyasaland, a Baptist minister named John Chilembwe, who had grown up in the world the missions made and had been taught by missionaries, led an armed rising against the injustices of colonial rule and was killed. In the Congo basin, which Livingstone had thought was the Nile, Stanley’s work for King Leopold opened the way for one of the worst atrocities of the colonial era.

It would be unjust to blame Livingstone for all of this. He did not want Africa conquered, and his ideal of African communities trading freely with Britain while governing themselves was different from what happened. But it would be dishonest to pretend that his vision had nothing to do with it. He called for Britain to come to Africa. He believed that British influence was a Christian influence. He did not see how easily that belief could be used by people who cared nothing for Christ. Christians who admire him should learn from that blindness. The gospel can be carried on the back of power, but power does not stay its servant for long.

When Zambia and Malawi became independent in 1964, they did something that surprised many observers. They kept his name. The town of Livingstone, near the Victoria Falls, kept it, and his statue still stands there. Blantyre kept its name. Many African Christians, then and now, have honoured him as a man who hated the slave trade, treated Africans as equals, and died among them. Others have seen him as a forerunner of colonial rule and asked why his memory should be kept. Both views have their reasons, and Africans have every right to make up their own minds about him. It is not for a British biographer, or for any outsider, to tell them which to hold.

The One Convert

And what of his missionary work, judged by the standard he would have used? He baptised one convert whom we know of, and suspended him from communion within months. By any ordinary measure, his career as a missionary was a failure, and he knew it. In his own lifetime he was criticised for abandoning the missionary calling for exploration, and the criticism had force.

But Sechele did not fall away. He went on reading his Bible, holding worship, and teaching his people, and the Bakwena became a Christian people in large part because of him. That was Livingstone’s doing as well as Sechele’s. And the missions founded after Livingstone’s death in the lands he had explored brought the gospel to millions. Was that his work? Not directly. He did not found them, staff them or lead them. But they would not have existed without him. He was, in his own words at Cambridge, a man who began a work and left it for others to carry out.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Jesus’s saying about the grain of wheat: unless it falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Jesus spoke it of his own death, and he went on to apply it to all who follow him: “He that loveth his life loseth it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal” (John 12:25, ASV). Livingstone’s life did not bear much visible fruit while he lived. It bore fruit after he died, in the missions, in the closing of the slave market, in the churches of Malawi and Zambia and Tanzania, and in the lives of people like Chuma and Susi, who learned the faith in his company and kept it. His heart, literally, was buried in African earth. It is not too much to say that it bore fruit there.

The Man Himself

This book has tried to tell the truth about him, and the truth is mixed. He was brave, persevering, honest about money, generous to the poor, and devoted to the cause of African freedom. He kept his word to the men who carried him across Africa. He respected Africans more than most Europeans of his day, and he gave his life to a continent he loved. He prayed every day, read his Bible through again and again, and dedicated himself to Christ at sixty as he had at twenty.

He was also proud, stubborn and often unjust. He could not work with equals, and he blamed others for his own mistakes. He neglected his wife and children for his work, and they paid a terrible price. He told his own story in ways that flattered him, and he was sometimes careless with the truth about his failures. He believed too easily that his own plans and God’s were the same. And he set going a vision of Africa’s future that others turned to purposes he would have hated.

The Victorian legend made him a saint. Some modern accounts have made him a villain, or a fool. He was neither. He was a sinner who had been forgiven and who knew it, a servant of Christ who often mistook his own will for his Master’s, and a man who went on, through failure after failure, because he believed that he had been sent. “We are unprofitable servants,” Jesus taught his disciples to say; “we have done that which it was our duty to do” (Luke 17:10, ASV). Livingstone would not have quarrelled with that verdict. In the best known of his last prayers, he asked only to be accepted, and to finish his task. God accepts the unprofitable. The task was finished by others, as it always is.