Another Man’s Foundation

“yea, making it my aim so to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, that I might not build upon another man’s foundation.”

— Romans 15:20, ASV

Kuruman

Kuruman, when Livingstone arrived in July 1841, was the most famous mission station in southern Africa. It lay in dry country on the southern edge of the Kalahari, where a strong spring, the “Eye” of the Kuruman River, rose out of the limestone. Robert Moffat and his colleagues had led its water into channels and planted gardens and orchards. A stone church, large enough for hundreds, had been finished in 1838. There was a printing press, on which Moffat was printing the Scriptures in Setswana, and a school. The people of the station were mostly Batlhaping, one of the Setswana-speaking peoples, and a congregation of believers had been gathered over twenty years of patient work.

Livingstone was disappointed. He had expected, perhaps from Moffat’s descriptions in London, a large population, and he found a small one, scattered across dry country. He wrote home that the number of people within reach was far smaller than he had imagined, and that the Society had too many missionaries crowded into the south while vast regions to the north had none. It was a judgement that was partly right and partly unfair, and it was typical of him. He did not see what twenty years of work had cost. He saw what had not yet been done.

Moffat himself was still in Britain, and Livingstone was under orders to wait at Kuruman until he returned, and then to go north with him to choose a new station. He did not wait long. Within a few months he was asking permission to travel, and by the end of 1841 he was on the road.

Not Where Christ Was Named

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s statement of his own missionary aim, in the letter to the Romans: to preach the gospel “not where Christ was already named, that I might not build upon another man’s foundation.” Livingstone took this as his own principle. He wanted to go where no missionary had been. It was not that he despised the work at Kuruman. He thought that it was done, or at least that it could be done by others, and that his calling was to go beyond it.

Paul’s words were not a criticism of other missionaries. Paul was explaining why he had not yet visited Rome, where a church already existed, and why he wanted to go on to Spain. He was also, in the same chapter, collecting money for the poor believers in Jerusalem, a church he had not founded, and he was eager to be refreshed by the Roman Christians on his way. Paul’s pioneering was part of a fellowship. Livingstone’s, increasingly, was not. He came to regard the established stations, and many of the men who served at them, with impatience, and he said so in letters to the Society’s directors in terms that his colleagues found hurtful when they heard of them. He was right that the interior needed the gospel. He was less right about the people who had spent their lives on the edge of it.

The First Journeys

His first journey north, late in 1841, was made with Rogers Edwards, an older missionary at Kuruman who had come out as an artisan and been ordained in the field. They travelled by ox-wagon into the country of the Bakwena and other Setswana-speaking peoples, several hundred miles to the north and north-east. Livingstone found that the people were eager to receive a missionary, and particularly a doctor, and that his medicine gave him an entrance everywhere he went.

In 1842 he went north again, this time with a few African companions from Kuruman and without any European. He travelled farther than any missionary had done in that direction, as far as the town of Sekgoma, the chief of the Bamangwato, and he visited a people called the Bakaa, who had a reputation among Europeans for violence towards travellers. He walked among them without weapons, slept in their village, and treated their sick. Nothing happened to him. It was the first of many occasions on which Livingstone found that the dangers Europeans feared in the interior were smaller than they imagined, if a traveller came openly and in peace.

It was on these early journeys that he first met Sechele, the young chief of the Bakwena, who would become the most important African in the first half of his life. That meeting, and what came of it, is the subject of a later chapter.

Six Months Without English

Livingstone saw at once that he could do nothing without the language. Setswana was the language of all the peoples of the region, and Moffat had already given it a written form. But most missionaries learned it slowly, at the station, from books and interpreters, and spoke it badly all their lives. Livingstone decided to do it differently. He wrote that he cut himself off from all European society for about six months, living among the Bakwena at a place called Lepelole, so that he would be forced to hear and speak nothing but Setswana. He gained, he said, by this ordeal, an insight into the habits, ways of thinking, laws and language of the people that proved of incalculable advantage in his later dealings with them.

It was a remarkable thing to do, and few missionaries of his time would have done it. At Lepelole he also tried to help the people with practical work, persuading them to dig a channel to bring water to their gardens. He treated the sick, who came to him in large numbers. He preached, at first through an interpreter and then in his own halting Setswana. He also watched and listened, and his letters and journals from these years are full of careful observations about the lives of the people around him: how they farmed, how they hunted, how their chiefs governed, how they settled disputes.

Native Agents

Out of these journeys came the first of Livingstone’s large ideas about missions. He became convinced that the gospel would spread through Africa not mainly by European missionaries, who were few, expensive and often sick, but by African Christians. Europeans should go ahead, open the way, and train African teachers, who would then carry the message to their own people far more effectively than any foreigner could. In the language of his time, he called them native agents.

The idea was not new. Moffat and others had used African evangelists for years, and the London Missionary Society had long believed in it. But Livingstone pressed it with unusual force. He thought that the European missionaries at Kuruman and the older stations were holding back African converts from responsibility, and he urged the Society to place African teachers in the villages of the interior. It was one of his best insights, and the later history of African Christianity proved him right: the churches of southern and central Africa were built far more by African evangelists, catechists and teachers than by Europeans. He did not always follow his own insight. In practice, as we shall see, his own work rested heavily on African Christians such as Mebalwe, and he gave them less space in his books than they deserved.

Seeing and Not Seeing

Reading Livingstone’s letters from these first years, one is struck by two things together. The first is his openness. He liked the people he met, he enjoyed their company and their humour, and he respected their intelligence. He wrote, against the racial theories that were becoming fashionable in Britain, that Africans were in no way inferior to Europeans in natural ability. He took their questions seriously, including their objections to Christianity. He was happier sleeping in an African village than at a mission station.

The second is the limits of his openness. He saw African religion almost entirely as darkness and superstition, and he had little patience with the customs that bound African societies together: the initiation schools, the role of rainmakers, the marriage of several wives by chiefs and wealthy men. He believed that Christianity would replace them, and he expected that it would come with what he called civilisation, which meant in practice many of the habits of a Scottish working family: square houses, clothes, ploughs, regular work and trade with Britain. He did not see how much of this was culture rather than gospel.

That is not a reason to dismiss him. Almost every missionary of his generation thought the same way, and so did most of their critics. But it is a reason to read him with care. Livingstone saw the people around him more clearly than most Europeans of his time. He did not see them as clearly as he thought he did.

The Edge of the Map

By 1843 he had persuaded the Society to let him found a new station in the north. With Rogers Edwards he chose a site at Mabotsa, in a pleasant valley among the Bakgatla people of a chief named Mosielele, some two hundred miles north-east of Kuruman. He built a house there with his own hands and began work.

He was thirty years old. He had been in Africa for two years. He spoke Setswana, he had travelled farther north than any other missionary from Kuruman, and he had a reputation among the Batswana as a healer. He was also restless, impatient with his colleagues, and already looking beyond the station he had just begun. Paul’s words in Romans end with a plan: “whensoever I go unto Spain” (Romans 15:24, ASV). Paul never got there, as far as we know. Livingstone’s Spain was always over the next horizon, and he would spend the rest of his life walking towards it.