The Lion at Mabotsa

“But the Lord stood by me, and strengthened me; that through me the message might be fully proclaimed, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.”

— 2 Timothy 4:17, ASV

The Lions of the Valley

Mabotsa was a beautiful place, a valley among hills, with good water and the large town of the Bakgatla people under their chief, Mosielele. It was also, in 1843 and 1844, troubled by lions. They came down at night and attacked the cattle in their enclosures, and sometimes in daylight. The Bakgatla believed, Livingstone wrote, that the lions had been sent against them by a neighbouring people, through witchcraft. He thought the real reason was simpler: the lions were bold because the people had not killed one, and if one could be killed the others would go. In February 1844, when the lions killed several cattle, he went out with the men of the town to encourage them in the hunt.

What happened next is the most famous incident in his life before Stanley, and he told it himself in Missionary Travels, thirteen years later, with a calm that is almost comic. The men surrounded a small wooded hill where the lions were lying. Livingstone saw one of them sitting on a rock, and fired both barrels of his gun into it. The men, however, did not close in to finish it, and Livingstone turned to go after them. He was reloading when he heard a shout.

Like a Terrier With a Rat

“Starting, and looking half round,” he wrote, “I saw the lion just in the act of springing upon me.” He was standing on a little rise, he went on; the lion caught him by the shoulder as it sprang, they fell to the ground together, and, growling horribly close to his ear, it shook him as a terrier shakes a rat.

He went on to describe, with a doctor’s detachment, what he felt. The shock, he said, produced a stupor like that of a mouse in the jaws of a cat. It brought on a kind of dreaminess, in which he felt neither pain nor terror, though he was fully aware of everything that was happening. He compared it to the state described by patients under chloroform, who see the surgeon’s knife but do not feel it. He was able to turn his head and see the lion’s paw on the back of his head, and its eyes directed at someone else.

The someone else was Mebalwe. Livingstone’s account names him only in passing, as the native schoolmaster, but Mebalwe was one of the most important people at Mabotsa. He was a Christian teacher from Kuruman who had come north with Livingstone to help found the station, and he was doing much of the day-to-day work of teaching and evangelism there. Standing some yards away, Mebalwe raised his gun and tried to fire at the lion. Both barrels misfired. The lion left Livingstone, sprang at Mebalwe, and bit him in the thigh. Another man, whom Livingstone had earlier rescued from a buffalo, tried to spear the lion, and the lion caught him by the shoulder. Then, at last, the bullets Livingstone had fired at the beginning took effect, and the lion fell dead.

The whole thing, Livingstone said, took only a few moments. Besides crushing the bone into splinters, he wrote, the lion left eleven tooth wounds in the upper part of his arm.

Courage That Is Not His

The lion story was told for a century as an example of Livingstone’s courage, and he was certainly brave. But it is worth noticing whose courage saved his life. Mebalwe ran towards the lion with a gun that failed, knowing what had just happened to the man on the ground. The other man ran at it with a spear. Both were badly hurt. Both, as far as we know, recovered. Neither was famous. In the Victorian retellings Mebalwe is often left out altogether, and the lion simply lets go of the missionary.

That pattern will recur throughout this book. Again and again, Livingstone’s survival depended on the courage, skill and loyalty of Africans whose names appear in his books, if at all, as footnotes. It was Mebalwe who saved him at Mabotsa, as it was Makololo men who carried him to the Atlantic and back, and Susi, Chuma and their companions who carried him, dead, to the coast. A Christian reading of his life should notice them, because God noticed them.

A Merciful Provision

Livingstone drew a theological lesson from the experience, and it is characteristic of his way of seeing the world. The dreaminess he had felt in the lion’s jaws, he thought, was probably felt by all animals killed by predators. He suggested that this strange state was probably produced in all animals killed by beasts of prey, and if so, that it was a merciful provision of a kind Creator for lessening the pain of death.

A modern reader may find that too tidy. The natural world, red in tooth and claw, raises harder questions for Christian faith than Livingstone allowed here, and he would come to see a great deal more suffering than a single lion attack. But it is worth noticing what he did. He did not see God only in his rescue. He looked for God in the experience of being attacked, and found, as he believed, a sign of kindness even there. The psalmist says, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me” (Psalm 23:4, ASV). Livingstone had walked a short way into that valley, and he reported that it was not as terrible as he had feared.

The verse at the head of this chapter is from Paul’s last letter, written from prison in Rome, near the end of his life. At his first trial, Paul says, no one stood with him; everyone deserted him. “But the Lord stood by me, and strengthened me … and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.” Paul’s lion was almost certainly a figure of speech, for danger or for the Roman authorities. Livingstone’s was real. But the point is the same in both cases: God delivered his servant, not for the servant’s sake, but “that through me the message might be fully proclaimed, and that all the Gentiles might hear.” Livingstone believed he had been spared for a purpose. That belief would carry him through many later dangers. It would also, at times, make him reckless.

A Crooked Arm

There was no other doctor within hundreds of miles, and Livingstone had to direct the setting of his own arm. It was done badly. The bone did not knit properly, and a false joint formed in the upper arm. He was ill for weeks with the wounds, and he could never afterwards lift his left arm above the level of his shoulder. He had to learn to fire a gun from his left shoulder, and every heavy load or fall reminded him of the lion. Thirty years later, when his body was brought home to London, the surgeons who examined it identified him by that false joint.

He went to Kuruman to recover. The Moffats had come back from Britain at the end of 1843, and their eldest daughter, Mary, had come with them.

Mary Moffat

Mary Moffat was born at Griquatown, in the northern Cape, in April 1821, the eldest child of Robert and Mary Moffat. She had grown up at Kuruman, been educated partly at the Cape, and spent the last few years in England with her parents. She was twenty-three, practical, capable and reserved. She spoke Setswana from childhood, knew the country and the people, and understood exactly what the life of a missionary’s wife involved, because she had watched her mother live it. She was teaching in the infant school at Kuruman.

Livingstone, recovering from the lion, spent the spring of 1844 at Kuruman, and he and Mary were engaged in the middle of the year. His letters about the engagement are notoriously unromantic. He described her to friends in terms of her practical qualities rather than her charms, and he seems to have been at least partly guided by the thought that a missionary in the interior needed a wife who knew the country. That is not the whole story. His later letters to her show real tenderness, and after her death he wrote that he had loved her when he married her and loved her more the longer he lived with her. But the marriage began with a missionary’s calculation as well as a young man’s affection, and it would be shaped all its life by the priority he gave to his work.

They were married at Kuruman on 9 January 1845, and they went north together to Mabotsa.

A Quarrel and a Departure

Mabotsa did not last. Rogers Edwards, the older missionary with whom Livingstone had founded the station, came to resent him. Edwards felt that Livingstone had taken credit for the station in his letters to the Society, and that he treated him as an inferior. Livingstone, for his part, thought Edwards slow and petty. The quarrel was bitter, and it went to the Society’s district committee. Livingstone was not wholly in the wrong; Edwards seems to have been a difficult colleague. But it was a pattern that would recur: Livingstone could not easily work beside another European as an equal.

His solution was characteristic. Rather than continue the dispute, he gave up the house he had built with his own hands and left Mabotsa to Edwards. In 1845 he and Mary moved some forty miles away, to Chonuane, the town of the Bakwena and their chief Sechele, whom Livingstone had met on his first journeys and who had asked him to come. There, at last, he would have a people and a chief of his own, and no colleague to share them with. It was there that the most important relationship of his missionary life began.