Sechele

“And Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest? And he said, How can I, except some one shall guide me? And he besought Philip to come up and sit with him.”

— Acts 8:30-31, ASV

A Chief Who Had Lost and Won

Sechele was about Livingstone’s age, a tall, intelligent and forceful man who had become chief of the Bakwena after a childhood of danger and exile. His father, the chief Motswasele, had been murdered by his own people when Sechele was a boy, and the young heir had grown up as a refugee. He had regained his chieftainship with the help of Sebetwane, the leader of the Makololo, a people from the south who had fought their way north across the Kalahari to the Zambezi. Sechele was a skilled hunter, a shrewd politician and, by the custom of his people, a rainmaker, responsible through ritual for bringing the rain on which everyone’s life depended. He had several wives, as chiefs did, and through them a web of alliances with leading families of the Bakwena.

He was also, as Livingstone soon discovered, one of the most eager learners he would ever meet. Livingstone wrote that Sechele learned the alphabet on the first day of his residence at Chonuane. Within a short time he was reading, and once he could read, he read the Bible with an appetite that astonished his teacher. His favourite book was Isaiah. Livingstone remembered him saying that Isaiah was a fine man who knew how to speak. Livingstone noted with amusement that from so much sitting over his books the chief, once spare and active, grew stout.

The verse at the head of this chapter is about another African statesman reading Isaiah, the treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia, sitting in his chariot on the road home from Jerusalem. Philip the evangelist ran up beside him and asked whether he understood what he was reading. “How can I,” the official replied, “except some one shall guide me?” For a few years at Chonuane and Kolobeng, Livingstone and Sechele sat side by side in the same way. It was the nearest thing to a real missionary partnership that Livingstone ever had. It ended, as we shall see, in grief on both sides.

All My Bones to Shake

Sechele did not receive the gospel passively. He asked hard questions, and Livingstone, to his credit, recorded some of them. When he first heard Livingstone describe the coming judgement, he was deeply troubled, and asked a question that missionaries have heard all over the world. As Livingstone told it, Sechele said, “You startle me: these words make all my bones to shake,” and that he had no strength left in him. Then he asked why, if Livingstone’s forefathers had been alive at the same time as his own, they had not sent word of these terrible things sooner. His ancestors, he said, had all passed away into darkness without knowing where they were going.

Livingstone did not record a satisfying answer, because there is none that removes the force of the question. He mentioned the geographical difficulties, and said that he hoped Christianity would spread. Sechele was not consoled. His question is still asked, and it deserves to be heard as he asked it: not as a debating point, but as grief for his own people, the parents and grandparents who had died without hearing what he was now being told mattered more than anything. It is also a rebuke to the Church that took eighteen centuries to reach the Bakwena.

The Whips of Rhinoceros Hide

Sechele was a chief, and he thought like one. Once he was persuaded that Christianity was true, he wanted his people to accept it, and he could not understand why Livingstone did not simply tell them to. Livingstone recorded his offer with obvious affection for the man who made it.

Did Livingstone imagine, Sechele asked, that the people would ever believe merely because he talked to them? Sechele himself could make them do nothing except by beating them. If Livingstone liked, he would call his headmen, and with their litupa, whips of rhinoceros hide, they would soon make everyone believe together.

Livingstone refused, and he was right to refuse. Faith cannot be beaten into anyone. But Sechele’s offer was not foolish. In the society he governed, a chief’s religious choices were not private. He was responsible for the rain, the harvest, the initiation of the young, and the rituals that held the people together. If he changed his religion, everything changed, and the people expected to follow their chief or to resist him. Livingstone’s idea of individual conversion, one soul at a time, each person freely choosing, was a Protestant European idea that made little sense to the Bakwena. Sechele was trying to tell him how his world worked. Livingstone heard the offer as a charming mistake. It was also good political advice, and it explains a great deal about what happened next.

The Drought

Chonuane was short of water, and in 1847 Livingstone persuaded Sechele to move the whole town forty miles to the banks of the Kolobeng River, where there was water for irrigation. Livingstone built a house there, a church and a school, much of it with his own hands, and Sechele built himself a square house in European style with Livingstone’s help.

Then the rains failed. Year after year, from about 1847 onwards, the country suffered drought. The Kolobeng River dwindled and then dried up. Gardens died, cattle grew thin, and hunger came. In a society where the chief was responsible for rain, the explanation seemed obvious to many of the Bakwena. Sechele had abandoned the rain rites under the influence of the missionary, and the rain had stopped. The new religion was killing them.

Livingstone recorded, in Missionary Travels, a long imagined conversation between a medical doctor and a rain doctor, based on the arguments he had actually heard. It is one of the fairest things he wrote. The rain doctor points out that both men use medicines, and both pray to God, and that neither can be sure what the other’s medicine does. Why should the missionary condemn the rain doctor’s medicine and expect his own to be trusted? The medical doctor’s answers are not always convincing, and Livingstone seems to have known it. He let the rain doctor have some of the best lines. He understood that, to the Bakwena, the drought was evidence, and that he had no evidence to set against it.

Baptism

Sechele asked for baptism. Livingstone was willing, but there was a difficulty. The London Missionary Society, like almost every Protestant mission of the time, would not baptise a man who had more than one wife. Sechele would have to send away all his wives but one.

It was a terrible demand, and Sechele understood its cost better than Livingstone did. His wives were not only his partners. They were women he had married by the law of his people, the mothers of his children, and the daughters of families on whom his authority rested. To send them away would humiliate them, impoverish them and enrage their relatives. Sechele hesitated for a long time. Livingstone held to the rule. In the end Sechele decided to do it. He kept his first wife and sent the others back to their families, with new clothing and the goods that had been theirs in his house, and with a message that he had nothing against them, but that he was following the word of God.

He was baptised on 1 October 1848. The Bakwena watched in dismay. Work in the town stopped, a great meeting was called to discuss what the chief had done, and many people stayed away from the services. Livingstone noted that some of the wives who had been sent away had been among the most regular hearers at the school and the church.

The question of polygamy has troubled missions in Africa ever since, and many African church leaders have argued that the missionaries got it wrong: that the demand to put away wives broke families, cast women and children into poverty, and made Christianity seem an enemy of African life. Others have argued that the missionaries were right about the ideal of marriage and wrong about how to reach it. This book cannot settle the question. It can say that Livingstone, who was rarely in doubt, did not seem to see how much he was asking, and that the women who paid the price were not asked at all.

The Fall

A few months later, early in 1849, it became known that one of Sechele’s former wives was pregnant, and that he was the father. Sechele confessed. Livingstone suspended him from communion. He wrote in sorrow, and the episode seems to have broken something in him. He had put his whole hope for the Bakwena in this one man, and the man had failed. Livingstone never again baptised a convert that we know of. Sechele is, as far as the record shows, the only African he ever baptised.

That fact is often repeated, sometimes to make Livingstone look a failure and sometimes to make him look a heroic sower who left the reaping to others. It should be repeated carefully. Livingstone was not the only missionary at work among the Batswana, and the church at Kuruman and elsewhere was growing. He had helpers, Mebalwe and others, who taught and preached. And Sechele did not abandon his faith. He went on reading the Bible, praying and holding worship for his people. In later years he invited other missionaries to the Bakwena, and he preached himself. He remained, in his own way and on his own terms, a Christian until his death in 1892, and Christianity spread among the Bakwena largely through his example and his authority, as he had always said it would. The man Livingstone suspended became, in the long run, the evangelist of his people.

Who Is Guiding Whom?

The Ethiopian official in Acts was baptised by Philip in a pool by the roadside, and then, the story says, “the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip; and the eunuch saw him no more, for he went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39, ASV). The missionary disappears from the story. The African goes home with the gospel, and what he does with it there is not recorded, but the Church in Ethiopia remembers him as its first evangelist.

Livingstone, too, disappeared from Sechele’s story. Within a few years he had gone north and never came back to live among the Bakwena. What Sechele did with the gospel after that, he did without Livingstone’s guidance. He did it imperfectly, as all of us do. He also did it with a persistence that matched his teacher’s, and he did it in his own language, among his own people, in ways no foreign missionary could have managed.

It is worth asking, at the end of this chapter, who was guiding whom. Livingstone taught Sechele to read, and Sechele read Isaiah. But Sechele also taught Livingstone, or tried to: about how a chief’s faith affected a whole people, about the cost of the demands the mission made, about grief for ancestors who had died without the gospel. Livingstone did not always learn. He left Kolobeng convinced that he had failed among the Bakwena and that the way forward lay elsewhere, in the north, among peoples who had never heard a missionary. He may have been right about the north. He was wrong to think he had failed with Sechele.