Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (11 page)

‘
A VERY BEAUTIFUL
young woman came to look at us, perfect in every way, and nearly naked but unconscious of indecency — a very Venus in black,’ Livingstone wrote on 18 March 1868.

A day later, his very next journal entry read, ‘Grant, Lord, grace to love Thee more, and serve Thee better.’ Together, in words notable for their honesty and simplicity, the entries dovetailed Livingstone’s barely suppressed sexuality and unashamed spirituality within the span of just two sentences. The date was 19 March. It was his fifty-fifth birthday, and the second anniversary of the start of his search for the Source.

In the year and a half since Musa and the Johanna men had abandoned him, Livingstone’s caravan had experienced extreme hardships — but not, as those in England had believed, death. Yet his prediction to friends back home that he would return in two years was not to be. Livingstone was now deep in Africa, on the banks of the Lualaba — a mighty river similar in appearance to his beloved Zambezi. And though Livingstone was growing
weary, he felt the Source was almost his. He felt confident there was a connection between the Lualaba and the Nile — a connection that would prove his theory about a chain of lakes and rivers coursing north from the southern reaches of Africa all the way into the Mediterranean.

The juxtaposition between sensual and spiritual in his journal entries mirrored the unconventional manner in which Livingstone had explored in the time since Musa’s desertion. After the initial shock of losing valuable men, and being forced to shed the supplies they would have carried, Livingstone had been relieved. The Johanna men’s churlish behaviour was a drain on the caravan’s spirits. Pressing forward with, by now, just a few porters, a small herd of goats he’d purchased for milk, and two faithful attendants, Chuma and Susi, Livingstone had continued his march north. He had veered away from Lake Nyassa to the north-west. He had crossed over the four-thousand-foot mountains Livingstone had named for Kirk and reached the Loanga River on 16 December 1866. The rainy season was upon them and food had grown scarce. The group subsisted on goat milk and handfuls of dried corn.

‘We have had precious hard times,’ Livingstone wrote on New Year’s Day, 1867. ‘I would not complain if it had not been for a gnawing hunger for many a day, and our bones sticking through as if they would burst our skin.’ He prayed for grace and truth and God’s mercy. The goats died during the first two weeks of 1867. Game was nowhere to be found, and Livingstone took his ‘belt up three holes’ from starvation. ‘I feel always hungry, and am constantly dreaming of better food when I should be sleeping,’ he wrote.

The rains of January overflowed the rivers and raised the levels of swamps, bringing misery and sickness. The land seemed like one giant marsh. The only foods to forage were mushrooms and leaves, and Africa’s myriad assortment of dangers was everywhere. ‘Sitting down this morning near a tree my head was just one yard from a
good sized cobra, coiled up in the sprouts of its roots,’ Livingstone wrote. ‘A very little puff adder lay in the path.’

The twentieth of January 1867, however, brought the blow that sent Livingstone reeling. In a carefully planned escape, two more porters deserted, stealing as much of the expedition’s supplies as they could carry. The theft was devastating. ‘They left us in a forest and heavy rain came on, which obliterated every vestige of their footsteps. To make the loss the more galling they took what we could least spare — the medicine box, which they would only throw away when they came to examine their booty,’ Livingstone wrote. ‘The forest was so dense and high there was no chance of getting a glimpse of the fugitives, who took all the dishes, a large box of powder, the flour we had purchased dearly to help us as far as the Chambeze, the tools, two guns, and a cartridge pouch. But the medicine chest was the sorest loss of all. I felt as if I had now received the death sentence.’

Livingstone struggled to find God’s presence in the loss. Instead of diminishing his faith, or leading him away from Christianity towards African beliefs in ancestor worship and witchcraft, the explorer’s years in Africa had deepened and transformed his Christian faith. It was his habit each Sunday to read the Church of England service aloud, but otherwise he set aside organized religion in favour of a more personal relationship with God. In the manner of King David probing God’s nature through the Psalms, so Livingstone undertook a series of one-to-one conversations with God in his prayers and journal. He sought God’s presence in all things, in good times and bad, speaking and writing words that came from the heart. Even in the furthest reaches of Africa he prayed on his knees at night and read his Bible daily. So when the precious medicines that protected him from malaria were stolen, Livingstone began a rambling discussion with God, wondering how he was going to survive without those vital supplies. ‘Everything of this kind happens by the permission of One who watches over us
with most tender care, and this may turn out for the best,’ he wrote. ‘It is difficult to say “Thy will be done,” but I shall try.’

He concluded his prayer, though, with an admission that worry was threatening to supersede his faith. ‘This loss of the medicine box’, he wrote, ‘gnaws at my heart terribly.’

Despite his fears, Livingstone placed his trust in God. Instead of turning back to race for the safety of the coast, he resumed his search for the Source. He pushed on as the trail entered thick woods and chin-deep swamps. He looked for God’s hand in the loss of his medicines, and prayed for the strength to prevail. Livingstone was in a land of empty silence, gloom and thick air. Blood-sucking leeches crawled down his clothing, into his shoes, attached themselves to his genitals. Their s-shaped, black-and-blue bruise marred his body for days after he’d picked them off ‘with a smart slap of the palm’. For food, Livingstone ate rats. Travelling in heavy daily rain, through a land of ‘dripping forests and oozing bogs’, he found himself almost destitute. It was a testimony to their loyalty that Chuma, Susi and the small handful of porters remained at Livingstone’s side.

Then, just when things looked their worst, Livingstone’s life was saved by the people he despised most. On 1 February 1867, he encountered a band of Arab slave traders. They took pity on the destitute, failing traveller, and gave Livingstone food to restore his strength. He accepted it, in spite of the compromise he was making. Before the Arabs could leave, Livingstone wrote to the British Consulate in Zanzibar, begging that a second packet of relief supplies be sent to Ujiji, where he would meet them. Livingstone’s supply list read like a starving man’s fantasy: coffee, French meats, cheeses, a bottle of port. With his original supplies so depleted, this additional shipment would be vital. The Arabs accepted his letters and promised to deliver them.

Livingstone’s compromise seemed relatively minor — accepting food for himself and his starving men,
entrusting his mail to their care — but showed how greatly the search consumed him. Few men of his era spoke out as passionately against slavery as Livingstone. To eat food that was paid for with money earned from slavery was against everything for which he stood.

In his journal, there was no attempt at rationalization, just a matter-of-fact admittance that he’d come across a caravan led by a slaver named Magaru Mafupi. The slaver was a ‘black Arab’, born of an Arab father and an African mother.

The lineage might have confused the outside world, but Livingstone knew well the symbiotic relationship between Africans and Arabs. Although Europeans perceived the African continent to be an uncharted land populated by indigenous cultures, the truth was that Arabs had lived alongside Africans for over a thousand years. It was the seventh century AD when Arabian ships began trading beads for ivory with Bantu tribes along the East African coast. A mingling of their cultures began: the Arabs brought Islam; Swahili, meaning ‘coastal’, was formed by merging Arabic and Bantu; the financiers of India and Persia set up shop in Zanzibar to outfit caravans; African men found work hauling ivory, giving birth to the occupation of pagazi — porter. Little boys of the Nyamwezi tribe even carried small tusks around their village, training for the great day when they would join the mighty caravans.

That relationship between Arab and African had been corrupted, though, as slavery became lucrative in the sixteenth century. Losers in war were routinely enslaved, and children were often kidnapped as their parents worked the fields. But more than any other segment of the African populace, tribes residing below the equator suffered. As early as the seventh century, men, women and children from sub-equatorial Africa were being captured by other African tribes and spirited north across the Sahara’s hot sands. Two-thirds of those surviving the epic walk were women and children about to become concubines or servants in North Africa or Turkey. The males
comprising the remaining third were often pressed into military service.

That slave trade route — known as the Trans-Saharan — was augmented by the opening of the East African slave trade a century later. Instead of Africans, it was the Arabs driving this new market, focused mainly along the easily accessible coastal villages. They found that slaves were a more lucrative business than gold and ivory, and began capturing clusters of men and women for work as servants and concubines in India, Persia and Arabia. Even with the second slave route open, however, slavery was not a defining aspect of African life, but a gruesome daily footnote.

When the Portuguese came to East Africa in 1498, however, and as other European colonial powers settled the Americas during the following century, that changed. Slavery became the continent’s pivotal force. By the end of the sixteenth century, England, Denmark, Holland, Sweden and France had followed Portugal’s initial example, and pursued slavery as a source of cheap labour and greater national wealth. A third slave trade route — the Trans-Atlantic — opened on Africa’s west coast. Slaves bound for America, the Caribbean, South America, Mexico and Europe were marched to the west coast ports of Luanda, Lagos, Goree, Bonny and Saint Louis, then loaded on ships for the journey.

Great Britain’s economy was once so dependent upon slavery that some maps of Western Africa were divided by commodities: Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, Slave Coast. But as Britain began to see itself as a nation built on God and morality, and as it became savvy for politicians to align themselves with the growing Christian evangelical movement, slavery was abolished in all British colonies and protectorates in 1834. During his first trip to Africa in 1841, Livingstone was terribly unaccustomed to the sight of men, women and children being bought and sold. As he insinuated himself into the fabric of African life over the years that followed — speaking with the natives in their tongue wherever he went, sleeping in the villages, making friends as he shared meals and nights around the campfire
— the barbarism of the practice incensed him even more. He grew determined to stop it.

Even as other nations slowly abandoned the practice on humanitarian grounds, Portugal continued to dominate the slave trade. Slavery was, in fact, the cornerstone of its economy. The tiny nation exported African men and women by the hundreds of thousands, from ports on both the east and west coasts of Africa. Livingstone’s focus was on the east, where Portugal had supplanted the Arabs as the coastal region’s reigning power. African tribes were raiding other tribes then selling captives to the Arabs in exchange for firearms. The Arabs, in turn, marched the captives back to the east coast, where they were either sold to the Portuguese or auctioned in Zanzibar. The slaves were then shipped to Arabia, Persia, India and even China.

As Livingstone was pushing into Central Africa from the south in the 1840s and 1850s, still a missionary but on the verge of becoming a bona fide explorer, the Portuguese were entering the same region from the east. At first, they didn’t pay much attention to Livingstone. He was just a missionary in their eyes — a fearless missionary, and one who travelled to places few other men considered going, but a missionary nonetheless. As his journeys mounted over time — three trips across the Kalahari Desert, and an east-to-west walk across Africa — all that changed. Livingstone’s fame began to grow. Back in England, which he hadn’t seen since leaving in 1840, Livingstone became a national hero. He was an adventurous cipher, a man few knew personally, but who was single-handedly charting the African interior in the name of God and country. That he was nearly shipwrecked off Malta, just like the Apostle Paul, on his way back to England after the walk across Africa, was the sort of fine coincidence heightening Livingstone’s veneration in the British public’s eyes. Heroes like Livingstone didn’t come along every day.

When Livingstone finally returned to England in 1856, after fifteen consecutive years in Africa, he used his newfound fame to denounce the slave trade. The Portuguese
Government began scrutinizing Livingstone and his achievements. They were concerned his journeys would lead to a greater British presence in Central Africa and a reduction in their lucrative slave trade. At Whitehall, Sir Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, found himself apologizing to the Foreign Office on behalf of his intrepid protégé. Livingstone’s anti-slavery speeches, it seemed, were offending Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. Albert’s cousin Pedro also happened to be King of Portugal.

By then, it was too late to divert Livingstone from his outspoken anti-slavery course. He was being hailed as the world’s greatest explorer. His fame was phenomenal. By coincidence, the recent repeal of a stamp tax made newspapers affordable to the masses for the first time. Britain’s population of four million was one of the world’s most literate, and was becoming hungry for news. Livingstone’s exploits made great press, and his fame continued to grow. Crowds mobbed him on the streets and even in church. He was given the keys to cities, and received great endowments to continue his explorations.