Into Africa Page 8
The juxtaposition between sensual and spiritual in his journal entries mirrored the unconventional manner in which Livingstone had explored in the seventeen months 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 felt relief. The Johanna men's churlish behavior was a drain on the caravan's spirits. Pressing forward with 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 northwest. He had crossed over the four-thousand-foot mountains he had named for Kirk and reached the Loanga River on December 16, 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 journaled.
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 danger 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.”
January 20, 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 toward African beliefs in ancestor worship and witchcraft, the explorer's years in Africa had deepened and transformed Livingstone's Christian faith. It was his habit each Sunday to read the Church of England service aloud, but otherwise he set aside organized religion in favor 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-on-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 farthest 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. Bloodsucking leeches crawled down his clothing, into his shoes, attached themselves to his genitals. Their S-shaped, black and blue bruises marred his body for days after he'd picked them off “with a smart slap of the palm.” For food, Livingstone ate rats. Traveling 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 February 1, 1867, he encountered a band of Arab slave traders. They took pity on the destitute, failing traveler, and gave Livingstone food to restore his strength. He accepted it without a second thought about 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 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 A.D. 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. As early as the seventh century, men, women, and children from subequatorial 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, slavery was still 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 labor and greater national wealth. A third slave trade route—the transatlantic—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 became 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 native tongue wherever he went, sleeping in the villages during his travels, 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.
Livingstone's focus was on the east coast, where Portugal had supplanted the Arabs as the coastal region's reigning power. Even as other nations slowly abandoned the practice on humanitarian grounds, slavery became the cornerstone of Portugal's 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. 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 traveled 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. As president of the Royal Geographical Society, Murchison found himself apologizing to the Foreign Office on behalf of his intrepid protégé. Livingstone's antislavery 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 antislavery 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 were becoming zealots 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.
There was something miraculous in the son of a poor tea merchant making nations tremble. Livingstone reveled in the power, even as his life became more and more complex. The cloak of quiet Christian missionary had been cast off once and for all, and he spoke with the zeal of a man demanding to be heard. Livingstone resigned from the London Missionary Society to focus his work exclusively on ending the slave trade through his “three C's”—Christianity, commerce, and cotton (later amended to “colonialism”). He felt that an influx of legitimate trade to the interior would empower the natives. His new employer was the British Foreign Office, which officially designated him Consul to the Tribes of Eastern Africa. Even his father felt something special in the air. In 1857 Neil Livingstone impulsively reattached the “e” to the family name.
In his speeches, Livingstone didn't gloat about his discoveries à la Burton and Speke. Instead, he spoke out against the slave trade in the most graphic terms. “This was no idle boaster, no self-sufficient egotist,” noted naturalist H. G. Adams, “proclaiming his doings upon the housetops and calling all men to speak and applaud. He was compelled to speak and describe what he had seen and heard, for only by so doing could he advance the great cause to which he had devoted himself.”
Livingstone's antislavery speeches were scathing and volatile, one of the few forums in which the quiet man expressed public rage. He was not antislavery because it was convenient or politically correct, but because Africa had become his home. It was the destruction of a people. Population size, population distribution, class structure, marriage patterns, ratios of men to women—all were altered by the forced diaspora of mostly peaceful, agricultural tribes to other lands.
By 1867, as Livingstone traveled once again in Africa, his ideals had been forced to change. Still passionate in his antislavery stance, Livingstone now had a new concern—finding the source. Nearly starving and with nowhere else to turn, he decided to accept the aid of slave traders rather than return home. The source bid had officially become Livingstone's obsession.
Almost as soon as the Arabs who had given him aid left on February 3, 1867, Livingstone became sick with rheumatic fever. He recovered, but was buffeted by a series of fevers and delusions in the months that followed. “I had a fit of insensibility that shows the power of fever without medicine,” he wrote on April 1, 1867. “I found myself floundering outside my hut and unable to get in. I tried to lift myself from my back by laying hold of two posts at the entrance, but when I got nearly upright I let them go and fell back heavily on my head on a box. The boys had seen the wretched state I was in, and hung a blanket at the entrance to the hut, that no stranger might see my helplessness. Some hours elapsed before I could recognize where I was.”
Clearly, Livingstone would not be able to find the source without further assistance. On May 20, 1867, in a village whose chief's name was Chitimba, he crossed paths with another Arab caravan led by a man named Hamees, and quietly joined their ranks. Whereas the British were fond of traveling into Africa in ones and twos, the Arab caravans numbered in the hundreds, making it possible to carry huge amounts of food and creature comforts. Because their objective was not a cursory exploration, but a lasting trade presence, the Arabs made frequent use of outposts like Ujiji and Tabora as resupply points, making it possible for some traders to remain in the interior—and maintain a relatively comfortable lifestyle—indefinitely.
Livingstone was not party to the Arab slave raids, nor did he assist in their ivory gathering, but he subsumed the moral imperative of battling slavery for the greater goal of finding the source. Rationalizing his actions by inflating their importance, he wrote of the Arabs in his journal. “They are connected with one of the most influential native mercantile houses in Zanzibar. Hamees has been particularly kind to me in presenting food, beads, cloth, and information.”
Hamees, however, was also at war with a powerful African chief named Nsama
, whose village blocked travel to the west. The trader had no intention of moving his caravan until the bloodshed was ended. When Livingstone argued that he would travel on alone rather than spend months waiting out the impasse, the Arabs insisted he would be mistaken for one of them and murdered. Thus, Livingstone did no exploration whatsoever for more than three months. From May 20 until August 30 he lingered impatiently in Chitimba's village, cared for by Hamees and the Arabs, waiting for the trail west to open. Then, after traveling just one hundred miles at a dawdling pace, Hamees brought his caravan to a halt for three more weeks. It was the Koran, Hamees insisted, that told him he must stop.
Livingstone was growing furious with the frequent stops, but he had become too accustomed to the luxury of Arab travel to strike off alone. He continued the journey to the west with Hamees when the caravan began moving again. And though Livingstone enjoyed debating the Arabs about their beliefs, contrasting the wonders of Christianity with his disdain for Islam, he was becoming more and more like them every day. Not even the sight of slavery repulsed him any longer. It had become just another aspect of the African scenery. “These valleys along which we travel are beautiful. Green is the prevailing color,” he wrote on November 1, as the caravan marched toward a village named Casembe, home to yet another powerful regional chief. “But the clumps of trees assume a great variety of forms, and often remind one of English park scenery. The long line of slaves and carriers, brought up by their Arab employers, adds life to the scene: They are in three bodies and number four-hundred and fifty in all.”