Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (23 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Livingstone’s answers to an LMS questionnaire give a revealing insight into the nature of the missionary’s vocation:
When first made acquainted with the value of the gospel myself ... the desire that all might enjoy its blessings instantly filled my mind and this next to his own salvation appeared to me ought to be the chief object of every Christian ... [The missionary’s] duties chiefly are, I apprehend[,] to endeavour by every means in his power to make known the gospel by preaching, exhortation, conversion, instruction of the young, improving so far as in his power the temporal condition of those among whom he labours by introducing the arts and sciences of civilization and doing everything in his power to commend Christianity to the ears and consciences. He will be exposed to great trials of his faith and patience, from the indifference, distrust and even direct opposition and scorn of those for whose good he is disinterestedly labouring, he may be tempted to despondency from the little apparent fruit to his exertions, and exposed to all the contaminating influences of heathenism ...
The hardships and dangers of missionary life, so far as I have had the means of ascertaining their nature and extent[,] have been the subjects of serious reflection and in dependence on the promised assistance of the Holy spirit, [I] have no hesitation in saying that I would willingly submit to them considering my constitution capable of enduring any ordinary share of hardship or fatigue.
 
Livingstone knew quite well what he was letting himself in for. But he also had a strange confidence that he had what it took. And in this he was quite right. After the dark, Satanic mills of Lanarkshire, the world held no terrors for him.
He originally intended to go to China but, when the outbreak of the first Opium War prevented that, persuaded the LMS to send him to South Africa. He seemed the perfect man to carry on the work being done at Kuruman. As both a preacher and a doctor, Livingstone was ideally suited to the task of spreading Christianity and civilization together. Moreover, unlike many a young missionary, he turned out to have an iron constitution that was more than equal to the rigours of African life. He would survive being mauled by a lion and countless attacks of malaria, for which, with characteristic rigour, he devised his own distinctively disagreeable remedy.
24
Yet Livingstone was quickly disillusioned by what he found at the Society’s model mission. Converting Africans turned out to be painfully slow work, as his early diaries at Kuruman make clear:
The population is sunk into the very lowest state of moral degradation. So much so indeed it must be difficult or rather impossible for Christians at home to realize anything like an accurate notion of the grossness which shrouds their minds. No one can conceive the state in which they live. Their ideas are all earthly and it is with great difficulty that they can be brought to detach [them] from sensual objects ... All their clothing is soaked in fat, hence mine is soon soiled. And to sit among them from day to day and listen to their roaring music, is enough to give one a disgust to heathenism for ever. If not gorged full of meat and beer they are grumbling, and when their stomachs are satisfied then commences the noise termed singing.
 
This was the reality behind the
Missionary Magazine’s
pious propaganda. As the mission’s founder Robert Moffat admitted, there had been
no conversions, no enquiring after God; no objections raised to exercise our powers in defence. Indifference and stupidity form the wreath on every brow; ignorance – the grossest ignorance – forms the basis of every heart. Things earthly, sensual and devilish, stimulate to motion and mirth, while the great concerns of the soul’s redemption appear to them like a ragged garment, in which they see neither loveliness nor worth ... We preach, we converse, we catechize but without the least apparent success. Only satiate their mendicant spirits by perpetually giving and you are all that is good. But refuse to meet their endless demands, their theme of praise is turned to ridicule and abuse.
 
Livingstone gradually came to the depressing realization that the Africans showed interest in him not because of his preaching, but because of his medical knowledge – including what they called the ‘gun medicine’ that enabled him to kill game with his rifle. As he noted dourly of the Bakhtala tribe: ‘They wish the residence of white men, not from any desire to know the Gospel, but merely, as some of them in conversation afterwards expressed it, “that by our presence and prayers they may get plenty of rain, beads, guns etc”’.
Even when the gospel could be dazzlingly illustrated, using the magic lantern he carried into every village, the response was disheartening. When Sechele, Chief of the Bakwena, gave him permission to address his people in August 1848, the result came as no surprise:
A good attentive audience but after the service I went to see a sick man and when I returned the chief had retired into a hut to drink beer, and as is the custom about forty men were standing outside and singing to him, or in other words begging beer by that means. A minister who has not seen as much pioneer service as I have done would have been shocked to have seen so little effect produced by an earnest discourse concerning the future Judgement.
 
It was not until he cured one of Sechele’s ailing children that the chief took his message seriously. Only as a healer of the body, it seemed, was it possible to save the African soul.
By now Livingstone had spent seven years as a missionary. Like Moffat, whose daughter Mary he had married in 1845, he had learned the native languages and laboured to translate the Bible into them. But Sechele appeared to be his one and only convert. And just months later, the Chief lapsed, reverting to his tribal custom of polygamy. It was a similar story a few years afterwards, when Livingstone tried to convert members of the Makololo tribe. Another British visitor noted that ‘the tribe’s favourite pastime’ was ‘imitating Livingstone reading and singing psalms. This would always be accompanied by howls of derisive laughter’. Not a single Makololo was converted.
Livingstone concluded that doing things by the missionary handbook could never break down what he regarded as ‘superstition’. Some better way had to be found to penetrate Africa than simply preaching in the wilderness. The wilderness itself had to be somehow converted – to be made more receptive to British civilization.
But how was he to open up the heart of darkness? To answer that question, Livingstone had to make an unspoken career change. In 1848 he effectively ceased to be a missionary. He became instead an explorer.
Since the foundation of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 there had been those who had argued that Africa needed to be explored before it could be converted. As early as 1796 Mungo Park had charted the course of the River Niger. Livingstone himself had already dabbled in exploration at Kuruman, but in setting off across the Kalahari desert to find Lake Ngami in 1849 he effectively joined the exploration movement; indeed, his report of the 600 – 700 mile journey was passed on by the London Missionary Society to the Royal Geographical Society, winning its gold medal and part of its annual Royal Prize for geographical discovery. Whether she liked it or not, his wife now became an explorer too, as did their three children. Livingstone was not unrealistic about the risks involved in taking his entire family into the unknown, but he was unhesitating about the need to run them:
... We have an immense region before us ... It is a venture to take his wife and children into a country where fever, African fever, prevails. But who that believes in Jesus would refuse to make a venture for such a captain? A parent’s heart alone can feel as I do when I look at my little ones and ask, Shall I return with this or that one?
 
It is one of the less easily intelligible characteristics of the early missionaries that they attached more importance to the souls of others than to the lives of their own children. However, a second expedition came so close to killing them all that Livingstone finally decided to send his family home to England. They did not see him again for four and a half years.
25
The expeditions to Lake Ngami were the first of a succession of almost superhuman journeys that were to enthral the mid-Victorian imagination. In 1853 he travelled three hundred miles along the upper reaches of the Zambezi river, then set off from Linyanti in present-day Botswana to Luanda on the coast of Portuguese Angola: in the words of
The Times
, ‘one of the greatest geographical explorations of the age’. After recovering his strength, he then retraced his path to Linyanti before embarking on an astonishing march to Quilimane in Mozambique, making him the first European literally to traverse the continent from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans. Here was the quintessential hero of the age: sprung from humble origins, blazing a trail for British civilization in what was manifestly the least hospitable of all the world’s continents. And he was doing it unprompted, voluntarily. Livingstone had become a one-man NGO: the nineteenth century’s first
médicin sans frontières
.
To Livingstone, the search for a way to open up Africa to Christianity and civilization was made still more urgent by the discovery that slavery was still thriving. Though the slave trade in the west of the continent had supposedly been suppressed following the British abolition law, slaves continued to be exported from Central and East Africa to Arabia, Persia and India. Perhaps as many as two million Africans fell victim to this eastward traffic in the course of the nineteenth century; and hundreds of thousands of them passed through the great slave market on the island of Zanzibar, which linked together the various economies of the Indian Ocean.
26
To a man of Livingstone’s generation, who had no experience of the far larger slave trade the British themselves had once run in West Africa, the spectacle of slave caravans and the devastation and depopulation they left in their wake was profoundly shocking. ‘The strangest disease I have seen in this country’, he later wrote, ‘seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves ... One fine boy of about twelve years ... said he had nothing the matter with him, except pain in his heart’. Livingstone was as indignant about the sufferings of slaves as a previous generation had been indifferent to them.
It is easy to dismiss the Victorian missionaries as cultural chauvinists, unthinkingly dismissive of the African societies they encountered. This charge cannot be levelled at Livingstone. Without the assistance of the indigenous peoples of Central Africa, his journeys would have been impossible. The Makololo may not have accepted Christianity, but they were eager to work for him; and as he came to know them and the other tribes who helped them, his attitudes gradually changed. The Africans, he wrote, were often ‘wiser than their white neighbours’.
To those who portrayed them as murderous, he replied that he had ‘never entertained any suspicions of foul play while among pure Negroes and was with one or two exceptions always treated politely, indeed so thoroughly civil were the more central tribes [that] ... a missionary of ordinary prudence and tact would certainly secure respect’. He refused to believe, he would later write, ‘in any incapacity of the African in either mind or heart ... In reference to the status of Africans among the nations of the earth, we have seen nothing to justify the notion that they are of a different “breed” or “species” from the most civilized’. It was precisely Livingstone’s respect for the Africans he encountered that made the slave trade so repugnant to him; for it was this ‘trade of hell’ that was destroying their communities before his very eyes.
Up until now Livingstone had only had to contend with what seemed to him primitive superstitions and subsistence economies. Now, however, he was on a collision course with a sophisticated economic system organized from the East African coast by Arab and Portuguese slave traders. Yet in his usual undaunted way, he had soon worked out a scheme that would not only open up Africa to God and civilization, but also dispose of slavery into the bargain. Like so many Victorians, he took it for granted that a free market would be more efficient than an unfree one. In his view, ‘the witchery of the slave trade’ had distracted attention ‘from every other source of wealth’ in Africa: ‘Coffee, cotton sugar oil iron and even gold were abandoned for the delusive gains of a trade which rarely enriches’. If an easier route could be found by which honest merchants could travel to the interior and establish ‘legitimate trade’ in these other commodities – buying the products of free African labour rather than taking that labour by force and exporting it – then the slave traders would be put out of business. Free labour would drive out unfree. All Livingstone had to do was to find this route.

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