Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (12 page)

There was something miraculous in the son of a poor tea merchant making nations tremble. Livingstone revelled 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 Cs’ — 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 anti-slavery speeches were scathing and volatile, one of the few forums in which the quiet man expressed public rage. He was not anti-slavery 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, mostly agricultural tribes to other lands.

By 1867, as Livingstone travelled once again in Africa, his ideals had been forced to change. Still passionate in his anti-slavery 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 3 February 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 1 April 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 20 May 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 travelling 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 subordinated the moral imperative of battling slavery to the greater goal of finding the Source. Rationalizing his actions by inflating his Arab rescuers’ 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 over three months. From 20 May until 30 August he lingered impatiently in Chitimba’s village, cared for by Hamees and the Arabs, waiting for the trail west to open. Then, after travelling 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 with 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 colour,’ he wrote on 1 November, as the caravan marched towards 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.’

On 21 November 1867, Livingstone arrived in Casembe with Hamees and his caravan. The path into the village was lined with red anthills towering twenty feet high. The chief, also named Casembe, was a cruel man. He was fond of cutting off the hands and ears of his subjects. His chief advisor was a pompous dwarf with a broken back named Zofu, measuring three feet, nine inches tall.

In Casembe, Livingstone was introduced to another powerful Arab trader, named Mohamad bin Saleh. The new acquaintance was about to become Livingstone’s third Arab benefactor. He was an older man, heavy and black, with a thick white beard and a broad smile. ‘Mohamad bin Saleh proposes to go to Ujiji next month. He waited when he heard we were coming in order that we might go together,’ Livingstone wrote in his journal on 27 November. Bin Saleh promised Livingstone the caravan’s march from Casembe to Ujiji would take just one month.

As Livingstone waited three weeks for the day of departure from Casembe, battling a fever and observing the chief and Zofu with bemusement, his will to find the Source inexplicably wavered. Thoughts of Ujiji were prompting emotional images of home. The village was a
natural stepping-stone from the interior back to British civilization. ‘I am so tired of exploration, without a word from home or anywhere else for two years, that I must go to Ujiji for letters before doing anything else,’ he wrote.

But as Livingstone marched out of Casembe with Bin Saleh on 22 December, the desperation ebbed. The act of moving forward once again, and through a region that was not only new to him but delightfully beautiful, boosted his morale. The wide open country was populated by many villages. Wildlife seemed to be everywhere, and Livingstone wrote of zebras, lions, hippos, buffalo and leopards glimpsed along the way. He waxed eloquent about the beauty of the countryside. ‘The number of new notes I hear’, he wrote after a day walking through a bird-filled forest, ‘astonishes me.’

During those hours of each day the caravan was on the march, Livingstone and his attendants quickly fell behind. His pace was a slow, deliberate plod. But he rarely paused for very long, and so rejoined the Arabs at the end of every day. Livingstone didn’t like that the Arabs often lingered for two or three weeks at a time in one spot, for he longed to reach Ujiji and lay his hands on his supplies. But he stayed with the Arabs anyway, lacking the strength or resources to press on alone.

Despite Bin Saleh’s promises to reach Ujiji in one month, the caravan was still hundreds of miles south and west of Lake Tanganyika — and Ujiji, across the lake on the eastern shore — after three long months on the trail. By March of 1868, they were still on the banks of the Lualaba River, still well south of Tanganyika. The rainy season had begun, swelling the rivers to waist deep and turning the swamps to interminable seas of black mud. At the broad, overflowing Lualaba, Bin Saleh called a halt. The rainy season was making the paths worse and worse. The land through which they marched was often what Livingstone called a ‘sponge’ — ground so waterlogged that a man could slip down into what looked like solid earth, as if he were falling into water. Bin Saleh ordered that travel would cease until the rains stopped —
yet another halt which could take several months. Livingstone pleaded with him to continue, even though his remaining faithful followers were reminding him that they were too tired to continue. ‘They were tired of tramping,’ Livingstone noted in his journal, ‘and so am I.’

The need to find the Source had become an obsession once again, however, and Livingstone could not stand the monotony of waiting for the rains to end. If he couldn’t move forward to Ujiji, he rationalized it was better to backtrack and look for the Source. He had heard rumours of a lake named Bangweolo eighty miles off, which was connected by a river to a lake named Mweru he knew of. Livingstone wanted to explore the possibility that these were somehow part of the chain of lakes that became the Nile. Bin Saleh was adamant that Livingstone should not go. Almost all of Livingstone’s porters, emboldened by Bin Saleh’s opposition, and reluctant to leave the good life as a caravan member, deserted Livingstone to remain with the Arabs. On 13 April 1868 he marched deliberately away from Bin Saleh’s caravan. Livingstone began his journey with just six attendants, chief among them Chuma and Susi. Two days later, an attendant named Amoda turned around and fled back to the luxury of Bin Saleh’s caravan. Livingstone was down to just five men.

His march south was through the same swamps of black mud and parasites and leeches from which he had just come. His attendants often carried Livingstone through the rivers, and lifted him up when he sank into one of the great underwater depressions left by elephant footprints.

Starvation became a constant once again. Willing to eat anything, Livingstone often gnawed unripened ears of corn down to the husk. His teeth moved over the cobs with such intensity that his two front teeth loosened in their sockets and fell out. Trying to make light of his new look, Livingstone joked in his journal that he looked like a hippopotamus, but his physical decline was serious. His dysentery was becoming chronic. His hair had turned from brown to grey-streaked. It had always been his habit
to shave daily, but he’d given that up and now wore a bushy white beard. Livingstone truly looked like a feeble old man.

On 26 June 1868, honestly appraising his decline, he pondered where he would like to be buried when he died. ‘We came to a grave in the forest,’ he wrote. ‘It was a little rounded mound, as if the occupant sat in it in the usual native way. It was strewed over with flour, and a number of large blue beads put on it. A little path showed that it had visitors. This is the sort of grave I should prefer. To lie in the still, still forest, and no hand ever disturb my bones. The graves at home always seem so miserable, especially in the cold, damp clay, and without elbow room.’

Livingstone threw himself into his work. There seemed no rhyme or reason to it: north one day, south another. Investigate one river, then another. He was not lost, just performing a marvellously thorough, detailed exploration. His location was south-west of Lake Tanganyika, almost a thousand miles from Zanzibar, walking in broad circles about the countryside. The commitment to a two-year journey was long forgotten. ‘I hope I am not premature in saying, that the Sources of the Nile rise from ten to twelve degrees south — in fact, where Ptolemy placed them,’ he wrote to his friend William Cotton Oswell, hoping to mail the letter when he finally made his way to Ujiji. The missive was a detailed explanation of the course of various rivers — and, through that explanation, an argument for his Source theory. ‘The Chambeze is like the Chobe, forty to fifty yards broad. But the country is not like that at all. It is full of fast-flowing perennial burns — we cross several each day, and crossed the Chambeze in ten degrees, thirty-four minutes south. It runs west into Bangweolo. Leaving that lake it changes its name to the Luapula, then into Lake Moero. On leaving it, the name Lualaba is assumed.’

Then Livingstone’s tone changed abruptly. ‘I hope you are playing with your children instead of being bothered by idiots. In looking back,’ he wrote, ‘I have but one regret and that is that I did not feel it my duty to play with
my children as much as to teach the Bakwains. I worked very hard at that and was tired out at night. Now I have none to play with.’ Livingstone was showing himself to be far more than merely a one-dimensional heroic Victorian archetype. He possessed, in fact, a very human mixture of hope, dreams, longing, depression, spirituality, sexuality and regret.

As July of 1868 came to an end, even a three-year journey became less and less likely. Livingstone’s search for the Source, with all the redemption, financial peace and everlasting glory it promised, held him tightly in its grip. He would not return to civilization until he found it. However, unable to continue his search without supplies, he finally turned around on 30 July and marched north to rejoin Bin Saleh’s caravan. He planned to travel with them to Ujiji. There, Livingstone would resupply, then resume the search. He was becoming sure that the Lualaba River was the Source. He just needed to prove it by finding the Fountains of Herodotus, then following the Lualaba to where it linked with the Nile.

It took ten weeks to journey north and rejoin Bin Saleh’s caravan, a task made easier because the Arabs still hadn’t made progress. Several other Arab traders had joined with Bin Saleh since Livingstone left, including Mohammed Bogharib, a flamboyant man whom Livingstone met at Casembe’s village. The traders hoped to use their strength in numbers to travel safely through the region’s hostile tribes — including the Mazitu, who had migrated from Lake Nyassa.