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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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In February 1861 Henry Burrup’s wife returned home without him. Her husband, together with his newly appointed bishop, Charles Frederick Mackenzie, had perished in a Malawian swamp – Burrup of dysentery, Mackenzie of fever. Nor were they the only victims. The London Missionary Society sent the Revd Holloway Helmore with an assistant named Roger Price to Barotseland, along with their wives and five children. After just two months, only Price and two of the children were left alive. Central and East Africa are scattered with dozens of missionary graves – men, women and children who heeded Livingstone’s call and paid for it with their lives. The problem was simple enough. Despite Livingstone’s tourist-brochure promises about the ‘healthy highlands of Central Africa’, the Batoka plateau turned out to be infested with malarial mosquitoes. So was the other site Livingstone had suggested as a possible missionary centre, the Zomba Plateau in what is now Malawi. The local tribes also proved unexpectedly hostile. These places were quite simply uninhabitable by Europeans.
More serious still, there turned out to be a fundamental flaw in Livingstone’s geography. Following the Zambezi on foot from Victoria Falls towards the Indian Ocean, he had bypassed a fifty-mile section, believing it to be more of the same wide river. He could not have been more wrong.
In the aftermath of his Cambridge lectures, with his prestige at its zenith, Livingstone had secured – for the first time – government backing for his endeavours. With a government grant of £5,000 and the diplomatic title of Consul, he was able to embark on an expedition up the Zambezi, the principal aim of which was to demonstrate its navigability and suitability for commercial traffic. By now Livingstone’s ambitions knew no bounds. Confidentially, he informed the Duke of Argyll and the Cambridge Professor of Geography Adam Sidgwick that the expedition had a further objective:
I take a practical mining geologist from the School of Mines to tell us of the Mineral Resources of the country [Richard Thornton], then an economic botanist [Dr John Kirk] to give a full report on the vegetable productions – fibrous, gummy and medicinal substances together with the dye stuffs – everything which may be useful in commerce. An artist [Thomas Baines] to give the scenery, a naval officer [Commander Norman Bedingfeld] to tell of the capacity of the river communications and a moral agent to lay the foundation for knowing that aim fully [probably a reference to Livingstone’s brother Charles, a Congregational minister in the United States]. All this machinery has for its ostensible object the development of African trade and the promotion of civilization but what I have to tell to none but such as you in whom I have full confidence is that I hope it may result in an English colony in the healthy highlands of Central Africa.
 
With these high hopes, Livingstone arrived at the mouth of the Zambezi on 14 May 1858.
Reality did not take long to intrude. It soon became apparent that the river was much too shallow for the steamer the expedition had been lent by the Colonial Office. The expedition was decanted into a much smaller paddle steamer, but it too constantly grounded on sandbanks. It took until November for them to reach Kebrabasa, by which time sickness and dissension were rife in their ranks. And here they found the most fatal of all the flaws in Livingstone’s plan. At Kebrabasa – the place his earlier expedition had bypassed on foot – the Zambezi flows into a narrow, stone-walled channel which transforms it into a raging, impassable torrent; at one point it plunges over a thirty-foot waterfall which no boat could possibly negotiate. In a word, the Zambezi was and is not navigable. And with that, the project to penetrate Africa with commerce, civilization and Christianity was sunk.
Livingstone flailed around, feverishly trying to salvage the situation. He stubbornly insisted that ‘a steamer of light draught would pass the rapids without difficulty when the river is in full flood’. He struck up the River Shire, only to encounter more rapids and threatening natives. He struggled on past Lake Shire to Lake Nyasa. By now, however, the expedition was disintegrating: Bedingfeld was forced to resign, Thornton was dismissed (but refused to go), Baines sacked on a bogus charge of pilfering the stores, Rae sent back to England to get a new boat. In March 1862 came news of the deaths of Bishop Mackenzie and Henry Burrup. A month later Mary Livingstone, who had by now joined her husband, herself succumbed to hepatitis, her constitution weakened by chronic alcoholism. By now Livingstone was in a state of severe mental turmoil, quarrelling bitterly with the few people still with him. Kirk, whose loyalty to Livingstone somehow never wavered, was at one point left behind when he set off to collect specimens on Mount Morumbala and had to run after the expedition’s replacement boat, the portable steamer
Lady Nyassa
, yelling desperately for it to stop. ‘That will teach you to be twenty minutes late’, was Livingstone’s sole comment as Kirk clambered aboard. Kirk concluded sadly that ‘Dr L.’ was ‘what is termed “cracked” ’.
Back in Britain, opinion now turned against Livingstone. On receiving letters from him proposing that a colony could be established in the Shire Highlands, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, retorted bluntly that he was ‘very unwilling to embark on new schemes of British possessions’. Livingstone ‘must not be allowed to tempt us to form colonies only to be reached by forcing steamers up cataracts’. On 2 July 1863 the expedition was formally recalled.
The Times
led the public backlash with a bitter editorial:
We were promised cotton, sugar and indigo, commodities which savages never produced, and of course we got none. We were promised trade and there is no trade. We were promised converts and not one has been made. We were promised that the climate was salubrious, and some of the best missionaries with their wives and children have died in the malarious swamps of the Zambezi.
 
At Kuruman Livingstone had failed as a missionary. Now, it seemed, he had failed as an explorer.
Yet this Victorian man of iron simply did not know how to give up. Despite the fiasco of the Zambezi expedition, he still could see a way to snatch a victory from the wreckage. It was just a matter of getting back to the roots of the Evangelical movement: anti-slavery. While languishing by Lake Nyasa, the Zambezi expedition had encountered a number of slave convoys. Once again, Livingstone was galvanized into action by the sight of human suffering. Having sailed the
Lady Nyassa
2,500 miles across the Indian Ocean to Bombay – in itself an amazing feat, given that the forty-foot vessel was a shallow-bottomed river steamer – Livingstone returned to London and prepared to rejoin the battle against the ‘trade of hell’. On 19 March 1866 he set off from Zanzibar with a new expedition and an old purpose: to stamp out slavery once and for all.
The remaining years of Livingstone’s life were spent in strange, almost mystical wanderings around Central Africa. At times he seemed to be conducting research on the slave trade; at times obsessively seeking the true source of the Nile, the Holy Grail of Victorian exploration; at times just trudging through the jungle for its own sake. On 15 July 1871 he witnessed a horrific massacre at a town called Nyangwe, where Arab slave traders pulled out their guns after an argument over the price of a chicken and indiscriminately shot more than 400 people. The experience only deepened Livingstone’s aversion to the slavers; yet in practice he was forced to rely on them for supplies and porters when his own sources failed. Nor was his search for the source of the Nile any more successful. Like his new Jerusalem on the Zambezi, it too eluded him: the ancient ‘fountains’ he dreamt of locating, which he believed both Ptolemy and Herodotus had described, turned out to be treacherous swamps that drained into the Congo.
David Livingstone’s grave – which looks rather incongruous in the Gothic grandeur of Westminster Abbey – bears a simple inscription in his own words: ‘All I can add in my solitude, is, may heaven’s rich blessing come down on every one ... who will help to heal this open sore of the world’. The words were a carefully crafted injunction to the next generation. The ‘open sore’ was, of course, the slave trade, which Livingstone had become convinced was the source of all Central Africa’s troubles.
He had died, at Ilala by the shores of Lake Bangweolo, in the small hours of 1 May 1873, a disappointed man; the slave trade seemed, ultimately, to be ineradicable. Yet just over a month later the open sore of slavery did begin to heal. On 5 June that same year the Sultan of Zanzibar signed a treaty with Britain pledging to abolish the East African slave trade.
36
The old slave market was sold to the Universities Mission to Central Africa who erected above the old slave cells a rather splendid cathedral – a fitting monument to Livingstone’s posthumous success as an abolitionist. Symbolically, the altar was built on the exact spot where the slaves had once been flogged.
Nor did Livingstone’s triumph from beyond the grave end there. In the shadow of the Batoka Plateau, hard by the Victoria Falls, lies the Zambian town of Livingstone, named after the good doctor himself.
37
For decades after his visit no Christian could come here and hope to survive because of malaria and native hostility. Yet between 1886 and 1895 the number of Protestant missions in Africa trebled. Today Livingstone, with a population of just 90,000, has no fewer than 150 churches, making it surely one of the most intensively evangelized places on earth. And this is only one small town in a continent where millions of people today embrace Christianity. Africa is in fact a more Christian continent than Europe. There are now, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.
How did a project that had seemed a total washout in Livingstone’s lifetime yield such astonishing long-term results? Why was it possible in the end to achieve in vast areas of Africa what had failed so badly in India? Part of the explanation obviously lies in the development of effective quinine-based prophylactics against malaria. That made being a missionary a far less suicidal vocation than in the early 1800s; by the end of the century there were as many as 12,000 British missionaries ‘in the field’, representing no fewer than 360 different societies and other bodies.
But the other half of the answer lies in one of the most famous meetings in the history of the British Empire.
Henry Morton Stanley – born John Rowland, the illegitimate son of a Welsh housemaid – was an ambitious, unscrupulous and trigger-happy American journalist. Apart from an iron constitution and equally ferrous will, he had almost nothing in common with David Livingstone. A turncoat and a deserter during the American Civil War, Stanley had established his reputation as an ace reporter by bribing a telegraph clerk to send his copy ahead of his rivals during the Anglo-Abyssinian War.
38
When the editor of the
New York Herald
commissioned him to find Livingstone, who had not been heard of for months since embarking on yet another expedition up the Rovuma river towards Lake Tanganyika, Stanley scented the biggest scoop of his career.
After a ten-month hunt, interrupted when he became embroiled in a minor war between Arabs and Africans, Stanley finally found Livingstone at Ujiji on the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika on 3 November 1871. His account of the encounter makes it clear that he was almost overwhelmed by his moment of glory:
[W]hat would I not have given for a bit of friendly wilderness, where unseen, I might vent my joy in some mad freak, such as idiotically biting my hand, turning a somersault or slashing at trees in order to allay those exciting feelings that were well-nigh uncontrollable. My heart beats fast, but I must not let my face betray my emotions, lest it shall detract from the dignity of a white man appearing under such extraordinary circumstances.
So I did that which I thought was most dignified. I pushed back the crowds, and, passing from the rear, walked down a living avenue of people, until I came in front of the semicircle of Arabs, in front of which stood the white man with his grey beard. As I advanced slowly towards him I noticed he was pale, looked wearied, had a grey beard, wore a bluish cap with a faded gold band round it, had on a red-sleeved waistcoat and a pair of grey tweed trousers. I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such a mob – would have embraced him, only, he being an Englishman, I did not know how he would receive me; so I did what cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing – walked deliberately up to him, took off my hat, and said: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’.
 
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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