DAVID LIVINGSTONE
BETWEEN 1870 AND 1900, the British Empire added over 5 million square miles (13 million sq km) of territory, a faster rate of expansion than in any other period. For most Britons, assumptions of the essentialness of the empire to the nation’s economic health, coupled with fears that territory would be claimed by a rival if it was not claimed by them first, ensured strong support for imperial expansion. At the same time, however, voices of dissent expressed discomfort with the idea of Britain as such an aggressively imperialist nation. A small but influential cadre of staunch anti-imperialists stood against the prevailing tide and offered a variety of arguments, both moral and pragmatic, against the expansionist imperative.1 More mainstream ‘liberal imperialists’, meanwhile, wished for expansion to continue, but for it to be instilled with a moral purpose that would overlie sheer military might. In this context, it was imperative to create narratives of empire that highlighted the moments in which the British could be viewed as nobly sacrificing themselves as part of their broader effort to bring morality, justice and spiritual enlightenment to the ‘dark places’ of the world.
It was the expansion of the empire in Africa that created the greatest need for these narratives, as it entailed the conquest and domination of large non-white populations. There was no way, in other words, to pretend that Africa was an empty land awaiting European exploitation. Driven by two motives that were not particularly attractive – profit and international competition – the colonization of Africa represented imperialism in its most naked form. In consequence, it required elaborate justifications to transform it from something blatantly mercenary and nationally self-aggrandizing into something noble and heroic. This is where imperial heroes came in.2 They helped Britons to minimize in their conceptions of empire the brutality, violence and coercion that the colonization of Africa entailed and in their place to emphasize idealism, morality, piety and duty. Victorian Britain’s greatest African hero, David Livingstone, was a failed missionary turned explorer who died while looking for the source of the Nile in the wrong place. It was his very lack of readily definable accomplishments, however, that made it possible to transform him into the personification of the ideals of the empire, rather than of its harsh realities.
The Ideal Explorer-Hero
In 1865, during his last trip to Britain, David Livingstone met Lady Jane Franklin. At the time, he was Britain’s most famous explorer, and was about to embark upon a search for the source of the River Nile that would consume the final seven years of his life. (Sir Roderick Murchison, who as president of the Royal Geographical Society in the early 1850s had led the calls for search expeditions to rescue Franklin, would soon be calling for expeditions to rescue Livingstone.) Later, Livingstone made a connection between his own and Franklin’s enterprises. Writing from Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in November 1868, he observed: ‘The discovery of the sources of the Nile is somewhat akin in importance to the discovery of the Northwest Passage, which called forth … the energy, perseverance and the pluck of the Englishman. And anything that does that is beneficial to the nation and its posterity.’3 Here, Livingstone acknowledged that his work, like Franklin’s, was defined as an heroic endeavour less for its practical utility and more for the fortitude and determination that it demanded. Like Franklin, Livingstone failed in his most important objectives, which in his case were to spread Christianity in Africa and to locate the source of the Nile.4 But that did not matter. For, also like Franklin, he came to be more important for the values that he represented than the things that he accomplished.5
In Livingstone’s case, those values were embodied not only by his career as an explorer but also by his life story, which featured numerous elements that were easily mythologized. Born in impoverished circumstances in 1813 in Blantyre in Lanarkshire, he went to work in a cotton mill at age ten. (See Figure 34.) After a twelve-hour day spent in sweltering heat crawling around dangerous machinery, he attended school for two hours each evening. Then, back home in the single-room tenement that he shared with his parents and four siblings, he read until his mother forced him to blow out the candle. He struggled to reconcile his love of science and his father’s strict Presbyterian religious beliefs until, at the age of nineteen, he read Thomas Dick’s The Philosophy of a Future State (1829), which convinced him that there was no contradiction between science and Christianity. This reconciliation of his intellectual interests and religious beliefs helped Livingstone to conceive the idea of becoming a medical missionary. At age nineteen, he was promoted to spinner, and he began saving his increased wages to pay the fees for the medical school at Andersonian University in Glasgow, where he enrolled in 1836. Two years later, he was accepted for training as a missionary to China by the London Missionary Society, but when the Opium War broke out, Livingstone was forced to come up with a new plan and determined to go to Africa instead.
After taking his medical degree in November 1840 and being ordained as a Nonconformist minister, Livingstone arrived in Cape Town in March 1841. Having married the daughter of his fellow missionary Robert Moffat, he established a mission station, first at Chonwane, which he had to abandon due to a lack of water, and then further north at Kolobeng. There he converted Sechele, chief of the local Kwena, but the latter’s new-found faith lasted only six months. Sechele was the first and last convert he ever made. Sechele’s lapse gave Livingstone serious doubts about the efficacy of the preaching of the gospel as a missionary strategy. Instead, he began travelling into the interior of Africa with the goal of opening it up to European traders and missionaries, in whose wake he believed Christianity would inevitably follow. In 1852, he set out to cross the African continent from west to east, in search of a malaria-free zone that could serve as a site for a missionary station. Beginning in Linyanti in what is now Zambia, he travelled 1,200 miles (1,920 km) west to Luanda (today the capital of Angola) on the Atlantic coast, reaching it in April 1854. Severely debilitated after suffering over two dozen bouts of fever, he was too weak even to write his own letters for two months. After recovering, he returned to Linyanti in order to continue his journey eastwards to the Indian Ocean. Setting off in November 1855, he soon discovered what the local peoples called Mosioatunya (‘the smoke that thunders’), an immense waterfall that he renamed Victoria Falls in honour of his sovereign. To the east lay the elevated, cool, fertile Batoka Plateau, which he thought would make an excellent location for a missionary station.
In May 1856, Livingstone arrived at Quelimane in what is today Mozambique. From his starting point in Cape Town, he had travelled 5,000 miles (8,000 km) and had accomplished the first crossing of sub-Saharan Africa by a European. In Britain, he was lionized as a hero, and crowds mobbed him in the street. He received a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society, an honorary doctorate from Oxford and a private audience with Queen Victoria. To commemorate his being given the freedom of the City of London, the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Carden, presented him with a wooden casket decorated with silver embellishments. (See Figure 35.) On the top, a three-dimensional figure of Livingstone shakes hands with an African chief under a palm tree. More palm trees decorate the corners, while silver panels on the sides depict a globe, navigational instruments and African scenes. A spectacular and expensive object, it shows the level of fame and heroism to which Livingstone had ascended.
But what exactly had he done? The globe and navigational instruments hinted at some sort of geographical accomplishment, but the main scene showed Livingstone greeting an African by shaking hands, an indication of equality between the white man and his black counterpart. For many Britons, it would have recalled the famous ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’ medallion created by Josiah Wedgwood during the campaign for the abolition of the slave trade in the late eighteenth century. It thus alluded to Livingstone’s efforts to end the ongoing slave trade in Africa, and cast him in a moral light. In any practical sense, however, Livingstone’s journey had been a failure. He had set off to prove that the Zambesi could be used as a highway for commerce and missionary activity into the interior of Africa. It was, in fact, useless for this purpose. In order for a mission station or trading post on the Batoka Plateau to be viable, it had to be reachable via the Zambesi from the east coast, but the Kebrabasa Rapids, which would be discovered two years later, made such a voyage impossible.6 The precise details or achievements of his transcontinental trek were unimportant, however; instead, it was Livingstone’s determination and diligence that registered most with his contemporaries in Britain. The Lord Mayor of London praised his ‘zealous and persevering exertions’, while the Glasgow Town Council expressed their regard for his ‘undaunted intrepidity and fortitude, amid difficulties, privations and dangers’. The United Presbyterian Church of Glasgow declared that Livingstone had exhibited ‘an amount of energy and intrepidity’ that placed him in ‘the very van of bold and enterprising spirits’; nothing had ‘daunted’ him, ‘not forest nor swamps, not flooded plains nor rapid rivers, not burning fevers nor savage man’.7
Livingstone’s account of his journey, entitled Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), sold an astonishing seventy thousand copies. It not only defined Livingstone in the eyes of the Victorian public, but also southern Africa.8 The interior of Africa had already been reshaped in the British imagination by Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton and others from a site of curiosity to one of geographical discovery and scientific research, but Livingstone now refashioned it into a place that Britons were duty-bound to improve and transform.9 Now, any attempt to assist Africa and its peoples was inherently heroic, even if it failed, since it was inherently a selfless effort to benefit humanity.
Livingstone became a hero in Britain in 1857, the same year in which a bloody and violent rebellion erupted against British rule in India. His missionary activities in Africa provided a counterweight to what had occurred in the subcontinent, which some Britons saw as divine retribution for an empire that had come to be based on commercial profit rather than on the religious salvation of its subjects. Livingstone sympathized with this view. When he spoke in Cambridge University’s Senate House, he declared: ‘I consider we made a great mistake when we carried commerce into India, in being ashamed of our Christianity … Those two pioneers of civilisation – Christianity and commerce – should ever be inseparable; and Englishmen should be warned by the fruits of neglecting that principle as exemplified in the management of Indian affairs.’10 At a time when the Indian population had made it clear that they did not view the British as their benefactors, and when many Britons had been deeply shaken by the force and scale of the rebellion, Livingstone provided reassurance that the empire could still be a morally and spiritually uplifting enterprise.
He knew better, of course: he had seen first-hand what Europeans had done to Africa with their insatiable desire for gold, ivory and slaves. But he was able to convince himself, and his fellow Britons, that somehow it would be different in the future. His grand schemes for the colonization and development of central Africa, however, were beyond the limited capacities of missionary societies; they required the backing of the British government. He thus left the employ of the London Missionary Society and became British consul of an ill-defined region encompassing Mozambique and the area to the west, with the goal of carrying out further explorations along the Zambesi and ultimately of establishing a British colony in the region. (He ignored the fact that much of this territory had already been claimed by the Portuguese, and that, even if it had not been, the British government had no interest in colonizing it.)
In 1858, his discovery of the Kebrabasa Rapids shattered his dream of reaching the Batoka Plateau by river, but, ever the optimist, he turned towards a new objective, the River Shire, which flowed into the Zambesi about 100 miles (160 km) from the coast.11 Following it north, he traced its origin to Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi), but there he discovered that Arab slave-traders were already well established in the region, leading to violent conflict among the local tribes. Moreover, the Portuguese were determined to protect their claim to the region, by military means if necessary. These factors meant that no English merchants were likely to set foot in what Livingstone had named the ‘Shire Highlands’, but he was running out of options for a place to establish a permanent British commercial and missionary presence in the interior of Africa.
Livingstone’s efforts to convince the British government to begin the process of formal colonization bore little fruit. ‘I am very unwilling to embark on new schemes of British possessions,’ wrote the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, in response to his repeated entreaties.12 His pleas for humanitarian intervention in Africa produced more tangible results, however. Livingstone’s lectures inspired four universities – Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Trinity College Dublin – to dispatch a combined mission to central Africa. Livingstone recommended that it establish a station in the Shire Highlands, even though he was well aware of the difficulties it was likely to encounter. The outcome was more disastrous than even he could have predicted. The mission’s leader, Charles Mackenzie, the first Anglican bishop to go to central Africa, was determined to intervene immediately to curb the slave trade, which embroiled the mission in tribal warfare even before it had reached its destination in Magomero in present-day Zambia. When the party was challenged by a group of Ajawa warriors, Livingstone ordered his men to open fire. At least six Africans were killed; to reinforce the point, Livingstone marched to their village and burned it to the ground. At few other points in his career was the contrast between his ideals and his conduct so starkly set in relief.
Over the ensuing months, Mackenzie continued to launch attacks on the Ajawa in a misguided attempt to impose order on the chaotic region. The situation worsened when he died of fever in early 1861, thus depriving the mission of its leader. In 1863, Livingstone’s supporting expedition was recalled by the British government, and the universities’ mission was withdrawn soon thereafter. The Shire Highlands experiment had been an ignominious failure: twelve of the missionaries had died, and everything that Livingstone had promised – the navigability of the Zambesi and the Shire, the healthy climate, the fertility of the Shire Highlands, the peaceful local population – had turned out to be false. The Times was blunt in its assessment:
We were promised cotton, sugar and indigo, commodities which savages never produced; and of course we got none. We were promised trade, and of course there is no trade, although we have a Consul at 500l. a year. We were promised converts to the Gospel, and not one has been made. We were told that the climate was salubrious, and a Bishop and some of the best missionaries of the temperate region of South Africa, with their wives and children, have perished in the malarial swamps of the Zambesi. In a word, the thousands subscribed by the Universities, and the thousands contributed by the Government, have been productive only of the most fatal results.13
After the failure of the Shire Highlands mission, Livingstone faced an uncertain future. He had spent over a decade trying to establish a permanent British mission and settlement in the upper Zambesi region; it was now clear that this was impossible. To continue working in Africa, he would have to complete the transition from missionary to explorer. He therefore immersed himself in answering the greatest African geographical question of the age: finding the source of the River Nile. In the late 1850s, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke had become the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika, and the latter, while Burton lay prostrate with illness, had discovered a second lake, which he named Lake Victoria, from which he claimed the Nile flowed. In 1862, Speke had returned to Lake Victoria and found an outlet, Ripon Falls, on its northern side that he argued confirmed his claim. Two years later, however, Samuel Baker found another possible source, a body of water that he named Lake Albert, which lay 150 miles (240 km) northwest of Lake Victoria. Denying both Speke’s and Baker’s claims, Livingstone believed that the source of the Nile lay even further south than Lake Tanganyika.
In 1866, Livingstone disappeared into the interior of Africa; nothing would be heard from him for over five years. As time passed, the mounting concerns for his welfare and inevitable rumours of his death did much to repair the damage done to his reputation by the Shire Highlands debacle. His fellow missionary Horace Waller wrote to him in 1869 that he was now surrounded ‘with a halo of romance such as you can’t imagine’.14 Two more years would pass, however, before the journalist Henry Morton Stanley ‘found’ Livingstone in Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.15 Stanley had been dispatched by the scoop-seeking editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett, who believed that news should be created, not merely reported. Like Livingstone’s, Stanley’s life was a rags-to-riches tale. Born into illegitimacy and poverty in North Wales, he grew up in a workhouse before emigrating to America in 1859, when he was eighteen. He fought on both sides of the Civil War and then evolved from soldier to war correspondent, eventually wangling a job at the Herald. The moment in which he met Livingstone in Ujiji enshrined both of them in legend; the mere ‘mention of your name’, wrote Waller to Livingstone after the story reached Britain, ‘makes the rafters shake!’16
The greeting that Stanley purportedly uttered to Livingstone – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – became one of the most famous phrases of the Victorian age, not least because it was made comical by its obsequious politeness and its absurdity: the question was uttered, after all, by one of the only two white men for thousands of miles to the other, and the answer was hardly in doubt.17 Britons readily saw it as proof of the gaucherie of Americans, among whom they counted Stanley, because they were unaware of his Welsh birth. In fact, he may never have actually said those words: he later destroyed the relevant pages of his diary, and Livingstone did not mention them in the version of the meeting that he recorded. They did not appear in the Herald until August 1872, three months after the story that Stanley had found Livingstone had broken. But despite the fact that he was much ridiculed for the phrase, Stanley never denied having said it.
Resisting Stanley’s entreaties to abandon his expedition and return home, Livingstone continued to search for the source of the Nile. Now sixty years old, he was suffering from a variety of ailments, and in the spring of 1873 he became so weak that his men had to carry him on a litter. They decided to return to Ujiji so that he could recover, but along the way Livingstone collapsed completely. In the village of a chief named Chitambo, his followers built him a hut in which he could rest. After lingering for two weeks, he was found dead one morning – probably on 1 May. According to legend, he was discovered kneeling by his bed in prayer, but in reality pain from a large blood clot that had formed in his intestine had probably caused him to hunch into a fetal position.
Two of Livingstone’s companions, Abdullah Susi and James Chuma, were determined to return Livingstone’s body to his own people. This was a highly dangerous undertaking, as many of the tribes along the route back to the coast forbade the carrying or moving of corpses. Nonetheless, Susi and Chuma built a special enclosure so that they could secretly embalm the body by salting it and drying it in the sun. After removing the internal organs and burying the heart in a tin flour-box under a tree, they wrapped the rest of the body in bark, sailcloth and a sheath of calico in order to disguise it as a bundle of cloth. They then carried it 1,500 miles (2,400 km) to Zanzibar; ten men died along the way.
A European received the first definitive news of Livingstone’s death in October 1873. In Unyanyembe in what is now Tanzania, Chuma, who had gone ahead of the main caravan in order to obtain supplies, met Lieutenant Verney Lovett Cameron of the Royal Navy, who was leading an expedition sent by the Royal Geographical Society to relieve Livingstone.18 Upon learning that he was too late, he tried to convince Chuma and the others to bury the body, but they would not be dissuaded from completing their mission. Cameron himself continued on to Ujiji in order to retrieve Livingstone’s books and papers, but he sent his companions William Edward Dillon and Cecil Murphy to accompany the body to Zanzibar.19 The journey was so arduous that along the way Dillon ‘shot himself in a fit of delirium’.20
The news of Livingstone’s death reached Zanzibar in January 1874. From there, the information was relayed to the Foreign Office by the acting British consul, Captain William Prideaux, who reported that
as a mark of respect to the memory of Dr Livingstone, the flag-staff of this Agency was kept at half-mast from sunrise to sunset on the 5th of January. This example was followed by His Highness the Sultan, by Her Majesty’s ships of war then in harbour … and by the Consular representatives of the other Foreign Powers in Zanzibar, from all of whom I received letters of condolence on the death of this eminent explorer and distinguished servant of the Queen.21
Once the news reached Britain, Livingstone ascended to the greatest heights of heroism. A large crowd met his coffin at Southampton on 15 April 1874. A special train carried the body to London, where it lay in state in the Royal Geographical Society for two days prior to the funeral in Westminster Abbey. (See Figure 36.) Agnes Cotton Oswell, the wife of Livingstone’s friend and fellow African explorer William Cotton Oswell, recorded in her diary that as the coffin was carried through the streets of London the crowd that gathered to see it included ‘every grade of life, from the Queen to the humblest crossing-sweeper’.22
In the months and years that followed, Livingstone was transformed into an object of quasi-religious veneration. (See Figure 37.) Suspending its rule that a person had to have been dead for ten years prior to having his portrait put on display, the National Portrait Gallery immediately acquired a small pencil sketch of Livingstone by Joseph Bonomi.23 Soon, plans were under way for dozens of memorials, scattered throughout Britain, Africa and the rest of the empire. Over a hundred biographies would be published, and Livingstone became the subject of countless songs, poems, plays, novels and other works of fiction and non-fiction. Although his birthplace in Blantyre did not officially open as a museum until the 1920s, the then-current occupant began admitting visitors in 1882; a visitors’ book in the collection of the David Livingstone Centre records the names of 9,943 visitors up to 1913. Most were local or from other parts of Scotland, but visitors also came from all over England, Wales and Ireland, as well as the United States, Jerusalem, Germany, Switzerland, Paraguay, Italy, China, Canada, southern and central Africa, Syria, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Ceylon, India and the Straits Settlements.24 In 1899, the mvule tree under which Livingstone’s heart had been buried became diseased and had to be cut down. Pieces of the tree were treated as sacred relics, and items made from it were sold as souvenirs.25 (See Figure 38.)
Amidst this flood of adulation, however, there was still only a vague understanding of what precisely Livingstone had accomplished. His work as a missionary had produced no converts, and his geographical achievements had been feats of endurance rather than discovery. It was that very endurance, however, that had transformed him into the greatest explorer-hero of the Victorian age. From his childhood, when he refused to accept the life of poverty and ignorance that lay before him, to the end of his life, when he continued his explorations despite his rapidly declining health, Livingstone was defined not by what he accomplished but by his refusal to submit or surrender.26 Driven by willpower rather than ambition, Livingstone was perceived as free from venal motives. The periodical John Bull posthumously described him as ‘self-yielding in these all too selfish days’ and as a man whose ‘heroic sacrifice has led the van’.27
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, it was Henry Morton Stanley’s mode of exploration – marching behind the barrel of a gun – that prevailed in Africa, while Livingstone’s philanthropic vision crumbled in the face of international competition, ambition and (often illusory) economic profit. Stanley may not deserve the amount of blame that he has been apportioned for what occurred in the ‘scramble for Africa’, and especially in the Belgian Congo, where he served as King Leopold II’s chief agent in the 1880s.28 But if Livingstone had blurred the distinction between mission work and exploration, Stanley, as Felix Driver has written, blurred that between ‘exploration and warfare so profoundly that it becomes almost unrecognisable’.29 In the 1890s, Stanley acknowledged his role as Livingstone’s mirror image: ‘My methods … will not be Livingstone’s. Each man has his own way … The selfish and wooden-headed world requires mastering, as well as loving charity.’30 Livingstone, naively, believed that the British could bring commerce and Christianity to Africans while avoiding colonialism’s most destructive effects. Stanley, realistically, knew that African imperialism was really about money and power; unlike other explorers, he did not remove the episodes in which he beat and whipped his porters from the published version of his journal. His attitude to Africa was unabashedly proprietary: as he neared the famous rendezvous with Livingstone, he wrote of feeling ‘proud that I owned such a vast domain’.31 But in their contrasting personalities, Livingstone and Stanley allowed the British to have their African cake and eat it too. (See Figures 39 and 40.) Revering Livingstone allowed them to believe that commerce and national self-aggrandizement were genuinely compatible with Christianity and cultural enlightenment in Africa. Stanley, meanwhile, carried on with the business of acquiring territory and extracting profit from it. His honest brutality made it all the more imperative for Britons to be able to point to a hero who was not associated with aggression, violence and bloody conquest. Livingstone’s failure to achieve more in Africa thus became the source of his heroism. He was, in the end, a poor imperialist, but he was a great imperial hero in the eyes of a Victorian public who desperately wanted to see Britain’s endeavours in Africa as noble and benevolent. In Livingstone’s hands, wrote Sir John Scott Keltie, assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, in 1893, the scramble for Africa became ‘a kind of holy crusade’.32 It was, of course, nothing of the sort, but Livingstone made it possible to maintain the illusion.33
But that was the mythic version of Livingstone. The real man had been more like Stanley than either he or his subsequent mythologizers would have admitted, for he was not above the use of violence when other methods failed. He beat and threatened to shoot his African followers when they did not obey, and once told one of his European companions when he was having difficulty with his African servants ‘to break their heads if they did not do’ as he commanded.34 We have already seen how he shot at Africans while defending the Shire Highlands mission in 1861, and he did so again when attempting to sail a steamer up the Rovuma in 1862. Over the course of his career, he was responsible for the deaths of at least eight Africans. An episode that occurred on his final journey is revealing. After parting from Stanley in August 1872, Livingstone had headed south to Lake Bemba in northern Zambia, but his explorations were hindered by the refusal of the local peoples to let him use their canoes to cross the lake. He ‘therefore seized seven canoes by force and when the natives made a show of resistance he fired his pistol over their heads, after which they ceased to obstruct him’.35
Livingstone was not, then, the saint of posthumous mythology. But the unsaintly Livingstone died in 1873, while the saintly one lived on. In 1896, the National Portrait Gallery acquired a portrait of him by Frederick Havill. The original accompanying label read: ‘David Livingstone, 1813–1873. African traveller and missionary. Explored the interior of Africa and published various accounts of his travels, during which he shewed great courage and self-sacrifice, both as explorer and missionary.’36 Here, we see many of the complexities of Livingstone’s African career encapsulated in barely thirty words. There is the confusion as to whether he was explorer or missionary, and no clear statement of what precisely he accomplished in either arena. What is emphasized above all, however, is his ‘great courage and self-sacrifice’, demonstrating that achievement mattered less than character when the Victorians assessed their explorers.