by Tim Jeal
The centurions, according to Seneca – another name on Livingstone’s reading list – travelled with their 200 soldiers further up the Nile than anyone would manage until the mid-nineteenth century, ascending the river as far as the Bahr el-Ghazal (a White Nile tributary, briefly thought to be the main channel) and the marshes of the Sudd. Braving tribesmen’s attacks, overpowering heat and clouds of mosquitoes, they came at last through the shimmering haze ‘to immense swamps, the end of which neither the natives knew, nor is it possible for anyone to hope to know’.36 It would be 1841 – almost 2,000 years later – before the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali, sent an expedition that succeeded in penetrating the Sudd’s 300-mile maze of papyrus-choked channels. Only one of the nineteenth-century explorers, who subsequently struggled upstream through the Sudan and Equatoria, won more than faint praise from the exacting Dr Livingstone.
None rises higher in my estimation than Miss Tinné, who after the severest domestic afflictions, nobly persevered in the teeth of every difficulty … [she] came further up the river than the centurions sent by Nero Ceasar [she had passed Gondokoro and reached Rejaf], and showed such indomitable pluck as to reflect honour on her race.37
Alexine Tinné, Holland’s richest heiress, lost her mother and an aunt to fever while navigating the Bahr el-Ghazal. When Livingstone was penning his praise for her, he had no means of knowing that she had already been hacked to death by Tuaregs, during a valiant attempt to reach the Nile’s source by crossing the Sahara, and then heading east through Chad to strike the river, she hoped, near its head.38 As for Livingstone’s fellow Britons, Richard Burton, John Speke and Samuel Baker – he wrote little about these younger rivals, except to criticise them. For why praise explorers, who seemed certain to be ‘cut out’ by his Bangweulu ‘Nile’ sources, which were so far south of their entire sphere of operation?
Livingstone’s confidence that the Lualaba was the Nile received an unexpected boost while he was confined to his dark and smoky hut in Bambarre. Two Arab ivory traders arrived in mid-August, after a long journey that had taken them to Katanga and beyond. Their names were Josut and Moenpembé and what they said electrified the sick man. Their information was that Lake Bangweulu was not the only source of the Lualaba. A nearby spring, to the west of the lake, gave rise to a river, which, after joining with the waterway that issued from Bangweulu, flowed on northward as the Lualaba. So there were two sources of the Lualaba. The Arabs also announced that near to these north-facing sources, there were two additional springs, whose waters flowed to the south. What thrilled Livingstone was their account’s uncanny resemblance to what had been written about the Nile’s source by Herodotus, ancient Greece’s most famous historian.
In 457 BC, Herodotus had visited Egypt and travelled up the Nile as far as the first cataract, eager to discover whatever he could about the river’s origins. He would be largely disappointed. From a variety of Egyptian and Greek travellers, he learned that the river probably came from far to the west, from the country we now know as Chad, but no convincing detail was volunteered. On returning home, Herodotus wrote: ‘Not one writer of the Egyptians, or of the Libyans, or of the Hellenes, who came to speak with me, professed to know anything, except the scribe of the sacred treasury of Athene at the city of Sais in Egypt.’39 But this one scribe made up for the vagueness of the historian’s other informants. Between two mountains, he said, could be found ‘the fountains of the Nile, fountains which it is impossible to fathom: half the water runs northward into Egypt; half to the south’. Although Herodotus had sensed that ‘the scribe did not seem to be in earnest’, Livingstone believed he had been. This was because the scribe’s version tallied so closely with Josut’s and Moenpembé’s. There was one difference. The scribe had mentioned two mountains between the four sources, whereas the Arabs had mentioned ‘a mound between them, the most remarkable in Africa’.40 But, in Livingstone’s opinion, this difference seemed too small to worry about. A remarkable mound was likely to be a colossal feature: perhaps a range of mountains. Nor was he being naive to have believed the Arabs. The oral accounts of travellers often turned out to be true, and he knew already that the sources of the Zambezi, and the Kafue, were within a hundred miles of Bangweulu – so two southward-flowing rivers existed in reality.
The presence of mountains near the northward-flowing sources delighted Livingstone for another reason. In about AD 150, the Greek astronomer and geographer, Claudius Ptolemaeus -Ptolemy, as he is generally known – had stated, in his Geography, that after marching for twenty-five days into the interior from somewhere near Mombasa, a traveller would arrive at ‘the snowy range of mountains from whence the Nile draws its twin sources’. Ptolemy had this information from the report of a Greek trader, Diogenes, who, on returning from a voyage to India a century earlier, had landed on the East African coast, where he claimed to have reached the sources after a twenty-five-day march. This would not have taken him far inland. More likely, he had heard from Arab traders that, while in the interior, they had learned about the existence of sources close to snow-peaks known as the Mountains of the Moon.41 Livingstone found this compelling:
What we moderns can claim is rediscovery … The headwaters of the Nile are gathered into two or three arms, very much as was depicted by Ptolemy … [he] was not believed because his sources were between 10 and 12 north latitude.
This was, of course, where Livingstone had found Lake Bangweulu and where Josut and Moenpembe had just been.42 The recuperating explorer found this additional Greek endorsement of his own view of the Nile’s sources wonderfully reassuring.
By 10 October, Livingstone’s ulcers were starting to heal, and for the first time since 22 July he was able to leave his hut. Just as he was making plans to move on, he heard that the leader of a trading party from Ujiji had reported that a second caravan was en route for Manyema ‘with letters and perhaps people for me’.43Clearly, he would have to wait till they came, before heading for the river. And wait he did, very reluctantly, until 4 February the following year. ‘I am in agony for news from home; all I feel sure of now is that my friends will want me to finish my work.’44 Also on the 4th, ten men arrived who had been sent from the coast by Dr John Kirk, the acting British Consul at Zanzibar. Livingstone was enraged to find that these new arrivals were slaves and not freemen. Almost at once these men, who were owned by Indian coastal traders (known as banians), told him they would not move except for higher wages, and claimed that Consul Kirk had instructed them to force him back to Zanzibar as soon as possible. Only when Livingstone threatened the men’s leaders with his pistol would they agree to march.45
Even after reading about the public rows on the Zambezi Expedition, it would have amazed the Rev. Dr Livingstone’s contemporaries to know that he sometimes threatened to shoot Africans. In fact he had once fired at Susi, one of his three longest-serving attendants, who had been with him since 1863, and still was. Susi’s offence had been to seize Livingstone’s hand roughly, and to refuse to let it go. So Livingstone had fired at him, and had very fortunately missed. This incident would be cut from the published version of Livingstone’s Last Journals by the clergyman editor appointed by his family, as would many others which showed his ‘faithfuls’ in an unflattering light.
There being no law or magistrate higher than myself, I would not be thwarted if I could help it … They would like me to remain here and pay them for smoking the bange [cannabis], and deck their prostitutes with the beads which I give them regularly for their food.46
Despite the reputation for devoted behaviour which they would later enjoy in Britain, his followers were as different from the members of a Sunday School as it would be possible to imagine.
It is doubtful whether any of his men understood why he was prepared to travel in the rainy season, risking his life and theirs. Why did the direction of rivers matter so much? Why could he not rest more and enjoy his life? There is no evidence that Livingstone ever tried to explain. Before he left Bambarre, two of his favourites, Chuma and Gardne
r, brought him close to despair by taking part in an Arab attack on local Manyema. Gardner actually returned, dragging after him a woman he had captured. Chuma came ‘caricolling [sic] in front of the party … mimicking shooting’.47 Chuma had been a boy of ten when released by Livingstone from a slave gang near Lake Nyasa (Malawi) in 1861, and, like Gardner, had spent several years at the Nassick Mission School in Bombay, having been left there by Livingstone in 1864. ‘Christian boys from Nassick,’ Livingstone shouted at them both, ‘[should] not need to be told not to murder.’ Chuma countered that in 1863, in the Shire Highlands, Livingstone had fought the Ajawa (Yao) and had shot at them. ‘Yes,’ Livingstone retorted, ‘to make slaves free, but you want to make free people slaves.’48 (The Yao had been allies of Portuguese slave traders.)
As he was preparing to leave Bambarre, several of the men who had deserted him the previous June asked to be taken back. Mabruki (another Nassick pupil) was allowed to stay, but Livingstone told Ibrahim and Simon ‘to be off or [he] would certainly shoot them’. Simon had admitted to two murders and Ibrahim to numerous thefts, so their master’s fury with them was understandable.49 He left for the Lualaba on 16 February 1871, with Muhammad Bogharib’s caravan and his own fourteen men.
The grass and mud are grievous, but my men lift me over the waters … The country is everywhere beautiful and undulating: light green grass covers it all, save at the brooks … Grass tears the hands and wets the extremities.50
Early in the journey, Katomba, a slave-trading associate of Bogharib, presented Livingstone with an eighteen-inch-tall female gorilla. He judged this motherless infant: ‘The most intelligent and charming of all the monkeys I have seen. She holds out her hand to be lifted and carried, and if refused makes her face [resemble] a bitter human, weeping.’ It dismayed Livingstone not to be able to take her with him. ‘I fear that she will die … from people plaguing her.’51 The rains had not quite ended, but there was sunshine too, and as so often in the past, Livingstone enjoyed the beauty of villages nestling between tree-covered hills. Soon after dawn, he loved to see people sitting outside their huts around a fire when the low rays of the sun were just appearing.
The various-shaped leaves of the forest all around their village are bespangled with myriads of dewdrops. The cocks crow vigorously and strut and ogle; the kids [goats] gambol and leap on the backs of their dams … thrifty wives often bake their new clay pots in a fire, made by lighting a heap of grass roots … The beauty of this morning scene of peaceful enjoyment is indescribable.52
Yet Livingstone was accompanying people who could change in an instant this peaceful tableau to one of death and misery. Days later, Livingstone was thankful to be travelling independently again. In exchange for his double-barrelled gun, Katomba lent him seven men. Since Bogharib had left him to go in search of slaves and ivory, the extra men would be indispensable.53 Livingstone’s main problem was a dearth of canoes, which began to worry him seriously as he came within six miles of the river. The nearest vessels were said to be about five days’ journey away across a region criss-crossed with shallow rivers. On 11 March he was told by Amur, yet another slave trader, that there was no point in trying to progress along the Lualaba unless he could muster 200 guns. All the people for miles around, said Amur, hated strangers and ‘wanted a white one to eat!’54 Of course, Livingstone ignored this warning. He knew very well that most of the slavers wanted to drive him back eastwards, away from their profitable new slave frontier.
Crossing many streams that flowed into the Lualaba – now three miles distant – he was depressed to meet a party of slavers with eighty-two captives and twenty tusks. He travelled the final miles to the river with this party’s leaders, Abed bin Salim and Hassani, who when questioned, swore to him that they ‘never began hostilities’. ‘They began nothing else,’ he countered in his journal. ‘The prospect of getting slaves overpowers all else, and blood flows in horrid streams.’55
Although the last day of March was an unforgettable one for Livingstone, he described the river clinically and without emotion in his journal:
I went down to take a good look at the Lualaba here [at the town of Nyangwe]. It is narrower than it is higher up, but still a mighty river, at least 3,000 yards broad, and always deep: it can never be waded at any point … It has many large islands … The current is about two miles an hour away to the north.56
During the three days following his first sight of the Lualaba’s wide expanse of smooth and slow-moving brown water, he made numerous attempts to buy canoes from local people, but all failed. Four days later, a local Manyema chief agreed to sell him a dugout large enough to hold him and all his men. But the one that actually arrived turned out to be able to carry no more than three people.57 The Manyema’s refusal to sell canoes and dugouts was entirely rational. They feared that if strangers were to cross the river they would extend the slave trade to the left bank. But, as Livingstone realised, this reluctance was already encouraging the slavers to take dugouts by force. Only Dr Livingstone, the man of peace, was being denied what he so desperately needed. He described: ‘Waiting wearily and anxiously [while] the owners of canoes say, “Yes, yes; we shall bring them,” but do not stir.’ His lack of progress obliged Livingstone to ask his followers to build him a wooden house, so that he could leave the vermin-ridden hut he had been loaned.58
The ten men who had recently arrived from Zanzibar – and whom he had been shocked to learn were slaves – now began to make life even harder for their master by telling the local Manyema: ‘He does not wish slaves and ivory, but a canoe in order to kill Manyema.’ Livingstone soon discovered that slavers, like Hassani and Abed, had ‘aided [his] men in propagating the false accusation’. Not surprisingly, the Arab-Swahili wanted to stop Livingstone spying on them as they extended their activities north and west of Nyangwe. As for his followers, their attitude was easy to understand. No African or Arab had ever followed the Lualaba downstream for more than 100 miles north of Nyangwe, and it scared all Livingstone’s men to contemplate venturing into an unknown region, peopled by tribes who had every reason to hate new arrivals. Understandably, his men wanted to return home at once, rather than die in this remote and frightening place.
By mid-May Livingstone still had no canoe, and now Abed added to his anxieties by telling him he had overheard his men – the recent arrivals from Zanzibar – plotting to kill him. ‘He advised me strongly not to trust myself to them anymore.’ Since they admitted that they had shot three men and had been capturing and selling people, Livingstone realised that this was good advice.59 But without these ten slaves, how could he finish his work? He could hardly travel thousands of miles with four men. As usual, when he was worried, Livingstone’s bowels started to plague him.
His next venture was to try to buy dugouts from the Wenya people, who lived on the left bank. But the Arabs chose this moment to buy up all the Wenya vessels that had until then been available for sale, ‘nine large canoes – and I could not secure one’.60 Eventually, on 5 July, in desperation, he offered Dugumbé, a leading slave trader in Nyangwe, £400 to provide him with ten porters to replace the mutinous slaves sent by Consul Kirk from Zanzibar. But even this vast sum could not persuade Dugumbé to help a man, whom the Arab was sure would one day expose his bloody record, if given the chance. In mid-month, Livingstone was finally reduced to pleading. ‘I have goods at Ujiji … take them all and give me men to finish my work … do not let me be forced to return now I am so near the end of my undertaking.’ But Dugumbé merely said he would consult his associates and report back.61 The Arab had still not answered Livingstone by 15 July, the day on which an event took place in Nyangwe that changed everything.
One of the only places where Livingstone had felt able to forget his worries had been Nyangwe’s market, where up to 3,000 people came to buy and sell. That day there were half that many, but he found it no less enjoyable to watch the market women, old and young, laughing and joking as they bartered their earthen pots for cassava, palm-oil,
salt, pepper, and relishes for their food. Local fish of many varieties were also for sale, and Livingstone loved the bustle: children carrying squawking fowls, a pig breaking free, sellers throwing up their hands after failing to convince a potential customer of the value of a goat or sheep. The weather was so hot and sultry that he did not stay as long as usual. As he was leaving, he was surprised to see five Arab-Swahili in their white robes come into the market carrying guns. Until now, whenever he had been in this place, the Arabs had respected the local custom never to bring arms there. Livingstone was shaken to note that three of these armed men worked for Dugumbe; but while he was considering whether to reprove them, they began firing into the throng, killing people at point-blank range. A moment later, as screams echoed around him, other Arabs fired into a crowd of terrified people fleeing towards the creek where their canoes were moored. Pandemonium followed, with men and women flinging themselves into canoes, either swamping vessels, or making it impossible for anyone to paddle. The press of numbers in the creek soon prevented canoes from getting out into the river, away from the guns. So wounded men and women ignored the boats and scrambled into the water, hoping to swim against the current to an island a mile away. In horror Livingstone watched overloaded canoes sinking, and the long line of heads making for the island beginning to thin out, as one by one the swimmers drowned. The firing had been so frenzied near the creek that the Arabs had actually shot several of their own number there. They later reckoned that 400 were shot or drowned. Livingstone suspected this was an underestimate. ‘No-one will ever know the exact loss on this bright and sultry morning; it gave me the impression of being in Hell.’
Massacre of the Manyema women in Nyangwe (from Livingstone’s Last Journals).
While people were still drowning, Dugumbe arrived at the creek and ‘put people into one of the deserted vessels to save those in the water’. But since his men had started the firing, Livingstone was not mollified by these humane acts. He knew the attacks had been concerted ‘to make an impression in the country as to the importance and greatness of the newcomers’. Even while Dugumbe had been saving people from the water, men under the orders of Tagamoio, an associate of his, continued the reign of terror on land ‘shooting right and left like fiends’. Although Dugumbe claimed to have told Tagamoio to stop, he continued the slaughter into the following day, burning twenty-seven villages around Nyangwe. Livingstone wrote in anguish:
