David Livingstone: Trailblazer
By John Waters
IVP, 228 pages, £?
David Livingstone's own accounts of his epic journeys, Journals and Letters, have been published in addition to at least twenty books written about him, so anybody courageous enough to embark on another life of Livingstone in 288 pages has to be highly selective. If you are anything like me, you read with questions: how far was Livingstone a real missionary out to win souls and plant churches, and how far was he a maverick adventurer-explorer? What did his long absences do to his family? Do we find him a living, loveable personality? What really made this most famous of all missionaries tick?
In missionary terms, he was not a pioneer. The earliest five missionaries in the Cape under the London Missionary Society arrived in March 1799, including Johannes Van der Kemp (1747-1811), who assisted (1797) founding the sister Netherlands Missionary Society. Livingstone's father-in-law, Robert Moffat (1795-1883), was a child of four when LMS started work in South Africa, and when Moffat first arrived in the Cape in 1817, David Livingstone (1813-1873) was not yet four years old! Thus when Livingstone first arrived in Southern Africa in 1841, as a missionary of the London Missionary Society, others had been at work for 42 years. Yet, apart from the Cape and some coastal areas, much of inland Africa was unexplored and virtually unknown to the Anglo Saxon world.
He began as a missionary with LMS, but only served one term (of fifteen years). On his first return visit to Britain he resigned from the LMS (1857). Thereafter he was an Honorary British Consul and an independent geographer, though he insisted on doing 'missionary' work. LMS wanted him back to lead a new mission to the Kololo people, but his view of mission was much wider than theirs, and in later years he corresponded with Henry Venn, General Secretary of CMS, and his journeys were reported in the CMS Missionary magazine, the Intelligencer.
Mission stations
Robert and Mary Moffat at Kuruman represent the 'mission station' philosophy later so strongly attacked by Roland Allen ('a mission station is a stationary mission and a mass of stationery'). Livingstone, on the other hand, is an early exponent of the 'itineration' model favoured by John Livingstone Nevius, though it might be said that he took it to extremes! He was often in territories where he could not communicate directly and dependent upon interpreters. He did not seem to aim at planting self-propagating churches, but rather to ensure that as many people as possible might hear the gospel.
His concern for 'commerce' and trade 'elevating' the African, was motivated by a desire to prevent the inter-tribal 'slave wars'. The victorious tribe sold those of the defeated tribe to either the Swahili-speaking Arab traders penetrating from the east coast or the Portuguese slave traders entering from the west and south. The cost of feeding slavers and enslaved alike on the long journey back to the coast was more than the anticipated income from the sale of slaves, but they acted as porters for ivory tusks and that made it profitable. Commerce and the opening up of regular, safe, trade routes would provide alternative cash crops and hopefully bring the slave trade to an end. Livingstone's concern was not due to any diminishing of his desire to see men and women saved through Christ, but rather as someone who had seen the situation with his own eyes, something practical had to be done. The mercy and peace of Christ had to be brought to Africans, often kind and generous (except when threatened), and the villains were avaricious Arabs and Portuguese and greedy, white plantation owners wanting cheap labour. Livingstone, perhaps naively, saw what Thomas Fowell Buxton called 'legitimate commerce' as the way to end wicked exploitation of Africa labour. Like all good missionaries he was more pro-African than pro-white, indeed he seems to have got on much better with African rulers, and with African colleagues than he ever did with fellow missionaries!
Courageous
The book brings out the courage of a man who walks 1,500 miles to what is now Angola on the west coast and then turns back across to the mouth of the Zambesi on the east coast. The maps in the book are most helpful in following the otherwise confusing exploration of rivers, tributaries and lakes. As an explorer, he was quite remarkable, and his motivation was always to spread the gospel.
He married Mary Moffat in January 1845. She had grown up in Africa and had never been to Scotland or England. Over the course of the next seven years she gave birth to five children, departing for Scotland in April 1852 with the four surviving ones. She suffered acute culture shock and had a nervous breakdown. When he returns as a hero to Britain they are reunited after four and a half years of separation. On the way out to Africa together with the youngest child, Mary is discovered to be pregnant for the sixth time, and cannot accompany David on his travels and so returns to Britain again. She finally meets up with him at the mouth of the Zambesi after a further three years and nine months of separation on February 1 1862. Tragically, she dies three months later and David is desolated.
Absent father
When he returned to Britain for the second time, he had never seen his youngest child, Anna Mary, born three years earlier. His eldest son Robert had repeatedly run away from boarding schools in Scotland and in the end refused to study. He was kidnapped in Natal, forced to serve in the American Federal Army and was buried at Gettysburg. As with many 19th century missionaries, we can see the pressures of a world with no birth control, poor travel, scanty communications and appalling health risks. When one meets people fearful of 'risks' in today's world, we appreciate afresh the courage and sacrifice of such heroes and heroines of the past.
John Waters is to be congratulated on writing an interesting biography in a brief space, though in addition to bibliography, notes, glossary and index, a chronology of main events and dates would have helped. In the end I found myself reflecting whether from the point of view of LMS leadership, Livingstone was not yet another independent-minded, individualistic maverick, that makes you wish your selection procedures had been more effective! His own father-in-law seems to have shared some of those anxieties. And yet the toughness of the work and the sacrifices called for mean that such men (and women) find their life purpose in such work. They do not meet the neat and tidy expectations of administrators, but they do achieve a great deal, make excellent missionaries and are loved by the indigenous people among whom they work (if not always by their fellow missionaries!).
Michael Griffiths
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