“The First River I Ever Saw!”
O NE of Bishop Hannington’s inimitable
sketches represents the unlucky traveller in his tent surrounded by a perfect mob of inquisitive natives. Livingstone often had the same sort of experience. The one white man they had ever seen was a perpetual source of wonder to the men and women of that unknown land. They would watch his every action and paw all his possessions with untiring zest. His boots and stockings were especial objects of wonder. A few years ago when another Scottish traveller was in the Lake Mweru district he found that all around that part of the world the natives still sing a “ Livingstone ” song. It was evidently composed by some local ballad-maker when the great white Doctor first arrived amongst them.
“ Ingeresa who slept on the waves,
Welcome him, for he hath no toes !
Welcome him, for he hath no toes ! ”
Ingeresa was their word for a Britisher; and what evidently struck them about this one was that he should have come so many thousands hi
112 “ THE FIRST RIVER of miles and yet have no toes—none, anyhow, that they could see under his stockings!
One day Livingstone heard two of his porters discussing him, and one of them said: “ How thin his legs are! They would not look anything at all, I expect, if he did not put them into those strange bags.” That last remark so riled Livingstone that on their next march he fairly walked his men off their legs, and kept it up so sturdily that they looked at him at last with awe. Evidently the queer “ bags ” hid some muscle!
In one village where he and Oswell arrived on their march a prodigious crowd visited the white men’s camp. Among the first was a gentleman who appeared in a gaudy dressinggown of printed calico. Others wore garments of blue, green and red baize. This, naturally, roused Livingstone’s interest, for all the other natives wore nothing at all but their birthday suits of brown. He guessed some trader had been there before him. It turned out that some half-castes had visited this Makololo village and had exchanged gaudy calicoes—for boys. It had been quite a new idea to the Makololo, and they naively confessed they “ disliked it,” but the calicoes and green baize were very tempting, and the village elders succumbed. The boys, however, whom they handed over to these Mambari traders were not their own kith and kin, but some captives they had in the village.
Later on the Mambari visited other Makololo villages, and if calicoes failed muskets succeeded. In one year’s raiding they captured over two hundred slaves.
Livingstone felt this gave him still another good reason for finding a highway from the coast into the darkest interior of this land. If once the country were opened up for proper trade, he was convinced this horrible slave business might be stopped.
It was in 1851 that he and Oswell first sighted that highway, when they discovered the great Zambesi River. If Livingstone had never made any other discovery than that his name would go down in history as the greatest of African pioneers. The born explorer must have an even greater gift than grit; he must have that gift of “ direction ” which really amounts to a seventh sense. Livingstone had that gift. There was no suggestion of such a river on the Portuguese maps he used, for no white man was then aware of its existence in that particular district of Africa. The natives called it the Sesheke at the point where Livingstone first struck the Zambesi. They could tell him little or nothing of the lands farther up the great river. But Livingstone followed his own reasoning, and he knew what a big discovery he had made. As he and Oswell stood on the banks of that mighty tropical waterway and watched its great brown waves surge past them, H
114 “THE FIRST RIVER they felt they realised for the first time what a real river was. “ This is the first river I ever saw! ” exclaimed Livingstone.
Then a native boatman took them in his strange-shaped canoe towards the other shore, and the little craft seemed to bob like a cork upon the yellow waves. As they reached mid-stream and the wonderful scenery opened out, all the two travellers could say to one another was: “ How glorious! How splendid! ” If it hadn’t been for the stolid old native who paddled them, Livingstone declared he would have given way altogether; but then, he added, “ that native might have said, ‘ What on earth are you blubbering for? Afraid of these crocodiles, eh? ’ ” That was so like Baba Daud; he was a very typical Scot. It is amusing to compare his way of describing such occasions to the very electric ones of Stanley.
And so Livingstone made that further entry on his new map of Africa. It is not an easy thing to make a map. It needs a special training to get the exact bearings, and then to set them down. If he had been an ordinary traveller even that wonderful discovery might not have conveyed much to geographers, unless he could also have set it correctly on the map. But he was not only a trained naturalist and geologist, he was an expert geographer himself; and a traveller to-day could journey all over Livingstone’s Africa with one of those beautifully drawn maps made by the great pioneer.
A typical example of his accuracy in mapmaking may be given. When Livingstone was on the south bank of Lake Tanganyika he mentioned a certain cape, Akalonga. At the fixing of the frontiers between British Central Africa and the Congo state the officials reported this to be a mistake on the part of Livingstone. But many years afterwards the traveller Torday proved Livingstone to have been perfectly correct in drawing Cape Akalonga on his map. He found in that district an old native who remembered Livingstone, and Torday closely questioned the man on the subject of the cape. The old man’s eyes lit up when he heard again the name of Baba Daud. “ He never lied,” he said. “ Come and see.” And at the place marked on Livingstone’s map the traveller saw clearly by the soil how the lake had originally stretched up to the foot of the mountain, and Akalonga was in fact “ a cape.”
Fever and the tsetse fly soon proved to Livingstone that he must go farther yet to find a district for his mission; so Oswell and he made their way onward through Linyanti. That journey of theirs must have been a pretty strenuous experience. The whole land in some parts was one big swamp. Near the River Chobe they had to force their way hour after 116 “ THE FIRST RIVER hour through quite deep marshy water, the sharp reeds, keen as razor-edges, cutting them, and tearing their clothes into tatters. Great tangled masses of climbing convolvulus, with stalks thick and strong as whipcord, brought them up continually against a sort of matted wall. They felt like pigmies in that hot tangle of giant tropical growth, and the perspiration streamed off their bodies as they bent down the stiff reeds and then mounted wearily over the solid, slippery obstacle into the deep waters beyond. The reeds were full of strange sounds; birds of every hue uttered weird cries, and jerked and wriggled among the reedy masses. Now an otter would glide away at their approach, or a water-snake would lift its ugly little head. Again a great splash near by would tell them that a hippo had heard them coming.
More dead than alive, they finally reached dry land, and camped by an inlet to the Chobe. Next day they came upon their friends the Makololo, who looked as if they had seen a ghost when they beheld the draggled white men. “ Why,” said one of them, “ he has dropped among us from the clouds, yet came riding on the back of a hippopotamus! We thought no one could cross the Chobe, but here he drops among us like a bird! ”
When Livingstone arrived at Linyanti for the second time he found the whole population of nearly seven thousand natives waiting to welcome him. Sebituane’s son was now King. He was a good-looking native boy of about eighteen, with a skin the colour of coffee and milk, instead of the black hue of the river tribes. Sekeletu, for that was his name, had not been left the throne by his father. Sebituane bequeathed it, as we saw, to his daughter Mamotshisane. But the young princess had no taste at all for power, and begged her brother to act as king. She was a simpleminded girl, and, like many another princess, she longed to be really free, and to be able to live her own life like other girls. As queen of that tribe it was expected of her that she should marry, and it was their immemorial custom for a royal lady to choose her husbands from men already married to other wives. Mamotshisane did not care for this at all, and she hated the thought of meeting the jealous looks of girls who were once her friends. Sekeletu, her brother, was quite ready to act as king, but he had a half-brother named Mpepe, who was furious at being passed over, and who was now working up a party to push Sekeletu off the throne.
Sekeletu welcomed Livingstone, for his father had told him the white man would bring great benefits to his country. He looked upon Baba Daud as almost a miraculous being, and he pressed all sorts of presents upon the Doctor. In return Livingstone gave Sekeletu a lot of 118 “ THE FIRST RIVER useful gifts. These included an umbrella and a hat; and because Livingstone did not belong to that class of explorer that accepts hundreds of pounds worth of ivory from a native in return for a few yards of calico and a gun that will not shoot, he also gave the King goats, fowls, wine, percussion-caps and other things, worth about thirty-one pounds.
There are some delightful entries in Livingstone’s diary, describing his mission work in Sekeletu’s village. He taught them many useful things, and in the evenings would get the people together and tell them about God. One sentence in his Journal is very characteristic. “ At first,” he writes, “ we have to enjoin on the women who have children to remain sitting for when they kneel they squeeze their children, and a simultaneous skirl is set up by the whole troop of youngsters who make the prayer inaudible.” There never was a more unconventional missionary. He thoroughly understood the native mind, and was never anything but perfectly simple and natural with them. And that was why his black children all so loved Baba Daud.
Sekeletu and he soon organised an expedition together into the country of the Marotse, and one morning they set out with a retinue of a hundred and sixty servants and porters and came to the village where Mpepe lived. Sebituane, the old king, had left Mpepe the charge of the royal cattle, and that prince took charge of them so thoroughly that he removed the whole herd to Naliele, where he lived. At this village was a powerful circle of native medicine-men, and the reports of their magic were so alarming that Sekeletu gave his brother’s headquarters a wide berth. Sebituane himself had never felt easy about Mpepe’s hut of enchantments. Not long before he died he said to Sekeletu: “ That hut of incantation will prove fatal to either you or me.” Sekeletu quite believed it had proved fatal to his poor old father, and he hoped Livingstone’s magic might be strong enough to overcome his halfbrother Mpepe’s.
Some half-caste Portuguese slave traders had paid a visit to the district, and had carried off the entire population of a Bakalahari village as slaves. Their leader travelled at his ease in a bag-like hammock, carried by slaves; and Sekeletu’s people called him “Father of the Bag.” Unfortunately Mpepe and the “ Father of the Bag ” made friends, and together planned a revolt against Sekeletu.
Mpepe’s plan was to invite his brother, the chief, to a conference. Then, as they sat together in the hut, he would suddenly give a signal, kill Sekeletu with an axe, and his men would cut down the royal guard. A number of Portuguese retainers of “ the Father of the Bag” came up to Mpepe’s kraal, so as to be 120 “ THE FIRST RIVER “ in at the death ”; and the revolt would certainly have succeeded if it hadn’t been for Livingstone.
As soon as the half-castes saw that Sekeletu’s guards wore hats of an unusual shape, they guessed a white traveller must have given them iheir headgear, and suspected he might be amongst the King’s followers. Their countenances fell, and they began to pack up in a hurry. They had no wish to run agog with white men; it might spoil their slave trade. Livingstone’s appearance, in fact, completely spoilt the little plot.
It was now Sekeletu’s turn; but he bided his time. Livingstone and the King had planned an expedition to the Zambesi; and as it was evidently to be a long journey, Sekeletu and his companions rode on oxen—a plan proposed by the Doctor, who, however, was much amused at their not always successful efforts to keep mounted. On the road to Sesheke the party ran into Mpepe. That young rascal was armed with a little axe, and as soon as he saw his brother he made for him. The King managed to turn his ox, and galloped off to a village near by, where he waited for Livingstone and the others. In a short time Mpepe and his followers came boldly up, and both brothers, in true native fashion, waited for the first “ opening.” Nothing was said on either side, but Mpepe’s retainers kept their weapons in their hands, and Livingstone took care always to keep between the chief actors in the drama. Mpepe dared not touch the white man, and it looked as if, in the meantime, things had come to a deadlock. Presently, as night fell, the different parties retired to their huts, and Livingstone, worn out by his long ride, was soon fast asleep.
Next morning he heard what had happened during the night. Nokuane, the King’s lieutenant, had made his way into Mpepe’s hut with a handful of snuff, and as the prince stretched out his hand for a pinch, Nokuane seized his wrist, led him outside the hut and speared him. Mpepe’s men fled, and the revolt was over.