Among the Makololo
FTER accompanying his wife and children to the Cape, and there with a heavy heart bidding them farewell as they sailed for England, Dr. Livingstone turned his attention to preparations for a journey of 1,000 miles to the northward. In this he had three ends in view. First, the finding of a healthful location fora mission in the Barotse country, to which he could bring his family. Then as he realized that the distance from the Cape was too great to permit communication between the coast and the Barotse country by this route, he wished to find some passage to the coast, either east or west. Besides this, the shadow of the slave-trade was, as a new thing, beginning to darken that portion of the land to which he was going. In addition to the inhumanity of the slave-traffic, Livingstone saw that it would prove an insurmountable barrier in the way of missionary operations, but that while it was the only profitable traffic known to the natives they would not abandon it. It was of vital importance, therefore, to take steps for the introduction of some legitimate commerce by which the slave-trade might be supplanted.
Livingstone left the Cape in June, 1852, but owing to many annoying delays, it was September before he reached Kuruman. Here the sad news of the attack of the Boers on the Bakwains was brought to him by the wife of Sechele, who nad herself been hidden in a cleft of the rock over which a number of the assailants were firing. The tribe of the Bakwains had already left Kolobeng and found a new home somewhat to the south. The Boers had come first to the deserted station, where they showed their hatred of Livingstone by gutting his house, destroying his furniture and whatever they could lay their hands on, and tearing in pieces his precious books and journals. Then they had followed the Bakwains to Limaue, where they had arrived on a Saturday evening, “spoiling for the fray.” They told Sechele that they had come to fight because he was getting “too saucy,” allowing Englishmen to proceed to the north, though they had repeatedly ordered him not to do so. To this the chief replied that he could not molest Englishmen, when they had never done him any harm, but had always treated him well. Yielding to his earnest entreaties that they should not fight upon the Sabbath day, the Boers waited until Monday morning before beginning their assault. Then they began firing upon the town and upon the Bakwains, who made a brave resistance all day, but were finally forced to retire on account of having no water. Thirty-five Boers and sixty Bakwains were killed during the fight. This village and others in the vicinity were set on fire by the Boers, the crops of the people burned, and their cattle carried off, all without the slightest provocation, but out of sheer hatred to the mission, and with the avowed determination to kill Livingstone had they found him, as they expected to do. Had he been able to carry out his original intention of arriving at Kolobeng in August, he would probably have lost his life; or, had he escaped with that, at the least all the property that he carried with him for the journey would have been seized, and his projected enterprise brought to an end.
Dr. Livingstone did not hesitate to express his righteous indignation over the injustice and cruelty of the Boers. For Lisa OF DAVID LIVINGSTONE, 33
one ordinarily so patient, he had a very large vial of indignation which he poured out right heartily when he thought the occasion demanded it. The subsequent history of the Transvaal Republic did much to convince others that he was not far wrong as regards the low estimation in which he held these “free and independent” Boers.
As for Livingstone the effect of this outrage was to free him from the last local tie, and to give fresh vigor to his determination to open the country which the Boers were trying so hard to shut up. To his brother-in-law he wrote that he would open a path through the country, or perish.
In June, 18538, Livingstone had reached the Makololo country. His journal shows how unwearied were his efforts to teach the people, though, as was to be expected, they received ideas on divine subjects but slowly. All the Africans he met were firmly persuaded that they should have a future existence, and had also a vague kind of belief in some Supreme Being, but this was all, and as in our case at home, nothing less than the instructions and example of many years could be depended upon to secure their moral elevation. “ We introduce,” he writes, “entirely new motives, and were these not perfectly adapted for the human mind and heart by their divine Author, we should have no success... We can afford to work in faith, for Omnipotence is pledged to fulfil the promise.... Our work and its fruits are cumulative; we work towardsanother state of things. Future missionaries will be rewarded by conversions for every sermon. We are their pioneers and helpers. Let them not forget the watchmen of the night—us, who worked when all was gloom, and no evidence of success in the way of conversion cheered our paths. They will doubtless have more light than we; but we served our Master earnestly, and proclaimed the same gospel as they will do,”
In his endeavors to find a healthful locality Livingstone penetrated to the farthest limit of the Barotse country, but no such place as he sought could be found. Everywhere he finds the terrible African fever that had so nearly proved fatal to his own family on their previous journeys. Here, too, the horrors of the slave-trade haunt and harrow him, while he sees heathenism in its most unadulterated forms.
“During a nine weeks’ tour,” he says, “I had been in closer contact, with heathens than I had ever been before; and though all were as kind and attentive to me as possible, yet to endure the dancing, roaring, and singing, the jesting, grumbling, quarreling and murderings of these children of nature, was the severest penance I had yet undergone in the course of my missionary duties. I thence derived a more intense disgust of paganism than I had hitherto felt, and formed a greatly elevated opinion of the effects of missions in the south, among tribes which are reported to have been as savage as the Makololo. The benefits which to a casual observer may be inappreciable are worth all the money and labor that have been expended to produce them.”
With respect to the results already obtained by the labors of missionaries he writes elsewhere: “ Having visited Sierra Leone and some other parts of the West Coast, as well as a great part of South Africa, we were very much gratified by the evidences of success which came under our own personal observation. The crowds of well-dressed, devout and intelligent-looking worshipers, in both the west and south, formed a wonderful constrast to the same people still in their heathen state. At Sierra Leone, Kuruman, and other places, the Sunday, for instance, seemed as well observed as it is anywhere in Scotland.” This is certainly more than can be said of our own land, though it must make us blush to acknowledge it. Indeed it is now said that in Sierra Leone there is a larger proportion of Christians than in the United States.
Of course Livingstone, travelling about from place to place as he did, was not cheered by such results as these which could only follow many years of seed-sowing; but amid all his difficulties, he patiently pursued his work as missionary, preaching twice every Sunday, generally to good audiences, sometimes to as many as a thousand. Sometimes he was greatly in hopes that a real impression had been made, but he was continually met by the notion that the Christian religion was a religion of medicines, and that all the good it could do was by charms.
“The great difficulty ””—to quote again from his journals —“in dealing with these people is to make the subject plain. The minds of the auditors can not be understood by one who has not mingled much with them. They readily pray for the forgiveness of sin, and then sin again; confess the evil of it, and there the matter ends. ”
Sometimes, too, Livingstone experienced the disadvantage of having to speak through an interpreter. It was easy enough to carry on communication on all ordinary matters through the medium of a third person, but when it came to the exposition of religious truth, in which the interpreter took little or no interest, it was “uncommonly slow work.” Some, indeed, began to pray to Jesus in secret as soon as they heard of the white man’s God, but with little comprehension of what they were doing. Many, however, kept to the determination not to believe, like certain villagers in the south, who put all their cocks to death because they seemed to crow the words “ Tlang lo rapeleng”—“ Come along to prayers.”