David Livingstone: Mission and Empire

297 Pages·2004·17.419 MB·English

by  Andrew C. Ross

DAVID LIVINGSTONE
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David Livingstone
Mission and Empire
Andrew C. Ross
Hambledon and London
London and New York
Hambledon and London
102 Gloucester Avenue
London, NWi 8HX
838 Broadway
New York
NY 10003-4812
First Published 2002
ISBN i 85285 285 2
Copyright © Andrew C. Ross 2002
The moral rights of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyrights
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of the book.
A description of this book is available from the
British Library and from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Carnegie Publishing, Lancaster
Printed on woodfree paper and bound in
Great Britain by Cambridge University Press
Contents
Illustrations vii
Introduction ix
Note on African Names xiii
1 The Displaced Gael i
2 A Student in Glasgow and London 11
3 The LMS and Southern Africa 27
4 Kuruman and Mabotsa 37
5 Kolobeng and the North 53
6 South African Politics 67
7 Coast to Coast 79
8 Years of Triumph 109
9 The Zambesi Expedition 125
10 Linyanti 151
11 Failure and Defeat 165
12 Home and Family 187
13 Bombay to Bangweulu 199
14 Last Journeys 223
15 Livingstone and Imperialism 239
Notes 245
Bibliography 265
Index 268
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Illustrations
Plates
Between Pages 114 and 115
1 David Livingstone, photograph by Thomas Annan
2 Shuttlerow, Blantyre, the single-end where Livingstone spent
his childhood
3 The Shuttlerow tenement in the 1860s
4 Mary Livingstone
5 Three Ngoni chiefs with their bodyguards
6 The Cabora Bassa Gorge, drawing by John Kirk
7 The Lady Nyassa, the shallow-draught river boat in which Livingstone
sailed to Bombay
8 Livingstone with his youngest child, Anna-Mary, on his last visit
to Scotland
9 Robert Livingstone
10 The last of Livingstone's Kololo
11 Agnes (Nanee) and Tom Livingstone, with Chuma, Susi
and Horace Waller, at Newstead Abbey
VIII DAVID LIVINGSTONE
Maps
1 Southern Africa 29
2 Livingstone's Trans-Africa Journey, 1853-56 81
3 The Zambesi Expedition, 1858-64 127
4 Livingstone's last journeys, 1866-73 201
Text Illustrations
1 David Livingstone being mauled by a lion 47
2 Arrival at Lake Ngami 59
3 Lake Ngami 59
4 A coffle of slaves 91
5 Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa 118
6 The Ma-Robert in the Zambesi above Sena 140
7 Narrative of the Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries 153
Introduction
On Saturday 18 April 1874 the London Illustrated News carried two striking
full-page illustrations: one was of mourners following a hearse through the
streets of Southampton which were thronged with spectators; the other was
of a coffin and its bearers proceeding down the aisle of Westminster Abbey.
The hearse which, to the sound of minute guns and muffled church bells,
moved through Southampton from harbour to railway station was carrying
the coffin of David Livingstone, who was to be laid to rest in Westminster
Abbey. The long biographical editorial in the same issue began:
'A Peerage or Westminster Abbey!' was the celebrated saying of Nelson before
plunging into the Battle of the Nile. No such aspiration, we may be sure, ever
disturbed the simple mind of Dr Livingstone, whose mortal remains were a week
ago consigned to the tomb. Probably, if he had been consulted, he would have
preferred to be buried on the banks of one of the many rivers which he has
discovered in Central Africa, and among the primitive negro races who, barbarous
as they are, revered him as a father, rather than in the historical abbey, which is
the mausoleum of so many British worthies, and of some unworthies. But the
public funeral of Saturday last, if not quite in harmony with the antecedents of
the great explorer, was a becoming national tribute of respect to a man whose life
was one long service to the cause of missionary enterprise, practical philanthropy,
and scientific discovery.
After reviewing Livingstone's life in some detail, the editorial ended with
a repeat of the same note of caution with which it had begun; a questioning
tone that did not appear in any of the long and detailed reports of the
funeral in the Times, the Scotsman or other major newspapers. The London
Illustrated News alone raised the question as to whether this tribute really
did fit the man and what he stood for:
It is nearly a year ago that, exhausted with hardship of travel, he pathetically
enjoined his faithful native adherents, 'Build me a hut to die in, I am going home'
- and there, at líala he slept the sleep of the just. His lifeless body was conveyed
during many months of a toilsome and dangerous journey a distance of more
than a thousand miles to the coast, by his humble body-guard, one and all liberated
slaves - a grander and more touching momento of the great missionary explorer