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Home , David Livingstone, Sekeletu

DAVID LIVINGSTONE

Zambia by Richard Hall

Supreme among these white travellers was David Livingstone, who first set foot on soil at the age of 38 and was to die on it nearly a generation later. He pursued a myth derived from the writings of Herodotus, the Greek 'father of history', that the had its source in a series of fountains. Livingstone's obsession that they bubbled out of the earth somewhere beyond drew himto his death at Chitambo's village, 130 miles north-east of the Copperbelt. In his 10,000 miles of tramping, Livingstone crossed and re-crossed Zambia, visiting places where probably no white man had been before; if they had, they had left no records.

Livingstone's unique role in the history of Zambia was that by the account of his journeys he brought mysterious Central Africa into the forefront of attention in Victorian England. Livingstone had decided, while he was studying medicine in , that he would become a missionry in China, but had to abandon this aim because of Palmerston's 'Opium War'. Then through the London Society he met Robert Moffat, who since January 1817 had been working for that body in Southern Africa. Livingstone was drawn by the challenge of the 'dark continent' and early 1841, soon after he became a doctor, he arrived at Moffat's missionary headquaters in Kuruman (now Cape Province, South Africa). Shortly Livingstone advanced into what is now Bechuanaland. After four years at Mabotsa he had collected much information about the country beyond the Kalahari desert.

In 1849, Livingstone crossed Kalahari for the first time ans in August reached Lake Ngami, that unpredictable stretch of , water 200 miles south of the ; with him were two English big- game hunters William Oswell and Mungo Murray. The following year he went back across the Kalahari, taking with him his wife Mary (Robert Moffat's daughter) and their young children. His objective was the Barotse valley, where the Kololo ruler Sebituane was waiting to recieve him. But his hopes were frustrated when the children and his servants were attacked with fever beside Lake Ngami. Mary Livingstone had obviously been seriously affected by the rigours of the journey because she was expecting a baby (which died only a few weeks after it was born in Kolobeng and she was paralysed in the face. Livingstone was not deterred, however, and resolved to take his family (his wife, pregnant again), with him on a third expedition.

The expedition got under way in April 1851. The Livingstone’s and three children were accompanied by their wealthy friend William Oswell and his Jamaican servant, George Fleming. On June 18, the expedition reached the Chobe river. It was only later that Livingstone realised that Mambari slave- traders were very active in the Zambezi valley, selling goods brought from Angola, and even making shoes for the Kololo. Long before Sebituane arrived on the Zambezi, the region had obtained trade goods from the west.

At the beginning of August, Livingtone and Oswell crossed the Linyanti (Chobe) leaving Mrs Livingstone behind with the waggons, she being only a few weeks from her confinement. The two men, with the guidance of the Kololo, made their way on horseback towards Zambezi (which they knew as the Sesheke, after the town at the point where crossings were usually made0. With increasing excitement they drew nearer the river and reached it on the afternoon of August 4. All we could say to each other was "How glorious ! How magnificent ! How beautiful !"' They crossed on to Zambian soil briefly and heard about the from the local chiefs, Mwanamwali and Monibothale. 'Four days below Sesheke is situated the waterfall of Mosio-tunya, or 'resounding smoke'. It is so named because of the spray rising with great noise so high as to be visible ten or twelve miles off.

In 1851, the Luyi and other pre-Kololo people were in the grip of domestic , and Sebituane had also exchanged fourteen year old boys with slavers for old guns. This made him even stronger as a ruler, and he then acquired English muskets by selling captives to the Arabs.

Yet Livingstone made a prophetic observation about the Maribund Kololo, who soon were to be wiped out by their own subjects. They had suffered severly from in the marshy Linyanti area, while the Lozi did not seem so susceptible. The Kololo were 'all sickly looking and yellow' when compared compared with their powerfully built subjects. It would seem they were also suffering from syphillis, caught from the Ila tribe. Under the shrewd Sebituane, the Kololo could maintain their position, but when he died they were doomed. Sebituane told his daughter Mamochisane that she should become the chief after him; and in the way male chiefs constantly took new wives, so she must have many husbands. This did not appeal to Mamochisane, who abdicated, and gave throne to her younger brother Sekeletu, who was barelt seventeen years old.

After a trip to Capetown to send his wife and four children home to England, Livingstone came back to Zambian soil in the middle of 1853. With a group of porters Livingstone began his journey late in 1853 to on the west coast.

The missionary's intentions in making the journey through Angola were to seek an easy route by which doctors, teachers and could reach the hinterland north of the Zambezi. After seven months of struggling through Angola, he realised that this was no gateway to Zambia. Livingstone turned back and retraced the way he had come from the Zambezi. In later life, especially after his wife died of malaria on the lower Zambezi in 1862, he became irascible and quarrelsome.

On November 16, 1855, during the west-to-east march across the continent, the Kololo took him to see the world's most awe-inspiring waterfalls, which he promptly named after : 'I decide to use the same liberty as the Makololo did and gave the only English name I have ever affixed to any part of the country.'

A few days later, Livingstone set off across the Batoka plateau, crossed the Kafue south-east of Modern , ans reached Quelimane on the Indian Ocean in May 1856. In London, Livingstone was awarded the by the Royal Geographical Society the year before. He was famous and his book, Missionary Travels and Research in South Africa became a best-seller. Less than two years later he was back again on the Zambezi, at the head of a powerful expedition to which the British Foreign Office had contributed £5,000. Its aim was to see if the Zambezi could be opened to ‘trade with the natives’ and most important in Livingstone’s eyes, to look for ways of wiping out the slave trade in Central Africa; in a burning phrase, he had described this as the ‘open sore of the world’.

The expedition lasted for five years, and in general it was a failure. Livingstone’s white companions, especially his brother Charles, could not keep up with him, and he became morose at the repeated disasters and delays. Most of the five years 1858-63 were spent around Lake Nyasa, but in 1860, Livingstone took his brother and the botanist up to the Victoria Falls. From there they went on to Linyanti to see Sekeletu. It was not at first a cheerful reunion, although the people were happy to see ‘Monare’, with many of the Lozi porters he had taken with him to the east four years earlier. Sekeletu, ulcerated with leprosy, his kingdom far from secure, his elders hazy with beer and dagga, had become distrustful of all outsiders.

THE ARABS AND THE YEKE

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the trading supremacy of the Arabs along the African east coast had been challenged by the Portuguese. Yet it is clear that the ancient contact with Zambia’s people was never completely denied to the Arabs. In a letter dated March 22, 1798, the Brazilian explorer Francisco de Lacerda told the Lisbon government: ‘The dry goods hitherto imported into this country [the Bisa area] have been bought by the Mujao [Yao], indirectly or directly, from the Arabs of and its vicinity. Hence these people received all the ivory exported from the possession of the Casembe [Mwata of the Lunda].’1 Later he said : ‘I now think with reason that the great number of tusks which once went to Mozambique, and which certainly came from these lands, now goes to Zanzibar.’ From Antonio Gamitto, the Portuguese army captain who visited the Lunda in 1831, there is even more specific evidence. When he arrived at the court of Mwata Kazembe two ‘Moors’ were there, and he was able to pick them out immediately from among a great crowd of Africans. These Arabs, whom Gamitto called Impoanes, told him they came from the east coast, which was at least 800 miles away by the shortest route. When the arrogant Portuguese expedition began quarrelling with the Lunda, they were told bluntly by a court spokesman that Mwata Kazembe would have no compunction in cutting off their heads; the Lunda had little need of Tete, because they obtained all the cloth they needed from either the Zanzibar coast or Angola.

The two Arabs Gamitto met beside 130 years ago were in the van of a great wave of traders who ruthlessly scoured the heart of Africa throughout much of the last century. From 1750 to 1820 the coastal Arabs had been weakened by internecine fighting, although despite this the Zanzibar slave market was busy with the buying and selling of enslaved Africans brought from the interior. There then appeared on the scene the remarkable Seyyid Majid bin Said, through whose inspiration the Arab renascence was to begin. At the age of 16, in 1806, Seyyid Said killed his uncle, Kis bin Ahmed, Imam of the Persian Gulf state of Oman; the Omanis had long dominated Zanzibar and Mombasa, and Seyyid Said soon moved southward to establish himself as Sultan of Zanzibar as well.

One of the supreme ironies of the career of Seyyid Said is that while his subjects were the lords of the slave-trade, which aroused such loathing in Victorian England following Livingstone’s revelations, the sultan was helped and protected by the British. They had signed treaties with him in Oman and the Royal Navy had wiped out pirates interfering with the Omani sea routes. When he extended his domination to the African coastline, the British decided to back him as a counter-balance to increasing French activities in the Indian Ocean. To act through the sultan and assist in the extension of his empire was much cheaper than direct British control. In 1841, Britain posted Lieut-Col. Atkins Hamerton to Zanzibar to become consul, and the power behind Seyyid Said’s throne. A British official called Robert Cogan declared hopefully that Zanzibar could be used as a gateway through which ‘education and morality’ might be directed to a wide expanse of Africa. In 1845, the sultan agreed under pressure to sign a treaty banning the shipment of African slaves from Zanzibar to Oman; in return for the loss of taxes, on slave exports, Britain bound herself to pay him £2,000 a year. The treaty was a soporific for British consciences, but was easy to circumvent. Nonetheless, Seyyid Said remarked gloomily to Queen Victoria’s representative : ‘You have put on me a heavier load than I can bear.’

The caravans still set out from Zanzibar for long expeditions to the interior, and to each one Seyyid Said gave a blood-red flag to show that it had the blessing of the sultanate. Hindu and muslim merchants from British India (the forerunners of today’s numerous Indian community in East Africa) would give the Arabs credit on goods for bartering. Since the caravans might be away for more than a year at a time, it was natural that staging posts should be set up inland, and these posts developed into permanent Arab settlements. The town of Kazeh (now ) was founded in about 1830;8 500 miles from the ocean, it was on the main caravan route to beside . By 1850, many slave-traders were regularly coming down from Ujiji to the northern regions of Zambia, while others were using the more direct route across the top of Lake Nyasa or through Kota Kota.

It is important to realise that the adventurers, paying a certain allegiance to the Sultan of Zanzibar, were rarely pure Arab. Almost all the Arabs had some proportion of African blood, for just as slavery was permitted by the Koran, so racial mixing was not subject to any taboos. Arab aristocrats had no hesitation in taking African wives, and as the British explorer Sir Richard Burton pointed out with some relish, the ladies of Zanzibar used their slaves for more than cooking. Livingstone remarked of two Arab traders he met in in 1853 that they were ‘quite as dark as the Makololo’. Whatever the colour of the invaders, however, they were usually referred to by the tribes with whom they came into contact as Balungwana or Bangwana, which had the broad meaning of ‘outsiders’. The name Swahili has sometimes been applied to Arabs of inferior standing and comes from the word sawahil, the plural of sahil, meaning ‘the coast’. Closely allied to the Arabs were the Yeke or Yongo, who were Africans of the important Nyamwezi tribe. The Nyamwezi became involved in the slave-trade because their home was close to Tabora and many of them found employment as carriers between the lakes and the coast. From this experience the Nyamwezi learnt enough to begin ivory and slave-trading on their own, usually selling captives to Arab middlemen at Tabora, Ujiji and elsewhere.

Balungwana dispersion over Zambian soil quickly became widespread. Livingstone first met Syde bin Habib at Naliele in 1853; this wealthy trader had come from the Lake Mweru area and reached the Zambezi valley through the Katanga. He was the same Syde bin Habib who had a house at Mpweto, where the Luvua flows out of Mweru. The Lala people of Serenje say in their history that the Swahili came ‘selling flint and steel for making fire’ and traded for ‘slaves and handmaids’. Livingstone also met around Lake Nyasa Arabs who had travelled far across the Luangwa. Yet it was not the Arabs who first caused devastation on a wide scale, but the Yeke.

From the very beginning, the scent of death hung over Livingstone’s last journeys in Zambia. After the personal tragedies and defeats of the Nyasaland expedition he seemed to be a man in pursuit of oblivion. Gone were the high spirits so evident in his first book, Missionary Travels. Now he was left with a relentless courage, which for seven years drove the emaciated body of a hero prematurely aged. Everything was against him: he suffered constantly from dysentery and internal bleeding, his uncontrolled servants deserted him, and in a futile experiment, his baggage animals included six camels and three tame Indian buffaloes. Much has been written about Livingstone’s final years in Africa but one fact is undeniable : but for the help constantly given him by his lifelong enemies, the Arab slave-traders, he would almost certainly have died six years before he did.

Livingstone entered the Luangwa valley from the east at the end of 1866 and journeyed northwards towards the Bemba country. By the time Livingstone reached Lake Mweru and arrived at the court of Mwata Kazembe he had been struggling for more than a year across the plateau. While at Kazembe’s, he stayed with the Arab traders and talked with an old man called Perembe who was reputed to be 150 years old. Perembe said that when the Portuguese expedition led by Lacerda had reached Kazembe in 1799, he himself was married and already had forty children; the Lunda had conquered his ancestors, the old man told Livingstone.

Towards the end of 1868, Livingstone was waiting, after a journey to Lake Bangweulu, to travel northwards to Ujiji with a party of Arabs led by the notorious Mohamed Bogharib. The caravan included a vast accumulation of copper, ivory and slaves, and when some slaves escaped fighting broke out with neighbouring Bemba tribesmen, whom the Arabs accused of hiding the runaways. Livingstone watched a furious battle which lasted for two days when the Bemba attacked the emcampment at dawn. He was astonished by the courage of the Africans, who rescued their wounded while the Arabs fired at them. The fighting over, the caravan moved off, with Livingstone being carried in a litter by the Arabs. He left Zambian soil, to begin his wanderings around the Lualuba river and the shores of Lake Tanganyika, to meet Stanley, and then return once more to Lake Bangweulu as though drawn by a fatal magnet.

In the months leading up to his death in the Lala country, Livingstone received little help from the villagers as he wandered through the swamps in the rains. A reason may have been his close connection with the slave-traders four years earlier; also the loss of his medicine chest had destroyed the ‘magic’ which made him revered. Time and again he wrote of the delays put in his way, especially by Chief Matipa whose village was close to the point where the Chambeshi entered the lake. With one excuse after another, Matipa kept him waiting weeks for canoes, until in desperation Livingstone went and fired a shot through the roof of the chief’s hut. ‘Thanks to the Almighty Preserver of men for sparing me thus far on the journey of life. Can I hope for ultimate success?’ he wrote in his journal. It was his sixtieth birthday. Kneeling beside his bed six weeks later, Livingstone died. An African servant who could read and write, and who had been given the name Jacob Wainwright at a mission school for freed slaves in India, intoned his burial service. Within two decades of Livingstone’s death, missionaries of many societies began to penetrate the land that is now Zambia. From the south came the Jesuits, who after numerous deaths among their numbers managed to establish themselves in the Bantu Botatwe country. Other Catholics, the White Fathers, were able to win favour with the Bemba sub-chief Makasa in the far north and despite the initial opposition of Chitimukulu, soon spread their influence across the plateau. The Plymouth Brethren set up stations in the north and north-west, while in Barotseland the French Protestants of the Paris Missionary Society established themselves among the Lozi. Around the shores of Lake Tanganyika the London Mission Society was active by 1880, and in the bitter fighting at the time between the Bemba and the Mambwe, the mission stations became places of refuge for people fleeing from raiders. Yet the Bemba always took care to avoid damaging the goods of the missionaries and would pile up the white man’s property neatly before attacking a village. Such regard was not shown in the south by the Ila, who at first threatened to kill any Europeans who entered their territory. Near where Lusaka now stands, an Austrian missionary named and his wife Rosa lost all their possessions and barely escaped with their lives when the Ila surrounded them; one of their party, Oswald Zoldner, was killed.

Yet it was not occasional hostility from the people which presented the greatest obstacle to missionary penetration. Malaria and blackwater fever were the enemies which killed scores of Europeans north of the Zambezi in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For that reason, increasing use was made of African preachers and teachers. One of the first of these to arrive came from the headquarters at Livingstonia, in Nyasaland. His name was David Kaunda, and he settled at Chinsali. His youngest son was to become Zambia’s first Prime Minister and President.