Livingstone’s Tribe: A Journey From Zanzibar to the Cape

I laughed. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, swaying again, ‘I am a little drinked. Come, and we will look together for the graves of your missionaries.’

We finally found them on the hill opposite, at the end of a track. Bushes and shrubs grew restlessly across the little plot and billowed around the entrance, two stone pillars on which mould sharpened the blackened outline of a crucifix. Amid the turmoil of grass and weeds were two or three mounds. The headstones were gone and the resting place of John Boden Thomson was unmarked. This was all that remained of the London Missionary Society’s expedition to central Africa in 1878.

Like so many of his calling, Thomson was a Scot, but he grew up knowing none of the wretchedness in which the young Livingstone was forged. Indeed, childhood indulgence made him a bit of a prig. In 1870 he was assigned to his first missionary posting, among the Matabele people of central Africa.

A new mood was on the rise in Britain. That year the writer and philosopher John Ruskin delivered a lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford that inflamed a generation. ‘Here is what England must do or perish,’ Ruskin said. ‘She must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthy men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on … If we can get men, for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave kindly and righteously for her, and who will bring up their children to love her.’

Thomson was not the best example of the new generation and his first mission was an utter failure. His companions, a melancholy Yorkshireman named William Sykes and Thomas Morgan Thomas, a manic-depressive Welshmen, were ill-suited, and the Matabele were a warlike folk forbidden by their king, Lobengula, to follow the Gospel. After a demoralising encounter with the king Thomson wrote: ‘He told me that God had given the Bible to the white man, but as He had not given it to the black man also, it was clear He did not mean the black man to have it.’

After five despairing years among the Matabele, Thomson’s heart lifted at the receipt of orders to join an expedition to plant a new mission at Lake Tanganyika. The objective was nothing less than a living monument to the society’s most revered son, Livingstone, in the place with which his name was synonymous, Ujiji. Thomson sailed for Zanzibar to join the expedition leader, Roger Price.

Price was no stranger to disaster in Africa. In 1859 he and a missionary named Holloway Helmore led their families, four adults and five children in all, 500 miles through the Kalahari desert to the source of the Zambezi where, one by one, they started to die. The last to go were Price’s daughter and wife, who was so emaciated that in places her bones had broken through the skin. Only Price and two of the children reached safety.

After this harrowing experience, Price may not have been well suited to lead a new expedition. He and Thomson were at odds even before they started away from the coast, in July 1877. This time it was the pack animals which died one by one, bogged down in swamps. The expedition had not yet cleared the coastal belt when the last wagon had to be abandoned and the missionaries started to suffer bouts of fever. At this stage Price, haunted by memories and intimations of catastrophe, recognised that the project was inherently flawed and announced he was returning to advise the directors that a mission could be set up at Ujiji only after supply stations had been established along the route. Now he and Thomson quarrelled openly. The party divided, three other members carrying on with Thomson. They were still 600 miles from Ujiji.

Fever afflicted them all. Thomson was also haemorrhaging internally and had to be supported as they limped along. But his tongue had lost none of its sharpness, especially towards the younger brethren, who came to dread their leader’s disapproval. As the party stumbled agonisingly towards Ujiji, Thomson became increasingly isolated from his companions, and their peril. He wrote to the directors in a shaking hand: ‘Please do not let Mrs Thomson know I have been so ill. It would only make her anxious for nothing.’

On a day in late August, when the weather was fine and mild, he received his reward with the sight of the inland sea. For a few days he rallied. ‘I cannot tell you how pleased we were to get here,’ he wrote to the directors. ‘We have found a most healthy-looking site for our station close on Kigoma Bay. It is the highest hill here.’ Soon afterwards he suffered an apoplectic attack. His companions nursed him for a week, immersing his body in water to bring down the raging temperature. Then he died. He was thirty-seven and in eight years had failed to make a single convert.

Although Price’s judgement had been amply vindicated, the directors were looking for scapegoats rather than explanations and he was disgraced. Now Joseph Mullens, the society’s foreign secretary, determined to find out for himself just what it was that made central Africa so uncongenial to missionary activity. A month after setting out from Zanzibar, he died of fever.

After that the society abandoned Ujiji. In a flash of unusual candour, an official report noted that this ‘painfully fascinating story stands as a striking example of how great missionary enterprises ought not to be attempted’.

THE LITTLE ANGLICAN church stood on a spur of the hill identified by Thomson, across the valley from his grave. I had intended to pause just for a moment but a service was in progress and a sidesman who spotted me bustled up and shepherded me to a pew.

The crude whitewashed walls, unadorned by images or symbols, were surmounted by wooden rafters and a roof of corrugated iron which radiated eddies of heat down on the congregation. Relief came with a light air wafting in through large glassless windows that looked out to the lake. Even so, I was soon sweating profusely. We were tightly bunched on the pews, 350 people or so, and I was pressed up against a corpulent man.

I was in a reverie when he nudged me. ‘You must go up,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You must go up. The minister wants you to introduce yourself to everyone.’

From the back, I walked up the aisle, aware of the buzz at the appearance of a mzungu which trailed me like a slipstream. Grinning foolishly, I was enfolded in the arms of the minister at the lectern. ‘Now you tell us about yourself,’ he said firmly. ‘I will translate.’

I did it as best I could. I said I was from a town named Windsor, near London, that I brought greetings from Anglicans in Britain. I told them a little about my journey, I said I loved their country and thanked them for their hospitality. At the end I said: ‘Nafurahi sana kukuona.’ This went down very well and I returned to my seat amid applause and shining faces.

The rest of the service occupied almost two hours. An animated pastor, who somewhat resembled Archbishop Desmond Tutu, gave an extended sermon in sonorous tones; a youth group improvised a piece of theatre that I was unable to follow but which induced a general state of hilarity; the singing was lovely.

At the door the minister embraced me again. ‘Come back, Stephen,’ he said.

I was halfway down the hill before it suddenly struck me that I had missed an opportunity. What I should have said was that the Quini Ingrezi (Queen Elizabeth), also lived in Windsor and, if she had known I was going to speak to an Anglican congregation in Africa, she would have wanted me to pass on her greetings. It might have sounded twee, but I know they would have loved it.

AFTER A FEW days by the water I could imagine how painful it must have been for the explorers to drag themselves away from the lake and start back into that fearful void, back into the inferno described by the most indefatigable of them all, Henry Stanley:

… the torrid heat, the miasma exhaled from the soil, the giant cane-grass suffocating the wayfarer, the rabid fury of the native guarding every entry and exit, the unspeakable misery of life, the utter absence of every comfort, the bitterness which each day heaps upon the poor white man’s head, and the little – too little – promise of success one feels on entering it.

Each evening at the hotel I took a table beneath a thatch umbrella on the grass leading down to the edge of the lake. It was the day’s reward, the dried sweat and crusted grime showered off and a cold Safari at hand, looking across that miraculous stretch of water at the fireworks of sunset. One evening a malachite kingfisher, a dazzling creature the size of a large, stubby thumb, preened himself on a reed. He took off, and at a height of about thirty feet above the water poised, a beak almost as long as his body pointing down like a tiny harpoon, body arched and frozen, wings a blur, before plunging like a stone into the water with a surprising splash. For an instant he disappeared entirely, then burst through the surface again with a fish, a filament of silver seemingly impaled on a needle. It was the most exquisite and perfect act of hunting I had ever seen.

Later, poring over a map, the majesty of the place became even more clear. The world’s longest lake was also the deepest after Lake Baikal, a great cleft in Africa’s surface. Imagine standing on the edge of an escarpment running 200 miles in either direction and falling away almost vertically to a depth of a mile and the dimensions may become more clear. The grandeur does not stop with Tanganyika. The map shows a great chain of lakes. Starting with Lake Malawi, another awesome gash 350 miles in length with fjord-like depth, the chain swings in a curve up through Tanganyika and curls back through lakes Kivu, Edward and Albert. This vast semi-circular fissure in the earth’s crust, almost 2,000 miles in length, is now largely forgotten as the western branch of the Great Rift Valley. That term has come to mean the eastern rift, which breaks away at the top of Lake Malawi and turns north-east through Tanzania, passes through the middle of Kenya, rises into the Ethiopian Highlands, plunges into the Danakil Depression and runs up the length of the Red Sea all the way to the Lebanon.

There is, however, a symbolic as well as geographic wholeness to the two rifts. Joined at Lake Malawi in the south and Lake Turkana in the north, they enfold in a great oval a bed of territory that might be likened in shape and function to a womb in Africa’s body. For here, at Olduvai Gorge and along the banks of Turkana, were made the discoveries of the Leakey family, culminating in the fossils of Homo erectus and Homo habilis, that have certified this as the cradle of mankind. Burton, infatuated as he was by Lake Tanganyika, was closer to the mark than he realised when he wrote of ‘this African Eden’.

Burton and Speke were at Ujiji for three months. While Burton interrogated the inhabitants, Speke bartered for the use of vessels to explore the lake. Now, once only, came the chance of a discovery that would have forestalled years of feuding and geographic controversy. They set off in canoes to find the river at the lake’s northern tip. From chiefs and traders they received contradictory reports: some said the river flowed into the lake, some that it flowed out. The point was fundamental: if it flowed in, the river could not be the Nile, and the lake could not be its source. The balance of the reports favoured that alternative, but the issue was destined to remain unresolved. When only a few days from the northern mouth their boatmen refused to go further, for fear of cannibals. Both men were thoroughly done in and one suspects they did not protest much. In any event, they arrived back in Ujiji after a month on the lake, no more certain on this critical question than when they set out.

In May 1858 Burton gazed back at the lake for the last time. ‘The charm of the scenery was perhaps enhanced by the reflection that I might never look upon it again,’ he wrote. In later years he could still claim the satisfaction of being the first European to see the inland sea, but by then the memory was tainted by knowledge that what he had discovered was the source not of the Nile, but the Congo.

Tabora: Wednesday, 17 March

THE TRAIN FROM Kigoma got in at 6 a.m. The little second-class compartment was packed and stuffy, heaving during the night with bodies, snoring, grunting, muttering. In the thin light of dawn I wrestled the rucksack from the train and walked the half-mile or so to the first hotel. An omelette and lady-finger bananas restored the spirit.

In town I met Jemaal, a tall and willowy young man with a battered Toyota for hire. Like most folk here, he was a Nyamwezi, the Bantu people who were the Arabs’ most formidable rivals for control of the trade route. During the mid-nineteeth century, these were badlands, and the Nyamwezi chief, Mirambo, built an empire on porterage, trade and war. I like the description in my history volume of Mirambo’s army of mercenaries, the dreaded ruga-ruga: ‘Distinctive with red cloak, feather head-dress, ivory and copper ornaments, they are somewhat reminiscent of the predatory companies of the European Hundred Years’ War, attaching themselves to whichever leader held out most hope of plunder.’

Jemaal evidently had hopes of plunder, too, and was saddened to discover that I was a scrawny prize. But pickings are leaner on the old trade route these days and eventually we settled on a price for the round-trip to Kazeh.

Once a crossroads, Tabora is now more a dead end, isolated by the collapse of Tanzania’s road system. The tarmac broke up as soon as we left town. After about five miles the road trailed off into a track, gouged and rent by stormwaters, that would have challenged a Land Rover. Jemaal, his face set in a rictus of determination, forged gamely on, the Toyota bucking and grinding, until with a shudder and a bang we came to a halt, a rear wheel sunk in a trench.

I was beginning to have my doubts. The Toyota was not just stuck, it was steaming and looked fit to explode. I feared that Jemaal might decide on reflection that his fee had been insufficient or, worse still, discover damage to the car, turn nasty and summon the local ruga-ruga to secure adequate compensation.

‘I could walk from here,’ I suggested.

He would not hear of it. Gesturing towards a couple of wide-eyed and naked children who had appeared from a thatch hut, he shot out an order. One scurried away and came back with a badza, a short-handled hoe. Jemaal started to hack away at the sides of the trench while ordering us to collect rocks and stones. Within half an hour we had built a bridge under the wheel, and the Toyota rolled free. Jemaal grinned triumphantly and I felt ashamed at my faint-heartedness. Rather more gingerly now, we sailed on.

It was Evelyn Waugh, in his dazzling little travel diary, A Tourist in Africa, who observed ‘wherever you find old mango trees in East Africa, you are on the Arab slave-tracks’. I knew we had reached Kazeh when large green-black shapes billowed above the maize fields.

Even Burton, who rejoiced in its Arab inhabitants, never made great claims for the place. There was nothing, he wrote, that could properly be called a town; rather it was a ‘scattered collection of oblong houses with central courts, garden plots, storerooms and outhouses for the slaves’. Only one of these Zanzibari dwellings survived amid the shambas and huts of the little settlement, although it was in remarkably good condition and had been kept as a museum. The Toyota’s arrival was an occasion of astonishment then delight to the curator who had been weeks without a visitor and was slumbering on a chair beside the carved wooden door.

All the explorers seem to have stayed here, Livingstone and Stanley for a spell during which their friendship acquired a closeness that neither was able to achieve with anyone else. Burton lingered, too. Here, perhaps in the courtyard with the mango tree, he renewed his acquaintance with the Arab, Snay bin Amir, delighted to be back with ‘the open-handed hospitality and the hearty good-will of this truly noble race’ and contrasting it with ‘the niggardness of the savage and selfish African’. The indulgence was to cost him dear. For now Speke was galvanised. From the slavers, the white men had heard of a second lake, even larger than Tanganyika, lying to the north. Speke, bored by the company of both Arab and African and tired of being patronised by Burton, decided to go in search of it.

Tomorrow I will take the train following in his trail.

4. The Nyanza (#ulink_e78b813b-3a86-5d1b-96bc-8202d5959d01)

THE OVERNIGHT TRAIN TO Mwanza, seething with passengers in sweaty, hot darkness, brought back memories of long-ago railway journeys in India. Fleeing a swarming compartment, I set out in search of refreshment. In the dining-car an overhead light spread a thin ochre smear on the grimy walls. A few men sat around drinking warm beer. Two figures caught my eye.

One was a peasant woman with her head deep in a book. It came as a shock to realise that she was the first person I had seen reading since setting out. She wore a ragged skirt, a grubby T-shirt bearing the legend ‘The Dark Secret’ and had her hair tied up in a cheap purple scarf. Her book was entitled Chinese Literature. On the back cover was written The Women’s Trilogy.

The second figure was an Asian in his thirties with a moustache and glassy smile who was drinking with a group of Africans. He noticed me and brought his beer over. He was a coffee trader, a wheeler and dealer in a notoriously sharp business, but had been cutting deals of various sorts all his life. He had made big money in the ‘good years’ under Mobutu in Zaire and had interests in Canada and Australia, where he had scraped under the immigration wire – ‘it’s hard to get in, but even harder for them to get you out’. He was tough, shrewd, sleek and cosmopolitan, an artist in the game of survival.

He asked where I was going next. Across Lake Victoria by ferry, I said. His face lit up with a look of demented glee. ‘My wife was on the Bukoba,’ he said, and sat grinning wildly at me.

I was stunned. Nine months earlier the grossly overloaded ferry Bukoba had been approaching her berth in Mwanza when she capsized. Well over 700 people were on the boat, which had a capacity of 430, and only those on the upper levels managed to scramble into the water. Many more could have been saved but rescue workers, who heard shouts and banging from those trapped in the air lock, drilled into the hull. As the air giving the Bukoba buoyancy rushed out, she sank like a stone. Only fifty-three survivors were picked up. Perhaps 700 people died, including a Ugandan businessman on whose body was found $27,000 in cash; the great majority were still entombed in the wreck at a depth of about ninety feet.

I must have looked horrified and muttered an apology. The man was obviously a maniac, perhaps demented by grief. His face was still flushed with mad excitement.

‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘She escaped.’

As he related it, he had always known the Bukoba was ill-fated. ‘Even when it was empty it stood so,’ he said, indicating a list to one side. ‘I have worked in ships and I knew that was a bad one. I said to my wife, “If you are on that ship look out, and if anything happens, don’t fight the water. You can’t fight the water.” When it happened, when the boat went over, she remembered. She just let herself go, and the water pulled her out. She could not swim, but she remembered, “don’t fight the water.” So she floated, and they rescued her.’