David Livingstone believed he could defeat the enslavement of Africans if Africans could grow and trade crops instead of each other - NEW SERIES starts today!
Belgian advert or 'Trade Card'. Livingstone was the first European to record his visit to the spectacular Masio-atunya [which means ‘Smoke that Thunders’]. He named it Victoria Falls
In August 1854 the news reached London that a poor missionary Dr David Livingstone had somehow – and for some reason - completed an extraordinary journey, some 2000 kilometres from what is now Zambia to the Angolan coast.
The president of the Royal Geographical Society, always anxious to raise funds for expeditions, at once informed the press. But, although the London papers dutifully printed his letter, and the provincial press then copied it out, as they always did, the fact was that nobody was really interested. The Worcester Journal, for example, paid more attention to a large catch of herrings by three young men in Plymouth.
Within a day or two everyone had forgotten all about Dr Livingstone.
By 1856, with the support only of the Kololo tribe of central Africa, Revd Dr Livingstone had travelled a total of 5000 miles – about 8000 km. It’s an unbelievable statistic. But why was this obscure missionary, in the employment of the London Missionary Society, not getting on with his job in his mission station, preaching, as he was paid to do?
Why was he supported only by an African tribe? Why did they support him? And how did his strange expeditions to find a navigable river either running east or west to the coast of Africa become one of the modern legends of British history?
#73 Stronger than the ox he rode
Ep 1 Dr Livingstone, I presume?
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Slave traders walking their enslaved Africans to the coast, from Livingstone's 'Narrative of an expedition to the Zambezi'
Livingstone called slavery ‘the bitter fountain of African misery.’ But he intelligently realised that, unless he could come up with some alternative way for the Africans to make money, the slave trade would go on.
It was an idea he had picked up from Thomas Fowell Buxton, leader of the abolition movement from the 1820s, whom he had heard in 1840. It is exactly the same problem as the opium trade of Afghanistan and the drugs grown in South America. No amount of drugs enforcement will ever make the slightest difference until the local farmers have the infrastructure and markets for alternative crops.
Livingstone grasped that the solution was not to ban the slave trade but to replace it. As we saw in our series on the abolition of British enslavement, these things do not end as a result of moral pressure, but only when they are no longer profitable.
So Livingstone’s grand plan, ‘Christianity, commerce and civilisation’ as he called it, was not intended to be an imperialist, colonising, racist and idealistic attempt to take central Africa over. It was conceived as a practical solution to a humanitarian disaster, a realistic way to confront a complicated issue.
It depended on finding other things the Africans could trade, but also on finding a practical route to carry bulky trade goods into and out of the interior.
Slaves were made to walk to the coast. But cotton, ivory, coffee or tobacco would have to be transported. And for that he would have, in fact, to find a navigable river.
