Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A journey to the heart of Africa
Some key events from this week in history are reflected in the following reports from the archives of the Argus’s 160-year-old titles
TURNING the mighty Zambezi into a “Christian commercial highway” into the heart of Africa was an idea that excited Cape Town’s mind at the close of April in 1858 when its author, the explorer David Livingstone, called at Table Bay on the eve of his second great expedition.
The intrepid Scot, though at times irascible, and a doubtful, even inept, organiser, was a fervent opponent of slavery who, with others of like mind, believed that the combined benevolence of “Christianity, commerce and civilisation” – the words inscribed on his statue at Victoria Falls – would rid the continent of slave traders, and make Africa great.
He explained why in an impassioned address at a farewell dinner on April 23, 1858 at the Commercial Exchange (more or less where the Golden Acre stands today), a function described as being “one of the largest we have seen in this colony”.
In sentiments worthy of an Nkrumah or an Mbeki, Livingstone said: “I look on the country (Africa) as destined to be a very great one indeed. I have always looked on it as one that will be prosperous, that is destined rapidly to rise.”
But it never would as long as slavery continued, and the Western Atlantic world had to own up to its guilt in this.
“We know that a large portion of the race to which we belong – which I like to call not the Anglo-Saxon race, but the Anglo- American race – are guilty of holding a large portion of our fellow-men in bondage. The Americans are not alone guilty. We are guilty; for if we did not purchase their cotton, and give them increasing prices for it, they would, long ere this, have given it up.”
Englishmen, he said, “are fond of liberty, and like to see other nations enjoy liberty, but we have got so entangled as to be the mainstay of slavery”.
The key lay in “the present opening of Africa”.
“We know that it is supposed that cotton and sugar, and other tropical products, cannot be obtained in sufficient quantity except by slave labour.
“England has been trying for a great many years to put down this slavery system; but at the very time we are making these efforts in one direction, we are upholding slavery in another. Now that we have the prospect of opening up the country, where there is abundance of labour for the production of these tropical products, I think there is a prospect of getting abundance of these things, and of getting rid of slavery in the world.”
The Zambezi – which he had already explored, though not fully – was the key.
Livingstone said: “If we have a navigable pathway into the country beyond – then there is a prodigious extent of country, all well adapted for the cultivation of those products which we now get through slave-labour. And what I hope to effect is this: I don’t hope to send down cargoes of cotton and sugar… but I hope we shall make a beginning, and get in the thin end of the wedge, and by getting right into the centre have a speedy passage by an open pathway, working from the centre out towards the sides.”
In fact, what he did not yet know in 1858 was that the river was not navigable beyond the cataracts of Cahora Bassa.
Not for the first time, geol- ogy redirected history. But the principle remained. “We go as Christians,” Livingstone said. “We go to speak to the people about our Christianity, and to try and rec- ommend our religion to those with whom we come in contact. I have received the greatest kindness from all classes of people in the interior… and I hope Christian merchants and Christian men will yet go into that country and form a standard for commencing operations amongst them.”
A day after the dinner, none other than governor Sir George Grey presided over a public meeting at the Commercial Exchange at which Livingstone was presented with a testimonial – and 800 guineas – as a token of the Cape’s regard for his enterprise.
The money was not its value, Grey pointed out.
“It is much more precious than it appears to be. It contains the offerings of poor coloured races who wished to evince their gratitude to him who had striven so hard, and had undergone so much, in the hope of promoting the temporal and spiritual welfare of their fellows.”
Speaking a few days later, Livingstone’s father-in-law, the missionary and translator of the Bible into Setswana, Robert Moffat, said he wished for great things to accrue from the Zambezi venture, adding: “Let us hope that the time is not far distant when British influence and British humanity will be extended to every tribe in the country, and when the British flag will float over every promontory and estuary on the eastern side of this continent; for until that is the case, I fear that slavery will not be abolished.”
He was probably right, in a limited sense at least – though he would not have imagined that, when the pressing need arose in the next decade, the loner Livingstone – who disdained as unduly hostile the convention of travelling with heavily armed retainers – would end up accepting help and hospitality from two of the most notorious Arab slave traders, Mohamad Bogharib and Mohamad bin Saleh.
Moffat might also have been surprised – as might readers today – by the sharpish comment that appeared in the paper at the end of April, 1858, a few days after his speech, in which the writer, who signed himself with the initials “R.M.B”, cut to the quick.
He wrote: “Among other things that have lately come to pass in this land, is the arrival in Table Bay of a vessel called the Pearl. This ship, besides many others, brings a party of men, at the head of whom is a certain doctor, called David Livingstone, who, like Van Riebeek… is going to try and found another trading station upon the river Zambezi, where Christianity is to be taught the natives, and trading carried on; and it is supposed by some, who reason from what they know, that should this party be successful, they will, in the course of time, extend themselves, as did the trading station of Van Riebeek, and that the natives will be deprived of their lands in the same manner as it has been done in the colony of the Cape of Good Hope”.
And who could doubt that he was right, too?