AFRICA AND LIVINGSTONE
By EDWARD SHILLITO
WHEN David Livingstone stepped upon the deck of the barque ' George ' on December 8th, 184o, he was a traveller with sealed orders. Africa called him, and till the last drops of his sacrifice fell, Africa did not let him go. But Africa gave to him a rich reward. Had he gone to China, as he had once expected to go, " Livingstone of China " would have been a man of distinction, but not the man as we know him. Between the day on which this young Scottish missionary set sail and the day in 1874 when he was buried among the immortals in Westminster Abbey much had happened both in Africa and in Livingstone ; during all those years there was the pressure of a hidden hand upon him.
Africa led him from one stage to another. It offered him a life of improvisations, only to be seen in their unity at the end. Each new enterprise held within it the secret of what was to follow. That he could not know when he sailed. The seals could not be broken till the hour came. His one purpose in life did not change ; but, like other of the world's greatest pioneers, he came to himself in an improvised life ; he went out not knowing whither he went.
It was Africa, not any province of it, that called Livingstone. Africa to him had almost a personal reality. When in the Senate House at Cambridge he said, " I beg to direct your attention to Africa," he did not think of the word as a geographical term ; by that time in his life Africa had un- veiled to him her dark, sorrowful face, one in its sorrow, one in its destiny. In 1840 she was between two ages : was she still to be the slave of other continents? Had Livingstone to have any part in her deliverance? He might ask, but he could not tell as he went out ; nor could he tell that in that service he would become himself.
No one who reads his letters and his journals can escape from the evidence everywhere of movement. There is a plot in the story, of which the chief actor is at first only dimly aware. The reader says in the same breath " this is the same man, but he is different." The drama is making the player. The pilgrimage is making the pilgrim. He had to go ; but by his faith he " turned his necessity to glorious gain." Not all who entered that land did that.
What was the man like when he sailed, still in the making? Stubborn, obstinate, dour at times, but more cheerful than is sometimes thought ; restless; entirely without fear ; a man also of a swift and penetrating mind, a born scientist. Above all, he had a faith which had settled for ever the main concern of his life ; nothing less than a faith that would wear was enough for his task. He had flinch to give, but he had still much to receive before his powers were matured and used to their last limit.
That fierce obstinacy, which seemed to his companions at times little less than madness, found its true meaning as the plot proceeded. His impatience took its place, for there was no room for postponement in the Africa which called him ; what had to be done must be done while it was day ; he was still at the last critical and hot in his anger against injustice. But somehow in his closing days we see these qualities the same and yet not the same. Through his service to his Africans and their response to him there grew in his character an almost pathetic tenderness and gentleness which were never forgotten when they told by the fires at night their stories of Nyaka, the white man who was the first to come their way.
Africa came more and more to mean for him the Africans, as the victims of human cruelty, with vultures as they have been called, hovering over them. It was no accident that his final purpose was to strike at the African slave trade. Rather in that last endeavour every earlier one was gathered up ; if Africa was to become what from the first he had dreamed it might be, a blessing and not a curse to the new world, one condition must be fulfilled. That traffic must cease.
A man who gives himself to such a service and at such a price grows with his service. Livingstone as he is seen at the end is a minister of atonement to Africa. That is not a word coined by him. Pitt spoke of it in his greatest speech on Africa. Albert Sthweitzer in our time has said that any service we give to Africa is not philanthropy but atonement. In such a work as that there are new springs of life.
When the body of Livingstone was carried to the coast through many perils by his Africans, that was the last and greatest honour Africa gave to him. That was her last word which sealed him for her own.
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