Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone (33 page)

On 15 July 1871, Livingstone took his usual seat in the shade to observe the marketplace. There was controversy as the market opened that afternoon. All morning long Livingstone had heard the sounds of gunshots from the far side of the Lualaba, and could see the smoke of huts being set afire as Arabs burned, enslaved and murdered. As he hobbled into the marketplace he noticed that only about fifteen hundred people had come that day. He blamed it on the fires, remembering that many of those who normally came to market lived in those villages.

At the time, Livingstone didn’t look anything like the
man Murchison and England knew. In addition to being toothless and bearded, a combination of inactivity and the food provided by the Arabs had made Livingstone chunky and round. His clothes barely fitted him. The Arabs marvelled that Livingstone could eat a pot of rice and saucer of butter and still have room for a pot of porridge. The weight would come off as soon as he began travelling again, but in the meantime, Livingstone’s gait was a slow waddle and he had trouble breathing. He plopped down slowly in the shade to watch people and write in his journal.

Livingstone had observed many things from that perch over the previous months. The locals paid little attention to Livingstone, or to the Arabs mingling among them. It was understood that the slavers would not raid Nyangwe, instead using it as a base to raid other villages. The only rule was that guns were not allowed in the marketplace.

Even as the citizens and Arabs rubbed shoulders in the market square, the subtle awareness that the Arabs had the power to enslave them made for a palpable distance between the two groups. The Arabs contributed to the feeling. Despite having mixed with the African populace for centuries, Arabs still held themselves apart, and viewed the people with disdain.

‘It was a hot sultry day,’ Livingstone wrote later. ‘And when I went into the market I saw Adie and Manilla, and three of the men who had lately come with Dugumbe. I was surprised to see the three with their guns, and felt inclined to reprove them, as one of my men did, for bringing weapons into the market.’

Livingstone chalked up the newcomers’ faux pas to ignorance of local customs, and got up to leave the market. He noticed two of the Arabs haggling with a vendor over a chicken then trying to grab it without paying for it. The market was always a frantic place, with raised voices and misunderstandings common. For two men and a vendor to disagree was nothing unusual.

But in the next instant, Livingstone’s opinion of the slavers changed for ever. ‘The discharge of two guns in
the middle of the crowd told me the slaughter had begun: crowds dashed off from the place, and threw down their wares in confusion, and ran. At the same time the three men opened fire on the mass of people near the upper end of the marketplace, volleys were discharged from a party down near the creek on the panic-stricken women who dashed at the canoes. These, some fifty or more, were jammed in the creek and the men forgot their paddles in the terror that seized all.’

Though the Lualaba was broad, the creek feeding into it where the canoes were kept was thin and slow. The mass of people rushing to the boats clogged the narrow outlet, allowing the Arabs to conduct target practice on the men, women and children of Nyangwe. ‘Wounded by balls,’ Livingstone wrote, they ‘poured into them and leaped and scrambled into the water shrieking’.

As the Arabs stood along the river bank, calmly aiming and firing, then reloading quickly so as not to miss the opportunity to kill again, the locals left their canoes behind. Splashing into the Lualaba, they began swimming for the far shore. The game became a test of skill for the Arabs; instead of shooting legs and torsos, they had only heads sticking above the water to aim at. The sun glinted off the languid green river, silhouetting those heads, making them appear as bobbing melons. ‘It was the heads above water showed the long lines of those that would inevitably perish,’ Livingstone wrote. He had run out of paper, and was penning his journal on any scrap he could find — old bills, magazine pages. Livingstone’s supply of ink was done, too. He had made a new batch by pressing roots until a red dye oozed forth. Its colour brought a ghostly realism to the tales of murder.

‘Shot after shot continued to be fired on the helpless and perishing. Some of the long line of heads disappeared quietly, whilst other poor creatures threw their arms high, as if appealing to the great Father above, and sank.’

The carnage was relentless and began taking on the chaos of a battlefield. The wounded who managed to make it across wailed in agony on the far bank. In
midstream, one native who’d got a canoe out into the river attempted to save others, while another who’d got a canoe fled, alone. The local women knew the river well from their years diving for oysters. Many of them were able to hold their breath long enough to ride the current downstream underwater, resurfacing for a quick snatch of air, then submerging until they were out of rifle range. Then, on the far bank of the Lualaba, a place where Livingstone would never explore, the women slipped ashore into the jungle. Some never made it any further, though, as the abundant population of crocodiles was picking them off one by one.

The shooting and burning continued for twenty-four hours. As the Arabs were setting fire to the grass-roofed huts and sending canoes of their own into the river to enslave the stragglers, they learned they had killed two of their own in addition to almost four hundred locals. Another slaver was drowned on the river, done in by his own greed when his boat capsized.

Throughout the carnage Livingstone was impotent, enraged. What began as a commonplace market dispute over a chicken had become a catastrophic display of Arab brutality. The attack had not been planned, and there was no greater Arab objective, which made the slayings all the more senseless. A righteous rage coursed through him, but there was nothing Livingstone could do to stop the slaughter. His Britishness convinced him he was somehow in charge, however, and cried out for propriety. From his cargo he extracted the Union Jack he was entitled to carry as a British consul. He sent his men forth showing the flag, demanding a ceasefire. Only then did Dugumbe get a grip on his men. The shooting stopped temporarily, and in the eerie aftermath the only sounds were the wounded begging for help.

Livingstone pulled his pistol and advanced on the killers, prepared to do something he had never contemplated — commit murder. He never even came close. Dugumbe stepped forward to stop him, well aware that his renegade employees wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the
chubby old man. All Livingstone could do to vent his anger was to retreat into his journal and rededicate himself to the anti-slavery cause. For almost five years he had looked the other way, compromising his principles for the sake of exploration and the comforts provided by his Arab hosts. It was as if he had sold a part of his soul in the name of ambition. And what had he accomplished? He was sicker than ever, impoverished, and had no hard evidence that his theories about the Nile’s Source were accurate. True, he had some very good ideas and a vast amount of circumstantial evidence backing it up, but the Source was as elusive in the summer of 1871 as it had been the day of the Nile Duel.

‘As I write I hear the loud wails on the left bank over those who are there slain, ignorant of their many friends who are now in the depths of the Lualaba. Oh, let Thy kingdom come!’ his words cried to God. ‘No one will ever know the exact loss on this bright sultry morning. It gave me the impression of being in hell.’

Livingstone spent the rest of that day helping the survivors find their spouses. Later, when the instigators had the gall to blame the slaughter on Livingstone, the explorer knew it was time to leave. Forsaking thoughts of crossing the river to find Herodotus’s fountains, he decided to return to Ujiji. The local chiefs, who had secretly thought Livingstone a slaver, were so impressed by his intercession during the massacre that they begged him to stay and help them consolidate several of their villages into a Manyuema nation, of which Livingstone would be ruler. ‘But I told them I was so ashamed by the company in which I found myself that I could scarcely look the Manyuema in the face. They had believed that I wished to kill them — what did they think now? I could not remain among bloody companions, and would flee away.’ He would return to Ujiji and claim the supplies that should be waiting. Then he would hire new men and search anew for the fountains.

Even as Livingstone prepared to leave, the stress caused his health to worsen. His bowels loosened and he lost a
serious amount of fluid and blood. ‘I was laid up all morning with the depression the bloodshed made — it filled me with unspeakable horror,’ he wrote. “‘Don’t go away,” said the Manyuema chiefs to me, but I cannot stay here in agony.’

Livingstone fled Nyangwe a few mornings after the massacre. Just to show there were no hard feelings, the Arabs came to see him off. They had, however, little hope that Livingstone would accomplish the three-month march to Ujiji safely. Hostilities between the Arabs and local tribes were now at a fever pitch. Livingstone had no Arab guns or numbers to protect him. A tribe would be just as likely to kill Livingstone — a man known to travel in the company of Arabs — as let him pass.

Making matters more dangerous, the path Livingstone would follow to Ujiji was one he’d never travelled before, through virgin jungle and country populated by cannibals. The bright red waistcoat he was wearing was cut like the Arab garments, in honour of his hosts. Unfortunately, the natives would think he was one of them.

Livingstone’s journey went well for five days. He, Chuma, Susi and a handful of porters walked carefully, trying to make time and avoid attention. On the sixth day of travel, Livingstone came over a ridge and saw a most beautiful green countryside below. As he trudged through it, he saw the land was devoid of people. The Arabs had taken them all hostage. All that remained were the burned-out ruins of their villages. Livingstone was outraged, thinking it an act of ‘sheer wantonness’. There seemed to be nothing he could do to protect Africa from the slave trade. When, a few days later, a small group of African porters asked if they might travel with him, he readily agreed. They were headed for Ujiji, too. His group now numbered almost eighty. After helplessly watching the destruction of the Nyangwe massacre and then witnessing the ghostly sight of villages emptied by the slave trade, Livingstone was actually finding a way to preserve African lives — even if the potential killers were other Africans. He revelled in the added safety the new men
provided as they travelled ‘among the justly irritated’ local tribes.

Two weeks into the journey, Livingstone and his men walked through more burned-out villages. They slept in the remains of one village, protected by a fence of sharpened sticks. Livingstone was sick in the morning but he pressed on. At the next village the people took note of his red jacket. He was still unaware of its implications. ‘The people all ran away and appeared in the distance armed and refused to come near,’ he wrote of the villagers. ‘They threw stones at us and tried to kill those who went for water.’

That night, Livingstone slept in a small hut, protected within the cocoon of mosquito netting he travelled with at all times. But with the locals more and more sure Livingstone and his men were slavers, Livingstone tossed and turned with worry, despite his sickness. Unlike those in Nyangwe, the cannibals of this new region of Manyuema considered Livingstone an enemy. Not only would they relish killing him, but, as with all enemies killed in battle, the cannibals would happily soak Livingstone’s body in water until tender, then make a meal of Britain’s brave, beloved, overdue explorer.

The next morning Livingstone’s foreboding was justified. While marching through a jungle trail so narrow that leaves brushed against their faces, they were stopped abruptly by a blockade of felled trees. The vegetation was thick to the point of being impenetrable on either side, and triple-canopy deep overhead. Livingstone had been in Africa long enough to spot an ambush, and when he peered up into the trees he saw black shapes poised to pounce.

Hemmed in on the sides, watched from above, unable to turn around, Livingstone and his small caravan were easy targets as they climbed over the logs. Livingstone went last. ‘I was behind the main body, and all were allowed to pass till I, the leader, who was believed to be Mohammed Bogharib,’ Livingstone wrote. ‘A red jacket they had formerly seen me wearing was proof to them that
I was the same that sent Bin Juma to kill five of their men, capture eleven women and children, and twenty-five goats.’

Without warning, spears rained down from the trees, and from out of the dense foliage along the trail. Livingstone’s caravan had been funnelled into the ideal killing zone. They could only proceed forwards or backwards down the thin trail, but either way the enemy was all around them. ‘Another spear was thrown at me by an unseen assailant, and it missed me by about a foot in front,’ Livingstone wrote. ‘Guns were fired into the dense mass of forest, but with no effect, for nothing could be seen. But we heard the men jeering and denouncing us close by.’ As Livingstone hastened forward down the trail with all the speed he could muster, he walked past two porters, spears jutting from their dead bodies.

For five long hours, Livingstone and his men scampered down the trail, constantly under attack. The unseen enemies mocked him from above. ‘I can say this devoutly now, but in running the gauntlet for five weary hours among furies all eager to signalize themselves by slaying one they sincerely believed to have been guilty of a horrid outrage, no elevated sentiments entered the mind,’ he wrote later. ‘The excitement gave way to overpowering weariness, and I felt as I suppose soldiers do on the field of battle — not courageous, but perfectly indifferent to whether I were killed or not.’

At one point Livingstone thought he was safe, only to stumble into another ingenious killing zone. ‘Coming to a part of the forest cleared for cultivation, I noticed a gigantic tree, made still taller by growing on an anthill twenty feet high. It had fire applied near its roots,’ Livingstone wrote. The massive tree, the base of its trunk weakened by fire, was perfectly positioned to fall down on the trail and crush him and his men. Livingstone, however, ‘felt no alarm’. His unseen tormentors toppled the tree. The trunk snapped. In the silence of the jungle the sound was like the crack of a rifle salvo. Livingstone looked up in horror as the tree came straight down towards him,
unsure which way to run. With its thick trunk and profusion of branches, the tree would crush a wide area of the trail when it landed. ‘I ran a few paces back and down it came to the ground one yard behind me and, breaking into several lengths, it covered me with a cloud of dust. Had not the branches been previously rotted off, I could scarcely have escaped.’