D.D Phiri

Why we must remember David Livingstone

Several representatives of radio stations and newspapers have asked me why we should remember Dr David Livingstone. This was after the Livingstone Centenary Exhibition at the Blantyre Museum on Tuesday September 17 2013.

Africans remember Livingstone with great affection because he loved them. He did not travel from one corner of southern and eastern Africa to another to amass wealth. During his travel, he came across good and bad people; he saw the evils of being backward in modern civilisation. He tried to find routes that missionaries and honest traders could use to reach the interior of Africa and expose it to the higher civilisation that Christian Europe had attained.

He cherished the three C’s: Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation. To those of us who have embraced the Christian religion, we are certainly grateful. Through his efforts, we came to know the wonderful man called Jesus of Nazareth and his teaching of love for all and malice against none.

After he severed with his attachment from London Missionary Society in 1851 in Botswana and started exploring African north of the Kalahari, Livingstone came upon gangs of yoked slaves being taken northwards to the east coast of Africa. In Barotseland (southern Zambia), Chikunda agents of the coastal Arabs and Swahili. The most appalling situation he found on both sides of Lake Malawi which he visited for the first time on 16 September 1859. He wrote that annually about 19 000 men and women as well as children were being captured and marched to slave markets at the port of Kilwa in modern Tanzania and Zanzibar. He called this scenery the open sore of Africa.

Livingstone was a sworn enemy of slave trade. Every chief he visited in this part of Africa, he engaged in talks about the evils of what we nowadays call human trafficking.

To combat slave trade, Livingstone hatched the idea that missionaries should be accompanied by traders. Whenever missionaries appealed to chiefs and their advisers to stop slave trade, they would say how else do we obtain the cloth and the guns we need? The missionaries would say while we have come to teach you the word of God and how to read and write, we have, as companions, these men here. They are traders. You may obtain from them the goods they have with the goods you have minus human beings.

Of all the parts of Africa that Livingstone visited, he loved best the Shire Highlands and the lands east and west of Lake Malawi. It is to this region he advocated sending the first missionaries of any denomination and any nationality. It was to Dr Livingstone’s influence that by the beginning of the 20th century, Malawi was more advanced in education than neighbouring countries. Indeed, alumni of missions in the then Nyasaland went to neighbouring countries as teachers, clerks and artisans. They were highly respected.

In a sense, Livingstone did some publicity of Malawi as a tourist destination. He spoke in glowing terms about the country’s highlands. When later visitors spoke of Nyasaland as Scotland in a tropical setting or Switzerland without snow, they were echoing Livingstone using different epithets.

Livingstone’s personal life is worth emulating. His compassion was for humanity as a whole. He felt strong compassion for Africa though he was not an African. We, too, when we hear of holocausts and genocides in any part of the world, we ought to feel the pangs.

Livingstone was a non-quitter. When he believed that something was worth doing, he went after it all out. The difficulties ahead of him did not deter him. Those were the days when some people in Europe used to describe a missionary as someone with long hair who goes overseas looking for savages to eat him.

Those people used to call Central Africa as a dark continent. They alleged its people were just savages who would eat any white man who went there, a region where tribes were always killing one another. Livingstone proved this false through his writing. With a few African escorts, he would travel from one part of Africa to another and was received by friendly chiefs such as Sekeletu in Barotseland, Chibisa in Chikhwawa, Makata on the Ruvumo. When he died at Chitambo Village in modern Zambia, he was accompanied by only three faithful African servants. He demonstrated that in Africa, good people outnumbered bad ones.

 

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2 Comments

  1. We do not need to remember David Livingstone. Its sickening to hear such a thing being proposed more so from our renowned historian. David Livingstone enabled the colonisation of Malawi and we all know of its terrible effects in Malawi and other countries. What did he bring? Christianity which the west does not believe anymore. PLEASE – it seems slaves are many times happy and thankful for the exploitation and oppression by their Master.

  2. We do not need to have anything to do with this imperialist. Livingstone and Christianity were used to open up Malawi to colonialism as Namala has said. All the people who died (Chilembwe) included and all the evils Malawians suffered. Who cares about Livingstone? Let us stop this madness of having anything to do with this ghost. Grow up. Only Malawi can celebrate being colonialized. Rubbish. Cut off any connection with this imperialist. He cherished the three Cs because he believed that Africans were uncivilised patronising bastard! The real reason he came to Africa was commerce/mercantilism, pure and simple.

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