Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [60]
When they returned from the bush to retirement in Harrogate or Eastbourne, these men and women (for this was an endeavour in which both sexes took part) produced memoirs which appeared under titles like The Congo for Christ (by the Reverend J. B. Myers) or In Dwarf Land and Cannibal Country (by the Reverend A. B. Lloyd). The stories they told, of danger and hardship, followed by reward and redemption, had the effect of evangelizing for empire, which, in some eyes, was making up ‘by victories of the Cross overseas, for the losses of their Church at Home’: the further religious scepticism advanced in Britain, the harder British missionaries laboured abroad. Mission work took the zeal which had driven the anti-slavery movement in Britain and gave it a new focus, convincing many at home that the expansion of the empire was God’s work. In truth, missionaries were often resented in the colonies, or tolerated for as long as they were present and afterwards forgotten about. The most famous missionary of all, David Livingstone, made only one convert in his entire career, an African chief who later decided he had made a mistake and preferred polygamy to paradise.*
Who could doubt the rightness of the British Empire when it was expressed through such a man as David Livingstone? In person he could come across as dour and brusque, social awkwardness accentuated by an arm which had been mangled in an attack by a lion. He stood about 5 foot 8, with cropped hair and moustache setting off a well-tanned explorer’s face. But he was blessed with an ability to convey his convictions in clear and passionate language. One Englishman who heard him on his 1857 speaking tour recalled how ‘when excited, a varied expression of earnest and benevolent feeling, and remarkable enjoyment of the ludicrous … passes over [his face] … When he speaks to you, you think him at first to be a Frenchman; but as he tells you a Scotch anecdote in the Glaswegian dialect, you make up your mind that he must be, as his face indicates, a countryman from the north.’ The story this Scotsman told was of an astonishing walk he had made, right across Africa, armed with not much more than a Bible, walking stick, magic lantern, sextant, compass and nautical almanac. It made him into a national hero, led to an invitation to call on Queen Victoria and saw him showered with honours. Soon Livingstone was planning a return to Africa, further to advance ‘Christianity, Commerce and Civilization’, a trinity which ensured a healthy public subscription and the endorsement of a government eager to discover the commercial possibilities of trade up the Zambezi into the heart of Africa. The new expedition left England in March 1858, intending to travel upriver in a series of increasingly shallow-draught boats to the point where they could establish the headquarters from which they would explore, evangelize and disrupt the Arab slavers taking their sorry traffic down to the coast.
In Africa, those around him felt the full force of his manic obsession. One by one he fell out with his companions. Fresh volunteers arrived with supplies three years after his expedition had left England, but they too lapsed into sickness or fell foul of Livingstone’s mad determination. Even his most loyal assistant, the expedition doctor John Kirk, noted that ‘Dr L is out of his mind … he is a most unsafe leader’ and ‘about as ungrateful and slippery a mortal as I ever came in contact with’. Kirk had reason to be worried, for, by insisting they shoot a set of rapids by canoe, Livingstone had nearly drowned him. Eventually, the British government had had enough and recalled Livingstone to England after six years. His homecoming this time was much less fêted than his