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By Root 1176 0

return from the walk across Africa. But in 1866 he was off again. Now he planned not merely to spread the gospel and fight the slavers, but possibly also to find the headwaters of the Nile. This, Livingstone’s last journey, ran into trouble almost from the point of his arrival in Africa. Progress was much slower than expected. Porters deserted. Scientific equipment was damaged. Diversions were necessary. The medicine chest was stolen. Wet weather necessitated further detours. Supplementary stores ordered up from the coast were not at the rendezvous point. As year succeeded year, Livingstone succumbed to one sickness after another – cholera, dysentery, pneumonia, ulcerated feet and haemorrhoids. He had pulled out many of his own teeth and appears to have been hallucinating much of the time. ‘I am terribly knocked up,’ he scrawled with the juice of a berry in the margins of one of his surviving books. As he suffered in solitude, a vast audience at home had begun to hunger for news of his fate, for by now missions to ‘darkest Africa’ were much more than low-key matters of mere evangelism. What had become of the lone, lost Scot, Mr Valiant-for-Truth abandoned in the jungle, was a gift of a story to the rapidly growing mass media. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald recognized the commercial potential of a world scoop and Henry Morton Stanley’s marathon journey to discover Livingstone’s fate was the result.

Stanley’s celebrated greeting, when he eventually found Livingstone at Ujiji, in what is now western Tanzania – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – guaranteed the immortality of both men. Afterwards, they travelled together for a while, and then Stanley left Livingstone to continue his search for the source of the Nile. One year later, Livingstone was still in Africa, but by now he was a very sick man able to travel only if carried in a litter by his porters. His death in 1873 – he was discovered, it was said, kneeling in prayer – provided Britain with another imperial pietà. It was seven years since he had left home. His heart was removed and buried in Africa, but the devotion of his loyal servants in embalming the body and returning it to England was made to seem almost divinely ordained. Livingstone lay in state at the Royal Geographical Society headquarters and his elaborate funeral in Westminster Abbey in April 1874 consecrated imperialism. The tenacity and charm of the man who lies beneath the black slab in the floor of the Abbey had been matched by a cranky pigheadedness. And yet he retained the capacity to inspire the country, even more in death than in life. He really hated slavery, even if he was ineffective in making converts. The British Quarterly Review commented that ‘his death has bequeathed the work of African exploration and civilisation as a sacred legacy to this country’. The empire really was God’s work.

Of course, the evangelical impulse was born out of a conviction that the missionaries’ beliefs were superior: it could not be otherwise. It is also true that a special kind of casuistry rooted itself in the minds of the imperial clergy, that the empire was something which had been spread not by exploration, trade or force of arms, but by Providence. One especially overexcited clergyman proclaimed that ‘the flag which is always unfurled over every land and every sea’ was merely ‘the Cross three times’. In 1902, the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, declared that ‘the clergy are officers in an imperial army’, serving both England and Christ. Yet, even at the time they went about their work, British missionaries could be sneered at by members of the imperial establishment. It was not merely that they took the flag to places which had no immediately obvious benefit to the empire, but that they didn’t act the part. Members of the Universities Mission to Central Africa – which had been established to respond to Livingstone’s appeal to spread the word in Nyasaland – lived as near to the Africans as they could, celibate, eating native food, paid almost