Writing David Livingstone Back into South African History

Very little of the vast literature on David Livingstone treats his decade as a missionary in South Africa, focusing instead on his later expeditions to central Africa. Described as a failed missionary who gave up evangelism for exploring, he came under fire in the second half of the 20th century for leading European imperialism in Africa. A deeper look into Livingstone’s mission experience from 1841 to 1857 shows that his highly original writing on theology, missiology and colonialism ranks alongside the better-known work of South African churchmen such as Johannes van der Kemp, John Philip and J.W. Colenso. His analysis and experience of settler colonialism on the Cape frontier and in the Transvaal were not incidental but central to his decision to seek an east–west corridor for the introduction of commerce and Christianity to a region he hoped might be free of colonial aggression and human trafficking.


Introduction
David Livingstone continues to attract researchers and biographers like few figures in sub-Saharan African history.The mountain of hagiographic studies raised in the late 19th and early 20th centuries stands alongside the peaks and foothills of late-20th-century literature, debunking the man and the mythic status he acquired as a 'maker of the British Empire'.Almost all of this work concentrates on his central African expeditions.Surprisingly, not one of the many books published on Livingstone focuses on his 11 years as a missionary to the Tswana of South Africa.He is barely mentioned in general histories of South Africa; when he is, it is most often as a figure of the London Missionary Society (LMS), one of those who extended the so-called 'Missionaries' Road' to the north. 1 ß 2023 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies 1 The term 'Missionaries' Road' was widely used in the 20th century, not by missionaries, but by historians who regarded the establishment of a chain of mission stations as a prelude to the colonisation of the southern African interior.E. Walker, A History of Southern Africa, third edition (London, Longmans, Green, 1962) called Livingstone 'the most outstanding of all the men who served the L.M.S in Africa' but limited his coverage to conflicts in the Transvaal, his descent of the Zambezi and efforts to extend the Missionaries' Road; see pp.Outside South Africa, Livingstone's reputation as a hero of empire grew dramatically during the half-century following his death in 1873, just as Britain's dominion expanded.More than any other, he came to represent in his own person the most revered themes of popular imperialism: the Christian mission, science, humanitarianism and commerce (but not militarism).Having risen with empire, his fortunes fell with decolonisation.This debunking hit its stride with the publication of Tim Jeal's biography on the 1973 centenary of Livingstone's death.According to the publisher's dust jacket, 'Livingstone actually failed as a missionary (with only one convert, who lapsed), failed also in his search for the Nile's source, failed as a leader of Europeans, and failed as a husband and father'.It goes on to say that his 'hitherto unrecognized historical impact' on colonial politics was as a promoter of British imperial power in Africa.Jeal spices his critique with personal abuse, accusing the missionary of hypocrisy, lies and double-dealing.Livingstone's theory that the spread of Christianity required time rather than European missionaries is dismissed as a 'convenient' excuse for his ineffectual evangelism.For Jeal, there is 'no doubt' that 'missionary failures had originally driven Livingstone north' and into a new career as an explorer. 2 book produced by John Mackenzie to accompany a 1996 exhibition at Britain's National Portrait Gallery concentrated on the myth-making that elevated Livingstone's stature far above any realistic appraisal of his actual achievements. 3It led one reviewer to complain that 'at times the relentless deconstruction of the myth seems to overwhelm our understanding of the man'. 4Felix Driver, one of the contributors, later wrote that 'the gospel of "legitimate commerce"' championed by Livingstone helped make 'humanitarianism a tool of empire'; while the argument of his Missionary Travels 'may have been humane', it 'nonetheless articulated a profoundly imperial vision'. 5ithin the parochial world of South African historical writing, Livingstone's reputation never rose very highmainly because of lingering memories of his clashes with Voortrekker leaders, whose stocks rose as rapidly as popular imperialism in Britain in the late 19th century.G.M. Theal dismissed him, as he did other LMS missionaries, as 'a strong partisan of the Bantu' who could not be trusted to judge the Transvaal Boers fairly. 6At the same time as Jeal's debunking of Livingstone's biography, the Van Riebeeck Society produced a characteristically South African attack on Livingstone's character.Livingstone's portrayal of Voortrekkers as pitiless conquerors engaged in clandestine trafficking of slaves had long rankled with Afrikaner nationalists.The texts reproduced by Isaac Schapera showed, according to the society's chairman Frank Barlow, that Livingstone 'laboured under narrow and persistent prejudices' and formed 'a warped conception of what he called the van Riebeeck principle' of forcible seizure of African land.They 'revealed the truth about the side of Livingstone's character which is here shown with all its faults'. 7he late-20th-century reappraisal of Livingstone seems to have made little impact on South African historical studies, mainly because it was situated within the larger context of the British empire.More recent South African historians who mention Livingstone fall in with the standard narrative of failed missionary-turned-explorer.For example, Elizabeth Elbourne writes that 'Livingstone, who went out to southern Africa as an LMS missionary in 1840 and became an explorer instead … "discovered" vast tracts of Africa in the name of Christianity and commerce; his anti-slavery writings provided a subsequent justification for the British takeover of many of these lands'. 8Timothy Keegan observes that by the time of the War of the Axe (1846-47), 'Livingstone had tired of colonial causes and shifted … [his] focus northwards'. 9No wonder then that Jeal produced a revised edition in 2013 with the South African chapters unaltered by even a word.He claimed that his 1973 book had remained 'unchallenged in its factual essentials'. 10owever, a counter-movement had been under way for some time.In an essay composed for the 1999 bicentenary of the London Missionary Society in southern Africa, Andrew Ross outlined an effective refutation of Jeal's bill of indictment. 11Three years later he extended his interpretation in Livingstone: Mission and Empire, which disputed the failed missionaryturned-explorer thesis.His chapter on South African politics focuses on the year 1852 when Livingstone wrote in passionate opposition to racism and settler colonialism, particularly in relation to frontier warfare and the Sand River Convention which effectively freed the Transvaal Boers from British oversight.Livingstone's most radical proposal was that Africans be allowed to arm themselves against colonial aggression. 12Christopher Petrusic made similar points at about the same time. 13John Mackenzie argued convincingly that Livingstone was neither a prophet of, nor an advocate for, British imperial expansion. 14ithout revisiting Livingstone's merits as a historical protagonist, this essay argues that his venture into central Africa grew directly out of his experience of missions and politics in South Africa.I will suggest that, while lacking their public profile, Livingstone ranks alongside Johannes van der Kemp, John Philip and Bishop John Colenso as a South African theorist of missions and European colonialism.He did not turn to exploring because he failed as a missionary; rather, he argued against the mission stations' prevailing model of evangelisation, maintaining that the role of the foreign missionary should be limited to propagating the basic ideas of Christianity.Furthermore, the work of conversion must and would be done by Africans.
Livingstone, like Colenso, argued strongly for compatibility between science and the gospel.Again, like Colenso, he took a tolerant approach to African customs, pointing out that it took centuries for his own ancestors to purge traditions and behaviour at odds with a strict interpretation of the Bible.Like Colensoand unlike his father-in-law Robert Moffat -Livingstone believed that prior to the coming of missionaries the peoples of southern Africa knew of a 'High God' and of an existence beyond the grave.
He may have been the first to articulate an interpretation of modern South African historyone that reads uncannily like that of the revisionists who nonetheless view him as an instrument of British imperialism.Unlike Colenso, John Philip and other 19th-century missionaries, he did not accept the inevitability of British imperial rule.Nor did he see empire as the providential instrument for the upliftment of the heathen.Livingstone identified settler colonialism as the driving force behind the endless frontier wars and injustices inflicted on African societies.For him, racism was not the cause but the consequence of slavery and the theft of indigenous peoples' land.The only effective defence against colonial aggression was armed resistance.For that reason, he opposed restrictions on the arms trade across southern Africa.
When Livingstone left Kolobeng mission he was not intending to extend the missionary road north as a pathway for empire, but to draw an east-west line across the continent that would halt the northward advance of the settler-colonial frontier.His crusade against the slave trade was not a departure from, but the logical extension of, his exposure to forced labour and human trafficking in the Trekker republics of the Transvaal. 15

Livingstone as Missionary and Victorian Intellectual
From the time of his arrival at Cape Town in 1841 up until 1856, when he returned to Britain, Livingstone regarded himself solely as a missionary.Throughout his epic cross-African journey he continued to preach and teach.His employment as an explorer began only when he agreed to lead the Royal Geographical Society's Zambezi expedition of 1858; which is to say that nearly half of his African career, the whole of which extended from 1841 to 1873, was devoted to Christian evangelism.He began his work in Kuruman at the mission station of his future father-in-law, Robert Moffat.From there he went on to found missions in various parts of today's Northwest province, finishing up at Kolobeng in modern-day Botswana.
Despite a notoriously impoverished Scottish childhood, he acquired, through self-guided reading and formal medical studies, a wide knowledge of contemporary thinking about science, theology and political economy.His journals and letters demonstrate the keen interest he took in current events across the globe.Like Bishop Colenso and the American missionaries of Natal, he rejected fundamentalist and literal accounts of the Bible, amused at the creationist idea that when God made limestone 'he made the shells in them'. 16His observations on the geology of Africa fused Christian belief with the science that had been lately propounded by Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison.
We took a glance back to this valley … and thought of the vast mass of material which has been scooped out and carried away in its formation.This naturally led to reflection on the countless ages required for the previous formation and deposition of the same material (clay shale), then of the rocks, whose abrasion formed that, until the mind grew giddy in attempting to ascend the steps, which lead up through a portion of the eternity before man.
The different epochs of geology are like landmarks in that otherwise shoreless sea.Our own epoch, or creation, is but another added to the number of that wonderful series which presents a grand display of the mighty power of God: every stage of progress in the earth and its habitants, is such a display.So far from this science having any tendency to make men undervalue the power or love of God, it leads to the probability that the exhibition of mercy we have in the gift of his Son may possibly not be the only manifestation of grace which has taken place in the countless ages during which works of creation have been going on. 17vingstone's formulation of his 'own epoch, or creation' as one in a serieseach the work of Godresembles, but does not replicate Colenso's version: '[t]he old races of plants and living creatures died out and passed away, and new races were called into being, from time to time, by the Word of God; and the face of the Earth was fit for man to live on; and then he was formed and placed upon it'. 18Livingstone takes a leap beyond the bishop with his audacious speculation that prior to biblical genesis, the creator 'may possibly' have mercifully intervened for the benefit of other creatures at times and places unknown to us.
He was well versed in contemporary writing on political economy.He made trenchant comments on John Locke's justification for landed property, that 'the man who subdues or cultivates a portion of the earth has a better title to it than he who only hunts over it.He bestows his labour upon it, and that is his property'.So far, so good: [b]ut the doctrine has rather a wide application.It would strip Earl Grey of his broad acres around Alnwick Castle as well as Sandillah [Sandile] of the gorges and blood-stained valleys of the Amatola.It would place in the very same category the English and Irish landlords who evict their tenantry in order to form deer-parks, and the Bushmen who endeavour to perpetuate a wilderness with their poisoned arrows. 19plied to southern Africa, Lockean theory would elevate the land claims of the Bantuspeaking mixed farmers above those of the frontier Boers: '[t]he encroachments of the Boers differ essentially from those of the Americans and other civilised communities, inasmuch as they cultivate less of the soil than do the aborigines whom they expel'. 20Livingstone reviewed arguments in favour of colonies as outlets for alleged surplus population, only to dismiss them as 'freaks of madness … the figment of political economists' wildly extrapolating from Malthusian theory. 21ivingstone's grounding in economic and political theory gave him a far deeper insight into the rationality of African practices than most missionaries.His well-known dialogue between himself as the 'medical doctor' and a Kwena 'rain doctor' makes the point that all beliefs must be understood in their social and cultural context. 22As a missionary he took a tolerant view of African customs, rejecting only those he regarded as specifically condemned by the Bible.Unlike Moffat, but very like Colenso, Livingstone believed that southern African societies had previous knowledge of a 'High God' and a soul that survived the death of the body.He acknowledged that levirate marriage and bride wealth were sanctioned by the Bible. 23Although he regarded polygamy as specifically forbidden by the New Testament, he could see it was not just about sex.It enhanced household prestige for individual families and helped chiefs to build alliances. 24He differed from Colenso on the biblical propriety of baptising polygamists, but sympathised with their reluctance to break up existing families.That was the case with Chief Sechele who said 'he could not get rid of his superfluous wives without appearing to be ungrateful to their parents who had done so much for him in his adversity'. 25Livingstone, 'perceiving at last some of the difficulties of his case, and also feeling compassion for the poor women, who were by far the best of our scholars', felt 'no desire that he should be in any hurry to make a profession by baptism, and putting away all his wives but one'. 26

Livingstone's Theory of Christian Missions
Until the turn of the 20th century the predominant model of the modern missionary enterprise was the mission station.In the early 19th-century Cape Colony it gave refuge to people beset by threats to their lives, livelihoods, and conditions of labour.Following the proclamation of Ordinance 28 and the abolition of slavery the mission station survived, justified partly by the idea that it provided a beacon of light that would spread Christian truth into the darkness of surrounding 'heathenism', and, more practically, as a means of exercising missionary authority over African residents.Jean and John Comaroff see Robert Moffat's station at Kuruman as a paradigmatic example of missionary command and control. 27Livingstone, Moffat's son-in-law, argued that the mission station had outlived its usefulness.He deplored the proliferation of stations in the Cape Colony.They wasted scarce resources, promoted conversion rather than evangelism and inhibited the growth of selfreliant African churches.
Livingstone argued that Christianity could not be spread by coercion or a foreign missionary 'going about with a Bible under his arm'. 28It must be freely carried forward by African agents who could express the message in language fitted to the norms and concepts of their culture.In a letter to his sister, he explained that even someone well versed in the Tswana language could not preach a sermon on the atonement as might be done in Scotland: [l]et the same sermon be preached here, & as much good would be done by an address in Greek.But I need not go through all the process we must take to explain the simplest text in the Bible.If you look at the sermons of the apostles in the Acts, you will see that to different people their address was different in order to make the truth profitable.The Jew was addressed differently from the Gentile, and though the object & the truths were the same, Gentiles of different localities were addressed differently. 29he ideal evangelist would be someone like Sechele, 'a master of his own language' who preached 'in his own simple and beautiful style'. 30For that reason alone it made no sense to establish new stations in places already well supplied with them.Livingstone differed profoundly from missionaries who feared their congregations would fall into immorality and theological error without strict supervision.
The idea of making model Christians of the young need not be entertained by any one who is secretly convinced, as most men who know their own hearts are, that he is not a model Christian himself.The Israelitish slaves brought out of Egypt by Moses were not converted and elevated in one generation, though under the direct teaching of God Himself … Our own elevation also has been the work of centuries, and, remembering this, we should not indulge in overwrought expectations. 31vingstone pointed out that the early Christian Churches were none too pure.
The popular notion … of the primitive church is perhaps not very accurate.Those societies especially which consisted of converted Gentilesmen who had been accustomed to the vices and immoralities of heathenismwere certainly anything but pure.In spite of their conversion, some of them carried the stains and vestiges of their former state with them when they passed from the temple to the church.If the instructed and civilised Greek did not all at once rise out of his former self, and understand and realise the high ideal of his new faith, we should be careful, in judging of the work of missionaries among savage tribes, not to apply to their converts tests and standards of too great severity. 32 saw no need for foreign missionaries where African churches had already formed.All effort should be directed to regions where the gospel had not yet been preached.No station should remain under foreign direction beyond the lifetime of a single missionary. 33Once an African church had formed, it could be expected to take up the work of local evangelisation.Of course, a foreign missionary needed a place to live but no larger than necessary for the needs of his immediate family.Livingstone specifically rejected the station as a place of command and control over a resident population.At his own mission: we were simply strangers exercising no authority or control whatever.Our influence depended entirely on persuasion; and, having taught them by kind conversation as well as by public instruction, I expected them to do what their own sense of right and wrong dictated.We never wished them to do right merely because it would be pleasing to us, nor thought ourselves to blame when they did wrong, although we were quite aware of the absurd idea to that effect. 34aptisms, church attendance and a great many other things, but not conversions. 35Individual accounts of conversion were celebrated but not reckoned as the criteria of success or failure by any society.Livingstone thought it: very unfair to judge of the success of these by the number of conversions which have followed.These are rather proofs of the missions being of the right sort.They shew the direction of the stream which, set in motion by him who rules the nations, is destined to overflow the world.The fact which ought to stimulate us above all others, is not that we have contributed to the conversion of a few souls, however valuable these may be, but that we are diffusing a knowledge of Christianity throughout the world.The number of conversions in India is but a poor criterion of the success which has followed the footsteps of missionaries there.The general knowledge is the criterion, and there, as well as in other lands where missionaries in the midst of masses of heathenism seem like voices crying in the wilderness, Reformers before the Reformation, future missionaries will see conversions follow every sermon.We prepare the way for them … We work for a glorious future which we are not destined to see. 36ny, if not most, of the pioneering foreign missionaries in southern Africa preached for years before baptising a single individual.For example, at Moffat's Kuruman station 'no visible success attended their labours for nearly 15 years.The seed, however, was sown'. 37ivingstone pointed to his own experience as a demonstration of the way Christianity would spread far and wide.Africans, not white missionaries, were the key agents.His own role had been limited to living among the Tswana, learning their language and engaging them in conversations about faith.He was fortunate to find a receptive listener in the Kwena Chief Sechele -'the one convert'whom he taught to read and write.Though they came to differ on polygamy, Sechele went on to found missions of his own in neighbouring regions, unsupported by any official society.Livingstone expressed surprise and delight to find that after his own mission closed, 'Sechele himself … [had], though unbidden by man, been teaching his own people.In fact, he has been doing all that I was prevented from doing'. 38he first English missionaries to the Ndebele of Zimbabwe found people singing hymns taught by Sechele.This demonstrated to Livingstone 'the essential vigour of Christianity … Sow the seed and it never dies.The Divine Spirit will see to it'. 39It was largely through Sechele's influence that Christianity became the religion of the Ngwato chiefs to his north, extending eventually to all of Botswana. 40ivingstone's theory of Christian expansion was his own, different from the better-known doctrines of his time.He nurtured no eschatological expectation that preaching to all the world would inaugurate the Second Coming of Christ.Nor did he merely echo the 'three selves' theory of Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson which aimed at creating indigenous churches that were self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating. 41Livingstone did not see himself as shaping African churches.He did not care if African Christians were denominationally orthodox or morally pure, as Europeans measured orthodoxy and purity.Put a Bible in their handsone written in their languageand they would find their own paths to the truth.His critique of the mission station was threefold.It wasted scarce resources, it created unrealistic expectations of what an African Christian community should be and, through its paternalistic structure, fostered dependency rather than personal responsibility.'Are', he asked, 'our stations to be kept up for ever because others will not do their duty?Perpetual tutelage and everlasting leading strings would enfeeble angels'. 42He contrasted the poor record of the mission stations with the experience of the Tlhaping people near Kuruman who, after moving away to different parts of the country, sent to Griquatown for religious instruction and eventually founded their own churches. 43He concluded that: [t]ime seems an essential element in African success.The work is never forced by either numbers or money … The experience of the past seems to say, that central stations ought to be formed as foci of light to the dark masses around, and no European ought to go where a native church is already formed.There ought to be an entirely onward movement of the missionary corps in Africa. 44e way or another, with the passage of time 'the present mission stations will all be broken up'. 45Whether it happened through lack of resources or attacks like those of 'French soldiery … in Tahiti, or tawny Boers … in South Africa', 'our duty is onward, onward, proclaiming God's word whether men will hear or whether they will forbear'. 46he whole of Livingstone's critique of missions and prescriptions for reform grew from his ten years in South Africa, unlike, for instance, Bishop Colenso, who was ready to theorise about Zulu missions after ten weeks in Natal. 47From the standpoint of the 21st century it is Livingstone who best predicted the development of African Christianity, as even the demythologising Jeal acknowledges in a backhanded kind of way.The 1973 edition of his biography concluded with the words, '[u]ndoubtedly Livingstone's greatest sorrow would have been that Africa never became a Christian continent'. 48In the edition of 2013, when Africa was widely regarded as among the most Christian continents, Jeal changed the sentence to read, fatuously, 'Undoubtedly Livingstone's greatest sorrow would have been that Africa is not yet the earthly paradise he had believed it might one day become'. 49

Race and Settler Colonialism
Livingstone had no time for the developing theories of racial difference being propounded in Europe and America at the time.While accepting that phenotypical differences like colour existedand personally finding some groups more physically attractive than othershe refused to associate any of them with innate intellectual capacity or patterns of behaviour.In his first and still most famous book, Missionary Travels and Researches, he referred more than once to the 'stupid prejudice against colour'. 50He believed that slavery and hostile relations led to racial prejudice, not the other way around.Afrikaner nationalists of the last century accused Livingstone of racial prejudice against the Boers, because of what he had to say about the Boers of the highveld.However, they argued their case by taking quotations out of context.Moreover, Livingstone made it clear that he regarded the racially identical Dutch of Cape Town, Holland and the north-eastern United States as quite different in their attitudes and behaviour.The frontier Boers conceive themselves to be vastly superior to the blacks.They were enemies, and many of the latter are vanquished and despoiled enemies.The dominant race always explains its ascendency and excuses its tyranny by the same self-complacent inferences.The Irish were for five centuries esteemed an inferior race by their English conquerors, but they have since vindicated their characters in every department, and more especially in war. 51en Livingstone wrote that 'every year the Boers become worse' and that the 'young especially make rapid strides to downright savageism', he made a generalisation based on a record of forced labour and commando violence, not genetics or degeneration theory. 52He often used his fellow Scots as examples of how context alters attitudes and behaviour: '[t]hough most virtuous at home, no sooner do they become naturalised abroad than they take the lead in every evil work', becoming known as 'the most merciless slave-drivers in the West Indies'. 53e Boers are descendants of pious refugees from France and Holland, and resemble the Scotch in many of their phases of character.Freed from the restraints of colonial law, and acquiring, by the possession of horses and fire-arms, unlimited power over the helpless Bechuana tribes, their downward course has been accelerated fearfully. 54e same went for European colonists of the eastern Cape.Within months of arriving they assimilated the racialised behaviour and attitudes of those who came before.
From these insights Livingstone developed the first comprehensive interpretation of South African colonial history.His starting point is the day when Jan van Riebeeck, founder of the Dutch East India Company's Cape Colony, 'coolly' calculated how many of … Hottentot 'cattle might be stolen with the loss of but a very few of his own party'.This is the first enunciation of what we call the Van Riebeck [sic] principle.This unfortunate obliviousness of the rights involved in meum and tuum has been a prominent feature in the history of the border Boers during the last two hundred years. 55holars have disputed whether any such principle was enunciated by van Riebeeck the man.That misses the point.It was not the man, but the practice Livingstone condemned.He interpreted the subsequent eastward expansion of the Cape frontier up to the 1830s as a drive to steal African land, property and labour.It would only stop when it met an immovable obstacle.That, he wrote in 1849, is what happened in the most recent frontier war, the so-called War of the Axe: Commissariat would send grist to their mills.Well the war began, and cattle and sheep were swept off by thousands.The 'Caffre depredation' journal [Grahamstown Journal] had a perfect glut of its favourite articles. 56e result was ferocious resistance from people who had learned to defend themselves with modern arms and tactics.The British won the war but lost the peace, gaining little in the way of land or booty, and leaving a grievance never to be forgotten.According to Livingstone, it was heightened Xhosa powers of resistance that diverted the drive for land and labour northward and eastward, finding in Mzilikazi and Dingane foes with less capacity to resist their horses and guns. 57In his view there was at the structural level no significant distinction to be made between Piet Retief's trekkers and the 1820 British settlers.
Something did change, however, when the Boers settled north of the Vaal.Too far from markets where they might sell their produce, they made ivory hunting, cattle raiding and human trafficking their chief pursuits.A decisive turning point came when the Sand River Convention of 1852 freed the Transvaalers from British rule.They immediately set about enforcing a dubious claim to all the highveld between the Kalahari and the eastern escarpment.The convention allowed them to ban Africans from buying or possessing the guns and ammunition that would have enabled them to mount a resistance.Among the first victims were Sechele's people and Livingstone's home at Kolobeng, which was sacked by a Boer commando in 1852.This was the 'van Riebeeck principle' with a vengeance.There was no place in Adam Smith's political economy for conquest of this nature.Livingstone, acolyte of the Scottish enlightenment, therefore aligned himself with Proudhon: colonial property is theft.He observed that atrocities of territorial conquest could be seen in many parts of the world, for example in the French war in Algeria and Russian campaigns in central Asia.The 'freedom' which the Voortrekkers sought beyond the Vaal 'was identical with that which is so highly valued by the Southern States of the American Union'. 58or the victims of colonial aggression, abstract appeals to justice were futile.Force must be met with force.Although Livingstone denied that he personally had sold guns and ammunition to Sechele's people, he contended they had every right to self-defence.
I had no hand in procuring the guns of the Bakwains, but felt very pleased when they did get them.Moral suasion and the law of love are very fine in their places, but they would not do if introduced to [Britain's] Newgate [gaol], the doors being left open … Resistance to … tyrants and murderers is I think obedience to God. 59 He is, so far as I know, the only southern African missionary of the 19th century to advocate the armed struggle.

The Missing Chapter
The view that Livingstonefailing as a missionary and thwarted by the Transvaal Boers for whom he nursed an irrational animosityabandoned missionary work and his former concern with South African politics for a new career as an explorer needs correcting, as does the argument advanced by Andr e du Toit that Livingstone, believing in 'a divine mandate 56  for European colonization', was driven to contest the Boers' more limited claims to divinely sanctioned dominion. 60Had Livingstone's best-selling Missionary Travels come out in the version that went to the publisher, the breadth and passion of his critique of settler colonialism would be better appreciated.Thanks to the Livingstone Online project, the omitted sections are now freely available. 61The prefatory letter to British government Colonial Secretary Henry Labouch ere, and the planned first chapter on the Cape Colony, are particularly revealing.
In the letter of 2 April 1857, Livingstone reminds Labouch ere of their recent meeting in the House of Commons and puts in writing the substance of the interview he hoped to have on southern African affairs. 62The Boers' attack on Sechele and subsequent kidnapping of 200 children was 'contrary to the express provision in an Article of the treaty which these Boers had entered into with Sir George Cathcart'.The chief expressed his confidence in British justice by travelling to Cape Town to put his case before the Queen.Similar faith in British protection inspired large numbers of Griqua and Tswana people, 'who have become Christians through the teaching of English missionaries and have engaged in commerce so assiduously that about £5,000 of worth of ivory and 830,000 skins of small animals are annually sent to the Colonial markets'.Their lives and livelihoods were then threatened, as shown by the attack on Sechele: [w]hen Sir George Cathcart [gave] the Rebel Boers their independence he also passed a Powder Ordinance by which ammunition to any amount may be sent into the Transvaal Territory [for their use] while not an ounce is allowed to enter the country of the Griquas & Bechuanas … As there is not [t]he smallest doubt that these Transvaal Boers continue in the open violation of the treaty to enslave the natives the enforcement of the provisions of the Powder Ordinance against those who have always been our Friends amounts to unintentional but direct aid to Slavery. 63e original Chapter 1, 'The Cape Colony', shows how important South Africa continued to be for Livingstone's conception of his mission, past and future.He did not give explicit reasons for dropping the chapter, but editorial markups in another hand show that the decision came late in the process.Petrusic infers from a letter to publisher John Murray, dated 6 April 1857, that the section was 'curtailed and sweetened' at Murray's instigation.64 Justin Livingstone regards the deletion more harshly as an act of self-censorship.65 The proximity of the decision to the Labouch ere letter, at a time when Livingstone was in close contact with the politically conservative Roderick Murchison and John Murray, suggests the pressures that may have been brought to bear on him to avoid controversy.Whatever the cause, the effect was to make it look as though Livingstone aimed his critique of settler colonialism mainly at the Boers.
The opening of the discarded chapter conveys a quite different impression: [i]n the minds of many Englishmen the ideas of the Cape and Caffre wars are as inseparably connected as the Siamese twins and it is somewhat difficult for those who live on a railway island to realise the idea of our little unprotected party quietly travelling through the heart of the Colony to the capital with as little sense of danger as if we had been in England. 66 goes on in ironic mode: every now and then we are forced to hear of the happy homesteads of English settlers made desolate by hordes of ruthless savages.Thousands of sheep & cattle are driven off to be devoured in the mountain fastnesses.The gardens and fields of the comfortable families are left desolate while those whose industry would in the course of a few years have rendered them independent, if they have escaped with life, are reduced to beggary.English troops are then sent to chastise the Caffres and avenge these fearful outrages, for it is quite abhorrent to the English nature to leave her children unprotected in the presence of such barbarians.The English soldier fights as bravely there as anywhere else.The fatigues of bush fighting are excessively severeand their privation which must be endured in following a brave and crafty foe are such as can scarcely be imagined by those who never saw the fighting grounds.The Officers are decimated by perpetual anxiety, Caffre bullets, and the certainty that their labours will be appreciated nowhere.Millions of Pounds are cheerfully paid out of the British Treasury for the defence of the Colonial Frontier, but notwithstanding the most lavish expenditure of money and men there is not the smallest probability that the next outbreak will be prevented. 67ere was a way to prevent perpetual warfare: the 'grand experiment', which Livingstone terms the Glenelg treaty or 'philanthropic system'.Practised in the decade before the 1846 War of the Axe, it 'treated the Caffres as rational creatures and presupposed that they had some sort of natural title to their lands and if we could keep a treaty so could they'. 68Not only did it keep the peace, but proved 'remarkably cheap' for the British treasury.At the urging of the Grahamstown Journal, 'the great organ of the war party', the Glenelg policy gave way to what Livingstone terms the D'Urban policy, which counted on the willingness of 'the Dutch Colonists' to 'turn out and exterminate the Caffres if only allowed to do it in their own way'.That plan was further tweaked 'by a gentleman conversant with Indian Affairs', Sir Harry Smith, who proposed to arm 'one part of the Caffres against another'.He 'then elected himself the paramount chief of Caffreland'.It was at this point, according to Livingstone, that everything went dreadfully awry.Africans, who are as loyal to their chiefs as the Scottish Highlanders had been to their Bonnie Prince Charlie, rallied round their properly constituted sovereign.Not even the Xhosa paramount chief Sandile 'could have invented a more certain and efficient means of rallying all the chivalry of Caffreland around him than that "a white man [Harry Smith] who had been made a chief by a woman [Victoria] should depose him who had been made a chief by God"'. 69So £2 million was spent and countless lives lost in a contest equal in its ferocity to the Russian campaign against the Circassians or the French war in Algeria.
After warfare conducted 'in exact accordance with the views of a large party on the Frontier', a campaign 'as severe as the most bloody minded could desire', the Xhosa stood unbowed.It was high time the frontier settlers realised they could not 'exterminate a single African tribe … Their past seems to forbode that if we follow the fighting policy we can only hope for a permanent peace when we have depopulated all the country between Graham's town and Timbuctu'.Livingstone's repeated injunction is that if we wish to end the endless frontier wars we should listen to what the Xhosa say.Hear Sandile's eloquence: Writing David Livingstone Back into South African History 297 [s]ome white men come and say 'the Caffres steal'but the white men are the robbers.God made a boundary by the sea and white men cross it to rob us of our country.When the son of God came down from Heaven you white men killed him.It was not black men who did that.
Englishmen make laws about the land and break them.They make a boundary and then take it away.The reason why we fight is we do not wish to live under the English.Is it God who sent the Englishman across the sea to take our country?Is it God who created him bids him come and rule over the chiefs of other countries?Is that right? 70e chapter goes on to restate Livingstone's denunciation of the injustices perpetrated during the so-called Kat River rebellion, and the farcically tragic trial of Andries Botha, which he had attended in 1852. 71In concluding, he calls for an inquiry into colonial blunders and atrocities in the frontier wars, similar to those exposed by William Russell as Times 'special commissioner' during the recent Crimean War. 72he chapter wraps up with a plea for revocation of the Powder Ordinance which prevented the Tswana and Griqua from arming themselves against Boer commandos.No one reading it could imagine that Livingstone had lost interest in South African affairs in the 1840s.By placing the letter to Labouch ere and this chapter at the head of his draft manuscript, he explicitly connects his denunciation of settler colonialism to his project for a mission to central Africa.That the chapter was deleted does not lessen its importance as evidence of the state of Livingstone's thinking on Cape colonialism in 1857.

The Central African Mission
As Missionary Travels makes plain, Livingstone undertook his various expeditions from 1849 to 1856 to find territories where missionaries could operate without interference from the Boers.He did not set out to 'discover' Lake Ngami whose 'exact position … had, for half a century at least, been correctly pointed out by the natives'. 73He went in hope of finding a practical route to the country of Kololo chief Sebetwane, who Sechele described as a truly great man.Sechele was as keen as Livingstone to visit the Lake Ngami region, known to be rich in ivory, and to reacquaint himself with Sebetwane. 74Having established relations with the Kololo through the chief's son and successor, Sekeletu, Livingstone proposed an expedition to find a route to the Atlantic coast of Angola along which the Kololo could send ivory and other products to be exchanged for European manufactures, including guns and ammunition.The route, if found, would also serve the needs of the Kololo mission he envisaged.Sekeletu grasped the advantages of the plan and bankrolled the enterprise with elephant tusks and an escort of young men.When swampy ground and fast flowing rivers showed the impracticality of the western path to the sea, Livingstone persuaded Sekeletu to equip another expedition, this time going eastward down the Zambezi to the Indian Ocean.
The expedition made Livingstone's name as an explorer: the man who crossed Africa from west to east.That, however, had not been his object, nor that of the Kololo who made it possible.He hoped to found a mission that did not rely on supplies or personnel coming up from the Cape.His story refutes both the 'road to the north' and the 'failed missionaryturned-explorer' narratives.That the Zambezi route proved as unfeasible as the Angolan route and that the Anglican and Presbyterian missions he inspired struggled to survive does not affect the underlying object of his explorations.It was certainly not to extend the 'Missionaries' Road' to the north.He aimed to open a route to central Africa free from fear of Boer attacksan east-west route from the sea for commerce that would enable Africans to join the global economy on their own terms, armed with the weapons they needed to defend themselves against the human traffickers who had done so much damage.Knowing what was to come, his watchwords of Christianity and commerce naturally suggest intellectual and economic imperialism to 21st-century minds.It may be going too far to declare Livingstone, as Andrew Ross has done, the 'patron saint of African nationalism'; however, his vision of African evangelists without permanent mission stations propagating their own understandings of Christian truth deserves recognition as an original contribution to missiology. 75So does his analysis of settler colonialism and frontier warfare as grand larceny.Both were born of his South African experience and deserve to be written back into South African history.
entries in J. Omer-Cooper's History of Southern Africa (London, James Currey, 1987), pp.103, 267, concern Livingstone's efforts to defend the Missionaries' Road.T.H.R. Davenport's South Africa: A Modern History, fourth edition (London, Macmillan, 1991), pp.162-3, has but two mentionsone of Livingstone's advocacy of British trade and the other of Sechele's baptism.Volume I of M. Wilson and L. Thompson's (eds), Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vols.(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969) uses Livingstone primarily as a source of ethnographic data.A. Roberts' entry on Livingstone in the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2008) passes over his South African years in two paragraphs.The biographical entry in South African History Online barely mentions his mission to the Tswana and passes over his radical politics.