Heroes of Livingstone's last trek revealed

Published on Sunday 20 May 2007 00:39

HE ARRIVED home to a hero's welcome and a statesman's burial after giving up his life to the exploration of Africa.

Scots-born Dr David Livingstone became one of the most celebrated figures of the Victorian age for his attempts to discover the source of the River Nile.

But a new book to be published tomorrow reveals for the first time the extraordinary - and gruesome - lengths the famous missionary's loyal African servants went to to ensure his body was returned the thousands of miles back to Britain.

After taking steps to mummify his body following his death in what is now Zambia in 1873, his remains were carried more than 1,000 miles across the continent by faithful attendants James Chuma and Abdullah Susi.

Drawing on archive material, author Claire Pettit has pieced together Livingstone's final journey through the "dark continent" he came to love before his burial 11 months later in Westminster Abbey.

Pettitt said: "This is the first time that anyone has reconstructed this journey in such detail. I was just amazed by the fact that they carried him more than 1,000 miles even though they didn't need to. It's a remarkable story of dedication."

The book, Dr Livingstone I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers And Empires, also explores the "racist" reaction of Victorian Britain when the servants were invited by Queen Victoria to visit Livingstone's homeland. Despite their celebrity status, they were made to live and eat with British servants.

Livingstone, who was born in Blantyre, in Lanarkshire, died in May 1873 in the village of Chief Chitambo at Ilala, south-east of Lake Bangweulu in Zambia, from malaria and internal bleeding caused by dysentery. It was two years after his fateful meeting with American journalist Henry Moreton Stanley, who made his name by "finding" the missionary explorer after the British government had almost given him up for dead, and uttering one of the most famous greetings in history.

After his death, the book explains, his servants' first act was to remove Livingstone's intestines and internal organs, including his heart, which was buried under a Myula Tree, now the site of a Livingstone memorial.

His principal servant, Jacob Wainwright, who was later to accompany Livingstone's body on the voyage back to Britain, read a Christian burial service as his innards were lowered into the ground. An inscription was carved on the tree reading: "Dr Livingstone, May 4, 1873."

An African funeral, with drumming and dancing, was then organised which went on for two days. In the meantime, the open trunk of his body was packed with salt as a preservative and dried under the fierce African sun. Next his face was bathed in brandy as an extra preservative and his servants bent back his legs at the knees to make a shorter 'package' for carrying.

Pettitt describes how Livingstone's body was then wrapped in calico and encased in a cylinder of bark before being sewn into a large piece of sailcloth. Finally, it was tarred to make it watertight.

Few records remain of the hardships the servants encountered on their nine-month journey to the east coast, but at one stage they had to pretend the body was a bundle of cloth as one tribe forbade the transportation of human remains across its land.

When they finally reached the village of Bagamayo on the coast, Pettit writes that they were "summarily paid off" and the appropriately named HMS Vulture was summoned to take Livingstone's remains to Zanzibar for the final voyage home. His mummified body reached Southampton docks on April 15, 1874, 11 months after his death. Three days later he was interred at Westminster Abbey with Stanley and Wainwright as coffin bearers.

Wainwright was allowed to accompany Livingstone's body on the voyage home - only after his passage was funded by the Church Missionary Society - but Chuma and Susi were left behind despite their astonishing devotion to their former master.

They were brought over later, Pettitt writes, by Livingstone's friend, James Young, the Scotsman who had made his fortune from paraffin, but they missed his elaborate funeral.

Horace Waller, another close friend of Livingstone, complained at the time that Chuma and Susi's efforts should have been better rewarded.

"The task that these men performed was truly Herculean," he remarked.

Pettitt, who teaches Victorian literature at King's College, London, believes Wainwright, Chuma and Susi's subsequent treatment exposed a deep streak of Victorian "racism".

Although lauded as emblems of "fidelity, loyalty and obedience," they were quartered with other servants on their tour around the country.

Confused by their treatment - one moment a celebrity, the other a servant - Chuma and Susi soon returned to Africa.

According to Stanley, on his later return to East Africa, Susi fell into "very bad drinking habits." Chuma died just eight years later from consumption.

Wainwright also returned to Africa after five months. He died in 1892 in Tanzania.

Pettitt believes their story deserves to be better known. "If it hadn't been for them then the Livingstone legend might not have taken off in the way it did. They got his body home."

Out of Africa

During their epic voyage across Africa, Wainwright, Chuma and Susi were also intercepted by a Royal Navy lieutenant, Verney Lovett Cameron, at a village some distance from the coast.

Cameron was to become the first European to cross equatorial Africa from sea to sea.

He had been sent by the Royal Geographical Society, 18 months after the famous meeting with Stanley. The society was anxious not to lose Livingstone again, but Cameron arrived only after his death.

Although Cameron tried to "bully" the servants into burying what was left of Livingstone at Unyanyembe village, they refused and persuaded him to help them return the doctor home.

Cameron continued his march and reached Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, in February 1874, where he eventually found Livingstone's papers, which he sent on to England.