After David had answered all the Reverend Moffat’s questions, he excused himself to take a walk around the mission property. The mission was as beautiful as ever. The man-made canals flowed with spring water and fed smaller ditches that now watered over five hundred acres of garden plots. The plots were owned and cared for by local African families, and the Reverend Moffat gave the people advice on what to plant and when. Indeed, there was nothing the Reverend Moffat liked to do more than to get out in the garden himself, since he had been a master gardener before becoming a missionary.
David sat on a bench in the mission garden for a while. The scent of orange blossom and the chirping of crickets filled the air. As he sat, David thought about what he was going to do. While he had been recuperating in Mabotsa it had all seemed so simple. He would ride down to Kuruman and ask Mary Moffat to marry him. If she agreed, they would be married, and she would move back to Mabotsa with him. But now, as he looked around Kuruman, he wasn’t so sure the plan was workable. He had forgotten just how settled everything at Kuruman was. The place ran like clockwork. There was not a weed in the garden or a blade of grass out of place.
Mary lived with her parents in a large stone house, where five servants did all the cooking, cleaning, and laundry for the family. Would she really want to leave all this and move to Mabotsa, where she would have to do her own cleaning and help with the cooking? And there would also be laundry to wash and floors to scrub. Not only that, David knew that he could not live the kind of life Mary’s father lived. The Reverend Moffat liked to stay around the mission, tending the garden, talking with the local Africans, and working on his translation of the Bible into the local dialect. David thought these were all good things for the Reverend Moffat, but not for him. He needed to travel, map unexplored areas, talk with previously unknown chiefs, and preach the gospel message where it had never been heard before.
The longer he sat in the garden, the more David wondered about the kind of life he had to offer a wife. Would Mary Moffat be willing to accept such a life? There was only one way to find out. Clumsily he stumbled to his feet. By tonight, he promised himself, I’ll know whether I’m going to have a wife or not.
Chapter 11
A Married Man
Dark-haired, twenty-three-year-old Mary Moffat tipped her head and stared at David Livingstone. “You are serious, aren’t you?” she asked.
David looked into her deep brown eyes and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I would like you to be my wife, Mary. I know it will not be an easy life….”
“No life is easy,” interrupted Mary matter-of-factly. “Look at my father and mother. Everyone thinks my father has the model mission station for all of Africa here at Kuruman, but no one knows how much work it takes to keep it all going.”
David chuckled. He had picked a practical woman, that was for sure. “Well, what do you say, Mary?” he prodded nervously.
“Mary Livingstone. I like the sound of that!” she said, nodding her head. “Do you think January would give you time to build us a house?”
David smiled at his soon-to-be wife. “I think that will do just fine. A midsummer wedding, it is then!”
David could hardly wait to get back to Mabotsa and start building. Whenever a hunting party was traveling through on its way south, he would write a letter to Mary telling her how the house was coming along. He even drew pictures of the house for her.
The house progressed quickly. It was fifty-two feet long and twenty feet wide, a typical rectangular mission house. The front door led into the center room, which was the living room. To the left was a bedroom, and to the right a pantry and a study. The kitchen was a small building completely separate from the house. All kitchens were built this way because of the heat the ovens generated and because the ovens sometimes caught on fire. If the ovens did catch fire, the fire might burn down the kitchen but not the entire house.
About halfway through the project, David ran into a problem, which he described in a letter to Mary: “A stone falling was stupidly, or rather instinctively, caught by me in its fall by the left hand and it nearly broke my arm over again. It swelled very much, and I fevered so much I was glad of a fire, although the weather was quite warm.”
It took two weeks of complete rest before David was up and about again. David realized, however, that it was useless to try to lift his arm higher than his shoulder, so he gave up the idea of building a solid stone house. Instead, the house was completed with plastered mud walls. David used helpers from the village to do the work when his arm became too painful.
Roger Edwards could not help David because he’d had an accident in which he had crushed a finger. David doubted that Roger would have helped anyway. The relationship between the two missionaries had become strained, especially now that David was about to become Robert Moffat’s son-in-law.
The two men disagreed over things small and large. Roger continually reminded David that he was the junior missionary at the station, both because he was thirteen years younger and because he had been in Africa only three years. However, David got on well with the Africans; he learned their languages quickly and was fascinated by their customs. He wanted the natives to have more say in the life of the mission and hoped to start a training program so that they could become preachers and teachers themselves. Roger Edwards was not in favor of this at all. Eventually, things came to a head when Roger showed David a stinging letter he had written to the London Missionary Society. David was shocked when he read it. Roger had written about things David thought they had forgiven each other for long ago.
Perhaps it was his Scottish sense of justice, but something inside David Livingstone was stirred when he read Roger’s letter. David wrote an equally scathing letter to the LMS telling his side of the story. There was just one problem. David mailed his letter off, unaware that Roger had had second thoughts and had ripped up his letter instead of sending it. Now, as David prepared for his wedding in January, a blunt letter complaining about the senior missionary in Mabotsa was on its way to England.
The wedding was held in the church at Kuruman on January 2, 1845. The Reverend Moffat married David and Mary, and Mary’s two younger sisters, Ann and Bessie, were Mary’s attendants. David stayed on in Kuruman with Mary for two months before the couple moved to Mabotsa.
Things in Mabotsa did not go well for the newlyweds. Roger Edwards and his wife had originally left Kuruman partly to get away from the constant direction of Robert Moffat and his family. They resented Mary Livingstone’s moving to Mabotsa. They were not gracious and tried to make things as difficult as possible for the young missionary’s wife. The letter David had written to the London Missionary Society had caused a stir, and a letter was sent to the Reverend Moffat asking him to look into the situation. All in all, Roger Edwards and David Livingstone had had enough of each other. To David’s way of thinking, Africa was a huge, uncharted land, and David was living in a tiny, remote spot with a man who irritated him every day. One of them would have to go!
David finally decided that he was the one who should leave. One evening after dinner, he decided it was time to tell Mary of his plan. “Mary,” he began, as she mended a hole in his jacket, “I have something to tell you. I’ve been considering this for quite some time, and I think we should leave Mabotsa.”
Mary looked up, startled. “But where will we go? Back to Kuruman?” she asked.
David shook his head. “Mary, there are already too many missionaries sitting around in the southern areas. I want to go somewhere where there are no missionaries. Somewhere where people have not really heard the gospel message yet.”
“But the money,” she replied. “And the baby.”
David reached out and held her hand. “If God is leading us, we will have enough money, and you will be a good mother wherever you are.”
Although David tried to sound confident, the same questions had been swirling around in his head. Mary was pregnant and due to have a baby on their first wedding anniversary, and the money was a problem. David had received seventy-five pounds a year as a single man, and the London Missionary Society had raised the amount to one hundred pounds when he and Mary married. Within a few months, though, there would be three mouths to feed on the extra twenty-five pounds a year. As well, starting a new mission station was costly. David knew this from his experience in setting up the Mabotsa station. Every spare penny he’d had went into the building and equipping of the mission station.
“Well,” said Mary, breaking into his thoughts, “I suppose you have made up your mind, but I do hate to leave this house and all the work you have done.”
“I do, too,” replied David, looking around at the house, “but if I did it once, I can do it again. And my arm is stronger now.”
“Do you have a plan?” his wife asked. “Somewhere in mind for us to go?”
“Yes,” said David, his eyes lighting up. “I want to go farther north to Chonuane.”
“Chonuane?” questioned Mary. “What makes you think Chonuane would be a good place for us?”
“I have been there before. Remember I told you about Chief Sechele. I healed his son, and we had long talks together. I think he might be key to opening the area up to the gospel message. He listens well and asks intelligent questions. I haven’t found many people here who are as interested in Christianity as he is.”
“Perhaps it would be a good idea,” agreed Mary, “as long as we can be settled before the baby arrives.”
The move forty miles north to Chonuane was completed just in time for the arrival of the Livingstones’ first baby, who was named Robert, after David’s grandfather.
Life at Chonuane was much more difficult than it had been at Mabotsa. Food was scarce, and a long drought had set in, making it impossible to grow the variety of fruits and vegetables that had grown in Mabotsa. Still, David was very happy at Chonuane, especially when he spent time with Chief Sechele. The chief had proven even more intelligent and eager to learn than David had first thought. David showed Chief Sechele a translation of the Old Testament in his own dialect—Sechuana—that Robert Moffat had prepared. The chief, who had never read a word in his life, was now eager to learn. Within two days, he could read and write the alphabet, and only six weeks later he was reading the Old Testament by himself!
David and Chief Sechele studied the Bible together every day. David also busied himself with building a house, doing medical work, and starting a church in the village. A year later, the Livingstones’ second child was born. This time the baby was a girl, whom they named Agnes, after David’s sister.
By now Chief Sechele had read the Bible through several times and had decided to become a Christian. David was thrilled about the chief’s decision, except for one thing. Like every other chief in the area, Chief Sechele had more than one wife; in fact, he had five wives. Each wife was the daughter of one of his subchiefs, and the chief had married each of them to strengthen his ties within the tribe. Now, as a Christian, Chief Sechele was beginning to think that having more than one wife was wrong. David did not know what to tell him. Polygamy went against everything he had ever been taught was right, but Chief Sechele’s wives depended on him, since each one had borne him children. David also understood that in African culture, divorce was a great insult to a wife and her entire family.
The two men talked at length about the problem, and in the end, David told Chief Sechele that he would have to do what he thought was best. The chief decided to go ahead and divorce his latest two wives as politely as possible. He gave them both new clothes and many of his possessions and sent them back to their families. There was an immediate uproar. Many people in the tribe questioned who Chief Sechele thought he was, taking on the white man’s ways and forgetting the ways of his forefathers. But the chief would not back down. He was baptized, and although no one else in the village followed his example, he continued to live as a Christian.
