David was deeply disappointed that the conversion of Chief Sechele did not lead to many more conversions. He wrote to the London Missionary Society, telling them of a comment one tribesman had made to him: “To be plain with you, we should like you much better if you traded with us and then went away without ever boring us with preaching that word of God of yours.”
Chief Sechele thought he had an answer to David’s problem. “Do you really think my people will eventually believe what you say just by talking to them?” he asked David. “I can only make them do something by beating them. Let me summon my head man, and with our rhinoceros hide whips we’ll make the whole village believe!”
Of course, David could not agree to this forced conversion. He believed that in time, the people would understand that the God of the Bible was more powerful and more loving than any of their tribal gods. However, time was not on David’s side. As the drought wore on, many people in the tribe wanted David to leave. Not only did the people believe that David had stirred up trouble with Chief Sechele, but they also believed that he had brought bad magic to them and had stopped the rain from coming.
Eventually, after two years at Chonuane, the drought drove David from the village. There was simply not enough water for a missionary family to live and grow a garden. In August 1847, David Livingstone, his wife, and their two children moved forty miles west to Kolobeng, a small settlement situated on the shores of a river.
Indeed, the drought had become so severe that Chief Sechele and the entire village at Chonuane moved with the Livingstones. At the new location, David immediately set to work building a mission house, damming the river, and planting crops. He was convinced that this time he had found the right spot to build another great missionary station like Kuruman. There was just one problem: the neighbors—not the other African tribes, but someone much more dangerous—were the Boers.
Chapter 12
Where Others Have Not Planted
When David Livingstone first heard about the Boers, he had been impressed with their courage and determination. After all, over six thousand people—men, women, and children—had trekked northward from the coastal towns of Port Elizabeth and Cape Town into uncharted regions. In the process they founded the republics of Orange Free State, Natal, and Transvaal. Their exodus north from the coast, known as the Great Trek, began in 1835, six years before David arrived in southern Africa.
Now, though, these trekkers were David’s neighbors, and David began to understand better who they were and why they had left the coast in the first place. It was very simple, really. The Boers were descended from Dutch colonists who had arrived in southern Africa from Holland in the seventeenth century and had established large farms for themselves. After they had enslaved the Hottentot tribes, who lived on the coast at the time, things generally went smoothly for the next one hundred fifty years. The Boers had everything they wanted—free labor, large tracts of land, and no one telling them what to do. But that all changed in 1814 when the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost part of the African continent, fell into British hands. British law, which soon included a ban on owning slaves, prevailed there. Through the efforts of William Wilberforce in England, slavery had been outlawed in all British territories by 1833. This meant that the Boers had to free their slaves and find some other way to work their land.
Understandably, the Boers were not happy at this turn of events. How dare the British tell them how they should run their lives, they protested. However, when the Boers realized the British were serious and they would be forced to give up their slaves, they decided to abandon their farms and move northward away from prying British eyes. So the Great Trek began. Within a few years, most Boers had abandoned the coastal areas and headed inland.
From the time David arrived in Cape Town and then in Port Elizabeth, he had not wanted to live around large groups of white people. He hated the constant arguing and bickering, and he wanted to live and work with native people far away from the influence of traders and slave owners. However, to the east of Kolobeng lay a settlement of Boers who had made the Great Trek, and these people were not happy to have David for a neighbor. They had already made slaves of six tribes in the area and now had their eyes on Chief Sechele and the Bakwains. It would be a simple enough matter for the Boers to round up this tribe, except for one thing—David Livingstone lived among them.
The Boers did everything they could to get David and his family to leave the area. They forbade David to preach the gospel message in their territory and told him that if he sent a native agent to preach in his place, they would kill the agent. David stood firm, however, and would not be intimidated into leaving.
Eventually the Boers got tired of waiting for David to leave and decided to attack the Bakwains at Kolobeng whether David was there or not. Their plan for the raid was simple, just like all of their other raids. They would force unarmed Africans from other tribes to go with them. When they reached the village they wanted to attack, they would push the unarmed natives to the front and use them as human shields. From behind the unarmed Africans the Boers would fire at the village. If the people in the village tried to fight back in any way, the unarmed Africans, not the Boers, would be killed. When the fighting was over, the Boers would take the women and children captive and plunder the village.
David heard a rumor about the Boers’ intentions, and sure enough, soon afterwards a messenger arrived from the Boers commanding Chief Sechele to surrender rather than face the death or enslavement of his entire tribe. The Boers’ actions enraged David, who climbed onto a horse and rode three hundred miles to Boer headquarters to protest what was about to happen.
When David arrived, he was met by several hundred men, saddled and ready to join the fight to enslave the Bakwains and take their land. Each man was armed with a rifle, while there were only five guns in the whole of Kolobeng. If the Boers were ever allowed to go through with their plan, a tremendous slaughter would take place in the village. David was appalled and went straight to their commander. After many angry exchanges and numerous threats, the commander finally agreed to call off the raid on Kolobeng. However, he refused to promise that there would be no attack on the area at some time in the future.
What changed the commander’s mind was David’s threat to write and tell people in England and Europe what the Boers were doing. David knew this would touch a raw nerve, since the reason the Boers wanted him out of the village was so that there would be no European witnesses to their actions. The Boers themselves were not proud of the tactics they used in battle and did not want people observing them and telling others about them. So David’s threat to tell people in Europe what the Boers were up to changed the Boers’ minds about attacking Kolobeng and won the day.
David was saddened by the whole situation. Africa might be vast, but the areas where native people could live without interference from the Boers was shrinking each year. As he thought about the situation, David decided he had to find a path north through the Kalahari Desert. If he found such a path, perhaps he could lead the Bakwains out of the reach of the Boers. However, mounting an expedition to search for a route north through the vast Kalahari was expensive. Since David had already borrowed against his yearly stipend from the London Missionary Society, he could not afford to buy oxen, horses, and supplies and hire the men he would need to accompany him. Still, he would not give up the idea. There had to be some way to finance such a trip. He would just have to find it.
David wrote to many people explaining his desire to travel north and search for a path across the Kalahari Desert. One of the people he wrote to was his old friend Captain Thomas Steele, one of the hunters who had traveled north with David and Roger Edwards on their trip from Kuruman to establish the mission station at Mabotsa. Although Captain Steele was too busy to make a trip into the Kalahari Desert, his friend Cotton Oswell had the time and interest to make such a trip. Cotton Oswell was a civil servant from India who loved to visit Africa to hunt wild animals. He came from a very wealthy family and had plenty of money to spend on such pursuits. One day in December 1848, David received a letter from him.
“Mary, I don’t believe it. Listen to this,” he exclaimed as he read the letter.
Mary set her basket of laundry down and gave David her full attention. “What is it?” she asked.
“It’s a letter from Cotton Oswell. He has landed at Port Elizabeth and is ready to mount an expedition into the Kalahari! He says, ‘I have engaged ten servants, purchased two wagons, twenty horses and eighty oxen. As I write to you they are being loaded up with 300 lbs. of coffee, 400 lbs. of tea, 100 lbs. of salt, 400 lbs. of sugar, two cases of brandy, a box of soap, 10 lbs. of pepper, three bottles of mustard, and an assortment of buckets, silverware, dishes, and kettles. In addition to the food I have a telescope, a sextant, gunpowder, and cartridges.’ He goes on to say, ‘I would be honored if we could join forces on this venture.’” David looked up at his wife, his eyes shining with delight.
“God answers prayer!” Mary exclaimed. “Why, David, everything he lists in his letter must have cost him six hundred pounds at least to buy, and he’s invited you along with him. How wonderful!”
Cotton Oswell also said in his letter that he would be passing through Kolobeng in March. Along the way he was going to collect his friend Mungo Murray, another hunter who would accompany them on the trip. This was the best news David had heard in weeks, and he began immediately making preparations for Cotton Oswell’s arrival.
David tried to convince Chief Sechele to go along with him, but with the threat of a Boer attack still hanging over the village, the chief felt he should stay home with his people. However, David did recruit thirty Bakwain warriors and guides to join him. He could not afford to pay them, but he promised to make room in his wagon for the tusks of any elephants they managed to hunt down. The ivory from the tusks was worth a lot of money in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town.
David had often heard the Bakwains talking about a great lake in the Kalahari Desert. The Bakwains called it Lake Ngami, and David had set his sights on finding it. He had learned the hard way that a mission station must be situated beside a steady supply of water, and Lake Ngami could be such a place.
Although he had never met Cotton Oswell, David was certain that any friend of Captain Steele’s would be a good and honest man. Indeed, he had been so impressed with Thomas Steele that when Mary gave birth to their third child, he named the boy Thomas Steele Livingstone. Now David waited anxiously for Cotton Oswell and his party to arrive.
When the men finally arrived at Kolobeng, David soon discovered he had been right. He and Cotton Oswell liked each other from the moment they met. Cotton Oswell had no objection to looking for Lake Ngami, and he was delighted to find that David could speak some of the local dialects.
The expedition left Kolobeng on June 1, 1849. First it headed northwest to a village called Serotl, 120 miles from Kolobeng. Serotl was on the edge of the Kalahari Desert and was the last point marked on the map. It was a sobering moment for everyone as the group passed the last point known to white men. No one knew what lay beyond.
Passing Serotl, the expedition entered the territory of Chief Sekomi of the Bamangwato tribe. The chief seemed friendly enough and insisted that two of his men accompany the party to act as scouts to find water for the eighty oxen, twenty horses, and forty-five men who needed a large supply of water each day.
