“But how can we do that? The chief made a big show of giving us this hut to sleep in. Wouldn’t it insult him if we didn’t use it?” inquired David.
The question hung in the air. The two men knew that they were indeed blessed to have been welcomed into the village at all. The last thing they needed was to insult the chief by refusing his hospitality. However, as the day unfolded, so did an answer to their dilemma.
“They want me to get things out of the wagon,” said Pomare as the missionaries sat eating corncakes for breakfast.
“What kind of things?” asked David.
“They don’t know, they’re just curious,” replied Pomare.
David smiled as he looked over to where the wagon stood. Several groups of people had gathered near it, poking at its wheels and canvas canopy.
“Well, let’s see what we can do for them,” said David, scrambling to his feet.
An hour later, the entire village was in an uproar. The people loved David’s shaving mirror most of all. They passed it from one person to the next, each trying to make a funnier face in the mirror than the person before. They laughed until tears ran down their faces.
“They want to know what is in that black bag,” Pomare said to David.
“You’ll have to tell them they can’t touch the things in there. That’s my medical bag. Do you think they know what a doctor is?” David asked.
“I’ll try explaining it,” said Pomare. “They have a witch doctor in the village, for sure.”
The people did understand that the things David Livingstone had in his bag could cure them, and they immediately began to ask him for help.
It was then that David had his idea. “I would like to help you,” he said, “and I will. But first you must let me put up my medicine tent. My medicine works best in there.”
The people understood perfectly and waited patiently while David and Roger scorched the ground and then pitched their tent. For the rest of the day, David doctored the people, most of whom had infections of one kind or another that had not properly healed. As he worked, David asked Pomare to interpret for him so that he could learn as much as possible about Bechuana people’s customs and ways of looking at the world. One thing he learned was how the work was divided up in the village. The women did the gardening, built and maintained the huts, collected firewood, and cooked the meals. The men’s job was to hunt for food and turn what they did not eat into things to wear. The men were expert at tanning skins and making them into clothes for everyone in the village. David was startled to learn that the people even had a way to make metal spearheads, though Pomare told him that the exact process was a closely guarded secret.
That night, the two missionaries slept in the “medicine tent.” Much to his relief, David awoke the next morning free of tampans.
The men had more medical work to do the next day and the day after that, but finally on the fifth day, it was time to leave.
“Are we headed back to Kuruman?” asked Roger as they folded the tent and loaded it onto the wagon.
David looked at his partner. Even though Roger Edwards had been a missionary in Africa for many years, he already expected David to make all the decisions. This was a decision David was only too glad to make. “No. We have come so far, we might as well press on farther north before we turn back,” he announced. Then seeing the panic in his partner’s face, he added, “I don’t think Reverend Moffat will beat us back.”
Roger nodded glumly, and David felt a surge of frustration. Why doesn’t he want to go on? Are all missionaries so ready to scurry back to their own homes and forget the thousands, maybe millions of people out here who have never heard the gospel message? David didn’t have an answer. What he did know, despite his short time in Africa, was that he was different from other missionaries. The missionaries he had met so far were settlers; he was a pioneer, a trailblazer. He had a burning passion in his heart to push farther out into the unexplored areas. He didn’t know where this desire would take him; all he knew was that God had given it to him, and somehow God would use it for good.
Chapter 8
A Second Trip North
The wagon rumbled northward. Every hour David Livingstone would pull out his compass and take a reading. In a notebook he would record the exact direction they were headed and jot down a careful description of the land they were traveling through. Four days after leaving the village of Mabotsa, the group arrived at a village belonging to the Bakwains, a subtribe of the Bechuana people. Again the travelers were welcomed into the village, where the people poked and prodded at their belongings. Most of them had never seen a white person before, and they insisted David roll up his shirtsleeves so they could examine his skin more closely. They spat on his freckled forearms and rubbed vigorously, then laughed with surprise when his freckles would not rub off. They also peered at the two white missionaries’ long bumpy noses, pinching them to make sure they were firmly attached to their faces. “Long noses,” the children giggled as they danced around the men with glee.
Once again, the missionaries were offered a hut to sleep in by the chief, but this time David was ready. He explained that he was a doctor and needed to use his own tent to make medicine. Once the word was out that he could cure people, he was pressed to examine all manner of ailments from sore eyes to infected feet.
The visit with the Bakwains was a great success, and David began wondering why it was so hard to make friends with the tribes around the mission at Kuruman. One night as he and Roger Edwards lay in their tent, he asked about this. “Why is it that the people here are so much more friendly to missionaries?”
David heard Roger Edwards clear his throat. “Umm. I think there are a lot of reasons, but probably the main one is the whole problem of marriage. The way to show you are an important man in Africa is to have many wives. If you can support many wives and all the children they produce, it shows you have a lot of wealth.”
“That makes sense,” said David.
“Well, yes it does. But it’s not God’s way. The Bible teaches that each man must have only one wife, and that’s where the problem begins. When a native man becomes a Christian, he has to give up all but one of his wives. The natives don’t want to do this, and they end up despising missionaries and the gospel message.”
“How do we get around that?” asked David.
“I don’t see that we do,” said Roger, rolling over on his cot. “It’s a matter of getting to the children young, before they marry, I think. Once they have more than one wife, it’s very difficult to get them to budge.” He yawned loudly. “Well, I’m sleepy, how about you?”
“Yes, me too,” replied David, although his mind was already racing. He lay on his back on his cot for a long time, thinking about the whole problem of converting Africans. He could see what a problem having many wives could be, but there had to be some way to reach the African men. There had to be some way around the problem, though right then he couldn’t think what it might be.
The two missionaries stayed in the village for a week, and David made many friends as he treated their endless ailments and illnesses. When he announced it was time for him to return to Kuruman, the people of the village were upset.
“What have we done wrong to send the white men away?” they asked Pomare. Then they begged, “Please tell them to stay with us until the rainy season starts.”
“Tell them I will be back,” David instructed Pomare. “And the next time I come I will stay longer.”
This seemed to cheer the people up a little, and they crowded around the wagon to say farewell to their new friends.
The trip back to Kuruman was slow. David insisted on taking a different route so that he could take notes and add details to his map along the way. The villages were small and sparsely spread along this route, and it was not until they were about one hundred fifty miles from Kuruman that they came across a village of any size. It, too, was a Bakwain village, and the men stopped to introduce themselves. However, Sechele, the village chief, sent word to them that he could not entertain them properly because of his sore eyes. David was able to supply him with some ointment that began to cure his problem. Chief Sechele and the missionaries then sat down together to a meal of milk and beans. The chief was so grateful for the ointment that he presented the missionaries with a deer carcass to take along for food on the remainder of their journey. David thanked him and promised to return to visit him on his next trip north.
As David and Roger Edwards left the village, they had no idea they were being followed. They had gone about ten miles when David pulled the wagon to a halt and they began to set up camp for the night. As they were preparing a patch of ground on which to pitch their tent, David heard an unfamiliar sound under the wagon. He stopped and listened. There it was again. It sounded almost like sobbing. When David crawled under the wagon to investigate, he found a girl who looked to be about eleven years old. The girl was naked except for many strands of colorful beads draped around her neck and body. Tears were streaming down her face.
“What are you doing here?” David asked softly, and then he remembered that she wouldn’t understand a word he was saying. He backed out from under the wagon and went to fetch Pomare, who was hauling water from a nearby stream. He waited patiently for Pomare to tell him why this girl had followed them out into the wilderness and why she was now crying so hard under the wagon.
It didn’t take long for the girl’s story to come tumbling out. The girl’s parents had died when she was very young, and her older sister had taken care of her since then. However, the week before, her older sister had died, too, and now an uncle had decided to sell her as a wife to someone in the village. The girl did not want to be married. Instead, she wanted to stay with some friends who lived near Kuruman. When she heard that that was where the missionaries were headed, she followed the wagon, waiting until she was far away from the village before showing herself.
Pomare had just finished relating the girl’s story when a warrior with a gun slung across his shoulder came running down the trail towards them. David looked around frantically. He guessed the warrior had come to retrieve the girl, but it was too late to hide her. David stepped in front of the girl and waited. As soon as he got close, the warrior started yelling in Bantu. He had come for the girl, who had been promised to his brother as a wife.
David quietly prayed under his breath. He admired the girl’s plucky determination, and he made it clear to Pomare that she would not be forced to return to the village. After several minutes of heated exchange between Pomare and the warrior, an agreement was worked out. If the girl returned all the beads she was wearing (which were used as money) she would be free to travel on with the missionaries. The girl quickly unwound the beads and handed them to the warrior, who seemed satisfied with the outcome of the situation as he trotted off back along the trail.
For the rest of the journey the girl traveled with the men. Sometimes she walked alongside the wagon with Pomare and the other African guide. At other times she rode in the wagon beside David, chattering away to him in Bantu the whole time.
Finally, in December 1841, the travelers arrived safely back in Kuruman. The girl was reunited with her friends, who welcomed her into their hut.
Roger Edwards seemed particularly relieved to find that the Reverend Moffat hadn’t returned in their absence. In fact, the reverend had sent a letter saying that he would be staying in England even longer than planned. The printing of the New Testament in the Sechuana dialect was taking longer than expected, and the London Missionary Society had been so impressed by his talks on Africa that they had asked him to write a book about his missionary work before he returned. So the Reverend Moffat was hard at work writing a book, which he had decided to entitle Missionary Labors and Scenes in Southern Africa.
