Chasing Doctor David Livingstone: Petina Gappah (1871)
Petina Gappah, author of Out of Darkness, Shining Light
In this invigorating episode of Travels Through Time, the award-winning Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah takes us in pursuit of the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone in the year 1871. We follow the journalistic chancer Henry Morton Stanley as he attempts to find Livingstone and pull of the newspaper scoop of the year.
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David Livingstone was one of the towering figures of Victorian Britain. He was a missionary who became an explorer, who believed that he was divinely appointed to solve the puzzle of the geography of Africa.
Livingstone made his name in the 1850s when he became the first recorded Briton to set eyes on Victoria Falls. In 1855 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and the next year he published his huge bestseller, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa.
Victorian Britons grew used to consuming stories of Livingstone’s travels as heroic adventure narratives. He was portrayed as a dynamo of energy and an oracle of vision who chased after the loftiest prizes: mysterious lakes or hidden rivers in a vast continent.
But what of the African people who travelled with Livingstone? What did they think of this peculiar wandering mzungu? What kind of lives were living at that time? What did Livingstone’s intervention in their societies mean for them?
“It seemed most peculiar to me that a man should leave the life he knows in his own land, should sail for months and months in a jahazi on an angry sea to come all this way just to wander about looking for the beginning of a river. ”
The Zimbabwean novelist Petina Gappah raises these questions during the course of this episode as she takes us back to the year 1871. She tells us how glamorous Livingstone’s adventures were for his contemporaries. She shows us the magic and peril of strangers encountering one another for a first time. She explains how Livingstone’s expeditions worked as logistical enterprises. Then she depicts some of the more disturbing aspects of the period: the east African slave trade, and the massacres it generated.
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Click here to order Petina Gappah’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show notes:
Scene One: 21 March 1871, Bagamoio, a port on the east coast of what is now Tanzania. The American journalist Henry Morton Stanley sets out from Bagamoio for a daring mission into the African interior.
Scene Two: 15 July 1871, A day market in Nyangwe, a village in Manyema, on the right bank of the Lualaba River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Livingstone witnesses a massacre.
Scene Three: October 1871, Ujiji in present day Tanzania. Stanley finally meets Livingstone, having marched 700 miles to reach him.
Memento: The instruments that David Livingstone used, later ‘purloined’ by Lt Cameron
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest; Petina Gappah
Producer: Maria Nolan
Reading: Makomborero Kasipo
Editorial: Artemis Irvine
Titles: Jon O
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Images
The search for David Livingstone in central Africa, led by H.M. Stanley. Wood engraving, 1872. (Wellcome Collection)
What you will learn in this episode
David Livingstone’s biography and motivations for exploring in Africa
About the little-documented east African slave trade
What the Indigenous people thought of Livingstone
The etymology of the word mzungu
About the ‘cold-fish’ character Henry Morton Stanley and his get-rich-quick schemes
Gallery of images
All images from the Wellcome Collection
Livingstone’s description of the Nyangwe Massacre
“I was walking away to go out of the market, when I saw one of the fellows haggling about a fowl, and seizing hold of it. Before I had got thirty yards out, the discharge of two guns in the middle of the crowd told me that slaughter had begun: crowds dashed off from the place, and threw down their wares in confusion, and ran. At the same time that the three opened fire on the mass of people near the upper end of the marketplace volleys were discharged from a party down near the creek on the panic-stricken women, who dashed at the canoes. These, some fifty or more, were jammed in the creek, and the men forgot their paddles in the terror that seized all. The canoes were not to be got out, for the creek was too small for so many; men and women, wounded by the balls, poured into them, and leaped and scrambled into the water, shrieking.
A long line of heads in the river showed that great numbers struck out for an island a full mile off: in going towards it they had to put the left shoulder to a current of about two miles an hour; if they had struck away diagonally to the opposite bank, the current would have aided them, and, though nearly three miles off, some would have gained land: as it was, the heads above water showed the long line of those that would inevitably perish.
Shot after shot continued to be fired on the helpless and perishing. Some of the long line of heads disappeared quietly; whilst other poor creatures threw their arms high, as if appealing to the great Father above, and sank.”
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Click here to order Out of Darkness Shining Light by Petina Gappah from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
Featured image from Dynamichrome
Abraham Lincoln, 1865
5th February 1865, Gardner's Gallery, Washington DC, United States
Original glass plate by Alex Gardner
(Library of Congress)
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Original caption reads, “Abraham Lincoln, three-quarter length portrait, seated and holding his spectacles and a pencil.”