He paused. ‘Weird too,’ he went on. ‘There’s been talk about witchcraft at one of the holding centres for weeks. A few days ago an old couple arrived on their own. One of our people saw them going down to the water supply. The next thing a mob attacks them, starts stoning them. By the time our people got there they were dead. Everyone was standing around yammering that these were the witches who had come to poison the water supply.’
He was a gawky young engineer just three months out of Melbourne. He shook his head. ‘Weird,’ he said again.
I STARTED UP the hill to find the grave of a missionary failure. It was a good sweaty climb to the little Anglican church, but before reaching it I was hailed by an elderly gent with white whiskers in a dark three-piece suit.
‘Are you going to pray up ther?’ he asked. I said what I was really looking for was the missionaries’ graves.
‘There are no graves up there,’ he said emphatically.
‘Where are the missionary graves, then?’
‘Well,’ he said, swaying, ‘we have many graves. Over there’ – sweeping a hand towards the hill opposite – ‘we have Christian graves, Muslim graves, all sort of graves.’
I laughed. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, swaying again, ‘I am a little drinked. Come, and we will look together for the graves of your missionaries.’
We finally found them on the hill opposite, at the end of a track. Bushes and shrubs grew restlessly across the little plot and billowed around the entrance, two stone pillars on which mould sharpened the blackened outline of a crucifix. Amid the turmoil of grass and weeds were two or three mounds. The headstones were gone and the resting place of John Boden Thomson was unmarked. This was all that remained of the London Missionary Society’s expedition to central Africa in 1878.
Like so many of his calling, Thomson was a Scot, but he grew up knowing none of the wretchedness in which the young Livingstone was forged. Indeed, childhood indulgence made him a bit of a prig. In 1870 he was assigned to his first missionary posting, among the Matabele people of central Africa.
A new mood was on the rise in Britain. That year the writer and philosopher John Ruskin delivered a lecture at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford that inflamed a generation. ‘Here is what England must do or perish,’ Ruskin said. ‘She must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthy men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on … If we can get men, for little pay, to cast themselves against cannon-mouths for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave kindly and righteously for her, and who will bring up their children to love her.’
Thomson was not the best example of the new generation and his first mission was an utter failure. His companions, a melancholy Yorkshireman named William Sykes and Thomas Morgan Thomas, a manic-depressive Welshmen, were ill-suited, and the Matabele were a warlike folk forbidden by their king, Lobengula, to follow the Gospel. After a demoralising encounter with the king Thomson wrote: ‘He told me that God had given the Bible to the white man, but as He had not given it to the black man also, it was clear He did not mean the black man to have it.’
After five despairing years among the Matabele, Thomson’s heart lifted at the receipt of orders to join an expedition to plant a new mission at Lake Tanganyika. The objective was nothing less than a living monument to the society’s most revered son, Livingstone, in the place with which his name was synonymous, Ujiji. Thomson sailed for Zanzibar to join the expedition leader, Roger Price.
Price was no stranger to disaster in Africa. In 1859 he and a missionary named Holloway Helmore led their families, four adults and five children in all, 500 miles through the Kalahari desert to the source of the Zambezi where, one by one, they started to die. The last to go were Price’s daughter and wife, who was so emaciated that in places her bones had broken through the skin. Only Price and two of the children reached safety.
After this harrowing experience, Price may not have been well suited to lead a new expedition. He and Thomson were at odds even before they started away from the coast, in July 1877. This time it was the pack animals which died one by one, bogged down in swamps. The expedition had not yet cleared the coastal belt when the last wagon had to be abandoned and the missionaries started to suffer bouts of fever. At this stage Price, haunted by memories and intimations of catastrophe, recognised that the project was inherently flawed and announced he was returning to advise the directors that a mission could be set up at Ujiji only after supply stations had been established along the route. Now he and Thomson quarrelled openly. The party divided, three other members carrying on with Thomson. They were still 600 miles from Ujiji.
Fever afflicted them all. Thomson was also haemorrhaging internally and had to be supported as they limped along. But his tongue had lost none of its sharpness, especially towards the younger brethren, who came to dread their leader’s disapproval. As the party stumbled agonisingly towards Ujiji, Thomson became increasingly isolated from his companions, and their peril. He wrote to the directors in a shaking hand: ‘Please do not let Mrs Thomson know I have been so ill. It would only make her anxious for nothing.’
On a day in late August, when the weather was fine and mild, he received his reward with the sight of the inland sea. For a few days he rallied. ‘I cannot tell you how pleased we were to get here,’ he wrote to the directors. ‘We have found a most healthy-looking site for our station close on Kigoma Bay. It is the highest hill here.’ Soon afterwards he suffered an apoplectic attack. His companions nursed him for a week, immersing his body in water to bring down the raging temperature. Then he died. He was thirty-seven and in eight years had failed to make a single convert.
Although Price’s judgement had been amply vindicated, the directors were looking for scapegoats rather than explanations and he was disgraced. Now Joseph Mullens, the society’s foreign secretary, determined to find out for himself just what it was that made central Africa so uncongenial to missionary activity. A month after setting out from Zanzibar, he died of fever.
After that the society abandoned Ujiji. In a flash of unusual candour, an official report noted that this ‘painfully fascinating story stands as a striking example of how great missionary enterprises ought not to be attempted’.
THE LITTLE ANGLICAN church stood on a spur of the hill identified by Thomson, across the valley from his grave. I had intended to pause just for a moment but a service was in progress and a sidesman who spotted me bustled up and shepherded me to a pew.
The crude whitewashed walls, unadorned by images or symbols, were surmounted by wooden rafters and a roof of corrugated iron which radiated eddies of heat down on the congregation. Relief came with a light air wafting in through large glassless windows that looked out to the lake. Even so, I was soon sweating profusely. We were tightly bunched on the pews, 350 people or so, and I was pressed up against a corpulent man.
I was in a reverie when he nudged me. ‘You must go up,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘You must go up. The minister wants you to introduce yourself to everyone.’
From the back, I walked up the aisle, aware of the buzz at the appearance of a mzungu which trailed me like a slipstream. Grinning foolishly, I was enfolded in the arms of the minister at the lectern. ‘Now you tell us about yourself,’ he said firmly. ‘I will translate.’
I did it as best I could. I said I was from a town named Windsor, near London, that I brought greetings from Anglicans in Britain. I told them a little about my journey, I said I loved their country and thanked them for their hospitality. At the end I said: ‘Nafurahi sana kukuona.’ This went down very well and I returned to my seat amid applause and shining faces.
The rest of the service occupied almost two hours. An animated pastor, who somewhat resembled Archbishop Desmond Tutu, gave an extended sermon in sonorous tones; a youth group improvised a piece of theatre that I was unable to follow but which induced a general state of hilarity; the singing was lovely.
At