Livingstone and Me
David Livingstone was born over two centuries ago, and he is still much written about. I surprise myself at the shifts in my perception of this great Scottish hero. Not always one of mine though.
As a colonial, our British rulers made sure that we were given their version of world events. When I was a child, there was not one child in the whole island (of Mauritius) who waved his little paper Union Jack with anything less than reverence and fervour every 24th of May to celebrate Empire Day! We burst our lungs singing Rule Britannia.
Our heroes were all British heroes. We recited, ‘Our Nel was as brave as a lion and as gentle as a lamb.’ We rejoiced as Sir Francis Drake put the wicked
Spanish Armada to flight. We cheered Wellington’s triumph over Napoleon at Waterloo. We cursed the Kaiser, thought Americans were stupid to choose to stop being part of the Empire over which the sun never set. We followed the march of Montgomery in the African desert and knew that he would be more than a match for Rommel.
David Livingstone had brought Light to the dark continent and converted the natives to Christianity, although we would have preferred to see Islam there. We followed Scott’s journey to the Antarctic and simply knew that the Norwegian must have played dirty in order to beat him. Shackleton, Gordon, cigar-chomping Churchill, who would make sure that Hitler was defeated.
When in my teenage years people began talking about independence, most of us asked if we hadn’t gone mad. How can any sane person off his own bat want to stop being part of that great family?
You see,we were not taught to reason why, we were taught to … eh … never question our elders. At school, we were given the facts, and they defined the truth. No teacher asked for our opinion; we weren’t supposed to have opinions; we were enjoined to accept theirs. Nobody in his right mind would question that the three angles of a triangle added up to one hundred and eighty degrees.
Strange as it my seem, the first teacher who asked for our opinion on a text we had read, was an Englishman who had been in the war against Germany. He even challenged our belief that Satan, in Paradise Lost, was a complete rotter. Or Shylock the Jew for that matter. He asked us what we thought of being Mauritians but ruled from London. He read us a passage from The Noble Savage and asked us whether the opinions Dickens expressed in it were not
racist. He said that in his opinion, German composers like Mozart and Beethoven were the true greats (“What? Better than Gilbert and Sullivan?). He asked us what we thought of the Tabla, the Harmonium.
It was very disturbing. There we were serene in our hitherto unshaken beliefs and now we were hearing stories about how the Blacks were allowed to die in the streets of South Africa because the ambulances were only for Whites. Churchill caused the famine in Calcutta (Pather Panchali), but the fact that he destroyed Dresden needlessly, would have made him guilty of war crimes
if the Allies had lost the war. Had we been taught wrong all these years?
Still, when I left Mauritius to come for university studies in England, it was with the fervour of our elderly Muslim acquaintances who had scrimped and saved for a lifetime in order to go to pilgrimage in Mecca.
I had of course heard of the notices in shop windows advertising for accommodation: Sorry No Coloured, and knew that there was a small percentage of folks who were racists, but the impact when it actually happened to me was unforeseeable. Little by little, all the illusions I had harboured were peeled away like the layers of an onion.
Inevitably I swung from one extreme to the other. I was now an exploited and repressed ex-colonialist. I exulted in Hungary beating England at Wembley. Livingstone was an arrogant Imperialist. Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole because Norwegians were cleverer. Gandhi had defeated the invaders by Ahimsa (Peaceful resistance). The whole of Africa was doing away with
colonialism. The Mau Mau was defeating the Brits, the Algerians were defeating the French. The Russians were the new heroes. There were Gagarin, Castro, Tito, Nehru… Whoever believed that British is Best. British products were shoddy.
But it is in the nature of pendulums to swing. Boris Pasternak happens, Gulags, Prague. Where are the heroes?
Time for rehabilitation. Didn’t Livingstone campaign against slavery? Why do the people of independent Malawi call their university Livingstonia? Why do they have Livingstone museums? But the one ting that swung it for me was the story of what happened to his body after his death in Ujiji. The natives who had worked with/ for him took his heart out and buried it under a Mvula tree in Chitambo, and then carried him for over a thousand miles to the coast to be taken for burial in Westminster Abbey. What sort of man would inspire such veneration after his death?
Even this fierce opponent of colonialism wrote a Radio play for the BBC on the controversial figure of Henry Morton Stanley and his meeting with Livingstone in Ujiji.
