II
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MWILI WA DAUDI
It was to the intelligence and superior education of Jacob Wainwright . . . that we were indebted for the earliest account of the eventful eighteen months during which he was attached to the party.
Horace Waller, in The Last Journals of David Livingstone
After that sad event, Jacob Wainwright commenced keeping a diary and continued it for nine weary months, during which they were working their way to the coast, carrying with them the mortal remains of their late master. It is a most interesting record of their journeys.
Letter from Reverend William Price, the Times, April 18, 1874
The Rev. William Price—who at the Church Missionary Station at Nassick, near Bombay, trained the “Nassick Boys” who so nobly brought home Livingstone’s body—has lately transplanted to Mombasa a considerable colony of liberated slaves found in slave dhows, captured by our cruisers, and made over to his care for education at Nassick. These children have been carefully trained by him in various industrial arts as well as in the Christian religion.
Authorised Report of the Church Congress Held at Plymouth: October 3, 4, 5, & 6, 1876
1
4 May 1873
First Entry from the Journal of Jacob Wainwright, written at Chitambo’s Village; in which he gives Further Particulars of the Doctor’s Final Sufferings, Narrates the Woeful Discovery made by the Boy Majwara, and Prays for Grace to Live under a Due Sense of the Mercies of God.
Praise be to the God of Israel and the God of Moses, who made the world and gave Life and Breath to all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small; the God of Grace and Mercy who so loved the world that He gave in sacrifice His Only Begotten Son, that we might have Life Everlasting and not Perish. He has made a Covenant with His Chosen; He has given his Servant His Word.
After his bodily suffering, the Doctor’s Perfect Rest has come. He has left for another shore, to join that great multitude which no man can number, and whose Eternal Hope is in the Word made Flesh. Fear not, sayeth the Lord, for I have called thee by name and thou art Mine. May the Lord in His Munificence grant us Grace, that we may live always with a Due Sense of the Divine Mercies of God. And the Righteous shall gather and be counted in the Days of Wrath.
It was the boy Majwara who found the Doctor, dead on his knees, his hands clasped together under his bowed head. When I eventually went in with the others, it was to find his journal at his side, his pen having fallen to the ground. He had clearly attempted to write in his journal, a touching message of farewell perhaps, or an encouragement to those he left behind to be ever steadfast, but instead of distinguishable words, I saw only indecipherable scrawls followed by a long line that trailed off. The last words he had written in his journal were those of 27 April, four days previously, the day after we arrived at Chitambo’s, when he had written, “Knocked up quite, and remain—recover—sent to buy milch goats. We are on the banks of the Molilamo.”
I was not among the first to see the Doctor. It was only after the expedition leaders had consulted together that they roused me along with the rest of the pagazi. This is how it is with them; Matthew Wellington and Carus Farrar are who they consider the leaders of the seven of us from the Nassick school. And all because they laugh and smile with them; all because they drink pombe and chew the quat leaf like they are mere pagazi. Yet it is I, ignored and overlooked, who is a natural leader of men, for I do not hesitate to speak my mind and tell them when they do wrong. I fear no man; nor did I hesitate to tell even the Doctor when he did wrong.
“Jacob the Zealot,” he called me, for I was more earnest, he said, than John the Evangelist. This is how he mocked God’s Messenger! But I forgave him. Yes, I forgave him. There is no doubt in my mind that he spoke thus because he was unable to repel the truth of my words; they were as a burning lance to a festering boil, for I pride myself on my gift to convince.
At the school at Nassick, when I wanted to discuss a point of theology, I often found that there was no one around me to raise it with because little clusters of both the teachers and the other students melted away upon my approach, unable to counter the force of my conviction.
But it is not for me to put my personal disappointments to the fore. Instead, my eyes are turned up to the Throne of Heaven. For I know without a doubt that it is due entirely to my efforts, and to my ceaseless prayers, that the Doctor had risen to pray. I know that it is entirely my doing that he may yet go to his Eternal Rest in a state of Perfect Grace.
Even though my heart was sorrowing, I could not help but rejoice. For months now, I had tried to turn the Doctor’s thoughts to Ujiji, and from thence to the coast and then on a ship home to England.
In my mind, I was on that ship with him, enduring the endless tossing of the waves so that, at journey’s end, I would be ordained a priest and finally become the missionary I always dreamed I would be. I have no greater desire in my life than that. It is a dream that occupies my every waking thought, and on which I lay my head at night. Nothing moves me as much as the thought of returning to my own land, to bring to salvation the very people who sold me into bondage. But no, not to be their Savior, for Christ alone has the Power, Jesus alone has the Glory. To be an Instrument of Salvation merely, is what I wish to be, to bring my people to the Love and Fear of the Lord.
I could have talked of my dream of a mission with the Doctor, but all he wanted was to talk about his own dream. On and on he talked about the fountains of Herodotus. His hope was that by finding the fountains spoken of by this ancient Greek, he would find the source of the Nile.
“I will do better than Speke and Burton, they should have followed Herodotus,” he said often.
I had my own doubts about this and expressed them to him. For I did not see how he could place so much credence, not to mention faith, in the words of a centuries-dead man who knew of those fountains only by report.
I reminded him that he had told me that this Herodotus had not actually seen the fountains himself, but had merely written of what he had heard. “I cannot claim to know of these places that this Herodotus writes about,” I said to him, “for my learning is not as advanced as yours, but I fear that this man may mislead you.”
He looked at me with a mix of surprise and irritation.
“What can you possibly know of the matter?” he asked. He spoke with such astonishment that he may well have been receiving advice from the birds that were flying above us.
“You gave me this book to read,” I said, and held out the book that he called his Ptolemy, “and see how he describes the hippopotamus. He says of it that it is an animal the size of an ox with four legs with cloven hoofs, a horse’s mane and tail, and conspicuous tusks, with a hide so tough that when dried it can be made into spear shafts. But as we both know, for we have seen it, the creature itself is nothing like its description of it. Let us rather read the Bible together and pray upon the matter.”
“I have read the Bible through four times in the last three years,” he said snappishly. “I will not find the source of the Nile there. It is on Herodotus that I must rely.”
It grieved me sorely to hear him discuss in such a cavalier manner the Book of Books, as though it could be compared with the writings of a Greek who no doubt lived a life of Sin. For the Greeks believed in many gods, in gods too, that acted like men and lusted after women and changed shape to possess them. They lived lives of fornication and jealous quarrels and sired children out of wedlock, as though they were mere mortals; worse than mortals actually, for no Christian would act like those heathen gods.
“Is it not akin,” I pressed him, “to placing faith in those sages who held once that the earth was flat?”
“You are no geographer, Jacob,” he said, “and what do you know about flat earths?”
I found I surprised him most when I let slip some of the knowledge that I had acquired at the Nassick school. On those occasions, he gave me a quizzical, half-amused look, the same h
e had given me when I mentioned Herodotus and the hippopotamus. It grieved me sorely that he seemed to be of the same mind as those of my old teachers who thought that those of the Black Race had no need for knowledge that we could not directly apply, that we should limit our learning only to the skills that we could use to assist the explorers and missionaries as they went into our natal land, that our knowledge should be limited to that which we could do with our hands.
Though I talked thus, I was unable to persuade him to turn his thoughts homeward. And so it was that I resigned myself to preparing his Soul for his Real Home. For we have no Abiding Home on Earth, we long for a Home that is Far away. Realizing that his end was near, I prayed for his Soul every night for the past month. “Our Life is but a Vapor,” I said to the Lord, “and this night his Soul may be required of him. Keep him then, dear Lord, in a State of Preparation for His Last Hour.” And so it is that the Lamb who takes away all Sin has answered me.
As they talked over the fire, the men discussed what he had been doing on his knees. “It looks like he was praying,” said Farjallah Christie.
“But you know Bwana Daudi,” Susi said. “It could also have been that in his delirium, some thought or observation came to him that he wanted to write in his journal.”
But though I remained silent, I knew better. For it is due to the Grace of God, who chose me as the Divine Instrument to manifest His Power, that the Doctor died on his knees, Blessed in the Sight of God. In the hour before he died, feeling a great presentiment, I rose from my tent and went into his hut. The men outside were sleeping, as was, inside, Majwara. The Doctor lay on his back, with his eyes closed. His breathing was shallow and steady.
As I watched his chest rise and fall, I was seized with the conviction that I could be an agent for his healing. Casting my eyes to the heavens, I called on the power of the Holy Ghost. I placed my hands on his shoulders. His eyes opened. He was feeble under my arms as he fought against my power. Careful not to wake the boy, I said a final, fervent prayer for his immortal soul. I left the hut and returned to my own quarters.
I am certain that the Power of my Faith moved him to rise after I left him, and moved him to continue the prayer that I had begun for him. And now he sleeps unknowing, to wake only at the Sound of the Last Trumpet. Then shall he be weighed in the Scales and tried in the Final Judgment. And I know that his soul is safe. For had I not gone in to pray for the Doctor, he would not have risen to his knees, and thus ended his Mortal Life Blessed in the Eyes of the Lord.
2
6 May 1873
Second Entry from the Journal of Jacob Wainwright, written at Chitambo’s Village; in which Wainwright gives a Thanksgiving for the Bountiful Gifts of Providence as he Reflects on how he came from the Dark into the Radical Light of God’s Grace.
When this journal is published, which is my eventual hope, Readers of this account will, no doubt, already be aware of the Nassick school of the Church Missionary Society, which I have mentioned more than once. It is the only school of its kind, being a school established to educate boys who were captured as slaves and freed by British gunboats. Certainly, the fame of this school has grown beyond the borders of the Principality of Bombay in India, where it is located in Saharinpoor, the city of refuge.
For the edification of those who may not yet be aware of it, however, it may perhaps be well if I explain that it was established by the Reverend William Price, in the Year of Our Lord 1854, and now finds itself under the command of the Reverend Charles William Isenberg, who has distinguished himself through many publications, most prominent of which is a dictionary of the Amharic language that is spoken by the Abyssinian people of the Horn of Africa.
Even those Readers who may be well acquainted with the Nassick school may, nonetheless, wonder who this Jacob Wainwright is who addresses them as the author of these pages. What is his provenance; how came he to be the most accomplished, best learned, and most illustrious offshoot of that excellent school; and how came it to pass that he was so closely associated with the final days of Doctor Livingstone that he saved his Soul from the perdition of eternal damnation?
I must confess that I am normally of a retiring nature, and am not one who is keen to push himself forward. Indeed, my inclination is to avoid as far as possible all public notice, for attention of that kind is above all most repugnant to me. But to answer these most interesting questions requires me, in this entry, to do what I should perhaps have done in the first, which is to provide an account of myself, and explain to the Reader who this Jacob Wainwright is who addresses himself so familiarly to the Reader.
When I reflect on my early life, it is with Thanksgiving for having come out of the darkness of slavery. Like the Doctor’s man Chuma, I too, was born among the Yao people, where I was called Thenga, the only son of Mapira, a fisherman, and Ngunda, his second wife. I had a sister, Njemile, as well as other sisters and brothers through my father’s first two wives. Their names have now been lost to me, for it is an age since I was taken from my homeland.
A most fearsome race, the Yao gained great wealth from the trade in human flesh, for they were practiced in the sale of slaves. It was, however, most unusual that they sold their own; my misfortune rose from the long-standing enmity between my father, Mapira, and his brother, a native chief who felt uneasy in his power and saw a threat in every blood relation. He accused his brothers of sorcery, a grievous charge in those parts, and had them and their wives put to death.
Then he sold off their sons and gave their wives and their daughters in marriage to strangers, including my own poor mother and my sister Njemile. My brothers and I were sold, with other blood relatives, to Arab traders, who walked us to the coast.
I was not eight years old then. My memories of that journey are of being with giant, fearsome men who seemed to me to be made up of nothing but hair. I remember only fear and marching, more fear and more marching, marching and marching for many miles until we reached the coast. There we were handed over to a group of men who, as I found out later, were Suaheli Arabs. The next memory I have is of water, so much water, water that stretched before me like an endless field. Then the sensation of being tossed about on a dhow in that endless water, and sailing with others—I later learned—to Zanzibar, where we were to be sold at the slave market.
We were at sea for what seemed like an eternity when came the shout, “Muzungu, muzungu!” Our Arab captors were driven into a state of high panic at the sound of this word. They turned to us, their captives, with the most frightening of the commands they had given us thus far: we were all to jump into the sea. If we did not, they said, the muzungu people who were coming would capture us and eat us all.
Many of the people in the dhow were, like me, from the country of the Yao. The word “muzungu” sounded to our ears like “Mazitu,” a group of Nguni marauders from the south who were the only other people the Yao considered to be more fearsome than they. Even my uncle, who held fearful sway over his people, would have trembled greatly at the thought of Mazitu invading his land. If these Muzunguzitu were that fierce, this would surely be the end of us all.
There followed chaos and much consternation as, all around me, people jumped headlong into the water. Fear rooted me to the spot, for as terrifying as whatever it was these Muzunguzitu were, the dark, unwelcoming waters of the sea below frightened me even more. I was caught up in a small group of captives who moved toward the prow of the dhow, and there, trembling with the others, I hid.
Before long came toward us an even bigger dhow, and one that seemed to be moving with terrifying speed. Even more captives jumped from the sides into the waters below. Caught between the terror of being eaten by the Muzunguzitu and drowning in the ocean, I remained frozen where I was. There were a dozen or more with me, all boys. We crouched low, trying to make ourselves unseen as we waited for we knew not what.
Soon came the heavy tread of footsteps in our dhow. In a matter of moments, our captors became themselves the captives. From the prow wher
e I crouched, I saw the Muzungu, men with strange skin who wore white clothes and had as much hair about their faces as our Arab captors. There were others as well, men of our race, but they were as terrifying to behold as their companions, for they were dressed in the same manner as the men with the strange skin and hair.
Both groups of men spoke a language we did not understand, until one said in the Yao tongue that they had come to get us. One of the black men reached for me, and lifted me, stiff and unyielding, to his chest. The others did the same to other small boys. We were more frightened still and fought against this further capture, until we finally understood that he meant not to eat us, but to rescue us.
But to rescue us and take us where?
Home was not possible: we were surrounded by the ocean on every side. Even if we had been asked where home was, how could we have known? All we saw around us was the endless ocean. We could not have said where home was even if we wanted to.
It was only when I had been at the school for two years that I understood what had happened that day.
As my Readers will be aware, many years before we were captured, the British had abolished the trade in slaves along the Indian Ocean. What some Readers may not know is that this odious trade was nonetheless flourishing along the coastline of the Indian Ocean. For this reason, the British navy ran blockades along the coast, to stop slaves’ reaching Zanzibar, and to prevent those who had already been sold from reaching Persia, Arabia, and India.
The ship that rescued me, the SS Daphne, was one among a small fleet that patrolled the waters to recapture slaves from the dhows headed east. Once rescued, the slaves were sent to begin new lives in India, with the youngest among them being taken to the Nassick school, a haven and a home for the poor boys who had been captured and could not return to their homes.
Out of Darkness, Shining Light Page 10