02.03 - Commerce and Christianity

3. Commerce and Christianity.

Commerce and Christianity So far, Livingstone had not come into direct contact with the slave trade. The Act of Abolition, passed in 1833, had stopped this on the west coast but it persisted in the east. On this journey, as he neared Linyanti in the very heart of the continent, Livingstone encountered a party of Arab slave traders driving their captive Africans, like cattle, to the slave markets on the coast. Livingstone said he was ’so appalled by this terrible trafficking in human life’ that he determined to put a stop to it. He decided that, if easier routes could be found by which honest merchants could travel to the interior and establish trade with the Africans, then the slave trade could not survive. The cure lay in commerce and Christianity, in that order, and to this end the discovery of such routes became the immediate object of his quest.

Africa’s great rivers might prove to be what Livingstone called ’the highway to the interior’, and so from Linyanti he set out northwards with a party of twenty-seven Makalolo carriers furnished for him by Chief Sekeletu. At Sesheke, Livingstone had his first sight of the great Zambesi River and, turning northwest, began the hazardous trek which would bring them ultimately to the port of Luanda on the Atlantic Coast. To show that it was a journey of goodwill, shields were left behind and only spears were carried; a minimum amount of baggage and no stores were taken, except for a small quantity of tea, coffee and sugar. From the outset it was an unfortunate journey. Livingstone, for the first time, fell victim to malaria (as did most of his companions) - a disease which was to hamper him for the rest of his life.