“The Publicity Stunt” refers to Livingstone’s internationally hyped expedition to find the headwaters of the Nile. Milbrandt calls it a “stunt” because Livingstone’s deeper motive was not the Nile. “Livingstone was no longer mounting a Nile expedition, but a grand publicity stunt. The Nile quest provided the platform he needed to campaign against the slave trade” (118).
Have you ever heard about the extraordinary effect that the life of David Livingstone (1813–1873) had on the East African slave trade? It received only a passing sentence in an article I wrote two years ago. Then that summer, another world opened to me. I read Jay Milbrandt’s The Daring Heart of David Livingstone: Exile, African Slavery, and the Publicity Stunt That Saved Millions. I would like to give you a window into that world.
Milbrandt’s subtitle is not only provocative; it prepares you for what’s coming. “Exile” refers to the long stretches of time Livingstone spent in the eastern interior of Africa, cut off from his homeland — sending, in one season, over forty letters, only to have one get through.
“African Slavery” refers to “the devilish traffic in human flesh” feeding not the American plantations from West Africa, but the plantations of Arabia, Persia, and India, especially via the routes through the island of Zanzibar off the eastern coast of today’s Tanzania.
“The Publicity Stunt” refers to Livingstone’s internationally hyped expedition to find the headwaters of the Nile. Milbrandt calls it a “stunt” because Livingstone’s deeper motive was not the Nile. “Livingstone was no longer mounting a Nile expedition, but a grand publicity stunt. The Nile quest provided the platform he needed to campaign against the slave trade” (118).
The final phrase of the subtitle, “That Saved Millions,” carries more than one meaning. Not only was slavery declared illegal in colonial East Africa 36 days after Livingstone’s death, but his larger dream to see a “Christian Africa” was in one sense realized 140 years later, because “as of 2012, a Pew Foundation study reported 63% of Sub-Saharan Africa as identifiably Christian” (247).
Missionary, Doctor, Advocate
David Livingstone did not set out to be a global voice for the healing of the “open sore of the world” — the East African slave trade. He set out to heal the disease of sin with the gospel, and the diseases of the body with medical training — all the while believing the Africans were not subhuman.
As a young man, he heard Robert Moffat, a missionary to South Africa, say, “I had sometimes seen in the morning sun the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had ever been.” This image captured him. God’s call emerged as Moffat’s testimony mingled with Livingstone’s confidence that the word of God would do its saving work:
The Word written shall find its own mysterious tortuous way into every region, dialect, and language of the earth; and men shall be convinced of sin, as well as taught their need of a Saviour by its life-giving power. It shall whisper peace to the agitated conscience, and tell of the love of a Father reconciling the world to himself by the blood of his Son. (Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures, 179)
Then two more pieces of Livingstone’s calling were put in place. One was his conviction that medical training was crucial. Waiting to be sent by the London Missionary Society, Livingstone studied medicine at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. He said,
My great object was to be like Him, to imitate Him as far as He could be imitated. We have not the power of working miracles, but we can do a little in the way of healing the sick, and I sought medical education in order that I might be like Him. (Daring Heart, 21)
The other piece of his calling was the conviction that Africans were fully human — as he would discover, to his horror, the slave traders did not believe, with murderous results.
In answer to objectors, we would say, Were not the ancient Egyptians true Negroes? They were masters of the civilization of the world. When Greece was just emerging from the shades of barbarism, and before the name of Rome was known, the negro-land of Mizraim was proficient in science and art, and Thebes, the wonder city of the world. Solon, Plato, and a host of our Greek and Roman intellectual masters confess their obligation to the stupendous “learning of the Egyptians” in which Moses was so apt and able a scholar; notwithstanding, too often does the white man of the present day undervalue the humble descendant of that giant who helped to make him what he is! (Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures, 124)
The seeds were all sown for the fury and perseverance Livingstone would repeatedly experience in the years to come, as he came closer and closer to “the open sore of the world.”
‘Establishing Trade, Destroying Slavery’
At first, he was optimistic that legitimate commerce with East Africa would dry up the need for slave capturing and trading. “I believe we can by legitimate commerce, in the course of a few years, put an entire stop to the traffic of slaves over a large extent of territory” (Daring Heart, 23). He believed this would even have profound effects on West African slave trading with America:
England has, unfortunately, been compelled to obtain cotton and other raw material from the slave States, and has thus been the mainstay and support of slavery in America. Surely, then, it follows that if we can succeed in obtaining the raw material from other sources than from the slave States of America, we should strike a heavy blow at the system of slavery itself. (36)
Over time, Livingstone came to see that “establishing trade and destroying slavery,” though connected, would not be achieved without working to turn the hearts of the entire British establishment, at home and in the colonies, against a trade that they were almost totally ignorant of. Hence his “stunt.”