Introduction
The present Magololo chiefs of southern Malawi are the patrilineal descendants of fifteen porters whom David Livingstone dismissed for insubordination at Chikwawa in mid-November 1861.Footnote 2 The men had formed part of a larger group of servants who served the explorer during his transcontinental journeys (1853–1856) and the exploration of the Lake Malawi region (1858–1861). Adapted from an extended account of these men's exploits before and after their separation from Livingstone, this essay weaves together major themes in the history of nineteenth-century Africa and in the Livingstone historiography.Footnote 3
While that historiography has mutated over the years, producing divergent “Livingstones,” one feature has remained constant: Researchers, past and present, have continued to read a two-sided history from the European and English-speaking side only. But whether saint, villain, or imperialist, Livingstone could not have accomplished his mission without the Magololo,Footnote 4 who created the possibility for his life to be memorable. This essay tells the African and Mang'anja-speaking side of the Livingstone saga.Footnote 5
To tell it is to shift the angle of vision. The Magololo come into view as men who had their own ambitions and dreams and as historical agents who, in pursuit of their interests, sometimes set courses of action counter to their master's plans. Their services as carriers of goods and people and as cutters of firewood for steamboats fall within the scope of African labor history. To recount their deeds is to revisit the debates about nineteenth-century African workers that, in the 1980s, culminated in such publications as The Workers of African Trade.Footnote 6
Those debates will be engaged on three fronts. First, from this fresh angle of vision, the role of political forces in the birth of the wage labor regime in Africa emerges into full view. Like many other Africans before and after them, Sekeletu's men became wage earners under the weight of older noncapitalist tributary relations. As in other parts of the world, unfree labor ultimately gave birth to free labor. Second, this study corroborates the findings of other researchers on the nature of work performed by Third World laborers, especially in the early stages of their history. The Magololo earned their wages not by producing commodities but by cutting firewood, cooking food, transporting people, and moving goods made by others. Their history as wage-earning carriers replicates, in this part of the world, the adventures of the Chikunda of the Zambezi Region and especially the Nyamwezi of modern Tanzania.Footnote 7 The Magololo spent most of their time in service work whose long-term consequence would be large colonial and capitalist profits but whose short-term result was fame for Livingstone.
Finally, the story of the Magololo reveals conditions under which even illiterate black workers rebelled against powerful white employers. In a replay of the strikes of southern Ghana's canoemen in 1753 and Samori's porters in nineteenth-century Mali,Footnote 8 the fifteen Magololo disobeyed Livingstone's orders when he imposed unbearable demands on them.
That said, it remains true that as subordinate tributary and, later, wage laborers, the voices of the Magololo cannot compete with Livingstone's, which will ring louder than theirs throughout. No amount of evidence, including the testimonies of the ex-porters' descendants, can redress the imbalance. The obvious technical reason is that Livingstone kept a diary while his men did not. But it is also a question of power. Livingstone determined the agenda and set the conditions of his men's employment. In this regard, the story of the Magololo is, again, similar to the histories of other subaltern classes and “the people without history,” whom we often can only “hear” through the words of their oppressors. The voices of the Magololo will become louder and capable of channeling the voices of others in the historical record only when they have themselves become labor extractors. That phase of their story lies outside the purview of this essay.
The Kololo State, Livingstone, and Tribute, 1853–1864
Sekeletu, the young Kololo king, provided Livingstone with the resources that the missionary needed for the transcontinental journeys that had made him a famous explorer by 1856. The African ruler's “generosity” flowed from his belief that, in Livingstone, he had found a reliable ally in his struggles to maintain the integrity of the conquest state founded by his father over the Lozi (“Barotse”) of the contemporary Western Province of Zambia and parts of Namibia.
The new state originated in the military and political upheavals (mfecane) that accompanied the rise of the Zulu state of Shaka. Among the many groups of people dislocated by the turmoil were the Kololo Sotho-speakers of what is now the Republic of South Africa. After leaving their homeland in 1823, they reached and conquered the Lozi of Bulozi around 1840, under the leadership of Sibitwane. The Kololo replaced the Luyana-speaking rulers of the Lozi.Footnote 9
After his death on July 7,1851, Sibitwane was initially succeeded by his daughter, who resigned after a short while in favor of her eighteen-year-old half-brother, Sekeletu. The young king also inherited the kingdom's problems, which included an environmental crisis. In a reversal of the Great Dying, when the indigenous populations of the New World succumbed to Old World diseases, the ruling Kololo aristocrats had begun to die from malaria in the Linyanti marshes. As natives of the mosquito-free highlands of modern South Africa, they had no immunity. The new rulers knew, however, that they could avert the disaster by relocating to the malaria-free Batoka Highlands, but politics ruled out that option: The Batoka Highlands belonged to the raiding zone of the more powerful Ndebele.
Sekeletu was therefore relieved and excited to hear from Livingstone: First, because the missionary's wife, Mary, was the daughter of the Reverend Moffat, the trusted white friend of the Ndebele king and, second, because he would return to Africa with Mary and some missionaries and, together with Sekeletu and his court, would occupy the Batoka Highlands. Confident on two grounds, that no Ndebele would attack a community hosting the daughter of Moffat and that Livingstone would live up to his promise, Sekeletu spared nothing in his attempts to win the missionary's favor.
He provided Livingstone with canoes, food, oxen and, above all, twenty-seven men who acted as porters to and from Luanda between 1853 and 1855.Footnote 10 Some of these porters would be among the 114 men who accompanied Livingstone to the east coast after they had led him to the Mosiantunya Falls, which he renamed Victoria after the British Queen. The Kololo state “made” Livingstone the explorer, but, as will become clear shortly, the nation did not get a return on its investment. Livingstone did not live up to his promises mainly, and quite ironically, due to the very success of the transcontinental journeys that Sekeletu had financed.
The transcontinental journeys from Linyanti to Luanda and to Tete must have been unique moments for the porters, as they also must have been for Livingstone. Not many had ventured such long distances from their villages, and for such extended periods, as these men did during the years 1853–1856. The return trip from Linyanti to Luanda lasted nearly two years, from November 1853 to July 1855, during which they covered roughly 2,000 miles (as the crow flies). The 114 young men, headed for Tete from November 1855 to March 1856, traversed some 800 miles one way.Footnote 11 These were days of adventure and hardship, crisscrossing southern Africa's varied natural and social landscapes. Unfortunately, there is not much information about their experiences during this period, Livingstone being the only diarist on the spot. Moreover, the evidence from other reporters with him during the period from 1858 to 1863 shows him to be a person who habitually underreported painful experiences, which—on long expeditions that tested everyone's endurance—must have been many.
On their long march to Luanda, the Magololo carted different types of goods and people. Livingstone seems to have done most of the journey on his own and became a burden for his men only when incapacitated by dysentery, malaria, and other diseases. For the most part, however, the Magololo were saddled with the belongings of Sekeletu and Livingstone. After leaving his baggage wagon at Linyanti, Livingstone's belongings on the trip to Luanda did not amount to much beyond his two boxes of clothes and papers, a small tent, scientific instruments, a magic lantern, and slides to go with it. The king's inventory was more substantial. Sekeletu provided the expeditions to Luanda and Tete with oxen for use as food and as tribute to foreign rulers. Thus, some porters kept themselves busy driving the oxen while the others carried the king's ivory. Livingstone was supposed to sell the ivory, keep part of the proceeds for the king, and use the balance to support the transcontinental journeys for which the missionary had no resources of his own. Sekeletu was sufficiently interested in Livingstone's project to give the missionary every support, including the free services of his subjects.
The Transcontinental Journeys, 1853–1856. © Andrew Ross, 2004, David Livingstone: Missions and Empire, and Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
As an employee of the London Missionary Society, in any case, Livingstone was not in a position to pay his men on a regular basis during the years 1853–1856. He was not, therefore, the employer of the 27 or 114 men who accompanied him from Linyanti to Luanda and Tete; Sekeletu was. This is the case whether one considers the missionary as the king's agent, as the late Andrew Ross did—or think, as I do, of Livingstone as executing his own agenda, which the king thought could serve his interests as well.Footnote 12 By working for the missionary, the porters fulfilled their tributary obligations to Sekeletu.
Sekeletu's presence was always felt on the transcontinental journeys. The king was physically represented by two Kololo aristocrats on each journey from Linyanti to Luanda and from Linyanti to Tete. Directly responsible to Sekeletu, the aristocrats supervised the king's subjects and were in that respect the equals of the missionary. They were, I would hazard, behind the open conflict between the missionary and his men on their way to Luanda on May 11, 1854. The African leaders apparently challenged Livingstone's right to lead, and the missionary responded in the only way he could as a man without the power to hire and fire the mutineers: He threatened to kill the leaders with his revolver.Footnote 13 Livingstone could only exercise legitimate authority over the subjugated Lozi, Mbunda, Saleya, Subiya, and Toka, whom the Kololo contemptuously called “Makalaka” or “black ones.”Footnote 14
It is not unthinkable that some Makalaka joined Livingstone voluntarily, viewing him as a potential liberator from their oppression. Under the Kololo, Bulozi was not a happy place for the conquered, who were systematically excluded from positions of power. Unlike the former Luyana aristocracy, who had integrated prominent members of their subjects as administrators, the Kololo were both rulers and administrators. They also had cultural practices that further isolated them from their subjects; for instance, they continued to circumcise their young men while their subjects did not.Footnote 15 There were many points of conflict in Bulozi under the Kololo, and many Makalaka, especially members of the former ruling families, responded to the mounting tensions by fleeing into exile in neighboring societies.Footnote 16 Service under Livingstone offered some young Makalaka an alternative to the independent migrations, which explains in part why the explorer would have great difficulty repatriating them in 1860.
Life under conquest and the longing for freedom may explain why Sekeletu's subjects joined Livingstone's long and arduous journeys, but not why the men seem to have bonded so well with Livingstone during the years 1853–1856. Apart from the botched mutiny cited above, the sketchy and indisputably one-sided evidence gives the impression of a mobile community largely free of major or simmering conflicts. It seems that, unable to offer material rewards, Livingstone secured his men's loyalty by treating them as well as Sekeletu might have done. And he had little option, as a beneficiary of Sekeletu who, moreover, dreamed of returning to Bulozi to live under Kololo rule.
As a prospective subject of Sekeletu, Livingstone conducted himself in ways that were not typical of most Europeans of his time. Thus, in imitation of Sekeletu's father, Sibitwane, Livingstone slaughtered oxen and fed his men with the meat in order to inspire courage.Footnote 17 He also resisted the temptation to treat individual failings as representing the shortcomings of the Kololo nation. He had come to the healthy conclusion that, as a group, the Kololo were neither morally superior nor inferior to any other human group; as among any other group, there were, among the Kololo, both villains and saints, with Sekeletu as a specimen of the latter.Footnote 18 Thus, though he often observed the Sabbath with the porters and taught them how to recite the Lord's Prayer and the Apostles' Creed, Livingstone never forced his Christian faith on them. None of the ex-porters who founded chiefdoms in Malawi became a Christian.Footnote 19
Again, keeping in mind the one-sided nature of the evidence—that in his diaries Livingstone speaks more about himself than he does about his men—the Magololo appear to have responded well. They saw him as like themselves, a person they trusted well enough to share their feelings with openly. For example, they told him they did not understand the ban on polygamy or the belief in the afterlife, saying, “When we hear words about other things, we hold them fast; but when you tell much more wonderful things than any we have ever heard before, we don't know how it is, they run away from our hearts.” In his company, the porters felt free to “assent to the truth with the most perplexing indifference, adding, ‘But we don't know,’ or, ‘we don't understand.’”Footnote 20 Given the posture of many missionaries, it would seem that only genuine affection could have accommodated such expressions of doubt.
The Magololo could, therefore, proudly declare to other Africans, especially those threatening to attack them, that their white man was different from other white men. As they reportedly told Chief Mpende, “Ah! If you only knew him as well as we do who have lived with him, you would understand that he highly values your friendship.”Footnote 21 True, one can consider this another figment of Livingstone's mind, but it is a figment firmly rooted in reality. His utter dependence on Sekeletu obliged him to handle the king's men with respect.
Livingstone must have parted on good terms with his porters when he left Tete for England in May 1856. Many were eager to travel with him to the east coast and a few even wanted to accompany him to England. Apparently, it was mostly for financial reasons that he took only one with him.Footnote 22 Those who remained at Tete kept faith with him in spite of the delay in his return, a delay that led the residents of Tete to taunt the Magololo, saying that their master would not come back. There was, therefore, nothing but jubilation in the Magololo community when Livingstone finally appeared at Tete in September 1858. As he happily noted in his diary:
I went ashore and was at once surrounded by my faithful Makololo. They grasped my hand all at once and some began to clasp me round the body, but one called out. ‘Don't do that! You will soil his clothes.’ It is not often I have shed a tear, but they came in spite of me, and I said, ‘I am glad to meet you...’ They… came on board and again expressed their joy at seeing me. ‘Now our hearts will sleep. We have seen you.’Footnote 23
They must have genuinely liked him, and the news about the death of thirty-six of his servants touched him so much that he was moved to prayer: “Great Lord, that I may be more faithful to them who remain.”Footnote 24
Thus, the familiar argument that Livingstone treated his African workers better than their European counterparts has some merit. The Livingstone of the above quotation is a very different human being from the image of the bad manager of European employees during the period from 1858 to 1863. However, the argument misses a larger point in its narrow focus on the African-European comparison. The contrast should instead center on the dynamics of Livingstone's operations between 1853 and 1856 as against 1858 to 1863. From that standpoint, it is clear that between 1858 and 1861 Livingstone treated his Magololo employees in substantially the same way as he did their British counterparts. He may even have become more insensitive to the sufferings of the Magololo given the presence of his British employees, who expected, as members of a higher racial order, to be treated better.Footnote 25 Otherwise, one would not be able to explain the Magololo mutiny of late 1861. Quite ironically, after 1858 a better-financed Livingstone would become a less effective leader of the Magololo than the poor missionary of 1853–1856.
Wage Labor and Its Impact
“They had each as many goods received as wages as he could carry.” Footnote 26
“We must and ought to treat the Makololos as men. We dont [sic] make fools of them by supposing they are equal to ourselves. We would not call a Frenchman a brother and it is not likely we shall begin with niggers, but they are decent fellows for savages and will do some work well and for that we pay them.” Footnote 27
“What kind of people can these whites be, who treat even their chiefs in this manner?” Footnote 28
Upon his arrival in England from Africa in 1856, Livingstone received a hero's welcome, partly in recognition of the “discoveries” he made and publicized, but mainly because of his portrayal of central Africa as a land of unlimited resources, particularly cotton, and large populations eager to receive British manufactures and the Gospel. The British government and industrialists, therefore, financed his mission to Africa to advance the cause of “Christianity and Commerce.” This enterprise, which they called the Zambezi Expedition and which I will sometimes refer to as the Batoka Project, was to be headquartered in the “healthy” Batoka Highlands to the east of Victoria Falls, under the rule of Sekeletu after his relocation from the “unhealthy” Linyanti Marshes. A steamboat, the Ma-Robert, would act as the settlers' lifeline, connecting them to the world economy as it plied the Zambezi River to the Indian Ocean, exporting central Africa's products and importing British manufactures, including those necessary to sustain the Batoka outpost.
The project also secured specialists to work under Livingstone's supervision. When the expedition left England for Africa in early 1858, there were seven such employees: Norman Bedingfeld, the second in command of the expedition; John Kirk, the economic botanist; Charles Livingstone, David's brother, the official “moral agent”; Richard Thornton, the geologist; George Rae, the engineer; Thomas Baines, the store-keeper; and John Walker, the quartermaster. From Sierra Leone, Livingstone recruited about a dozen Kru sailors to support the British staff.Footnote 29 Excluded from this plan were the Magololo he had left at Tete in 1856 and who were still waiting for him there. For an expedition dependent on steam technology, their experience as canoe men and as porters had become obsolete; Livingstone intended to expatriate them immediately during the Ma-Robert's maiden trip to the Batoka Highlands. Such was the grand plan until the expedition reached Tete.
Once on the Lower Zambezi, however, Livingstone did not have a chance to execute any element of the plan. The central premise was completely impractical: No steamboat could go over the Cahora Bassa Rapids. Having missed the rapids on his way to Tete in 1856, Livingstone seemed unwilling to believe in their existence until he saw them for himself in late 1858.Footnote 30 The shock of that encounter permanently inscribed the rapids into British imperial history. It affected different players, differently. Livingstone lost a great deal. His Zambezi Expedition had earned the financial backing of the British government and British capitalists on the understanding that the Zambezi River would provide cheap transportation for the region's exports and imports. The news that the Zambezi was not, after all, an African Mississippi spelled the beginning of the end—at least before his death in 1873—of the era of Livingstone the hero. His reputation took a heavy beating and the Government recalled the Expedition in 1863. Sekeletu lost even more: He received no dividend from his investments in Livingstone's failed imperial projects.
Without British colonists acting as a shield against the powerful Ndebele, Sekeletu never moved to the Batoka Plateau. His dreams of environmental security became unrealizable. Malaria would continue to decimate the Kololo rulers in the Linyanti marshes until 1864, when an uprising of the conquered easily overthrew the numerically inferior invaders. The Kololo state came to an end one year after Sekeletu's death from a skin disease, often identified as leprosy. Sekeletu and his nation had made a bad investment in Livingstone's adventures, even though the same adventures helped liberate those of the king's subjects who, following his encounter with the reality of the Cahora Bassa Rapids, did not immediately leave Tete for Bulozi, as originally planned.
Although a major blow, the Cahora Bassa Rapids debacle did not break Livingstone. On the contrary, the encounter strengthened his resolve to find the Lake he had heard about from his Portuguese hosts at Tete in 1856. He redirected his unspent resources into the exploration of the Malawi region, whose “salubrious” Tchiri Highlands would replace the inaccessible Batoka Hills. The Magololo, who had been assigned no role on the Zambezi Expedition, became key players in the journeys to the Lake Malawi region. They replaced the Kru, who would be repatriated to Sierra Leone in July 1859 for many reasons, particularly “their inability to march.”Footnote 31 Journeys to the Lake required both marchers and deckhands. In their unexpected roles, the Magololo would make the emblematic transition to wage labor faster and more completely than many other Africans, including the Nyamwezi of modern Tanzania, whose participation in the labor market was subject to the economic as well as political demands of the village.Footnote 32 The Magololo did not experience such constraints.
On the one hand, Livingstone would not rely on Sekeletu's authority to employ the Magololo on the journeys to Lake Malawi; he re-engaged them on contract in the same way he enlisted the “Sena” and other Africans in the region. On the other hand, the Magololo did not need to work for the returned Livingstone as Sekeletu's subjects. During Livingstone's absence, the Magololo had operated as independent agents, hiring their services to whoever was ready to pay them. Many had married local women and were raising their own families and turned to Livingstone mainly when under economic pressure, as in mid-1859 when they were eager to travel to Lake Malawi, expecting to be paid in goods they could exchange for food.Footnote 33 The same Livingstone who never managed to convert a single Magololo to Christianity succeeded in shepherding the porters into the “dawn of the era of capitalist” labor relations. The Magololo were in this sense even ahead of their subjects in southern Malawi after 1870. As rulers, the Magololo would set the terms of their subjects' employment by European travelers on the same routes that the ex-porters had marched under Livingstone.Footnote 34
Between late 1858 and 1861, Livingstone made five journeys to the Malawi region with those Magololo willing to work for him. All but two of the trips fell in two parts, the first by steamboat from the Expedition's headquarters at Tete, down the Zambezi River to its confluence with the Tchiri River, up the Tchiri as far as Chibisa's (now Chikwawa Township). A series of rapids, beginning with the Mamvera cataracts that Livingstone renamed after one of his patrons, Sir Roderick Murchison, blocked the Tchiri River about fifteen miles above Chibisa's, preventing the Ma-Robert and any other boat from the south to reach the Lake. Chibisa's thus became a relay station, where the Magololo and their companions left the steamboat and launched the second half of the journeys to Lakes Malawi and Chilwa. The role of the Magololo as deckhands ended at Chibisa's, and from there they carried their white companions and goods.
An unspecified number of Magololo workers visited the Malawi region for the first time on the Ma-Robert from December 1858 to February 1859. Their journey ended at Chibisa's. A month later, fifteen Magololo left Tete on the second expedition to the Malawi region. A few of these stayed at Chibisa's, guarding the Ma-Robert while the rest accompanied Livingstone on foot to Lake Chilwa, which they reached on April 18.Footnote 35 From Lake Chilwa, the party did not go to its base at Tete; it went instead on to the Indian Ocean and from there launched the third voyage to the Lake region. The destination of this trip, which in all probability included all the fifteen Magololo of the second expedition, was Khulubvi village, near present-day Nsanje Township, where they purchased rice. By June they were back at Tete with the rice, which was in high demand there.Footnote 36
Trips to the Lake Malawi Region, 1858–1861. © Andrew Ross, 2004, David Livingstone: Missions and Empire, and Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
A month later, thirty-six Magololo boarded ship on the fourth mission to the Lake Malawi region. Ten of the men remained at Chibisa's, guarding the Ma-Robert; the rest continued with their master toward his “discovery” of Lake Malawi in September 1859. From there they retraced their footsteps to the Ma-Robert at Chibisa's, which took them back to Tete by December 1859. Then, after the trip to Bulozi, about fifteen Magololo boarded the Ma-Robert toward the Indian Ocean. The older sternwheeler sank in the Zambezi River before the party received a new steamer, the Pioneer, at the beginning of 1861. They used this boat to launch their fifth trip to the Malawi region in May 1861 (in the company of newly arrived members of the Universities Mission to Central Africa [UMCA], who had come to establish the first Christian mission on the Tchiri Highlands on Livingstone's recommendation). This would be the Magololo's last trip to the region under Livingstone. (He would visit the Lake for the last time in 1863.)
Livingstone's biographers have differed on the significance of the Malawi expeditions relative to the transcontinental journeys of 1853 to 1856. I leave that debate to Livingstone scholars except to make two points. First, his supposed “discovery” of Lake Malawi, the thing that every school child in Malawi knows Livingstone for, was in fact not that. His Portuguese hosts at Tete had told him about the Lake in 1856. When he went there in 1859, he knew not only what he was looking for but also its location relative to Tete. Second, his Magololo porters gained usable knowledge from the journeys. Understandably, while that point has not interested his biographers, it denotes unintended consequences of great historical import.
The Magololo had more opportunity to learn about this region than they did about any other, excluding their homeland and the Tete area. They went from village to village buying food for everyone, including themselves, using Livingstone's cloth and other goods. The trips opened their eyes to the fact that although united by language, history, and religion, the inhabitants of the region were politically divided, each village an independent unit. They encountered no central authority able to mobilize these communities against a common enemy. The journeys also taught them the value of such commodities as cloth and guns. They could see a land of opportunity for themselves with the guns and cloth they were receiving as wages at the end of each excursion into Malawi.Footnote 37 The trips thus provided the Magololo their best chance to understand the region's political economy, just at the time when the hardships involved gave them reason to separate from their master.
The journeys that earned them cloth and guns were an exercise in endurance and hardship. Their master became single-mindedly determined to restore his fame soon after his encounter with the Cahora Bassa Rapids. For example, driven by the need to know more about the rapids that had shattered his dreams, Livingstone pressed the Magololo so hard across the hot rocks of the Cahora Bassa range that they developed blisters on their feet. They were completely stupefied, unable to believe this was the same Livingstone they thought they knew: “The Makololo declared that they had always believed I had a heart till now, that I had become insane surely. For they shewed (sic) me the broken blisters on their feet in vain and, if they could only speak so as to be understood by the other doctor [Kirk], they would return with him and let me throw myself away.”Footnote 38 This was at the beginning of December 1858, and, unfortunately, the experience of being worked to the point of physical suffering would become common place for Livingstone's porters in subsequent years. And the Magolo came to detest work on the steamboats even more than their Journeys on foot.
Livingstone brought two sternwheelers to the region: the Ma-Robert from 1858 until December 1860, when it sank in the Zambezi River; and the Pioneer at the beginning of 1861. Both steamboats were structurally deficient. Frustrated, Livingstone once wrote how the Ma-Robert's “badly-constructed furnaces consumed a frightful amount of wood. Fires were lighted at two in the morning, but steam was seldom up before six.” As a result, the Magololo often spent hours and days cutting wood, and when they were unable to supply enough firewood, villagers were recruited to assist them. Indeed, wood collecting became one ordeal that earned the Magololo the sympathy of their master.Footnote 39
Besides consuming mountains of firewood, both the Ma-Robert and Pioneer drew more water than the Tchiri and Zambezi could provide for even during some wet seasons. Livingstone was justifiably indignant when the builders of the Pioneer delivered a boat drawing five feet against his explicit instruction to limit the boat's draught to three feet.Footnote 40 Moreover, because they drew more water than was normally possible on the Tchiri and Zambezi Rivers, the two steamboats often ran aground against silting beds, sandbanks, shoals, and other obstacles. Thus, when not cutting firewood, the Magololo were busy dragging the vessels over shoals and sandbanks.Footnote 41 The Pioneer was no different and became a source of great discomfort for its occupants.Footnote 42 Sometimes the deckhands had to unload the ship's contents, including “the large anchors weighing 8 cwt.” in order to lighten it.Footnote 43 The dragging damaged the thin hull of the Ma-Robert, which leaked badly as a consequence. Thus, when not pulling the ship across sandbanks, the Magololo spent hours bailing out the steamboat.Footnote 44 And, for their own comfort, the European passengers were often forced to assist or substitute for the overworked Magololo.Footnote 45 The delays were endless.
It took the Ma-Robert nearly four months to traverse the roughly 400 miles from the Indian Ocean to Tete.Footnote 46 Similarly, the Pioneer made only “a few hundred yards progress” a day during its maiden trip on the Tchiri River in mid-1861.Footnote 47 The Magololo spent forty-two days, between May and July 1861, trying to get the ship from Chiromo to Chibisa's Village, a distance of no more than fifty miles.Footnote 48 The design of the two boats was such that steam technology did not give Livingstone any special advantage on the Tchiri and Zambezi Rivers. Dug-out canoes consistently outperformed the Ma-Robert, which Livingstone appropriately called the “puffing ‘Asthmatic.’ ”Footnote 49
The heaving, pulling, and firewood cutting exacted so much labor from the Magololo that they were overwhelmed with joy when the Cahora Bassa Rapids forced their master to abandon his dream of making it to the Batoka Hills on the Ma-Robert. The deckhands could not conceal their pleasure and expressed their delight right into Livingstone's ears:
Those of the Makololo who worked on board the ship were not sorry at the steamer being left below, as they had become heartily tired of cutting the wood that the insatiable furnace of the “Asthmatic” required. Mbia, who was a bit of a wag, laughingly exclaimed in broken English, “Oh, Kebrabasa [Cahora Bassa] good, very good; no let shippee up to Sekeletu, too muchee work, cuttee woodyee, cuttee woodyee: Kebrabasa good.”Footnote 50
This was in November 1858. A few months later, in January 1859, Mbia himself or his countrymen would be as pleased when the Mamvera Rapids, near Chibisa's, blocked the Ma-Robert on the Tchiri River. The Magololo were among the first Africans to fall victim to what is today called inappropriate technology. They earned their wages the hard way.
The Magololo were paid according to two different principles, marking the diversification of the workforce. The first recognized the employees' skills and social status. “Headmen” in charge of small Magololo groups received more than the men they led. Thus, each headman on the journey to Lake Chilwa in March to May of 1859 received five fathoms of cloth while all their subordinates were paid only three fathoms each.Footnote 51 Similarly, the headmen who supervised more than thirty-six Magololo on the first trip to Lake Malawi from July to December 1859, received four fathoms each, while the porters themselves netted only two each.Footnote 52 The headmen's payment was only equaled by sailors. After a quick trip to the Zambezi Delta in May 1860, each sailor earned four fathoms of cloth and four brass rods against the ordinary deckhand's two fathoms and two brass rods.Footnote 53 Livingstone was clearly committed to this hierarchical principle. However, in shaping the future of the porters, that strategy proved less effective than the egalitarian principle.
Perhaps with his own experience as a factory worker in mind, Livingstone conscientiously applied the second principle, according to which everyone who worked for him received something. Moreover, while headmen and sailors generally received higher pay, their rewards did not differ in kind from those of the ordinary worker; they all received beads, clothes, guns, and powder. Finally, there is scattered evidence indicating that Livingstone sometimes ignored the principle of hierarchy, paying everyone the same amount of goods. For example, immediately after receiving a cloth consignment he had been expecting for some time, he “gave 2 pieces of 30 yds to each of Makololo” regardless of their rank.Footnote 54 He distributed guns the same way. On February 8, 1860, eleven of the Magololo who had gone to Lake Malawi, and the ten who proceeded with him to the Zambezi Delta all received guns for their services.Footnote 55 Ordinary workers gained access to the same new instruments of power, sometimes in the same amount, as did their professional and political leaders. True, the Magololo and Livingstone may have continued using the language of hierarchy, but the everyday practices placed the workers on the opposite trajectory.
The long-term implications of the egalitarian pressures became apparent almost immediately after the fifteen Magololo on the second trip to Lake Malawi separated from Livingstone in mid-November 1861. The two Kololo aristocrats among the mutineers, Kasisi (or Ramakukane) and Mlooka, were reportedly bitter about their inability to control their former Makalaka servants, Chiputula (Ranyeu) and Mlauli, respectively. Subsequently, the contest for supremacy over the other Magololo and their new Mang'anja subjects in the Lower Tchiri Valley would set Kasisi against none other than Chiputula, his former servant. The two had left Bulozi registering differently on the social scale, but began their political careers in Malawi on an equal footing.
The aristocrat and his former servant had the same type of assets, and, in the eyes of the local Mang'anja, there were no social distinctions between them: Both wore European clothes; both were armed with guns; and, like the rest of the group, they were both “black Englishmen” (azungu akuda). Finally, tradition has it that because they were all unmarried and committed adultery (chigololo) with the wives of their hosts, the Mang'anja called the ex-porters collectively aMagololo. In the end, wage labor dealt a deadly blow to a system of privilege based on birth and at the same time brought unity to a group that had started as members of different ethnic groups.
The destabilization of hierarchical orders between segments of Magololo workers became one side of the story of the impact of wage labor. The other side relates to Sekeletu's loss of influence over Livingstone's workers. Employment under Livingstone and the Portuguese, when the explorer was in England from 1856 to 1858, sharpened the Magololo's appreciation of how their labor was valued under different social regimes. They understood how, as human artifacts, Sekeletu's laws were no more legitimate than the laws of the Portuguese and Livingstone. The Magololo caught their master's attention as they debated among themselves the relative merits of the three patterns of labor control:
Our own men … had often discussed the rights of labour during their travels; and, having always been paid by us for their work, had acquired certain new ideas, which rather jostled against this old law. They thought it unjust to be compelled to give up both [sic] tusks to the Chief: bad as the Portuguese were, they were not so oppressive as that; they allowed the hunter one of the tusks; Sekeletu's law was wrong; they wished he would repeal it.Footnote 56
The outcome would have been different if Livingstone had repatriated the men immediately after his arrival from England in late 1858. The two-year delay undermined Sekeletu's authority over the porters, in much the same way as the religious component of Livingstone's “civilizing mission” allegedly did among the young and subjected peoples of Bulozi.Footnote 57 After working for the explorer following his return from England, many porters were reluctant to return to Bulozi in 1860.
On the eve of his departure for Bulozi in May 1860, Livingstone allowed only three Magololo (out of roughly seventy), who were ill, to remain at Tete. Then fifteen told Livingstone they did not want to go back to Bulozi. About thirty more deserted the expedition in the neighborhood of the Cahora Bassa Rapids, forcing those still on the journey to add to their own payload the goods abandoned by the deserters. Burdened by the extra luggage, the faithful ones kept grumbling and made “the journey excessively disagreeable” for Livingstone and his fellow Europeans.Footnote 58 In the end, Livingstone reached Sekeletu's second capital at Sesheke with fewer than 30 of the original 114 men.Footnote 59 The returning porters would retrace their steps back to Tete in the company of new employees, lured by stories of adventure and the prospects of earning an income. Altogether sixteen Magololo left Sesheke for Tete with Livingstone on September 17, 1860.Footnote 60
Six of the new recruits were professional canoe rowers, headed by Mwita (“Mobita”) who had traveled to Luanda in 1853–1855. Then there were two Kololo aristocrats, Kasisi and Mlooka, and their Batoka servants, Chiputula and Mlauli, respectively. The king sent Kasisi and Mlooka to procure medicine for his skin disease, expecting them to come back to Bulozi with the medicine in less than a year.Footnote 61 But like everyone on the Tete-bound entourage, the two aristocrats never returned to Bulozi. They were all out to begin a new chapter in their lives as wage laborers. Livingstone probably never appreciated that by undermining Sekeletu's authority over his subjects, wage labor also weakened his own hold over the employees.
The Livingstone of 1858–1861 may have been an attractive paymaster, who fairly compensated his workers. But he was also a more difficult companion than the Livingstone of 1853–1856. The Magololo not only endured the drudgery of long walks on treacherous terrains and navigating badly constructed paddle steamers, as described earlier; they also bore the brunt of their master's bad relations with the white employees he had brought from England. These British employees mediated the ties of the Magololo to their master between 1858 and 1861.
Because Livingstone's biographers, particularly Tim Jill, have already detailed the speed with which his relationships with this group of his employees degenerated, it is now important only to highlight the features of those relationships that affected the Magololo. Sekeletu's men did not meet Norman Bedingfeld, who had been dismissed for insubordination sometime before the expedition reached Tete in September 1858. But they witnessed the firing of Thomas Baines, the storekeeper, and Richard Thornton, the geologist, as well as that of John Walker, the quartermaster, who was sent home at the same time as the Kru.Footnote 62 The reduction in the number of European personnel on the expedition tarnished Livingstone's name back in England, but did nothing to improve the environment for those left behind. There was constant bickering and quarreling among the five white men: David and Charles Livingstone, John Kirk, John Hutchins, and William Rowe (before Rae rejoined them in 1860). The clashes between the two Livingstone brothers became particularly ugly during the land journey to Bulozi in 1860: “the general history of our journey [to Bulozi],” wrote Kirk, who appears to have come from a higher stratum of British society than most of his companions, including the Livingstone brothers, “has been rather a singular one for the quarrels between the two brothers and use of the most abusive filthy and blasphemous language ever heard in that class of society.”Footnote 63
The English did not, moreover, only squabble among themselves; they also drew the Magololo into their fights. Charles traded blows with Sekeletu's men,Footnote 64 which brought his brother into the scuffles. Angry, the elder Livingstone would often try to bring order to the crowd by applying the stick against the porters.
The Magololo also felt the opprobrium derived from their master's attempts to manage the decline of his prestige in the eyes of his British sponsors and the public. The Britain that had worshipped him immediately after the transcontinental journeys was turning against him after a streak of unfavorable news from southern Africa: The cancellation of the Batoka project, mismanagement of his white personnel, and the sudden death of five of the six missionaries who had gone to Sekeletu's Linyanti capital in early 1860, hoping to find Livingstone there, when the explorer was still at Tete. The steady flow of bad news was chipping the veneer of Livingstone the hero.
Managing this damage pushed his energies to full throttle. A malaria-free area had to be found as an alternative to the inaccessible Batoka plateau. And, having “discovered” such a place in the Tchiri Highlands, he was determined to locate a river without rapids that, unlike both the Tchiri and Zambezi Rivers, did not run through Portuguese settlements. Having mistakenly identified the Rovuma to be such a river, he pushed ahead looking for its source in Lake Malawi during his second trip to the Lake. That search became the background to the Magololo mutiny of late 1861.
Livingstone's second trip to the Lake, when nothing “short of a tempest” could change his mind, exposed the Magololo not only to the violence that accompanied the slave raids and the rise of Yao chiefdoms in the Tchiri Highlands, but also to developments taking place in the northern half of the Lake. In that part, where Livingstone expected to find the source of the Rovuma, he “dragged the party over the hills by the shore” and brought the Magololo closer to the dreaded Ngoni or Mabzyiti (the “Mazitu” and “Azitu” of European sources) invaders. Sekeletu's men were petrified by the prospect of running into the Ngoni invaders who, like the Kololo and Ndebele, had fled (what is now) South Africa in the early nineteenth century. In the Ngoni, the Magololo saw the Ndebele, whose raids into the Batoka Hills had shaped Sekeletu's foreign policy, including his friendship with Livingstone. Frightened and exhausted, on October 5 the porters expressed their collective decision not to go farther.Footnote 65 Thinking they had their master's consent, the porters rushed south for their lives and, in so doing, committed what for Livingstone amounted to the first “mutiny.” The second was in the making.
The Magololo were frightened of falling into the hands of the Ngoni because, since the beginning of the trip, in August, the porters traveled alone on land, while their master and the other Europeans (with one Magololo and two Sena men) used a small boat on both the Lake and Tchiri River. They made this arrangement partly because the four-oared boat could not accommodate everyone, and mainly because it allowed the Magololo to procure food with the cloth they carried from village to village. They needed the food for themselves as well as for the boat party. Food presented a major challenge during this trip.
Though they were not new to hunger and to eating poor food, the experience of late 1861 was unique in three ways. To begin with, hunger affected both the Magololo and their European companions. In September and October, food scarcity had already become common in those parts of the Lake region that depended on maize and other grains. There was little to sell to strangers. Besides, in much of the area surrounding the northern section of the Lake, Europeans experienced what might be called relative hunger—they disliked cassava, the main crop there. Finally, there was little or no demand for the cheap cloth that the Magololo peddled; the people who lived north of the Lake enjoyed access to higher-quality cloth directly from the east coast. Thus, in addition to the Ngoni threat, the expedition confronted a food crisis that eventually forced Livingstone to call off the search a few days after the Magololo's first “mutiny.” (As he headed south, African travelers would tell Livingstone the source of the Rovuma was nowhere close to the western banks of the Lake.) The boat party met the Magololo once before the second “mutiny” occurred, at the mouth of the Linthipe River.
The Magololo arrived at the mouth of the Linthipe on October 23, at the same time as the European party, and the two groups decided to spend the night there together. In the evening, the hungry Magololo asked Livingstone for permission to go out and kill elephants. Livingstone's answer was a firm “no.” The porters waited for nightfall. While the Europeans were fast asleep, all the Africans, except for one Magololo and two Sena men, went out hunting. When at daybreak Livingstone discovered what had happened, he was furious, and set off for Chibisa's in the company of the three Africans and his fellow whites.Footnote 66 He was in a hurry to welcome his wife and the ladies of the UMCA at the Khongone mouth of the Zambezi before the beginning of December.
It seems that the Magololo did not intend to rebel when they went out hunting against their master's orders. Thus, upon finding their master had left, they proceeded, apparently hoping to join the Expedition on its way to the Pioneer at Chibisa's. They arrived at the Mamvera Rapids, fifteen miles above Chibisa's, on November 7, 1861, the same day as the Europeans. At night, they sang and danced, trying to attract Livingstone's attention, but they were rebuffed. The Europeans had closed ranks in their view of the Magololo as a troublesome group. In mid-November they left the Magololo at Chibisa's and headed to the Lower Zambezi on the Pioneer. The events of that day became the centerpiece of the founding charter of the Magololo chiefdoms in Malawi.Footnote 67
Conclusions
History is not always kinder to those in power than it is to their subordinates. Neither Livingstone nor Sekeletu, who set the agenda that shaped the story just told, accomplished their goals. Livingstone failed to plant a British colony on the Batoka Plateau, with the failure of Sekeletu's resettlement dream as the most important collateral damage. The Cahora Bassa Rapids crushed both projects, just as malaria had precluded Sekeletu's exit from the Linyanti swamps. Loaded with social meaning, Livingstone's encounter with the Cahora Bassa Rapids both damaged his reputation as an explorer and created possibilities for the transformation of his Magololo workers.
Work was the critical agent in the discovery and, to some extent, realization of the Magololo's potential for transformation. After the abandonment of the Batoka project, in which they were not to take part because steamboats were to connect the new British colony with the outside world, the Magololo became key players in the journeys to the Malawi region that required both porters and deckhands. Even though work on steamboats did not move the Magololo beyond the service sector they had known as porters, it exposed them to a new labor system they would exploit for their personal development. Livingstone hired them on contract and offered them wages in the form of commodities such as cloth and guns—that approach to labor relations ultimately helped transform Sekeletu's subjects into wage laborers and, finally, into exploiters of other people's labor. Theirs was a revolutionary path that left both victors and victims in its wake.
The first and most immediate losers were the few Kololo aristocrats among the workers. Receiving the same cloth and guns as the Makalaka did, those aristocrats lost the material basis of their power among Livingstone's employees. Moreover, as experienced wage earners, the Magololo faulted not only Sekeletu for his demands, but also Livingstone for ignoring their basic needs, including food. They revolted, proving, ironically, how a better financed Livingstone could have become a less successful leader than the Livingstone operating under a tight missionary budget and living off Sekeletu's “generosity.” Clearly, tributary ties were, in this case, a more effective system of control than the wage connection.
The movement between tributary and wage labor became a feature of the society the Magololo would build after freeing themselves from Livingstone. Here, as elsewhere, the transition to wage labor would be neither complete nor permanent. As rulers, the Magololo would exploit the Mang'anja of southern Malawi primarily as their subjects and subordinate the wage relation to tribute. As former workers themselves, however, they would not only recruit their subjects for work on European enterprises; they would also defend the rights of their subjects and, in that way, repeat the history of revolt they had pioneered under Livingstone. Through work, the Magololo ended in places neither Livingstone, nor Sekeletu had planned for them; yes, in places they themselves probably never imagined.
