Thebe Mabanga
LIVINGSTONE’S TRIBE: A JOURNEY FROM ZANZIBAR TO THE CAPE by Stephen Taylor (Flamingo)
One of the many striking observations that Stephen Taylor makes in this book is about Africabased correspondents for the predominantly Western media. “As a tribe,” he says, “journalists in Africa dwell amidst the sweetest landscapes, live off the finest pasture and know the best watering holes while making fleeting forays on expenses and usually in packs into what they like to call The Heart of Darkness in order to tell the rest of the world what a hellhole Africa really is.”
Taylor has firsthand experience. To write this book he travelled through Africa on the ubiquitous matatu, overcrowded buses, on terrible roads and by train. His journey stretched from the island of Zanzibar to the Cape in search of what he calls “Livingstone’s Tribe” those white people who stayed on after independence in the various African states, from Tanzania in the Sixties to Zimbabwe in 1980. These are people “who had lived through coups and wars, and learnt to live with the corruption, the collapse of services and the generally miserable lot of the African citizen”.
The missionary David Livingstone helped end the slave trade on the continent and inspired a generation of missionaries to abandon the comfort and bad weather of England to try to convert Africans to Christianity. As a noted explorer, of course, he also opened up much of the continent to colonisation.
On his journey Taylor encounters fascinating characters, among them Daudi Ricardo, a descendant of the 19thcentury economist David Ricardo. Daudi Ricardo came to the southern highlands of Tanzania to recover from a injury suffered during World War II. When Julius Nyerere came to power, Ricardo gave up his ranch, Matanana, and went to help build a socialist Tanzania. He spent 25 years serving as a fieldworker for development projects. Now he has misgivings about the presence of white people in Africa: “I’ve often doubted, and I still do, whether we have any business being here. All this advising and cajoling of people who are we to say? But can we get out? No, it’s gone too far for that.”
Now in his 70s, Ricardo is an ailing man of modest means who has learnt an enduring lesson about natives of the “dark continent”. “Africans are endlessly tolerant,” he notes, adding: “But those of us who stay face a challenge. We have to learn a new cultural language and that can be very painful.”
Taylor’s journey is filled with startling ironies such as the painful episode of a failed mission found in Mbweni, Zanzibar. The village was founded by a Bishop Edward Steere using land bought from Muslim slave owners with the aid of 22 freed slaves (seven men and 15 women). Within two years, he was baptising converts; the village school had a missionary teacher, a shop at the crossroads and a thriving populace.
But the picturesque arrangement proved to be a faade masking serious problems. Steere’s successor, Frank Weston, uncovered these: he found that imposing a Christian value system was merely slavery of a different kind. Without elders, social tradition and a common sense of origin, the community could not maintain its bonds. After about a century, the village disintegrated with the eventual passing of the last of two generations of missionaries. Moreover, most people in the island are now Muslim, not Christian. Taylor notes the irony succinctly: the slave owners’ faith has endured better than that of the liberators.
Taylor presents his exploration as an illuminating travelogue, an engaging study of societies dealing with a colonial legacy and an honest, unapologetic account of the continent and its ills. His attention to detail and lucid descriptiveness makes good reading.
The most important contribution this book can make to South Africa at present is to breathe new life into discussions about the “African renaissance”. The observation that former colonies accept colonialism as an inescapable fact of memory forms a strong premise from which to engage this aspect of their past. It allows them to try to reverse its damage by using any solution that works, not just “African solutions”.
Another brilliant observation that Taylor makes is about the white people of Cape Town. They are charectarised, he says, by “a vapid smugness. [They are] blithely disinterested in just about everything, and most particularly the rest of the country.” Well said.