“O! that the Holy Spirit would enlighten them": Reconstructing Livingstone’s African Audiences
For his journey to the coast, Livingstone packed four tin boxes. Three of these boxes contained items that one might expect an explorer and missionary to carry: food, survey equipment, trade goods, spare clothing, a tent, and a Bible. The fourth was devoted entirely to a tin improved phantasmagoria lantern and its accompanying slides. This, he used to project biblical material as he explained the main tenets of Christianity. For someone devoted to carrying “as few ‘impedimenta’ as possible,” the lantern seems out-of-place. In Missionary Travels, Livingstone justifies the lantern’s place in his baggage train by presenting the lantern as a powerful educational tool.[2] His account of his expedition includes a particularly eventful lantern show before a Lunda Ishinde, a local chief, named Kabompo.[3]
Livingstone portrays the lantern show as a fundamentally visual and sonic medium. His description of the accompanying narration suggests that projected images helped overcome linguistic barriers, particularly among Africans who did not speak a variant of seTswana. The lantern supported Livingstone’s evangelistic work by attracting large crowds, some of which may have numbered in the hundreds. There were at least 1,000 at Livingstone’s initial reception in Kabompo, and the presence of the Ishinde’s court several days later at the lantern show suggests that there was an equally large audience.[5][Shinte] had his principal men and the same crowd of court beauties near him as at the reception. The first picture exhibited was Abraham about to slaughter his son Isaac; it was shown as large as life, and the uplifted knife was in the act of striking the lad; the Balonda men remarked that the picture was much more like a god than the things of wood or clay they worshiped. I explained that this man was the first of a race to whom God had given the Bible we now held, and that among his children our Savior appeared. The ladies listened with silent awe; but, when I moved the slide, the uplifted dagger moving toward them, they thought it was to be sheathed in their bodies instead of Isaac’s. “Mother! Mother!” all shouted at once, and off they rushed helter-skelter, tumbling pell-mell over each other, and over the little idol-huts and tobacco-bushes: we could not get one of them back again. Shinte, however, sat bravely through the whole, and afterward examined the instrument with interest. An explanation was always added after each time of showing its powers, so that no one should imagine there was aught supernatural in it; and had Mr. Murray, who kindly brought it from England, seen its popularity among both Makololo and Balonda, he would have been gratified with the direction his generosity then took. It was the only mode of instruction I was ever pressed to repeat. The people came long distances for the express purpose of seeing the objects and hearing the explanations.[4]
Among all the magic lantern shows given by missionaries, the show in Kabompo has received the most scholarly attention thanks in part to Livingstone’s centrality in discussions of the nineteenth-century missionary movement, African history, and colonization. As Justin Livingstone has observed, biographies of Livingstone have tended to follow the interpretive mode du jour; these range from late-Victorian narratives that lionize Livingstone (Thomas Hughes, 1901) to scathing pathographies (Judith Listowel, 1974; Tim Jeal, 1973, revised and expanded 2013) to feminist studies of Mary Livingstone, his wife, and his family (Jamet Wagner Parsons, 1997; Julie Davidson, 2012).[6] Similarly, interpretations of Livingstone’s lantern show have challenged the overly celebratory view of Livingstone’s missionary activity. Tim Jeal characterizes Livingstone’s efforts to dispel the aura of the supernatural as ultimately unsuccessful; Jeal frames this interpretation by portraying the Lunda as gullible and prone to believe the stories told to them by other African groups that the white men came from the sea.[7] James R. Ryan focuses instead on the lantern’s status as a mechanical novelty. Though outside the scope of his study, Ryan briefly mentions Livingstone’s packing list for the Zambezi expedition to say that the lantern “also served to demonstrate the superiority of European technology.” For Ryan, Livingstone’s lantern shows anticipate the ways that the lantern lectures produced by the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee distributed and reinforced British supremacy.[8] T. Jack Thompson also situates Livingstone within the context of other lantern shows, but Thompson focuses on later missionaries who made lantern lectures with photographs that they had taken while in Africa, including John and Alice Harris’ “Congo Atrocities” which called for sanctions against King Leopold.[9] In each of these cases, the lantern is interpreted as an agent of imperialism as both an educational tool and as a technological novelty.
Despite the fact that Livingstone’s lantern show in Kabompo has served as a touchstone for conversations about missionaries as agents of empire, studies of this moment rely almost exclusively on this passage from Missionary Travels, overlooking references to other lantern shows in this text and in Livingstone’s letters, journals, diaries, and field notes. In this case study, I turn to Livingstone’s field-authored documents, his other published narratives, and extant examples of projectors and slides to reconstruct the content of Livingstone’s lantern shows through the details given in the Missionary Travels account. I then place this show within the context of his travels more broadly. From Livingstone’s perspective, the lantern served a double purpose in that it presented the main tenets of Christianity while also functioning as a potent visual representation of the benefits of increased trade with England. By comparing the content of his lantern shows to commercially available scriptural slides, I expand the argument made by other scholars by showing how Livingstone’s narration of the slide of Abraham aligns with covenant theology. However, the geographic distribution and temporal scope of references to the lantern in Livingstone’s writings indicate that Africans co-opted the lantern show to negotiate a more advantageous place within pan-African trade networks. Rather than seeing Livingstone’s audiences in black and white terms, I foreground the ways in which the lantern show brought together Africans from diasporate ethnic groups, many of whom had been displaced by warfare and the slave trade. Though his audiences would have been characterized as “native” by European standards, many of the Africans who Livingstone met would not be considered indigenous to the regions in which Livingstone encountered them. I argue that chiefs’ responses to Livingstone’s lantern shows register as calculated performances of power. Demonstrations of bravery, wealth, and authority were not only designed to impress Livingstone but were also intended to command the respect of the Africans traveling with him. In this manner, the lantern show became a vehicle for African agency within the pan-African ivory trade.
This emphasis on increasing commerce with the African interior as a means to combat the slave trade would become the primary focus of Livingstone’s subsequent expeditions. Although Livingstone never stopped being a missionary, he broke formal ties with the LMS in 1855 in order to devote his energies to exploring the Zambezi. With the support of the Royal Geographic Society, Livingstone began a second expedition in 1858, this time to investigate whether the Zambezi could function as a highway to the interior. These hopes were dashed when they encountered the Cabora Rapids. To make matters worse, tensions among members of the expedition were high, and many were openly critical of Livingstone’s leadership. Livingstone returned to England in 1864 but sailed for Africa two years later to search for the source of the Nile until his death in 1873. It was during this final journey when he lost contact with his family and friends, sparking Henry Morton Stanley’s search for Livingstone and the now immortal encounter. Inventories and personal letters indicate that Livingstone brought a lantern with him on the Zambezi expedition and his travels in the Lake Tanganyika region, but he devoted the most narrative space and energy in describing the lantern shows that he gave on his way to the coast during his first expedition.
[1] For a brief biography, see “Livingstone’s Life and Expeditions” by Justin D. Livingstone (no relation).
[2] Missionary Travels, John Murray, 1857, p. 230.
[3] Livingstone refers to the Ishinde by his official title, “Shinte.” Livingstone uses the Ishinde’s name, Kabompo, to refer the town where the Ishinde lived. To avoid confusion, I use the term “Kabompo” to refer to the village and “Ishinde” to refer to the person.
[4] Missionary Travels, pp. 298-299.
[5] Livingstone: Revised and Expanded Edition, Yale University Press, 2013, p. 131.
[6] “Revisionism: sins, psyche, sex,” Livingstone’s ‘Lives’: a metabiography of a Victorian icon (Manchester University Press: 2014), pp. 272-291. This overview appears in a condensed form in “Livingstone’s Posthumous Reputation.”
[7] Livingstone: Revised and Expanded Edition, pp. 133-4.
[8] Picturing Empire, University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 31. For his discussion of the COVIC, including a fascinating analysis of the COVIC’s photographer, Hugh Fisher, see pp. 183-213.
[9] Thompson also includes an extended discussion of the collection of lantern slides at the Livingstonia mission station in Malawi that were used by missionaries at the turn of the twentieth-century onwards. “Missionaries and the Magic Lantern,” Light on Darkness? Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 207-238, and “David Livingstone’s Magic Lantern, United Kingdom,” Trophies, Relics, or Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific, Karen Jacobs, Chantal Knowles, and Chris Wingfield, editors, Sidestone Press, 2015, pp. 94-97.
