Social Lights
Diary entries written in Linyanti and Sesheke remediate the quantity and volume of the audiences’ responses without describing what was said. Proportionally, the majority of the lantern shows’ narration was provided by members of the audience. Livingstone’s first lantern show in Linyanti “brought such a concourse of women and the pictures so loosened their tongues it was only occasionally I could get in a word of explanation.”[1] In this case, Kololo women represent the most prominent voices. Elsewhere, the audiences’ responses seem nondescript. According to Livingstone, “they assent to the truth, but ‘We don’t know’, or ‘You speak truly’, is all the response.”[2] Livingstone interprets these vanilla responses as signs of the audiences’ focus, for he repeatedly emphasized their “attentiveness” in his journals and diaries.
Other details suggest that the walla of the audience was distracting. Although the audience is not always described in gendered terms, the actions of the Kololo men in Linyanti suggest that women were subverting the conventions of public-speaking. The day after the womens’ enthusiastic narration, Livingstone wrote that “they propose to make Mapulanyane stand with a switch and keep them off.” The implication seems to be that the “they” in view were Kololo men. Such actions resonate as demonstrations of control not only in gendered terms but also political ones. The Kololo allowed women to ascend to the throne, and the Lozi, who were among the Kololo vassals, nominated women as sub-chiefs. By limiting the extent to which women spoke in the context of the lantern show, the Kololo men were applying social pressure for women not to adopt public positions of authority. Such demonstrations ultimately persuaded Mamochisane, Sebituane’s daughter, to step down as Queen of the Kololo in favor of her brother, Sekeletu.[5] In the context of the lantern show, Livingtone objected to this proposal to quell the womens’ commentary through violence, “hop[ing] milder measures will be effectual in preserving the peace.”[3] Despite his initial reservations about using brute force to limit the audience’s participation, Livingstone had become so exasperated by the time he reached Sesheke that he accepted help from Morianstane, who “hurled his staff at the heads of some young fellows whom he saw working with a skin instead of listening.”[4] Here, the demonstration of force did not have the gendered overtones that lantern show in Linyanti did, for the hurled staff was targeted at other men.
The threat of physical harm may have made audiences more attentive, but it did not necessarily make the lantern an effective teaching tool. Livingstone remarks repeatedly during this run of lantern shows that the audience did not appear to remember the content of the audio-visual lesson, for “though they listen with apparent delight to what is said, questioning on the following night reveals almost entire ignorance of the previous lesson.”[6] In order to read this passage as a record of failed communication, one would have to assume that Livingstone was inept or that his audience was unable to remember. I find both of these assumptions problematic. First, Livingstone was still in his linguistic comfort zone, for the Kololo spoke a dialect of seSotho that was close to the seTsana Livingstone had learned while living in Kolobeng and Kuruman. Livingstone’s published analysis of seTswana reflects his skills as an amateur linguist. While there is a chance that information was lost in translation, it would have been least likely to happen here and more likely to happen further north. Since the Kololo who traveled with Livingstone were able to serve as translators, we must assume that they were familiar with the main tenets of Christianity to the point that they could explain them in seLozi. They would have memorized this material in the context of Livingstone’s sermons and lantern shows in Linyanti and Sesheke. Secondly, the Kololo had a rich oral tradition. Knowledge was transmitted and preserved verbally through song and speech. In such an aural culture, it would be surprising if the Kololo could not remember information that had been presented in a sonic medium, especially since they were able to translate the content of these addresses into other African languages.
There is the possibility that the audience could not remember the content of the lesson because they were in a chemically-induced altered mental state—cannabis sativa had been introduced to central Africa through contact with Arabic and Indian traders on the east coast. Throughout his travels, Livingstone observed its value as a trade commodity and its effects on the people whom he encountered. Livingstone notes that mutokwane, the Kololo-Lozi term for cannabis, was part of the tributes offered to Sekeletu, and that the Kololo king was particularly fond of its effects.[7] Though not described extensively in narratives of the first expedition, a long discourse on Kololo mutokwane smoking practices appears in Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi,[8] and samples of cannabis to be traded with the Lozi from Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition now reside in the Pitt-Rivers Museum. In Kololo country, men were the most prominent smokers, despite being forbidden to do so by their wives. (According to Livingstone, this public protestation masked the fact that “some of the women smoke it secretly.”) With predictable distaste for the practice, Livingstone remarks that cannabis produces
This profusion of nonsensical sentences is a characteristic of Livingstone’s descriptions of the effects of cannabis and his accounts of the audiences’ verbal responses to projecting images. Though tenuous, this similarity suggests that mutokwane may have been a factor in the Kololo’s supposed forgetfulness.[10]in some a species of frenzy, which passes away in a rapid stream of unmeaning words or short sentences, as “the green grass grows,” “the fat cattle thrive,” “the fish swim.” No one in the group pays the slightest attention to the vehement eloquence, or the sage or silly utterance of the oracle, who stops abruptly, and, the instant common sense returns, looks rather foolish.[9]
Instead of assuming ineptitude on the part of Livingstone or incapacitation on the part of the Kololo, I think that it is safer to read the lantern’s apparent inefficacy as a demonstration of Kololo agency. In this light, the audiences’ forgetfulness registers as a ploy to garner a repeat performance. (If they remembered the previous night’s lesson, why would Livingstone have cause to show the pictures again?) For the mutokwane enthusiast, projected pictures offered a colorful visual experience. Kololo efforts to solicit entertainment were ultimately successful, for Livingstone gave multiple performances on back-to-back evenings, and reprised his role as the lanternist when he returned to Linyanti and Sesheke in 1855.
Livingstone's account of these shows in Missionary Travels simultaneously foregrounds the large crowds in Kololo country while also silencing them. He omits any reference to his lantern shows entirely, excising the women who prevented him from speaking. Instead, Livingstone describes how
Here, Livingstone emphasizes the size of his audience by placing them in single file. Whereas his journals focus on the voices of his Kololo audience, the published account turns to his own. The vocal strain caused by trying to shout over the audience’s narration is recast as a result of the crowd’s size. This account of Moriantsane places Livingstone back in control, for he attributes the impetus to regulate the distracted members of the audience to a desire to please. By remediating the gist of the questions asked, Livingstone underscores the attentiveness of the audience and avoids representing the lantern as an ineffective educational tool.I gave many public addresses to the people of Sesheke under the outspreading camel-thorn-tree, which serves as a shade to the kotla on the high bank of the river. It was pleasant to see the long lines of men, women, and children winding along from different quarters of the town, each party following behind their respective head men. They often amounted to between five and six hundred souls, and required an exertion of voice which brought back the complaint for which I had got the uvula excised at the Cape. They were always very attentive; and Moriantsane, in order, as he thought, to please me, on one occasion rose up in the middle of the discourse, and hurled his staff at the heads of some young fellows whom he saw working with a skin instead of listening. My hearers sometimes put very sensible questions on the subjects brought before them; at other times they introduced the most frivolous nonsense immediately after hearing the most solemn truths.[11]
[1] This kind of running commentary would also characterize Lozi responses to writing. See Livingstone’s African Journal 1853-1856, Isaac Schapera, ed., Chatto & Windus, 1963, p. 18.
[2] Livingstone’s African Journal 1853-1856, p. 315.
[3] Livingstone’s Private Journals, Isaac Schapera ed., University of California Press, 1960, pp. 273-274.
[4] Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; Including a Sketch of Sixteen Years’ Residence in the Interior of Africa, and a Journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda on the West Coast; Thence across the Continent, down the River Zambesi, to the Eastern Ocean, John Murray, 1857, pp. 235-236.
[5] That is not to say that women did not wield tremendous power privately. Elizabeth Ischei, among others, attributes the persistence of the Kololo language (instead of Lozi) as the lingua franca of this region to the influence of Kololo women. A History of African Societies to 1870, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 400.
[6] Livingstone’s African Journal 1853-1856, p. 315.
[7] Missionary Travels, , p. 198.
[8] David Harvey, “Stability of cannabinoids in dried samples of cannabis dating from around 1896-1905,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 117-28, accessible via Research Gate, DOI: 10.1016/0378-8741(90)90068-5.
[9] David Livingstone and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries, and of the Discovery of the Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa 1858-64, John Murray, 1865, accessible via Google Books, p. 304.
[10] For an extended discussion of other explorers who encountered cannabis in Central Africa, particularly its remediation in the writings of Paul Pogge and Hermann Wissmann, see Johannes Fabian’s chapter on “Carisma, Cannabis, and Crossing Africa,” Out of their Minds, University of California Press, 2000, pp. 151-179.
[11] Missionary Travels, pp. 235-236.
