HE is one of history's most famous explorers, and his first-person account of a 19th century massacre helped lead to the closure of one of Africa's most notorious slave markets. Now researchers say they have evidence Dr David Livingstone may not have been telling the whole truth.
An international team of academics used spectral imaging technology to decode Livingstone's long-illegible field diary and say it hints that his own men may have taken part in the atrocity. "Livingstone's party might have been involved in the massacre," said Adrian Wisnicki of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, who directed the project. But he advised caution: "We're only beginning to analyze the evidence."
It is an explosive claim, because Livingstone's account of the horror seen in the African village of Nyangwe galvanized Britain to shut the slave market in Zanzibar, a critical hub for East Africa's human traffickers. Livingstone himself denied allegations that his men had been involved.
And while Livingstone biographer Tim Jeal praised Wisnicki's efforts, he said he was skeptical that the Scottish missionary would have tried to cover up his party's role in the killings. "Nobody can know for sure, but I don't think the proof is there," Jeal said. Regardless of the exact circumstances, the Nyangwe massacre was one of the darkest points of Livingstone's career.
In his posthumously published Last Journals, Livingstone described how a "bright sultry summer morning" in July 1871 had turned to hell when slavers opened fire on some 1,500 people at Nyangwe's market.
Pandemonium broke out as the market goers, many of them women, scrambled for their canoes or tried to swim across the nearby Lualaba River.
"Shot after shot continued to be fired on the helpless and perishing," Livingstone said, describing how many others drowned in the river. "Some of the long line of heads disappeared quietly; whilst other poor creatures threw their arms high, as if appealing to the great Father above, and sank." Livingstone said he could not know how many had died, although he cited estimates running into the hundreds.
When news of the massacre reached Britain, it ignited a wave of revulsion. By 1873, the British consul had pressured the Sultan of Zanzibar to close the island's large slave market. Livingstone's account was first communicated to the outside world by journalist Henry Stanley. It is Livingstone's field diary, improvised from bank cheques and ageing pieces of newsprint and written in ink made from seeds and berries, which Wisnicki claims as evidence for his theory that Livingstone's men were involved in the massacre.
The raw notes have long been considered unreadable as a result of the unusual writing material, the tropical weather and the unorthodox ink. But Wisnicki's team submitted the notes to spectrographic analysis. The field diary makes clear that Livingstone, an ardent abolitionist, was horrified by the moral character of the freed slaves sent to reinforce his expedition. He describes them as "senseless slaves with no honour".
Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania, in East Africa. It comprises the Zanzibar Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, 25-50 kilometres (16-31 mi) off the coast of the mainland. It consists of numerous small islands and two large ones: Unguja (the main island, informally referred to as Zanzibar), and Pemba.
Other nearby island countries and territories include Comoros and Mayotte to the south, Mauritius and Réunion to the far southeast, and the Seychelles Islands about 1,500 km to the east. Arab and Portuguese traders visited the region in early times, and it was controlled by Omanis in the 18th and 19th centuries. Britain established a protectorate (1890) that became an independent sultanate in December 1963 and a republic after an uprising in January 1964.
In April 1964 it joined Tanganyika to form a new republic that was renamed Tanzania in October 1964. The capital of Zanzibar, located on the island of Unguja, is Zanzibar City, and its historic centre, known as Stone Town, is a World Heritage Site. Zanzibar's main exports include spices, raffia, and tourism. In particular, the islands produce cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and pepper.
For this reason, the islands, together with Tanzania's Mafia Island, are sometimes called the Spice Islands (a term also associated with the Maluku Islands in Indonesia). Zanzibar's ecology is of note for being the home of the endemic Zanzibar Red Colobus Monkey and the (possibly extinct) Zanzibar Leopard.
The presence of microlithic tools attests to at least 50,000 years of human occupation of Zanzibar. A Greco-Roman text between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, mentioned this island as Menuthias. The islands became part of the historical record of the wider world when Persian traders discovered them and used them as a base for voyages between the Middle East, India, and Africa.
Unguja, the larger island, offered a protected and defensible harbor, so although the archipelago offered few products of value, the Persians settled at what became Zanzibar City ("Stone Town") as a convenient point from which to trade with East African coastal towns. They established garrisons on the islands and built the first Zoroastrian fire temples and mosques in the Southern hemisphere.
During the Age of Exploration, the Portuguese Empire was the first European power to gain control of Zanzibar, and retained it for nearly 200 years. In 1698, Zanzibar fell under the control of the Sultanate of Oman, which developed an economy of trade and cash crops with ruling Arab elite. Plantations were developed to grow spices, hence the term Spice Islands. Another major trade good for Zanzibar was ivory.
The Sultan of Zanzibar controlled a substantial portion of the East African coast, known as Zanj. This included Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, and trading routes that extended much further inland, such as the route leading to Kindu on the Congo River. Zanzibar was famous worldwide for its spices and its slaves.
It was East Africa's main slave-trading port, and in the mid-19th century as many as 50,000 slaves were passing annually through the slave markets of Zanzibar. Sometimes gradually and sometimes by fits and starts, control of Zanzibar came into the hands of the British Empire; part of the political impetus for this was the 19th century movement for the abolition of the slave trade.
Source: allAfric
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