He is waiting now for the arrival of Syde bin Habib, Dugumbé, and others who are bringing him letters and medicines from Ujiji. Months pass and there is no sign of them. He is heartsick and weary with the intolerable delay. The one excitement is in the shedding of blood. Every day has its story of horrors, and he can bear it no longer. But there are to be darker tragedies yet before he escapes out of the Manyuema country.
The year 1871 dawns. “O Father! Help me to finish this work to Thy glory.”
It was February before the men arrived who were bringing letters and stores for him; but, alas! “only one letter reached, and forty are missing.” The men, too, have been corrupted by the Arabs, and refuse to go north with him. He is again outwitted by his cunning foes. Weary days of bargaining follow, and at last terms are arranged. The expedition starts, and on March 29th Livingstone is at Nyangwé on the bank of the Lualaba, the furthest point westward that he was to reach at this time. He finds the Lualaba here “a mighty river 3,000 yards broad.”
Livingstone was to learn to his cost that the men who had been sent up country to him, ostensibly to help him on his way, were his worst enemies. They poisoned the minds of the Manyuema against him. They stirred up strife, and were guilty of every kind of crime. All Livingstone’s efforts to get canoes for exploring the river were neutralised by them; though he afterwards saw in this the hand of God for his deliverance, for other canoes were lost in the rapids. “We don’t always know the dangers we are guided past.”
We now reach the event which was the climax of Livingstone’s moral sufferings, and which, when known in Europe, sent a thrill of horror through the nations which had heard of the lesser agonies of the slave traffic with comparative indifference. On the 28th of June, one of Syde bin Habib’s slaves, named Manilla, set fire to eight or ten villages, alleging an old debt by way of an excuse. He then made blood-brotherhood with other tribes, which angered Dugumbé and his followers, who planned revenge. The 15th of July was a lovely summer day, and about 1,500 people came together for the market. Livingstone was strolling round observing the life in the market place, when three of Dugumbé’s men opened fire upon the assembled crowd, and another small troop began to shoot down the panic-stricken women as they fled to the canoes on the river. So many canoes were pushed off at once down the creek that they got jammed, and the murderers on the bank poured volley after volley into them. Numbers of the victims sprang into the water and swam out into the river. Many were hit and sank; others were drowned. Canoes capsized and their occupants were lost. The Arabs reckoned the dead at four hundred; and even then the men who had tasted blood continued the awful butchery and fired village after village. “No one will ever know,” writes Livingstone, “the exact loss on this bright, sultry, summer morning; it gave me the impression of being in hell.” Dugumbé protested his innocence, and helped to save some who were drowning; but it is clear that Livingstone in his heart accuses him of complicity. He counted twelve burning villages; and on the next day sees as many as seventeen. “The open murder perpetrated on hundreds of unsuspecting women fills me with unspeakable horror.” It “felt to me like Gehenna,” he writes later; and the nightmare never left him afterwards. “I cannot stay here in agony,” he adds; and on the 20th he starts back for Ujiji, in spite of the entreaties of those who had every reason to desire that he should not go away and publish the story. The atrocious wickedness of the Arabs was
THE MANYUEMA AMBUSCADE.
that they demoralised their slaves, and trained them to perpetrate these butcheries of natives, and then excused themselves on the ground that they had nothing to do with the crime.