Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: The Pathetic Death of Bwana Ingeleshi
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Parliament of Philanthropy’: The Fight to Bury Livingstone
- 2 Laying to Rest a Victorian Myth: The ‘Lost Heart of the Nation’, Victorian Sentimentality & the Rebirth of Moral Imperialism
- 3 A Perfect Savagery: The Livingstone Martyrs & the Tree of Death on Africa's ‘Highway to Hell’
- 4 The Graveyard of Ambition: Missionary Wars, Bachelor Colonialism & White Memorials, Chitambo, 1900– 1913
- 5 White Settlers, Frontier Chic & Colonial Racism: How Livingstone's Three Cs Fell Apart
- 6 ‘The Hearts of Good Men’: 1973, the One- Party State & the Struggle against Apartheid
- 7 ‘Chains of Remembrance’: Livingstone, Sentimental Imperialism & Britain's Africa Conversation, 1913– 2013
- Conclusion
- Epilogue: The Testimony of Pastor Manduli
- Index
Prologue: The Pathetic Death of Bwana Ingeleshi
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue: The Pathetic Death of Bwana Ingeleshi
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A Parliament of Philanthropy’: The Fight to Bury Livingstone
- 2 Laying to Rest a Victorian Myth: The ‘Lost Heart of the Nation’, Victorian Sentimentality & the Rebirth of Moral Imperialism
- 3 A Perfect Savagery: The Livingstone Martyrs & the Tree of Death on Africa's ‘Highway to Hell’
- 4 The Graveyard of Ambition: Missionary Wars, Bachelor Colonialism & White Memorials, Chitambo, 1900– 1913
- 5 White Settlers, Frontier Chic & Colonial Racism: How Livingstone's Three Cs Fell Apart
- 6 ‘The Hearts of Good Men’: 1973, the One- Party State & the Struggle against Apartheid
- 7 ‘Chains of Remembrance’: Livingstone, Sentimental Imperialism & Britain's Africa Conversation, 1913– 2013
- Conclusion
- Epilogue: The Testimony of Pastor Manduli
- Index
Summary
By the candle still burning they saw him, not in bed, but kneeling at the bedside, with his head buried in his hands upon the pillow … he had passed away … But he had died in the act of prayer … commending his own spirit, with all his dear ones, as was his wont, into the hands of his Saviour; and commending AFRICA – his own dear Africa – with all her woes and sins and wrongs, to the Avenger of the oppressed and the Redeemer of the lost.
W.G. Blaikie, The Life of David Livingstone, 1880In the morning, they carried the Bwana's body to a Mupundu tree … on a large flat iron plate. They pulled out all his stomach and heart and lungs and put them in a hole in the ground near the Mupundu tree. Then they built a platform about eight feet high and put the body on that. They did not put fire under it. Then [Chief] Chitambo called all his villages to bring food and they brought a meal and goats and chickens and the Bwana's people mourned for three days. After three days, they put the body in a box that had carried guns and then they went off … to the coast.
Headman Lupoko, son of Chief Chitambo, interviewed by district commissioner, Mapika, Northern Rhodesia, 1932Victorians dealt in moral certainty, and Livingstone's death held all the aces. Sensational and gruesome, it was a tale of manly, masochistic endurance, a biblical parable of redemption, with a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice on behalf of all mankind. The location had been ‘darkest Africa’, also known as that ‘savage country’. Even in the 1870s, its interior was still imagined as a land of cannibals, unicorns and men who grew tails. It was understood as the cradle, not of humanity, but of its opposite, for at its dark centre was the heart of human slavery – the ‘greatest evil facing mankind’. The Serpent had seemingly slithered out of the Garden of Eden and coiled itself around Africa's plumptious middle.
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- Information
- Empire of SentimentThe Death of Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism, pp. xv - xxxviiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018