Volume 1, Number 9 · December 26, 1963
Dark Mission
By J.H. Plumb
Livingstone's African Journals 1853-56
edited with an Introduction by I. Schapera
California, two volumes (236 & 259) pp., $11.50
African explorers are at a discount—at least in Africa. Their statues are being broken up or removed to obscure suburbs. As one native of Nyasaland remarked about Livingstone, 'How could he have discovered us? We were always here!' For young nations struggling towards independence, the recent past is often best forgotten in order to obliterate the shame, the frustration, the sense of inadequacy which exploitation and submission always create. So the stature of the great explorers—Mungo Park, H. M. Stanley, Heinrich Barth, Richard Burton and the rest will diminish. They will be reduced to cosy adventure-reading a la Moorehead, or buried in meticulous scholarship à la Schapera. The careful annotation of Livingstone's diaries and journals, however, needed to be done and Mr. Schapera has done it as well as it can be done—minute variations between the journals and the final published version, Missionary Travels and Researches, are correct to a thousandth of a comma, the failure to track down obscure place names in the Barotseland Gazeteer unflaggingly recorded, and plants, animals, fishes described in the splendid rotundity of their scientific nomenclature: for the addict of editorial virtuosity this book could become an obsession; but most readers might doubt whether these rough notes deserved such Herculean labors. However, they have been performed, and this edition will last, awaiting the historian, black or white, who will finally judge the missionary factor in African history, doubtless as a part of that greater and more difficult evaluation of the role of the white man in the development of Africa. Whatever the color of the historian, the assessment will be difficult, for ambiguities of motive are as commonplace as the African atrocities perpetrated by Arabs and Europeans.
Review, 1231 words
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