This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

The grave was buried in dry silt and foliage, and it took an hour of hacking and digging in the stifling midday heat before steel chinked on stone. Slowly, amidst the clatter of hoes and machetes, six pillars emerged from the earth. The grave revealed, our excavation party set down their tools to say the Lord’s Prayer in Chichewa, the dust still hanging round them in the windless air.

We were in Mozambique, at the confluence of the Ruo and Shire rivers just across the border from Malawi. We had set off before dawn, travelling by dugout canoe along a stretch of water busy with crocodiles and known locally as Mtayamoyo — the place where you lose your life.

Here, on 31 January 1862, Charles Mackenzie lost his. The last warrior bishop of the Anglican Church, Mackenzie died horribly of blackwater fever whilst leading a campaign against slavery which has been consigned to oblivion in Britain, but deserves to be remembered as amongst our greatest moral crusades.

This was the region that obsessed David Livingstone because, once the transatlantic slave trade had been suppressed, the largest slave market in the world was on Africa’s east coast, and its major source of victims was the territory around Lake Malawi.

The situation Livingstone encountered there in the 1850s and 60s was appalling. Slave raiding was rampant, conducted by local tribes, Arabs and their Islamised African accomplices, and African-Portuguese robber-barons ruling private fiefdoms. Into this scene also entered the Ngoni, an expansionist tribe of the Zulu diaspora. The result was endemic inter-tribal warfare, disruption of agriculture and recurrent famine.

Captives were marched 500 miles or more to the coast, where survivors were sold mostly to Omani Arabs whose empire, re-centred on Zanzibar in 1840, was reaching its zenith. Other buyers came from the Arabian peninsula, the Persian Gulf, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, and even French and Portuguese slavers were occasionally apprehended late in the 1890s.

You increasingly encounter special pleading for slavery as it was practised in the Arab world: that it was somehow not fully “chattel slavery” as in the Americas; that slaves might be treated better, or enjoy a measure of social mobility. For those in domestic service, this was sometimes true, but many others were put to hard labour, especially in spice plantations.

Young boys might be castrated for sale as eunuchs, and there was mass sexual enslavement, particularly of women, with harems kept open on Zanzibar until 1909. The whole system was highly racialised, with the price of slaves varying wildly according to skin tone.

Slavery here had been practised at least since the eighth century. By the mid-nineteenth, between 15,000 and 50,000 slaves were sold each year in Zanzibar alone. Naval policing was difficult. Slavers used small, coast-hugging dhows along an immense, friendly coastline. British warships struggled to intercept them and, if pressed, traders could easily put their cargo ashore.

❂

Livingstone concluded that the only way to extirpate slavery here was through missionary settlement deep in the interior: Christianity, civilisation and (how else to pay for it?) commerce — the infamous Three C’s that cause us such embarrassment today. He also believed Malawi would lend itself to large-scale cotton cultivation, undermining the economies of the US slave states. He was wrong about cotton, but the rest of his vision was vindicated by men of the highest personal and intellectual calibre Britain has ever produced.

It was to the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Dublin that Livingstone first directed his appeal in 1857. Mackenzie was a gifted Cambridge mathematician; his successors included classicists, theologians, physicians, naturalists and linguists — young men who gave up lucrative prospects to join a mission in which survival was reckoned so unlikely that many used the long voyage from Britain to choose their epitaphs.

This was the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, the UMCA, of which Mackenzie was consecrated bishop on New Year’s Day 1861. Later that year, he and a dozen companions were dropped off at the mouth of the Zambezi by a British warship which then sailed away. They transferred to a cramped, flimsy steamboat, aiming to sail 200 miles inland to a place Livingstone thought favourable, but the river proved barely navigable. One 12-mile stretch took a month as they ran aground on sandbanks, necessitating unloading and reloading of the entire vessel, sometimes on consecutive days.

My own journey was facilitated by air travel, a 4×4 vehicle, maps, 5G, antimalarial prophylaxis and local friends. Yet I still remember the exhaustion of bad, dusty roads, searing heat and a minor stomach upset. The physical achievement of those men in reaching their destination leaves me astonished. All went down with fever or dysentery and remained ill intermittently. Communication with the outside world was all but impossible.

❂

When cataracts halted progress, the missionaries disembarked at a village where Livingstone had established friendships years before. They hired porters and continued on foot, climbing steeply to reach their destination in the Shire Highlands, where they built a few shoddy huts — one playfully designated “the Bishop’s Palace” — under the misdirection of an incompetent carpenter from London. They planted crops but, until the first harvest, subsisted off tinned food and what little they could barter from struggling locals.

The task of freeing slaves, however, proved easy, at first. Early on they encountered a slave caravan. When the slavers fled, they were left with 84 men, women and children bound together with ropes and slave sticks. One woman reported that her baby had been beaten to death a few days before because it hindered her from carrying the load assigned to her.

It seemed so easy to do good: freed slaves and escapees were welcomed, a local tribe foreswore slaving. At one point, Mackenzie stumbled upon some locals in the process of breaking a woman’s legs to bury her alive with her dead husband. The bishop successfully intervened.

But when a local village begged protection, the missionaries unwisely agreed and found themselves in the middle of a tribal war, defending themselves with firearms Mackenzie had been reluctant to bring at all. He equivocated about the ethics even of rescuing slaves, let alone fighting, but as the situation escalated, he found himself hacking through his new diocese with a rifle in one hand, crozier in the other.

At one point, trying to discourage further attacks, he marched on a slaver village, but found the inhabitants had fled. He ordered it to be burned. It then emerged that the people they had taken to be victims were engaged in slaving like everyone else.

❂

In the vexed discussion of our past, we seldom pause to wonder what it was actually like for the individuals involved on the ground, taking decisions for better or worse often in nightmarish circumstances. The missionaries held agonised debates about what to do. They had attracted all the suffering humanity left behind by slave raiding, including scores of orphaned children. One with learning difficulties would not leave Mackenzie’s side. “Look at them and tell me if you could refuse,” the bishop answered a doubting companion. But they were increasingly struggling to look after themselves, let alone others.

Malaria proved rampant. Malnourished and exhausted, they were all very ill. Due to meet Livingstone on New Year’s Day at a village 50 miles away, Mackenzie and Henry Burrup, a young Oxford classicist, the least sick, set off with two local guides through hostile territory in torrential rain and with worsening diarrhoea. After nine days on foot, they switched to a canoe but this capsized in the swollen river. They lost their quinine, and began to get markedly more sick.

Arriving late for the rendezvous, they learnt Livingstone had gone three days earlier. The villagers gave them shelter, but they continued to deteriorate. Soon Mackenzie could not move and began bleeding from nose and mouth. When he died, Burrup was growing delirious but oversaw his friend’s committal to a shallow grave before returning alone. He died three weeks later.

When word reached Britain, there was outrage. The mission’s sponsors could not comprehend the circumstances Mackenzie had faced, and he was denounced on all sides. Edward Pusey was vocal at Oxford, condemning him for having taken up arms. “The gospel,” he pronounced, “is planted, not by doing, but by suffering.” Meanwhile missionaries continued to die in Africa until a relief mission was dispatched to evacuate them.

But over the following years, Mackenzie morphed into an odd mix of flawed hero, martyr and salutary lesson. Incredibly, volunteers continued to come forward, now better prepared. The UMCA was re-founded on an island in the middle of Lake Malawi where it flourished, as did missions established by Scottish Presbyterians elsewhere in the territory.

❂

I often found it mystifying how such a large swathe of the world came to embrace an alien religion without coercion. Mackenzie’s doomed effort showed that some aspects of their task were easy: the message of peace on earth and goodwill to all men proved highly attractive to long-suffering locals. Mackenzie’s successors continued to die of disease and the enmity of slavers but they persevered, mostly peacefully, and came to prevail in what amounted to a heroic appeal to better nature. When the British government reluctantly absorbed the territory as a protectorate in 1891, only a handful of slaver fiefdoms remained to be subdued by force.

In the Anglican cathedral in Zanzibar, built at the site of the old slave market, reads a plaque:

To the glory of God and in memory of Livingstone and other explorers, men good and brave who, to advance knowledge, set free the slave, and hasten Christ’s kingdom in Africa, loved not their lives even unto death.

I visited with a party of Scandinavian aid workers who had never heard of the UMCA and told me: “They were all just colonialists, right?” The Anglican Church recently adopted a similarly dismissive attitude towards these extraordinary figures from its past. Earlier this year Justin Welby, as archbishop of Canterbury, gave a sermon in Zanzibar but chose to emphasise the faults of the early missionaries over their achievements and sacrifices. “They did not change their attitudes,” he averred. “They treated Africans as inferior.”

I am curious to know who exactly the former Archbishop had in mind. Mackenzie’s successors gave everything they had to the region, and their graves litter Malawi, still venerated today. They committed to sharing the lives of local peoples and — as I argue in my recent book (Goodbye, Dr Banda) — approached their cultures with a curiosity and respect seldom matched by Western visitors today. The imputation that they treated Africans as inferior dishonours men who died precisely because they considered Africans as worthy of that sacrifice as anyone else.

❂

The archbishop’s sermon came in the context of a recent Church commitment to compensate communities affected by the legacy of slavery with a package of up to £1 billion. The basis for this was a report into profits derived from historical investments in the slave trade. The Church “must ensure that the gaps of history are filled”, enjoined the report; that “voices that have been excluded are now included”. Well, a major contribution to ending slavery strikes me as just one such gap.

Others are less bashful about their past. Up the coast at Mombasa, Kenya, an exhibition at the old slave fort relates how its capture by Omani Arabs in 1698 was “driven by a humanitarian call for help from the people of the East African coast”. This is a disingenuous account of a period of ruthless imperial expansion,which led to periodic local rebellions over many decades and massive expansion of the slave trade.

The exhibition is similar to others along the coast from Zanzibar to Lamu, all products of Omani patronage proudly asserting the cultural and spiritual enrichment brought by their rule. Mention of slavery is conspicuously absent. Yet outside Mombasa lie five kilometres of sea caves into which slaves were packed when the trade outgrew the facilities of the fort. This practice ended only in 1895 when Britain achieved supremacy.

My visit to Mombasa earlier this year coincided with a BBC report of contemporary Malawian women tricked and trafficked to Oman then forced into domestic servitude, their passports confiscated. They reported violence, sexual abuse, gang rape and death threats. The government of Malawi, amongst the poorest in Africa, ended up compensating Omani employers to have the women repatriated.

In 1897, British gunboats compelled the sultans of Zanzibar into finally abolishing slavery. Looking back from the present, the intervening epoch of anti-slavery begins to resemble a brief aberration, set against a world fast reverting to more deeply ingrained habits. The extraordinary record of the Church of England could be harnessed as an inspiration to resist this process. But that seems unlikely when church leaders are more concerned with asserting their superiority over the past, rather than learning from it.