David Livingstone’s Only Convert

Livingstone gave up on this African chief, but he said, “I’ll never give up Jesus”  

Stephen Tomkins is the author of David Livingstone: The Unexplored Story

David Livingstone

BBC News Magazine 18 March 2013 (edited)

It is 200 years since the birth of David Livingstone on 19 March 1813. Livingstone (1813 to 1873) is the most famous missionary to visit Africa in the 19th Century. But as author and Church historian Stephen Tomkins explains, the story of an African chief he converted is every bit as incredible as Livingstone's.

"Africa's Greatest Missionary"?

According to the title of one biography, David Livingstone was "Africa's Greatest Missionary".

This is an interesting claim about the Scots-born man, considering that the number of people he converted in his 30-year career is either one or none!

The variation is because Livingstone himself wrote off his one convert as a backslider within months of his baptism.

Roger Sechele

The irony is that this one backslider has a much better claim than Livingstone to be Africa's greatest missionary.

This man whom Livingstone gave up as a drop-out and back-slider became a preacher, a leader and a pioneer of adapting Christianity to African life - to the great annoyance of European missionaries.

His name was Roger Sechele, and he was the kgosi (chief) of the Bakwena tribe, part of the Tswana people, in what is now Botswana in Southern Africa.

Born in 1812, Sechele was 10 when his father, the previous chief, was killed. Two of his uncles divided the tribe between them. Sechele escaped with a few followers into the desert for 9 years, and returned to oust one of his uncles.

Gunpowder Gift Proves Fatal

This was how things stood when Sechele first met Livingstone - he ruled a half-tribe. Livingstone persuaded him to make peace with his other uncle by sending him a gift of gunpowder for the uncle’s rifle.

The uncle suspected the gunpowder was bewitched; he tried to neutralize it with fire, and was killed in the resulting explosion. Due to these unforeseen events, Sechele ruled over a reunited Bakwena tribe.

‘African Chief wants Missionary’

Like many African chiefs, Sechele was keen to have a missionary living in his town. Missionaries came with guns (and powder), making them an invaluable defense, and they brought medicine.

Sechele amused Livingstone by asking for medicine to make him a better hunter. But the thing Sechele wanted above all from David Livingstone was literacy.

He learned the alphabet, upper and lower case, in 2 days, compiled his own spelling books, and set about reading the one book available in his language, the Bible. He ate breakfast before sunrise in order to start school as quickly as possible, and then taught his wives to read.

Two Problems—Rainmaking & Polygamy

As Sechele grew increasingly interested in Christianity, he found 2 huge barriers in his way. One was rain.

Tswana tribes had rainmakers, whose job was to use magic to make the rain come when needed. Livingstone, like all missionaries, vehemently opposed rainmaking, on both religious and scientific grounds.

Sechele happened to be his tribe's rainmaker as well as chief, and Livingstone's stay coincided with the worst drought ever known, so Sechele's decision to stop making rain was predictably unpopular.

The greater problem was polygamy. Sechele had 5 wives, and Livingstone insisted that to become a Christian he needed get rid of the "superfluous" ones. This was a political as well a personal nightmare, threatening the political structure of the tribe and relations with other tribes.

Baptized 1848

But in 1848 Roger Sechele divorced 4 of the women and was baptized. The following year, however, one of his ex-wives became pregnant, and it turned out Sechele was the father—he had fallen. He repented, and told Livingstone: "Do not give me up because of this. I shall never give up Jesus. You and I will stand before him together."

But Livingstone did give up on him, going north to embark upon his celebrated adventures—he was the first European to traverse Africa, he “discovered” Victoria Falls and led expeditions to find the source of the River Nile…

At this point, Sechele largely disappears from view. His reappearance was startling.

Ten Years Later

The first British missionaries who arrived to work with the Zulu Ndebele tribe in what is now Zimbabwe in 1859 were staggered to find that they already had regular Christian prayers. Roger Sechele had beaten them to it.

Sechele had decided to lead church services for his own people after Livingstone left. He taught reading, the Bible became popular, and slowly the Bakwena tribe became Christian.

Sechele travelled hundreds of miles as a missionary to other tribes, and having withstood the European Boers, his own Bakwena tribe became a refuge, absorbing many neighboring tribes into their Christian society.

At his death on 25 Sept. 1892, Sechele ruled 30,000 people, a hundred times larger than the initial number Livingstone first found with him.

In the estimation of Neil Parsons, of the University of Botswana, Sechele "did more to propagate Christianity in 19th-century southern Africa than virtually any single European missionary." IT’s a story repeated many times over in Africa: The European missionaries typically gained a few Christian converts. However, some of these “few” became zealous evangelists, bring the gospel to hundreds (and even thousands) of their own people.

African Christian puzzles Missionaries

For European missionaries though, Sechele was a frustrating puzzle, "a half Christian and a half heathen."

He returned to rainmaking, considering it a political necessity, and late in life returned to polygamy, marrying a young woman for entirely political reasons.

Missionaries also strongly objected to his use of traditional charms and purification rites, and the list of his ancestors on the church wall.

And yet, even  his critics admitted, "he reads the Bible threadbare", and when confronted he ran scriptural rings around them.

"Roger Sechele had to keep his wits about him," wrote the missionary Elizabeth Price about her husband, "or he would have been lost, so wily and cunning is Sechele - murdering sacred scripture and bringing it to defend him in a way which horrifies and amazes one. A strange, strange mixture he is."

Such strange mixtures are still found in African Christianity. Unlike other converts who were content to follow European Christianity, Sechele went back to the source and recreated it as an indigenous religion.

Hopefully, in the year of Livingstone's bicentennial, Sechele will finally get a bit more of the recognition due to him.