Missionary Travels and Researches in South AfricaLivingstone, David
Religion
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
Livingstone, David
Missions -- South Africa; South Africa -- Description and travel
Sechele continued to make a consistent profession for about three years;
and perceiving at last some of the difficulties of his case, and also
feeling compassion for the poor women, who were by far the best of our
scholars, I had no desire that he should be in any hurry to make a
full profession by baptism, and putting away all his wives but one. His
principal wife, too, was about the most unlikely subject in the tribe
ever to become any thing else than an out-and-out greasy disciple of
the old school. She has since become greatly altered, I hear, for the
better; but again and again have I seen Sechele send her out of church
to put her gown on, and away she would go with her lips shot out, the
very picture of unutterable disgust at his new-fangled notions.
When he at last applied for baptism, I simply asked him how he, having
the Bible in his hand, and able to read it, thought he ought to act. He
went home, gave each of his superfluous wives new clothing, and all his
own goods, which they had been accustomed to keep in their huts for him,
and sent them to their parents with an intimation that he had no fault
to find with them, but that in parting with them he wished to follow
the will of God. On the day on which he and his children were baptized,
great numbers came to see the ceremony. Some thought, from a stupid
calumny circulated by enemies to Christianity in the south, that the
converts would be made to drink an infusion of "dead men's brains",
and were astonished to find that water only was used at baptism. Seeing
several of the old men actually in tears during the service, I asked
them afterward the cause of their weeping; they were crying to see their
father, as the Scotch remark over a case of suicide, "SO FAR LEFT TO
HIMSELF". They seemed to think that I had thrown the glamour over him,
and that he had become mine. Here commenced an opposition which we had
not previously experienced. All the friends of the divorced wives became
the opponents of our religion. The attendance at school and church
diminished to very few besides the chief's own family. They all treated
us still with respectful kindness, but to Sechele himself they said
things which, as he often remarked, had they ventured on in former
times, would have cost them their lives. It was trying, after all we had
done, to see our labors so little appreciated; but we had sown the good
seed, and have no doubt but it will yet spring up, though we may not
live to see the fruits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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