IN HER LATEST novel, Petina Gappah reimagines the death of Scottish missionary and doctor David Livingstone, focusing on his African servants, the names history forgot. They are Christians, Muslims, healers, porters, women, and children: a family of strangers who band together to carry Livingstone’s body, marching more than 1,500 miles in 285 days, so his remains may be claimed in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, and returned to England.
Every name on this trip holds stories that could occupy a novel of their own. To encompass them, Gappah employs two distinct narrators: Halima and Jacob Wainwright.
Halima, the doctor’s cook, is known for her sharp tongue, which ridicules the caprice of men and repeatedly tells of her youth as a sultan’s slave. In the early days of the journey with Livingstone’s body, Halima mourns the doctor, whom she calls “Bwana (Master) Daudi,” like a paternal figure. Though the men on the journey take credit, she is the one who proposes a way to preserve the doctor’s corpse for the long road ahead.
But Halima’s love for the bwana does not prevent her from noting his contradictions. She wonders why he would leave his family to search for the source of the Nile, argues with his colonial perception of a children’s game, and questions how a man who condemns the slave trade would have one of their company whipped.
In a scene rife with her satiric humor, Halima laments on behalf of Livingstone’s children: “The thought of those poor children in that far-off land, so cold, so dark, and so dreadfully poor, with a mother who died from pombe and a father who died looking for rivers, wandering and wandering like he had no home, made me sorry, and I asked Chuma to name all of them.” By deploying moments of levity, Gappah humanizes her characters with a range that colonization rarely allows.
Where Halima is a cook and a bondswoman, Jacob is a freed slave, educated at the Nassick School in British-occupied Bombay. Where Halima dreams of a house to call her own, Jacob dreams of ordination and receiving due glory for his role in Livingstone’s final journey. Unlike Halima, Jacob insists on his identity as an outsider, superior because of his proximity to the white man.
Jacob narrates the mission of transporting Livingstone’s body in diary-like entries, painting a lofty self-portrait that reveals his blind spots. While his self-righteousness limits his access to the lives around him, Jacob’s biblical allusions evoke Exodus, rendering an epic tale of love, loss, and betrayal on a bitter road paved with bones. Ultimately, when Jacob tries to reveal Livingstone’s troubling role in the machinery of slavery, his superiors remind him of his limits as a black man.
With her masterful, multilayered storytelling, Gappah examines the hypocrisy of colonialism while imagining a world for the characters subsumed by the shadow of slavery.
Elinam Agbo earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. Born in Ghana, she grew up in the U.S. Midwest.
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