One hundred years ago today, my grandfather William Livingstone woke up in his family home at Magomero (in what is now known as Malawi) to what he would imagine would be another normal working day. He was with his wife Kitty and their two small children, Nyasa aged 5 and William, their baby of 6 months. Willie and Kitty already knew of personal tragedy having lost a little daughter Dorothy as an infant – she had been born after Nyasa, and was buried in Mombasa. But by 1915 Willie and Kitty were moving on with their lives, and loved living in Africa.
Willie had moved out to Nyasaland, as it was known then, in 1893 as he needed to earn a living and there were limited openings on the West Coast of Scotland. In his search for gainful employment, he had been offered the job of managing his Livingstone cousins’ estate of Magomero that lay between Blantyre and Zomba. On considering the huge move he would need to make from his own family home in the Hebrides, and leaving his own family behind in order to take up that post, he felt this was his best option to get on in life. Opportunities, such as he was being presented with, were rare at that time, and so he felt himself lucky to have been given the chance to manage a large African estate.
The challenges he was to face were huge, with the responsibility of looking after some 200,000 acres of largely undeveloped bush. The task, set to him by his owners, was to develop the planting of coffee, cotton and tobacco. As a bachelor at the time, he relished the opportunity to prove his worth as an experienced agriculturalist.
So over the years Willie proved himself to be a successful planter, experimenting with different crops and also importing cattle for breeding stock from his homeland in Scotland. He became well integrated into the settler community making, not only agricultural improvements, but also welfare improvements for their estate workers, such as building a hospice. In times of famine, he was known to open up the estate grain stores to feed the local workers and help in the limited ways he was allowed. Willie was, after all, only a salaried employee and, as such, would have needed final approval and authority from the AL Bruce Estates as his paymasters before he did anything.
Inevitably there were problems in managing such a vast area, not only in the settling of estate workers and immigrant/itinerant workers, experimenting (and sometimes failing) with crop plantation, being mindful always of the need to produce financial returns for his employers. It was a hard balancing act for him, made even harder when the planter community, along with a plethora of missionaries were marginalised, and seen as a minority group by the more official and officious colonial administrators who concentrated mostly on their own agenda of maintaining colonial rule.
When convenient for the colonial administrators, the Magomero estates were lauded by the British Governor of Nyasaland and visiting dignitaries would be shown around these plantations as a model of pioneering agriculture. In achieving these accolades, Willie was tireless in his work, going out at dawn and not returning till last light. He was both kind and then quick tempered, but above all he was finally a family man.
I have had the advantage, now, all these years later, to try to understand my grandfather better. Much has been written about him in relation to the Chilembwe rising of 1915, but little has been written with the benefit of my family archive that I have luckily been given access to over the last 20 years. What is sad is that no one talked about my paternal grandfather when I was a child, and I never thought to ask. We lived abroad, and so my four siblings and I never knew any of my grandparents before they had died. Only years later, in my late twenties, did I start to ask questions.
What I have understood is that Willie’s successes and frustrations were understandable when set against the backdrop not only of his employers, but also the climate and pioneering challenges he had to face. He arrived in Nyasaland in 1893 as an ambitious young planter with a challenge that he took up with verve. Crops sometimes failed due to lack of rains, (something never seen in Scotland) and unknown infestations. Each time, he then had to think creatively as to how to generate successes for his employers. With great resolve, he eventually created impressive cotton growing operations for his employers. Pride in this work is quite evident not only from Willie, but also from the AL Bruce estate workers – from many photographs we have in our family archive.
Willie continued to build on his successes and then took time to return to Scotland in 1904 to see his family. On this return holiday, he met a young lady who was eventually to become his wife, Kitty. He courted her for nearly four years – mostly by letter – when correspondence took three months to get back to the UK. Their courtship was both tender and hilarious, and I am writing a book about their life together. It has been a life’s work for me and I hope to have this published in this centenary year as a token of commemoration of their lives.
Willie married Kitty in 1908 in Port Appin, Argyll, returning to his native island of Lismore for the celebrations. Kitty had been the teacher in the local village, and was now, after a protracted courtship, happily set to move out to ‘deepest’ Africa with her planter husband. She took to Africa like a duck to water and loved living in the bush. She continued to teach those near to her and then started a family of her own. As mentioned earlier, they had their own personal tragedies, but nothing would prepare her for what was yet to come.
On the night of 23rd January 1915 the young married couple had friends to stay at Magomero and all seemed well as Kitty and Willie retired to bed. Kitty was bathing as it was about 9 pm and Willie was bouncing his infant son Alastair on their bed, singing to him “It’s a long way to Tipperary… it’s a long way to go!”. Alastair, no doubt, was chuckling as any baby would in that situation and Nyasa, his daughter, was also in the room laughing at her father’s antics.
Suddenly all hell broke loose and men armed with spears broke into their bedroom. Willie was stabbed and fell to the ground as he tried to grab is rifle so as to protect his wife and children. Kitty rushed out in her dressing clothes from the bathroom to witness the commotion when suddenly their attackers brutally beheaded Willie in front of her and her small children. At the same times as my grandfather was murdered, two of his colleagues Duncan MacCormick, his assistant manager and Robert Ferguson were also killed, nearby. My grandmother and her children were unquestionably traumatised in witnessing this scene – no wife or child should ever have been exposed to such horror. What makes it worse is that the prime mover behind this armed uprising, John Chilembwe, was a Baptist minister trained in America and my grandfather was ironically also the son of a Baptist minister. Kitty, her two children, her houseguests, and their children were all abducted and forced to march through the bush for three days and nights, following the macabre sight of the head of Kitty husband’s stuck on a pole. Eventually they were found and rescued, thankfully unharmed.
This incident became known as the Nyasaland Rising of 1915, also now known as the Chilembwe Rising, and was actually intended to lead to a wider revolt. Yet this is a tragic history that should never have happened had the colonial administrators done the job of protecting their citizens with their taking into account tha matters raised by Chilembwe’s passionate letter to them only six months earlier in October 1914. Instead, this letter, that essentially protested against the conscription of black Africans into the white men’s war of 1914 (World War 1) was censored. Had the same colonial administrators even bothered to heed my grandfather’s early warnings of impending subversion, this tragedy could so easily have been avoided – yet they failed wholly to listen to and act on Chilembwe’s grievances and my grandfather, his colleagues and Chilembwe and his supporters all paid the ultimate sacrifice.
