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Black Livingstone:
A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo
Pagan Kennedy
Viking, 237 pages, $24.95

Pagan Kennedy's Black Livingstone reads like a swashbuckling fantasy, the work of a novelist's romantic imagination. But amid the scenes of jungle exploration, big-game hunting, international political intrigue, and even courtroom drama, readers will discover a tale stranger than fiction.

In 1890 the segregated Presbyterian Church in the U.S. sent William Sheppard, a young African American born in Virginia near the end of the Civil War, to "darkest Africa" as a missionary. And it insisted on assigning him a white companion, since the denomination would never send a black man to Congo alone and unsupervised.

Samuel Lapsley, the white son of an Alabama plantation owner, was naturally expected to oversee the mission. Yet the two men traveled through the African wilderness as yokefellows, sharing a tent, meals, and clothing, not to mention occasional fears, triumphs, and sorrows. Crossing a racial divide to forge a friendship improbable in their time, the missionaries became partners in the dangerous effort to take Christianity into the largely unexplored Congo.

A sad collaboration between colonialism and the church also is part of the drama. The deceitful efforts of King Leopold II of Belgium, who summoned Lapsley to offer advice about where to set up the mission, come across as particularly hair-raising.

"Once the missionaries had helped to westernize the territory—building roads and schools, teaching the people English—Leopold would expel them," Kennedy writes. "Then he'd send in traders and make a fortune. Though they little suspected it, the missionaries would work for the king."

Equally improbable is the understated romance between Sheppard and Lucy Gantt, a prim young schoolteacher he wooed, won, and then abandoned for nearly a decade while he worked to establish a settlement in Africa. Ken-nedy speculates that the Presbyterian Foreign Mission would have been "more open to hiring a black missionary if he had a sweetheart to write him letters, a Christian girl waiting at home to help distract him from the native women." Still, for Lucy to wait for Sheppard during a ten-year engagement, when letters could take a year or more to arrive, suggests he must have been a man of extraordinary charms.

When one-third of all travelers to Africa died, usually of disease, it took an extraordinary person to survive, let alone succeed, in the Congo wilderness. While Lapsley died early on, succumbing to tropical fever, Sheppard thrived, and went on to run one of the only all-black missions in Africa. Lapsley's primary focus was the Christianizing and "civilizing" of the heathen. Sheppard concentrated on meeting the tribes throughout the region—the Bateke, the Zappo-Zaps, the Kuba—and bridging the culture gap by addressing their physical needs. "He was far more interested in saving bodies than souls," Ken-nedy writes. "Lapsley longed to keep the Africans from falling into the fiery pit of unbelief, but Sheppard preferred to see them clothed and fed and cheerful."

Sheppard approached Congo and its people less as an evangelist than as an explorer, like Britain's renowned David Livingstone. While learning from and eventually advocating for Africans, Sheppard pursued his myriad interests as hunter, art collector, philanthropist, and documenter of the highly developed native culture and civilization he instinctively appreciated.

Against all expectation—except perhaps his own—Sheppard became the hero of an extraordinary story. The young man who worked his way through Virginia's Hampton Institute and Alabama's Tuscaloosa Theological Institute indelibly marked the history of the church and of Congo.

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September 9 2002, Vol. 46, No. 10