The Physician and the Slave Trade: John Kirk, the Livingstone Expeditions, and the Crusade against Slavery in East Africa (review)

Daniel Liebowitz. The Physician and the Slave Trade: John Kirk, the Livingstone Expeditions, and the Crusade against Slavery in East Africa. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1999. xii + 314 pp. Ill. $27.95.

Daniel Liebowitz is a physician who, while in Zanzibar in 1993, learned about another physician who had lived there well over a century before. In 1873 John Kirk, trained in medicine at Edinburgh, was named British Consul General of Zanzibar, which made him the highest-ranking British official in East Africa. Prior to that he had been a companion of and physician to David Livingstone on his second Zambezi expedition (1858-63), as well as a naturalist who sent back to England a number of important species of both plants and animals hitherto unknown outside Africa. Throughout his career Kirk was a successful crusader against the East African slave trade, and toward the end of it he became an inadvertent player in the European scramble for Africa.

Liebowitz, the physician, decided to write about Kirk the physician after learning that his subject, although once eulogized as among the greatest men Great Britain had produced during the nineteenth century, had become a forgotten man in the late twentieth century, save perhaps in the United Kingdom and East Africa. Kirk is most definitely not forgotten in the pages of East African history repeated in this work, where he is frequently mentioned as a steadying influence on the manic-depressive Livingstone as well as a steady opponent of the cunning Henry Morton Stanley. Kirk was also recognized as an astute diplomat: in 1873 he finally succeeded in persuading the Sultan of Zanzibar to sign a treaty with Great Britain that suppressed the East African slave trade.

Unfortunately, readers of the Bulletin hoping for much in the way of things medical will be disappointed. There is an appendix listing the medical stores carried on the Livingstone expedition. The reader learns, not suprisingly, that malaria and dysentery plagued all expeditions into the East African interior. There are a few words on the cholera that struck Zanzibar in 1872, killing about a quarter of the slave population. And the author speculates on the cause of death of various unlucky explorers. But this is about all.

Dr. Liebowitz visited Scotland, England, and many East African countries in elucidating Kirk's life, and even retraced Livingstone's second Zambezi expedition. In addition to the impressions gained from these travels, he has drawn on a variety of sources, including British Foreign Office materials, a number of secondary accounts, some published diaries, and newspaper and journal articles. He does not bring to light much that is new, but he makes a significant contribution nonetheless by marshalling the evidence to retell the story of Livingstone, Stanley, the struggle against the slave trade, and the politics of early European imperialism in Africa from Kirk's point of view.

Maps are sprinkled throughout the text to help readers follow the story, and a number of photographs are included to flavor it. The work is well documented and well indexed.

Kenneth F. Kiple
Bowling Green State University

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