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I love you dearly, my Sons, but I would rather learn you were dead than see you lacking in the spirit of your vocation and become some kind of African Robinson Crusoes, as I have sometimes told you. Sursum corda! This is my cry sent to you across space, so as to rouse your souls.

In 1879, Lavigerie writes to Father Deniaud, in Tabora. He complains that his diary is desperately dry. He reminds the missionaries that they are not explorers, but apostles.

News of the 8th Caravan for Equatorial Africa (21 November 1888)
A telegraphic dispatch from Zanzibar has been sent to His Eminence Cardinal Lavigerie bringing news from the interior of East Africa. Last August, just a few days before the revolt of the coastal natives , the Archbishop of Algiers had sent to the [region of the] Great Lakes a new caravan of his heroic missionaries who, despite the worries aroused in people’s minds and the consequent dangers that they could run, did not hesitate to set out for their destination, namely the missions of Lake Tanganyka and Lake Nyanza.

In 1890, Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Catholicae Ecclesia, praises Lavigerie’s energy and notorious apostolic zeal.