David Livingstone

David Livingstone

David Livingstone (19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish missionary and explorer of the Victorian era, now best remembered because of his meeting with Henry Morton Stanley which gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Early life

Livingstone was born in the village of Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, Scotland and first studied medicine and theology at the University of Glasgow. While working in London, he emulated the example of another Scot, Robert Moffat, and joined the London Missionary Society, becoming a minister.

From 1840 he worked in Bechuanaland (now Botswana), but was unable to make inroads into South Africa because of Boer opposition.

He married Robert Moffat's daughter Mary in 1844, and she travelled with him for a brief time at his insistence, despite her pregnancy and the protests of the Moffats. She later returned to England with their children. David Livingstone
David Livingstone

Victoria Falls

In the period 1852–56, he explored the African interior, and was the first European to see Victoria Falls (which he named after his monarch, Queen Victoria). Livingstone was one of the first Westerners to make a transcontinental journey across Africa. The purpose of his journey was to open trade routes, while accumulating useful information about the African continent. In particular, Livingstone was a proponent of trade and missions to be established in central Africa. His motto, inscribed in the base of the statue to him at Victoria Falls, was "Christianity, Commerce and Civilization."

At this time he believed the key to achieving these goals was the navigation of the Zambezi River. He returned to Britain to try to garner support for his ideas, and to publish a book on his travels. At this time he resigned from the missionary society to which he had belonged. Zambezi expedition
Livingstone returned to Africa as head of the "Zambezi Expedition", which was a government-funded project to examine the natural resources of southeastern Africa. The Zambezi river turned out to be completely unnavigable past the Cabora basa rapids, a series of cataracts and rapids that Livingstone had failed to explore on his earlier travels.

The expedition lasted from March 1858 until the middle of 1864. Livingstone was an inexperienced leader and had trouble managing a large-scale project. The artist Thomas Baines was dismissed from the expedition on charges (which he vigorously denied) of theft. Livingstone's wife Mary died on 29 April 1863 of dysentery, but Livingstone continued to explore, eventually returning home in 1864 after the government ordered the recall of the Expedition. The Zambezi Expedition was castigated as a failure in many newspapers of the time, and Livingstone experienced great difficulty in raising funds to further explore Africa. Nevertheless, the scientists appointed to work under Livingstone, John Kirk, Charles Meller, and Richard Thornton did contribute large collections of botanicological, geological and ethnographic material to scientific institutions in the UK.

Source of the Nile

In March 1866, Livingstone returned to Africa, this time to Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania), where he set out to seek the source of the Nile. Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, and Samuel Baker had (although there was still serious debate on the matter) identified either Lake Albert or Lake Victoria as the source (which was partially correct, as the Nile "bubbles from the ground high in the mountains of Burundi halfway between Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria" [1]). Finding the Lualaba River, which feeds the Congo River, Livingstone decided that this river was in fact the "real" Nile.

Illness, pain and death

Livingstone was taken ill and completely lost contact with the outside world for six years. Only one of his 44 later dispatches made it to Zanzibar. Henry Morton Stanley, who had been sent in a publicity stunt to find him by the New York Herald newspaper in 1869, found Livingstone in the town of Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in 1871. Stanley joined Livingstone, and together they continued exploring the north end of the Tanganyika (the other constituent of the present Tanzania), until Stanley left the next year.

Despite Stanley's urgings, Livingstone was determined not to leave Africa until his mission was complete, and he died there, in Chitambo, Barotseland (now Zambia) on 1 May 1873 from malaria and internal bleeding caused by bowel obstruction. His body, carried over a thousand miles by his loyal attendants Chuma and Susi, was returned to Britain for burial in Westminster Abbey.

Honours

Blantyre, the largest city in Malawi, is named after Livingstone's birthplace
A portrait of Livingstone long featured on a Scottish banknote
According to Marlene Nourbese Philip, in her influencial book "Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence", David Livingstone "advocate[d] the destruction of African society and religious customs so [he] could bring European commerce more easily to the Africans, and then Christianity", and he "captured and seized the Silence [he] found-- possessed it like the true discoverer [he was]-- dissected and analysed it; labelled it-- [he] took their Silence-- the Silence of the African-- and replaced it with [his] own-- the silence of [his] word."