David Livingstone

• 1. Introduction

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  David Livingstone, a Scottish doctor and missionary, once explained his obsession with Africa to a friend in a single blunt sentence. The sources of the Nile, he said, were "valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men." He wanted that power for one purpose. He hoped to use it against an immense evil, the East African slave trade. Livingstone spent years of his life chasing a geographical riddle he did not truly care about for its own sake. Britain made him a hero anyway. Victorian readers saw a missionary martyr, a scientist, an explorer, a reformer and a rags-to-riches inspiration, all in one man. Later critics took that reputation apart piece by piece. How did a cotton mill boy become one of the most popular British heroes of his century? What did he actually accomplish, and who paid for it? And why do cities, schools and hospitals on several continents still carry his name?

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• 2. Mill and Classroom

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  On the 19th of March 1813, David Livingstone was born in a tenement built for cotton factory workers in Blantyre, Scotland. The building stood on the banks of the River Clyde, under the bridge that crosses toward Bothwell. He was the second of seven children born to Neil Livingstone and Agnes Hunter Livingstone. At the age of 10 he went to work in the cotton mill of Henry Monteith and Company. He and his brother John worked as piecers, tying broken threads on the spinning machines. Their working day ran from 6 am to 8 pm. David later became a spinner and stayed in mill work until he was 26. The monotony taught him endurance, and it gave him sympathy for people who labour. He liked to hum a line from a Robert Burns song about men becoming brothers, for a' that.

  His father, Neil, was a Sunday school teacher and teetotaller who sold tea door to door. He handed out Christian tracts along the way. Neil read widely in theology, travel and missionary writing, and the habit passed to his son. David also roamed the countryside collecting animal, plant and geological specimens from local limestone quarries. Neil feared that science was eroding Christianity and tried to restrict his son to theology alone. The boy refused to give up nature. In 1832 he read Philosophy of a Future State by Thomas Dick. It gave him a way to reconcile faith with science, and apart from the Bible it was perhaps his greatest philosophical influence.

  At the age of 15, Livingstone left the Church of Scotland for a local Congregational church. Preachers there, such as Ralph Wardlaw, denied that salvation was limited by predestination. Livingstone also embraced the American revivalist Charles Finney's claim that "the Holy Spirit is open to all who ask it." For Livingstone this meant freedom from the fear of eternal damnation.

  A pamphlet changed his direction at the age of 21. Karl Gützlaff, a missionary, was calling on the churches to support China, and he proposed that missionaries should be trained as medical doctors. Livingstone used the idea to persuade his father that medicine could serve religion. He entered Anderson's University in Glasgow in 1836, studying medicine and chemistry. He also attended theology lectures. He paid his way by returning to the mill from Easter to October, with the management's agreement. A local Roman Catholic man named Daniel Gallagher, later a priest, tutored him in the Latin he needed for medical school.

  The London Missionary Society was the main missionary organisation open to Congregationalists. Livingstone applied in October 1837 and waited until August 1838 for his interviews. He was then accepted for training at Ongar, in Essex. There the Reverend Richard Cecil taught him Greek, Latin, Hebrew and theology. Cecil's reports were lukewarm. He noted a "heaviness of manner" and "rusticity" but also "sense and quiet vigour." He later called Livingstone "worthy but remote from brilliant." Livingstone then trained clinically at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. He qualified as a licentiate of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow on the 16th of November 1840. Four days later he was ordained at the Albion Chapel in Finsbury, alongside William Ross, another missionary bound for South Africa.

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• 3. Mission Stations

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  In a missionary boarding house in Aldersgate, London, Livingstone kept pestering a visitor named Robert Moffat with questions about Africa. Moffat ran the London Missionary Society station at Kuruman in South Africa. China had been Livingstone's first hope, but the looming First Opium War made the society's directors nervous about sending recruits there. They suggested the West Indies instead. Livingstone answered that the West Indies already had enough doctors. Moffat recalled the moment Livingstone asked whether he would do for Africa. Moffat said yes, provided he went to unoccupied ground. He pointed north, where he had sometimes seen "the smoke of a thousand villages, where no missionary had ever been."

  Another idea soon joined that vision. On the 1st of June 1840, Livingstone attended a meeting at Exeter Hall in London. There the abolitionist Fowell Buxton argued that the African slave trade would end if chiefs could buy European goods through "legitimate trade" instead of selling people. Christian missions would strengthen the effect by preaching and opening schools. The argument fit an earlier book by the missionary John Philip, who had claimed that Christianity would bring free trade and free labour. It became the backbone of Livingstone's thinking for the rest of his life.

  The journey to Africa was long. During the voyage to the Cape of Good Hope he studied Dutch and the Tswana language, and the ship's captain taught him navigation. At Rio de Janeiro he went ashore, admired the cathedral and scenery, and handed out tracts to drunken sailors in a dockside bar. The ship reached Simon's Bay on the 15th of March 1841. From the 19th of May to the 31st of July he rode an ox-cart to Kuruman. The Moffats were still in Britain, so he immersed himself in Tswana life and trekked 750 miles with the artisan missionary Roger Edwards, scouting for a new station. They settled on Mabotsa.

  In January 1844 Livingstone rode out to the Vaal River to meet the returning Moffats. In their ox-cart he met their daughter Mary for the first time. She had been born and raised in Africa. Weeks later, on the 16th of February, lions were raiding the village herds at Mabotsa. Livingstone had a clear shot at a large lion, but it attacked while he was reloading. It crushed his left arm and pinned him down. A deacon named Mebalwe distracted it by firing at it and was bitten himself. Another man tried to spear the animal before it dropped dead.

  Livingstone and Edwards set the broken bone clumsily, yet it healed strongly. The arm hurt him for the rest of his life, and he could never raise it above his shoulder. Mary nursed him at Kuruman, and the two became engaged. They married on the 9th of January 1845. That same year Livingstone left Mabotsa after irreconcilable differences with Edwards, and because the Bakgatla showed little interest in the Gospel. He abandoned his next station at Chonuane in 1847, citing drought and the nearness of the Boers.

  The next station, Kolobeng, produced the only recorded convert of his missionary career. Sechele, chief of the Kwena people in what is now Botswana, was born in 1812. Livingstone was fascinated by his ability to read, and the chief learned the alphabet in two days. After two years of patient persuasion, Livingstone converted Sechele in 1849. Only a few months later Sechele lapsed. Part of the difficulty was rain. Sechele's own rainmakers claimed they could command it, while Livingstone could not demand it of his God.

  Baptism came only after long hesitation. Sechele had five wives, and Livingstone told him to send four away, a demand that shook the Kwena community. Sechele complied, and Livingstone baptised the women too. A year later one of the divorced wives became pregnant, and Sechele was the father. Sechele begged Livingstone not to abandon him, since his faith remained strong. Livingstone left the country and went north.

  Sechele stayed a Christian and led missionaries to neighbouring peoples. Neil Parsons of the University of Botswana judged that he "did more to propagate Christianity in 19th-century southern Africa than virtually any single European missionary." Many European missionaries doubted his sincerity, because Sechele kept both rainmaking and polygamy. Livingstone's years of preaching had produced one convert. The territory beyond Kolobeng was already pulling at him.

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• 4. Crossing Africa

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  In 1849 Livingstone and the hunter William Cotton Oswell crossed the Kalahari Desert and reached Lake Ngami. The Royal Geographical Society noticed. In 1850 it presented him with a chronometer watch for his journey to the great lake. On those travels he also heard of a river that might become a highway to the coast. In August 1851 he and Oswell reached the Zambezi, which he hoped would be a key to the interior.

  In 1852 he sent his family to Britain and travelled north alone to the village of Linyanti on the Zambezi. There Sekeletu, chief of the Kololo, gave him the authority of a nduna. Livingstone was to lead a joint investigation of trade routes to the coast, accompanied by 27 Kololo warriors serving as guides and interpreters. The party reached the Portuguese city of Luanda, on the Atlantic coast, in May 1854. The trip nearly killed him, since fever almost took his life along the way. He decided the route would be too hard for future traders and walked back to Linyanti.

  His second leg ran east. Sekeletu lent him 114 Kololo men. Following the Zambezi, Livingstone became the first European to see the waterfall the local people called Mosi-oa-Tunya, "the smoke that thunders." He named it Victoria Falls, after Queen Victoria. He finished at Quelimane on the Indian Ocean, having mapped most of the Zambezi's course. He was hailed as the first European to cross south-central Africa at that latitude and as the man who had opened up the continent.

  That phrase hides a long history. Portuguese traders had already penetrated to the middle of the continent from both coasts. In 1853-1854 two Arab traders crossed from Zanzibar to Benguela. Around 1800 two African traders had gone from Angola to Mozambique. Livingstone still argued for trade and missions, but abolishing the slave trade, as practised by the Portuguese of Tete and the Swahili Arabs of Kilwa, was now his chief aim. He believed that navigating the Zambezi as a Christian commercial highway was the way to do it.

  He returned to Britain in December 1856. His book Missionary Travels, published by John Murray in 1857, became a bestselling travelogue. It carried his field science and sympathetic portraits of African people. It also argued that missions and legitimate commerce by river would end slave trading. Not every page held up. His passages on Portuguese Angola contained some extraordinary mistakes. He listed Quissama and Libolo as fierce and independent nations when both were provinces of Benguela. He also described a people called Jingas as an independent nation in the heart of Angola, though that was a reference to Queen Nzinga. The book made him a celebrity regardless.

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• 5. The Zambezi Failure

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  A letter waiting for Livingstone at Quelimane brought news he did not want. The London Missionary Society congratulated him on his journey, but its directors said they had limited power to back plans connected "only remotely with the spread of the Gospel." Livingstone, who wanted to open the interior for trade, was already drifting toward the government. Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society, introduced him to the foreign secretary. Livingstone told a friend he was "nearly quite off with the Society." He resigned in 1857 and that May was appointed her majesty's consul with a roving commission. The following February his jurisdiction was defined as the eastern coast of Africa and the independent districts of the interior.

  The society, meanwhile, still expected a mission to the Kololo in Barotseland that Livingstone had promoted. It was a disaster. A missionary, his wife, a second missionary's wife and three children died of malaria. Livingstone had suffered more than 30 attacks of fever himself but understated them, and he overstated the quality of the land. The party also carried wholly inadequate supplies of quinine. His biographer Tim Jeal sees the episode as a major failing and a sign of a pattern, in which Livingstone put his goals and career above the lives of those near him.

  By then Livingstone was in demand as a public speaker and had been elected to the Royal Society. The public subscribed to his next venture. The government added £5,000 to investigate British trade by way of the Zambezi. In December 1857 the Foreign Office proposed an expedition far bigger than he had imagined. Livingstone had pictured another solo trip with African helpers. In January 1858 he agreed to lead a party with six specialist officers, recruited in a hurry in the United Kingdom.

  On the 10th of March they sailed on the steamer Pearl, carrying a prefabricated iron river steamer called Ma Robert, built in portable sections. At Freetown they picked up 12 Kru seafarers to crew it, and on the 14th of May they reached the Zambezi. The plan collapsed quickly. The river was impassable beyond the Cahora Bassa rapids, which Livingstone had never explored. Pearl unloaded supplies on an island about 40 miles upstream, and Ma Robert had to be hauled across shoals in slow, repeated trips. The riverbanks were a war zone. Portuguese soldiers and their slaves were fighting the Chikunda slave-hunters of Matakenya, called Mariano, yet both sides received the expedition as friends.

  The specialists, stuck at Shupanga, quarrelled and made little progress. The artist Thomas Baines was dismissed. Other members became the first Europeans to reach Lake Nyasa, which they explored in a four-oared gig. In 1861 a new survey vessel, Pioneer, carried the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, led by Bishop Charles MacKenzie, up the Shire River. Livingstone raised money for a steamer designed for the lake, Lady Nyasa. It was shipped out in sections, against his wishes, with a party that included Mary Livingstone. MacKenzie had died of malaria by the time they arrived, and on the 27th of April 1862 Mary died of the same disease.

  Livingstone's own party was fraying. The physician John Kirk wrote that Livingstone was "out of his mind and a most unsafe leader." Early in 1863 they towed Lady Nyasa up the Shire past scenes of devastation, where Mariano's slave raids had caused famine. They had to clear the paddle wheels of corpses drifting downstream. The government ordered the expedition recalled, and Livingstone brought the ships down in 1864. Newspapers condemned it as a failure, and raising money for later exploration became hard. Kirk, Charles Meller and Richard Thornton had nevertheless sent home large botanical, ecological, geological and ethnographic collections to scientific institutions in the United Kingdom.

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• 6. Lost and Found

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  In January 1866 Livingstone landed at Zanzibar to begin his last journey. Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke and Samuel Baker had named Lake Albert or Lake Victoria as the Nile's source, which was partly right, but the argument continued. Livingstone believed the source lay farther south. His team included freed slaves, Comoros Islanders, twelve Sepoys and two servants from his earlier expedition, Chuma and Susi. The group began to shrink almost at once. His assistants deserted, and the Comoros Islanders returned to Zanzibar and falsely reported that Livingstone was dead.

  On the 6th of August he reached Lake Malawi, by which time thieves had taken most of his supplies, including all his medicines. His health declined as he pushed through swamps toward Lake Tanganyika. Illness forced him to travel with slave traders. On the 8th of November 1867 he reached Lake Mweru, and he went on to become the first European to see Lake Bangweulu. In the Lualaba River he saw a possible upper reach of the Nile. He later realised it flowed into the Congo. In 1869 he fell gravely ill in the jungle, and Arab traders saved him with medicines and carried him to an outpost.

  On the 15th of July 1871, Livingstone stood in the market at Nyangwe on the Lualaba and watched around 400 Africans massacred by Arab slavers. He was standing beside Dugumbe, the leading Arab trader there, who had been helping him. His field diary records the immediate shock. Researchers who scanned the diary found that Livingstone left out some of his concerns when he turned his notes into a journal. He feared that some of his own followers, slaves hired through John Kirk, acting consul at Zanzibar, had behaved violently and might have helped start the violence. The version edited by Horace Waller and published in 1874 as the Last Journals omits that context. It also leaves out earlier violent resistance by villagers to Arab slavers, so the villagers appear as passive victims.

  The massacre left him too shattered to carry on his mission. After the wet season ended, he travelled 240 miles back to Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. He was violently ill most of the way, and he arrived on the 23rd of October 1871.

  By then Livingstone had been out of contact with the world for six years. Only one of his 44 letter dispatches reached Zanzibar. A surviving letter to Waller, made public in 2010 by its owner Peter Beard, reads: "I am terribly knocked up but this is for your own eye only... Doubtful if I live to see you again..."

  Henry Morton Stanley had been sent to find him by the New York Herald newspaper in 1869. He found him in Ujiji on the 10th of November 1871. Stanley reported that he greeted Livingstone with the words "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" and that Livingstone answered "Yes." Stanley later tore the pages of that encounter out of his diary, and Livingstone's own account does not mention the greeting. The line first appears in a Herald editorial dated the 10th of August 1872. Tim Jeal suggests that Stanley spent his life ashamed of his humble background and manufactured events to compensate.

  Stanley urged Livingstone to leave. Livingstone refused to quit until his task was done, though illness left him confused and his judgment suffered. He explored the Lualaba again, found no link to the Nile, and returned to Lake Bangweulu and its swamps. There he searched for rivers that might flow out to the north.

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• 7. Slavery and Compromise

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  On the 27th of June 1866, Livingstone's journal recorded that his party came upon a man who had died of starvation. One of his men found many slaves still wearing slave-sticks, abandoned by their masters because there was no food. They were too weak to speak or to say where they came from, and some were quite young. Livingstone wrote that "to overdraw its evil is a simple impossibility." That same year he described a woman lying dead on the path, shot or stabbed by an Arab who had been angry about losing the price he had paid for her.

  Livingstone also wrote about a disease he called "broken-heartedness." It struck free men who had been captured and made slaves. The victims placed a hand on the correct spot and described their only pain as being in the heart. Eight of the captives, with many others still in chains, died within three days of crossing a river. Livingstone also estimated that no more than one in five slaves survived to reach their buyers in Cuba and elsewhere. Critics have called his figures highly exaggerated. His letters, books and journals nonetheless built public support in Britain for abolition.

  The reality of his last expeditions was more tangled than his rhetoric. Livingstone was a poor leader of other Europeans. By the end he was an individualist explorer with servants and porters but no expert support. Unlike maverick explorers such as Stanley, he refused to use brutal methods to keep porters in line and supplies safe. As a result he depended on help from the very men he wanted to put out of business. From 1867 he accepted hospitality from Mohamad Bogharib and from Mohamad bin Saleh, known as Mpamari. Both kept and traded slaves, as Livingstone admitted in his journals.

  The relationship ran in both directions. The traders gained from Livingstone's influence with local people, which helped win Mpamari's release from bondage to Mwata Kazembe. Livingstone, for his part, was furious to find that some replacement porters sent from Ujiji at his request were slaves. His public crusade and his private survival had collided.

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• 8. Death and Legacy

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  Livingstone died on the 1st of May 1873, aged 60, in Chief Chitambo's village at Chipundu, south-east of Lake Bangweulu in present-day Zambia. The cause was malaria and internal bleeding from dysentery. His attendants Chuma and Susi arranged funeral ceremonies. They removed his heart and buried it under a tree near the place where he died, most likely a mpundu tree. The Livingstone Memorial there gives the date of death as the 4th of May, the date that Chuma and Susi carved into the trunk. Most sources prefer the 1st of May, the date of his last journal entry.

  Chuma and Susi then led the rest of his remains, with his last journal and belongings, to the coastal town of Bagamoyo. The trip took 63 days and covered more than 1,000 miles. On the way they met the expedition of the English explorer Verney Lovett Cameron, who went on to Ujiji and sent Livingstone's papers to England. Seventy-nine followers completed the journey and were paid their wages. In London his body lay in repose at 1 Savile Row, then the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society, before burial at Westminster Abbey.

  The cost to his family was heavy. Mary died in 1862, and his children grew up missing their father. Of their six children, Elizabeth died at two months. Robert took the name Rupert Vincent, served as a substitute in the Union Army in the American Civil War, was captured, and died at the Salisbury prison camp in North Carolina. Thomas died in Egypt in 1876, aged 27, of bilharzia contracted as a child in Africa. William Oswell, nicknamed Zouga after the river near his birthplace, became a doctor and died in Trinidad in 1892. Only Agnes, William Oswell and Anna Mary married and had children. Livingstone's one regret in later life was that he had not spent enough time with them.

  By the late 1860s Livingstone's reputation had suffered. His missions and the Zambezi Expedition had failed, and nobody supported his ideas about the Nile. Stanley and his newspaper rehabilitated him. The loyalty of his servants, who carried his body across the continent, inspired wonder, and his last journal revealed a stubborn determination in the face of suffering. He had been wrong about the Nile, yet he put Lake Ngami, Lake Malawi, Lake Bangweulu and Victoria Falls on European maps. His observations filled in large areas that had been blank, including much of the upper Zambezi.

  The Universities' Mission to Central Africa was founded in 1860 at his request. Missionaries and medical workers sponsored by it brought education and healthcare, and the African Lakes Company brought trade. Within 50 years of his death, colonial rule had arrived. Livingstone had imagined something else, namely settlements of devout Europeans living among Africans and helping them find ways of life that did not involve slavery.

  The 1960s were harsh on him. Critics noted that he made one convert who backslid, explored few areas others had not, freed few slaves, treated colleagues badly and travelled with slave traders. Alvyn Austin wrote in 1997 that Livingstone nevertheless endured as a heroic legend. The cities of Livingstone in Zambia and Livingstonia in Malawi keep his name with pride, while Rhodesia has been renamed. In 2002 a UK-wide vote ranked him 98th among the 100 Greatest Britons. The Clydesdale Bank printed his portrait on its £10 notes from 1971 to 1998. His birthplace in Blantyre is now the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum, a museum in his honour, run by the David Livingstone Trust.

  The centenary of his birth in 1913 brought celebrations at the Royal Albert Hall. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, told the audience that Livingstone had "carved his name on the history of mankind." Species such as Livingstone's fruit bat, and a mineral called livingstonite, also carry his name. On the 11th of November 2011, his 1871 field diary, the one that recorded Nyangwe, was published online for the first time by the David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project.

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