David Livingstone

Scottish explorer and missionary

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By George Albert Shepperson Article History

David Livingstone

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Born:

March 19, 1813 Scotland

Died:

May 1, 1873 (aged 60) Zambia

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David Livingstone, (born March 19, 1813, Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland—died May
1, 1873, Chitambo [now in Zambia]), Scottish missionary and explorer who exercised a
formative influence on Western attitudes toward Africa.
Early life

Blantyre: David Livingstone's birthplace

Livingstone grew up in a distinctively Scottish family environment of personal piety,

poverty, hard work, zeal for education, and a sense of mission. His father’s family was
from the island of Ulva, off the west coast of Scotland. His mother, a Lowlander, was
descended from a family of Covenanters, a group of militant Presbyterians. Both were
poor, and Livingstone was reared as one of seven children in a single room at the top of
a tenement building for the workers of a cotton factory on the banks of the Clyde. At age
10 he had to help his family and was put to work in a cotton mill, and with part of his
first week’s wages he bought a Latin grammar. Although he was brought up in
the Calvinist faith of the established Scottish church, Livingstone, like his father, joined
an independent Christian congregation of stricter discipline when he came to manhood.
By this time he had acquired those characteristics of mind and body that were to fit him
for his African career.

In 1834 an appeal by British and American churches for qualified medical missionaries
in China made Livingstone determined to pursue that profession. To prepare himself,
while continuing to work part-time in the mill, he studied Greek, theology, and medicine
for two years in Glasgow. In 1838 he was accepted by the London Missionary Society.
The first of the Opium Wars (1839–42) put an end to his dreams of going to China, but a
meeting with Robert Moffat, the notable Scottish missionary in southern Africa,
convinced him that Africa should be his sphere of service. On November 20, 1840, he
was ordained as a missionary; he set sail for South Africa at the end of the year and
arrived at Cape Town on March 14, 1841.
Initial explorations

For the next 15 years, Livingstone was constantly on the move into the African interior:
strengthening his missionary determination; responding wholeheartedly to the delights
of geographic discovery; clashing with the Boers and the Portuguese, whose treatment of
the Africans he came to detest; and building for himself a remarkable reputation as a
dedicated Christian, a courageous explorer, and a fervent antislavery advocate. Yet so
impassioned was his commitment to Africa that his duties as husband and father
were relegated to second place.

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From Moffat’s mission at Kuruman on the Cape frontier, which Livingstone reached on
July 31, 1841, he soon pushed his search for converts northward into untried country
where the population was reputed to be more numerous. This suited his purpose of
spreading the Gospel through “native agents.” By the summer of 1842, he had already
gone farther north than any other European into the difficult Kalahari country and had
familiarized himself with the local languages and cultures. His mettle was dramatically
tested in 1844 when, during a journey to Mabotsa to establish a mission station, he was
mauled by a lion. The resulting injury to his left arm was complicated by another
accident, and he could never again support the barrel of a gun steadily with his left hand
and thus was obliged to fire from his left shoulder and to take aim with his left eye.
Ngami, Lake

On January 2, 1845, Livingstone married Moffat’s daughter, Mary, and she

accompanied him on many of his journeys until her health and the family’s needs for
security and education forced him to send her and their four children back to Britain in
1852. Before this first parting with his family, Livingstone had already achieved a small
measure of fame as surveyor and scientist of a small expedition responsible for the first
European sighting of Lake Ngami (August 1, 1849), for which he was awarded a gold
medal and monetary prize by the British Royal Geographical Society. This was the
beginning of his lifelong association with the society, which continued to encourage his
ambitions as an explorer and to champion his interests in Britain.
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Opening the interior

With his family safely in Scotland, Livingstone was ready to push Christianity,
commerce, and civilization—the trinity that he believed was destined to open up Africa—
northward beyond the frontiers of South Africa and into the heart of the continent. In a
famous statement in 1853 he made his purpose clear: “I shall open up a path into the
interior, or perish.” On November 11, 1853, from Linyanti at the approaches to
the Zambezi and in the midst of the Makololo peoples whom he considered eminently
suitable for missionary work, Livingstone set out northwestward with little equipment
and only a small party of Africans. His intention was to find a route to the Atlantic coast
that would permit legitimate commerce to undercut the slave trade and that would also
be more suitable for reaching the Makololo than the route leading
through Boer territory. (In 1852 the Boers had destroyed his home at Kolobeng and
attacked his African friends.) After an arduous journey that might have wrecked the
constitution of a lesser man, Livingstone reached Luanda on the west coast on May 31,
1854. In order to take his Makololo followers back home and to carry out further
explorations of the Zambezi, as soon as his health permitted—on September 20, 1854—
he began the return journey. He reached Linyanti nearly a year later on September 11,
1855. Continuing eastward on November 3, Livingstone explored the Zambezi regions
and reached Quelimane in Mozambique on May 20, 1856. His most spectacular visit on
this last leg of his great journey was to the thundering, smokelike waters on the Zambezi
at which he arrived on November 16, 1855, and with typical patriotism named Victoria
Falls after his queen. Livingstone returned to England on December 9, 1856, a national
hero. News from and about him during the previous three years had stirred the
imagination of English-speaking peoples everywhere to an unprecedented degree.

David Livingstone

Livingstone recorded his accomplishments modestly but effectively in his Missionary

Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), which quickly sold more than 70,000
copies and took its place in publishing history as well as in that of exploration and
missionary endeavour. Honours flowed in upon him. His increased income meant that
he was now able to provide adequately for his family, which had lived in near poverty
since returning to Britain. He was also able to make himself independent of the London
Missionary Society. After the completion of his book, Livingstone spent six months
speaking all over the British Isles. In his Senate House address at Cambridge on
December 4, 1857, he foresaw that he would be unable to complete his work in Africa,
and he called on young university men to take up the task that he had begun. The
publication of Dr. Livingstone’s Cambridge Lectures (1858) roused almost as much
interest as his book, and out of his Cambridge visit came the Universities’ Mission
to Central Africa in 1860, on which Livingstone set high hopes during his second
expedition to Africa.

The Zambezi expedition of David Livingstone

Livingstone, David

This time Livingstone was away from Britain from March 12, 1858, to July 23, 1864. He
went out originally as British consul at Quelimane:

for the Eastern Coast and independent districts of the interior, and commander of an
expedition for exploring eastern and central Africa, for the promotion of Commerce and
Civilization with a view to the extinction of the slave-trade.
This expedition was infinitely better organized than Livingstone’s previous solitary
journeys. It had a paddle steamer, impressive stores, 10 Africans, and 6 Europeans
(including his brother Charles and an Edinburgh doctor, John Kirk). That Livingstone’s
by then legendary leadership had its limitations was soon revealed. Quarrels broke out
among the Europeans, and some were dismissed. Disillusionment with Livingstone set
in among members both of his own expedition and of the abortive Universities’ Mission
that followed it to central Africa. It proved impossible to navigate the Zambezi by ship,
and Livingstone’s two attempts to find a route along the Ruvuma
River bypassing Portuguese territory to districts around Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi) also
proved impractical. Livingstone and his party had been the first Britons to reach
(September 17, 1859) these districts that held out promise of colonization. To add to
Livingstone’s troubles, his wife, who had been determined to accompany him back to
Africa, died at Shupanga on the Zambezi on April 27, 1862. His eldest son, Robert, who
was to have joined his father in 1863, never reached him and went instead to the United
States, where he died fighting for the North in the Civil War on December 5, 1864.

The British government recalled the expedition in 1863, when it was clear that
Livingstone’s optimism about economic and political developments in the Zambezi
regions was premature. Livingstone, however, showed something of his old fire when he
took his little vessel, the Lady Nyassa, with a small untrained crew and little fuel, on a
hazardous voyage of 2,500 miles (4,000 km) across the Indian Ocean and left it for sale
in Bombay (now Mumbai). Furthermore, within the next three decades the Zambezi
expedition proved to be anything but a disaster. It had amassed a valuable body of
scientific knowledge, and the association of the Lake Nyasa regions with Livingstone’s
name and the prospects for colonization that he envisaged there were important factors
for the creation in 1893 of the British Central Africa Protectorate, which in 1907
became Nyasaland and in 1966 the republic of Malawi.

Back in Britain in the summer of 1864, Livingstone, with his brother Charles, wrote his
second book, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (1865).
Livingstone was advised at this time to have a surgical operation for the hemorrhoids
that had troubled him since his first great African journey. He refused, and it is probable
that severe bleeding hemorrhoids were the cause of his death at the end of his third and
greatest African journey.
Quest for the Nile
Livingstone returned to Africa, after another short visit to Bombay, on January 28,
1866, with support from private and public bodies and the status of a British consul at
large. His aim, as usual, was the extension of the Gospel and the abolition of the slave
trade on the East African coast, but a new object was the exploration of the central
African watershed and the possibility of finding the ultimate sources of the Nile. This
time Livingstone went without European subordinates and took only African and Asian
followers. Trouble, however, once more broke out among his staff, and Livingstone,
prematurely aged from the hardships of his previous expeditions, found it difficult to
cope. Striking out from Mikindani on the east coast, he was compelled by Ngoni raids to
give up his original intention of avoiding Portuguese territory and reaching the country
around Lake Tanganyika by passing north of Lake Nyasa. The expedition was forced
south, and in September some of Livingstone’s followers deserted him. To avoid
punishment when they returned to Zanzibar, they concocted the story that Livingstone
had been killed by the Ngoni. Although it was proved the following year that he was
alive, a touch of drama was added to the reports circulating abroad about his expedition.
Zambia: Lake Bangweulu

Drama mounted as Livingstone moved north again from the south end of Lake Nyasa.
Early in 1867 a deserter carried off his medical chest, but Livingstone pressed on into
central Africa. He was the first European to reach Lake Mweru (November 8, 1867)
and Lake Bangweulu (July 18, 1868). Assisted by Arab traders, Livingstone reached
Lake Tanganyika in February 1869. Despite illness, he went on and arrived on March
29, 1871, at his ultimate northwesterly point, Nyangwe, on the Lualaba leading into
the Congo River. This was farther west than any European had penetrated.

When he returned to Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika on October 23, 1871,
Livingstone was a sick and failing man. Search parties had been sent to look for him
because he had not been heard from in several years, and Henry M. Stanley, a
correspondent of the New York Herald, found the explorer, greeting him with the now
famous quote, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” (The exact date of the encounter is unclear,
as the two men wrote different dates in their journals; Livingstone’s journal suggests
that the meeting took place sometime in October 24–28, 1871, while Stanley reported
November 10.) Stanley brought much-needed food and medicine, and Livingstone soon
recovered. He joined Stanley in exploring the northern reaches of Lake Tanganyika and
then accompanied him to Unyanyembe, 200 miles (320 km) eastward. But he refused
all Stanley’s pleas to leave Africa with him, and on March 14, 1872, Stanley departed for
England to add, with journalistic fervour, to the saga of David Livingstone.

Livingstone moved south again, obsessed by his quest for the Nile sources and his desire
for the destruction of the slave trade, but his illness overcame him. In May 1873, at
Chitambo in what is now northern Zambia, Livingstone’s African servants found him
dead, kneeling by his bedside as if in prayer. In order to embalm Livingstone’s body,
they removed his heart and viscera and buried them in African soil. In a difficult journey
of nine months, they carried his body to the coast. It was taken to England and, in a
great Victorian funeral, was buried in Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874. The Last
Journals of David Livingstone were published in the same year.

Influence of David Livingstone

Livingstone

In his 30 years of travel and Christian missionary work in southern, central, and eastern
Africa—often in places where no European had previously ventured—Livingstone may
well have influenced Western attitudes toward Africa more than any other individual
before him. His discoveries—geographic, technical, medical, and social—provided a
complex body of knowledge that is still being explored. In spite of his paternalism and
Victorian prejudices, Livingstone believed wholeheartedly in the African’s ability to
advance into the modern world. He was, in this sense, a forerunner not only of
European imperialism in Africa but also of African nationalism.