David Livingstone

Scottish missionary and explorer

• Born: March 19, 1813
• Birthplace: Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland
• Died: May 1, 1873
• Place of death: Chitambo's village near Lake Bangweulu, Barotseland (now in Zambia)

Although Livingstone is often remembered as a missionary, his real importance was as an explorer whose travels, together with moving appeals asking Britons to do something about the slave trade in the African interior, focused the eyes of the civilized world on previously unexplored regions of Africa and thereby helped to open that continent to the Western world.

Early Life

The son of an impoverished tea vendor who was more interested in distributing religious tracts than in selling tea, David Livingstone was born near Glasgow, Scotland. Although he grew up in a large family under adverse economic circumstances, Livingstone managed, even though he began working in a cotton mill at the age of ten, to secure a solid education. He accomplished this by studying in every spare moment, and, while still in his teens, he determined to become a medical missionary.

Livingstone’s preparations for such a career were successful, and when he completed his medical studies and became Dr. Livingstone in 1840, he was already unusual: It was simply unheard of for a factory boy from a poverty-stricken background to achieve such educational heights. Livingstone’s original intention had been to serve in China, but the outbreak of the Opium War effectively ended this plan. Instead, he sought and won an assignment from the nondenominational London Missionary Society in South Africa. He reached Cape Town on March 14, 1841, and from there made his way into the interior to the mission station of Kuruman, Bechuanaland. This isolated outpost had been established by Robert Moffat, and a few years later, in 1845, Livingstone would marry Moffat’s daughter, Mary.

Life’s Work

For most of the first decade that he spent in Southern Africa, from 1841 to 1849, Livingstone devoted himself to the type of labors that were expected from missionaries. Livingstone founded three separate mission stations—Mabotsa, Chonuane, and Kolobeng—in the interior to the north of Kuruman. However, he quarreled incessantly with other missionaries and his superiors, and the sole convert he made, a chieftain named Sechele, soon lapsed. By 1849, frustrated with the routine of mission station life and increasingly attracted by the vast unexplored region to the north, he began traveling as a sort of itinerant missionary.

In truth, Livingstone’s religious duties were increasingly subordinated to exploration, and it was in the field of discovery that Livingstone made his real mark. Between 1849 and 1852, he made three journeys, with the noted big-game hunter William Cotton Oswell as a companion, that altered the entire course of his career. The two men explored Lake Ngami and the upper reaches of the Zambezi River, and during these travels, Livingstone came to recognize the extent of Africa’s internal slave trade.

Livingstone sent his wife and children, whom he regarded as impediments to his exploring ambitions, back to Great Britain in 1852, and following their departure, he continued his travels on the Zambezi. Between 1853 and 1856, he crossed the entire southern interior of Africa, traveling first to the Portuguese port of Luanda, Angola, on the west coast and then later following the course of the Zambezi to Quelimane, Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean. During the latter journey, which had commenced at Linyanti, he discovered the massive waterfalls on the Zambezi that he named Victoria Falls, in honor of the British monarch. After the completion of this journey, he returned to England for the first time since he had originally traveled to Africa.

Livingstone was already something of a geographical celebrity, thanks to contacts he had established with Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, and articles he had written for the society’s journal. It was the appearance of his great book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857), however, which brought Livingstone national fame. Livingstone completed the book shortly after returning home, and its appearance caused a sensation. He described his travels in detail and depicted the Southern African interior as a region that offered a fertile field for his countrymen to pursue the laudable and interconnected goals of commerce, Christianity, and civilization. So compelling was his book, together with a series of lectures that he made in England, that he secured government support for an exploratory mission on the Zambezi. Its primary purpose was to open the interior for parties of settlers who would bring British commerce and the benefits of their advanced society to the region.

After severing his formal ties with the London Missionary Society, in 1858 Livingstone returned to Africa as head of the Zambezi expedition. This undertaking was a fiasco from start to finish. Far from being the navigable river that Livingstone had imagined it to be, the Zambezi posed all sorts of obstacles as a potential highway to the interior. The Anglican missionaries who followed him suffered greatly from the climate, and Livingstone proved woefully inadequate as a leader in the conduct of the expedition. He quarreled with the other members of his party, death and disease took a heavy toll on the Universities’ Mission that he had encouraged to come to the region, and his wife died while en route to join him. Ultimately, the British government, under growing protest, recalled him in 1863. Livingstone returned to England by way of India and arrived home on July 23, 1864.

Livingstone was no longer the conquering hero he had been in 1857, but his ill-fated Zambezi expedition had added appreciably to geographical knowledge of Africa. By this juncture, he had become fascinated with the controversy surrounding attempts to discover the sources of the Nile, and thenceforth he abandoned all pretense of being a missionary. He rested in England in 1865 and wrote, in collaboration with his brother Charles, a book entitled Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and Its Tributaries (1865). Shortly after it was published, he made his way back to Africa, and by early 1866, he was once more in the interior. Although his announced goals were to end the slave trade and advance Christianity, he had become virtually obsessed with the watershed of the Nile. The remaining seven years of his life would be spent in an unsuccessful search for the Nile’s sources, and during most of this time, he would travel without European companions.

From 1866 to 1871, Livingstone traveled in the area of Lake Nyasa and the upper reaches of the Congo River. Among his discoveries were Lakes Mweru and Bangweulu, but these years cost him dearly in health. Indeed, when the journalistHenry Morton Stanley found him at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika late in 1871, he was near death. With the medicines and supplies brought by Stanley, Livingstone quickly recovered. Together they explored portions of Lake Tanganyika and ascertained that that body of water was not a part of the Nile system.

The few weeks he spent with Livingstone influenced Stanley profoundly, and he did his best to persuade Livingstone to leave Africa. Livingstone refused, but he did open himself up to his traveling companion in a way that he had never done with any other person. He told Stanley of the horrible massacre of Africans by Arab slave traders that he had witnessed a few months earlier, and he shared his dreams of what he desired for the continent’s future. Eventually, Stanley’s anxiety to let the outside world know that he had “found” Livingstone led to his departure. The two separated at Unyanyembe (near the modern city of Tabora, Tanzania), with Livingstone determined to continue his explorations for the Nile’s sources.

Livingstone’s health, already seriously affected by recurrent bouts of malaria and years of unconcern for his physical state, degenerated rapidly. Livingstone’s instruments had also been damaged in transit, and in his final days, he was for all practical purposes lost. After days of being carried by the handful of retainers who continued to accompany him and being in a coma much of the time, Livingstone died in the predawn hours of May 1, 1873. Death came at a small village on the shores of Lake Bangweulu in what is now northeastern Zambia. His African companions eviscerated his body and embalmed it as well as they could before beginning the long journey back to the East African coast with it. After the party reached Zanzibar, Livingstone’s remains were turned over to British authorities. Eventually, his body was taken to England and interred in London’s Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874.

Significance

David Livingstone was a difficult and complex individual who was always surrounded by controversy. There can be little doubt that he was an abysmal failure as a missionary, husband, and father. He lacked the patience to pursue the daily drudgery required of missionaries to Africa in his era, and he was so lacking in sympathy and understanding for his wife that he drove her into alcoholism. Similarly, at least some of his children were disillusioned by Livingstone’s total lack of parental concern. In contrast, his son-in-law, Robert Moffat, proved to be one of the most successful Protestant missionaries in nineteenth century Southern Africa, and he, too, would make important contributions to exploration. Against Livingstone’s shortcomings stand his compassion for Africans and his almost superhuman determination as an explorer and exponent of Great Britain’s civilizing mission on the African continent.

There is no disputing Livingstone’s profound influence in directing British attention to what he called the “open, running sore” of the internal slave trade in eastern Africa. Similarly, his writings, his speeches, and the very nature of this controversial man captured the public imagination. In particular, his “last journey”—the final seven years he spent in Africa—fascinated the British public. There was something exceptionally poignant about the aging, ill man, struggling against all odds and frequently incommunicado as he sought to discover the sources of the Nile.

In the aftermath of his death, Livingstone came to be viewed almost as a saint. Modern observers realize that such adoration was misplaced. Nevertheless, Livingstone exerted a profound influence on the exploration and opening up of Africa to Western world. His death inspired Stanley to complete his unfinished geographical travels, and the attention he directed to Africa—both official and otherwise—loomed large in the “scramble” of the late 1870’s and 1880’s. Livingstone remains a frequently misunderstood figure who has attracted scores of biographers yet who still awaits a definitive biography. Thanks to the massive Livingstone Documentation Project launched in connection with the centenary celebrations of 1973, the wherewithal now exists at the National Library of Scotland for such a study.

Bibliography

Buxton, Meriel. David Livingstone. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Comprehensive biography based on recent scholarship, describing the complexities of Livingstone’s personality.

Clendennen, Gary W., and I. C. Cunningham, comps. David Livingstone: A Catalogue of Documents. Edinburgh: Livingstone Documentation Project, 1979. A full listing of all known extant Livingstone documents, with a description and their location, which is invaluable for any serious study of the man. Cunningham prepared a supplement that was published in 1985.

Dugard, Martin. Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Dual biography, focusing on both men’s travels through Africa. Provides a detailed re-creation of their journeys; contrasts their personalities and thoughts about Africa.

Jeal, Tim. Livingstone. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973. Although characterized by a certain overemphasis on debunking the Livingstone myth, Jeal’s is perhaps the fullest, and certainly the most readable, of the many modern biographies of Livingstone.

Ransford, Oliver. David Livingstone: The Dark Interior. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. A detailed, carefully researched biography that is marred by the author’s insistence that all Livingstone’s life and actions can be explained by a disease that led to wide swings in mood ranging from deep depression to great elation.

Ross, Andrew C. David Livingstone: Mission and Empire. London: Hambledon and London, 2002. Scholarly account of Livingstone’s life.

Seaver, George. David Livingstone: His Life and Letters. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957. A solid life notable primarily for reprinting a number of interesting Livingstone letters.