David Livingstone: Scottish Missionary, Doctor, and African Explorer

who was David Livingstone the Scottish missionary explorer of Africa and what did he discover

David Livingstone occupies a singular place in the history of nineteenth century exploration, Christian missionary work, and the long struggle against the East African slave trade. Born in a single tenement room on the upper floor of a Scottish cotton mill village in 1813, he rose through unrelenting self education and a stern Calvinist work ethic to become one of the most celebrated explorers of the Victorian era, the first European known to have crossed the southern African continent from west to east, the man who introduced the wider world to the thundering waterfall the local Kololo people called Mosi-oa-Tunya, and the persistent investigator whose final years were consumed by a search for the source of the Nile that ended in fever, exhaustion, and a quiet death in a grass hut at the village of Chitambo in what is now Zambia. He was a missionary who in three decades of African work counted only a single fully attested convert who later lapsed, a husband whose long absences contributed to a marriage marked by separation and tragedy, and a flawed leader whose Zambezi expedition of the late 1850s and early 1860s ended in recrimination and the death of his wife. He was also, at the same time, the man whose reports to the Royal Geographical Society reshaped the map of central Africa, whose impassioned campaign against the Arab Swahili slaving caravans of the East African interior helped propel a decisive British and international diplomatic effort to suppress the trade, and whose memory inspired a generation of subsequent explorers, missionaries, and African nationalists. The complexity of his life, the genuine sacrifices he made, the errors he committed, and the long shadow he cast over the colonial encounter between Europe and Africa all demand a careful retelling, one which neither hagiographically inflates the missionary saint of Victorian schoolbooks nor cynically reduces a complicated human being to a one dimensional agent of empire.

Early Life in the Cotton Village of Blantyre

David Livingstone was born on March 19, 1813, in the small village of Blantyre on the bank of the Clyde River in Scotland, about eight miles southeast of Glasgow. His birthplace, a single small room in a tenement block known as Shuttle Row, was tied to the Blantyre cotton works, a textile mill that depended on the labor of poor families drawn from the surrounding countryside and the Highlands. His father Neil Livingstone, a tea seller and devout member first of the established Church of Scotland and later of an independent congregation, was a man of intense religious feeling, ascetic personal habits, and a powerful belief in the importance of literacy and Christian instruction. His mother Agnes Hunter Livingstone came from a respected Lowland family with a Covenanter tradition, and she ran a household of considerable order despite the cramped quarters in which the family of seven, including David, his older brother John, his younger brother Charles, and his sisters, were obliged to live. The family was not unlettered, despite its poverty; books circulated freely in the household, religious tracts were read aloud, and the children were expected to memorize passages of Scripture and the Westminster Shorter Catechism from a very young age. The Scottish tradition of universal parish schooling, which traced its origins to John Knox and the Reformation of the sixteenth century, ensured that even the children of mill workers in industrial Lanarkshire could acquire a working command of reading, writing, and basic mathematics, and it was within this culture of disciplined literacy that David Livingstone first learned the habits of mind that would later sustain him through years of solitary travel.

The Blantyre mill at which the Livingstone family worked was one of a network of cotton spinning enterprises that had transformed the Clyde valley over the previous half century. From around the age of ten, David Livingstone began work as a piecer at the mill, threading and joining broken threads on the spinning frames for shifts that ran from six in the morning until eight at night, with brief intervals for meals. The work was exhausting, the heat of the mill rooms oppressive, and the cotton dust hazardous to the lungs of the children employed there. Yet Livingstone, with a precocity that astonished his fellow workers, propped a book on the spinning frame as he tended his thread, snatching sentences of Latin grammar or natural history between the passes of the carriage, and he attended the mill school in the evenings, which provided two hours of instruction after the long day at the machines. With his first earnings he purchased a Latin grammar by Thomas Ruddiman, and in the years that followed he taught himself the rudiments of Latin literature, dipping into Horace and Virgil with the persistence of a young man who refused to accept that intellectual life was the privilege of the wealthy. He later recalled that during this period of childhood labor he had read so widely in books of travel, theology, and natural science that his father, alarmed by the secular tendency of some of his reading, occasionally took books from his hand and replaced them with religious volumes. The young David obeyed, but never lost the conviction that the truths of nature and the truths of revelation belonged to the same single order of created reality.

The religious atmosphere of the Livingstone household shifted in his adolescence when his father, dissatisfied with what he considered the spiritual coldness of the established Church of Scotland, withdrew from it and joined an independent congregation drawing on the evangelical revival of the period. David, after a period of doubt and prolonged struggle with the doctrinal demands placed upon him, eventually underwent the conversion experience expected of a Scottish Calvinist of his generation, accepting personal responsibility for his sins and committing himself to a life of evangelical service. The decisive influence in shaping the direction of that service was a small book by the American minister Dick titled Philosophy of a Future State, together with the missionary appeals of Karl Gutzlaff, a German Protestant who had labored among the Chinese on the southern coasts. Gutzlaff's call for medical missionaries to China caught Livingstone's imagination, for it offered a way to combine the healing of bodies with the preaching of the gospel, and it suggested that a poor Scottish mill hand might yet find a means by which to serve in distant lands. From around 1834 onward, the goal of becoming a medical missionary in China animated his self education and provided the focus for the remarkable program of study and saving that culminated, several years later, in his enrollment at Anderson's University in Glasgow.

Medical Training in Glasgow

By the autumn of 1836, at the age of twenty three, David Livingstone had accumulated enough savings from his work at the mill, supplemented by his family's modest contributions, to enroll at Anderson's University in Glasgow, an institution founded in the late eighteenth century to provide scientific and medical instruction to a broader social spectrum than the older, more aristocratic University of Glasgow. He divided his time between Blantyre and Glasgow, walking the eight miles to and from the city when the weather permitted and lodging in inexpensive rooms when the academic terms required his continuous presence. He attended lectures in chemistry, materia medica, anatomy, midwifery, and the practical clinical disciplines required for the diploma of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, while at the same time pursuing courses in Greek and divinity that would qualify him for missionary ordination. His instructors included Thomas Graham, who would later become the master of the Royal Mint and a chemist of international reputation, and a generation of Glasgow medical men who were then absorbing the new sciences of cellular pathology, anaesthesia, and tropical disease that would transform nineteenth century medicine. Livingstone was a serious, attentive, and capable student, though not a brilliant one; he was at his best when grappling with practical problems of physiology and therapeutics, and he applied himself with particular interest to the diseases of tropical climates, which he correctly anticipated would form a central part of his future work.

During his Glasgow years, Livingstone submitted himself to examination by the London Missionary Society, a non denominational evangelical body founded in 1795 with the goal of sending Christian missions to the heathen world. The Society accepted him as a candidate after some hesitation, and after a probationary period at its training establishment at Ongar in Essex during 1838 and 1839, he was approved for missionary service. His original intention had been to go to China, but the outbreak of the First Opium War between Britain and China in 1839 closed that field of activity for the immediate future, and the elder missionary Robert Moffat, then on furlough in England from his long established mission at Kuruman on the northern frontier of the Cape Colony in southern Africa, persuaded the young Scotsman that the great inland plain of southern Africa offered an immense field for evangelism and medical service. Moffat famously declared, in a conversation that proved decisive for the direction of Livingstone's career, that he had sometimes from his mission station seen the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had ever been, an image that lodged itself in Livingstone's imagination and gave concrete form to his sense of vocation. With his medical diploma secured in November 1840 and his ordination as a missionary completed at Albion Chapel in London on November 20 of the same year, David Livingstone embarked from the port of London in early December 1840 on the ship George, bound for the Cape Colony, beginning the long ocean voyage that would carry him, after some four months at sea, to the southern tip of Africa.

Arrival in Africa and the Kuruman Mission

The young missionary arrived at Simon's Bay in March 1841 and travelled overland in slow stages, by ox wagon over rough tracks, through the Cape Colony to the mission station at Kuruman, the remote outpost in what is now South Africa where Robert Moffat had labored since 1820. The journey of more than seven hundred miles took three months and gave Livingstone his first sustained encounter with the landscapes, peoples, and languages of southern Africa. He passed through Boer farming communities of Dutch and Huguenot descent, met groups of Khoekhoe and San peoples whose lifeways had been profoundly disrupted by European settlement, and observed the patterns of frontier trade, missionary activity, and intermittent conflict that characterized the northern reaches of the Cape Colony in the early Victorian period. He also began the lifelong habit of careful observation that would distinguish his later writings, recording in his notebooks the geology of the regions through which he travelled, the species of plants and animals he encountered, the customs and material culture of the African peoples he met, and the atmospheric and climatic conditions that affected agriculture and human health. By the time he reached Kuruman in late July 1841, he had already accumulated a substantial fund of impressions that would inform his subsequent missionary and exploratory work.

Kuruman in the early 1840s was an established and relatively well-watered mission station, with its own chapel, school, printing press, and irrigation gardens, set among the Tlhaping people of the southern Tswana group. Robert Moffat, although still on furlough at the time of Livingstone's arrival, had built up the station over two decades of patient work, and his colleagues continued the routine of preaching, schooling, medical care, and translation. Moffat himself had translated the Bible into Setswana, and the press at Kuruman produced hymn books, primers, and tracts in that language. Livingstone, after a brief period at Kuruman during which he assessed the existing work and acquired a working knowledge of Setswana, came to the conclusion that the field around Kuruman was already adequately supplied with missionaries and that his vocation lay further to the north, in the country of the Bakwena and other Tswana groups who had not yet been reached by sustained Christian teaching. With characteristic restlessness he began a series of journeys northward, exploring possible sites for a new mission station and observing the political and ecological conditions of the interior. Within his first year in Africa he travelled hundreds of miles by ox wagon and on foot, slept in the open under the stars, suffered his first attacks of malaria, and began to form the conviction that the deep interior of the continent, hitherto almost unknown to Europeans, was both densely populated by African peoples and accessible by river systems and overland routes that no European had yet systematically described.

In 1843, after consultations with the London Missionary Society and with the agreement of the Bakwena chief Sechele, Livingstone established a new mission station at Mabotsa, a site in the country of the Bakgatla approximately two hundred miles to the northeast of Kuruman. It was at Mabotsa that he had one of the most famous and physically consequential incidents of his life, the attack by a lion that nearly killed him in February 1844. The Bakgatla had been losing cattle and sheep to a pride of lions that had taken to attacking livestock by day, and Livingstone, in accordance with the custom of the country, joined a party of hunters who set out to drive the lions away. When a wounded lion charged him, it seized him by the left arm above the elbow, shook him as a terrier shakes a rat, and crushed the humerus into eleven splinters before it was distracted and ultimately killed. Livingstone survived, but the bone never healed properly, the arm could never be raised above shoulder level, and the false joint that formed at the site of the fracture was decades later one of the means by which his body was identified after his death in the interior. The attack also taught him an unforgettable lesson about the nature of severe physical trauma, for he reported that during the worst of the attack he experienced no pain or fear, only a curious dreamlike detachment, which he later compared to what he believed many small animals felt at the moment of being killed by a predator, and which he cited as evidence of a providential mercy in nature.

Marriage to Mary Moffat and Early Mission Journeys

While convalescing from his injuries at Kuruman, Livingstone became close to Mary Moffat, the eldest daughter of Robert and Mary Moffat. Mary, then in her mid twenties, had been born at the Kuruman station and had grown up speaking Setswana fluently; she had assisted her parents in school and medical work and had an intimate, lived familiarity with the African landscape and African peoples that few young European women of the period possessed. After a courtship conducted with the gravity appropriate to two devout Scots Presbyterians, David Livingstone and Mary Moffat were married at Kuruman in January 1845. The marriage, although it would later be strained almost to breaking by long separations and by Livingstone's relentless commitment to his exploratory work, was at the outset a true partnership; Mary Moffat Livingstone shared her husband's missionary vocation, accompanied him on long journeys into the interior, helped to manage the affairs of the new mission stations he established, and bore him several children under conditions of extreme physical hardship. Their first child, Robert, was born in 1846, followed by Agnes in 1847, Thomas in 1849, Elizabeth, who lived only six weeks in 1850, William Oswell in 1851, and Anna Mary in 1858 during one of Mary's later, brief returns to Africa.

After his marriage Livingstone moved the family north to a new station at Chonuane, in the country of the Bakwena under chief Sechele, and then in 1847 to Kolobeng, where he built a stone mission house, a school, and a small chapel. Sechele, the Bakwena chief, became Livingstone's most important early convert and one of the few Africans whom Livingstone formally received into church membership. Sechele was an intelligent, politically shrewd, and theologically curious man who learned to read in Setswana, studied the Bible carefully, and questioned Livingstone closely on points of doctrine. Yet the relationship between missionary and convert became the source of a painful episode that revealed both the cultural assumptions of European Christianity and the practical impossibility of importing those assumptions wholesale into African societies. Sechele, in accordance with Bakwena custom, had multiple wives, several of whom were daughters of subsidiary chiefs whose alliance with the Bakwena depended upon those marriages. Livingstone, applying the demands of his Calvinist tradition, insisted that the chief send his other wives away, retaining only the first. Sechele complied, dismissing the other women with adequate material provision, but the social consequences for the women, for their children, and for the political stability of the Bakwena polity were severe. Sechele's subsequent backsliding, including a sexual relationship with one of the dismissed wives that produced a child, was treated by Livingstone as a personal failure, but later historians have read it as evidence of the deep tensions involved in the missionary project's attempt to remake African social institutions in the image of European norms.

The Kolobeng station, despite Livingstone's hard physical labor in constructing it and in attempting to make its fields productive through irrigation, was undermined by a combination of severe drought, frequent harassment by Boer commandos from the Transvaal who resented the missionary's presence and his perceived encouragement of African resistance to Boer labor demands, and Livingstone's own growing conviction that the future of his work lay further north, in the well watered lake and river country that he had begun to glimpse from the testimony of African travelers and traders. In 1849, in company with the English hunter and Cape colonist William Cotton Oswell and the trader Mungo Murray, he undertook the journey that brought him to the southern shore of Lake Ngami in present day Botswana, the first time a European had reached that lake, and a journey for which he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1851. Lake Ngami opened to Livingstone the prospect of a great inland water system extending northward into territories never described by European geographers, and it confirmed his sense that the deep interior of southern Africa was a region of major rivers, fertile valleys, and populous African societies whose existence had been largely unknown in Europe. The visit to Ngami was followed by a second journey in 1850, on which Mary Livingstone, then pregnant with their fourth child, accompanied him as far as the lake's vicinity before the illness of their other children compelled the family to return south. The hardships of that journey, including a savage attack of fever that nearly killed two of the Livingstone children, made the dangers of the family's exposure to the interior brutally clear, and in 1851 Livingstone made the decision that would shape much of the remainder of his life: he would send Mary and the children to Britain, so that the children might be educated and Mary spared the hardships of further exploration, while he himself would press northward into the unmapped continent and attempt to find a route from the interior to either the east or the west coast that might open the region to lawful European commerce and to Christian missions.

The Great Transcontinental Journey

In April 1852 David Livingstone saw his wife and four small children embark at Cape Town on a ship bound for England. The separation, which was meant to last only two years, was in the event to extend for more than five, and the impact upon the family was severe. Mary, in poverty and ill health, drifted among lodgings in Scotland and England, supported inadequately by the London Missionary Society and by the limited contributions of relatives. The children, raised at a distance from the father whose absences they barely understood, grew up with a sense of dislocation and resentment that would mark the rest of their relationships with him. Livingstone himself, who throughout his life acknowledged the painfulness of these separations and who in his private letters expressed real grief at the prolonged absence from his family, nevertheless persuaded himself that the larger duty of opening Africa to Christianity and to the suppression of the slave trade required these sacrifices. The judgment one passes upon that decision will depend in part on the weight one assigns to the duties of family life relative to the duties of public service, and in part on one's estimate of how much Livingstone genuinely accomplished through the journeys that the separation made possible.

From mid 1852 until late 1856, Livingstone undertook the journeys that established his international reputation as an explorer. Traveling north from Cape Town through the Bechuanaland country, suffering recurrent bouts of malaria and fevers of various kinds, he reached the Zambezi River at a settlement called Sesheke in the country of the Kololo people, whose chief Sekeletu provided him with porters, guides, and a substantial measure of political protection. From there, in November 1853, accompanied by twenty seven Kololo porters and with very limited European equipment, he set out westward, ascending the Zambezi and its tributaries, crossing the watershed into the basin of the Kwango, and traveling through the territories of the Lunda and other peoples of central Africa until he reached the Portuguese town of Luanda on the Atlantic coast of present day Angola in May 1854. The journey, undertaken across roughly fifteen hundred miles of country much of which had never been described by a European, was an extraordinary feat of physical endurance and of cross cultural diplomacy. Livingstone suffered repeated attacks of malaria so severe that on one occasion he was left for dead by his companions, but he survived, in part because of the resilience of his constitution and in part because of the meticulous use he made of quinine, a drug whose prophylactic and therapeutic value against malaria was just then being established by European medical research and which Livingstone helped to popularize through his published accounts.

At Luanda he was offered the opportunity to take a ship back to Britain, but he refused, considering himself bound by an obligation of honor to return his Kololo companions to their own country. Accordingly, after a period of rest and recovery, he set out again in September 1854, retraced his path across central Africa to the upper Zambezi, and then, instead of stopping there, continued eastward in late 1855 down the course of the Zambezi River through country no European had described, reaching the Indian Ocean at the Portuguese settlement of Quelimane on the coast of present day Mozambique in May 1856. It was during this eastward leg of the journey, on November 16, 1855, that he came to the great waterfall on the Zambezi that the local Kololo called Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, and which he named Victoria Falls in honor of the British monarch. He was the first European to record having seen the falls; he later wrote that scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight, a sentence that became one of the most quoted Victorian descriptions of the African landscape. The transcontinental journey, taken as a whole, made David Livingstone the first known European to have crossed southern Africa from coast to coast, established the basic geography of the upper and middle Zambezi for European cartography, and produced the body of observations and ethnographic notes that he would soon work up into the book that made him a popular celebrity in Britain.

He arrived in England in December 1856 to a hero's welcome. The Royal Geographical Society fêted him with its Patron's Medal, the queen granted him an audience, and the publication in 1857 of his book Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, a volume of more than seven hundred pages combining narrative, scientific observation, ethnography, and missionary reflection, was a sensational popular success that sold tens of thousands of copies in successive printings, with combined sales reaching some seventy thousand in the years following publication. The book, despite its sometimes turgid prose and its occasional lapses into pious commonplace, conveyed a vivid and detailed picture of the African interior, advanced strong moral arguments against the slave trade, and articulated Livingstone's famous doctrine that the future of Africa lay in the combination of Christianity, commerce, and civilization. By this formula he meant that the legitimate trade in African products such as ivory, palm oil, cotton, and other goods of commercial value would, if it could be securely established under the patronage of European mercantile and political institutions, displace the slave trade as the dominant economic activity of the African interior and would simultaneously create the material conditions under which Christianity could take root. The formula was simplistic, and its later implementation by colonial powers often produced consequences that Livingstone himself would have repudiated, but in its time it offered a vision of African transformation that motivated a generation of British missionaries, explorers, and humanitarian campaigners. During his English residence of 1857 and 1858 Livingstone broke with the London Missionary Society, whose conservative supervisors he had come to find an obstacle to his exploratory ambitions, accepted appointment as Her Majesty's Consul at Quelimane and commander of an expedition to explore eastern and central Africa for both scientific and commercial purposes, and prepared for the next phase of his African work.

t ambitious and the most disappointing undertaking of his career. The official goals of the expedition, as set out in the instructions issued by Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon, were to extend the geographical knowledge of central and eastern Africa, to investigate the agricultural and mineral resources of the country, to engage with the African peoples with a view to the encouragement of legitimate commerce and the suppression of the slave trade, and to assess the navigability of the Zambezi River as a highway by which European steamers might penetrate the interior. Livingstone, working from his transcontinental journey of the mid 1850s, had become convinced that the Zambezi offered such a highway, and his book Missionary Travels had encouraged the British public to share that conviction. The reality, as the expedition would discover with painful clarity, was that the Zambezi is interrupted in its lower reaches by a complex of cataracts and gorges known as the Cabora Bassa rapids, which makes through navigation by any vessel impossible. Livingstone's failure to investigate the Cabora Bassa during his first journey down the river, a failure that proceeded in part from his guides' having taken a detour around the gorges and in part from his own willingness to believe what he wished to be true, was to vitiate the entire premise of the expedition.

The expedition party that sailed from Britain in March 1858 consisted of Livingstone as commander, his brother Charles Livingstone as moral agent and general assistant, Dr John Kirk as expedition physician and naturalist, the geologist Richard Thornton, the artist Thomas Baines, the engineer George Rae, and the naval officer Norman Bedingfeld as master of the steam launch that had been built for the expedition. The ship, a paddle steamer called the Ma Robert, named after Mary Livingstone in accordance with the African custom of referring to a mother by the name of her eldest child, proved to be one of the great practical failures of the enterprise, for its iron plates were too thin, its boilers consumed wood at a rate that could not be sustained by the available bankside forests, and its draft was too great for the shallow channels of the Zambezi delta. The expedition labored from the outset under a combination of mechanical, climatic, medical, and personal difficulties that even a leader of the most equable temperament would have found challenging, and Livingstone, whose long years of solitary travel had not prepared him for the demands of supervising a multi member European team, repeatedly failed to manage his subordinates with the patience and tact that the situation required.

The discovery that the Cabora Bassa rapids made the upper Zambezi inaccessible to the Ma Robert forced Livingstone to redirect the expedition northward to the Shire River, a tributary of the lower Zambezi which he hoped might lead to a large inland lake of which the African inhabitants of the region had given him reports. Between 1859 and 1861 the expedition explored the Shire River and the country surrounding it, charted the Murchison Cataracts that interrupt the Shire's lower course, and in September 1859 reached the southern end of the long lake which the local peoples called Nyasa, today known as Lake Malawi. The discovery of the lake and the productive Shire highlands surrounding it was the most substantial geographical achievement of the expedition, and the highlands themselves, with their cooler climate, fertile soils, and dense African population, were identified by Livingstone as ideal locations for the establishment of missionary settlements and for legitimate trade in cotton and other agricultural products. The horror of the slave trade, which Livingstone and his colleagues now encountered with an immediacy they had not previously experienced, dominated their reports. The Shire highlands and the country around Lake Nyasa were being systematically devastated by the slaving caravans of the Arab Swahili traders operating from the Indian Ocean coast at Kilwa and Zanzibar, who acquired captives through warfare, kidnapping, and trade with the predatory Yao chiefs of the region, and marched them in long coffles down to the coast for sale to plantations on the islands of the western Indian Ocean and to markets further afield. Livingstone described seeing the corpses of slaves who had died on the road, of finding villages depopulated by the trade, and of meeting caravans whose conditions exceeded in cruelty anything he had previously known.

The Zambezi Expedition's relationship with the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, an Anglican enterprise that Livingstone himself had helped to inspire through his lectures at Cambridge and Oxford in 1857, became one of its most poignant episodes. The mission, led by Bishop Charles Frederick Mackenzie, joined Livingstone in 1861 in the Shire highlands, and the bishop, in a series of decisions that he and Livingstone made together, undertook armed action to liberate parties of slaves from the slaving caravans, a course of conduct that brought the missionaries into direct military confrontation with the Yao and that compromised the original conception of the mission as a non political evangelical enterprise. The strategy failed disastrously. Bishop Mackenzie and several of his missionary colleagues died of malaria and dysentery within months, the mission party was demoralized and ultimately withdrew, and the survivors expressed bitterness toward Livingstone, whom they accused, with some justice, of having misrepresented the salubrity of the climate and the practical conditions of work in the Shire highlands. Mary Livingstone, who had finally been able to rejoin her husband in early 1862 after years of separation, died of malaria at the Portuguese settlement of Shupanga on the lower Zambezi on April 27, 1862, only a few months after her arrival, and Livingstone, who had often acknowledged the cost of his absences from her, was overwhelmed with grief. He recorded in his journal that for the first time in his life he wished himself dead. The death of Mary Livingstone, the failure of the Universities' Mission, and the practical impossibility of using the Zambezi as a highway combined to bring the expedition to a state of near collapse, and in July 1863 the British government recalled the expedition, ordering its return.

Livingstone, refusing to accept the verdict of failure, used the remaining months of his commission to complete the exploration of Lake Nyasa and to demonstrate, with great difficulty, that the Rovuma River to the north did not offer an alternative route to the lake. He sailed the small steamboat Lady Nyassa, which he had purchased with his own funds, across the Indian Ocean to Bombay in early 1864 in a remarkable feat of small craft seamanship, and from there returned to Britain to write up his findings and to consider his next steps. The Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries, published in 1865 and written jointly with his brother Charles, was a more sober and less popularly successful book than his earlier Missionary Travels, but it included an unsparing exposure of the East African slave trade that would shape British public opinion for the remainder of the century. It was also during this period in Britain that Livingstone met the Royal Geographical Society's president Sir Roderick Murchison, who proposed to him a new project that would shape the final phase of his career: an expedition to settle the great geographical controversy of the day, the question of the source of the Nile River. The competing explorations of John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton in the late 1850s had identified Lake Victoria as a candidate for that source, but Speke had been unable to circumnavigate the lake or to demonstrate that it was the true ultimate origin of the river, and Murchison and others suspected that the true sources lay further south, perhaps in the lake and river systems of the central African plateau that Livingstone had begun to explore. Livingstone, who needed both a renewed sense of purpose and a means of redeeming the perceived failure of the Zambezi Expedition, accepted the commission with enthusiasm.

The Search for the Source of the Nile

David Livingstone departed from Britain in August 1865 on what would prove to be his last journey, traveling first to Bombay, then to Zanzibar, and from there in March 1866 to the mainland of East Africa at the mouth of the Rovuma River. The expedition was sponsored jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the British government, but its resources were modest, its personnel few, and its planning, in retrospect, gravely insufficient. Livingstone took with him a small party of porters and freed slaves, a number of pack animals, and a limited stock of supplies, and he set out into the country between the Rovuma and Lake Nyasa with the intention of working westward and northward to identify the rivers and lakes that fed the upper Nile. From the beginning the expedition encountered the same combination of difficulties that had marked his earlier work, but now compounded by Livingstone's advancing age, the cumulative effects of decades of malaria and dysentery on his body, and the diminished material resources at his disposal. The expedition party suffered desertion, theft, and harassment from local groups; the pack animals died one by one of tsetse fly disease; the medical chest, which contained the quinine on which Livingstone's health most depended, was carried off by a deserter in early 1867, a calamity from which his constitution arguably never recovered.

For more than seven years, from 1866 to 1873, Livingstone wandered across the lake and river country of what is now eastern Zambia, southern Tanzania, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and northern Malawi, mapping the courses of rivers, identifying lakes, and recording the impact of the slave trade. He reached Lake Tanganyika in 1867 and Lake Mweru in the same year, and in 1868 he reached Lake Bangweulu, whose extensive seasonally inundated swamps formed one of the great hydrological discoveries of the expedition. He pursued the course of the Lualaba River, which he became convinced was the upper course of the Nile, although it was in fact, as Henry Morton Stanley's later expedition would demonstrate, the upper course of the Congo. The geographical mistake was an honest one, made under conditions that made systematic cartography impossible, and it should not obscure the magnitude of Livingstone's positive achievement, which was the first European description of an immense and complex hydrological system whose existence had been almost entirely unknown to Europe. At the same time the expedition was producing a unique body of testimony about the operations of the Arab Swahili slave trade in the central African interior, which Livingstone documented in his journals with a precision and an outrage that gave moral authority to the British anti slavery cause for the rest of the century. He witnessed the Nyangwe massacre of July 15, 1871, in which Arab traders shot and killed several hundred unarmed African villagers, many of them women, at a market on the banks of the Lualaba River. His account of the massacre, included in his journal and later transmitted to the British public, was a turning point in the political effort to compel the Sultan of Zanzibar to close his slave market and to suppress the trade in his domains.

By the autumn of 1871 Livingstone, ill, exhausted, and almost destitute, retraced his path eastward to the small Arab trading town of Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where he hoped to find letters and supplies. He found instead that an Arab subordinate had stolen and sold the supplies that had been sent to him from the coast, and he was reduced to depending on the charity of an Arab trader named Mohammad Bogharib for food and shelter. It was at Ujiji on November 10, 1871, that the most famous meeting of his life took place. The New York Herald, eager to capitalize on the international interest in Livingstone's silence and presumed loss, had commissioned the Welsh born American journalist Henry Morton Stanley to lead an expedition into the interior to find him. Stanley, after months of difficult travel from the coast at Bagamoyo, walked into Ujiji to find the elderly Scotsman, addressed him with the famous phrase Dr. Livingstone, I presume?, and proceeded to give him news, letters, food, and the practical assistance that revived both his health and his spirits. Stanley spent four months in Livingstone's company, traveled with him to investigate the northern end of Lake Tanganyika and to confirm that no outlet to the Nile flowed from it, and ultimately departed for the coast in March 1872, carrying with him Livingstone's journals and his message that he would not return to Britain until his geographical work was complete.

The decision was a fatal one. Livingstone, although he received a fresh consignment of supplies from the coast and was joined by a new party of porters, set out from Ujiji in August 1872 on what proved to be his final exploration, attempting to work his way around the southern end of Lake Tanganyika to investigate the southern shores of Lake Bangweulu and the rivers that flowed into and out of it. The campaign was conducted in the worst possible season, during the rains that flooded the country and made every river crossing a serious obstacle, and through territories of dense bush, marsh, and tsetse infested savanna. By early 1873 Livingstone was suffering from severe dysentery, recurrent malaria, and what was almost certainly a chronic loss of blood from internal hemorrhoids and possibly intestinal ulceration. He continued nonetheless, traveling first by ox cart, then in a hammock carried by his African companions, and finally on the litters with which his servants improvised when his strength failed. On the night of April 30 to May 1, 1873, in a hut at the village of Chitambo in the country of the Bisa people, in what is now the Lala chiefdom of central Zambia, his attendants found him kneeling in an attitude of prayer beside his bed. He was dead, having succumbed at last to the combined effects of malaria, dysentery, blood loss, and exhaustion. He was sixty years old.

The Journey of the Body and Burial at Westminster Abbey

What happened in the weeks and months following Livingstone's death is one of the most moving episodes in the history of African exploration, and one of the most enduring proofs of the personal regard in which his African companions held him. His chief attendants, Abdullah Susi and James Chuma, both of whom had been with him for years, together with the porter Jacob Wainwright, decided that the body of the man they called Bwana Daudi must be carried back to the coast and returned to the country of the white men. The decision was not without controversy among the African members of the expedition, for the journey would be long and difficult, the political situation between the various peoples of the region was unstable, and African custom in most of the region required immediate burial of the dead. Susi and Chuma supervised a procedure in which the heart and viscera of Livingstone were removed and buried under a tall mvula tree at Chitambo, where a long lasting memorial was carved into the trunk of the tree, while the body was dried in the sun for fourteen days and then prepared for transport. The body was wrapped in calico, bound to a pole, and disguised as a bale of goods for the dangerous passage through the territories of peoples who might have objected to its transit. The party of more than seventy men, under Susi and Chuma's leadership, traveled for some fifteen hundred miles over a period of nine months from Chitambo to the coast at Bagamoyo on the Indian Ocean, opposite the island of Zanzibar.

The body arrived at Bagamoyo in February 1874, was transferred by ship to Zanzibar and then to Britain, and was formally identified at the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society in London by the unmistakable evidence of the false joint in the left humerus that had resulted from the lion attack at Mabotsa thirty years earlier. The funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874, in the presence of Henry Morton Stanley, Jacob Wainwright, who had accompanied the body from Africa, members of the Livingstone family, representatives of the Royal Geographical Society and the London Missionary Society, and an enormous crowd of mourners. Livingstone was buried in the nave of the Abbey, where his tombstone, inlaid in the floor, bears the inscription Brought by faithful hands over land and sea here rests David Livingstone, missionary, traveller, philanthropist, born March 19, 1813, at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, died May 1, 1873, at Chitambo's Village, Ilala, followed by the famous lines from his last journal: All I can add in my solitude is, may Heaven's rich blessing come down on every one, American, English, or Turk, who will help to heal this open sore of the world. The reference was to the East African slave trade, against which Livingstone had argued and fought for the last decades of his life, and which would, within a few years of his death, be suppressed at the source by the international pressure to which his testimony and his death had contributed so substantially.

Livingstone and the East African Slave Trade

The East African slave trade, which Livingstone documented with such unsparing precision during his last expedition, was one of the great moral evils of the nineteenth century and was, for much of that century, less well understood in Europe than the Atlantic slave trade had been. From the medieval period onward, an active commerce in human beings had operated across the western Indian Ocean, supplying slaves to Arab and Persian markets, to the date plantations of southeastern Arabia, to the clove plantations of the Zanzibar archipelago, and to households throughout the Islamic world. By the early nineteenth century the trade had reached an industrial scale, with annual exports from the East African coast estimated by some scholars at between forty thousand and one hundred thousand persons. The interior collection grounds of the trade extended deep into the continent, with caravans operating from the coastal entrepôts at Kilwa, Bagamoyo, Pangani, and elsewhere into the country of the Yao, the Bemba, the Manyema, the Tabwa, and many others, and with a network of fortified slaving stations operated by Arab Swahili traders such as Tippu Tip, whom Livingstone himself encountered and described. The methods of capture combined warfare, kidnapping, and trade with predatory African chiefs who in some cases had been wholly absorbed into the slaving economy, and the mortality of the captured slaves on the long march to the coast was very high, with many caravans losing half or more of their members to disease, exhaustion, ill treatment, and execution. Livingstone's published descriptions of these conditions, both in his Last Journals which were edited and published posthumously by Horace Waller in 1874 and in the dispatches and letters which appeared in the press during his lifetime, brought home to the British public the scale and the moral character of the trade in ways that the previous decades of abolitionist agitation had not achieved.

The political response to Livingstone's testimony was substantial. The British government, under Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, dispatched the diplomat Sir Bartle Frere on a special mission to Zanzibar in 1873, and the Sultan of Zanzibar, Barghash bin Said, under the combined pressure of British naval power, diplomatic insistence, and the threat of broader commercial sanctions, signed a treaty closing the public slave market at Zanzibar in June of that year. The closing of the Zanzibar market was a watershed in the campaign against the East African slave trade, although the trade itself, conducted henceforth in clandestine forms, continued for some decades thereafter. The Anglican Universities' Mission to Central Africa, which had been so battered during Livingstone's Zambezi Expedition, reestablished itself on Zanzibar and built its cathedral church on the site of the former slave market, the altar of the cathedral being placed, with deliberate symbolism, on the location of the auction post where slaves had been sold. In central Africa itself, the work that Livingstone had begun was carried on by a generation of Scottish and English missionaries who established stations in the Shire highlands and around Lake Nyasa, including the Free Church of Scotland mission at Livingstonia and the Church of Scotland mission at Blantyre, named after Livingstone's birthplace, both of which played significant roles in the eventual establishment of the British Central Africa Protectorate, later the colony of Nyasaland, and which left a lasting educational and ecclesiastical legacy in present day Malawi.

The relationship between Livingstone's antislavery campaign and the European colonization of Africa that followed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century is complex and has been the subject of substantial debate among historians. It is undeniable that Livingstone hoped European political and commercial influence might displace the slave trade and create conditions for African economic and spiritual transformation, and that his appeals to British public opinion helped to create the climate within which the partition of Africa among the European powers was justified, at least in part, by the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention and the suppression of slavery. It is equally undeniable that the actual colonial regimes that followed often imposed forms of forced labor and racial discrimination that were themselves grave injustices, and that the partition of Africa pursued European strategic and economic interests far removed from anything Livingstone himself had envisaged. The judgment that one should pass upon the historical role of David Livingstone must therefore distinguish between the moral content of his own actions and convictions, which were marked by genuine compassion for African suffering and by a willingness to spend his own life in opposing what he considered evil, and the larger historical consequences of those actions, which were shaped by political and economic forces that he did not control and that produced both genuine improvements and grave new injustices in the lives of the African peoples among whom he had worked.

Medical and Scientific Contributions

David Livingstone was a trained physician of his period, and the medical work he conducted during his African travels constituted an important if often overlooked aspect of his career. His medical practice combined the conventional therapeutics of mid nineteenth century European medicine, including the use of mercurial preparations for various conditions, blood letting, and the administration of opium and other plant alkaloids for the relief of pain and the management of dysentery, with a steadily growing body of empirical observations about the diseases of the African interior. His most important specific medical contribution was the elaboration of a quinine based prophylactic regimen against malaria, which he himself relied upon during his journeys and which he advocated in his published writings and in his correspondence with medical authorities in Britain. The standard Livingstone prescription, which combined quinine, calomel, jalap, and rhubarb in a specific proportion that came to be known among British colonial doctors as the Livingstone Rouser, was used by an entire generation of European travelers in tropical Africa, and although its specific composition reflected the limited pharmacological understanding of the period, its emphasis on the systematic use of quinine to prevent and to treat malarial fevers anticipated the principles on which modern antimalarial chemotherapy is based.

His scientific contributions extended well beyond medicine. He was a careful and systematic observer of the geology, hydrology, and biology of the regions through which he traveled, and the geographical and natural history information collected during his journeys formed the basis of a substantial portion of the European knowledge of central Africa for the remainder of the nineteenth century. He sent specimens of plants and animals to British and continental European institutions for description and identification, contributed to the cartography of the African interior through the careful determination of latitudes and longitudes by celestial observation, and reported on the tsetse fly and its role in the transmission of what we now know to be trypanosomiasis in both cattle and humans, although the specific etiology of sleeping sickness was not established until decades after his death. His observations on the geology of the Zambezi basin contributed to the understanding of the great rift system of east central Africa, and his hydrological work, although marred by his mistaken identification of the Lualaba River with the upper Nile, produced a substantially correct picture of the central African watershed and laid the groundwork for the later work of Stanley, Cameron, and Junker. The Royal Geographical Society honored him repeatedly during his lifetime and after his death, awarded his memory permanent commemoration in its halls and publications, and listed him among the founders of the modern geographical understanding of Africa.

His ethnographic work was substantial. Although it was shot through with the racial and cultural assumptions of his period, including a settled conviction that Christianity and European forms of civilization represented a higher stage of human development than the African societies he encountered, it also displayed a degree of empathy with African peoples and an attention to the specific details of African life that was uncommon among European observers of his generation. He learned Setswana fluently, acquired a working command of several other African languages, recorded vocabularies and grammars, transcribed African oral traditions, described African political institutions in detail, and argued repeatedly against the simple racism that held African peoples to be incapable of intellectual, moral, or economic development. His relationships with African chiefs, including Sechele of the Bakwena, Sekeletu of the Kololo, and many others, were conducted with a recognition of African dignity and political legitimacy that distinguished him from many other Europeans of the colonial period. His observations on African agriculture, on the indigenous metallurgy of central Africa, on the medical and pharmaceutical knowledge of African healers, and on the conditions of women and children in different African societies, contributed to a body of European ethnographic knowledge about Africa that, although limited and often distorted, served as the foundation on which the later sciences of African anthropology and African history would be built.

Personal Life and Family

The personal and family life of David Livingstone is in many respects the most painful aspect of his biography, and the one in which his commitments to a higher cause were most evidently in tension with the obligations of intimate relationship. His marriage to Mary Moffat, although it was at its outset a partnership of shared faith and shared work, was strained almost beyond endurance by the years of separation that his exploratory ambitions required. From the time he sent Mary and the four children back to Britain in 1852 until her death at Shupanga in 1862, the couple was in each other's company for only a small fraction of the intervening decade, and the children grew up at a distance from a father whose absences they could only partially understand. The financial situation of the family was for much of this period precarious, with the modest income from the London Missionary Society and from Livingstone's eventual government appointments inadequate to provide a comfortable life for Mary and the children, and only the success of Missionary Travels in 1857 brought a measure of relief. The strain told upon Mary's health and spirits, and there is evidence that during her years in Britain she suffered from depression and from a sense of religious failure that her devoutly Calvinist family connections found difficult to understand. Her return to Africa in 1862, undertaken in part because she could no longer bear the separation, ended with her death from malaria only a few months later, and Livingstone's grief, although he eventually mastered it, was profound and lasting.

The five surviving children of the marriage led varied lives, marked in different ways by the absence of their father. Robert, the eldest son, born in 1846, never settled to a regular profession, emigrated to America during the Civil War, enlisted in the Union Army under the assumed name Rupert Vincent in a New Hampshire regiment, was captured at Fort Harrison in Virginia in October 1864, was transferred to the Confederate prisoner of war camp at Salisbury, North Carolina, and died there in early December 1864 from wounds received during a prison disturbance, his true identity unknown to his captors at the time of his death. Livingstone learned of the death only months later, and the loss was a heavy one. Agnes, the eldest daughter, born in 1847, became close to her father during his later return visits to Britain, traveled to Egypt to meet him on what was meant to be a homeward journey, and after his death became one of the most active custodians of his memory, working with Horace Waller on the publication of his Last Journals and supporting biographical projects throughout her life. Thomas, born in 1849, suffered from chronic ill health, including diabetes, and died in Egypt in 1876, only a few years after his father. William Oswell, born in 1851, named after the hunter who had accompanied Livingstone on the Lake Ngami journey, qualified as a medical doctor and lived into the early twentieth century. Anna Mary, born in 1858 during Mary's brief return to Africa, scarcely knew her father, who died when she was fifteen, and lived a quiet life in England.

The relationships within the Livingstone family during the explorer's lifetime were further complicated by Livingstone's difficult relations with his brother Charles, who served as a member of the Zambezi Expedition and whose performance was a source of recurring frustration. Charles, who had spent some years in the United States before joining the expedition, lacked the practical and personal qualities that the work required, and his disputes with John Kirk and other expedition members contributed to the breakdown of cohesion within the party. After the recall of the expedition, Charles returned to England, served briefly as a consul, and produced a written account of the expedition that minimized its difficulties; the relations between the two brothers remained strained for the remainder of David's life. Other extended family members, including his sisters, played important supportive roles, particularly in caring for the children during the periods of Mary's distress and during her last journey to Africa. The picture that emerges from the Livingstone family correspondence, which was preserved in part and has been published in various selections, is of a family bound together by deep affection and by a shared religious culture, but also strained by the practical and emotional consequences of David Livingstone's prolonged absences and by the death and loss that punctuated their lives.

Religious Thought and the Missionary Vocation

The religious life of David Livingstone is a subject deserving of serious attention, both because his self understanding as a missionary was the controlling motive of his career and because the gap between the conventional Victorian image of him as the saintly missionary explorer and the more complicated record of his actual missionary work has been a recurring theme in critical biography. Livingstone was raised in the Scottish Calvinist tradition, and the core convictions of that tradition, including the sovereignty of God, the depravity of the unregenerate human heart, the necessity of personal conversion, and the obligation of all Christians to participate in the propagation of the gospel, remained the framework of his thought throughout his life. He read his Bible daily, prayed at length both privately and in public, kept the Sabbath strictly even in the African bush, and held himself to a personal moral standard of considerable rigor. At the same time, his theology, as it appears in his published writings and in his letters, displayed a notable practical orientation and a relative lack of interest in the finer points of doctrinal controversy that had divided Scottish Presbyterianism in his lifetime. He was a man more interested in the application of Christian teaching to the practical problems of African life than in the disputes between established and free churches, and his sympathies, although they remained Calvinist, were broadly evangelical and pan denominational.

His actual record as a missionary, measured by the conventional metric of the number of converts received into church membership, was extremely modest. The single fully attested convert of his early years was Sechele, the Bakwena chief, whose later moral lapses Livingstone treated as personal failures and whose case has been read by later scholars as illustrating the deep tensions within the missionary project. During his later journeys, Livingstone preached frequently to the African peoples he encountered, distributed Bibles and tracts in the languages he knew, and conducted services on Sundays for his porters and for any Africans who chose to attend, but he established no further organized congregations and recorded no further individual converts. The most influential dimensions of his missionary work, in the view of most subsequent commentators, were not in the immediate winning of souls but in the longer term: the inspiration he gave to a generation of British missionaries who followed him into central Africa, the moral authority of his writings and his lectures, and the practical demonstration he provided that a European could live and work in the African interior. The missions that took root in the regions he had explored, including the Free Church of Scotland's Livingstonia mission, the Church of Scotland's Blantyre mission, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, and the various Catholic missions that followed in the subsequent decades, all carried his name and his memory as part of their founding tradition, and the African Christianity that grew up in their wake, although it has long since outgrown the European missionary framework, traces a substantial part of its institutional history back to the work that Livingstone began.

His theological reflections on Africa and African peoples deserve particular notice, both for their merits and for their limitations. He believed, in common with most of his evangelical contemporaries, that the Africans he encountered were the descendants of Adam and Eve, fully human, fully capable of salvation, and entitled to the gospel by the same divine command that obligated the gospel to be preached to all nations. He rejected, with a vigor that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries, the various racial theories that held African peoples to be biologically inferior or incapable of cultural development, and he insisted in his writings on the dignity, the intelligence, and the moral capacity of the African peoples he had known. At the same time, he held, in equally settled conviction, that the religious systems of those peoples, including the rich traditions of ancestor veneration, divine kingship, witchcraft belief, and oracular practice that he encountered, were forms of darkness from which the African peoples needed to be delivered by the saving truth of the gospel. The tensions inherent in this combination of theological universalism and cultural particularism marked his entire missionary career, and they are tensions that have remained at the heart of the encounter between Christianity and African religious culture throughout the subsequent history of African Christianity.

Livingstone's Character and Temperament

The personal character of David Livingstone, as it emerges from his journals, his letters, and the testimony of those who knew him, was a study in contrasts. He combined physical courage of a very high order with a recurring tendency to underestimate the dangers of the situations into which he led himself and others. He possessed extraordinary powers of endurance, both of physical hardship and of the loneliness and uncertainty of his African travels, but he was at the same time prone to long periods of depression and self doubt, particularly after the deaths of those close to him and after the failures and disappointments of his work. He had a profound sympathy with suffering, particularly the suffering of African slaves and of the victims of the slave trade, but he could also be harsh, sarcastic, and unyielding in his dealings with his European subordinates, especially during the Zambezi Expedition. He was capable of forming deep and lasting personal loyalties, as the devotion of his African companions Susi and Chuma demonstrates, but he was also capable of bitter quarrels with men whom he believed to have failed him, including Norman Bedingfeld, John Kirk on occasion, his own brother Charles, and others whose careers were touched by his work.

His religious faith, which was the central organizing principle of his life, was at once a source of remarkable strength and a means of self justification that allowed him to persist in courses of action whose human costs he might otherwise have hesitated to accept. The same faith that sustained him through the loneliness of his journeys, through the deaths of his daughter Elizabeth and of his wife Mary, through the loss of his son Robert in the American Civil War, and through the long final years of fever and dysentery in central Africa, also enabled him to subordinate the claims of his family to the demands of what he considered his higher calling, and to maintain his absolute confidence in the importance of his work even when his immediate results were disappointing. His ambition, although it was always couched in the language of service to a greater cause, was nonetheless real and substantial; he wanted to be the first European to perform the geographical and humanitarian feats that he set himself, and he resented competitors and detractors with a sometimes ungenerous spirit. His honesty, both in his published writings and in his private correspondence, was however very high; he reported what he saw and what he believed with a candor that has made his journals one of the indispensable primary sources of nineteenth century African history, and he was capable of acknowledging his own mistakes and his own failures with a frankness that is sometimes startling.

His relationships with his African companions reveal both the limits and the genuine reach of his moral imagination. He treated them, by the standards of his period, with conspicuous respect and consideration, and his African companions, including Susi, Chuma, Wainwright, and many others, gave him in return a personal devotion that was extraordinary even by the standards of an age in which such relationships were not uncommon. He preferred African company to European company on his long journeys, recorded the deaths of his African companions with sorrow comparable to that which he felt for his European associates, and provided in his last journals testimony to the courage, intelligence, and humanity of African peoples that contributed substantially to the European appreciation of African humanity in the decades that followed. At the same time, he retained throughout his life the assumption that African peoples were in some sense subordinate to European peoples, that they would benefit from European tutelage, and that the future of Africa lay in some form of European guided transformation. The judgment one passes upon the moral content of his relationships with Africans depends in part upon the comparison one chooses to make: against the standards of his own period, Livingstone was a man of unusual sympathy and respect; against the standards of the twenty first century, he remains a figure whose imperial assumptions cannot be dismissed.

The Zambezi Expedition

The Zambezi Expedition, which occupied Livingstone from March 1858 until the middle of 1864, was the most ambitious and the most disappointing undertaking of his career. The official goals of the expedition, as set out in the instructions issued by Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon, were to extend the geographical knowledge of central and eastern Africa, to investigate the agricultural and mineral resources of the country, to engage with the African peoples with a view to the encouragement of legitimate commerce and the suppression of the slave trade, and to assess the navigability of the Zambezi River as a highway by which European steamers might penetrate the interior. Livingstone, working from his transcontinental journey of the mid 1850s, had become convinced that the Zambezi offered such a highway, and his book Missionary Travels had encouraged the British public to share that conviction. The reality, as the expedition would discover with painful clarity, was that the Zambezi is interrupted in its lower reaches by a complex of cataracts and gorges known as the Cabora Bassa rapids, which makes through navigation by any vessel impossible. Livingstone's failure to investigate the Cabora Bassa during his first journey down the river, a failure that proceeded in part from his guides' having taken a detour around the gorges and in part from his own willingness to believe what he wished to be true, was to vitiate the entire premise of the expedition.

The expedition party that sailed from Britain in March 1858 consisted of Livingstone as commander, his brother Charles Livingstone as moral agent and general assistant, Dr John Kirk as expedition physician and naturalist, the geologist Richard Thornton, the artist Thomas Baines, the engineer George Rae, and the naval officer Norman Bedingfeld as master of the steam launch that had been built for the expedition. The ship, a paddle steamer called the Ma Robert, named after Mary Livingstone in accordance with the African custom of referring to a mother by the name of her eldest child, proved to be one of the great practical failures of the enterprise, for its iron plates were too thin, its boilers consumed wood at a rate that could not be sustained by the available bankside forests, and its draft was too great for the shallow channels of the Zambezi delta. The expedition labored from the outset under a combination of mechanical, climatic, medical, and personal difficulties that even a leader of the most equable temperament would have found challenging, and Livingstone, whose long years of solitary travel had not prepared him for the demands of supervising a multi member European team, repeatedly failed to manage his subordinates with the patience and tact that the situation required.

The discovery that the Cabora Bassa rapids made the upper Zambezi inaccessible to the Ma Robert forced Livingstone to redirect the expedition northward to the Shire River, a tributary of the lower Zambezi which he hoped might lead to a large inland lake of which the African inhabitants of the region had given him reports. Between 1859 and 1861 the expedition explored the Shire River and the country surrounding it, charted the Murchison Cataracts that interrupt the Shire's lower course, and in September 1859 reached the southern end of the long lake which the local peoples called Nyasa, today known as Lake Malawi. The discovery of the lake and the productive Shire highlands surrounding it was the most substantial geographical achievement of the expedition, and the highlands themselves, with their cooler climate, fertile soils, and dense African population, were identified by Livingstone as ideal locations for the establishment of missionary settlements and for legitimate trade in cotton and other agricultural products. The horror of the slave trade, which Livingstone and his colleagues now encountered with an immediacy they had not previously experienced, dominated their reports. The Shire highlands and the country around Lake Nyasa were being systematically devastated by the slaving caravans of the Arab Swahili traders operating from the Indian Ocean coast at Kilwa and Zanzibar, who acquired captives through warfare, kidnapping, and trade with the predatory Yao chiefs of the region, and marched them in long coffles down to the coast for sale to plantations on the islands of the western Indian Ocean and to markets further afield. Livingstone described seeing the corpses of slaves who had died on the road, of finding villages depopulated by the trade, and of meeting caravans whose conditions exceeded in cruelty anything he had previously known.

The Zambezi Expedition's relationship with the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, an Anglican enterprise that Livingstone himself had helped to inspire through his lectures at Cambridge and Oxford in 1857, became one of its most poignant episodes. The mission, led by Bishop Charles Frederick Mackenzie, joined Livingstone in 1861 in the Shire highlands, and the bishop, in a series of decisions that he and Livingstone made together, undertook armed action to liberate parties of slaves from the slaving caravans, a course of conduct that brought the missionaries into direct military confrontation with the Yao and that compromised the original conception of the mission as a non political evangelical enterprise. The strategy failed disastrously. Bishop Mackenzie and several of his missionary colleagues died of malaria and dysentery within months, the mission party was demoralized and ultimately withdrew, and the survivors expressed bitterness toward Livingstone, whom they accused, with some justice, of having misrepresented the salubrity of the climate and the practical conditions of work in the Shire highlands. Mary Livingstone, who had finally been able to rejoin her husband in early 1862 after years of separation, died of malaria at the Portuguese settlement of Shupanga on the lower Zambezi on April 27, 1862, only a few months after her arrival, and Livingstone, who had often acknowledged the cost of his absences from her, was overwhelmed with grief. He recorded in his journal that for the first time in his life he wished himself dead. The death of Mary Livingstone, the failure of the Universities' Mission, and the practical impossibility of using the Zambezi as a highway combined to bring the expedition to a state of near collapse, and in July 1863 the British government recalled the expedition, ordering its return.

Livingstone, refusing to accept the verdict of failure, used the remaining months of his commission to complete the exploration of Lake Nyasa and to demonstrate, with great difficulty, that the Rovuma River to the north did not offer an alternative route to the lake. He sailed the small steamboat Lady Nyassa, which he had purchased with his own funds, across the Indian Ocean to Bombay in early 1864 in a remarkable feat of small craft seamanship, and from there returned to Britain to write up his findings and to consider his next steps. The Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries, published in 1865 and written jointly with his brother Charles, was a more sober and less popularly successful book than his earlier Missionary Travels, but it included an unsparing exposure of the East African slave trade that would shape British public opinion for the remainder of the century. It was also during this period in Britain that Livingstone met the Royal Geographical Society's president Sir Roderick Murchison, who proposed to him a new project that would shape the final phase of his career: an expedition to settle the great geographical controversy of the day, the question of the source of the Nile River. The competing explorations of John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton in the late 1850s had identified Lake Victoria as a candidate for that source, but Speke had been unable to circumnavigate the lake or to demonstrate that it was the true ultimate origin of the river, and Murchison and others suspected that the true sources lay further south, perhaps in the lake and river systems of the central African plateau that Livingstone had begun to explore. Livingstone, who needed both a renewed sense of purpose and a means of redeeming the perceived failure of the Zambezi Expedition, accepted the commission with enthusiasm.

The Search for the Source of the Nile

David Livingstone departed from Britain in August 1865 on what would prove to be his last journey, traveling first to Bombay, then to Zanzibar, and from there in March 1866 to the mainland of East Africa at the mouth of the Rovuma River. The expedition was sponsored jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the British government, but its resources were modest, its personnel few, and its planning, in retrospect, gravely insufficient. Livingstone took with him a small party of porters and freed slaves, a number of pack animals, and a limited stock of supplies, and he set out into the country between the Rovuma and Lake Nyasa with the intention of working westward and northward to identify the rivers and lakes that fed the upper Nile. From the beginning the expedition encountered the same combination of difficulties that had marked his earlier work, but now compounded by Livingstone's advancing age, the cumulative effects of decades of malaria and dysentery on his body, and the diminished material resources at his disposal. The expedition party suffered desertion, theft, and harassment from local groups; the pack animals died one by one of tsetse fly disease; the medical chest, which contained the quinine on which Livingstone's health most depended, was carried off by a deserter in early 1867, a calamity from which his constitution arguably never recovered.

For more than seven years, from 1866 to 1873, Livingstone wandered across the lake and river country of what is now eastern Zambia, southern Tanzania, the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and northern Malawi, mapping the courses of rivers, identifying lakes, and recording the impact of the slave trade. He reached Lake Tanganyika in 1867 and Lake Mweru in the same year, and in 1868 he reached Lake Bangweulu, whose extensive seasonally inundated swamps formed one of the great hydrological discoveries of the expedition. He pursued the course of the Lualaba River, which he became convinced was the upper course of the Nile, although it was in fact, as Henry Morton Stanley's later expedition would demonstrate, the upper course of the Congo. The geographical mistake was an honest one, made under conditions that made systematic cartography impossible, and it should not obscure the magnitude of Livingstone's positive achievement, which was the first European description of an immense and complex hydrological system whose existence had been almost entirely unknown to Europe. At the same time the expedition was producing a unique body of testimony about the operations of the Arab Swahili slave trade in the central African interior, which Livingstone documented in his journals with a precision and an outrage that gave moral authority to the British anti slavery cause for the rest of the century. He witnessed the Nyangwe massacre of July 15, 1871, in which Arab traders shot and killed several hundred unarmed African villagers, many of them women, at a market on the banks of the Lualaba River. His account of the massacre, included in his journal and later transmitted to the British public, was a turning point in the political effort to compel the Sultan of Zanzibar to close his slave market and to suppress the trade in his domains.

By the autumn of 1871 Livingstone, ill, exhausted, and almost destitute, retraced his path eastward to the small Arab trading town of Ujiji on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where he hoped to find letters and supplies. He found instead that an Arab subordinate had stolen and sold the supplies that had been sent to him from the coast, and he was reduced to depending on the charity of an Arab trader named Mohammad Bogharib for food and shelter. It was at Ujiji on November 10, 1871, that the most famous meeting of his life took place. The New York Herald, eager to capitalize on the international interest in Livingstone's silence and presumed loss, had commissioned the Welsh born American journalist Henry Morton Stanley to lead an expedition into the interior to find him. Stanley, after months of difficult travel from the coast at Bagamoyo, walked into Ujiji to find the elderly Scotsman, addressed him with the famous phrase Dr. Livingstone, I presume?, and proceeded to give him news, letters, food, and the practical assistance that revived both his health and his spirits. Stanley spent four months in Livingstone's company, traveled with him to investigate the northern end of Lake Tanganyika and to confirm that no outlet to the Nile flowed from it, and ultimately departed for the coast in March 1872, carrying with him Livingstone's journals and his message that he would not return to Britain until his geographical work was complete.

The decision was a fatal one. Livingstone, although he received a fresh consignment of supplies from the coast and was joined by a new party of porters, set out from Ujiji in August 1872 on what proved to be his final exploration, attempting to work his way around the southern end of Lake Tanganyika to investigate the southern shores of Lake Bangweulu and the rivers that flowed into and out of it. The campaign was conducted in the worst possible season, during the rains that flooded the country and made every river crossing a serious obstacle, and through territories of dense bush, marsh, and tsetse infested savanna. By early 1873 Livingstone was suffering from severe dysentery, recurrent malaria, and what was almost certainly a chronic loss of blood from internal hemorrhoids and possibly intestinal ulceration. He continued nonetheless, traveling first by ox cart, then in a hammock carried by his African companions, and finally on the litters with which his servants improvised when his strength failed. On the night of April 30 to May 1, 1873, in a hut at the village of Chitambo in the country of the Bisa people, in what is now the Lala chiefdom of central Zambia, his attendants found him kneeling in an attitude of prayer beside his bed. He was dead, having succumbed at last to the combined effects of malaria, dysentery, blood loss, and exhaustion. He was sixty years old.

The Journey of the Body and Burial at Westminster Abbey

What happened in the weeks and months following Livingstone's death is one of the most moving episodes in the history of African exploration, and one of the most enduring proofs of the personal regard in which his African companions held him. His chief attendants, Abdullah Susi and James Chuma, both of whom had been with him for years, together with the porter Jacob Wainwright, decided that the body of the man they called Bwana Daudi must be carried back to the coast and returned to the country of the white men. The decision was not without controversy among the African members of the expedition, for the journey would be long and difficult, the political situation between the various peoples of the region was unstable, and African custom in most of the region required immediate burial of the dead. Susi and Chuma supervised a procedure in which the heart and viscera of Livingstone were removed and buried under a tall mvula tree at Chitambo, where a long lasting memorial was carved into the trunk of the tree, while the body was dried in the sun for fourteen days and then prepared for transport. The body was wrapped in calico, bound to a pole, and disguised as a bale of goods for the dangerous passage through the territories of peoples who might have objected to its transit. The party of more than seventy men, under Susi and Chuma's leadership, traveled for some fifteen hundred miles over a period of nine months from Chitambo to the coast at Bagamoyo on the Indian Ocean, opposite the island of Zanzibar.

The body arrived at Bagamoyo in February 1874, was transferred by ship to Zanzibar and then to Britain, and was formally identified at the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society in London by the unmistakable evidence of the false joint in the left humerus that had resulted from the lion attack at Mabotsa thirty years earlier. The funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on April 18, 1874, in the presence of Henry Morton Stanley, Jacob Wainwright, who had accompanied the body from Africa, members of the Livingstone family, representatives of the Royal Geographical Society and the London Missionary Society, and an enormous crowd of mourners. Livingstone was buried in the nave of the Abbey, where his tombstone, inlaid in the floor, bears the inscription Brought by faithful hands over land and sea here rests David Livingstone, missionary, traveller, philanthropist, born March 19, 1813, at Blantyre, Lanarkshire, died May 1, 1873, at Chitambo's Village, Ilala, followed by the famous lines from his last journal calling for help to heal what he had called the open sore of the world. The reference was to the East African slave trade, against which Livingstone had argued and fought for the last decades of his life, and which would, within a few years of his death, be suppressed at the source by the international pressure to which his testimony and his death had contributed so substantially.

Livingstone and the East African Slave Trade

The East African slave trade, which Livingstone documented with such unsparing precision during his last expedition, was one of the great moral evils of the nineteenth century and was, for much of that century, less well understood in Europe than the Atlantic slave trade had been. From the medieval period onward, an active commerce in human beings had operated across the western Indian Ocean, supplying slaves to Arab and Persian markets, to the date plantations of southeastern Arabia, to the clove plantations of the Zanzibar archipelago, and to households throughout the Islamic world. By the early nineteenth century the trade had reached an industrial scale, with annual exports from the East African coast estimated by some scholars at between forty thousand and one hundred thousand persons. The interior collection grounds of the trade extended deep into the continent, with caravans operating from the coastal entrepôts at Kilwa, Bagamoyo, Pangani, and elsewhere into the country of the Yao, the Bemba, the Manyema, the Tabwa, and many others, and with a network of fortified slaving stations operated by Arab Swahili traders such as Tippu Tip, whom Livingstone himself encountered and described. The methods of capture combined warfare, kidnapping, and trade with predatory African chiefs who in some cases had been wholly absorbed into the slaving economy, and the mortality of the captured slaves on the long march to the coast was very high, with many caravans losing half or more of their members to disease, exhaustion, ill treatment, and execution. Livingstone's published descriptions of these conditions, both in his Last Journals which were edited and published posthumously by Horace Waller in 1874 and in the dispatches and letters which appeared in the press during his lifetime, brought home to the British public the scale and the moral character of the trade in ways that the previous decades of abolitionist agitation had not achieved.

The political response to Livingstone's testimony was substantial. The British government, under Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, dispatched the diplomat Sir Bartle Frere on a special mission to Zanzibar in 1873, and the Sultan of Zanzibar, Barghash bin Said, under the combined pressure of British naval power, diplomatic insistence, and the threat of broader commercial sanctions, signed a treaty closing the public slave market at Zanzibar in June of that year. The closing of the Zanzibar market was a watershed in the campaign against the East African slave trade, although the trade itself, conducted henceforth in clandestine forms, continued for some decades thereafter. The Anglican Universities' Mission to Central Africa, which had been so battered during Livingstone's Zambezi Expedition, reestablished itself on Zanzibar and built its cathedral church on the site of the former slave market, the altar of the cathedral being placed, with deliberate symbolism, on the location of the auction post where slaves had been sold. In central Africa itself, the work that Livingstone had begun was carried on by a generation of Scottish and English missionaries who established stations in the Shire highlands and around Lake Nyasa, including the Free Church of Scotland mission at Livingstonia and the Church of Scotland mission at Blantyre, named after Livingstone's birthplace, both of which played significant roles in the eventual establishment of the British Central Africa Protectorate, later the colony of Nyasaland, and which left a lasting educational and ecclesiastical legacy in present day Malawi.

The relationship between Livingstone's antislavery campaign and the European colonization of Africa that followed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century is complex and has been the subject of substantial debate among historians. It is undeniable that Livingstone hoped European political and commercial influence might displace the slave trade and create conditions for African economic and spiritual transformation, and that his appeals to British public opinion helped to create the climate within which the partition of Africa among the European powers was justified, at least in part, by the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention and the suppression of slavery. It is equally undeniable that the actual colonial regimes that followed often imposed forms of forced labor and racial discrimination that were themselves grave injustices, and that the partition of Africa pursued European strategic and economic interests far removed from anything Livingstone himself had envisaged. The judgment that one should pass upon the historical role of David Livingstone must therefore distinguish between the moral content of his own actions and convictions, which were marked by genuine compassion for African suffering and by a willingness to spend his own life in opposing what he considered evil, and the larger historical consequences of those actions, which were shaped by political and economic forces that he did not control and that produced both genuine improvements and grave new injustices in the lives of the African peoples among whom he had worked.

Medical and Scientific Contributions

David Livingstone was a trained physician of his period, and the medical work he conducted during his African travels constituted an important if often overlooked aspect of his career. His medical practice combined the conventional therapeutics of mid nineteenth century European medicine, including the use of mercurial preparations for various conditions, blood letting, and the administration of opium and other plant alkaloids for the relief of pain and the management of dysentery, with a steadily growing body of empirical observations about the diseases of the African interior. His most important specific medical contribution was the elaboration of a quinine based prophylactic regimen against malaria, which he himself relied upon during his journeys and which he advocated in his published writings and in his correspondence with medical authorities in Britain. The standard Livingstone prescription, which combined quinine, calomel, jalap, and rhubarb in a specific proportion that came to be known among British colonial doctors as the Livingstone Rouser, was used by an entire generation of European travelers in tropical Africa, and although its specific composition reflected the limited pharmacological understanding of the period, its emphasis on the systematic use of quinine to prevent and to treat malarial fevers anticipated the principles on which modern antimalarial chemotherapy is based.

His scientific contributions extended well beyond medicine. He was a careful and systematic observer of the geology, hydrology, and biology of the regions through which he traveled, and the geographical and natural history information collected during his journeys formed the basis of a substantial portion of the European knowledge of central Africa for the remainder of the nineteenth century. He sent specimens of plants and animals to British and continental European institutions for description and identification, contributed to the cartography of the African interior through the careful determination of latitudes and longitudes by celestial observation, and reported on the tsetse fly and its role in the transmission of what we now know to be trypanosomiasis in both cattle and humans, although the specific etiology of sleeping sickness was not established until decades after his death. His observations on the geology of the Zambezi basin contributed to the understanding of the great rift system of east central Africa, and his hydrological work, although marred by his mistaken identification of the Lualaba River with the upper Nile, produced a substantially correct picture of the central African watershed and laid the groundwork for the later work of Stanley, Cameron, and Junker. The Royal Geographical Society honored him repeatedly during his lifetime and after his death, awarded his memory permanent commemoration in its halls and publications, and listed him among the founders of the modern geographical understanding of Africa.

His ethnographic work was substantial. Although it was shot through with the racial and cultural assumptions of his period, including a settled conviction that Christianity and European forms of civilization represented a higher stage of human development than the African societies he encountered, it also displayed a degree of empathy with African peoples and an attention to the specific details of African life that was uncommon among European observers of his generation. He learned Setswana fluently, acquired a working command of several other African languages, recorded vocabularies and grammars, transcribed African oral traditions, described African political institutions in detail, and argued repeatedly against the simple racism that held African peoples to be incapable of intellectual, moral, or economic development. His relationships with African chiefs, including Sechele of the Bakwena, Sekeletu of the Kololo, and many others, were conducted with a recognition of African dignity and political legitimacy that distinguished him from many other Europeans of the colonial period. His observations on African agriculture, on the indigenous metallurgy of central Africa, on the medical and pharmaceutical knowledge of African healers, and on the conditions of women and children in different African societies, contributed to a body of European ethnographic knowledge about Africa that, although limited and often distorted, served as the foundation on which the later sciences of African anthropology and African history would be built.

Personal Life and Family

The personal and family life of David Livingstone is in many respects the most painful aspect of his biography, and the one in which his commitments to a higher cause were most evidently in tension with the obligations of intimate relationship. His marriage to Mary Moffat, although it was at its outset a partnership of shared faith and shared work, was strained almost beyond endurance by the years of separation that his exploratory ambitions required. From the time he sent Mary and the four children back to Britain in 1852 until her death at Shupanga in 1862, the couple was in each other's company for only a small fraction of the intervening decade, and the children grew up at a distance from a father whose absences they could only partially understand. The financial situation of the family was for much of this period precarious, with the modest income from the London Missionary Society and from Livingstone's eventual government appointments inadequate to provide a comfortable life for Mary and the children, and only the success of Missionary Travels in 1857 brought a measure of relief. The strain told upon Mary's health and spirits, and there is evidence that during her years in Britain she suffered from depression and from a sense of religious failure that her devoutly Calvinist family connections found difficult to understand. Her return to Africa in 1862, undertaken in part because she could no longer bear the separation, ended with her death from malaria only a few months later, and Livingstone's grief, although he eventually mastered it, was profound and lasting.

The five surviving children of the marriage led varied lives, marked in different ways by the absence of their father. Robert, the eldest son, born in 1846, never settled to a regular profession, emigrated to America during the Civil War, enlisted in the Union Army under the assumed name Rupert Vincent in a New Hampshire regiment, was captured at Fort Harrison in Virginia in October 1864, was transferred to the Confederate prisoner of war camp at Salisbury, North Carolina, and died there in early December 1864 from wounds received during a prison disturbance, his true identity unknown to his captors at the time of his death. Livingstone learned of the death only months later, and the loss was a heavy one. Agnes, the eldest daughter, born in 1847, became close to her father during his later return visits to Britain, traveled to Egypt to meet him on what was meant to be a homeward journey, and after his death became one of the most active custodians of his memory, working with Horace Waller on the publication of his Last Journals and supporting biographical projects throughout her life. Thomas, born in 1849, suffered from chronic ill health, including diabetes, and died in Egypt in 1876, only a few years after his father. William Oswell, born in 1851, named after the hunter who had accompanied Livingstone on the Lake Ngami journey, qualified as a medical doctor and lived into the early twentieth century. Anna Mary, born in 1858 during Mary's brief return to Africa, scarcely knew her father, who died when she was fifteen, and lived a quiet life in England.

The relationships within the Livingstone family during the explorer's lifetime were further complicated by Livingstone's difficult relations with his brother Charles, who served as a member of the Zambezi Expedition and whose performance was a source of recurring frustration. Charles, who had spent some years in the United States before joining the expedition, lacked the practical and personal qualities that the work required, and his disputes with John Kirk and other expedition members contributed to the breakdown of cohesion within the party. After the recall of the expedition, Charles returned to England, served briefly as a consul, and produced a written account of the expedition that minimized its difficulties; the relations between the two brothers remained strained for the remainder of David's life. Other extended family members, including his sisters, played important supportive roles, particularly in caring for the children during the periods of Mary's distress and during her last journey to Africa. The picture that emerges from the Livingstone family correspondence, which was preserved in part and has been published in various selections, is of a family bound together by deep affection and by a shared religious culture, but also strained by the practical and emotional consequences of David Livingstone's prolonged absences and by the death and loss that punctuated their lives.

Religious Thought and the Missionary Vocation

The religious life of David Livingstone is a subject deserving of serious attention, both because his self understanding as a missionary was the controlling motive of his career and because the gap between the conventional Victorian image of him as the saintly missionary explorer and the more complicated record of his actual missionary work has been a recurring theme in critical biography. Livingstone was raised in the Scottish Calvinist tradition, and the core convictions of that tradition, including the sovereignty of God, the depravity of the unregenerate human heart, the necessity of personal conversion, and the obligation of all Christians to participate in the propagation of the gospel, remained the framework of his thought throughout his life. He read his Bible daily, prayed at length both privately and in public, kept the Sabbath strictly even in the African bush, and held himself to a personal moral standard of considerable rigor. At the same time, his theology, as it appears in his published writings and in his letters, displayed a notable practical orientation and a relative lack of interest in the finer points of doctrinal controversy that had divided Scottish Presbyterianism in his lifetime. He was a man more interested in the application of Christian teaching to the practical problems of African life than in the disputes between established and free churches, and his sympathies, although they remained Calvinist, were broadly evangelical and pan denominational.

His actual record as a missionary, measured by the conventional metric of the number of converts received into church membership, was extremely modest. The single fully attested convert of his early years was Sechele, the Bakwena chief, whose later moral lapses Livingstone treated as personal failures and whose case has been read by later scholars as illustrating the deep tensions within the missionary project. During his later journeys, Livingstone preached frequently to the African peoples he encountered, distributed Bibles and tracts in the languages he knew, and conducted services on Sundays for his porters and for any Africans who chose to attend, but he established no further organized congregations and recorded no further individual converts. The most influential dimensions of his missionary work, in the view of most subsequent commentators, were not in the immediate winning of souls but in the longer term: the inspiration he gave to a generation of British missionaries who followed him into central Africa, the moral authority of his writings and his lectures, and the practical demonstration he provided that a European could live and work in the African interior. The missions that took root in the regions he had explored, including the Free Church of Scotland's Livingstonia mission, the Church of Scotland's Blantyre mission, the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, and the various Catholic missions that followed in the subsequent decades, all carried his name and his memory as part of their founding tradition, and the African Christianity that grew up in their wake, although it has long since outgrown the European missionary framework, traces a substantial part of its institutional history back to the work that Livingstone began.

His theological reflections on Africa and African peoples deserve particular notice, both for their merits and for their limitations. He believed, in common with most of his evangelical contemporaries, that the Africans he encountered were the descendants of Adam and Eve, fully human, fully capable of salvation, and entitled to the gospel by the same divine command that obligated the gospel to be preached to all nations. He rejected, with a vigor that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries, the various racial theories that held African peoples to be biologically inferior or incapable of cultural development, and he insisted in his writings on the dignity, the intelligence, and the moral capacity of the African peoples he had known. At the same time, he held, in equally settled conviction, that the religious systems of those peoples, including the rich traditions of ancestor veneration, divine kingship, witchcraft belief, and oracular practice that he encountered, were forms of darkness from which the African peoples needed to be delivered by the saving truth of the gospel. The tensions inherent in this combination of theological universalism and cultural particularism marked his entire missionary career, and they are tensions that have remained at the heart of the encounter between Christianity and African religious culture throughout the subsequent history of African Christianity.

Livingstone's Character and Temperament

The personal character of David Livingstone, as it emerges from his journals, his letters, and the testimony of those who knew him, was a study in contrasts. He combined physical courage of a very high order with a recurring tendency to underestimate the dangers of the situations into which he led himself and others. He possessed extraordinary powers of endurance, both of physical hardship and of the loneliness and uncertainty of his African travels, but he was at the same time prone to long periods of depression and self doubt, particularly after the deaths of those close to him and after the failures and disappointments of his work. He had a profound sympathy with suffering, particularly the suffering of African slaves and of the victims of the slave trade, but he could also be harsh, sarcastic, and unyielding in his dealings with his European subordinates, especially during the Zambezi Expedition. He was capable of forming deep and lasting personal loyalties, as the devotion of his African companions Susi and Chuma demonstrates, but he was also capable of bitter quarrels with men whom he believed to have failed him, including Norman Bedingfeld, John Kirk on occasion, his own brother Charles, and others whose careers were touched by his work.

His religious faith, which was the central organizing principle of his life, was at once a source of remarkable strength and a means of self justification that allowed him to persist in courses of action whose human costs he might otherwise have hesitated to accept. The same faith that sustained him through the loneliness of his journeys, through the deaths of his daughter Elizabeth and of his wife Mary, through the loss of his son Robert in the American Civil War, and through the long final years of fever and dysentery in central Africa, also enabled him to subordinate the claims of his family to the demands of what he considered his higher calling, and to maintain his absolute confidence in the importance of his work even when his immediate results were disappointing. His ambition, although it was always couched in the language of service to a greater cause, was nonetheless real and substantial; he wanted to be the first European to perform the geographical and humanitarian feats that he set himself, and he resented competitors and detractors with a sometimes ungenerous spirit. His honesty, both in his published writings and in his private correspondence, was however very high; he reported what he saw and what he believed with a candor that has made his journals one of the indispensable primary sources of nineteenth century African history, and he was capable of acknowledging his own mistakes and his own failures with a frankness that is sometimes startling.

His relationships with his African companions reveal both the limits and the genuine reach of his moral imagination. He treated them, by the standards of his period, with conspicuous respect and consideration, and his African companions, including Susi, Chuma, Wainwright, and many others, gave him in return a personal devotion that was extraordinary even by the standards of an age in which such relationships were not uncommon. He preferred African company to European company on his long journeys, recorded the deaths of his African companions with sorrow comparable to that which he felt for his European associates, and provided in his last journals testimony to the courage, intelligence, and humanity of African peoples that contributed substantially to the European appreciation of African humanity in the decades that followed. At the same time, he retained throughout his life the assumption that African peoples were in some sense subordinate to European peoples, that they would benefit from European tutelage, and that the future of Africa lay in some form of European guided transformation. The judgment one passes upon the moral content of his relationships with Africans depends in part upon the comparison one chooses to make: against the standards of his own period, Livingstone was a man of unusual sympathy and respect; against the standards of the twenty first century, he remains a figure whose imperial assumptions cannot be dismissed.

The Livingstone Tradition in Victorian Britain

The Victorian and Edwardian elevation of David Livingstone to the status of a national and imperial hero was one of the most striking cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century, and the iconography that surrounded his memory remained a powerful influence in British public life well into the twentieth century. Within months of his death in 1873 and burial at Westminster Abbey in April 1874, an extensive industry of biographical, devotional, and educational publications had grown up around his name. The official biography by William Garden Blaikie, The Personal Life of David Livingstone, published in 1880, set the pattern for what became a standard genre of inspirational Christian biography, in which the hardships of the missionary explorer were retold to generations of British schoolchildren as models of personal sacrifice, religious devotion, and imperial service. Editions of Livingstone's own writings were repeatedly reissued in popular formats, abridged for children, and adapted for use in Sunday schools, where they competed with the lives of saints and the histories of foreign missions for the moral instruction of the young. Statues of Livingstone, of which the most famous is the bronze figure at the Victoria Falls erected in 1934, were placed in churches, public squares, and museums across Britain and the empire, and the place of his birth at Blantyre in Scotland was preserved as a museum that has welcomed visitors continuously since the early twentieth century.

The cultural construction of the Livingstone legend served several interlocking purposes within Victorian society. It provided, in an age of growing religious doubt, a tangible example of how a life of practical service could embody the values of evangelical Christianity. It offered, in an age of expanding empire, a justification for British involvement in Africa that emphasized humanitarian rather than commercial or strategic motives, and that obscured the more troubling aspects of colonial enterprise behind the morally appealing figure of the lone missionary explorer. It supplied, in an age of class tension and labor agitation, an example of how a poor mill worker could rise through self education and personal merit to achieve world historical significance, a story that confirmed the Victorian liberal faith in individual effort and social mobility. The Livingstone legend was therefore not simply a record of the explorer's life but a complex cultural artifact in which the realities of his career were combined with the ideological needs of the society that received them, and the historian who seeks to recover the actual life of David Livingstone must work to disentangle the man from the myth without losing sight of either.

The reception of the legend in different parts of British society was however far from uniform. Among Scottish working class communities, particularly in the industrial towns of the Clyde valley, the memory of Livingstone as a Blantyre mill worker who had risen to become a national hero remained a source of distinctive pride, and the Scottish missionary tradition, including the work of Mary Slessor in West Africa and of many later figures, drew explicit inspiration from his example. Among English public school educated administrators of the colonial service, the Livingstone legend was often refracted through a more imperial and less explicitly religious framework, and it became part of the broader cult of the heroic Englishman abroad that animated such institutions as the Boy Scouts movement founded by Robert Baden-Powell, who had himself served in southern Africa. Among the missionary societies themselves, the Livingstone tradition was carefully preserved and transmitted as part of the institutional memory of evangelical Protestantism, and it provided a continuing source of recruitment for the missions in central Africa that bore his name. Among African communities in the regions he had visited, his memory was more ambiguous, with some traditions remembering him as a benefactor who had stood against the slave traders and others recalling more distant and more critical assessments of the missionary presence and of the European colonization that followed it.

African Memory and Postcolonial Assessment

The African reception of David Livingstone's memory has been complex and has evolved substantially over the past century and a half. During the colonial period, in the regions that became the British protectorates and colonies of Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and Southern Rhodesia, Livingstone was officially commemorated as a benevolent precursor of colonial rule, and his memory was incorporated into the educational curricula of the schools that the colonial authorities and the missionary societies established. The Anglican cathedral in Zanzibar, built on the site of the former slave market, continued to function as a place of worship and as a symbol of the European role in the suppression of the slave trade, and the town of Livingstone in Northern Rhodesia, founded in 1905 near Victoria Falls, served as the administrative capital of the colony until 1935. African Christian communities in central Africa often retained a respectful memory of Livingstone, particularly in the regions associated with the Livingstonia and Blantyre missions in present day Malawi, where the educational opportunities that the missions provided gave rise to a substantial African educated class that played leading roles in the nationalist movements of the twentieth century.

The postcolonial period brought a more critical reassessment of Livingstone's legacy, conducted by African historians, theologians, and intellectuals who insisted on situating his work within the broader context of European imperial penetration of Africa. The Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Nigerian theologian Bolaji Idowu, and many others wrote critically of the missionary enterprise of which Livingstone was the most prominent symbol, arguing that the missions had been complicit in the cultural and political subjugation of African peoples even when individual missionaries had displayed personal compassion and devotion. The historiography of African Christianity, which developed substantially in the latter half of the twentieth century through the work of such scholars as Adrian Hastings, Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, and Ogbu Kalu, produced a more nuanced picture in which the African appropriation and transformation of Christianity was placed at the center of the narrative, with the European missionary contributions being treated as the necessary but limited starting point of a much larger process. In this perspective, Livingstone appears as one figure among many in a complex history that includes African catechists, evangelists, and pastors whose names are less well known but whose contributions to the establishment of African Christianity were essential.

The independent states of Africa that emerged from decolonization have on the whole retained the public memory of Livingstone, although with variable emphasis. The town of Livingstone in Zambia continues to bear his name, the Victoria Falls have retained that English designation alongside the older Mosi-oa-Tunya, and the David Livingstone Centre at the falls remains an active site of historical commemoration. In Malawi, the missions founded by his followers continued to operate, the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian which descends from the Livingstonia and Blantyre missions remains a major denomination, and the educational institutions established in his name, including the Livingstonia synod's Mzuzu University and other schools, continue to serve the educational needs of the country. In Tanzania, the Anglican cathedral in Zanzibar remains a significant monument to the campaign against the slave trade. The continuing presence of Livingstone in the geographical and institutional landscape of central Africa reflects a complex acknowledgment of his role in the history of the region, one that neither uncritically endorses his colonial assumptions nor dismisses his contributions to the suppression of the slave trade and to the establishment of educational and medical institutions that have served African populations for generations.

The Written Legacy: Books, Journals, and Letters

The literary legacy of David Livingstone is substantial and forms an important primary source for the history of nineteenth century African exploration. His published writings include Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa of 1857, a single volume of more than seven hundred pages that combines narrative, scientific observation, ethnography, and missionary reflection; A Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries of 1865, written jointly with his brother Charles and intended as the official account of the Zambezi Expedition; and the posthumously published Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, edited by Horace Waller from the explorer's manuscript journals and published in two volumes in 1874. The Last Journals, in particular, became an immediate bestseller and exercised a profound influence on Victorian public opinion concerning the slave trade and the missionary enterprise. The text edited by Waller, however, has been the subject of substantial critical revision by modern scholars, who have shown that the editor made significant alterations to the original manuscripts in order to conform Livingstone's text to the moral and theological expectations of the Victorian reading public, softening some of his more critical observations and amplifying his expressions of religious devotion.

The original manuscript journals of David Livingstone, including those kept during his last expedition, are preserved in a number of archives, with the principal collections held at the David Livingstone Birthplace Museum at Blantyre, the Royal Geographical Society in London, the National Library of Scotland, the Wellcome Trust, and various other repositories. A significant project initiated in the early twenty first century, the Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project, has used multispectral imaging technology to recover passages of his field diaries that had been written during periods when he had run out of ink and had been forced to write on the pages of old books using fruit juices and improvised pigments, much of which had become illegible to the naked eye. The recovered passages, which include important material on the Nyangwe massacre and on his relationships with his African companions, have substantially enriched the documentary record of his last years and have been published online for free scholarly access.

His extensive correspondence, which extends over more than three decades and includes letters to family members, to officials of the London Missionary Society and the British government, to fellow explorers and scientists, and to a wide range of public figures, has been the subject of major editorial projects. The Livingstone Online project, sponsored by a consortium of universities and archives, has produced a comprehensive digital edition of his correspondence and journals that includes high resolution images of the original documents, transcribed and annotated texts, and contextual essays. The resulting body of documentation has made it possible for modern scholars to construct a far more detailed and nuanced picture of Livingstone's life, his thought, and his relationships than was possible when the standard sources were the published Victorian biographies and the heavily edited collections of his writings.

The literary qualities of Livingstone's writings have been variously assessed. He was not a stylist in the conventional sense; his prose, particularly in the published volumes, frequently lapses into the pious commonplaces of Victorian missionary literature, and his descriptions of African landscapes and peoples are sometimes burdened by extended moral or theological reflection. At his best, however, particularly in the journals and in the more spontaneous letters, he is a vigorous, observant, and frequently moving writer, capable of vivid description of natural phenomena and of African life, of moral indignation against cruelty and injustice, and of personal reflection that reveals the inner experience of a man whose external life was extraordinary. His description of the Victoria Falls, his account of the Nyangwe massacre, his reflections on the death of his wife at Shupanga, and the final entries in his journal during his last weeks at the village of Chitambo, are among the most affecting passages of nineteenth century English prose, and they retain their power to move and to instruct readers more than a century and a half after they were written.

Livingstone and the Royal Geographical Society

The Royal Geographical Society of London, founded in 1830, was the principal institution through which David Livingstone's geographical work was received, evaluated, and disseminated to the European scientific community. The society had been founded at a period when the systematic mapping of the world's continents was a central project of European science and statecraft, and its successive presidents and councils had taken the lead in promoting expeditions of exploration to the unmapped regions of Africa, central Asia, and the polar regions. The society's relationship with Livingstone began with his first communications from southern Africa in the 1840s, was cemented by the award of the Gold Medal in 1855 for his discovery of Lake Ngami, and reached its peak with the financial and institutional support that the society provided for his last expedition of 1865 to 1873. The Society's president during much of this period, Sir Roderick Murchison, was a personal friend and supporter of Livingstone, and the institutional history of the Society in the third quarter of the nineteenth century cannot be separated from the publicity and prestige that the Livingstone expeditions brought to it.

The Society's role in publicizing Livingstone's work and in coordinating the various search expeditions that were dispatched during his long silence between 1869 and 1872 was substantial. Following the apparent disappearance of the explorer in the central African interior, the Society organized a series of communications with the British government and with foreign scientific societies aimed at determining his location and at providing the assistance necessary for his return. Henry Morton Stanley's expedition, although it was sponsored directly by the New York Herald and was not under the Society's official auspices, was nonetheless coordinated through informal channels that included Society members and supporters, and the news of the meeting at Ujiji on November 10, 1871, when it reached London in the summer of 1872, was received as a triumph not only for Stanley and for Livingstone but for the broader project of geographical exploration that the Society represented. The subsequent dispatch of the Livingstone East Coast Expedition under Verney Lovett Cameron in 1873, which was intended to bring Livingstone fresh supplies but which arrived in central Africa shortly after his death, was sponsored by the Society and represented the institutional commitment to the cause that Livingstone had embodied.

Following Livingstone's death and the return of his body to Britain in 1874, the Society took an active part in the public commemoration of his life and in the dissemination of his last journals. The Society's headquarters, then at Savile Row in London and later at its present location on Kensington Gore, became a center of Livingstone commemoration, with portraits, expedition equipment, and original manuscripts preserved among its collections. The Society's awards and lectureships have continued to commemorate Livingstone over the subsequent century and a half, and its archives remain among the most important repositories of documentation concerning his life and work. The Society's promotion of African exploration in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, including the expeditions of Stanley, Cameron, Joseph Thomson, Mary Kingsley, and many others, drew on the institutional momentum that the Livingstone connection had established, and although the broader colonial implications of that promotion have been the subject of substantial later critical revision, the role of the Society as the principal European institutional sponsor of African exploration in this period cannot be overstated.

The Scientific Geography of Central Africa

The contribution that David Livingstone made to the European scientific understanding of the geography of central Africa is best appreciated by recalling the state of that understanding at the time of his arrival in Africa in 1841. The standard maps of the African interior published in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, including those of the British geographer James Rennell, were characterized by vast blank spaces over which speculative river systems and mountain ranges were sketched on the basis of fragmentary classical references and the reports of coastal informants. The southern African interior beyond the Orange River was virtually unknown to European cartography, and the central African region between the Zambezi and the Congo basin was a complete blank. By the time of Livingstone's death in 1873, the basic outlines of the southern and central African watersheds had been established, the courses of the Zambezi, the Shire, and the upper Lualaba had been traced for substantial distances, the great lakes of the central African plateau, including Nyasa, Tanganyika, Mweru, and Bangweulu, had been identified and partially surveyed, and the existence of the great rift system extending from the Zambezi to the Nile had been securely established. Livingstone was not the sole author of this transformation, for the work of Burton, Speke, Grant, Baker, and others contributed substantially to it, but his journeys were responsible for a substantial portion of the new cartographic information, and his hydrological synthesis, although flawed in important respects, provided the framework within which the others were interpreted.

His specific geographical achievements may be enumerated. He was the first European to reach Lake Ngami, in 1849. He was the first European to cross the southern African subcontinent from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, in the journeys of 1853 to 1856. He was the first European to describe the Victoria Falls, in 1855, and to establish their geographical coordinates with reasonable accuracy. He led the European discovery of Lake Nyasa, now Lake Malawi, in 1859. He was the first European to reach Lake Bangweulu, in 1868. He contributed, alongside Stanley and others, to the European understanding of the upper Congo basin, although he himself misidentified the Lualaba as the upper Nile. He established, in cooperation with John Kirk, the basic biogeographical principles of the Zambezi region, and he was among the first European observers to provide systematic descriptions of the tsetse fly, the malarial mosquito, and the other arthropod vectors that play such a crucial role in the disease ecology of tropical Africa. The scientific specimens that he collected and sent back to Europe, including plant and animal samples that have been preserved in such institutions as the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the Natural History Museum in London, contributed to the systematic study of African flora and fauna that occupied much of the second half of the nineteenth century.

His mistakes are also worth recording, both for the sake of historical accuracy and as a reminder of the conditions under which he worked. His identification of the Lualaba as the upper Nile, which he held with increasing conviction during the last years of his life, was a serious geographical error that was corrected only by Stanley's expedition of 1874 to 1877. His estimate of the elevation of the central African plateau, although generally accurate in its broad outlines, contained specific errors. His descriptions of certain river systems, particularly in the more remote regions of the upper Zambezi and the upper Congo, were sometimes confused by the difficulty of distinguishing between the seasonal channels of large rivers and the permanent watercourses of their tributaries. His belief that the Zambezi was generally navigable, which proved so consequential for the failed Zambezi Expedition, was a particularly damaging error. All of these mistakes, however, were made under conditions of severe physical hardship, with inadequate instruments, and in regions where no European had previously traveled, and the proportion of his geographical observations that has subsequently been confirmed by more detailed survey is high.

African Companions and Collaborators

The African men and women who accompanied David Livingstone on his journeys, who served as his porters, interpreters, guides, and personal attendants, and who in the end carried his body across fifteen hundred miles of difficult country to deliver it to the coast for repatriation to Britain, are a group of historical figures whose contributions to the European exploration of Africa have only recently begun to receive the recognition they deserve. The conventional narrative of Victorian exploration, structured around the heroic figure of the lone European traveler, has tended to relegate these African collaborators to the status of nameless background figures, occasionally mentioned in the explorer's journals but rarely treated as historical actors in their own right. The reality, as more recent historical scholarship has insisted, was that the European explorations of central Africa were collaborative undertakings in which African knowledge, labor, and political relationships were absolutely essential, and in which the European leader was typically dependent for his survival and for the success of his mission on a network of African colleagues whose names, however imperfectly recorded, deserve to be remembered alongside his own.

Abdullah Susi, a freed slave originally from the Shupanga region of present day Mozambique, was Livingstone's chief assistant during the final years of his life and one of the two men who superintended the carriage of his body to the coast. He had first joined Livingstone's service during the Zambezi Expedition, where he was employed as a sawyer to prepare wood for the steamer Ma Robert, and he had developed during those years a personal loyalty to the explorer that endured through all the subsequent vicissitudes of the central African journeys. Susi was a Muslim, like many of the freedmen who served European expeditions in nineteenth century East Africa, but his religion did not interfere with his service to the Christian missionary, and the relationship between the two men was marked by mutual respect and by a degree of personal affection that is evident in Livingstone's journals. After the explorer's death, Susi was the senior of the two African leaders who organized the long march from Chitambo to Bagamoyo, and he subsequently traveled to England, where he gave personal evidence to the Royal Geographical Society and to other audiences concerning the circumstances of Livingstone's death and the conduct of the final expedition. He returned to East Africa, where he continued to be active in subsequent expeditions and missionary work, and his testimony, as recorded by Horace Waller and by other interlocutors, forms an important supplement to the documentary record of the last years.

James Chuma, like Susi, was a freed slave who had become attached to Livingstone's service during the Zambezi Expedition. He was originally a member of the Yao people, had been enslaved in his childhood, and had been freed by Bishop Mackenzie of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, after which he became closely associated with Livingstone. Chuma served as a porter, an interpreter, and a personal attendant during the final expedition, and his role in the march back to the coast was equal to that of Susi. He too traveled to England after the funeral, where his appearance with Susi at memorial gatherings made a powerful impression on Victorian observers and contributed to the public acknowledgment of African contributions to the exploration enterprise. Chuma returned to Africa and served on subsequent expeditions, including the Royal Geographical Society's expedition to the great lakes under Joseph Thomson in the late 1870s, before his death in the early 1880s. His career, like that of Susi, illustrates both the limits and the genuine possibilities of African engagement with the European exploration enterprise in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Jacob Wainwright, the third of the principal African members of the final expedition, was a younger man than either Susi or Chuma, a former slave who had been educated at the Anglican mission school at Nasik in India and who had joined Livingstone's expedition as a relatively literate and articulate Christian convert. He was the only one of the African members of the expedition who could write, and it was he who carved the simple inscription on the trunk of the mvula tree at Chitambo recording the death and burial of Livingstone's heart and viscera. Wainwright accompanied the body to Britain and was present at the funeral in Westminster Abbey, where he was photographed by contemporary illustrators and where his presence served as a tangible reminder to British observers of the African dimensions of the explorer's life and work. He subsequently returned to East Africa, where he served briefly as a missionary, although his career was complicated by the difficult position in which his European education and his African origin together placed him, and he died in the early 1890s.

Beyond these three principal figures, the African dimensions of Livingstone's exploration enterprise included a large and shifting cast of porters, guides, interpreters, and chiefs whose names appear with varying degrees of completeness in his journals and in the records of his various expeditions. The Kololo porters who accompanied him on the great transcontinental journey of 1853 to 1856, the Bakwena and Bakgatla peoples among whom he had worked during his early missionary years, the Yao and Bemba and Bisa peoples through whose territories he passed during his final expedition, all contributed to the geographical and ethnographic knowledge that he was able to accumulate and to the practical conditions under which his journeys could be undertaken. The relationship of these African collaborators to the Livingstone enterprise was, to be sure, one of considerable inequality, with the European explorer occupying a position of nominal authority and of access to resources that the African participants did not share, but it was also a relationship of genuine cooperation in which African knowledge of routes, of climates, of political relationships, and of natural history was essential to the European achievement.

Comparison with Contemporary Explorers

The career of David Livingstone is best appreciated in comparison with the careers of other major European explorers of Africa in the nineteenth century, against whose achievements and failures his own work can be measured. The most direct comparisons are with the four other figures who, with Livingstone, dominated the European exploration of east and central Africa in this period: Richard Francis Burton, John Hanning Speke, Samuel White Baker, and Henry Morton Stanley. Each of these men brought a distinctive temperament, a distinctive set of skills, and a distinctive ideological commitment to the work of African exploration, and the differences between them illuminate the broader character of t