David Livingstone

Life

Livingstone was born on March 19, 1813, into a poor family in Blantyre, Scotland. His family was devout, and his father was a member of a Congregational church. From about the age of ten he worked in a cotton mill while attending night school. In 1834, after hearing an appeal for medical missionaries to be sent to China, he resolved to become a medical missionary, and he went on to study medicine and theology in Glasgow. When the Opium War made it impossible for him to go to China, he decided, under the influence of Robert Moffat, a missionary to Africa, to go to southern Africa instead. He set out as a missionary of the London Missionary Society and arrived in Cape Town in March 1841. In 1845 he married Moffat's daughter Mary, with whom he had six children; Mary died in 1862.

After leaving the London Missionary Society in 1857, he continued his explorations with the support of the British government. He set out on his final journey in 1866; this journey is also famous for the episode in which the explorer Henry Morton Stanley found him. He died of dysentery on May 1, 1873, in the village of Chitambo in present-day Zambia. His African companions, including Susi and Chuma, buried his heart beneath a tree there and carried his embalmed body to the coast. His remains were sent to Britain and interred in Westminster Abbey in London on April 18, 1874.

Ministry and Achievements

• Mission and medicine: For roughly his first ten years, he worked at mission stations, treating the sick and preaching the gospel. He also learned the languages and customs of African peoples.
• Exploration: He made Lake Ngami (1849), the Zambezi River (1851), and Victoria Falls (1855) known to Europe. He is regarded as the first European to cross the African continent. The travel narrative he published after returning to Britain attracted great interest among English-speaking readers.
• Missionary vision: As converts remained few and efforts to establish mission stations repeatedly met with difficulty, he came to regard exploring the African interior and opening routes into it as his calling. He argued that Christianity, commerce, and civilization had to advance together in order to end the slave trade.
• Opposition to the slave trade: He is credited with helping to bring about the prohibition of the slave trade by widely publicizing the realities of the African slave traffic. In this respect his work is connected with the broader abolitionist movement.

Assessment

Livingstone was revered as a hero in the Britain of his day, so much so that he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His tombstone describes him as a missionary, traveler, and philanthropist. Many assessments honor him as a missionary who respected Africans and labored to abolish the slave trade.

On the other hand, some critics contend that the information gained from his explorations was used by the European powers in their incursions into Africa and that he consequently served as a forerunner of colonization. Others point out that his vision of binding Christianity together with commerce and civilization was closely tied to colonialism and that he viewed Africans as people in need of enlightenment. The fact that he personally won very few converts as a missionary is also frequently noted. His defenders, by contrast, emphasize that he sought to end the slave trade and genuinely cared for Africa.