David Livingstone

Abstract

David Livingstone was a Scottish doctor, missionary and traveler. He was born in 1813 in tied accommodation at the Monteith, Bogle & Co. Cotton Mill in Blantyre Scotland. David was the second child of Neil and Agnes (née Hunter). He worked up to fourteen hours a day from the age of ten in the mill, and at age 19 he had saved enough money to attend Anderson College in Glasgow. He joined the London Missionary Society (LMS) in 1838 and gained his medical license in November 1840. Livingstone was intending to go to China but this was prevented due the Opium Wars (1839–1860). He went to South Africa in 1841, having heard the famous Scottish missionary Robert Moffat speak of the opportunities for missionaries there. His first eleven years in inland mission stations were centered around his association with Sechele, the leader of the Kwêna. In February 1844 Livingstone was bitten by a lion after an ill-judged attempt to disperse a pride who were harassing the animals of a village he was working in. While recuperating at the Moffat mission station, he fell in love with Robert’s daughter Mary. He married Mary in Kuruman, in the northern Cape province of South Africa, in 1845. They went on to have six children. In 1852, after a few years of traveling with them, Livingstone sent his family to Britain so he would be free to travel in earnest. From 1852 to 1856 Livingstone roamed the Zambezi with the support of Sekeletu, leader of the Kololo; during this trip Livingstone walked across the continent. In 1857 Livingstone resigned from the LMS and became British Consul to the African interior. The second Zambezi trip, known as the Zambezi Expedition, was primarily funded by the British government, and built on Livingstone’s understanding that if he could find a navigable route along the Zambezi this would facilitate trade, no such route is possible due to the Cabora Bassa rapids. Livingstone’s final journey was to identify the source of the Nile. He died in Chitambo, present-day Chipundu in Zambia, in April 1873. His body was taken to the coast by his associates and returned to Britain; his funeral was at Westminster Abbey in April 1874. Livingstone and his legacy were central to British ideas of imperialism, and it is from him that the concept of the three C’s of colonialism came: Christianity, commerce, and civilization, the purported answer to stopping the traffic in enslaved people.