Christian History Magazine Collection

The man, the missionary, the explorer, the legend.

by Alvyn Austin from Christian History magazine no. 56

With four theatrical words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”, which Henry Morton Stanley rehearsed in advance, David Livingstone became immortal. Stanley stayed with Livingstone for five months and then went off to England to write his bestseller, How I Found Livingstone. Livingstone, in the meantime, got lost again—in a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer.

His African friends, former slaves he had freed, buried his heart under an mpundu tree 70 miles from the shore of Lake Bangweulu. Then they carried his body back to his own people, an 11-month journey through equatorial jungle and open seas.

All Britain wept. The whole civilized world wept. They gave him a 21-gun salute and a hero’s funeral among the saints in Westminster Abbey. BROUGHT BY FAITHFUL HAND OVER LAND AND SEA, his tombstone reads, DAVID LIVINGSTONE: MISSIONARY, TRAVELLER, PHILANTHROPIST. FOR THIRTY YEARS HIS LIFE WAS SPENT IN AN UNWEARIED EFFORT TO EVANGELIZE THE NATIVE RACES, TO EXPLORE THE UNDISCOVERED SECRETS AND ABOLISH THE SLAVE TRADE. He was Mother Teresa, Neil Armstrong, and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one.

In the century and a quarter since his death, no missionary/explorer has been more constructed, deconstructed, psychoanalyzed (“a congenital manic depressive,” says one scholar), and turned into a stained-glass saint. There are well over 100 books about him, and African cities bear his name.

He was such an important figure that the history of southern Africa can be divided into B.L. (Before Livingstone) and A.L. (After Livingstone). When he arrived in 1841, Africa was as exotic as outer space, called the “Dark Continent” and the “White Man’s Graveyard.” Although the Portuguese, Dutch, and English were pushing into the interior, African maps had blank unexplored areas—no roads, no countries, no landmarks.

Livingstone helped redraw the maps, exploring what are now a dozen countries, including South Africa, Rwanda, Angola, and the Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). He is the stuff of legend, indeed.

But what can we presume about Livingstone today?

Latin on the Run

Livingstone’s birth became the foundation of the legend: he was born on March 19, 1813, in the grimy industrial town of Blantyre, eight miles from Glasgow. His family (parents Neil and Agnes, two brothers, and two sisters) lived in a one-room tenement. The central figure of his childhood was grandfather Neil (senior), who entranced the boy with stories of the olden days. (He had been a tenant farmer who had been evicted from Ulva, an island off the west coast of Scotland. Starting in the 1700s, the Anglo-Scottish gentry deliberately depopulated the countryside by evicting a million Scots, replacing them with vast sheep farms.)

Key discovery. Livingstone was less impressed with many of his early discoveries than he was with this one: that central Africa contained a vast network of rivers, which could become a key to stopping the slave trade.

When David was a child, his father started his own business as a door-to-door tea salesman, so the room was constantly fragrant with the smell of tea.

At age 10, David went to work in the cotton mill, clambering under gigantic, steam-driven machines to fix broken threads. After 14 hours of labor that exhausted most children, Livingstone attended classes for another two hours. He was so entranced with books that he spent his first pay on a Latin grammar. He propped the book on a machine, and each time he passed it, he read a line or two. In this way, he managed to learn Latin and Greek, and plowed through Virgil, Horace, and a stack of theological tomes. His father, a Calvinist Congregationalist who distributed tracts as he sold tea, disapproved of “trashy novels” (a title he bestowed on any nonreligious literature) and science books. The only escapism David was allowed were travel books like Robinson Crusoe.

Though his father condemned science as ungodly, David’s life was changed by the writings of Thomas Dick, an eccentric Scottish theologian and amateur astronomer who proclaimed both science and religion revealed the complexities of God’s world. After reading one book, Livingstone later wrote, “Immediately I accepted salvation by Christ and vowed to devote my life to his service.”

Two years later, after reading an appeal from Karl Gtzlaff (see Hudson Taylor, issue 52 of Christian History, page 35) for medical missionaries to China, Livingstone seized the opportunity. Not only could he merge scientific study and Christian service, he could also appease his father, who would not let him become a doctor unless it was for a religious purpose. At age 23, with no formal education, he registered in Anderson’s College in Glasgow, where he studied medicine, theology, and science. A year later, he applied to the interdenominational London Missionary Society (LMS).

By then, however, the door to China was slammed shut by the Opium War, leaving Livingstone looking for a new mission frontier. Within six months, he met Robert Moffat, a veteran missionary of southern Africa, who enchanted him with tales of his remote station, glowing in the morning sun with “the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before.”