David Livingstone
The Scottish missionary-explorer whose celebrated African journeys fired British imagination and helped open the continent to the imperial scramble that followed.
David Livingstone was the most famous Briton of his age not because he conquered anything but because he walked. Born in 1813 to a poor family in Blantyre, Scotland, he worked in a cotton mill from the age of ten, taught himself Latin and medicine, and sailed for southern Africa in 1841 as a missionary. Over the next three decades he crossed roughly a third of the continent on foot and by canoe, and by the time he died in 1873 he had made almost no converts to Christianity. His real influence was on the imagination of the country that sent him.
The interior on foot
Livingstone's obsession was the African interior, still a blank on European maps. Between 1852 and 1856 he crossed the continent coast to coast, tracing the Zambezi River, and in 1855 became the first European to see the vast waterfall the local Kololo called Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders.' He renamed it Victoria Falls, for his queen. His best-selling account, 'Missionary Travels,' turned him into a national hero and sold the British public a vision of Africa as a place to be opened.
That vision had a slogan: 'Christianity, commerce, and civilization.' Livingstone argued that legitimate trade and Christian missions, pushed into the interior, would strangle the East African slave trade he loathed. He had witnessed its horrors firsthand, documenting Arab-Swahili and Portuguese slaving caravans, and his account of the massacre he saw at Nyangwe in 1871 did more to move British opinion against slavery than any tract.
Lost and found
His later expeditions often failed. The government-backed Zambezi expedition of 1858 to 1864 was recalled after the river proved unnavigable. In 1866 he set out to find the source of the Nile and effectively vanished; for years no reliable word reached Europe. The New York Herald sent a young journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, to find him, and in November 1871, at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, Stanley reportedly greeted the one sick European in central Africa with a studied understatement: 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' The line, true or polished, became one of the most famous sentences of the century.
The door he opened
Livingstone died in 1873 in what is now Zambia, found kneeling by his cot. His African companions Chuma and Susi carried his body more than a thousand miles to the coast so it could be shipped home; he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Within a decade the sentiment he had stirred, part humanitarian, part commercial, part racial confidence, helped fuel the Scramble for Africa, in which European powers carved up almost the entire continent. Livingstone had preached commerce and Christianity as deliverance from the slave trade. What his fame actually opened was the map, and the powers that rushed through the door he left ajar came for conquest, not conversion.