The Story of David Livingstone
David Livingstone was born on 21 March 1813, in the mill town of Blantyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland. His father was a committed Protestant Sunday school teacher, who took a literal interpretation of the Bible. His father’s religious influence played a key role in influencing the young David, and he grew up with an aspiration to become a missionary himself.
From an early age, David was fascinated with geology, science and the natural world. Due to his father’s influence, he worried that science might conflict with religion. However, after reading Thomas Dick’s ‘Philosophy of a Future State’, David was able to reconcile religion with science. In 1836, he entered Anderson’s College in Glasgow to train as a medical missionary. Livingstone enthusiastically travelled to Africa where he strengthened his ideals of becoming a Christian missionary, searching for a greater scientific discovery, improved commerce and the abolition of slavery.
However, in Africa, he realised the difficulty of making converts to Christianity. During the 1840s he gained only one real convert to Christianity. He also narrowly survived death after being mauled by a lion. In 1845 he married Dr Robert Moffat’s eldest daughter, Mary. Although Mary had lived in Africa since she was four, she did not share her husbands interest in exploration. Although they had six children, David spent little time with his family, especially towards the end of his life.
His wife Mary came to suffer from alcoholism, and David admitted one regret he had was that he didn’t spend more time with his family. After this initial period, David Livingstone increasingly turned his attention to the exploration of the African continent which was largely unexplored by Westerners. Of particular note was his discovery (the first by a Westerner) of the great waterfall Mosi-oa-Tunya (“the smoke that thunders”) waterfall. Livingstone renamed it Victoria falls in honour of Queen Victoria.
In 1854–56 he made the first successful transcontinental journey across Africa from Luanda on the Atlantic to Quelimane on the Indian ocean. Livingstone had great success as an explorer partly because of his ability to get on with local tribal chiefs. He travelled lightly without soldiers, and this non-confrontational approach made it easier for him to be welcomed. He also had an ability to empathise with African locals and Livingstone was generally warmly remembered by native Africans — helping to improve relations between Britain and native Africans.
On these expeditions, he also toned down his Christian evangelism. He preached a Christian message but did not force tribal chiefs to accept it, like some of his contemporaries. However, although he had good qualities in endearing himself to locals, he was less praised by fellow members of his own expeditions. He was often criticised for his poor leadership and judgement — being subject to different moods and intolerant of criticism.
However, other members of Livingstone’s servants later expressed admiration for the steely determination of Livingstone in the face of difficulty and illness. At the end of the 1850s, he resigned from the London Missionary Society to devote more time to exploration. He received a commission from the Royal Geographic Society and this helped fund an exploration of the River Zambezi.
This exploration encountered many difficulties and was perceived to be a failure by many. In 1866, Livingstone returned to Africa for a mission to discover the source of the Nile. He never quite attained this goal but helped to fill in details about the Great Lakes of Lake Tanganyika and Lake Mweru. Livingstone also helped identify Lake Malawi and Lake Ngami. Unfortunately, on this expedition, he again lost helpers due to illness or desertion. He also had supplies stolen. This ironically required him to depend on the help of slave traders, which annoyed him.
After suffering a variety of tropical illness’ throughout his life, Livingstone died of dysentery on 1 May 1872, aged 59. He passed away knelt in prayer. His loyal local African attendants Chuma, Suza Mniasere and Vchopere were somewhat reluctant to give up Livingstone. In the end, they cut out his heart and buried it at a special memorial at the village of Ilala near the edge of the Bangweulu Swamps in Zambia. His body was then taken to the coast where it was put on a ship to England and buried in Westminster Abbey.
One year before his death, Livingstone was met by a correspondent from the New York Herald, Henry Morton Stanley. Livingstone had been lost in the heart of Africa for six years — his letters rarely getting through. It is said that Stanley famously found Livingstone in the town Ujiji on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 27th October 1871. He greeted Livingstone with the famous refrain: Dr Livingstone I Presume?
Slavery and the Congo
Tippu Tip, immaculately groomed, polite, speaker of perfect Arabic, and helpful to Europeans in distress, was also the most powerful of the Arab traders of slaves and ivory in east Africa during the last half of the 19th century. He and his minions — Arabs and Swahilis aided by thousands of central African men absorbed into the trade as slaves or freed slaves — stuck terror into the hearts of chiefs and villagers, compelling them to hand over tusks and slaves in exchange for their lives.
Villages that resisted saw their crops destroyed, granaries raided, dwellings burned, and inhabitants kidnapped, raped, and murdered. Whole villages disappeared, whole regions were depopulated.
On the map of trade routes below, Tippu Tip’s area is shown by the dotted lines in the Lake Tanganyika area. It covered the entire eastern half of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Most of the thousands upon thousands of slaves taken here were used to carry ivory to the coast and supplies back to the interior; they were not for export. Of every caravan, at least 20 percent died en route of hunger, disease, and exhaustion, a loss that required constant replenishment.
The numbers taken in this internal slave trade are not known, but this trade should be acknowledged in any total count for the Arab slave trade.
It has been suggested that the Arab slave trade created a whole new disruptive social system, “fragmenting society and leading toward the emergence of distinct cultural groups,” among them undisciplined, detribalized African men, neither slave nor free, who formed marauding private armies
David Livingstone spent his final years in Africa — 1866 to 1873 — searching for the source of the Nile, a quest that led him deep into Arab slave-and-ivory trading country, where Tippu Tip held sway. He set out believing that the Arab slavers were not as harsh as the Portuguese, whose depredations he had seen on previous journeys. He soon found out otherwise. The following quotations and are all from his last journals.
27th June, 1866. — To-day we came upon a man dead from starvation, as he was very thin. One of our men wandered and found a number of slaves with slave-sticks on, abandoned by their master from want of food; they were too weak to be able to speak or say where they had come from; some were quite young.
28th July, 1867. — Slavery is a great evil wherever I have seen it. A poor old woman and child are among the captives, the boy about three years old seems a mother’s pet. His feet are sore from walking in the sun. He was offered for two fathoms [a measure of cloth], and his mother for one fathom; he understood it all, and cried bitterly, clinging to his mother. She had, of course, no power to help him; they were separated at Karungu afterwards.
And soon this brief entry:
29th July, 1867. — Went 2½ hours west to village of Ponda, where a head Arab, called by the natives Tipo Tipo, lives; his name is Hamid bin Mahamed bin Juma Borajib.
Ill and destitute, Livingstone accepted help from this Tipo Tipo. The great slaver gave the great abolitionist supplies and guaranteed safe conduct on the next legs of his journey through a region seething with violence. The horrors of this trade exceeded all else he had so far seen in Africa. “To overdraw its evils,” he wrote, “is a simple impossibility. The sights I have seen, though common incidents of the traffic, are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from memory.” “Africa is bleeding from every pore,” wrote an Englishman making his way through this region shortly after Livingstone’s death.
In 1871, Livingstone witnessed a massacre carried out by rival slave traders and their men, some of whom he suspected belonged to his own party. It filled him with “intolerable loathing.”
July 15, 1871 . . . As I write I hear the loud wails on the left bank over those who are there slain . . . . Oh, let Thy kingdom come! No one will ever know the exact loss on this bright sultry summer morning, it gave me the impression of being in Hell.
The Arabs estimated the loss at between 400 & 500 souls.
Why would David Livingstone — missionary, explorer, ardent abolitionist to the end — accept help from Tippu Tip? At the beginning of his last journey, he wrote in his journal what every wilderness-lover knows: “The mere animal pleasure of traveling in a wild unexplored country is very great.” But by the time he encountered the famous slaver he was a already a sick man, virtually alone in Africa (except for a few porters and his faithful servants, Chuma and Simi), and most of his possessions, including his medicine chest, had been stolen. Simply put, he needed help and the Arab trader offered it.
After the massacre, a sick and deeply demoralized Livingstone returned to Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, where Henry Morton Stanley found him in 1871. When Stanley departed, Livingstone remained behind; he died in 1873 in a village on the shore of the lake. Chuma and Simi buried his heart there, carried his remains to Zanzibar, and accompanied the body back to London. In 1874, Livingstone was buried in Westminster Abbey. The plaque on his tomb bears a reminder of his life-long crusade against slavery — words he wrote on May 1, 1872, exactly one year before his death:
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.
In 1874, the English explorer Verney Lovett Cameron came upon Livingstone’s papers in Ujiji and sent them back to London. He also witnessed the horrific regional violence; he wrote in his diary,
“Africa is bleeding out her life-blood at every pore.”
In the 1770s and 1880s, the notorious slaver extended his power in central Africa, eventually claiming the entire eastern Congo for himself and the Sultan of Zanzibar. He also helped various English and German explorers find their way through the region; one of those was Henry Morton Stanley. Dr. Heinrich Brode, a German official who knew Tippu Tip in his later retirement and translated his autobiography from the Swahili (written in Arabic script), wrote
“. . . the paths traced out by his blood-stained hands have supplied the framework for all the subsequent cartography of German East Africa and the Congo Free State. Thus a life-work of destruction has served to aid the advance of civilization.”
Around 1890, realizing that the Belgians coming up the Congo River from the west and the European missionaries and Germans penetrating the interior from the east were gaining the upper hand politically, he returned to Zanzibar and wrote his autobiography. He died in 1905, a vastly wealthy man, having accumulated seven huge clove plantations on Zanzibar and some 10,000 slaves to work them.