Lonely Planet Curiosities and Splendour by Lonely Planet

Author:Lonely Planet
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788685146
Publisher: Lonely Planet
Published: 2019-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

DAVID LIVINGSTONE

INTRODUCTION

The missionary and explorer David Livingstone is best known for the encounter that took place at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika on 10 November 1871. Henry Morton Stanley was the New York Herald reporter charged with finding the great man of Africa, from whom nothing had been heard for the previous six years. ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ was, for contemporary readers, a thrilling moment. He first travelled to Africa in 1841, aged 28, to work as a missionary in South Africa and Botswana, then the British protectorate of Bechuanaland. Here he served under Richard Moffat, a cleric he met through the London Missionary Society (LMS), a multidenominational organisation dedicated to spreading the gospel throughout Britain’s colonies.

Livingstone’s account of that first expedition, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, published in 1857, made him an international celebrity (at 70,000 copies, it became one of the bestselling books of the 19th century), a de facto authority. The first meeting with Stanley paints Livingstone as a solitary figure, an anchorite bearing the lonely cross of righteousness. In fact, Livingstone was a married father of four, having wed Moffat’s daughter, Mary, in 1845. The family would join him in Africa on several occasions, at least until 1853, after which Livingstone deemed it unsafe.

It was in 1858 that he travelled to the region in and around the Zambezi River, and with which he was to become synonymous. (Two towns were named for him: Blantyre in Malawi, and Livingstone in Zambia, renamed Maramba in 2012.) Livingstone went not at the behest of the LMS, but in the service of the British government, as an official ambassador briefed with exploring the interior for the purposes of trade.

Livingstone’s lifelong obsession with charting Africa’s rivers betrayed wider motives. By making navigable the continent’s waterways, the great powers of Europe would, Livingstone believed, civilise the continent. And softening up the people through commerce, part of the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’, would in turn create thoroughfares for evangelising. (Livingstone found those local tribes indifferent to his preaching particularly frustrating.) While Livingstone’s expeditions can be read as the flexing of Christianity’s muscle at the height of the colonial era, he also believed they served a nobler aim: to eradicate the reprehensible human bondage of East Africa. ‘Slavery and the slave trade,’ Livingstone wrote, ‘are insuperable obstacles to any permanence inland.’ To him, slavery was the ‘great open sore on the world’.

It was during his years mapping the Zambezi that, in 1855, Livingstone became the first European to witness the river’s spectacular waterfalls, the Mosi oa Tunya (‘smoke that thunders’), and which he named in honour of Queen Victoria. ‘Scenes so lovely,’ Livingstone wrote of the now Victoria Falls, ‘must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.’ Though with little commercial benefit, the falls were to prove the highlight of the trip.

Nothing if not determined, Livingstone made his final trip to Africa in 1865. His employer on this occasion was the Royal Geographical Society, who tasked him with settling a long-running debate around the source of the great river Nile.

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