Frederick Havill painted this portrait after Livingstone’s death, working from photographs. Livingstone’s daughter later said she remembered her father sitting for only two artists, and Havill was not one of them. The painting belongs to the National Portrait Gallery in London. Photograph by the author.
David Livingstone is buried among Britain’s greatest citizens in Westminster Abbey. Livingstone became famous as a Christian missionary and explorer, but the words carved around his grave ask the world to help heal “the open sore of the world,” the African slave trade.
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Christianity and the Slave Trade
Missionaries reached Africa long before Livingstone. Portuguese priests arrived in the Kingdom of Kongo in 1491, and its king was baptized that year. His son Afonso made Christianity Kongo’s official religion. The Portuguese also traded enslaved people, and some priests took part. In 1526, Afonso wrote to the king of Portugal, begging him to stop the traders who were emptying Kongo of its people.
The Abolitionists
By the late 1700s, a growing number of people in Britain wanted to abolish the slave trade. Quakers and other Christians were among the first abolitionists. Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved man, wrote a best-selling book about his life that turned many readers against slavery. Yet in those years, British ships carried more enslaved Africans across the Atlantic than those of any other nation.
Livingstone in Scotland
Livingstone was born in Scotland in 1813 to a poor family of seven that lived in a single room. At ten, he worked fourteen hours a day in a cotton mill. When Livingstone began medical school in Glasgow, he returned to the mill each summer to pay for his classes. He hoped to become a missionary in China, but the Opium War made that impossible. Within a few weeks in late 1840, Livingstone completed his medical studies, was ordained a minister, and sailed for Africa as a missionary.
Livingstone in Africa
Livingstone arrived in southern Africa in 1841. He learned the Tswana language and spent years traveling from village to village. Britain had outlawed the slave trade in 1807, but it still flourished across central and eastern Africa. He came to believe human trafficking would end only when Africans had something else to sell. If chiefs could sell cotton and ivory to Britain, they could earn money without selling people.
Exploring Africa
To make that commerce possible, Livingstone needed a river that boats could follow deep into Africa, so he began to explore. Between 1853 and 1856, the Africans he befriended guided him across the continent, and he drew maps of places Europeans had likely never seen. Livingstone never established the river trade route he sought, but his book about his adventures became a bestseller and made him famous.
In 1866, Livingstone set out on one last journey to search for the source of the Nile River. While searching in East Africa, he found that Arab and Swahili traders were buying thousands of people and marching them to the coast in chains. In 1871, at a market town called Nyangwe, Livingstone watched slave traders open fire on a crowd, killing hundreds of people.
The world saw images like this of the proud meeting of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone. In truth, Livingstone was so sick and thin that he called himself “a mere ruckle of bones.” Thieves had taken most of his supplies, and he had little food or medicine left.”
“Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?”
After three years with almost no word from Britain’s most famous missionary, the New York Herald sent a reporter, Henry Morton Stanley, to find him. In late 1871, Stanley found Livingstone sick and nearly out of supplies. Stanley is reported to have greeted him with the iconic words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Stanley urged him to come home, but Livingstone refused to leave Africa. Stanley carried Livingstone’s letters home instead, and the missionary’s account of the Nyangwe massacre horrified the British public.
Livingstone’s Heart Remained in Africa
When Livingstone died in 1873, his loyal attendants buried his heart under a tree and carried his body a thousand miles to the coast. Five weeks after his death, under pressure from Britain, the Sultan of Zanzibar closed the largest slave market in East Africa.
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