Erik Visits an Non-American Grave, Part 1,984

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

Born in 1813 in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, Scotland, Livingstone was quite poor. His family worked in the textile mills and he started there too as a small child. These were 14 hour days, but somehow the kid got interested in the world around him. They were a serious family. His parents were deeply religious and his father worked sometimes as a minister and temperance advocate, plus sometimes he went full missionary. But his son was far more interested in nature than religion, which really bothered his father. Livingstone wouldn’t abandon religion, but as a teenager, he did abandon the Calvinism of his parents and become a congregationalist, with a great emphasis on the positive evangelicalism of the American minister Charles Grandison Finney that suggested that anyone could enjoy a relationship with the Holy Spirit and that most people would go to Heaven. That was heresy to the Calvinists.

Still, Livingstone spent most of his time in the cotton mills until he was well into his 20s. But he read a tract urging Christians to become not just missionaries in China, but educated missionaries, especially doctors, bringing modern medicine into backwards places. The idea that the Europe of the 1830s had some amazing medicine when it was still bleeding people was ridiculous, but this was the plan. Livingston was really into this and he started studying medicine in his off hours. The London Missionary Society accepted him on a tentative basis in 1838. He proved worthy and they helped him get the required formal education for their tasks, which included Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as the medicine and religious work.

By the late 1830s, the China plan was up in the air due to the tensions over the Opium War, when the British declared war on the nation in order to become a nation whose official policy was dealing drugs in order to control territories. So maybe that wasn’t a great time to send missionaries to China. So what about the West Indies? Well, it was kind of saturated out there. But Livingstone was restless. He asked the LMS, “what about Africa?” There were a few missionaries in South Africa. But that wasn’t good enough for Livingstone, who was a fanatic and wanted to be a missionary-explorer. So it was agreed that he would open new territory for the LMS in Bechuanaland, which is today Botswana.

Livingstone left England in 1840 and got to South Africa, slowly working his way north as he prepared for his mission. Of course there was no separating the religious project from the imperialist project, which Livingstone greatly believed in. These missionaries existed in no small part to bring more territory under British imperialist control. Hunting big game was also part of the fun. He was soon shooting a lion, when the lion attacked him and nearly ate him. He barely survived because one of his companions shot the lion before it was too late. Too bad really.

Unsurprisingly, many of the people Livingstone missionized to didn’t give a shit what he had to say and wanted him to go away. His mission in Botswana failed because he couldn’t get along with other missionaries who arrived there and also the Bakgatla didn’t listen to him. He tried another mission but abandoned it in 1847 because there were too many Boers nearby and because it was too close to civilization for his fetishized tastes of wild Africa. So to find the territory he wanted, he started accompanying British explorers deep into the African interior. He was on an expedition in 1849 that crossed the Kalahari Desert and got to Lake Ngami. In 1851, he reached Zanzibar on a different expedition.

These explorations are what really begin to drive Livingstone. He was obsessed with finding the source of the Nile River and he was equally obsessed with stopping the east African slave trade that naturalized slavery and brutality onto Muslims, conveniently sweeping under the rug what Europeans were up to, both with outright slavery until a couple of decades before and then through the deep exploitation of colonization at this very time. Let’s just say Livingstone wasn’t so concerned with what King Leopold was doing in the Congo. In all of this, Livingstone became the guiding light of British imperialism and the larger “scramble for Africa” among European powers in the second half of the 19th century.

Livingstone had a motto that he liked to use–a motto now emblazoned on a statue of him that presently resides at Victoria Falls–“Christianity, Commerce and Civilization.” In short, place 19th century British free market liberalism upon the savages. He wanted to control the Zambezi River has basically a Christian highway (and he very much meant Protestantism here) across much of Africa. He was also a tireless self-promoter. In 1856, he came back to England for awhile to promote himself, get a bunch of awards, raise funds, and provide a vision of British imperialism that many in that nation found appealing. The LMS was becoming dubious of him, and for good reason since they had at least some semblance of principle, but he didn’t need their support so much anymore. Instead, he convinced the Foreign Office to fund a huge expedition that that would see Livingstone’s Zambezi vision through.

The Zambezi Expedition was basically a huge failure–it was expensive, the ships ran aground, plenty of people died. This did not stop Livingstone. After more time in England in the aftermath, he returned to Africa in 1866 to continue his Nile source hunting, this time starting in Zanzibar. He spent years on the edges of anything the British knew and among other things, he witnessed a failed slave rebellion in which Arab slave traders massacred 400 Africans, which led him to stop his search for awhile. No one knew where he was. Finally, the New York Herald sent Henry Morgan Stanley to find him, leading to the classic “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” line when it happened in 1871. Or Stanley made it up. In any case, he tried to convince Livingstone to come home, but the imperialist refused, continuing in his almost completely futile mission to convert Africans to Christianity (he is known to have converted exactly 1 African to Christianity) and his desire to bring Africa under British control.

So, in 1873, Livingstone died of malaria and dysentery in what is today Zambia. He was 60 years old.

David Livingstone, or at least whatever was brought back from Africa, is in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

If you would like this series to visit some American imperialists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Sanford Dole is in Honolulu and Charles Conant is in Winchester, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.