Qualla: David Livingstone

David Livingstone: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. When David Livingstone died on the morning of 1 May 1873, he was found kneeling at his cot in the village of Chitambo, in what is now Zambia. He had been praying. He was sixty years old, dysenteric and malarial, broken by years of overland travel through central Africa in search of the source of the Nile. What happened next is one of the strangest acts of devotion in the history of exploration. His two African servants - Chuma and Susi, both former enslaved people he had helped free - decided that the only proper thing to do was to take his body home. They removed and buried his heart under a mpundu tree in the village. They dried his body in the African sun, wrapped it in calico and bark, and then carried it more than 1,500 miles overland to the coast at Bagamoyo - a nine-month journey through hostile country - so that the man could be buried in his native Britain. He is interred today in Westminster Abbey, in the nave, beneath a slab of black marble inscribed with his last written words.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

David Livingstone: From the Mill to the Mission Field

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. David Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 in a one-room flat at the top of a tenement called Shuttle Row, in the cotton-mill village of Blantyre on the River Clyde in South Lanarkshire, Scotland. The family was poor. His father Neil was a Sunday school teacher and door-to-door ...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

David Livingstone: The African Years

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Soccerman321, CC BY 3.0. Livingstone spent more than three decades in Africa. He married Mary Moffat, daughter of the Scottish missionary Robert Moffat, at the Kuruman mission station in 1845; their five children mostly grew up on the move and Mary herself died of malaria on the Zambezi in 1862. He cross...

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Image: Soccerman321 | CC BY 3.0

David Livingstone: The Complicated Legacy

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vincent van Zeijst, CC BY-SA 3.0. Livingstone was also, knowingly or not, a herald of empire. His mantra of "Christianity, Commerce, and Civilisation" became the manifesto of the late-Victorian missionary movement and was used to justify the European Scramble for Africa that followed his death. The missions he ad...

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Image: Vincent van Zeijst | CC BY-SA 3.0

David Livingstone: Buried Twice

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit National Archives of Malawi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Henry Morton Stanley's famous 1871 greeting at Ujiji - "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" - made Livingstone perhaps the most famous Briton of his day, the lost explorer found by a young American newspaperman. By the time of his death two years later, he was a national figure. When Chu...

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Image: National Archives of Malawi | CC BY-SA 4.0