David Livingstone
David Livingstone was a Scottish doctor, Congregationalist, pioneer Christian missionary with the London Missionary Society, and an explorer in Africa. Livingstone was married to Mary Moffat Livingstone, from the prominent 18th-century Moffat missionary family. Livingstone came to have a mythic status as a Protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of British commercial and colonial expansion. As a result, he became one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.
Livingstone's fame as an explorer and his obsession with learning the sources of the Nile was founded on the belief that if he could solve that age-old mystery, his fame would give him the influence to end the East African Arab–Swahili slave trade. "The Nile sources", he told a friend, "are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power which I hope to remedy an immense evil." His subsequent exploration of the central African watershed was the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of Africa. At the same time, his missionary travels, "disappearance" and eventual death in Africaand subsequent glorification as a posthumous national hero in 1874led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European "Scramble for Africa", during which almost all of Africa fell under European rule for decades.
Early life
David Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 in the mill town of Blantyre, Scotland, in a tenement building for the workers of a cotton factory on the banks of the River Clyde under the bridge crossing into Bothwell. He was the second of seven children born to Neil Livingstone and his wife Agnes Livingstone.David was employed at the age of ten in the cotton mill of Henry Monteith & Co. in Blantyre Works. He and his brother John worked 14-hour days as piecers, tying broken cotton threads on the spinning machines.
Neil Livingstone was a Sunday school teacher and teetotaller who handed out Christian tracts on his travels as a door-to-door tea salesman. He read books on theology, travel, and missionary enterprises extensively. This rubbed off on the young David, who became an avid reader, but he also loved scouring the countryside for animal, plant, and geological specimens in local limestone quarries. Neil feared that science books were undermining Christianity and attempted to force his son to read nothing but theology, but David's deep interest in nature and science led him to investigate the relationship between religion and science. In 1832, he read Philosophy of a Future State, written by Thomas Dick, and he found the rationale that he needed to reconcile faith and science and, apart from the Bible, this book was perhaps his greatest philosophical influence.
Other significant influences in his early life were Thomas Burke, a Blantyre evangelist, and David Hogg, his Sunday school teacher. At age fifteen, David left the Church of Scotland for a local Congregational church, influenced by preachers like Ralph Wardlaw, who denied predestinarian limitations on salvation. Influenced by revivalistic teachings in the United States, Livingstone entirely accepted the proposition put by Charles Finney, Professor of Theology at Oberlin College, Ohio, that "the Holy Spirit is open to all who ask it". For Livingstone, this meant a release from the fear of eternal damnation. Livingstone's reading of missionary Karl Gützlaff's Appeal to the Churches of Britain and America on behalf of China enabled him to persuade his father that medical study could advance religious ends.
Livingstone's experiences in H. Monteith's Blantyre cotton mill were also important from ages 10 to 26, first as a piecer and later as a spinner. This monotonous work was necessary to support his impoverished family, but it taught him persistence, endurance, and a natural empathy with all who labour, as expressed by lines that he used to hum from the egalitarian Robert Burns song: "When man to man, the world o'er/Shall brothers be for a' that".
Education
Livingstone attended Blantyre village school, along with the few other mill children with the endurance to do so despite their 14-hour workday. Having a family with a strong, continuing commitment to study reinforced his education.At the age of 21, he was excited by a pamphlet his father got from the church setting out Gützlaff's call for missionaries to China, with the new concept that missionaries should be trained as medical doctors. His father was persuaded and, like many other students in Scotland, Livingstone was to support himself, with the agreement of the mill management, by working at his old job from Easter to October, outwith term time. He joined Anderson's University, Glasgow, in 1836, studying medicine and chemistry, as well as attending theology lectures by the anti-slavery campaigner Richard Wardlaw at the Congregational Church College, where he may also have studied Greek.
To enter medical school, he needed some knowledge of Latin, and was tutored by a local Roman Catholic man, Daniel Gallagher. Livingstone worked hard, got a good grounding in science and medicine, and made lifelong friends including Andrew Buchanan and James Young.
The London Missionary Society was at the time the major organisation in the country for missionary work, and unlike others was open to Congregationalists. He applied to the LMS in October 1837, and in January was sent questions which he answered. He got no reply until he was invited to two interviews in August 1838. He was then accepted as a probationary candidate, and given initial training at Ongar, Essex, as the introduction to studies to become a minister within the Congregational Union serving under the LMS, rather than the more basic course for an artisan missionary. At Ongar, he and six other students had tuition in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and theology from the Reverend Richard Cecil, who in January 1839 assessed that, despite "heaviness of manner" and "rusticity", Livingstone had "sense and quiet vigour", good temper and substantial character "so I do not like the thought of him being rejected." A month later, he still thought Livingstone "hardly ready" to go on to theological studies at Cheshunt College, and "worthy but remote from brilliant". In June 1839 the LMS directors accepted Livingstone, and agreed to his request to continue studying with Cecil at Ongar until the end of the year, then have LMS support for medical studies in London.
To gain necessary clinical training he continued his medical studies at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, with his courses covering medical practice, midwifery, and botany.
He qualified as a licentiate of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow on 16 November 1840. On 20 November 1840 Livingstone was ordained a minister of the church, as was another missionary to South Africa, William Ross, in a service at the Albion Chapel, Finsbury. The ordination service was conducted by Cecil and J. J. Freeman.
Vision for Africa
Though Livingstone had responded to Gützlaff's call for missionaries to China, the looming First Opium War made the LMS directors cautious about sending recruits there. When he asked to extend his probationary training at Ongar, Cecil told him of their wish that he should be employed in the West Indies "in preference to South Africa". On 2 July 1839 he wrote to the LMS directors that the West Indies was by then well served by doctors, and he had always been attracted to other parts of the world rather than a settled pastorate. With LMS agreement, he continued to get theological tuition from Cecil until the end of the year, then resumed medical studies.On beginning his clinical training in January 1840, he returned to Mrs. Sewell's missionary boarding house in Aldersgate, where he had stayed previously when in London.
Others staying there were visited occasionally by the missionary Robert Moffat, who was then in England with his family to publicise the work of his LMS mission at Kuruman in South Africa. Livingstone questioned him repeatedly about Africa, and as Moffat later recalled; "By and by he asked me whether I thought he would do for Africa. I said I believed he would, if he would not go to an old station, but would advance to unoccupied ground, specifying the vast plain to the north, where I had sometimes seen, in the morning sun, the smoke of a thousand villages, where no missionary had ever been."
He was excited by Moffat's vision of expanding missionary work to the north of Bechuanaland, and by the hotly debated topic of Christianity and commerce. The LMS missionary John Philip, after discussion with the abolitionist Fowell Buxton, published Researches in South Africa in 1828, proposing that Christianity would always bring "civilisation" including free trade and free labour. This argument was reinforced for Livingstone when he attended the Exeter Hall meeting of 1 June 1840 where Buxton powerfully made the case that the African slave trade would be ended if chiefs, instead of having to sell slaves, could obtain desired European goods through "legitimate trade", its effect augmented by Christian missions preaching the gospel and introducing school education.
Mission stations
Livingstone left London on 17 November 1840, passenger on a sailing brig bound for the Cape of Good Hope, along with two other LMS missionaries: Ross, who had been ordained at the same service as him, and Ross's wife. During the long voyage he studied Dutch and the Tswana language, and the captain gave him extensive tuition in navigation. At Rio de Janeiro, unlike the other two, he ventured ashore and was impressed by the cathedral and scenery, but not by the drunkenness of British and American sailors, so he gave them tracts in a dockside bar.On 15 March 1841 the ship arrived at Simon's Bay, and for a month while it unloaded and loaded, the three stayed at Cape Town with Mr and Mrs Philip. As resident director of the LMS, Philip had continued their policy that all people were equal before God and in law, leading to disputes with Boers, and with British settlers as Philip held that Xhosa people were not to blame for the Xhosa Wars over extending the Cape Colony. Missionary factions disagreed over this, and over his emphasis on missionary work among Griqua people of the colony, while others like Moffatt wanted more focus on new areas. There were also tensions between artisan missionaries engaged for lay expertise, and ordained missionaries.
The ship took Livingstone and the Rosses on to Algoa Bay, from 19 May to 31 July they were on the long trek by ox-cart to the Kuruman Mission. The Moffats had not yet returned from Britain, and he immersed himself in Tswana life. From September to late December he trekked with the artisan missionary Roger Edwards, who had been at Kuruman since 1830 and had been told by Moffat to investigate potential for a new station. They visited and discussed the area called Mabotsa, Botswana, near Zeerust, North West Province, South Africa.
In 1842 Livingstone went on two treks with African companions; the principals were mission members Paul and Mebalwe, a deacon. In June 1843, Edwards got LMS approval to set up a mission station with his wife at Mabotsa. Livingstone moved there by agreement, and joined them in the physical work of building facilities. He wrote to tell LMS secretary Arthur Tidman, saying he would be delighted to call Mabotsa "the centre of the sphere of my labours", but would try to hold himself "in readiness to go anywhere, provided it be forward".
The Moffats, accompanied by two new missionary families, reached the Vaal River in January 1844. Livingstone rode out to meet them there, and then sat in the Moffats' ox-cart talking with Robert for hours during the seventeen or eighteen days it took to get home to Kuruman. For the first time, he met their daughter Mary, who had been born and brought up in Africa.
Lions often attacked the herds of the Mabotsa villagers, and on 16 February, Mebalwe and Livingstone joined them defending sheep. Livingstone got a clear shot at a large lion, but while he was re-loading it attacked, crushing his left arm, and forced him to the ground. His life was saved by Mebalwe diverting its attention by trying to shoot the lion. He too got bitten. A man who tried spearing it was attacked just before it dropped dead.
Livingstone's broken bone, even though inexpertly set by himself and Edwards, bonded strongly. He went for recuperation to Kuruman, where he was tended by Moffat's daughter Mary, and they became engaged. His arm healed, enabling him to shoot and lift heavy weights, though it remained a source of much suffering for the rest of his life, and he was not able to lift the arm higher than his shoulder.
Livingstone and Mary were married on 9 January 1845.
Livingstone was obliged to leave his first mission at Mabotsa in Botswana in 1845 after irreconcilable differences emerged between him and his fellow missionary, Rogers Edwards, and because the Bakgatla were proving indifferent to the Gospel. He abandoned Chonuane, his next mission, in 1847 because of drought and the proximity of the Boers and his desire "to move on to the regions beyond". At Kolobeng Mission Livingstone converted Chief Sechele in 1849 after two years of patient persuasion. Only a few months later Sechele lapsed.