David Livingstone: The Man Who Walked Across Africa

Like Mary Slessor after him, David Livingstone grew up poor in Scotland and went to work in a cotton mill when he was only ten years old. He fixed a book open on the spinning machine and read as he worked, snatching learning between the roar of the wheels. Bit by bit, he taught himself enough to become a doctor.

David went to Africa to tell people about Jesus, but he soon found he could not sit still in one place. There was a whole vast continent that maps of his day left blank, full of peoples no outsider had ever met. So David walked. He walked thousands upon thousands of miles, across deserts and through forests, over mountains and along great rivers, further than almost any traveller had gone before.

But the more he walked, the more he saw a terrible thing. Everywhere he went, slave traders were stealing people from their homes — mothers, fathers, children — and marching them away in chains to be sold. David called the slave trade “the open sore of the world,” and he made it his life's work to help end it. He wrote and spoke and travelled to shame the powerful into stopping it.

David made deep friendships among the African people he lived and travelled with, and they loved him. He was often ill, and often alone, and far from home for years at a time. He died in Africa, on his knees beside his bed, as if he had fallen asleep praying.

Then his African friends did something wonderful. They did not want his body lost in the wilderness. So they carried him — by hand, taking turns — more than a thousand miles to the coast, a journey of many months, so that he could be sent home to be buried with honour. But first, because they knew how much he had loved their land, they buried his heart in the soil of Africa. And there it stayed.