David Livingstone (For Teens)

A Scottish mill boy, born in 1813 at Blantyre, who became a doctor and went to southern Africa for the London Missionary Society in 1841. He worked among the Batswana, crossed Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean between 1853 and 1856, led a failed government expedition on the Zambezi, and spent his last years searching for the source of the Nile and exposing the East African slave trade. He died at Chitambo’s village, in what is now Zambia, in 1873.

Yes. It names his one known convert, the river plan that failed at Kebrabasa, his quarrels and unfairness to colleagues, the years his wife Mary spent alone in Britain, her death on the Zambezi, his son Robert’s death in an American prison camp, the slave traders he depended on, and the way his name was later used to justify colonial rule.

In a speech at Cambridge in 1857 he said that serving God in Africa was “emphatically no sacrifice” but a privilege, a small part of a great debt owed to God. The book honours that, and also points out that much of the cost of his calling was paid by others, especially his wife and children.

Sechele, chief of the Bakwena, is the only African he is known to have baptised, in 1848, and Livingstone suspended him a few months later. But Sechele kept his faith and led his people in it for the rest of his life, and the missions founded after Livingstone’s death in the lands he explored grew into large African-led churches.

He learned Setswana by living among the Bakwena, wrote that Africans were in no way inferior to Europeans, and kept his promise to bring twenty-seven men home from Luanda. But he saw little good in African religion and customs, used the prejudiced language of his time, and gave too little credit to the Africans, like Mebalwe, Sechele, Susi and Chuma, who saved and shaped his life.

From the full-length biography of David Livingstone, which draws on his own books and journals, his first biographer’s printing of his letters, and Stanley’s account, checked against modern historians. Uncertain stories, like Stanley’s famous greeting and the exact date of his death, are marked as uncertain. A separate edition for younger children tells the same story more simply.

That God can use a poor, hard-working kid who is bad at public speaking; that keeping your word matters even when it costs you; that your choices have a cost for the people closest to you; and that faithfulness can bear fruit long after you are gone.

His African companions, led by Susi and Chuma, with Jacob Wainwright, Matthew Wellington, Carus Farrar, Majwara, Halima, Farijala and many others. They buried his heart under a tree at Chitambo’s village and carried his body about a thousand miles to the coast. Only Jacob Wainwright went to England for the funeral.