Introduction: The Saint, the Explorer, and the Record

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves.”

— 2 Corinthians 4:7, ASV

A Funeral in the Abbey

On 18 April 1874, David Livingstone was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey. The coffin had come from Southampton by special train. The Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister were among the mourners, the Queen had sent a wreath, and the congregation sang the Scottish paraphrase “O God of Bethel, by whose hand.” Among the eight pallbearers were Henry Morton Stanley, the journalist who had found him alive at Ujiji, old friends and companions of his travels, and a young African named Jacob Wainwright, who had carried his body from the middle of the continent to the coast.

The black marble slab over the grave still bears the inscription chosen for it. It begins, “Brought by faithful hands over land and sea,” and calls him “Missionary, Traveller, Philanthropist.” It says that for thirty years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelise the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and to abolish the desolating slave trade of Central Africa, and then presents, as among the last words he wrote, a sentence that has been quoted ever since: a prayer, written in his solitude, that Heaven’s blessing would come down on everyone, of whatever nation, who would help “to heal this open sore of the world.”

The funeral was the beginning of a legend. Within a decade there were popular lives of Livingstone for every age and taste. Missions were founded in his name in what are now Malawi and Zambia, and towns, schools, hospitals and a waterfall-side city carried it. For the Victorian public he became a kind of Protestant saint: the mill boy who rose by hard work and faith, the doctor who healed Africans and freed slaves, the lonely hero who died on his knees.

What the Legend Says

A legend is not the same as a lie. Much of what the Victorians believed about Livingstone was true. He did rise from a cotton mill. He did cross Africa. He did hate the slave trade with all his heart. He did die, by the account of the men who found him, kneeling beside his bed.

But the legend says more than the evidence. It makes him a successful missionary, when he made one known convert. It makes him a discoverer of lakes and rivers that African people had lived beside for centuries, and that Portuguese and Arab traders had sometimes visited before him. It makes him a selfless family man, when his wife and children suffered for his choices. It makes him a gentle leader, when many who served with him found him hard, suspicious and unforgiving. It even improves his words. The inscription in the Abbey presents the “open sore” sentence as among his last written words, when in fact he wrote it a year before he died. A saying carved on many memorials, “I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward,” is a tidied version of something he wrote in a letter. Another, “Fear God and work hard,” is often given as his motto, though its source is less certain than the many plaques suggest.

The verse at the head of this introduction is Paul’s description of the gospel and the people who carry it: a treasure in clay jars. Paul does not say that the jars are beautiful. He says they are breakable, and that this is the point, so that “the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves.” A legend polishes the jar until no one notices the treasure. This book tries to show the jar as it was, cracked and stubborn and brave, and to let the reader decide what treasure it carried.

The Books He Wrote

Livingstone is unusual among missionaries in how much of his own record survives. His first book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, published in November 1857, was a bestseller. It told the story of his first sixteen years in Africa and his journey across the continent. It is vivid, often funny, full of natural history, and frank about many things, including the failure of his mission among the Bakwena. It is also a book written by a man who had just resigned from his missionary society and needed the public’s support for his next venture, and it is silent about much that was painful.

His second, the Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (1865), written with his brother Charles, told the story of the government expedition of 1858 to 1864. It is a more defensive book. It says little about the quarrels that broke the expedition apart, and less than it might about how badly things went.

The third was not written as a book at all. The Last Journals of David Livingstone (1874) were edited from his notebooks and journals by Horace Waller, a former member of the Universities’ Mission who had become a close friend. Waller worked with Susi and Chuma, two of the men who had carried Livingstone’s body to the coast, to add an account of his last days. The journals are the most intimate record we have, but they passed through Waller’s hands. Modern scholars, using new imaging techniques on Livingstone’s faded field diaries, have shown that the published text sometimes smooths over what he first wrote, especially about the massacre at Nyangwe in 1871. Those discoveries are discussed in this book in their place.

The Witnesses Around Him

Two other early books are quoted here. W. G. Blaikie’s The Personal Life of David Livingstone (1880) was written with the family’s cooperation and printed many private letters and journal entries. Blaikie wanted to show the inner man, the man of prayer and family affection, and he did so, but he was protective. Henry Morton Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone (1872) is the only full eyewitness account of Livingstone in his last years by an outsider. Stanley admired him deeply and wrote well, but he was a journalist who made his fortune from the story, and his own diaries do not always agree with his book.

There are other witnesses, and they matter. Livingstone’s companions on the Zambezi expedition kept diaries and wrote letters that were not meant for publication. His wife’s family wrote to him and about him. African witnesses speak less often in the written record, but they are there: in Sechele’s own letters and statements, in the testimony of Susi, Chuma and the boy Majwara about his death, and in the diary that Jacob Wainwright kept on the journey to the coast. Where their voices survive, this book tries to listen to them.

The Historians

For more than a century after his death, Livingstone was written about mainly by admirers. In the later twentieth century, historians began to look again. They showed how his reputation had been made and used, how often his plans had failed, how hard he could be on those who worked with him, and how his call for “commerce and Christianity” was taken up by people with very different aims. Some went so far as to treat him as little more than a forerunner of empire. Others, especially historians of African Christianity, have restored a more complicated picture: a man whose campaign against the slave trade was sincere and costly, whose respect for many Africans was real, and whose example helped bring into being churches that Africans then made their own.

This book draws on that work for its facts, and it agrees with much of it. It also tells his life as a Christian biography, which means taking seriously something his critics often set aside: that Livingstone believed himself to be a servant of Christ, prayed, read his Bible, and judged himself by it. He could be wrong about what God wanted. He was rarely insincere about wanting it.

A Word About Words

Livingstone wrote in the language of his time. He used words for Africans that are offensive today, and he sometimes wrote about African customs with contempt. He also wrote, often and against the opinion of many of his countrymen, that Africans were in no way inferior to Europeans, and that the differences between peoples were the result of circumstances, not nature. Both things are true of him. This book uses the names African peoples use for themselves where it can, and gives his own words as he wrote them only where they are needed, with a note where the language needs one.

Place names are another difficulty. Livingstone wrote Zambesi, Loanda, Quilimane, Nyassa and Tette; modern maps have Zambezi, Luanda, Quelimane, Nyasa (or Lake Malawi) and Tete. This book uses the modern spellings, except inside quotations and book titles.

What This Book Is For

The purpose of telling Livingstone’s story honestly is not to bring him down. It is to see him clearly enough to learn from him. He has things to teach about perseverance, about the cost of a calling, about the slow work of God in places where nothing seems to happen, and about the ways in which good intentions can be borrowed by power. He also has things to warn us about: the danger of a vision that leaves no room for the people closest to us, and of a faith so sure of its direction that it stops listening. Paul’s clay jar is breakable. That is why the treasure in it is worth looking for.