The Story of Dr. David Livingstonefrom “A Poet’s Progress,” Newtopia Magazine #17
Dr. David Livingstone
December 8, 2010, Illala Lodge, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
When Kerra, a native Zimbabwean, heard that some Americans were staying overnight in Victoria Falls, he asked if he could talk to us about his hero, the Great Liberator of Africa. I copied down as much of the story as I could, but Kerra talked very fast and I was only able to catch a portion of the story, and I suggest that you look elsewhere for the complete story of Dr. David Livingstone.
Historically, the tribes in Africa have fought amongst themselves for four reasons: to obtain goods, to obtain women, to obtain slaves, and because of the basic law of the jungle, which is that only the strong survives. The less competition there is for limited resources, the fewer people trying to live off the same piece of land, the better.
There is no written record of sub-Saharan African history before the arrival of the British. For the nomadic San—the only indigenous tribe in southern Africa—history only goes as far back as their grandfathers’ time because their great-grandfathers failed to pass the stories onto their children. San ceremonies include mythological elements that probably mirror some of the tribe’s historical record, but experts disagree about which ones and what they mean because the story itself is gone, so we will never know the extent of what’s been lost.
African Fetish
In San mythology, there is a god who is responsible for all creation, but he’s not responsible for much else. He’s not all powerful. Guardian angels, who are ancestral spirits that can intervene on your behalf with Fate and Destiny, are much more powerful than any San god, including the Creator of the Universe.
There was not much interest in gods for the San before the British. The San are nomads who follow nature—much like your Native Americans—so being able to read the weather was more important than trying to understand the mysterious motives of an invisible god. For the San, their most important gods were the Sun and the Rain, and their rituals were directed to them. They asked for sun, but not too much and not too little, and for rain, but not too much and not too little.
Typical African Village at the Time of Dr. David Livingstone’s Arrival
There is no word that the San use to describe the migratory life they live to differentiate it from the life of those in the trading settlements that have begun to appear beside their trails, but they do say that they live in “time” and the house dwellers do not.
For most Africans before the British arrived, Mother Earth was actually several goddesses, and they each had to be appeased for any of them to be happy. The first was the goddess as the sweet innocent, the child, the daughter. Then there was the bride with her hips like an open furnace, through whom the universe gives birth. Then there was the wise and bony crone, the bride after she’s known death. The greatest god of all for the San, however, was the cycle of birth and death, because all of Nature was subject to birth and death.
Dr. David Livingstone’s Travels in Africa
At the time that Doctor David Livingston arrived in Africa, most tribes had a triangular structure, with a single chief at the top, and then a collection of elders and advisers, and then the rest of the tribe. The average tribesperson was voiceless, even within their own families. Any and all decisions were made by consulting the elders and chief. But Doctor David Livingstone questioned this system. He painted a picture of a tribe where every individual’s voice could be heard. And he taught them about other human rights and respect for others, for we are all equal under God. And he told them that if they could learn to overcome their tribal structures, they could teach other tribes as well.
In Doctor David Livingstone’s later years he took on the slaving companies, and for that reason he is known by the Africans as the Great Liberator, the godfather of the emancipation of Africa, the prophet of the end of the long history of Africans exploiting and killing other Africans. Doctor David Livingstone died believing that the next generation of Africans would be transformed by Western ideas of freedom and democracy and tolerance and fundamental human rights, and that this would help them realize all of Africa was one country and one people. That future generation Doctor David Livingstone was talking about is my generation.
Dr. David Livingstone Was the First White Man in Many Parts of Africa
Doctor David Livingstone stepped into the most confused generation of Africans. We Africans say that the British and Portuguese conquest of Africa and colonialism had both pains and gains. It brought civilization to the jungle, but it was built on the theft of private land and the enslavement of natives, as well as legal injustices.
The missionaries who arrived with the first ships set up churches and hospitals, and fed and healed the natives, and on Sundays they taught a form of Christianity that was based on selected Christian teachings, such as “turn the other cheek,” and “the meek shall inherit the earth,” and “love thy neighbor,” and “trust in God’s will and a better life to come”—attitudes that made it easier for the Africans to be subdued and controlled. Within a generation of this, the Africans were a de-cultured, tradition less, unhistoried, emasculated, hopeless, landless people. What little they had—which had been enough to live on—was gone.
Dr. David Livingstone Searching for the Source of the Nile
In the mid-nineteenth century when Doctor David Livingstone arrived, Africa was still the dark continent for much of the outside world. His writings reported to England, and then Europe and the Americas, the real Africa he discovered as he traveled up the Zambezi River on the first of several government grants to find and map the source of the Nile. On the way he “discovered”—these were no surprises to the natives of course—and named Victoria Lake and Victoria Falls for his queen. The British dailies printed his reports with illustrations of magnificent landscapes and new species of birds and flora he discovered, and his encounters with lions and leopards and elephants and local tribesmen, some of them still cannibals. He lived with the tribes he came upon, often learning their language, asking about the meaning of their costumes and rituals, living their daily lives, and reporting to the world what he discovered.
David Livingstone’s Birth Home
David Livingstone was born in a family of nine living in a single room outside of Glasgow. The Livingston family was too poor and there were too many of them to afford rooms even in a Glasgow slum, but by the age of fourteen, David Livingstone had put himself through university, including medical school, to become a surgeon. In order to become a doctor of surgery, you had to master every subject in the curriculum—you had to be a master of physics and mathematics and Latin and the classics, as well as skilled in medicine, disease, anatomy, anesthesiology, and surgery. But upon graduation, Doctor David Livingstone never practiced medicine or surgery. Instead he left for Africa to join the missionary work of Robert Moffet.
Dr. David Livingstone Attacked by a Lion
On his first trip to Africa, Doctor David Livingstone was surprised by a lion. They raced and the lion won, biting deep into his shoulder. At the moment the lion bit into him, Doctor David Livingstone had a vision of how ridiculous it was that he had traveled 3000 miles in order to be eaten alive by the first lion he encountered. And he began to laugh, which so confused the lion that he ran off.
But the wound became infected and Doctor David Livingstone knew he had to get rid of the necrotic tissue before it festered, so he created maggot farms by leaving meat out in the sun, and he placed live maggots in his wound, and when they’d eaten away all of the dead tissue, he disinfected the wound with brine and brandy. This treatment went on for an entire year.
A Recuperating Dr. David Livingstone Transported by Natives
When Doctor David Livingstone was finally well enough to travel, he did not leave Africa. He did not want to return to England as one defeated by Africa. In his year-long recuperation it had become clear to him that one day he would die, today or fifty years from now, and he knew he had one chance to make the best use of this brief span of time by finding a cause he was willing to die for.
Dr. David Livingstone
In his short time in Africa he had already made many friends among the natives, and he learned fifteen of their languages, which is thought to be a record, certainly for a European. He saw that not being able to communicate with each other had turned Africa into a kind of Babel, but it was also clear to him that underneath their different languages they were all Africans. He became convinced Africa needed to find one unifying religion. As a Christian, he used the Bible to teach that all people were equal as the sons of God and that they had been instructed by Jesus to be their brother’s keeper. And Doctor David Livingstone knew where this message was needed most.
Whenever we think of the slave trade, we think of white merchants, but the African slave trade pre-dated the arrival of the Europeans, and even when the white merchants did arrive to trade, the only thing the Africans had to trade was slaves. England didn’t even allow slavery at the time—the boats had to travel to the Americas, and they’d return to England with sugar, gold, tobacco, and cotton.
Dr. David Livingstone at Lake Nyasa
Doctor David Livingstone decided to go to Lake Nyasa, where 20% of the African slave trade was conducted. But he was still in Africa on a royal commission to map the Zambezi River, so first he had to resign his commission. When he announced to the forty men who remained alive of the one hundred he’d arrived with a year before that he was going to Lake Nyasa to try to abolish the slave trade, they all decided to follow him to Lake Nyasa. When he arrived, he set up a hospital, and met with the clan leaders, and told them what he was there to do and why: he told them he was there to end the slave trade. What is ironic is that many times Doctor David Livingstone would have died if not for the slave traders’ help.
The first thing Doctor David Livingstone did was to raise funds through his missionary work as well as appealing for donations from the English and later the Americans too, and with those funds he bought slaves and freed them. Most of these freed slaves stayed with Doctor David Livingstone and his forty men, although he didn’t request that of them. He began to teach those who stayed what he knew of medicine and law and philosophy.
The Gravesite of Mary Moffatt Livingstone
As soon as Doctor David Livingstone decided that this was his life’s task, he sent for his wife to join him. Within two years she had died of malaria, but Doctor David Livingstone did not leave Africa even after the country had killed his wife.
The British public considered Doctor David Livingstone a national hero and a Christian saint, but the British government realized that he was no longer under their control, and with all of this attention on his work to end the slave trade and unify Africa with an eye toward home rule, the British were concerned for the Empire’s interests. For them, the less the world knew about what was going on in Africa, the better. The British government was certain that Doctor David Livingstone’s motivation was more political than social; that he himself wanted to be the ruler of this new, free Africa.
Dr. David Livingstone Teaching the Natives
First the government tempted Doctor David Livingstone with a knighthood and a private meeting and public appearance with the Queen herself. When he said he wasn’t interested in a knighthood or meeting the Queen, they told him he could do more good for Africa in England than dying there. His wife was already dead and most of his men. The locals could continue his work without his physical presence. Why not write his memoirs, or raise money for his mission in London, where the money is? Or they could honor him with a lifetime Oxford appointment and no active responsibilities. He could do whatever he wanted, they made it clear, but he would have to promise not to speak publically or publish any writings on the subject of slavery or home rule for the Africans. Doctor David Livingstone wrote back that he would sacrifice his life by staying in Africa happily if it meant freeing more African slaves. Then the British government sent Doctor David Livingstone’s son Ronald to encourage his father to return to the United Kingdom. But Ronald had never forgiven his father for his mother’s death, and there was such conflict that Ronald soon fled Africa. In a curious twist, he went to the United States and enlisted in the Union Army and was killed in battle. So Doctor David Livingstone’s son died fighting to end slavery, but in a different way and on a different continent.
Dr. David Livingstone
In the days before the beginning of the American Civil War, there was a lot of pressure on Britain to find a solution to the Livingstone situation. To the people of England and Europe and the Americas Doctor David Livingstone was a folk hero. And the American government wanted the British to find a way to control the Livingstone situation before it disrupted the flow of cheap labor into the South.
So the British government ordered him to return to Britain and when he refused they cut off his food and medical supplies, as well as his communications with the outside world. But Doctor David Livingstone and his men continued their work freeing slaves in Nyasa until they ran out of supplies and had to be rescued themselves by some other missionaries.
Henry Stanley Arrives in Africa
There had been no word from Doctor David Livingstone in the four years following his being shut off by the British government, but the story wouldn’t die. Eventually the New York Herald sent reporter Henry Stanley to Africa to find him. By then most people assumed he was dead. When Stanley found Doctor David Livingstone at Lake Nyasa he is supposed to have said, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Stanley stayed with Doctor David Livingstone for two years and became his mouthpiece for the outside world.
Dr. Livingstone, I Presume
By this time, Doctor David Livingstone had physically adapted to Africa. He was almost 60 and had spent more than half of his life here. But even the natives were surprised how well he fought the malaria that would eventually kill him. Ninety percent of those infected with malaria die within 48 hours, even with quinine treatment, but he lingered for two weeks before he developed bleeding hemorrhoids and bled to death overnight.
Dr. David Livingstone’s Death
His native companions buried his heart under a tree in what is now Zambia and put a letter where the heart had been that said, “You can have his body, but his heart belongs to Africa!” Then they walked for over a year to cover the 1500 miles to the nearest port, with Doctor David Livingstone packed in salt in a coffin on their shoulders. This event inspired wonder wherever it was reported.
Dr. David Livingstone’s Journal
The last words in Doctor David Livingstone’s diary, entered on the day he died, were: “All I can add in my solitude is to help to heal the open sore of the world.”
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