DAVID LIVINGSTONE, MISSIONARY AND EXPLORER

David Livingstone was one of the most significant individuals who lived in the nineteenth century. An unpretentious Scottish missionary doctor, explorer, and abolitionist, he opened the door for Christianity in southern Africa. During his life he was attacked by a lion, hippopotami, slave traders, and even clashed with the Boers and the Portuguese, whose treatment of the Africans he came to detest. During his lifetime he became a hero in Britain and beyond. He gained a degree of respect, trust, appreciation and even affection with many African people. He was a man who overcame many deprivations and discouragements, and displayed the utmost measure of courage, self–control, faith, wisdom, and ingenuity. I encourage you to read Vance Christie’s biography of David Livingstone.

Livingstone initially went to Africa in 1841 as a missionary with the London Missionary Society (LMS). At that time the LMS mission station of Kuruman, located about 800 kms north of Port Elizabeth (On the tip off South African on the coast.) was the northernmost station of any missionary society in southern Africa. It is Southwest of Johannesburg today. Livingstone arrived in Africa with the desire and determination to carry the Gospel of salvation further inland and to establish a new mission station there. Livingstone explored much of the interior of Africa.

It was in Kuruman that David Married his wife, Mary Moffat. She died of malaria in 1862, aged 41, while accompanying her husband on a trip to the Zambezi. She is buried in Africa. David and Mary had six children: Robert, Agnes, Thomas, Elizabeth (who died in her infancy), William Oswell, and Anna Mary. For the most part, the children grew up without a father, as Livingstone was often away for months and years. This is stated in his diaries as one of his great regrets.

After arriving in Kuruman, Livingstone conducted several missionary journeys hundreds of kilometres to the north and northeast of Kuruman and planted a succession of three new mission stations 300 -500 kms north of it. He once stated that he was willing to go wherever the Lord would lead, provided it was forward.

From Livingstone’s earliest months in Africa, it was also clear that he had a natural affinity for travel and exploration, not as ends in themselves, but ultimately as means for taking God’s Word to previously unreached areas. While venturing for the first time from the coast to Kuruman (by ox-drawn wagon at a top speed of just 3 kms per hour), Livingstone wrote enthusiastically of the enjoyment and freedom of that mode of travel. During that same initial trek to Kuruman, Livingstone was already writing of his desire to take the Gospel to people at a large lake (later identified as Ngami in Botswana) which was reported to be several hundred kilometres beyond Kuruman and which had never before been reached by Europeans.

Throughout his entire career in Africa, Livingstone repeatedly endured extreme difficulties, deprivations, and dangers in carrying out his numerous journeys. Yet he was able to maintain a remarkably positive outlook on his many travels, and even derive a good degree of enjoyment from them, despite the fact they often proved to be so extremely trying.

After his first eight years in Africa, Livingstone began a series of exploratory journeys that led not only to his discovering Lake Ngami but also to his learning about and eventually visiting several sizable tribes that populated a large region containing many substantial rivers, far north of the Kalahari Desert and Ngami. Always before that, Europeans thought that the vast inland region was nothing more than an enormous unpopulated desert, like the Sahara Desert in northern Africa.

Over the course of seven years (1849-1856), Livingstone explored and was the first European to discover Lake Ngami and the northern reaches of the Zambesi River, including his most outstanding geographical discovery ever, the mighty Victoria Falls on the Zambesi. In addition, during the last two and a half of those years, he became the first European ever to carry out a transcontinental journey across Africa.

While such exploration and geographical discovery were very appealing to Livingstone, they were never his chief objectives. Rather, he was always motivated primarily by his desire to help bring the message of Christianity to formerly unreached people groups. One of his most oft-quoted statements was: “The end of the geographical feat is but the beginning of the missionary enterprise.” 

Livingstone’s discoveries provided Britain and other Western nations with a largely revamped understanding of the interior of southcentral Africa, including its: peoples and their customs; geography and geology; animal and plant life; climate and natural resources. His extraordinary accomplishments and discoveries brought him widespread acclaim throughout Britain and high honours from officials in the British Government and Britain’s Royal Geographical Society.

During the second half of his career, Livingstone served in the employ of the British Government (as Commander of the Zambesi Expedition, 1857-1864) and of the Royal Geographical Society (exploring the watersheds of southcentral Africa, 1865-1873). In those capacities, Livingstone continued to make many significant geographical discoveries and to add much more to Britain’s and the world’s understanding of various aspects of southcentral and southeastern Africa as already mentioned.

Even while serving with the British Government and the Royal Geographical Society, he always viewed himself first and foremost as a Christian missionary. Thus, while planning to head up the Zambesi Expedition, Livingstone declared: “I don’t mean to be a whit less a missionary than heretofore.” And when about to set out on his final explorations of the watersheds of southcentral Africa he wrote: “I mean to make this a Christian expedition, telling a little about Christ wherever we go. His love in coming down to save men will be our theme.”

Throughout the latter half of his career Livingstone continued to have as his chief motivation the opening of southern Africa to Christianity. Helping bring Christianity to Africa was one of the primary objectives which was repeatedly and publicly stated of the Zambesi Expedition and of Livingstone’s role in leading it. He believed he was pioneering the way into that portion of the continent, and other Christians would follow behind, spreading the spiritual light of God’s Word throughout that desperately dark region of the world. During his lifetime he heartily supported the initial attempts that were made by others along that line in the inland areas where he served.

David Livingston spear headed what was to become the phenomenal growth of Christianity in Africa, which continues to this day.

With four theatrical words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”—words journalist Henry Morton Stanley rehearsed in advance—David Livingstone became immortal. Stanley stayed with Livingstone for five months and then went off to England to write his bestseller, “How I Found Livingstone.” Livingstone, in the meantime, got lost again—in a swamp literally up to his neck. Within a year and a half, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer. I hope I can live serving,  and die praying as he did.