Dr. Livingston, He Presumed Dan Jacobson American Scholar; Winter94, Vol.

63 Issue 1, p96, 6p
David Livingstone is without a doubt the most famous of all the medical missionaries who worked in south and central Africa during the nineteenth century. However, it was not because of his success either as a missionary or a medical man that he became one of the most celebrated of Victorians: a hero and an exemplary figure whose emaciated remains were brought back to Britain from Africa to lie in state before being interred in Westminster Abbey. It was his second career as an explorer, and as a writer and lecturer about his explorations, that turned him into a public phenomenon or legend. His appeal to those who knew nothing of Africa derived not only from the vast extent of the regions of the continent he mapped for the first time, but also from his habit of disappearing into those regions for years on end, before reappearing in equally dramatic fashion in one or another unexpected quarter of them. It was for the latter reason that his name was also to suffer the indignity of passing into the language in the form of an unintendedly comic catch phrase "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" For that he had to thank his fellow explorer, Henry Stanley, who had been paid to find him after the alarm raised by the most protracted of all his absences, and who greeted him in these terms when the two men finally met at Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, in 1871. Their meeting took place twenty years after Livingstone had abandoned his life as a missionary, and a full six years after he had once again vanished from the view of everyone other than his African guides and porters, the tribesmen he encountered, and the occasional Arab trader or slaver. All the journeys he undertook, once several ambitious, preliminary forays across the Kalahari Desert were behind him, were of prodigious length. No hardship and danger, either in prospect or reality, ever deterred him; nor did any obligation to wife, children, fellow missionaries, would-be traveling companions, or the sponsors of his later journeys. The photographs we have of him suggest something of his indomitablity and truculence-qualities we can infer as much from the setting of his head and neck on his shoulders as from his heavy black mustache, swarthy skin, and boulder-like features. The ten-year-old boy who in Blantyre, Scotland, had worked as a mill hand from six in the morning to eight at night, and had then studied Latin until the small hours, so that he might fulfill his ambition of one day becoming a doctor, was not to be overborne in later life by anyone or anything-other than his own irascibilities, suspicions, and depressions. (His proclivity for these was reinforced rather than relieved, on the whole, by his quasiCalvinistic faith.) Certainly he believed that on his journeys he was always doing God's work; he was helping to stamp out the slave trade and to bring in its place the blessings of what he called "Christianity and Commerce." But he was prepared to do the Lord's work only on his own terms; and he despised those who attempted to instruct him or to control his movements or failed to pursue to the letter the orders he erratically threw out at them. As a missionary he was in fact not just a failure but a cause of failure in others. In his seven years in and near what is now the Republic of Botswana, from 1844 to 1851, he succeeded in converting just one man, Sechele, the chief of the Kwena tribe, to the faith he preached. His enthusiastic advocacy of

harebrained schemes of his own devising later sent other brave missionaries and their wives and children to die of fever or thirst on the banks of the Chobe River, the sands of the Kalahari Desert, and the highlands of southern Malawi. Intolerant of opposition from any source, he was also extremely jealous of his own reputation, and systematically denied other European travelers any share of credit for the "discoveries" he claimed-the Victoria Falls being probably the most spectacular of these. Even the regard he increasingly felt for the Africans he lived and worked with, and the warmth of the affection he came to have for them, are to some extent vitiated by the fact that he was never in danger of having to think of them as his social or professional superiors. He could therefore afford his generosity to them. All that said, any reader of the biographies of which he is the subject, and above all any reader of Livingstone's books, private journals, letters, and papers, is bound to come away astonished by the physical power and intellectual energy of the man. That he was a great adventurer and seeker after knowledge, courageous to the point of obsession, and well beyond it, is evident enough. What is less well known is that he was also a remarkable writer, both in the more formal style of Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa (1857), and the later Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries (1865), and in his much more unguarded family letters and private journals. In my opinion, he is the finest writer of English prose ever to have dealt with southern African scenes and themes. For seven years, from one more or less chance-chosen spot or another, Livingstone looked out on the bleak, dusty, thorn-ridden landscapes of Botswana, or lumbered across them in his wagons, sometimes accompanied by his wife and infants, sometimes not. He quarreled fiercely with his fellow missionaries; preached unavailingly to the unconverted and never-to-be-converted; tried to teach their children to read and write; fathered five children of his own on his dejected wife Mary (and buried one of them); raised vegetables, did whatever gunsmithing (and, it seems, whatever gunrunning) he could for the locals; doctored them; studied their language; argued about the nature of the Almighty with the indispensable but constantly backsliding Sechele; and never ceased fretting over the best direction his future should take. No doubt those Botswanan years, with all their failures and frustrations, contributed more than he could ever have imagined to the fanatical resolve that was afterwards to carry him through the journeys that lay ahead-yet again across the Kalahari and relentlessly northwest to Luanda, on the Atlantic coast, and then eastwards across the breadth of the continent to arrive at the Indian Ocean; followed by a protracted and tormented series of forays up, down, and around the hitherto unmapped river and lake systems of Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, in a misguided search for (among other things) the sources of the Nile. He died in 1873, near Lake Bangweulu, in Zambia. His African bearers packed his body with salt and carried it back to Bagamoyo, near Zanzibar, on the east coast of the continent, where they delivered it to the British authorities. The journey took them over five months to make, and it cost the lives of ten more members of the party.