David Livingstone
- Lived
- 1813–1873
- Era
- Modern
- Where
- Southern and central Africa
- Tradition
- Congregational
Exploration, and a campaign against the slave trade
A Scottish mill worker from the age of ten who studied medicine at night, went to southern Africa as a missionary, made almost no converts, and spent thirty years walking across the continent instead.
Why it matters
His importance is not the mission but the reporting: he documented the East African slave trade in detail no one could dismiss, and his account of it did much to bring about its suppression. He mapped enormous stretches of the interior. His record is genuinely double-edged — the publicity he generated for Africa fed directly into the European scramble to partition it, which is not what he was arguing for. He died in what is now Zambia; his African companions carried his body a thousand miles to the coast, having first buried his heart.
In the record
-
1792–1910 AD Migration
The modern missionary movement
Documented the East African slave trade in detail no one could dismiss
All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.