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David Livingstone biography

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Quick Facts

  • NAME: David Livingstone
  • OCCUPATION: Explorer, Missionary
  • BIRTH DATE: March 19, 1813
  • DEATH DATE: May 01, 1873
  • EDUCATION: London Missionary Society
  • PLACE OF BIRTH: Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, Scotland
  • PLACE OF DEATH: Chief Chitambo's Village (formerly North Rhodesia), Zambia

Best Known For

David Livingstone was a Scottish missionary, abolitionist and physician known for his explorations of Africa, having crossed the continent during the mid-19th century.

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With the explorer thought to be lost, a transatlantic venture was developed by the London Daily Telegraph and New York Herald, and journalist Henry Stanley was sent to Africa to find Livingstone. Stanley located the physician in Ujiji in late 1871, and upon seeing him, uttered the now-well-known words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Livingstone chose to stay, and he and Stanley parted ways in 1872. Livingstone died from dysentery and malaria on May 1, 1873, at the age of 60,

in Chief Chitambo's Village, near Lake Bangweulu, North Rhodesia (now Zambia). His body was eventually transported to and buried at Westminster Abbey.

Legacy and Related Scholarship

Livingstone has been positioned as a staunch abolitionist who believed in the dignity of Africans, the viability of commercial enterprises for the continent and the imposition of Christianity, despite indigenous spiritual beliefs. His findings contained hitherto unknown details about the continent that led to European nations seizing African land in imperialistic zeal, which some speculate Livingstone would have opposed.

A copy of Livingstone's 1871 diary entries can be found at the website of the David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project, which chronicles his time in Nyangwe and sheds light on his place as a complex historical figure.

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