David Livingstone

We follow in the footsteps of the Scottish missionary, explorer and all-round Victorian hero, who fought to end the slave trade

- Lawrence Alexander

There aren’t many ten-year-olds working in a cotton mill who would spend their first week’s wages on a Latin grammar. David Livingstone, however, toiling on the factory floor, dreamed of bigger things: becoming a medical missionary in China.

Born 19 March 1813, one of seven children living with desperately poor Calvinist parents in a single room in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, Scotland (now the David Livingstone Centre), Livingstone continued working at the mill while studying medicine and theology.

The first of Britain’s ‘Opium Wars’ barred his way to China so, after being ordained as a missionary, he arrived in Cape Town in 1841. Horrified at the treatment of African people by the Boers and Portuguese he became a vocal advocate of the antislavery movement.