author
David Livingstone
1813–1873
Driven by faith, curiosity, and extraordinary endurance, this Scottish doctor and explorer became one of the best-known European travelers in nineteenth-century Africa. His journeys, writings, and outspoken opposition to the East African slave trade helped shape how Victorian readers saw the continent.
4 Audiobooks
About the author
Born in Blantyre, Scotland, in 1813, David Livingstone worked in a cotton mill as a boy while studying at night. He trained in medicine and joined the London Missionary Society, hoping to serve as a missionary in southern Africa.
Over the next three decades, he traveled widely through southern, central, and eastern Africa as a doctor, missionary, and explorer. He became especially famous in Britain and beyond for his long expeditions, his reports on African geography and peoples, and his role in bringing Victoria Falls to wider European attention.
Livingstone also wrote forcefully against the slave trade he witnessed in East Africa, which added to his reputation at home. He died in Africa in 1873, and his life soon took on an almost legendary status, though modern readers often view his legacy with both admiration and a more critical awareness of the colonial era in which he worked.