Collection: David Livingstone

David Livingstone was a Scottish-born missionary and Victorian explorer, whose ventures into Africa and the fame resulting therefrom was to have a considerable destabilising impact on the slave trade.

Livingstone’s fame as an explorer and his obsession with discovering the sources of the Nile river was founded on the belief that by solving that age-old mystery his fame would give him sufficient influence to end the African Arab-Swahili slave trade. “The Nile sources,'he told a friend, “are valuable only as a means of opening my mouth with power among men. It is this power which I hope to remedy an immense evil.'

He discovered Lake Ngami (1849), the Zambesi River (1851), The Victoria Falls of the Zambesi River (1855) and Lake Nyasa (1859).