Reflections on Highway Scholar’s Southern Africa Birding Safari, 19 Jan – 2 Feb 2024

18 February 2024

This statue of Scottish explorer Dr. David Livingstone stands in Zimbabwe on the western finish of Victoria Falls. After African independence, European monuments have been eliminated and European cities renamed however Livingstone’s statue nonetheless stands, the falls nonetheless bear the title he gave them⁽²⁾, and the closest city throughout the river is Livingstone, Zambia.

Twenty years in the past, two makes an attempt have been made to take away Livingstone’s statue however “resistance to the removals from the local people has ensured that Livingstone’s statue stays the place it was first erected, gazing sternly out in the direction of Satan’s Cataract.⁽¹⁾”

Our Zimbabwean information pointed to a phrase carved on the monument that’s key to Livingstone’s legacy in Africa.

Liberator.

In America we consider Livingstone as an incredible explorer however in Africa it’s his unending combat to finish the slave commerce that holds him in African hearts. Livingstone went to Africa as a Christian missionary physician and fell in love with exploring, finally mapping three lengthy journeys in southern and jap Africa overlaying 40,000 miles⁽²⁾.

Throughout his second expedition to the Zambezi River (1858-1864) he witnessed the horrors of the East African Arab-Swahili slave commerce and vowed to finish it. Males, girls and kids have been captured within the inside and marched to buying and selling posts on the Indian Ocean coast, considered one of which was Zanzibar a British colony dominated by Arabs.

Livingstone reasoned that if he grew to become well-known for locating the supply of the Nile he may affect the British authorities to finish the slave commerce so he returned to Africa in 1866 to perform each objectives.

5 years later, within the absence of stories, Livingstone was presumed lifeless or misplaced. As an alternative he was nonetheless exploring, very weak and sick with malaria and with out quinine to deal with it as a result of somebody stole his medical equipment. In the meantime he wrote letters to Britain describing the slave commerce however the slavers have been the one ones accessible to hold his letters to the coast. Realizing that Livingstone was towards slavery, they delivered solely considered one of his 40 letters.

Livingstone’s disappearance was such an incredible thriller that the New York Herald despatched journalist Henry Morton Stanley to Africa the place he caught up with Livingstone at Ujiji in October 1871 and mentioned, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

Livingstone didn’t wish to depart Africa so Stanley took Livingstone’s dispatches to Britain the place they uncovered the appalling massacres and cruelty of the slave commerce.

British response was swift however Livingstone didn’t reside to see it. “One month after his loss of life on 1 Might 1873, Nice Britain signed a treaty with Sultan Barghash of Zanzibar, halting the slave commerce in that realm. The notorious slave market of Zanzibar was closed eternally.⁽²⁾“

Greater than any of his contemporaries, Livingstone succeeded in seeing Africa by way of African eyes.

— Princeton College Library: David Livingstone, 1813-1873

p.s. Within the U.S. most of us don’t notice that the West African slave commerce that our nation participated in was not the one supply of slaves. Britain outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave commerce in 1807 but it surely continued elsewhere. As an example, Mauritania in West Africa didn’t impose penalties on its native slave commerce till 2007. At present slavery persists in a number of locations in Africa. Examine it right here.

(credit are within the captions) Footnotes on sources.

1. Data on Dr. David Livingstone’s Statue, Siyabona Africa web site.
2. Abstract of Livingstone’s life, Princeton College Library.
   • (*) “Victoria Falls was the one web site in Africa that Livingstone named with English phrases.”