Near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe stands a monument depicting a man warmly dressed for the area. The dignified Briton in full ammunition is called David Livingston. The monument was delivered according to merit: it was Livingstone who discovered South Africa for Europeans and painted white spots on its map.
“I will discover Africa or die,” declared Livingstone and achieved his goal. And his heart remained forever in Africa: Livingston was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, and his heart was interred near the African village of Chitambo.
David Livingston was born in 1813 in Blantyre near Glasgow to such a poor family that he was forced to work from the age of ten. From six in the morning until eight in the evening, young David worked at a paper mill.
Another would not think about anything but sleep, but Livingston is not like that: “Having received my earnings in a week,” he wrote, “I bought myself a Latin grammar …, then went to school from eight to ten o’clock in the evening, and still worked with a vocabulary until midnight, when my mother used to take my books from me. ” So on his own he learned Latin, Greek and mathematics.
The knowledge gained was enough to enter the university, and while continuing to work, Livingston learned to be a theologian and a doctor. Sometimes he put a book on the very machine on which he worked – then this ability to not pay attention to the situation will be very useful to him on his travels.
On the first expedition, he sailed at the very end of 1840. For this, Livingston received missionary status.
He spent the next fifteen years in continuous travels in South and Central Africa, and in just thirty-three years he traveled 50,000 kilometers across Africa, mostly on foot.
Livingstone quickly learned languages ​​and respected the local population – so much so that he called the geographical objects discovered by him as the natives of these places called them. He was the first famous person to speak out strongly in defense of the black population of Africa.
Only the waterfall on the Zambezi River was given by Livingston the name of the reigning British queen – Victoria.
Livingstone described the waterfall for the first time very figuratively: he called it a semblance of a monstrous curtain of snow driven by a blizzard.
In 1845 Livingston married Mary, the daughter of fellow missionary Moffett. Their honeymoon trip was a 35-kilometer journey through the desert in a van pulled by bulls. Faithful Mary accompanied Livingston on his travels, bore him four children and died on one of the expeditions – from malaria.
And after the death of his wife, Livingston stubbornly continued what he had begun: he spread Christianity, trade and civilization, looked for trade routes and discovered geographical objects.
In addition to Victoria Falls, the “Great Lion”, as the Africans called Livingstone, discovered Lake Nyasa and from about five large African lakes, explored and described famous rivers and lakes, looked for river sources and crossed Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
When Livingston fell seriously ill, and letters from him stopped coming to his homeland, an expedition was sent to find him.
“I wanted to rush to him, but did not dare in the presence of such a crowd; I wanted to hug him, but I didn’t know how he would take it. ” Then the journalist and traveler Henry Morton Stanley, who found Livingstone in the village of Ujigi on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, uttered the phrase that became world famous: “Dr. Livingston, I suppose?”
When there was a campaign to replace English names in Zambia, only one city retained its name. This city is Livingston.
Livingstonite is named after Livingstonite, a double sulfide of mercury and antimony. The American University of Florida bears his name.