II.

Missionary Travels

Livingstone was 27 when he arrived at Cape Town on Africa’s southern tip in 1841. He proceeded to the missionary society’s most northerly station, Kuruman, on the southern fringes of the Kalahari Desert. The station was led by fellow Scottish missionary Robert Moffat. Dissatisfied with the small number of converts at Kuruman, and having a growing desire to, as he put it, “preach the gospel beyond every other man’s line of things,” Livingstone began adventuring northward. Within a few years he had his own station at Mabotsa on the headwaters of the Limpopo River. In 1845 Livingstone married Mary Moffat, one of Robert Moffat’s daughters whom Livingstone had met at Kuruman. Through the early years of his explorations, Mary and their children would travel with Livingstone, facing considerable hardship as they did so.

As a missionary, Livingstone quickly came to believe that his primary task was not to remain in one spot, preaching the gospel to the few local people willing to listen. Instead, he should keep on the move, reaching new groups and extending to them an acquaintance with Christianity. Eventually he would expand this idea into a belief that his role was to “open up” Africa’s interior to broader influences from Western civilization. Once that occurred, he reasoned, commerce and Christianity would work hand in hand to end slave trading and uplift African peoples. Such motives drove Livingstone (“I will open a way to the interior or perish,” he vowed to his brother) and turned him into one of Europe’s greatest African explorers.

In 1849, with two European sportsmen and an African guide, Livingstone crossed the Kalahari Desert and found Lake Ngami, legendary among the people of the southern Kalahari for the rich, fertile area surrounding it. He had hoped to reach the Makololo people farther north (Livingstone had reason to believe that the Makololo chief would be open to a Christian mission), but failed to reach that area. Two years later, accompanied by his wife and children, Livingstone crossed the desert again. This time he reached the Makololo, whose chief welcomed him, and sighted the upper Zambezi River. Livingstone envisioned the Zambezi as a navigable waterway that would help open central Africa’s interior.