The Full Story
David Livingstone was born in a one-room tenement in Blantyre, Scotland, in 1813. His whole family lived in that room. He started working in a cotton mill at ten, propping books on the loom while he worked. He put himself through medical school.
He went to Africa as a doctor and a missionary. There he saw something he recognised: the Arab slave trade, still tearing through central and east Africa decades after Britain had abolished the Atlantic trade. Eighty thousand people a year were being taken in chains to the slave markets of Zanzibar. Livingstone made it his mission to expose it to Britain. He sent back dispatches. He published journals that made the country read, in calm prose, what the slave caravans were doing.
He died in 1873 in the village of Chitambo, in what is now Zambia, kneeling by his bed. His servants, Chuma and Susi, did something extraordinary. They cut out his heart and buried it under a mpundu tree. He belonged to Africa. Then they carried his body roughly a thousand miles to the coast, so that Britain could take him home. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. His heart is still in Zambia.
Why This Matters
Livingstone's reports forced a second phase of British abolition into public view. The outrage he created at home funded naval operations against the east African slave trade and, in 1873, forced the Sultan of Zanzibar to close the largest slave market on earth. He failed at almost everything he set out to do. He made no converts, found no easy trade routes, broke his health. What he did was make the slave trade impossible for Britain to ignore. That was enough to change it.