Man on a mission: spreading the Word, fighting slavery and exploring a continent

An intrepid missionary, explorer, physician and legend in his own lifetime, David Livingstone started his career in a mission station at Kuruman, says Graham Jooste.

- Graham Jooste

David Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 in the mill town of Blantyre, Scotland, in a tenement building for the workers of a cotton factory on the banks of the River Clyde. He was employed at the tender age of 10 in the mill, and he and his brother John worked 12-hour shifts as ‘piecers’, tying broken cotton threads on the spinning machines. Livingstone also attended Blantyre village school, along with the other mill children.

As a teenager at school, he became interested in nature and science, as well as religion, and went on to study theology and anthropology. He continued his montonous work at the mill, however, in order to support his impoverished family; it taught him persistence, endurance, and a natural empathy for all those who labour.

At the age of 21, Livingstone read a pamphlet that his father received from the church calling for missionaries to China, and it fired his imagination. They had to be trained as medical doctors as well. Livingstone entered Anderson’s University, Glasgow, studying medicine and chemistry, as well as attending anti-slavery lectures. After applying to the London Missionary Society, he was made a probationary candidate in 1838, and continued with his medical studies at the Charing Cross Hospital Medical School.

TO AFRICA

At the age of 27, Livingstone was ordained a minister of the church and assigned to the South African Order, instead of China, because of the outbreak of the First Opium War. He met with the Scottish Congregationalist missionary Robert Moffat in London, who at that stage was stationed at Kuruman.