"Livingstone" by Tim Jeal

 A biography of the Victorian British missionary and explorer of Africa who was greeted by Stanley with the famous words: "Doctor Livingstone, I presume."

Despite the fact that, as a missionary, he made only one convert who later apostatised  and, as an explorer, he made no significant discovery, David Livingstone was one of those Victorian icons who achieved near-saint status. This biography shows the man behind the myth. And he was horrid.

He was a self-made man. Born to poverty, living in a single room with his parents and four other siblings, he worked in a textile mill from the age of ten. Education came after eight PM. He must have had incredible determination and strength to save the money needed to go to medical school at the age of 21, moving on to missionary school and eventually being funded to go to Africa. But this strength and determination and the lack of either a proper childhood or, indeed, the chance to make mistakes and do the normal things that men learn from in their early adulthood meant that he was driven, intolerant of failure and weakness, and that he had almost no empathy. There is no doubt that these character traits made him able to struggle on where others gave up or died and there is equally no doubt that he was psychologically crippled, unable to provide leadership, and deeply flawed as a human being. His intolerance of personal failure led him to distort the truth to the point of lying and these lies led to other missionaries and their wives and children losing their lives. His inability to empathise led to the death of his own wife and the deaths of some of those for whom he was responsible, in expeditions he led. He was a monster.

The author makes these points time and again:

• "He was never able to judge others except by the standards he had set himself." (C 2)
• "He believed without question that in all working relationships one person had to dominate the other person or persons absolutely, whether man, wife, or fellow-missionary." (C 5)
• "Livingstone was to show himself capable not only of hypocrisy and self-righteousness in his dealings with colleagues but also of lies and double-dealing." (C 5)
• "Livingstone ... deliberately maligned innocent people for whose deaths he had been partially responsible, in order to escape the slur of having misrepresented the true situation ... He never showed regret for this behaviour." (C 12)
• "Livingstone ... would simply prove a disastrous leader." (C 14)
• "That central defect in Livingstone's character: his virtual inability to respond to the sufferings of others." (C17)
• "When his colleagues on the Zambesi fell ill, and could not endure hardships which he considered routine, he despised them for it. This scorn became so pronounced that in the end he was able to shrug off the deaths of the missionaries ... as just another form of spinelessness and lack of guts." (C 24)

But perhaps worse than these personal failings which might be excused as the normal foibles of a great man was Livingstone's intentions. He saw with crystal clarity that the reason missionaries were struggling to convert Africans to Christianity was because the power of tribal culture was too strong. "The central problem which any Christian critic of tribal organization faced was the fact that the whole system was based on collective generosity rather than on private ownership and personal wealth: a far more 'Christian' society in that respect than capitalist nineteenth century Britain." (C 8) So he proposed destroying tribal culture by a process of colonisation; he sought to replace tribalism with capitalism and the model he favoured was a few white people managing the labours of many black people: 

• "Everything, he repeated, was hopeless for Africa unless there was 'contact with superior races by commerce'. The Africans ... were cowardly and through their constant use of cannabis could not form 'any clear thought on any subject'." (C 10) 
• "Livingstone was one of imperialism's earliest prophets and advocates. From the mid-1850s he began writing about the British as a 'superior race' with a divine mission 'to elevate the more degraded portions of the human family'. British businessmen, he averred, were 'the most upright and benevolent in the world'." (C 13) 
• "Colonization ... would force social change on the Africans, destroying their customs and institutions and so leaving them psychologically prone to accepting a new set of beliefs." (C 24)

In the end the author tries to be fair to his subject and to explain why he was hero-worshipped: 

• "His dogged refusal to give up in the face of hopeless odds, his uncomplaining acceptance of agonizing pain and finally his lonely death conjure up images so powerful that his contemporaries' adulation seems, in retrospect, the only possible response." (C 24)
• "To be great is to be different, so ordinary criteria of judgment fall short. The point at which determination becomes obsession, and self-sacrifice self-destruction is very hard to estimate." (C 24)
• "Yet even if Livingstone's determination is called obsessive - and it was - it must be acknowledged that without this inflexibility he would never have left the mills." (C 24)

But in the end the people around him suffered. His wife (whom he had married because he felt that a missionary should have a wife to help him) and children were dragged along with him or sent back to England to live in poverty when he decided that they were an encumbrance. His fellow explorers were routinely denied any share in his discoveries by being lied about and libelled and just ignored when he wrote his books. Those who believed his claims about Africa (over-optimistic and false) suffered and died in trying to fulfil his plans.  

In many respects (such as the dreadful childhood and the routine use of falsehood to self-glorify and to libel others and the carelessness with the lives of others) Livingstone is very like that other famous African explorer Stanley: Frank McLynn in Stanley: the making of an African explorer shows what an awful man he was. Another 'eminent' Victorian who also worked others to death through refusing to believe that anyone's sufferings could match her own was Florence Nightingale, who biography by Cecil Woodham-Smith is here. Was it just Victorians whose heroes were monsters or are all 'great' people seriously flawed?

Other selected quotes:

• "Livingstone was not the first nor the last religiously motivated man to see his own wishes and personal preferences in terms of the dictates of Providence, and to justify them accordingly." (C 8)
• "Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five most young men learn, through close contact with other people, to accept that earlier ambitions and ideals may have been pitched too high. They come to realize that their are limits to their own abilities, and in marrying, or forming close attachments, are forced to recognize that compromise and concession are vital for the success of any close relationship." (C 24)
• "The expanding middle class ... discovered that Christian virtues could easily be exchanged for business virtues: abstinence, diligence, an exemplary home life and a weekly confrontation with the Maker could produce rewards in this life as well as the next." (C 11)

A brilliantly written book which exposes the monster behind the saintly hero.

September 2021; 384 pages

Other books about travel and exploration which are reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God