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David Livingstone Centre

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Drever
Drever
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5 out of 5
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David Livingston Centre

  • July 29, 2008
  • Rated 5 of 5 by Drever from Ayr
David Livingston Centre

The David Livingstone Centre near Glasgow tells the heroic story of his life from his earliest days to his funeral in Westminster Abbey. Besides having papers, photographs and artefacts belonging to the explorer, the Centre has created visual presentations of his life.

David Livingston born in Blantyre in 1813 became famous as a Missionary, explorer and abolitionist. Born into poverty he left school at the age of 10 to work in the cotton mill to earn money for the family. The seven family members lived in a single room in a tenement they shared with 23 other families in Shuttle Row. This tenement now forms the core of the David Livingstone Centre. Outwardly it resembles a grand mansion; inside offers a truer impression.

Despite the early end to his formal education, Livingstone's questioning mind and dedication ensured that he educated himself to a standard, which allowed entry to Glasgow University. There he studied medicine and theology to become a missionary doctor.

At age 25, Livingstone journeyed to Africa with his wife Mary. In the next 10 years he offered instruction and opened a string of stations. He also made some of the most amazing and dangerous explorations of the 19th century by exploring areas never before seen by Europeans. He used the Zambezi river as a way of moving across the continent and when he saw the might falls on that river named by natives "the smoke that thunders" he named them after Queen Victoria.

The river was also a highway for the slave trade. Livingston fought against it hoped to replace the slave economy with a capitalist one: buying and selling goods instead of people. The Livingstone Centre displays the shackles, chains and yokes used to control the slaves.

It was during this expedition that a lion attacked him. It is the subject of a sculpture outside the Centre. He was "shaken as a terrier does a rat." Its jaws broke the explorer's arm in two places. A cast of the arm bones in the Livingstone Centre shows the fractures clearly. In this period he also suffered the tragedy of his wife’s death after given birth to their sixth child.

In 1866 he set out to find the source of the Nile. After three years out of contact with his sponsors, The Royal Geographical Society, a young ambitious American journalist on the New York Herald, Henry Morton Stanley, set out to find him. They met in November 1870 in what is present-day Tanzania. Stanley's first words, when approaching the only other white man in this part of Africa, were the legendary "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

Livingstone continued to explore central Africa but now aged 60 and suffering from tropical illnesses he died on May 1, 1873 in what is now Zambia. His loyal African servants carried his embalmed body back to the coast and eventually to England.

He lies buried in Westminster Abbey though his heart remains in Africa buried at the foot of a mulva tree. The Livingstone Centre has a wonderful carving (made from Scots oak) representing that final journey and a copy of the Westminster Abbey tombstone.

His tombstone summarises his life: "Brought by faithful hands over land and sea, David Livingstone: missionary, traveller, philanthropist. For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort to evangelize the native races, to explore the undiscovered secrets, and to abolish the slave trade." Readers at the time avidly followed these exploits through his journals

The museum contains areas devoted to different areas of this complex man's life. These feature a full-size loom, with a model of Livingstone working at it. Also an art gallery, social history exhibition, children's animated display, gift shop and tearoom, Jungle Garden, African playground and riverside walks.

From journal Glasgow City of Culture

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