'Dr Livingstone, I Presume?' 

Article by Charlotte D’Arcy. Edited by Rose Colville. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard. 

Nineteenth century Britain was a rising superpower. Thanks to years of participation in the extremely lucrative Atlantic slave trade she had accumulated enough wealth to become the world’s first industrial nation. Many of these slaves were plucked from African coastlines and tributaries leaving much of the interior unexplored; Victorian Britons, therefore, knew Africa as the ‘Dark Continent’. However, the latter half of the century saw Western explorers infiltrate this mysterious expanse and make discoveries that opened Africa to British expansion. The most renowned of these explorers were Dr David Livingstone and his self-professed successor Sir Henry Morton Stanley; when the latter greeted the former with the infamous line “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” it secured him a place in the popular mythology of imperialism. 

The early nineteenth century witnessed Britain abolishing the slave trade (1807) and slavery itself (1833), proving her – somewhat contradictorily – to be more virtuous than her rivals for empire. The mid nineteenth century saw the triumph of capitalist expansionism in Europe and the creation of a new, wealthy industrial class. Also characteristic of this period was the extension of scientific knowledge, featuring Darwin’s theory of evolution and laws of natural selection in particular. Combined, these factors made Britons feel that they belonged to a highly moral, technologically innovative and intellectual nation. With this might and superiority Britain hoped to civilize the ‘dark spots’ of the world – she would teach Africa to be both religious and industrious. 

A few had already begun the process. When he was ‘discovered’ by Stanley in 1871, Dr Livingstone had been prowling Africa as a missionary for over twenty years trying to make converts and end slavery. He believed that Africa could be rescued from ‘darkness’ and that it could be Christianised and perhaps civilized, an attitude that was necessary for any missionary activity. In general however, missionaries were often deeply tempted to exaggerate ‘savagery’ and ‘darkness’ in order to justify their presence in Africa, to explain the frustrations they faced in creating converts, and to secure support from mission societies at home. The accounts of men like Livingstone who had actually been to Africa were widely circulated at the time and, with few to falsify their claims, the images and stereotypes they created were largely accepted by the reading public. 

To his successors, Livingstone seemed to have provided the moral basis for massive imperial expansion. He travelled extensively and was the first European recorded to see what the locals traditionally called Mosi-oa-Tunya (the mist that thunders), which is now known to us as Victoria Falls – a name that was bestowed onto the natural wonder by Livingstone in honour of the contemporary British Monarch. The doctor also renamed a number of other natural ‘discoveries’ after great figures of his time, for example Lord Palmerstone and President Lincoln whom he believed were crucial to the cessation of the slave trade. In this way, Livingstone disregarded (inadvertently or not) all previous African traditions and involvement with these natural sites and claimed them as discoveries (not rediscoveries) for the West, thereby opening the way for Western territorial claims. In How I Found Livingstone in Central Africa, Stanley presents the doctor as the patron saint of British imperialism in Africa.

There was a great deal of money to be made in the exploration of ‘darkest Africa’ (as we shall soon see in the story of Stanley), which was a great incentive to go. Surprisingly, many of those who traversed the African wilderness were not wealthy, despite what the cost of expeditions may suggest. Late nineteenth century Britain still retained a defined notion of class and it was still the ambition of many men to climb the class ladder; those at the top, however, were content to sit tight and defend their families, riches and reputations. African exploration provided an opportunity for fame and fortune that was up for grabs for those who were brave enough to tackle it. Our ‘heroes’, therefore, were social outcasts with nothing to lose; Livingstone was a poor Scottish factory-boy, and Stanley was (originally) from a Welsh workhouse. Furthermore, it was a man’s venture, which reinforced the notion of the empire as strong and masculine. 

The influence of fame is particularly telling in the case of Stanley – after he achieved his goal of finding the enigmatic doctor-cum-missionary, which the Royal Geographic Society had been planning for years, he gained an air of self importance that is clearly visible in his best-selling autobiographical tale How I found Livingstone in Central Africa. The work is unmistakably written for, and suitably adjusted to, an audience and includes fantastical details to electrify the reader, for example his impressive caravan that attended to his store of luxury items which included cases of Champagne and a bronze bathtub. In a poignant moment from the book, Stanley explains to a high-ranking chief how he came to Africa to make friends with the Africans, explore their lands and make discoveries, not to make trouble – he presents himself as a disinterested seeker after knowledge. 

However, Stanley oftentimes draws on the concepts of social Darwinism and portrays himself as the all-knowing, all-powerful white man (with superior weapons) who bravely, yet sternly, leads his men through the African wastelands. Africans awee depicted as dim-witted, lazy, cheating thieves, which further fashioned African stereotypes. He recalls how he ‘look[ed] back upon the scene with pleasure, for the wealth and prosperity it promises to some civilized nation, which in some future time will come and take possession of it’ (p. 106). Vast expanses of uninhabited African land were presented as ripe for the plucking; Stanley’s books and maps were weapons of conquest rather than objects for contemplation – Africa was a field for European endeavour and Stanley was an imperial pawn. It was the explorer’s job to map out African expanses; it was the geographer’s job to interpret it for exploitation. Furthermore, the attitudes and assumptions of explorers comprised a sort of ‘unofficial symbolic imperialism’ that aided the definition of cultural terms on which unequal political relations between colonizer and colonised could later be established. 

Therefore, the information explorers relayed back to the West was important not only in the formation of typecasts, but also as a precursor to imperialism in Africa. The ‘Dark Continent’ was a myth, a Victorian invention that was shaped by economic and political pressures, and also by a psychology of blaming the victim through which Europeans projected many of their own darkest impulses onto Africans. Patrick Bratlinger believes that ‘Africa grew ‘dark’ as Victorian explorers, missionaries, and scientists flooded it with light because the light was refracted through an imperialist ideology that urged the abolition of “savage customs” in the name of civilization’.

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