When someone asked David Livingstone why he became a missionary to Africa, he replied, "I was compelled by the love of Christ." A medical doctor, missionary, preacher, African explorer, humanitarian, and fighter against the slave trade, David Livingstone went fearlessly to places other outsiders had never gone and, from the obscurity of the remote African interior, became one of the most celebrated heroes of his era.

Born into a poor family of five children in Blantyre, Scotland, young David went to work at age 10. After working a 14-hour day at a cotton factory spinning jenny, he would go to night school for two more hours. With his first week's wages he bought a Latin text and propped it on his machine so he could study while working.

Before he was 21, he had committed his life to Christ as a medical missionary. He studied medicine and theology in Glasgow, and at 27 he was sent by the London Missionary Society to South Africa as both a doctor and an ordained minister. Arriving in l841 he trekked north 600 miles to Kuruman, thus beginning a life of walking that would take him more than 29,000 miles back and forth across Africa's vast interior. At Kuruman, he served in the station of the noted missionary Robert Moffat.

Once, when natives at the mission were losing cattle to lions, Livingstone fired on an attacking male lion which "caught me by the shoulder as he sprang, and we both came to the ground together. Growling horribly close to my ear, he shook me as a terrier does a rat." Distracted by the natives, the lion suddenly fell over dead from the bullet that had found its mark. Livingstone carried the lion's tooth scars on his shoulder the rest of his life. After his recovery he married Moffat's daughter, Mary, with whom he would eventually have six children.

Finding His Calling
For the next 10 years Livingstone was a traditional missionary. He wrote enthusiastically: "I am a missionary.... In this service I hope to live; in it I wish to die." But Livingstone soon found God leading him in a different direction. Frustrated over lack of converts, and after several failed efforts to set up mission stations, he concluded that God's purpose for his life was to use his talents to explore and map the vast African heartland -- to open up "God's Highway" which would bring "Christianity, commerce, and civilization" and put an end to the Arab slave trade.

In l852, after sending his wife and children to England, Livingstone started exploration, becoming the first European to go across Africa from West to East. It was on this trip that he discovered what the natives called mosi oa tunya – “The smoke [mist] that roars” where the Zambezi plunges over the edge of a huge fissure in the earth to form one of the world's most beautiful spectacles. He named it Victoria Falls after British Queen Victoria. Returning to a hero's welcome in England in l856, Livingstone was given an audience with Queen Victoria. She laughed when he told her of the African chief who, in trying to estimate her wealth, had asked: “How many cows does she have?”

In l857, Livingstone withdrew from the London Missionary Society due to honest differences over whether a missionary should stay in one place or should be allowed to travel and explore. In the same year, Livingstone published Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa and somewhat later Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries. The next year, he launched his ill-fated Zambezi Expedition. The plan was to go upriver in a steamboat, The Ma Robert, and establish a mission above Victoria Falls. Everything went wrong. Livingstone's wife and others died on the trip, the steamboat leaked and was finally blocked at a 30-foot waterfall. Livingstone changed plans, sailing up the Shire River to Lake Nyasa until England terminated the expedition.