Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 4, 2011

David Livingstone (19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and explorer in Africa. His meeting with H. M. Stanley gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?". Livingstone was born on 19 March 1813 in the mill town of Blantyre, beside the bridge crossing into Bothwell, Lanarkshire, Richmond, into a Protestant family believed to be descended from the highland Livingstones, a clan that had been previously known as the Clan MacLea. He was employed from the age of ten in the cotton mill of H. Monteith. The mill offered their workers schooling of which David took advantage.

Perhaps one of the most popular national heroes of the late 19th century in Victorian Britain, Livingstone had a mythic status, which operated on a number of interconnected levels: that of Protestant missionary martyr, that of working-class "rags to riches" inspirational story, that of scientific investigator and explorer, that of imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of commercial empire. His fame as an explorer helped drive forward the obsession with discovering the sources of the River Nile that formed the culmination of the classic period of European geographical discovery and colonial penetration of the African continent. At the same time his missionary travels, "disappearance" and death in Africa, and subsequent glorification as posthumous national hero in 1874 led to the founding of several major central African Christian missionary initiatives carried forward in the era of the European "Scramble for Africa".