Livingstone’s upper arm was splintered at once the lion’s teeth made a series of gashes like ‘gun-shot wounds’. He fired both barrels at the lion but only wounded him.Īs he vainly tried to reload, the lion leapt on him and, catching him by the arm, shook him ‘as a terrier dog does a rat’. It was not Livingstone’s only mistake he went with only one gun and with no at his side. On 16 February 1844 Livingstone was working on the ditches of the watercourse when some natives were screaming to him to help them kill a lion that had just dragged off some sheep.Īs Livingstone put it later: ‘I very imprudently ventured across the valley in order to encourage them to destroy him.’ Nevertheless he had always remained unworried by the thought of personal danger from them, and had assured friends in England that ‘the sense of danger vanishes when you are in a country of lions.’ ‘As early as 1842 had seen ‘a woman actually devoured in her garden’ by a lion, and had noticed that there was a plague of these animals at Mabotsa. Tim Jeal, describing the incident writes, There is one famous incident in Livingstone’s life which is famous and fascinating: the lion attack. But Livingstone passionately believed that an increase in commerce, instead of slavery, and an increase of Christianity instead of other religions would be beneficial to Africa, and he became more vitally involved with the mapping the land itself and learning about its people than any other missionary of his time. Whether he was just naive or cynically working for colonial domination remains a subject of debate. When speaking in Cambridge he confidently asserted, ‘I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity.’ Instead he tends to live in the memories of the British as an heroic Explorer. The Scotsman David Livingstone doesn’t neatly fit into the category of ‘missionary’.
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