Stanley Meets Livingstone (1871): The Famous Encounter at Ujiji

Stanley’s meeting with Livingstone at Ujiji in late 1871 is one of the most famous encounters in the history of exploration. The Welsh-born American journalist Henry Morton Stanley, sent by the New York Herald, found the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone alive on the shore of Lake Tanganyika after years in which the outside world had heard almost nothing from him. The story made Stanley a celebrity, revived Livingstone’s anti-slavery cause and helped to fix Africa in the European imagination on the eve of colonial conquest.

Background: the missing explorer

David Livingstone was born in Blantyre, Scotland, on 19 March 1813 and went to southern Africa in 1841 as a medical missionary of the London Missionary Society. Between 1853 and 1856 he crossed the continent from the Atlantic coast of Angola to the Indian Ocean coast of Mozambique, becoming the first European known to have done so, and named the Victoria Falls. His book Missionary Travels (1857) was a best-seller and made him a national hero in Britain.

A government-funded Zambezi Expedition from 1858 to 1864 was less successful, but Livingstone’s reputation survived. In 1866, backed by the Royal Geographical Society, he set out from the East African coast on a new journey. His aims were to find the true source of the Nile, a question that had divided geographers since Speke and Burton’s travels of the 1850s, and to expose the slave trade run by Arab and Swahili traders from Zanzibar deep into the interior.

He soon disappeared from view. Letters took months or years to reach the coast, many never arrived, and in 1867 some of his porters who had deserted claimed that he had been killed. A British search party under Edward Young showed that report to be false, but by 1870 nobody in Europe knew where Livingstone was, or whether he was still alive.

Stanley and the New York Herald

Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, on 28 January 1841. He spent part of his childhood in the St Asaph workhouse, sailed to New Orleans as a teenager, took the name of a merchant he claimed had adopted him, and fought on both sides in the American Civil War. After the war he became a newspaper correspondent and attracted the attention of James Gordon Bennett Jr., owner of the New York Herald.

Bennett wanted exclusive stories that would sell papers, and finding Livingstone was the greatest scoop imaginable. According to Stanley, Bennett gave him his instructions in Paris in October 1869, though Stanley first had to report on the opening of the Suez Canal and travel through the Middle East and India. He arrived in Zanzibar on 6 January 1871 and spent weeks buying cloth, beads and wire, the currencies of the interior trade, and hiring porters and armed guards.

The search for Livingstone

Stanley’s caravan left Bagamoyo on the mainland coast on 21 March 1871. It was large and heavily armed, with close to 200 men in total including porters, guards and two European assistants, both of whom died on the journey. Stanley followed the main caravan route inland towards Tabora (then called Unyanyembe), the great trading centre of the interior.

The journey was punishing. Stanley suffered repeated bouts of malaria, men deserted or died, and the route crossed swamps and dry plains. Near Tabora the caravan was caught up in a war between Arab-Swahili traders and Mirambo, a powerful Nyamwezi ruler who controlled the trade routes to the west. Stanley briefly joined the traders’ side, then abandoned the main road and made a long detour to the south to reach Lake Tanganyika.

Meanwhile Livingstone had endured his own ordeal. In July 1871, at Nyangwe on the Lualaba River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he witnessed armed followers of slave traders open fire on a crowded market, killing hundreds of people; he estimated the dead at around 400. Shocked and ill, he abandoned his exploration and walked back to Ujiji, arriving in late October to find that the supplies sent for him had been stolen or sold.

The meeting at Ujiji

Stanley reached Ujiji shortly afterwards, entering the town with flags flying and guns firing. In his book How I Found Livingstone (1872) he wrote that he walked through the crowd, removed his hat and greeted the pale, grey-bearded explorer with the words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”. The traditional date of the meeting, taken from Stanley’s account, is 10 November 1871.

Both details are less certain than they seem. Livingstone’s journal, studied closely by modern scholars, suggests that Stanley arrived earlier, perhaps in late October or the first days of November. Livingstone never recorded the famous greeting, and the pages of Stanley’s own diary covering the meeting were torn out, so it cannot be checked.

What is clear is that the two men got on well. Stanley brought food, medicine, letters and news of the world, including the Franco-Prussian War, and Livingstone’s health improved quickly. Livingstone, a reserved and difficult man with many of his own countrymen, warmed to the brash young reporter, who in turn came to admire him deeply.

In November and December 1871 the two men explored the northern end of Lake Tanganyika by canoe. Some geographers had suggested that the lake drained north into the Nile system. They found that the Rusizi River at the northern end flows into the lake, not out of it, ruling out that possibility.

They then travelled together to Tabora, where Stanley had stores. Stanley urged Livingstone to come home, but the older man was determined to finish his search for the Nile’s source, which he wrongly believed lay in the region of the Lualaba and Lake Bangweulu. The two parted on 14 March 1872. Stanley returned to the coast and sent back a caravan of fresh porters and supplies, which reached Livingstone that August.

Key people

• Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904): Journalist and explorer whose search made him world-famous. He later led some of the most significant and most violent expeditions of the era.
• David Livingstone (1813–1873): Missionary, physician and explorer, and a leading campaigner against the East African slave trade.
• James Gordon Bennett Jr. (1841–1918): Owner of the New York Herald, who paid for the expedition as a newspaper venture.
• Susi and Chuma: Abdullah Susi and James Chuma, Livingstone’s long-serving African companions, who later led the party that carried his body to the coast.

Consequences

Stanley’s dispatches caused a sensation. Some members of the Royal Geographical Society at first doubted his story or resented that an American newspaper had succeeded where British efforts had not, but Livingstone’s letters carried by Stanley confirmed it. Queen Victoria received Stanley and presented him with a gold snuffbox, and How I Found Livingstone sold in large numbers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Livingstone continued his journey but his health failed. He died on 1 May 1873 at the village of Chief Chitambo, near Lake Bangweulu in present-day Zambia. His companions, led by Susi and Chuma, buried his heart there, preserved his body and carried it for many months to the coast at Bagamoyo, a journey of roughly 1,000 miles (about 1,600 km). He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 18 April 1874.

His reports, above all of the Nyangwe massacre, strengthened British pressure on the Sultan of Zanzibar, who in June 1873 agreed to close the Zanzibar slave market and ban the seaborne slave trade from his mainland ports. This built on Britain’s own earlier abolition of slavery, although the slave trade inland continued for years.

Legacy

The encounter changed Stanley’s life. From 1874 to 1877, funded by the New York Herald and the London Daily Telegraph, he crossed Africa from east to west, circumnavigated Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika and followed the Lualaba down to the Atlantic, proving that it was the Congo River. The expedition was marked by repeated violence against Africans who opposed his passage.

From 1879 Stanley worked for King Leopold II of Belgium, building stations and signing treaties with local rulers along the Congo. That work laid the foundations of the Congo Free State, recognised in the period of the Berlin Conference, whose rule later became notorious for forced labour and atrocities. In this way the search for Livingstone became part of the story of the Scramble for Africa.

Livingstone’s own reputation followed a different path. In Victorian Britain he became a near-saintly symbol of Christianity, commerce and anti-slavery, and his ideas were later invoked to justify imperial expansion that he had not planned. Today he is still widely respected in Malawi, Zambia and other countries, where towns and institutions bear his name. A memorial marks the meeting site at Ujiji, near Kigoma in Tanzania.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Stanley certainly said “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”. Fact: The line comes only from Stanley’s published account; there is no independent record, and many historians think he invented or refined it.
• Myth: Livingstone was rescued and brought home. Fact: He refused to leave Africa and died there less than two years later.
• Myth: Livingstone was lost in an unknown wilderness. Fact: Ujiji was a busy trading town on established caravan routes; Livingstone was “lost” only in the sense that Europe had no news of him.
• Myth: The meeting solved the Nile question. Fact: It did not; the source question was settled by later expeditions, including Stanley’s own in 1875.

Timeline

• 1866, April: Livingstone leaves the East African coast on his last expedition.
• 1871, 6 January: Stanley arrives in Zanzibar to organise his search.
• 1871, 21 March: Stanley’s caravan leaves Bagamoyo for the interior.
• 1871, 15 July: Livingstone witnesses the massacre at Nyangwe on the Lualaba.
• 1871, 10 November: Traditional date of the meeting at Ujiji (Livingstone’s journal suggests a slightly earlier date).
• 1872, 14 March: Stanley and Livingstone part at Tabora.
• 1872, November: How I Found Livingstone is published.
• 1873, 1 May: Livingstone dies at Chitambo’s village, near Lake Bangweulu.
• 1874, 18 April: Livingstone is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Why it matters

The meeting at Ujiji turned exploration into mass entertainment and made an African journey front-page news in New York and London. It boosted the anti-slavery campaign in East Africa, but it also launched the career of the man who would help King Leopold II seize the Congo. Few encounters show so clearly how curiosity, humanitarian concern, journalism and empire were bound together in nineteenth-century Africa.