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00:00In the 18th century, the British regarded Africa as little more than a stopping-off
00:14point on the way to India, and a convenient source of slaves.
00:24The original empire was hard-nosed, even callous.
00:31The British had ruthlessly grabbed power in Asia and land in America.
00:39Native peoples were taxed, robbed, or wiped out.
00:45But the Victorians had loftier ambitions.
00:48They dreamt not just of ruling the world, but of redeeming it.
00:55In particular, the Victorians aspired to bring light to what they called the Dark Continent.
01:17The man who came to embody this new spirit of empire was David Livingstone.
01:24For Livingstone, commerce and colonization, the original foundations of the empire, weren't
01:31enough.
01:33He and missionaries like him wanted the empire to be born again.
01:50The British have a long tradition of sending aid to Africa.
02:11Today, British servicemen are in the West African state of Sierra Leone as peacekeepers.
02:18Their mission is a moral one, to help restore stability to a country that's been wracked
02:23for years by civil war.
02:33Two hundred years ago, a Royal Navy squadron was based in Sierra Leone on a remarkably
02:37similar mission.
02:39They hadn't come to colonize, or to conquer, but to prevent slave ships leaving the African
02:45coast for America.
02:47The empire had become a force for good.
02:53When the British first came to Sierra Leone back in 1562, it was as slave traders, and
02:58they spent the better part of the next two centuries shipping more than three million
03:02Africans across the Atlantic in chains.
03:05But then towards the end of the 18th century, something changed quite dramatically.
03:09It was as if a switch was flicked in the British psyche.
03:13Eventually they started shipping Africans back here, in order to set them free.
03:30Sierra Leone became the province of freedom.
03:34Its capital was renamed Freetown.
03:36The freed slaves walked through a freedom arch.
03:44Instead of ending up on plantations in America or the Caribbean, they were given a quarter
03:48acre of land, a cooking pot, a spade, and their freedom.
04:07And this wasn't because slavery had stopped being profitable.
04:12On the contrary, the British were intent on demolishing a pillar of their own imperial
04:18economy.
04:36In the bad old days, the slaves had been brought here and chained to these iron bars to await
04:40shipment across the Atlantic.
04:43Now they came to Freetown to lose their chains.
04:46What was going on to turn Britain from the world's leading enslaver into the world's
04:50leading emancipator?
04:51The answer lies in the extraordinary religious revival that was going on back home.
05:10The man who would become governor of Sierra Leone was Zachary Macaulay.
05:20As a young man, he had been the manager of a slave estate in Jamaica, but he quickly
05:25found he couldn't reconcile his work with his Christian faith.
05:31In search of kindred souls, he returned to England, to Clapham, and it was here that
05:38the empire was born again.
05:43You could say the moral transformation of the British empire began right here in this
05:47church.
05:48Macaulay's fellow parishioners, who included the dazzling parliamentary orator William
05:53Wilberforce, combined evangelical zeal with hard-nosed political nous.
05:58The Clapham sect, as they were known, excelled at generating a new wave of grassroots activism.
06:12From all over the country, petitions poured in.
06:15In Manchester alone, 11,000 people signed.
06:19So widespread was the popular revulsion that the government simply caved in.
06:24In 1807, they abolished the slave trade.
06:28It was as if a modern government, for purely moral reasons, had done away with the entire
06:33arms trade.
06:34Britain had just acquired an ethical foreign policy.
06:43Let us praise God for the servants of Christ some have called the Clapham sect, who rested
06:48not until the curse of slavery was swept away from all parts of the British dominions.
06:55This memorial sings the praises of Macaulay and his friends for their contribution to
06:59the abolition of slavery, but that was only stage one of a master plan to civilise the
07:04world.
07:05The memorial also praises their work for national righteousness and the conversion of the heathen.
07:12Now that was a new departure.
07:14For 200 years, the British Empire had exported capital, labour, goods, but now the Clapham
07:20sect aspired to export Christianity.
07:24In the 18th century, few people had questioned the morality of slavery, but now the empire
07:39had discovered its eternal soul.
07:44Spreading the word of God, and thereby saving the souls of benighted heathens, provided
07:49a new, not-for-profit rationale for expanding British influence.
08:06The Africans appeared to this new generation of British evangelicals to be backward and
08:11superstitious, but they also seemed capable of being civilised.
08:20And the civilising agencies were ready to begin their work.
08:31The missionary societies were the Victorian aid agencies, bringing both spiritual and
08:36material assistance to the less-developed world.
08:45By the 1830s, they had a network of missions spreading out from bridgeheads in every continent,
08:52including Africa.
08:58The model for this movement, the ideal mission, was here at Kuroman in South Africa.
09:27Kuroman was used by the London Missionary Society in its literature to show what the
09:31ideal mission should be like, and you can see why.
09:34It's a little bit of England in the heart of Africa.
09:37But it wasn't just about importing Twi architecture to Africa.
09:42The whole idea behind the Kuroman project was that in turning Africans into Christians,
09:47you were, at the same time, civilising them.
10:07According to the missionary magazine, it seemed to be working.
10:14The people are now dressed in British manufactures, and make a very respectable appearance in
10:19the house of God.
10:20The children, who formerly went naked, and presented a most disgusting appearance, were
10:26decently clothed.
10:34Instead of a few wretched huts, resembling pigsties, we now have a regular village.
10:40The valley on which it stands, which till lately was uncultivated, is now laid out in gardens.
10:49In other words, the aim was to make the Africans British in behaviour, as well as Christian
10:55in belief.
10:58And then, on the 31st of July, 1841, this ideal mission was struck by a human thunderbolt.
11:05A man who was to revolutionise the missionary movement, and change the relationship between
11:10Britain and Africa forever.
11:17His name was David Livingstone.
11:19For Livingstone, the work of conversion wasn't enough.
11:24This extraordinary man, as ambitious as he was altruistic, wanted more than just the
11:29souls of Africans.
11:31He wanted to get to the heart of Africa itself.
11:54David Livingstone was born in the textile town of Blantarn in Lanarkshire, the son of
11:59a poor travelling tea salesman.
12:03At the age of just 10, Livingstone started work at the mill.
12:09Despite a 12 hour day, 6 days a week, he buried himself in books, and paid his own way through
12:14medical school.
12:19As a young man, Livingstone was electrified by the religious revival that was sweeping
12:24through Britain.
12:28His was the ideal upbringing for a missionary.
12:37In sending Livingstone here to Curriman, the London Missionary Society seemed to have found
12:41the perfect man for the job.
12:43As both a preacher and a doctor, Livingstone seemed ideally suited to the task of spreading
12:48both Christianity and civilisation.
12:51What's more, unlike many young missionaries, Livingstone had a constitution of iron, and
12:56would go on to survive being mauled by a lion, not to mention umpteen bouts of malaria.
13:02And yet, Livingstone soon became disillusioned by life at Curriman.
13:06Converting Africans, according to the missionary handbook, turned out to be painfully slow
13:10work.
13:18The population is sunk into the very lowest state of moral degradation.
13:25It must be impossible for Christians at home to realise anything like an accurate notion
13:31of the grossness which shrouds their minds.
13:41No one can conceive the state in which they live, and to sit among them from day to day
13:45and listen to their roaring music is enough to give one a disgust to heathenism forever.
14:11This man, Chief Sechele of the Baquena, was Livingstone's one and only convert.
14:18Not much to show for seven years of missionary work.
14:24And just months later, Sechele reverted to his tribal custom of polygamy.
14:32Livingstone concluded that doing things by the missionary handbook was never going to
14:35break down what he regarded as African superstition.
14:38There had to be a better way than simply preaching in the wilderness.
14:42The wilderness itself had somehow to be converted, to be made more receptive to British culture.
14:48But how?
14:49Only it seemed, by making an unspoken career change, by effectively ceasing to be a missionary
14:55and becoming instead an explorer.
15:07Livingstone had felt constrained and frustrated in Curriman.
15:10In setting off across the Kalahari Desert, he was making a bid for freedom.
15:15But he could justify this, for surely Africa needed to be explored before its people could
15:25be converted.
15:29So Livingstone set off with his long-suffering wife and children in tow on a succession of
15:34almost superhuman journeys that were to enthrall the mid-Victorian imagination.
15:51Here was the quintessential hero of the new age of empire.
15:57Sprung from humble origins, blazing a trail for British civilization in what was manifestly
16:03the least hospitable of all the world's continents.
16:09Livingstone had become the 19th century's first Médecins Sans Frontières, literally
16:14a doctor without frontiers.
16:25To Livingstone, the search for a way to open up Africa to civilization and Christianity
16:30was made still more important by an appalling discovery.
16:35Slavery was still thriving.
16:44This was a revelation.
16:46Everyone in Britain thought that slavery had been extinguished in Africa.
16:52Yet Livingstone had found that slaves were being exported not just from West Africa,
16:57but from the East, to Arabia, Turkey, and Persia.
17:03Perhaps as many as two million Africans fell victim to this traffic in the 19th century
17:08alone.
17:11Livingstone's first encounter with slavery was an epiphany in his life.
17:18The strongest drama I have seen in this country seems really to be brokenheartedness, and
17:25it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.
17:32The many skeletons we see among the rocks and woods attest the awful sacrifice of human
17:37life, which must be attributed directly or indirectly to this trade in hell.
17:56Well, this is where the slaves were brought, to these cells in Zanzibar.
18:08They were shoved through a hole in here, 50 at a time.
18:14You can imagine what Livingstone must have felt when he saw this place, this absolutely
18:17claustrophobically stiflingly hot, dark, dank.
18:22And the slaves who survived were the ones who got sold.
18:39The thing was that up until this point, Livingstone had been dealing with subsistence economies.
18:44Now he was in a collision course with a sophisticated economic system run by Arab and Portuguese
18:50slave traders out of Zanzibar.
18:52But in his typical undaunted way, Livingstone was soon working on a scheme that wouldn't
18:57just open up Africa to God and civilisation, but would get rid of slavery into the bargain.
19:06Livingstone was convinced that if an easier route could be found, by which honest merchants
19:11could travel to the interior and establish legitimate trade with Africans, then the slavers
19:16would be put out of business.
19:18The free market would simply undercut the unfree one.
19:23All he had to do was find this route.
19:36Livingstone was indefatigable in his search.
19:39He was the first white man to cross the Kalahari Desert.
19:43He was the first man to traverse Africa from Angola to Mozambique.
19:48And then he found this.
20:05On the Zambezi River, east of Ishequi, Livingstone came across one of the great wonders of the
20:13world.
20:22The locals knew the falls as Mozia Tunya, the smoke that thunders.
20:30Livingstone promptly renamed them the Victoria Falls.
20:35He had never seen anything like them.
20:43No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England.
20:48But scenes so lovely must have been gazed on by angels in their flight.
20:57It was from this island that Livingstone got his first glimpse of what he called the most
21:03wonderful sight in Africa.
21:05But what really interested him was the vast Zambezi River itself, not for its natural
21:10beauty, but for its potential utility to his grand design.
21:18Livingstone believed he had found the means to open up Africa.
21:22Beyond the Victoria Falls, he assumed, the Zambezi must be navigable to the continent's
21:27east coast.
21:30That meant that commerce would flow upstream and Christianity would at last take root.
21:37There was just one thing missing, a suitable spot free of disease where the British themselves
21:42could settle.
21:45And then Livingstone saw his Shangri-La, the Batoka Plateau.
21:51Now his countrymen could sail up the Zambezi as far as the Victoria Falls and settle here.
21:56It seemed perfect, fertile and apparently disease-free.
22:01Once settled by white men, the Batoka Plateau would radiate civilising waves until the whole
22:05continent had been cleansed of superstition and slavery.
22:17It was a bold, even messianic vision for saving the souls of Africans.
22:25These were Livingstone's three C's.
22:29Commerce would produce civilisation and civilisation would clear the way for Christianity.
22:44Each was linked to the others in a seemingly unbreakable logical chain.
22:52In May 1856, Livingstone set off for home.
23:03He was hailed as a hero.
23:12But that same year, on the other side of the world, a crisis was brewing that would throw
23:17the whole strategy of Christianising the empire into chaos.
23:32For missionaries like David Livingstone, the interior of Africa was virgin territory.
23:40Indigenous cultures struck them as primitive.
23:43Indians' contact with Europeans had been minimal.
23:50In India, by contrast, the missionary movement faced an altogether more difficult challenge.
23:58Not only was India a manifestly more sophisticated civilisation, where both Hinduism and Islam
24:04were deeply entrenched, Europeans had been living alongside Indians for more than a century
24:09and a half.
24:22Until the first decades of the 19th century, the British hadn't the slightest notion of
24:26trying to Anglicise India, and certainly not to Christianise it.
24:34On the contrary, it was the British who often took pleasure in being Orientalised themselves.
24:48An overwhelmingly male population of merchants and soldiers working for the de facto government
24:53of the East India Company not only learned Indian languages, many also took Indian wives
24:59and mistresses. Their idea had always been to make money out of India, not to change it.
25:11The East India Company practised religious toleration out of pragmatism, not principle.
25:16Although it was now more like a government than a company, its directors still regarded
25:21trade as their paramount concern. They had no interest whatsoever in challenging traditional
25:26Indian culture. Indeed, they regarded any such challenge as posing a threat to Anglo-Indian
25:31relations, and that would be bad for business.
25:38The old Orientalism was about to clash head on with the new Evangelism.
25:47Once again, it was William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay, the Clapham sect, who led
25:52the campaign for a change of policy. They wanted India opened up to British missionaries
26:01for just the same reason that they wanted to stop the slave trade and evangelise Africa
26:06to save the world. By the time Parliament voted, 837 petitions
26:15had been submitted, urging that missionaries be let into India.
26:23These petitions have been filed away in the House of Lords for 189 years. They're from
26:30eager Evangelicals all over the country. This one's from Winchester, and here's what it
26:35says. The inhabitants of the populous regions in India, being involved in the most deplorable
26:40state of moral darkness and under the influence of the most abominable and degrading superstitions,
26:46have a preeminent claim on the compassionate feelings and benevolent services of British
26:51Christians. Once again, the Evangelicals took it for
26:57granted that they had a monopoly on morality, and once again, policy was to be changed in
27:03response to their well-organised lobbying. In 1813, a new East India Act opened the doors
27:10to missionaries, just as with the slave trade, Clapham had prevailed and the clash of civilisations
27:16had begun. To many of the missionaries, the subcontinent
27:37was a battleground in which they, as soldiers of Christ, were struggling against the forces
27:42of darkness. Theirs is a cruel religion, Wilberforce had
27:50declared. All practices of this religion have to be removed.
28:05But this was more than just a campaign to convert Indians to Christianity. It was a
28:10campaign to anglicise India's entire culture. Nowadays, the modern equivalents of the missionaries
28:20campaign against practices in far-flung lands which they consider barbaric, female circumcision
28:26or the lack of women's education. The aid organisations of the Victorian era weren't
28:31so different. In particular, two traditional practices relating to women appalled the Evangelicals
28:37here in India. One was female infanticide, which was rife in parts of northern India,
28:43but the one which really appalled them was sati, the self-immolation whereby a Hindu
28:49widow was burnt alive on her husband's funeral pyre.
29:00Between 1813 and 1825, 8,000 women had died in this way in Bengal alone.
29:08Needless to say, it was William Wilberforce who initiated the parliamentary campaign against
29:17sati. Wilberforce lost no time in gathering lurid
29:26accounts of widow burning. The widow was now led up the river, supported
29:34by her sons, amid great outcries from the multitude. She ascended it and standing, raised
29:42her hands to bless the people and then stretched herself beside the corpse of her husband.
29:48In an instant, amidst terrific shouting, the whole was in flames.
30:03Sati was far from universal, yet many Hindus persisted in regarding a widow's self-immolation
30:10as the supreme act not just of marital fidelity, but of piety. For years, the British authorities
30:16had tolerated sati in the belief that a clampdown would be construed as interference in Indian
30:22religious customs. Finally, in 1829, they banned it.
30:30The cynical but tolerant old India hands were appalled. Writing from Sitapur, Lieutenant
30:39Colonel William Playfair offered a dark warning. Any order of government prohibiting the practice
30:49would create a most alarming sensation throughout the native army. They would consider it an
30:54interference with their customs and religion. Such a feeling, once excited, there is no
30:59possibility of predicting what might happen. Playfair's fears were premature, but he was
31:06right about where the trouble would come from.
31:25The rock on which British rule in India was founded was the army. Yet eight out of ten
31:37of those who served in it were native sepoys, drawn from the country's traditional warrior
31:43castes.
31:55The sepoys were more than mere mercenaries. Whether they were Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs,
32:04they regarded their calling as warriors, as inseparable from their religious faith.
32:12This is a shrine to Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction.
32:25On the eve of battle, soldiers would come to temples like this and make sacrifices or
32:33offerings in the hope of winning her favour. But Kali is a dangerous and unpredictable
32:41Hindu legend. When she came to earth to punish wrongdoers, she ran amok, killing everyone
32:46in her path. If they felt their religion was under threat, there was a danger that the
32:51sepoys would follow her example.
32:59In 1857, rumours began to spread that Indian troops were to be issued with new cartridges,
33:05which were sealed with pork and beef fat. As the ends had to be bitten off, that implied
33:13instant defilement for both Hindus and Muslims. For the sepoys, this was the final proof that
33:21the British did have a plan to Christianise India. It was the spark that ignited the Indian
33:28mutiny.
33:45The mutiny began on the 2nd of May, 1857, at Meerut, and spread rapidly along the Great
33:50Trunk Road. Once they had resolved to defy their white officers, the Indian army was
33:59to run amok, killing every European they could find. In Lucknow, the British community was
34:10trapped here in the residency for three months. By the time relief came, two-thirds of them
34:20were dead.
34:26The Indian mutiny was more than its name implies. It was a full-blown war, and its
34:31causes were far more profound than lard-coated cartridges. The First War of Indian Independence
34:37is what the school books here call it, but it would be more accurate to describe it as
34:41an essentially conservative reaction to years of British interference in Indian culture.
34:47This was first and foremost a war of religion.
34:57To the British, the civilisation they were trying to build had collapsed into barbarism.
35:08Worst of all were the rumours that once-loyal sepoys were raping and then killing British
35:13women, the murderous heathen violating the pure and godly Victorian maiden.
35:26The mutiny seemed to confirm the idea that the empire was a struggle between good and
35:33evil, white and black, Christian and heathen. But of course, the calamity might also signify
35:43a measure of divine disapproval. Clearly, as far as the Lord was concerned, the conversion
35:48of India hadn't been proceeding quickly enough.
35:55This was the evangelical movement's worst nightmare. They had offered India Christian
36:00civilisation, and the offer had been violently rejected.
36:12In churches all over the country, the sermons turned from redemption to revenge.
36:26Now the Victorians revealed the other, harsher face of their missionary zeal.
36:35In the Crystal Palace, a congregation of 25,000 heard the fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher,
36:42the Reverend Charles Spurgeon, issue what amounted to a call for a holy war.
36:49My friends, what crimes they have committed. The Indian government never ought to have
36:55tolerated the religion of the Hindus at all. If my religion consisted of bestiality, infanticide
37:05and murder, I should have no right to it, unless I was prepared to be hanged.
37:13The sword must be taken out of its sheath to cut off our fellow subjects by their thousands.
37:23Those words were to be taken literally by the men sent out from Britain to quell the
37:27mutiny. The Indians called it the devil's wind.
37:35It was said that the path of the British army could be traced by the bodies of mutineers
37:42hanging from trees along the road. Untold thousands of Indians died in a frenzy
37:53of revenge killing. In Kanpur, prisoners were forced to lick the
37:58blood of their English victims. Elsewhere, they were strapped to the barrels
38:03of cannons and blown apart. The fruits of the mutiny were bitter indeed.
38:14The project to modernise and Christianise India had gone disastrously wrong. Those who
38:20actually had to run the place were vindicated. Tampering with native customs had been a recipe
38:26for nothing but trouble. But the evangelicals refused to accept this. As far as they were
38:31concerned, the mutiny had been caused precisely because Christianisation had been going too
38:36slowly. And there was no more influential exponent of that view than David Livingstone.
38:43On the 4th of December, 1857, just two months after the Indian mutiny was suppressed, David
39:00Livingstone gave an extraordinary lecture to would-be missionaries here in Cambridge
39:05University's Senate House. The man who had set out was David Livingstone.
39:13His attempt to Christianise the Dark Continent saw the mutiny as the result of too little missionary work, not too much.
39:23I consider we made a great mistake when we carried commerce into India, in being ashamed
39:29of our Christianity. Those two pioneers of civilisation, Christianity and commerce, should
39:37ever be inseparable. I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and
39:47Christianity. Do you carry out the work which I have begun? I leave it with you.
39:55For most of the new missionaries, theirs was to be a poignant but brief part in the great
40:02imperial drama. Scattered all over Central and East Africa are dozens of missionary graves,
40:07men and women who answered letters to the king and queen.
40:24Many of Livingstone's called to arms and paid for it with their lives. The problem
40:30was simple enough. Livingstone, the Victorian visionary, the prophet of a Christian Africa,
40:37had sold them a pup.
40:48Despite Livingstone's tourist brochure promises about the healthy highlands of Central Africa,
40:53the Batoka Plateau turned out to be infested with malarial mosquitoes. Africans might be
40:59able to live there, but for Europeans in those days it was quite literally uninhabitable.
41:04But the real problem, the one that was to prove insuperable, was with Livingstone's
41:08geography. Following the Zambezi from the Victoria Falls towards the Indian Ocean, Livingstone
41:17had bypassed a 50-mile section, believing it to be more of the same wide and navigable
41:22river. It wasn't.
41:35As Livingstone discovered when his government-sponsored expedition up the Zambezi reached there in
41:401858, the Cabora-Bassa Rapids were in the way, and no ship could ever hope to pass them.
41:47The Zambezi wasn't navigable after all.
41:54Livingstone's whole vision of penetrating Africa with commerce, civilization and Christianity
42:00had been based on a fatally flawed assumption.
42:04We were promised trade, and there is no trade. We were promised converts to the gospel, and
42:09not one has been made. We were told that the climate was salubrious, and a bishop and some
42:15of the best missionaries of the temperate region of South Africa with their wives and
42:18children have perished in the malarious swamps of the Zambezi.
42:24That was the Times in January 1863, part of a wave of criticism back in Britain. It seemed
42:30as if Livingstone's dream was in ruins, as if his life's work had been in vain.
42:38Livingstone had failed as a missionary, and now he had failed to bring commerce up the
42:43Zambezi. It had been heroic, but by the time of Livingstone's death in May 1873, his life's
42:52work seemed to have come to nothing.
43:00The inscription on Livingstone's grave reads like a final cry of despair.
43:09All I can add in my solitude is may heaven's rich blessing come down on everyone who will
43:15help to heal this open sore of the world.
43:22The open sore was of course the African slave trade based here in Zanzibar, which in Livingstone's
43:28lifetime showed no sign of abating. Yet within a month of Livingstone's death, the sore did
43:35begin to heal.
43:40In 1873, the Sultan of Zanzibar signed a treaty with Britain, pledging to abolish the East
43:46African slave trade.
43:49Finally, there was a tangible reward for Livingstone's extraordinary life.
43:58There could be few more potent symbols of Livingstone's ultimate triumph as an abolitionist
44:04than this Anglican cathedral, which stands on the site of the old slave cells.
44:15The altar was built on the exact spot where the slaves had been whipped, and it seems
44:20an appropriate monument to Livingstone's Christianising project. Admittedly, he got rather distracted
44:26in later years by a vain quest for the true source of the Nile, but there's no question
44:31that Livingstone had instilled the empire with a new moral purpose, linking the expansion
44:36of British trade with the spread of the Christian faith.
44:44In the end, this is Livingstone's greatest legacy.
44:54Today, Africa is a more Christian continent than Europe.
45:07This Zambian town, hard by the Victoria Falls, was named after Livingstone. It's where he
45:12once dreamt of building his African Jerusalem.
45:21For 50 years after his visit, no European could come here and hope to survive because
45:25of malaria. And yet today, there are no fewer than 150 churches in Livingstone.
45:43How did the project of Christianisation, which had seemed such a washout in Livingstone's
45:52lifetime, come to yield such astonishing long-term results? Why was it possible to achieve in
45:57vast tracts of Africa what had failed so abjectly in India? The answer lies in one of the most
46:04famous meetings in the history of the British Empire.
46:12Henry Morton Stanley was an ambitious, unscrupulous and trigger-happy American journalist. Apart
46:21from an iron constitution and will, he had almost nothing in common with David Livingstone.
46:29When the editor of the New York Herald commissioned him to find Livingstone, who hadn't been seen
46:33for years, Stanley centred the biggest scoop of his career.
46:41After a six-month search, Stanley finally found Livingstone at Ujiji in Tanganyika on
46:46the 3rd of November 1871. He was overwhelmed.
46:53My heart beats fast, but I must not let my face betray my emotions. I pushed back the
47:01crowds and, passing from the rear, walked down a living avenue of people, before which
47:09stood the white man. I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of such
47:16a mob. So I did what moral cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing. Walked
47:23deliberately up to him and said,
47:25Dr Livingstone, I presume. It took an American to raise the art of British understatement
47:31to its historic zenith. And yet this was more than just a great scoop. It was also a meeting
47:37between two generations, the older generation that had dreamt of bringing moral rebirth
47:43to the Africans, and a new, harder-nosed one that wanted Africa for itself.
47:55Livingstone had believed in the power of the Gospel. Stanley believed only in brute force.
48:02From now on, Livingstone's mantra of commerce, civilisation and Christianity was going to
48:07be combined with a fourth C, conquest. Christianity would eventually come to Africa, but not in
48:16the way Livingstone had hoped. It would come at gunpoint.
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