David Livingstone (1813–1873) was a Scottish physician, Congregationalist, and pioneer Christian missionary, an explorer in Africa, a writer and one of the most popular British heroes of the late 19th-century Victorian era.
Though known to some European geographers before the 19th century, David Livingstone identified the falls in 1855, providing the English colonial name of Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria. Since the mid 20th century, the site has been an increasingly important source of tourism. Zambia and Zimbabwe both have national parks and tourism infrastructure at the site.
Livingstone recorded his accomplishments modestly but effectively in his "Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa" (1857), which quickly sold more than 70,000 copies and took its place in publishing history as well as in that of exploration and missionary endeavour. Honours flowed in upon him.
Livingstone advocated the establishment of trade and religious missions in central Africa, but abolition of the African slave trade, as carried out by the Portuguese of Tete and the Arab Swahili of Kilwa, became his primary goal. His motto—now inscribed on his statue at Victoria Falls was "Christianity, Commerce and Civilization", a combination that he hoped would form an alternative to the slave trade, and impart dignity to the Africans in the eyes of Europeans. He believed that the key to achieving these goals was the navigation of the Zambezi River as a Christian commercial highway into the interior.
In 1864, Livingstone, with his brother Charles, wrote an other book, "Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries" (1865).
Livingstone died on 1 May 1873 at the age of 60 in Chief Chitambo's village at Chipundu, southeast of Lake Bangweulu, in present-day Zambia, from malaria and internal bleeding due to dysentery.
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