r. Livingstone was indirectly responsible for the opening up of Rhodesia, for it was to carry mail and provisions to his son-in-law that Dr. Robert Moffat paid his famous visit to Matabeleland in 1854.

r. Livingstone was born in 1813 at Blantyre, Scotland. He qualified as a medical missionary and joined the London Missionary Society in 1840. Next year he landed in Africa and was posted to Kuruman where he fell under the influence of Dr. Moffat and married Mary Moffat, one of his daughters.

rom Kuruman Livingstone made several expeditions of exploration across the Kalahari Desert until in August 1851 he stumbled, Columbus-like, upon a new world, a country of lush plains and healthy uplands woven together by a network of navigable streams leading into a "glorious river", the Zambezi. By discovering that the deep interior of Africa, instead of being a desert, was a land of exhuberant fertility, Livingstone had made the greatest "breakthrough" in all the history of African exploration.

r. Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls during the great journey he undertook between 1854 and 1856. Starting at Linyanti, half-way between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and armed only with a walking-stick, magic lantern, sextant, compass, nautical almanac, tattered Bible and unbounded faith, the doctor tramped right across the breadth of Africa, first going to Luanda on the west coast, then returning to Linyanti and descending the Zambezi to Quelimane. On 16 November 1855, during the latter part of the march, Livingstone was the first white man to see the Victoria Falls, and that night he wrote in his journal "Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight." He revisited the Falls again in August 1860 during the course of the Zambezi expedition, and then briefly entered Rhodesia to sketch the Falls from the south bank.

ivingstone devoted the remainder of his life to exploration and the eradication of the Slave Trade in Central Africa. He died in 1873 at Chitambo in modern Zambia. His body was carried to the coast by his devoted African servants, Chuma and Susi. From there it was conveyed by cruiser to England and buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey close to the grave of the Unknown Warrior.