“I proposed to catch the bloodhounds who fired in the market and on the canoes and put their heads on poles” (Image: David Livingstone Centre/Birkbeck, University of London)

Explorer David Livingstone has been credited with ending the east African slave trade by reporting a massacre of slaves in 1871. A new analysis of his original diary entries, however, shows that he sanitised his account.

Deciphered through sophisticated digital imaging techniques, the entries reveal his previously unreported hunger to avenge the massacre of 400 out of 1500 slaves gathered for sale in a market in Nyangwe, a village in what is now the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were slaughtered by slave traders firing indiscriminately into the throng.

News of the massacre emerged in the world press after Livingstone recounted the events to the journalist Henry Stanley after their famous meeting.


Stanley’s reports of the massacre changed history, prompting the British government to close the east African slave trade, and sealed Livingstone’s place in history as the catalyst for abolition.

But the newly deciphered diary entries demonstrate how Livingstone sanitised his own original accounts of the massacre, omitting raw emotional reactions to what he witnessed. They also reveal that he denied the possibility that those guilty of the massacre were part of his own party.

Heads on poles

In the “official” version, for example, Livingstone makes excuses for not pursuing the murderers, writing: “My first impulse was to pistol the murderers but Dugumbe [a leading slave trader in the village] protested against my getting into a blood feud and I was thankful afterwards that I took his advice.”

In the original diary, Livingstone was far more impassioned about finding the culprits, writing: “I went over to Dugumbe and proposed to catch the bloodhounds who fired in the chitoka [market] and on the canoes and put their heads on poles.”

“He was clearly furious, bewildered and devastated by what had happened,” says project director Adrian Wisnicki of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, who is also a research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.

Livingstone had slaves of his own at the time, and they were accused of being involved in the massacre. His original entry is ambiguous on this point: “Shot after shot followed on the terrified fugitives – great numbers died – and a worthless Moslem asserted that all was done by the people of the English – this will spread though the murderers are on the other side [of the river] plundering and shooting.”

In his sanitised version, he is much more adamant about clearing his own party of blame, writing: “Two wretched Moslems asserted ‘that the firing was done by the people of the English’. I asked one of them why he lied so and could utter no excuse.”

Livingstone himself sanitised his original 1871 entries when he copied them into his journal a year later, and these were edited further before they were published.

Invisible ink

Now historians can read the original, 80-page diary, thanks to a digital imaging technique that involves scanning the text with 12 different wavelengths of light, from infrared through to blue.

The entries have been illegible until now because Livingstone, lacking proper ink and paper, wrote them using pigments from berries on newspaper that was already covered with printed text. Over time, the pigments faded, blurred and merged illegibly with the underlying newsprint.

After scanning each page with the different wavelengths, researchers led by Mike Toth of R. B. Toth Associates – a company based in Washington DC that specialises in imaging ancient manuscripts – were able to distinguish Livingstone’s original words written in “berry” ink.

Wisnicki says the original accounts, which took 18 months to decipher, give historians a new, vivid picture of what happened at the time. Till now, they have mostly relied on The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, a compendium of Livingstone’s journals edited after the explorer’s death in 1873 by his close friend, Horace Waller, and published a year later.

Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary: A multispectral critical edition, funded by the British Academy and the US National Endowment for the Humanities, is now available free online through a digital library hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles.