Dr Livingstone’s Lost 1871 ‘Massacre’ Diary

Nov 3 2011 by Shirley Bartynek, Hamilton Advertiser

A DIARY written 140 years ago by Blantyre explorer David Livingstone on old newspaper with makeshift ink can be read today for the first time.

An international team of experts have used modern technology to reveal Livingstone’s harrowing account of the massacre of 400 slaves from a script that had faded into illegibility.

Later, Livingstone told the story to the journalist HM Stanley, whose report of the massacre changed history and forced the British Government to close the East Africa slave trade.

The remarkable 18-month project to uncover Livingstone’s personal account of the “unspeakable horror” of the slave trade was revealed today by the National Library of Scotland, home to many of Livingstone’s papers, including parts of his African diaries.

The diary pages recounting the massacre come from the David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre, run by the National Trust for Scotland.

When he wrote this particular diary, Livingstone was out of the public eye and was stranded without supplies in Central Africa.

He was forced to use berry seeds as ink and scribbled over the pages of a copy of the London Standard.

Exposed to the African environment, the manuscript deteriorated rapidly and was virtually invisible to the naked eye.

However, a team of scholars and scientists from the United States and the UK used spectral imaging to recover Livingstone’s original text.

This involves illuminating the manuscript with successive wavelengths of light – starting with ultraviolet – working through the visible spectrum, and ending with infra-red. Processed digital images enhanced the selected text.

However, Dr Adrian Wisnicki, who led the project, says there is evidence in the diary that suggests members of Livingstone’s party might have been involved in the massacre.

“Livingstone seems to have considered this possibility and this, together with his failure to intervene, appears to have left him with a profound sense of remorse,” says Dr Wisnicki, assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, London.

“In copying over the 1871 diary into his journal, Livingstone decided to rewrite or remove a series of problematic passages. It’s taken 140 years to discover Livingstone’s original words and reveal the many secrets of the original diary.”

Dr Wisnicki anticipates that the publication of the 1871 diary will change the way the public think of Livingstone.

He said: “Instead of the saintly hero of Victorian mythology, the man who speaks directly to us from the pages of his private diary is passionate, vulnerable and deeply conflicted about the violent events he witnesses, his culpability and the best way to intervene – if at all.”