The David Livingstone centre, bless, will always try to paint him in a positive light.

His biographer Tim Jeal, however, makes clear that he was imperfect, obsessive, perverse and often misguided man.

He wrote lovely letters to his wife, but it was probably a marriage of convenience, at least to begin with.  He risked their lives and health, and after Mary’s premature death on the Zambezi, eventually dispatched the children back to a “wretched exile” in Britain.

He had extraordinary endurance.  But 2 of his most disastrous judgements ended in serious loss of life.  And his last journey was that of a frail, delusional old man, struggling to control a murderous batch of porters, eventually to die lonely in Chitambo village.

[Julie Davidson, Sunday Herald]