David Livingstone citations

David Livingstone est un médecin, missionnaire protestant et explorateur écossais qui contribua à la fois au développement et à la promotion de l'empire commercial britannique d'une part, à la lutte contre la traite esclavagiste et à l'évangélisation du Sud du continent africain d'autre part. Il participa au mouvement d'exploration et de cartographie de l'intérieur du continent africain précédant le « partage de l'Afrique » entre grandes puissances européennes. Il fut notamment le premier Européen à découvrir la vallée du Zambèze et consacra une partie de sa vie à rechercher les sources du Nil.

Livingstone fut l'un des héros britanniques les plus populaires et les plus emblématiques de l'époque victorienne. Avec sa volonté d'articuler recensement des richesses de l'Afrique dans une perspective commerciale et évangélisation, il correspond à un tournant dans la perspective missionnaire. La haute idée qu'il avait de sa culture d'origine et sa volonté de faire « bénéficier » les Africains des avantages de la civilisation britannique en font un précurseur de l'impérialisme colonial européen qui se déploya après sa mort.

Sa « disparition », suivie de l'expédition de Henry Morton Stanley pour le retrouver, ajoutèrent à la glorification et au mythe victorien de cet explorateur majeur de l'Afrique. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. mars 1813 – 1. mai 1873
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David Livingstone: 6   citations 0   J'aime

David Livingstone: Citations en anglais

“Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.”

Speech to students at Cambridge University (4 December 1857)
Contexte: People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

“People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay?”

Speech to students at Cambridge University (4 December 1857)
Contexte: People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

“To overdraw its evil is a simple impossibility”

Livingstone While talking about the slave trade in East Africa in his journals.

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