David Livingstone Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
59 free David Livingstone trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
David Livingstone trivia covers one of the strangest careers of the Victorian age. A boy who tied threads in a Scottish cotton mill from the age of ten taught himself Latin, qualified as a doctor, and spent thirty years walking across Africa: mauled by a lion, first European to see the falls he named for his queen, leader of a disastrous government steamer expedition, and finally a sick old man hunting the source of the Nile until Henry Morton Stanley walked into Ujiji with the most famous greeting in exploration. This quiz follows him from Blantyre to the London Missionary Society, the Kalahari crossing to Lake Ngami, the coast-to-coast trek from Luanda to Quelimane, the Zambezi expedition and its rusting steamer Ma Robert, the slave-trade massacre at Nyangwe, his death at Chitambo's village and the 1,000-mile journey his companions Chuma and Susi made with his body. It also covers Stanley, Victoria Falls itself, and the memorials from Clydesdale banknotes to the city of Blantyre, Malawi. Easy questions suit anyone who knows the famous line; the expert tier assumes you have read the journals. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Livingstone, Stanley and Victoria Falls, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Livingstone's famous motto for Africa was 'Christianity, Commerce and' what?
Civilization
Civilization. He believed the three together would open up Africa, with honest trade along the Zambezi giving chiefs an alternative to selling captives.
Q 02From the age of ten, David Livingstone worked 14-hour days in what kind of mill?
Cotton
Cotton. He spent part of his first week's wages on a Latin grammar and propped his books on the spinning jenny, reading a sentence each time he passed.
Q 03In 1864 Livingstone sailed his small river steamer 2,500 miles across the Indian Ocean to sell it in which city?
Bombay
Bombay. His engineer had quit, so with a scanty, untrained crew and little fuel he served as his own captain and engineer.
Q 04Which organisation sent Livingstone out to Africa in 1840?
The London Missionary Society
The London Missionary Society. He chose it for its 'perfectly unsectarian character': it sent out, he wrote, no single church but simply the Gospel.
Q 05Livingstone first wanted to be a missionary in which country before Africa?
China
China. An appeal for medical missionaries there set him studying medicine, but the First Opium War shut the door before he could sail.
Q 06Which veteran missionary inspired Livingstone with talk of 'the smoke of a thousand villages'?
Robert Moffat
Robert Moffat. Home on leave from his Kuruman mission, he urged the young Scot to push north to unoccupied ground, and Livingstone later married his daughter Mary.
Q 07Livingstone's 1857 appeal to students at which university led to the Universities' Mission to Central Africa?
Cambridge
Cambridge. He ended his Senate House lecture by saying he would soon be cut off in Africa and urging the students to take up his work: 'I leave it with you!'
Q 08Which animal attacked Livingstone at Mabotsa in 1844, crushing his left arm?
A lion
A lion. His companion Mebalwe drew the animal off and was bitten too, and the badly set bone later identified Livingstone's body in London.
Q 09Who was the only African Livingstone is recorded as converting to Christianity?
Sechele, chief of the Kwena
Sechele, chief of the Kwena. Livingstone wrote him off as a backslider within months, yet Sechele kept preaching and, one historian says, spread Christianity more than almost any European missionary.
Q 10Which desert did Livingstone cross in 1849 with the hunter William Oswell to reach Lake Ngami?
The Kalahari
The Kalahari. Oswell paid for the guides, and the first European sighting of Lake Ngami gave the unknown missionary his first taste of fame at home.
Q 11Livingstone's 1840 voyage out to Africa put in at which South American port?
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro. He called it the finest place he had ever seen, where 'everything delighted me except man', and was dismayed by the drunkenness of visiting Europeans.
Q 12On his 1854 crossing to the Atlantic, Livingstone reached which Portuguese port?
Luanda
Luanda. He turned down a passage home to keep his promise to walk his Kololo companions back, and the mail ship he would have sailed on sank off Madeira with his papers.
Q 13Which Kololo chief lent Livingstone the men who accompanied him to both coasts?
Sekeletu
Sekeletu. Eager for direct trade with the coast, the young chief supplied 27 men for the march west and 114 for the journey east.
Q 21Which steamer did Livingstone's Zambezi expedition nickname 'the Asthmatic' for its snorting, feeble engine?
Ma Robert
Ma Robert. Named after his wife's African nickname, 'mother of Robert', it burned so much wood and crawled so slowly that canoes overtook it, and it finally sank on a sandbank.
Q 22Which rapids on the Zambezi proved impassable and wrecked Livingstone's plan of a river highway?
Cahora Bassa
Cahora Bassa. On his earlier journey to the coast he had heard of the rapids without ever seeing them, and his single-engined steamer had no power to climb them.
Q 23Which artist was dismissed from the Zambezi expedition after disagreements?
Thomas Baines
Q 14Which local name, meaning 'the smoke that thunders', did Livingstone record for the falls he named after Queen Victoria?
Mosi-oa-Tunya
Mosi-oa-Tunya. It was the name his Kololo companions used, and as he paddled towards the falls he saw columns of spray rising like smoke from five or six miles off.
Q 15Victoria Falls lies on the border between which two countries?
Zambia and Zimbabwe
Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Zambezi marks the border there, and the island on the lip from which he first peered into the chasm is now called Livingstone Island.
Q 16Which insect's bite did Livingstone call 'certain death' to some domestic animals?
Tsetse fly
Tsetse fly. He judged its bite perfectly harmless to man; it was later found to spread sleeping sickness.
Q 17Livingstone's 1856 arrival at which Mozambican port completed the first European crossing of south-central Africa?
Quelimane
Quelimane. A letter was waiting there from his own society, coolly declining to fund plans 'connected only remotely with the spread of the Gospel', and he soon resigned.
Q 18Livingstone's 1857 bestseller was titled Missionary Travels and Researches in which region?
South Africa
South Africa. The bestseller lifted his family out of near poverty and gave him the money and fame to leave his mission society and return as an explorer.
Q 19What government post did Livingstone take up after resigning as a missionary?
British consul
British consul. The roving post, covering Africa's eastern coast and the independent interior, came with command of a government expedition to explore the Zambezi.
Q 20In what position did Livingstone's attendants find him when he died in 1873?
Kneeling at his bedside
Kneeling at his bedside. Too weak to walk, he had been brought to the hut on a litter; by a candle still burning they saw his head in his hands on the pillow, as if in prayer.
Thomas Baines. The expedition's artist and storekeeper, he later reached Victoria Falls with the hunter James Chapman, and his paintings of them were published as an album of colour prints.
Q 24Which great lake, called Nyasa by Livingstone, did his Zambezi expedition reach in 1859?
Lake Malawi
Lake Malawi. He reached it in September 1859, and the British interest he stirred in the country around it led to a protectorate, later named Nyasaland, that is today's Malawi.
Q 25Which relative joined Livingstone's Zambezi expedition and co-wrote his book about it?
His brother Charles
His brother Charles. He left a pastorate in New England to join as general assistant, and back in Britain in 1864 the two wrote up the expedition together.
Q 26Of what did Mary Livingstone die in April 1862 on the Zambezi?
Malaria
Malaria. Determined to rejoin him after years apart, she fell ill at Shupanga less than three months after they were reunited and died within a week.
Q 27What geographical mystery obsessed Livingstone's final expedition?
The source of the Nile
The source of the Nile. Burton, Speke and Baker had pointed to the great lakes further north, but Livingstone was sure it lay to the south and searched there until he died.
Q 28The Lualaba, which Livingstone explored in his last years, becomes which great river downstream?
The Congo
The Congo. Livingstone never followed it far enough to be sure, and Stanley settled the question by riding it downstream all the way to the Atlantic.
Q 29At which Lualaba market town did Livingstone watch Arab slavers massacre hundreds of people in 1871?
Nyangwe
Nyangwe. It was the furthest point of his last journey, and the slaughter in the crowded market left him too shattered to go on, so he turned back east.
Q 30Which newspaper sent Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone?
The New York Herald
Stanley, born John Rowlands in Wales, had earlier bribed a telegraph operator to file his Magdala report ahead of the army's.