This image depicts Arab slave traders attacking Nyangwe on the near the Great Lakes and Central Interior regions. Livingstone described this in July 1871, in which he reports that "the Arabs themselves estimated the loss of life at between 330 and 400 souls" (p. 382-384). David Livingstone (1813–1873) was a famous Scottish physician, Christian missionary, explorer and abolitionist. His interest was to locate the source of the Nile River. His missionary work also reinforced the European “Scramble for Africa” and the colonization of the continent. This engraving was made from Livingstone's sketches. It is reproduced in Thomas W. Knox, The Boy Travellers on the Congo (New York, 1888), p. 219, where it is captioned Muini Dujambi's Followers Attacking Nyangwè. Knox's book, in turn, is a condensation of Henry Stanley's famous Through the Dark Continent (New York, 1878), but the Knox publishers took their images from several volumes of African travel exploration (p.2), without citing their sources. See images C014 and knox02.

David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to his death . . . by Horace Waller (London, 1874), vol. 1, facing p. 133; and (New York, 1875), facing p. 383.

Livingstone, David

English

Image is in the public domain. Metadata is available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

knox01

Africa--Great Lakes

Africa--Rainforest

"The Massacre of the Manyuema Women at Nyangwe", Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed March 28, 2023, http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/2898