David Livingstone Statue

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David Livingstone Statue
David Livingstone Statue.jpg
David Livingstone Statue
LocationLivingstone Victoria Falls
MaterialBronze statue
Opening dateNovember 2005
Dedicated to"David Livingstone
1813–1873
"

The statue of David Livingstone was erected at the Victoria Falls in Livingstone in November 2005[1]. It features a full body replica of Dr Livingstone standing with his right holding his journal and his left hand raised to his forehead as he look upon the water falls.

History

David Livingstone memorial at Victoria Falls, the first statue on the Zimbabwean side

The plan came in 2004 after a life-sized bronze statue of Dr David Livingstone which is located in Zimbabwe overlooking at the Victoria Falls for more than half a century. But after years of neglect by its current owners, the Zimbabwean government the Zambia government began to start calling for the statue sculpted in the 1930s by Sir William Reid Dick, to be handed over to them. Some older Leya people claim that the statue was originally erected on their side of the Zambezi - then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia - but was moved during the 1950s to its present site overlooking the Devil's Cataract, on what is now the Zimbabwean side. The figure of the Victorian explorer, leaning on his walking stick, has stood on the Zimbabwean side of the falls and been seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year to one of the seven natural wonders of the world. However the Zimbabwean made it clear that it had no intention of handing the statue over[2].

The Zambia authorities want to cap their success by making the figure of Africa's most celebrated explorer the center piece of the town of Livingstone, where the tourist trade is booming and so Donald Chikumbi, a senior official at Zambia's National Heritage Conservation Commission, went asked the Foreign Office in London and the British High Commission in Lusaka to help get to the bottom of the mystery. He was said that "Ideally, we would like to have the Victoria Falls statue, but obviously we have a stronger case if we can show that it was originally in Zambia. What is clear is that Zimbabwe does not want us to have it,"[2].


Location

The monument is located at the Victoria Falls.

Architecture

Life

David Livingstone (19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873[3]) was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and an explorer in Africa, one of the most popular national heroes of late–19th-century in Victorian Britain. He had a mythical status that operated on a number of interconnected levels: protestant missionary martyr, working-class "rags-to-riches" inspirational story, scientific investigator and explorer, imperial reformer, anti-slavery crusader, and advocate of commercial and colonial expansion.

Notes and references

  1. The Times of Zambia online: "David Livingstone remembered", 15 November 2005 – 23 November 2005; accessed 26 April 2007.
  2. 2.0 2.1 Dr Livingstone's statue is ours, we presume, Zambia informs Mugabe", 01 Aug 2004; accessed 15 November 2016.
  3. Lua error in ...ribunto/includes/engines/LuaCommon/lualib/mwInit.lua at line 23: bad argument #1 to 'old_ipairs' (table expected, got nil).