"The last decade of David Livingstone’s life did not go well for the famed Scottish missionary and explorer. In 1862, his long-neglected wife, Mary, came to join him in Mozambique, but she quickly contracted malaria and died. Nevertheless, he continued on his mission to find a navigable route through the River Zambezi. But in 1864, seven years before his famous run-in with Henry Morgan Stanley, Livingstone was forced to give up and return to Britain after most of his men abandoned him or succumbed to disease. He quickly fell from public grace as word got out about his failure to navigate the river. Eager to redeem his reputation, he returned to Africa two years later, this time in search of the source of the Nile River. But yet again, his assistants soon began deserting him, and added insult to injury by taking all of his food and medicine with them. Starving and crippled by pneumonia, cholera and cutaneous leishmaniasis, Livingstone had no other choice but to turn to Arab traders for help. But this posed a moral dilemma for the staunch abolitionist: his saviors were the types of men he had been criticizing throughout his professional career for their involvement in the lucrative slave trade in India and the Arab peninsula." - Mark H

"The diary begins on March 23, 1871. Forced to team up with the Arab slave traders due to his deteriorating health, Livingstone found—to his dismay—that he was actually beginning to like these men. “The Arabs are very kind to me, sending cooked food every day,” he wrote in April. He told them about the Bible, taught them how to make mosquito nets and drank fermented banana juice with them, which he swore off in the next day’s entry." - Mark H

"On July 15, however, Livingstone was abruptly woken from his stupor. The traders—his friends—went into a busy nearby market and began randomly firing guns into the crowd and burning down surrounding villages, killing at least 300 people, many of them women and children. Livingstone had never witnessed such an atrocity before, and he was “crushed, devastated and spiritually broken,” Wisnicki says. In Livingstone’s own words: “I was so ashamed of the bloody Moslem company in which I found myself that I was unable to look at the Manyema. . . This massacre was the most terrible scene I ever saw.”" - Mark H