Historical Materials

Lead Image Details

Lead image caption: Image of a two-page spread from David Livingstone and Informants from Zanzibar, “Notebook III” (22 July-7 October 1871), in Livingstone Online, ed. Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward, new version, second edition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2020). Copyright David Livingstone Centre, Blantyre. As relevant, copyright Dr. Neil Imray Livingstone Wilson. Images of the Livingstone manuscripts from the David Livingstone Centre are copyright University of Glasgow Photographic Unit. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.

Lead image commentary: The page at right, the first in a series of such pages, presents a list of Swahili words with definitions in English. Notably, the list begins with “Taone or Towny,” the Swahili word for “cholera.” Cholera had been the source of a significant epidemic in Zanzibar and East Africa in 1869 and 1870. The page at left makes clear that Livingstone worked with a variety of informants to gather the words in the list: “Suaheli spoken by the people from Zanzibar = collected in 1870-71.” The inclusion of such raw, field-based data points to the layered authorship of this document; word choices – for instance, the fact that the list begins with the words for “cholera” – indicate that local African cultural priorities exerted more influence in shaping the list than might be evident at first.

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