The Surgeon

Their suspicions were correct. Livingstone’s surviving private correspondence with family members and close associates confirms that he, along with his father-in-law the Rev. Robert Moffat, assisted Kgosi Sechele in the direct ordering of guns and bullet moulds from the Birmingham Gun quarter, then the world’s leading centre for the manufacture of made to individual order armaments. In a May 1849 letter to Moffat, Livingstone thus notes:

“Sechele sends three really splendid tiger (leopard/nkwe) karosses to Birmingham, two to the ladies who sent the chairs, not as payment, but as tebogelo for their friendship to one they knew whom not.