Tim Jeal obituary
Originally published by Africa | The Guardian — Read the original article →
Biographer who altered perceptions of Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone, Robert Baden-Powell and other figures active in Africa
Thanks to the biographer and novelist Tim Jeal, who has died aged 81, we now know that one of the most famous sentences in journalism – “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” – was almost certainly never uttered.
In November 1871, after a 700-mile expedition, the Welsh-American journalist and adventurer Henry Morton Stanley tracked down David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer. He had been lost to the outside world for six years and was now nearing death, in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania.