On the last stretch, a 60km dirt road between the main highway and the Zambezi, I was suddenly seized by a sense that we were unprepared. “We must find flowers!” I insisted. “Flowers for the grave.”

It was early September and southern Africa was moving into spring; there were rich new leaves on the trees and their branches were draped with flame creeper. Our route to Chupanga, a remote village in the Mozambican province of Sofala, took us through pristine miombo woodland but most blossoms were out of reach.

Later, when Mike slowed the Land Rover to inspect three white-headed vultures breakfasting on a tasty corpse, we spotted vermilion flowers on a shrub. I picked three blossoms, one for myself and each of my companions: Mike Muyafula, driver, guide and friend, and Gaia Allison, new acquaintance and adviser with Sofala’s government. Then I plucked a fourth – for Tim Jeal who was thousands of miles away launching his masterly new biography of Henry Morton Stanley.

Two weeks earlier, when I met the British writer at the Edinburgh Book Festival and told him about my trip, he made a request: “Lay a flower on Mary’s grave for me.” It was the least I could do, as he was the man who primed my ambition to reach the forgotten grave of Mary Livingstone in an obscure corner of Mozambique.

As with most Scots of my generation, the moral lessons of the David Livingstone story, along with its heroic elements and exotic context, were ingested with our school milk, but three years ago I read Jeal’s definitive biography of David Livingstone (Livingstone, Yale University Press) for the first time. It was a revelation, not only because it illustrates how the great but flawed Victorian led his second Zambezi expedition into catastrophe, but because it introduced me to the life of his wife – and to the inescapable fact that Livingstone’s obstinate conviction that the river was navigable from the sea to the Victoria Falls caused her death.

Mary’s wellbeing had long been sacrificed to her husband’s wanderlust. The more I read about her unhappy life, the more interested I became in this courageous but neglected woman who is little more than a footnote to the Livingstone legend. He has a tomb in Westminster Abbey, two statues at the Victoria Falls, a monument at Chitambo, in Zambia, where he died, a memorial museum in Scotland and any number of eponymous landmarks in central and southern Africa. She has no such honours. “Poor Mary lies on Shupanga brae,” as Livingstone himself wrote, overwhelmed by her death and belatedly tormented by regrets.

Where was Shupanga brae? I asked questions, made contacts. The grave’s site, 90km upriver from the Zambezi delta, was not unknown. I had seen its grainy photograph in the David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre, Scotland. Now called Chupanga, the village had long been a Portuguese trading centre when it became a base for Livingstone’s government-sponsored expedition of 1858. The journey’s purpose was to explore and establish the Zambezi as “God’s Highway” – a commercial waterway which would bring Christianity, commerce and colonisation to the interior and eliminate the slave trade – but six years later it collapsed in acrimony, with the loss of a dozen lives and £50,000 of British taxpayers’ money.

After a fatal attack of malaria, the mother of Livingstone’s five children was buried under a heap of stones in the shade of a baobab tree. Over 30 years later, a Catholic mission was established at the village and Mary’s grave became the centrepiece of its cemetery. At some point, as Chupanga mission grew into one of the largest and most dynamic in southern Africa, Livingstone family members replaced the cairn and wooden cross with a concrete tomb and headstone.

Mary Livingstone is better known in Africa as Mary Moffat. Born and raised in what is now South Africa, daughter of the distinguished Moffats of Kuraman (the mission where she met the young Scot on his first posting), she’d shared many of Livingstone’s early adventures, including two gruelling Kalahari treks to Lake Ngami. But although they were married 18 years they spent only half of them together. When he dispatched his family to the UK to free him for further exploration, she led a wretched, impecunious, nomadic life, desperately missing his support and dependent on the charity of friends and the London Missionary Society.

After his four-year coast-to-coast journey and “discovery” of the Victoria Falls, Livingstone returned to Britain a national hero and wrote the best-selling Missionary Travels. Mary’s money worries were over, but she was damaged. She had become over-reliant on tipples of brandy and was in danger of losing her faith. Conscious that his wife couldn’t be left alone again, Livingstone planned to take her on his next expedition. She sailed with him as far as Cape Town but didn’t join his cramped Zambezi steamship for another four years, as on the voyage out she discovered she was pregnant.

Her death three months after their reunion was the nadir of the expedition, although Livingstone had accepted at last that no steamship could ever pass the rapids at Cabora Bassa. He’d turned his attention to the Shire, the Zambezi tributary that led him to the mighty inland sea of “Niassa” (Lake Malawi) and the hills he called the Shire Highlands. This was the route I followed in reverse – not by boat but by Land Rover down the Shire Valley from Blantyre, the Malawian city named for Livingstone’s Scottish birthplace. The drive was only 480km, but our itinerary included two lonely border posts and one formidable obstacle: the Zambezi.

Sofala Province is one of the least developed regions in Mozambique. Its gateway to the Indian Ocean is the provincial capital of Beira and its northeast frontier is the Zambezi, which is both blessing and curse to those who live on its flood plains. They suffer regularly when the river swells and spills, and Chupanga is pressed into service as a camp for the displaced. Sofala was also cruelly affected by Mozambique’s 16-year civil war, and so was Chupanga mission. The church and buildings – home to a community of about 400 people – were laid waste, and the graveyard succumbed to the bush.

As emails whizzed back and forth between Scotland, Malawi and Mozambique, four people played key roles in getting me to Mary’s grave. Graeme White, who has a forestry concession near Chupanga, provided up-to-date information on the reopened mission and put me in touch with Gaia Allison, whose brief with the provincial government includes tourist development. And Chris Badger, managing director of Central African Wilderness Safaris, was sufficiently intrigued to provide a Land Rover at cost, with the complimentary services of Mike Muyafula, the best driver in Africa I’ve ever had.

The journey from Blantyre was uneventful, the border bureaucracy trouble-free and we made good time. Before Mike and I could rendezvous with Gaia at Mphingwe Camp, in the Whites’ Capatu concession, we had to cross the Zambezi at Mutarara, where we knew there was a bridge: a famous bridge, as we learned later. The 4km-long Dona Ana Bridge, the longest railway bridge in Africa, was built by the Portuguese in 1934 and blown up by Renamo soldiers during the civil war.

When we reached Mutarara we were told that we could cross the damaged and railless railway bridge in our Land Rover, but only at dawn, midday or dusk. The rest of its daylight hours were given over to repairs. Thus, in the workforce’s lunch break, the Zambezi was breached in at a cautious pace in convoy.

The following day found us looking for flowers on the way to Chupanga. I found my pulse quickening as I got my first sight of the restored church, the derelict mission buildings and the crumbling cemetery wall. The weather was heavy and sullen when Mary died, but on the morning of our visit the light was sublime, with a generous breeze blowing up the “brae” from the Zambezi. The grave was conspicuous among lesser monuments, its concrete cracked and scorched by fires lit to clear the elephant grass. Nearby we found the dead roots of the baobab tree, which is long gone.

As I approached Mary’s headstone, I felt a surge of emotions: satisfaction from achieving a longstanding goal, excitement for reaching the terminus of an adventurous journey and an aching sadness for the woman whose devotion to Livingstone was not only heroic but self-destructive. The shabby headstone, of course, says nothing of this. It merely records: “Here repose the mortal remains of Mary Moffat, the beloved wife of Doctor Livingstone, in humble hope of a joyful resurrection by our saviour Jesus Christ. She died in Shupanga House, 27th April 1862, aged 41 years.”

Gaia had set up a meeting with Father Medard Biembe Bakamba at the mission. With the blessing of Sofala’s tourism department we’d hatched a tentative plan to put Mary’s grave ‘on the map’ – an ambition dependant on finding funds to install visitor information in the church and put direction signs at the highway turn-off. Father Medard was keen to cooperate and had already made his own efforts to care for the last resting place of Livingstone’s wife. He noted: “We printed some leaflets in English, Portuguese and Sena, and locked the cemetery gate, inviting people to come to us for the key and make a small donation towards maintenance. But the few visitors we do get just climbed through the damaged wall.” The mission has more pressing priorities. Outside help is needed. Sitting under a cashew tree with the priest we talked over the need to launch a ‘Mary Moffat Fighting Fund’.

Two days later I returned to the cemetery. Our blossoms had shrivelled in the sun, but it was Sunday morning and the exuberant sound of African hymns spilled from the church. The Zambezi looked benign under blue skies and cottonwool clouds, and a lilac-breasted roller was showboating above the trees. Not a bad spot in which to spend eternity. I touched Mary’s headstone one last time and came close to saying a prayer. “I hope you found peace on Shupanga brae.”

Julie Davidson is writing a book about Mary Livingstone, and would like to thank Central African Wilderness Safaris and Wildlife Worldwide for helping support her research in Malawi and Mozambique.

The Mary Moffat Fighting Fund

Though still in its formative stages, the project has the approval of Sofala province’s department of tourism and the Chupanga mission. It aims to
raise money from churches, individuals and other sources to meet three priorities:
1. Road signage directing people to Chupanga – “site of Mary Livingstone’s grave”
2. A presentation on Mary’s life in the Chupanga church, with images and information supplied by the David Livingstone Centre in Blantyre, Scotland
3. Repairs to the infrastructure and ongoing maintenance of Chupanga cemetery, which is still in use

For more information, potential supporters should contact Julie Davidson in Scotland
( ) or Gaia Allison ( ) in Mozambique