Throughout the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans remained largely restricted to the coasts of Africa and had virtually no knowledge of the interior. The one person most responsible for opening pathways into the interior of Africa was David Livingstone. Born in Scotland in 1813, Livingstone traveled to Cape Town in 1841 to preach Christianity to the natives. Hungry for adventure, he endeavored to cross the Kalahari Desert in 1849. In 1851, he became the first European to see the Zambezi River, at which point a new dream was born—was there a navigable river from the coast of
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