David Livingstone was born in a single room in a cotton mill tenement in Blantyre, Scotland, one of seven children. He started working at age ten — fourteen-hour days tying broken threads under a spinning jenny — and spent his first week's wages on a Latin grammar book, which he propped on the machine and read while he worked. What came after that was one of the most extraordinary lives in the Victorian age: three crossings of the African continent on foot, the discovery of Victoria Falls, a decades-long campaign against the East African slave trade, and a death kneeling in prayer in a hut in Zambia, alone in the dark, still looking for a river that flows nowhere near where he thought it did.

But the public story of Livingstone — the heroic missionary-explorer, the moral beacon — was always a simplification of the actual man. He made one confirmed convert in a lifetime of missionary work. He accepted food and logistical help from the same slave traders he publicly condemned. He left his wife and four children in poverty in Britain for years at a stretch. Mary Livingstone died in Africa, on her third attempt to join him there, at 41. He lived eleven more years and never found what he was looking for.

This episode is about the gap between the legend and the person — and about two men named Abdullah Susi and James Chuma, who carried Livingstone's body 1,500 kilometres to the coast over nine months after his death, lost their own people to fever along the way, and were then largely written out of the story that followed. It is about what it costs to walk toward things without ever learning how to turn around.