This is not the kind of book that normally gets reviewed in a scholarly historical journal. Its author, who died three months before the book was published, was a Dutch medical doctor who spent time in Liberia and Gabon. He had a doctorate in agricultural sciences, though this had no relation to Africa. His book was a retirement project, a labor of love. The book was originally written in Dutch and published privately by the author in 2002. The foreword, by Sjaak van der Geest, a medical anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam, informs us that Sjoerd Rijpma struggled to find a publisher for the English translation, mostly because of the length of the book, and that the author ‘stubbornly refused to shorten his book’. Finally, Brill took pity on him and published it as it stands.

The argument of the book dictates its idiosyncratic structure. Rijpma's primary concern, as outlined in Part One of the book, is to question the narrative of the perpetual underdevelopment and nutritional poverty of Africa, and to suggest that its modern high rates of infant mortality and child malnutrition are attributable to the multiple disruptions of landholding, distribution of labor between the sexes, and indigenous medical traditions brought about by European colonialism. Specifically, he argues that the high incidence of child mortality in modern Africa is to be explained by the abandonment of indigenous traditions of prolonged breastfeeding, sexual abstinence after childbirth, and consequent spacing of births. In order to pursue this quest, he looked for the most systematic chronicler of African societies and agricultural production in the immediate precolonial period and, with good reason, fastened on David Livingstone as the best candidate.

Rijpma felt it necessary first to establish whether Livingstone could be judged a reliable informant. Part Two accordingly proceeds on a lengthy investigation of whether Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) and Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi (1865) may be treated as reliable sources of information about Africa. His conclusion is ambivalent. By reference to modern critical biographies of Livingstone such as Tim Jeal's, and by comparison of Livingstone's published accounts with his original letters and journals, Rijpma concludes that Livingstone ‘cannot be considered as a “usable”, let alone “reliable” source of “general” information’. However, this pessimistic verdict is then immediately cancelled out by the judgment that in the areas of medicine and natural history, ‘in which he was trained’ (a curious judgment in respect of natural history), Livingstone is indeed a reliable informant. On that basis, Rijpma embarks on a Part Three in which Missionary Travels and Researches and Narrative of an Expedition are examined all over again, but this time with particular reference to Livingstone's observations on matters of health and nutrition, and with the addition of an examination from the same perspective of his Last Journals, edited by Horace Waller. The conclusion reached is that Livingstone was consistently impressed by the number of healthy Africans whom he met and that very few children whom he encountered displayed symptoms of malnutrition.

Rijpma's conclusions are quite plausible and he tells us that his work has been subjected to the expert historical scrutiny of Jan Vansina. The result of this approach, however, is an unduly protracted and rambling volume. It is full of narrative detail that is superfluous to the argument. The reader is taken on two successive narrative journeys through Livingstone's explorations, the first framed by a wide horizon and the second by a narrower perspective more directly related to the primary theme of the book. Thus Riijpma presents us with two biographical treatments of Livingstone within a single volume, one of a general kind and one of a medical and agricultural nature. He has excavated the relevant primary sources with exemplary thoroughness, with the consequence that his analysis of Livingstone's travels is often fuller and more richly textured than in any modern biography. His historical judgement is, as might be expected of a writer not trained as a historian, of varying reliability: he refers, for example, to the ‘temporary conversion’ of the Bakwena chief Sechele, when it is quite clear that Sechele remained committed to Christianity even after his resumption of polygamy; and Livingstone's commitment to legitimate commerce, drawn from T. F. Buxton and ultimately John Philip, is dismissed as a ‘pseudo-humanitarian doctrine’. In fact, Livingstone's appeal in 1857 to a providentialist understanding of the harmony of Britain's Christian duty and her self-interest in freeing herself from dependence on American slave-grown cotton attracted considerable support among the Lancashire free trade lobby. In sum, this unusual book will repay attention both from Livingstone specialists and from historians of public health and agriculture in Africa, but its prolixity and lack of consistent focus will try the patience of all but the most tolerant of readers.