David Livingstone travelled in central Africa from the early 1850s until his death in 1873. His call for others to continue his work has inspired missionaries since then. Our paper explores this aspect of Livingstone's legacy through interviews with Church of Scotland missionaries who lived and worked in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia from the 1950s to the 1970s. The interviews reveal that Livingstone was remembered in both overt and subtle ways. We argue that his career provided both temporal and geographical markers from which our interviewees assessed their own work and experiences a century later. Recalling Livingstone's life provided historical and geographical meaning for our interviewees as they worked in those same spaces that Livingstone did. The paper also discusses the changes to missionary life in the 1960s, when Zambia achieved independence