Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery earlier this year which then transferred to the Royal Scottish Academy, this splendidly attractive tribute to Livingstone is very well done, and will scarcely fail to become a prized collector's item.

A sumptuous and well-selected array of illustrations from a multitude of sources, some well known but others not, is offered with six short chapters by as many authors who combine to celebrate their subject with a great deal of good sense and scholarship. Given the literally enormous Livingstonian bibliography that is available, these authors cannot have anything very new to say, save in viewing the man and his times from a latter-day perspective; but this they do with a tactful skill that helps to explain why Livingstone became a figure of towering fame in his lifetime (1813-73) and remained so for many decades after.

Yet there is still some puzzle here. Through some 30 years after 1840 Livingstone made difficult and often cripplingly exhausting journeys "beyond other men's limits" in the then unknown Africa north of the Orange River. He did this not so much in an attempt to convert the heathen, a project that he well saw was beyond his achievement, as to win the geographical and ethnographical knowledge whereby, ultimately, "unknown tribes" could be brought into touch with Victorian civilisation and set upon the road to salvation. Christianity and commerce would succeed where missionary rhetoric must fail. The London Missionary Society, which long and patiently supported him, could not easily find this attitude to their taste and preference, the awful because continuing lack of sure converts being in their eyes an understandable matter for dismay; but they bravely persevered while Livingstone, for his part, never wavered even in the harshest trials he faced.

In our own world of tremendous one-man journeys of exploration his feats of sheer endurance, however impressive they remain even for those of us who still go walk about in Africa, must lack the echoes of heroism that came back with such menace to Victorian ears. As the "martyr" of Victorian reputation Livingstone can no longer sound so superhuman. But to safe and comfortable Victorians, quite unaware of any likelihood of the holocausts of war and uncontrollable violence that lay ahead, his unfailing courage and high beliefs in human virtue were a grand and shining light.

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Where this man excelled, and I think these very competent authors would agree, was in standing stubbornly aside from the ideas and attitudes of Victorian approaches, above all English approaches, to the world of empire and conquest. There was no way, it seems, that even the most ingenious imperialist could fit this awkward and often abrasive character into the reductive scenarios of humanity as consisting of "us and them".

Of course there are passages in his flood of writings - his own books, his published letters and journals, much else - where Africans he knew became "them" in a familiar paternalism, but these are greatly outnumbered by passages in which Africans, however "different", are never "unequal".

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In a world of burgeoning European racism, Livingstone remained true to the canny humanism of his background and formation, Angus Calder's chapter is very good on this. The man "should be seen primarily as momentously a self-improving Lowland Scot"; and while he might like to boast of his family's Highland origins, a common Scottish preference, he was "equally pleased by acclaim from Lowland cotton workers", being "puritanical and dogged" as well as self-improving, but with "no yen to swagger in a plaid or kilt". He was indeed a world away from those who thought it well to celebrate him as saint or martyr.

In a shrewd piece about the culture of exploration in mid-Victorian Britain, Felix Driver sums up the drift of contemporary and later comment. "In life," he writes, "Livingstone had been an unreliable and frequently disappointing hero; in death he had become a saint", while "the effort to memorialise him was subsequently to take many forms, celebrating Livingstone the missionary, the explorer and the pioneer of empire".

Later again, as Tim Barringer writes, the military cult of exploring masculinity took over, and "Africa became the theatre for the playing out of European fantasies" as in the travel literature's "stylised accounts of gallant escapes and perilous encounters with lions or hostile natives, often matched with dramatic narrative plates".

The truly persuasive aspects of the Livingstone story - his indifference to personal advancement, his loyalty to African companions, his modesty of claim and demeanour - all vanished beneath the sweaty racism epitomised by Stanley and Baker and their kind. And with them and their attention-seeking ploys there also came, towards the end of the century, a new missionary attitude which more or less completely swallowed the grand imperialist illusion.

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Africans were no longer seen as Livingstone had seen them: as "different but equal". Now they had become different because, above all, they were necessarily and inherently inferior.

The worst vulgarisms of imperial conquest were running at full speed. Today, on the verge of a postimperialist epoch and ideology, if that is where we are, we can begin to measure just how far Livingstone was apart from his time and also ahead of his time.

Basil Davidson is a historian who since 1950 has specialised in the affairs of tropical Africa.