"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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Livingstone matriculated from Kearsney College in 1949. His first, brief, job
was as a night-shift bench chemist at a sugar mill. At the beginning of 1951 he went to
what was then Rhodesia and took up a post as an assayer in Southern Rhodesia’s
government metallurgical laboratories. In December 1952 he changed jobs and worked as
a technologist at the Pasteur Institute in Salisbury, until September 1956 when he was
awarded a diploma in medical laboratory technology. During an annual leave he worked
as an industrial contract diver at the Kariba dam project. He continued to study and
obtained a diploma in bacteriology. He then moved to the public health laboratories in
Lusaka, Zambia, where he was senior technician in charge of the bacteriological
department. In 1959 he became the officer in charge of the Broken Hill pathological
laboratories and held this position until December 1963. During this time he suffered
from a series of illnesses including pericarditis, septicaemia, meningitis, encephalitis,
spells of mental illness and tuberculosis of the kidneys.
In January 1964 Livingstone returned to South Africa to work for The Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) as a microbiologist. His job over the next 30
years was to establish bacterial criteria for ‘clean’ and polluted seawater. He was the
CSIR’s head of marine bacteriological research. He died of stomach cancer on 19
February 1996 at the age of 64. Livingstone held a PhD in water conservation from the
University of Natal (1989) and was awarded two honorary doctorates for literature from
Natal and Rhodes Universities. He was married twice, for seven and five years
respectively, and had no children.
His work
Livingstone first published in the English poetry magazine Outposts in the 1950s. His
debut volume of poetry, The Skull in the Mud, was published in 1960 when he was 28
years old. In the following two years further poems appeared in Contrast, Outposts, The
Central African Examiner and London Magazine. In 1963 he won the BBC-FBC radio
prize for drama for his verse-play The Sea My Winding Sheet, followed in 1975 by the
Olive Schreiner prize for another play, A Rhino in the Boardroom. A later prose play, The
Semblance of the Real, was published in 1984.
He also won a poetry prize in 1963 in a competition organised by Science Fiction
News. Oxford University Press then asked him for a selection of poems and this resulted