User:Claudia Bergmann (WMDE)/sandbox

Selim Hishmeh [also known as Salim Hishmeh] was a guide and interpreter from Jerusalem. Hishmeh spoke English, Swahili and Arabic and, was reportedly the first member of Henry Morton Stanley's rescue party to spot David Livingstone in Ujiji, East Africa, near Lake Tanganyika in 1871, two years after he went missing.

Life, Beliefs and Death
Selim Hishmeh was raised as Greek Orthodox Christian, became among the first members of the Jerusalem Protestant community in the mid-1850s. Hishmeh studied at the Bishop Gobat School in Jerusalem. While still quite young, Hishmeh became the interpreter for the American journalist and adventurer Henry Morton Stanley on his expedition to central Africa in 1871 in search of Dr. David Livingstone. Stanley’s biographer provides a rare portrait of Selim that he culled from Stanley’s autobiography and other sources. He notes that

by the 1880’s [Salim] had freed himself from his identification simply as Stanley’s interpreter and had begun to create for himself a new identity – part fact, part fiction – in which he began describing himself, not merely as “the first discoverer of Dr. Livingstone,” but also as “Chief of the Moabites.” He used the new designation with further embellishments in 1882 in an American town, where he visited the home of a Quaker entrepreneur and friend of the Quaker missionaries for whom his brother Ya‘qub had worked as a guide in 1869. The next year, Selim Hishmeh was in Scotland, using the designations “sheik” and “Arab Chief” when he gave a talk about his African adventures at a Presbyterian church. Some time after the death of Livingstone, Hishmeh moved to Lanark in Scotland. There he qualified as a medical doctor and a master stonemason. Selim Hishmeh died and is buried in Lanark.