It doesn't matter where you travel in Malawi, you will find reminders of the country's strong links with Scotland.
Street names such as Kirk Street, St Andrew's Street and McLeod Street, are commonplace.
The Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian (CCAP) is the sister organisation of the Church of Scotland. And Malawi's biggest city is Blantyre - named after the Lanarkshire birthplace of Dr David Livingstone.
That birth was on March 19, 1813, and the tenement in Shuttle Row where he and his four brothers and sisters grew up still stands today, part of the David Livingstone Centre, a museum commemorating his life.
Livingstone was from a working class family. He started work as a 10 year old in the Blantyre Cotton Mills - 14 hours a day, six days a week.
In the Scottish tradition and despite his punishing workload he still found time to educate himself to the extent that, at the age of 23, he enrolled at Anderson's University in Glasgow to study medicine, Theology and Greek.
In 1840 he moved to London where he was ordained as a missionary and in the December of that year he travelled to Africa. He married Mary Moffat, herself the daugther of a missionary, in 1845 and together they explored the unknown interior of East Africa.
In 1853 he pioneered a route across southern Africa and in 1854 was the first European to see the Mosi-oa-Tunya waterfall, known to Europeans as Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria, which is in present day Zambia.
He retuned to Britain a hero, and in 1857 published a best selling account of his travels: Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa .
He returned to Africa the following year as head of the Zambezi Expedition , a British government-funded project to examine the natural resources of south eastern Africa.
It was during this expedition that, in 1859, he discovered Malawi, the fertile land on the west side of the great stretch of water at the end of the River Shire - Lake Nyasa, or the Lake of Stars as he called it.
It was here he encountered the slave trade and developed a lifelong hatred for a practice he described as 'this devilish trade in human flesh'.
He brought the issue to the attention of the British public, and in Malawi actively fought against slavery, once famously releasing 84 slaves from their Arab captors.
In 1863, his wife Mary died of dysentery and year later the expedition was recalled to Britain.
In March 1866, Livingstone went to Africa once again, this time to Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania), where he set out to seek the source of the Nile. He arrived at Lake Tanganyika in February 1869 and despite ill health, he pressed on, arriving at Nyangwe on the Lualaba River, a tributary of the Congo, in March 1871.
Now very ill, Livingstone returned to Lake Tanganyika in October 1871. It was here that he was tracked down by Henry Stanley, a New York Herald reporter searching for him, and the phrase, Dr Livingstone I presume entered folklore.
Livingstone refused to accompany Stanley back to Britian, determined to continue his search for the source of the River Nile, an ambition he could not fulfil before his death by malaria and dysentery on May 1, 1873.
His legacy lives on in Malawi. Two years after his death the first expedition of Scottish missionaries arrived on the shores of Lake Nyasa and generations of Scots were to follow, each contributing to Malawi's development.
It was David Livingstone who inspired the Co-operation Agreement between Scotland and Malawi that was signed in November 2005 by First Minister Jack McConnell and the President of Malawi, His Excellency, Dr Bingu wa Mutharika.
A sculpture at the David Livingstone Centre at Blantyre, Scotland, depicting an incident during his travels in Africa when he was attacked by a lion.