The Poet's great-great-great-grandfather and namesake, Duncan Livingstone, although descended from Clan MacLea, fought for Prince Charles Edward Stuart under the command of Allan Maclean of Torloisk during the Jacobite rising of 1745.
[1] According to Donald E. Meek, however, Mo Rùn Geal Dìleas was composed by the Laird of Torloisk about his unrequited love for Lady Isabel of Balinaby, Islay, which ultimately rendered him, "a raving lunatic.
[3] According to David Livingstone, their ancestors were members of the illegal and underground Catholic Church in Scotland long after the Scottish Reformation and only switched to Presbyterianism due to the excessive use of corporal punishment by their landlord.
[15] According to literary historian Ronald Black, Duncan Livingstone's poetry was doubtlessly assisted by the Gaelic broadcasts which he began making from South Africa for the BBC during the early 1930s.
[19] Livingstone contemptuously mocked the collapse of the British Empire after World War II with the satirical Gaelic poem, Feasgar an Duine Ghil ("The Evening of the White Man").
In Dactylic hexameter lines similar to the odes of Friedrich Hölderlin, Livingstone argued that the Christian God had given the Europeans their colonies during the Scramble for Africa to elevate the quality of life for the native African population.
Instead, European colonialists had been corrupted by the twin vices of pride and greed; and the rapidly escalating loss of their colonies after World War II was divine justice and retribution.
"[21] The Sharpeville massacre also inspired Livingstone to write the poem Bean Dubha' Caoidh a Fir a Chaidh a Marbhadh leis a' Phoiles ("A Black Woman Mourns her Husband Killed by the Police"), in a mixture of the Scottish Gaelic and Zulu languages.
A manuscript of 140 unpublished poems, mainly in Gaelic except for few verses in English and Scots, is preserved as MSB 579 in the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town.
[24] They also reveal that, similarly to his contemporary, South Uist Bard and World War II veteran Dòmhnall Iain Dhonnchaidh, Duncan Livingstone made an English-Gaelic literary translation of Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard.
"[26] In an essay, Scottish professor Wilson MacLeod described Duncan Livingstone as a "poet of significance", who became a perceptive critic of the British Empire, which was best illustrated by his attitude towards its collapse in Feasgar an Duine Ghil.
MacLeod notes, however, that Livingstone's anti-colonialist attitude was rare among post-Culloden Gaelic poets, the vast majority of whom were "Pro-British and Pro-Empire", including Aonghas Moireasdan and Dòmhnall MacAoidh, who considered the expansion of the British Empire, "a civilizing mission rather than a process of conquest and expropriation".