The Search for the Source of the Nile

The Blank on the Map

As the 19th century dawned, Europeans still did not know where the Nile River sprang from. The prevalence of deadly diseases like malaria had prevented explorers from penetrating very far into Africa's interior, but this did not stop pioneers like Mungo Park (1771-1806), who attempted to find the source of the Niger River. From around 1820, new medicines like quinine helped combat Africa's worst diseases, and so the huge blank areas on the map of the continent began to be filled in. One of the most puzzling questions was the source of the Nile River, the waterway so well known through history and so vital to the welfare of Egypt.

Egyptian-sponsored expeditions were launched to find the source of the Nile, first travelling through Sudan and reaching the cataract at Juba around 1842. It was known that the Nile split into two near Khartoum, the Blue Nile branching off into Ethiopia, where its source was to be found in the highlands. The second branch, the White Nile, was the one of more interest to Europeans, as this led south into the heart of East Africa, where it was rumoured there were many great lakes. Knowledge of East Africa's lakes had long been in the possession of Arab traders coming from the south, particularly Zanzibar. These traders had penetrated deep into the interior in search of new sources of slaves. What was next required was someone to follow the White Nile from the north and head south to these lakes and find out which one was the source. At this point, there remained speculation that the lakes might all be part of a single inland sea called Unyamwezi.

There was more than mere geographical curiosity about the issue, since if navigable waterways could be found and mapped, this would greatly help the Europeans to establish new trade relations and exploit the vast natural resources most people imagined were hiding away in Africa's interior. The dream was to have steamships navigating up and down the Nile, bringing European-manufactured goods for sale to local peoples and then transporting precious raw materials like gold, ivory, and rubber to the coast and back to Europe. That was the dream, but the reality of mid-19th century Africa was that travelling anywhere was extremely difficult, highly dangerous, and entirely dependent on the cooperation of Africans, from chiefs to porters. Certainly, the European explorers determined to find the Nile's source were very often prejudiced and self-interested, but they were also brave and resourceful in an alien environment where no outside help could be expected.

Livingstone

The Scottish missionary David Livingston (1813-1873) was just as much an explorer as a man of the cloth. Livingston believed that by opening up Africa through cartography and developing European-led commerce, more Africans would be exposed to Christianity. His second ambition was to abolish the slave trade in Africa. From 1855 to 1856, Livingston explored the source of the Zambezi River when he embarked on a hugely ambitious expedition from Cape Colony, moving northwards to the coast of Portuguese Angola in west Africa, and then pushing on across the continent to follow the Zambezi, finally reaching the east coast in Portuguese Mozambique. During this expedition, in November 1855, Livingston became the first European to see what he christened Victoria Falls (after the British monarch) on the Zambezi.

Livingston's full narrative of his Zambezi expedition can be found in Missionary Travels, which was a bestseller in 1857. The book's success and Livingston's mantra that what Africa really needed was the three Cs of 'Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce,' encouraged the British government to provide the explorer with funds for another expedition. In 1858, he explored Lake Nyasa (today called Lake Malawi), again the first European to do so. He revisited Victoria Falls, and here he gives a memorable description of the experience:

We reached, on the 4th of August, Moachemba…and could see distinctly with the naked eye, in the great valley spread out before us, the columns of vapour rising from the Victoria Falls, though upwards of 20 miles distant…We proceeded…9th August, 1860, to see the Victoria Falls. Mosi-oa-tunya is the Makololo name and means smoke sounding; Seongo or Chongwé, meaning the Rainbow, or the place of the Rainbow, was the more ancient term they bore. We embarked in canoes…for some miles the river was smooth and tranquil, and we glided pleasantly over water clear as crystal, and past lovely islands densely covered with a tropical vegetation…Many flowers peeped out near the water's edge…But our attention was quickly called from the charming islands to the dangerous rapids… To confess the truth, the very ugly aspect of these roaring rapids could scarcely fail to cause some uneasiness in the minds of new-comers….Into this chasm, of twice the depth of Niagara-fall, the river, a full mile wide, rolls with a deafening roar…The whole body of water rolls clear over, quite unbroken; but, after a descent of ten or more feet, the entire mass suddenly becomes like a huge sheet of driven snow. Pieces of water leap off it in the form of comets with tails streaming behind, till the whole snowy sheet becomes myriads of rushing, leaping, aqueous comets….every drop of Zambesi water appears to possess a sort of individuality….racing down till lost in clouds of spray….The morning sun gilds these columns of watery smoke with all the glowing colours of double or treble rainbows.

(Livingston, Ch. VI)

Livingstone, eager to satisfy the insatiable appetite of Victorians back home for the novelties of Africa, took with him on his second Zambezi expedition the landscape artist Thomas Baines (1820-1875). In the study of history, it is sometimes difficult to recapture and comprehend the attitudes of the past. For Victorian Britons, who were living in a society already transformed by the British Industrial Revolution, reading richly illustrated travel books on Africa opened up an entirely different and unknown world. This sense of wonder, which men like Livingstone nourished, is here explained by historian L. James:

The new wave of explorers captured the public imagination with colourful and sometimes lurid accounts of whom and what they had discovered. Europeans were fascinated by the revelation of a primordial world full of natural marvels, strange races such as the pygmies and exotic animals, in particular the gorillas of the Congo forests. Many readers wondered whether they were being transported back in time, if not to the Garden of Eden then to the world in its infancy. In terms of stirring the imagination, mid-Victorian exploration in Africa was similar to space travel a century later.

(63)

Explorers like Livingston not only told their tales through books but also usually embarked on hugely popular international lecture tours, enthralling their audiences with magic lantern slides, specimens, and curiosities. Explorers were amongst the most recognisable international celebrities of the day. It is not surprising, then, that the Nile quest attracted a host of big names eager to solve the riddle and gather material for more public adulation.

Burton, Speke & Baker

From the late 1850s, the exploration of Africa entered a new and more dynamic phase, fuelled by the piqued interest of the public and the hopes of entrepreneurs. The British government now sponsored two other explorers: Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) and John Hanning Speke (1827-1864). Burton was already famous for his 1853 trip to Mecca, which was forbidden to non-Muslims. He spoke 35 languages and had travelled so extensively that he once said that the only place he did not feel comfortable was home. Speke was an army officer, big game hunter, and general adventurer. In 1857-9, Burton and Speke travelled along the slave trade route familiar to Arabs, that is, from Zanzibar to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. Speke describes in the following diary entry how essential innovative trade goods were for explorers to find porters and bribe chiefs to ensure safe passage through tribal territories:

The present was then opened, and everything in turn placed upon the red blanket. The googles created some mirth; so did the scissors…but the king [Kamrasi] was scarcely moved or uttered any remarks till all was over, when, at the instigation of the courtiers, my chronometer was asked for and shown. This wonderful instrument, said the officers (mistaking it for my compass), as the magic horn by which the white men found their way everywhere…The chronometer, however, I said, was the only one left, and could not possibly be parted with; though if Kamrasi liked to send men to Gani, a new one could be obtained for him.

The king would not take no for an answer, and so Speke was obliged to tell him that he needed the watch to know when to eat. This failed to convince, as Speke goes on to explain:

I can get nothing out of him until he has got it – the road to the lake, the road to Gani, everything seemed risked on his getting my watch – a chronometer worth £50, which would be spoilt in his hands in one day…When I told him that to purchase another would cost five hundred cows, the whole party were more confirmed than ever as to its magical powers.

(Fleming, 84-5)

In the end, Speke was obliged to give in, although the king promised to return his watch three times each day so that the explorer at least knew when to eat.

In 1857, Burton and Speke were the first Europeans to see Lake Tanganyika. Speke was not convinced it was the true source of the Nile and so, leaving behind Burton, he pushed on northwards to Africa's largest lake, Lake Ukerewe, which Speke renamed Lake Victoria Nyanza. Burton was not convinced Lake Victoria really was the source of the Nile, and the two explorers stopped speaking to each other as they made their way back to Zanzibar. The riddle of the Nile's source now seemed tantalisingly close to being solved. At least everyone agreed that the climate and soil of this part of East Africa seemed ideal for European settlers who could establish cash-crop plantations.

Speke, accompanied by James Grant (1827-1892), returned to Lake Victoria in 1860 and discovered the cascade he christened Ripon Falls (named after the president of Speke's sponsor, the Royal Geographical Society). Here at last, said Speke, was the source of the Nile. Explorer and big game hunter Samuel Baker (1821-1893), travelling with his Hungarian partner Flóra Sass (whom he had bought in a slave market in the Balkans), then cast doubt on Speke's claim when he discovered what he called Lake Albert (named after the consort of Queen Victoria) in 1864. Baker thought this lake was the source of the Nile. Baker's expedition was a large and well-equipped one. Nevertheless, Flóra writes in a letter to Baker's daughter, describing how arduous travelling the upper reaches of the Nile was:

At last we have arrived here – after a fearful struggle and weary journey in dragging a flotilla of 59 vessels including a steamer of thirty two horsepower over high grass and marshes…It would be quite impossible by any description to give you an idea of the obstacles to navigation through which we have toiled with the fleet, but you can imagine the trouble when you hear that we were thirty two days with 1,500 men in accomplishing a distance of only 2 miles…Our vessels drew four feet of water but in many places the depth of the river was only two feet.

(Fleming, 88)

Speke remained confident that Lake Victoria was the Nile's source, and, in 1863, he published his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. Speke died the next year in a shooting accident while hunting partridges. Oddly enough, the explorer's death came on the morning of the very day he was due to publicly debate with Burton at the British Association concerning their rival opinions as to the source of the Nile.

In 1864, then, three explorers each claimed a different lake was the source of the Nile. Burton thought it was Lake Tanganyika, Speke had plumbed for Lake Victoria, and Baker went for Lake Albert. Yet another expedition was required to solve the conundrum. In 1866, Livingston returned to Lake Nyasa and headed towards Lake Tanganyika. The Scottish explorer then disappeared. Five years passed, and there was still no news of Livingstone.

Stanley

The American journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904) was determined to discover the fate of the lost explorer and, commissioned by the New York Herald, he set off for the heart of Africa in 1871. Stanley managed to find Livingstone in November of that year in Ujiji, and the immortal line "Dr Livingstone, I presume" was reportedly uttered. Livingstone, having discovered the Lualaba River, was convinced, like Burton, that Lake Tanganyika was the source of the Nile. Livingstone continued his explorations, advancing further south, but he died in the upper Lualaba basin on 1 May 1873. Livingston's loyal servants, Susi and Chuma, buried the explorer's heart at the spot where he died, but they preserved the rest of his body and took it all the way back to Britain via Zanzibar. Livingston's much-travelled remains were then given a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey; Stanley was one of the pallbearers. Susi and Chuma, perhaps more usefully for Livingston's legacy, also saved the explorer's diaries, which were published in 1874. Ironically, the missionary-explorer had written an entry in June 1868 stating he wished to be buried in the quiet solitude of the African forest.

Unlike most other explorers, Livingstone had believed that Africans were no different from Europeans (or at least the poor and uneducated ones) and so they should be treated with dignity and respect. Livingstone became an icon of the Victorian world, regarded as a man of virtue, nothing less than a Christian martyr battling the twin evils of slavery and geographical ignorance. School children studied the explorer's words and deeds in their textbooks. Statues of the explorer were set up; the one in Prince's Street in Edinburgh is suggestive: Livingston is depicted holding a Bible but wearing a pistol on his belt.

Stanley, who "craved fame and adulation" (James, 64), was determined to outdo Livingston and so he returned to Africa in 1874-7. Stanley laboriously circumnavigated Lake Victoria, looking for likely water outlets that might link to the Nile. His toils at least revealed the enormous size of the lake (Africa's largest); if only he had had aerial transport instead of being chained to the ground by his cumbersome baggage train. Then, using a steel boat called Lady Alice, Stanley travelled along the Lualaba until he reached the west coast of Africa around what today would be the northern border of Angola. Stanley's expedition, along with a separate expedition by Verney Lovett Cameron in 1875, confirmed that the Lualaba was, in fact, the Congo River, or a tributary of it. This, therefore, showed that Lake Victoria (and not Lake Tanganyika) was the true source of the Nile River. Speke had been right all along.

Stanley's extensive travels in Africa appear in several books, notably How I Found Livingston (1872), Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa (1890). Stanley had hoped to be buried alongside Livingstone in Westminster Abbey, but this honour was denied him, largely because of his obvious racism towards and repeated cruel treatment of Africans.

The Fourth 'C': Colonisation

Now that East Africa's great waterway was mapped (and others like the Congo, Zambezi, and Niger, too), many more missionaries entered African states, followed by more explorers, then individual traders, and then trading companies. At first, these Europeans were small in number and not seen as being any particular threat by African leaders, who exploited them for their knowledge and trade goods. Explorers, in particular, seemed to ignore the fact that they were explorers only in the sense that they were the first Europeans in these regions. In the literature the explorers wrote once back home again, African people were largely dismissed as having the same level of interest to European readers as the local flora and fauna.

From around 1885, European governments began to take a much more active interest in Africa, and well-equipped and technologically superior armies were sent to establish protectorates and colonies. Now the exploitation would be reversed, and it reached a much greater and more sinister level. By the 20th century, in the whole of Africa, only two states (Ethiopia and Liberia) were not under direct European control.