Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure

by Tim Jeal

  More bad news swiftly followed. Chief Suwarora, the first important ruler on the road to the north, was building a line of thorn bomas (hedges) to defend his frontier and promised ‘to kill every coast-man, who dared attempt to enter Usui’. ‘My heart was ready to sink as I turned into bed,’ wrote Speke in his journal, ‘and I was driven to think of abandoning everybody not strong enough to go on with me carrying a load.’ The Cape Hottentots were certainly too ill for load-carrying. Two had already died, and the rest were yellow with jaundice, so Speke sent them to the coast to save their lives.

  After his reluctant return to Kazeh, the Arabs surprised Speke by begging him once again to negotiate on their behalf with Manwa Sera, since they were being ruined by the fighting, which had trapped their ivory in Ugogo, where the porters were starving to death. Though Speke was enraged with Abdulla and Muhinna, the leading Arabs at Kazeh, for continuing to employ the Watuta, he agreed ‘to write out all the articles of a treaty of peace’, with sanctions against them if they broke their word to Manwa Sera. Although he and Grant detested Muhinna, who had just refused to stop beating his chained female slaves, Speke still felt he had no alternative but to try to end the war in his own interests, as well as theirs.36 So he sent Baraka to locate Manwa Sera and bring his emissaries to Kazeh. Baraka achieved this miracle within a few days. But the negotiations foundered on the question of how much land should be restored to the African ruler. So, despite Speke’s best efforts, he left Kazeh having failed to create peace in the area through which he would now be travelling. In fact, just before he marched, he heard that Manwa Sera was recruiting Wagogo and Wasukuma warriors in order to renew the struggle.

  Speke was distressed to be travelling without Musa and his porters, but he felt he could wait no longer, and ignored Bombay and Baraka who both said he that he was misguided not to wait until the Arabs and their brutal mercenaries could gain a permanent advantage over Manwa Sera. Bucked by his acquisition of an experienced kirangozi, Speke told Baraka and Bombay about ‘the perseverance and success of Columbus, who, though opposed by his sailors had still gone on and triumphed’.37

  At Ukuni, just north of Kazeh, Speke’s shortage of porters obliged him to leave behind Grant and Bombay with thirty men and the bulk of the expedition’s supplies, while he and Baraka went north with just over sixty men, intending to return when enough new porters could be found.38 Between July and September the two explorers were separated, while Speke faced a succession of rapacious chiefs and headmen without the reassurance of Grant’s phlegmatic presence. Speke gave instructions to his new kirangozi to avoid all the chiefs on the road ahead, so he would not have to make ruinous hongo payments. But the man promptly led him to the boma (protected village) of Mfumbi, a sub-chief in Sorombo. Not only did Mfumbi ask for cloth and beads for himself, but insisted that the explorer should visit the head chief, Makaka, who lived ten miles to the west, and longed to see his first white man. Speke tried to send Baraka with a present, but of course that would not do at all. Chiefs, who had suffered losses due to the war – and all claimed they had – were not going to pass up an unrepeatable opportunity to use this white man and his possessions to bolster their depleted resources.39 Makaka immediately demanded a silk cloak embroidered with gold lace, of a kind Speke was determined to keep for King Rumanika of Karagwe and Kabaka Mutesa of Buganda. So to avoid giving away such an expensive garment, Speke was obliged to pay out many yards of inferior cloth of the most useful kind for purchasing food.

  The incompetent kirangozi now had the gall to explain that Mfumbi and Makaka had pretended to be chiefs but were actually ‘mere officers who had to pay tribute to Suwarora’. Before learning this, Speke had agreed a massive payment in cloth, and had also consented to give the ‘mere officer’ a ‘royal salute’, in order to be released by him. ‘I never felt so degraded as when I complied,’ he admitted. Makaka thought the volley had been fired too slowly and shouted: ‘Now fire again … be quick, be quick … We could spear you all whilst you are loading.’ In Speke’s tent, Makaka sat in his chair and stained the seat with the grease which he and his fellow tribesmen wore. He put on Speke’s slippers, asked to be given his bulls-eye lantern, and demanded Lucifer matches. Speke felt almost angry enough to murder the man, but realised that if he harmed him every chief in the country would become his enemy. In his present predicament, force was not an option – only patience and a stubborn determination not to be robbed of everything. Nevertheless, the perpetual worry made Speke ‘feel quite sick’. He felt worse when Baraka told him that Makaka had intimated that his superior chief, Suwarora, had captured an entire Arab caravan and would kill every member of it if the Watuta or any other strangers came any closer. Speke laughed at Baraka ‘for being such a fool’ as to believe such tales. ‘Makaka only wishes to keep us here to frighten away the Watuta … Suwarora by this time knows I am coming and he will be just as anxious to have us in Usui as Makaka is to have us here, and he cannot hurt us as Rumanika is over him.’

  Yet logic had no impact on Speke’s porters, who were just as scared of the Watuta as was Makaka. When Speke appealed to them to march north, they refused, and nothing he could say would change their minds. Speke had no alternative but to return to Kazeh yet again to try to recruit men there. Two and a half months of effort had amounted to absolutely nothing, except the fruitless expenditure of a mass of supplies. Yet giving up never entered his mind.

  By the time Speke reached Grant’s camp, he was suffering from a cough so bad that he ‘could not lie [down] or sleep on either side’. While climbing a hill, he ‘blew and grunted like a broken-winded horse’.40 Ill though he was, he had to press on with his search for porters or admit that he would never reach Uganda. But in Kazeh, he found that nobody would hire men to him while the war was still going on. A small exception was made by Abdulla, Musa Mzuri’s son, who loaned him two guides, Bui and Nasib, ‘both of whom knew all the chiefs and languages up to and including Uganda’. These men promised to accompany Bombay to Usui and to return with enough porters to enable Speke and Grant to go north together. So Speke marched back to Ukuni again and after a few days spent with Grant, marched north again to secure the porters in Usui.

  After Baraka and his previously loyal Wangwana porters had let him down, Speke had begun to think that the only way to reach Uganda would be to build a raft on the lake’s southern shore. But because his two new guides gave him renewed hope of succeeding by land, he abandoned the raft project. The Wangwana were also given fresh courage when a message unexpectedly arrived from Suwarora urging Speke to come to see him. Unfortunately, at this very moment Bui and Nasib heard that another local chief, Lumeresi, wanted to see their white man. Speke was determined to avoid going anywhere near another local chief, and ordered his kirangozi and his two new guides to steal past Lumeresi’s village by night. But Bui and Nasib flatly refused to risk offending this ‘savage chief’ by attempting to bypass him. Their timidity infected the Wangwana, who once again became fearful and defeatist, leaving Speke all but helpless.

  He might perhaps have been able to inspire them, if his health had been better; but his cough was now so bad that he had to sleep propped up in a sitting position. His heart felt ‘inflamed … pricking and twingeing [sic] with every breath’; his left arm was half-paralysed, his nostrils full of mucus, and his body was racked with pain from his shoulder blades down to his spleen and liver. In such a frail condition all he could do was repeat that he had no intention of going to Lumeresi’s boma. But he knew he would have to give in if his men went on refusing to obey his orders. ‘This was terrible: I saw at once that all my difficulties in Sorombo [with Makaka] would have to be gone through again.’41

  Speke’s first ten days as the involuntary guest of Lumeresi -really he was his prisoner – were a nightmare. The chief warned him that he would never be allowed to leave until he had parted with two dèolès- the richly embroidered cloaks he was saving for the kings of Karagwe and Buganda. Three weeks passed and Speke was still fa
iling to negotiate hongo payments satisfactory to his persecutor. At this ill-starred moment, Mfundi, who had robbed him shortly after his first departure from Kazeh, appeared in the village and declared that the road to Usui was closed, and that he personally had burned down all the villages on the path. On hearing this, Speke’s new guides begged to be released, since they ‘would not go a step beyond this’. Eventually, after a supreme effort of persuasion, Speke managed to get Bui, the bravest of the guides, to agree to come with him to Usui as soon as Lumeresi had agreed the hongo payment. Overjoyed by Bui’s change of heart, Speke had his chair placed under a tree and smoked his first pipe since he had fallen ill. ‘On seeing this, all my men struck up a dance, which they carried on throughout the whole night.’

  None of this had any effect on Lumeresi, who had been bullying the explorer for a month now, and was as determined as ever to have a finely embroidered silk cloak. In the end, Speke had no choice but to give him the dèolè he had saved for King Rumanika. Not even that was enough and Lumeresi insisted on his giving him double the amount of brass wire and cloth he had originally asked for. The chief’s drums were beaten at last, so a poorer Speke was free to go, but now Speke found that his guides, Bui and Nasib, who also doubled as interpreters, had fled.

  The shock almost killed me. I had walked all the way to Kazeh and back again [a round trip of over 200 miles] for these two men to show mine a good example – had given them pay and treble rations, the same as Bombay and Baraka – and yet they chose to desert. I knew not what to do, for it appeared that do what I would, we would never succeed; and in my weakness of body and mind, I actually cried like a child.42

  Speke’s ability to negotiate calmly, often for weeks at a time, with a succession of chiefs who clearly wished to rob him of everything, was remarkable. This, coupled with his unceasing efforts – in the face of serious illness – to keep his caravan together and find new porters (walking many hundreds of miles in the process) marked him out as a great explorer.

  Only a dozen miles to the south, Grant, for a change, was suffering even greater problems. A local chief sent 200 men armed with spears and bows and arrows rampaging through his camp, stealing whatever came to hand. Only one of Grant’s men stood at bay, with his rifle at full cock, in defence of his load; the rest fled. Grant himself had the terrifying experience of having the tips of assegais pressed against his chest. He was only too well aware of the danger he was in, since a few days earlier he had witnessed the execution of a man, whose genitals had been set on fire before he had been stabbed to death. But Grant was not harmed, and later that day, fifteen of fifty-six loads were returned – the chief evidently having felt that if his neighbouring chiefs had heard that he had left nothing for them to extract from the white man, he could expect to be attacked.43

  Speke was appalled when told what had happened, but he was saved from despair by the arrival at Lumeresi’s village of four men sent by Rumanika and Suwarora to say that they were eager to see him and that he should not believe anything he might have heard about them harming caravans. Lumeresi, however, sent these men away calling them frauds, and in the end only agreed to help Speke find porters for the journey north when Suwarora sent some more men bearing his mace – a long rod of brass decorated with charms. Lumeresi had remorselessly milked Speke from 23 July to 6 October 1861, when he and Grant, who had very recently joined him, were finally able to get away.44

  Travelling north once more towards Usui, the dried-up countryside began to change for the better. Before, the only shade had been offered by the occasional fig or mango tree, but now the endless tracts of leafless scrub and burned grass were giving way to mixed woodland and green hills crowned with granite outcrops. In the valley bottoms, they walked through ‘pleasant undulations of tall soft grass’, and crossed streams destined for the distant Nyanza. Speke would indicate on his map that he was rarely nearer to the lake than sixty miles. His desire not to encounter more chiefs than was absolutely necessary probably accounts for his failure to visit the lake at intervals to establish whether it was a single sheet of water or several.

  Close to Chief Suwarora’s stronghold, they dropped down into a valley ‘overhung by delightfully wild rocks and crags’, which Grant declared to be like ‘the echoing cliffs over the Lake of Killarney’.45 Unfortunately, the chief and his henchmen were not to prove as delightful as the country they inhabited. Despite their earlier promises to behave differently from Lumeresi and Makaka, they fleeced Speke in exactly the same way and left him and Grant to pitch their tents in a place where rats, fleas and vicious ants made their nights a misery. Grant described Suwarora himself as ‘a superstitious creature, addicted to drink, and not caring to see us, but exacting through his subordinates the most exorbitant tax we had yet paid’.46

  Speke felt slightly happier about his situation when he met an Arab trader, Masudi, who had taken over a year to travel the 150 miles from Kazeh to Suwarora’s boma at Usui and en route had been obliged to pay even more than he and Grant had done. Since leaving Kazeh, Speke and Grant had been on the road a mere eight months. Yet, while it seemed easily explicable that slave-trading Arabs should be ill-treated, it struck them as extraordinary that people who had never seen Europeans before, or ever been harmed by them, should treat them in a similar way.

  Left to wait for weeks outside the chief’s fenced enclosure, in patchy jungle with no shady trees, Speke and his men were robbed even by ordinary villagers – the most audacious theft being the abduction of two women attached to the caravan. Most of Speke’s captains had acquired additional wives and concubines during the journey. The thieves had torn off the women’s clothes, hurrying them away ‘in a state of absolute nudity’. This was too great an insult to be endured, and Speke gave orders that the next thief should be fired at. The following night an intruder was indeed shot at close range. ‘We tracked him by his blood, and afterwards heard he had died of his wound.’47

  He and Grant finally escaped the clutches of Suwarora on 15 November 1861 and began their march to Karagwe – a region which Grant would soon compare, rhapsodically, with the English Lake District. For Speke it was ‘truly cheering’ to reflect that they ‘now had nothing but wild animals to contend with before reaching Karagwe’.48 By the end of November they had reached a country of grassy hills, most of them 5,000 feet tall, and from the top of one called Weranhanjè, they saw far below them a beautiful lake, which Speke and Grant thought very like England’s Lake Windermere. On a plateau overlooking the water was the palace enclosure, shielded by a screen of trees. This kingly residence was on a larger scale than anything they had yet seen, with many huts and interlinked courtyards. To honour the king, Speke ordered his men to fire a volley outside the palace gate. To their surprise, Rumanika invited them in at once, without obliging them to wait for weeks for the honour of an audience.49

  From their first sight of him, both explorers were captivated. Rumanika, said Grant, was ‘the handsomest and most intelligent sovereign they had met with in Africa. He stood six foot two inches in height, and his countenance had a fine, mild, open expression’.50 Speke described the first greetings of the king as being ‘warm and affecting … [and] delivered in good Kiswahili’. It was clear from the start that the king felt himself fortunate to meet these strangers from afar and had no plans to fleece them. In fact he would rebuke his brother when he begged for a gun, and would never demand anything for himself, although Speke and Grant would voluntarily give him many presents. ‘He had been alarmed he confessed, when he had heard we were coming to visit him, thinking we might prove some fearful monsters, that we were not quite human, but now he was delighted beyond all measure by what he saw of us.’ He asked intelligent questions, such as whether ‘the same sun we saw one day appeared again, or whether fresh suns came every day’. But while Speke answered this question in a straightforward and factual way, when Rumanika asked him to explain the decline of kingdoms (it pained the king that Karagwe no longer ruled over Burundi and Rwanda) the exp
lorer told him that Britain maintained its power in the world because Christianity gave a sense of moral entitlement. In the spirit of wishing to share this bounty, Speke offered to take one of the king’s children back to England to be educated in a Christian school, so that he could return to Karagwe to impart to others what he had learned. In contradiction of what he had said earlier about Christianity, Speke went on to say that science was the branch of knowledge best adapted to increase a nation’s wealth, and he cited the impact of the electric telegraph and the steam engine. Rumanika’s intelligence and kindness, coming after so much bullying and disrespect, made Speke feel much more optimistic about the next and most crucial phase of his journey.51