by Tim Jeal
nearly every day … one, two or three of the wretched palace women, led away to execution, tied by the hand, and dragged along by one of the bodyguard, crying out as she went to premature death, ‘Hai Minangé!’ [‘O my lord!’] at the top of her voice in utmost despair.
This was indeed a world of extraordinary ambivalence. While Baganda society worked better administratively than any other he had seen in Africa – with courtyards kept clean, hunger unknown and plantations well cared for – the other side of the coin was that people lived in fear lest for some trivial offence, they might be handed over to one of Mutesa’s executioners to be bludgeoned to death or decapitated.8
Speke, by contrast, was treated with courtesy and rarely felt in danger, though he soon realised that he was getting nowhere with his plans to enlist the kabaka’s assistance. Even when Mutesa agreed to send an officer by boat to the Kagera river to collect Grant, and to send another officer to Gani, where it was believed that Petherick was detained, Speke doubted whether a channel of communication with Petherick would actually be established. The plain fact was that Mutesa wished to keep Speke with him for as long as possible, and did not want him to leave in order to search for the Nyanza’s outlet. Speke hoped that if he could lure Mutesa away from the palace on an elephant-hunting trip, he would have a better opportunity to explain his plans to him man to man. So he showed the kabaka how to aim and fire from the shoulder, simply so that the monarch would want him to teach him how to shoot elephant and rhinoceros in the countryside. When Mutesa was feverishly eager to set out with him, the explorer refused to play ball unless the kabaka agreed to ‘open the road outwards’. Grudgingly, he consented ‘to call all his travelling men of experience together’ so that Speke could show them a map and explain where he wished to go. This was to the place where Petherick was reputed to be held up.
Contriving a meeting with Petherick had become an obsession with Speke since it seemed to guarantee him a safe return down the Nile. But though a consultation with the ‘travelling men’ took place, afterwards Mutesa would not hear of Speke going anywhere with them.9 But the explorer did not give up, and was delighted to be permitted to call on the namasole (whom he called the Queen Mother). He hoped to make her his ally in his struggle to get the kabaka to back his exploring aims.
In the first few years of Mutesa’s reign, the Prime Minister and the Queen Mother had ruled the country, allowing the young kabaka little influence, but after several years of apprenticeship Mutesa had wrested control from them. Yet his mother still wielded considerable influence, which Speke hoped to exploit. Having heard that the Queen Mother suffered from various medical complaints, he brought his medicine chest with him, as well as presents of copper wire, blue egg beads and sixteen cubits of chintz. He guessed that the woman who greeted him had been good-looking before she became fat, and supposed she must be about forty-five. For a while Speke sat close to her, drinking ‘the best pombé [beer] in Uganda’ and smoking his pipe while she smoked hers. Quite soon, she dismissed the musicians and all but three of her wakungu (courtiers), and put on a déolé, so he could admire her in it. Then she leaned closer to him and begged his aid. Her liver, she said, was sending shooting pains all over her body, and she was often disturbed by dreams of her late husband, Sunna. Could her visitor cure her? Speke said that only by marrying again would she escape her dreams of her late husband. As for her physical ailments, he needed to see her tongue, feel her pulse and touch her sides. Her wakunga insisted that she could not be examined without the king’s permission, but she dismissed their interference robustly: ‘Bosh! I will show my body to the Mzungu.’ They were then ordered to close their eyes while she disrobed and lay prostrate. Speke examined her, and prescribed two quinine pills and told her to drink less pombé. Right from this first meeting, he seems to have charmed her. Despite the cumbersome arrangement of communicating via two interpreters, she told him he must visit her again, ‘for she liked him … she could not say how much’.10
Over the next fortnight Speke succeeded in making the kabaka and his mother furiously jealous of one another, but this did not result in his being given a hut within the palace grounds, nor did Mutesa promise that any serious efforts would be made to reach Petherick at Gani, nor even that Speke might soon be allowed to visit the lake’s outlet. Yet the explorer was flattered when the king dressed himself in dhoti trousers in order to look more like him, and his success with the Queen Mother and various women at court was another source of pride.11 So much so that when the departure of Mutesa’s men for Gani (without Speke) seemed imminent, the explorer warned Petherick in an unintentionally comical letter, that: ‘The game I am now playing will oblige you to drop your dignity for the moment and to look on me as your superior officer.’ Petherick was told not to bring a uniform because Speke did not have one with him.12 Clearly, Speke did not want anyone to undermine Mutesa’s and the Queen Mother’s conception of him as a man of high rank and importance in his own country.
Unless Speke had by now started to find daily life at Mengo so diverting, the kabaka’s refusal to help him locate either Petherick or the lake’s outflow would have depressed him horribly. Nor were his spirits about to take a plunge. Suddenly, just when most required, a brand new source of happiness transformed his life at court. To his amazement, Speke found himself in love.
TEN
An Arrow into the Heart
Six weeks after his arrival at the royal palace on Mengo Hill, Speke was sitting chatting to the Queen Mother when one of her courtiers asked him what colour his children would be if he married a black woman. Speke did not record his answer, but in another passage deleted from his published journal, he described the Queen Mother, ‘making a significant gesture by holding her two fists to her breasts, signifying a young budding virgin’.1 Then ‘with roars of laughter [she asked Speke if he] would like to be her son-in-law, for she had some beautiful daughters’. The courtiers told Speke matter-of-factly that when the ‘daughters’ arrived and ‘the marriage came off’, he might need ‘to chain the fair one … until she became used to [him]’.2
Three days later, when Speke called on the Queen Mother, she immediately produced two ‘Wahuma’ girls for him to take back to his hut. Speke believed that the paler-skinned and straighter-nosed Wahuma (Hima) originally came from Ethiopia, and that many centuries before his arrival at the Nyanza, they had risen to power over the darker Bantu already settled in Buganda, Karagwe and Rwanda. Although it was true that the Hima had come from the north, they were members of a Luwo clan originally from southern Sudan, rather than from Ethiopia. But after moving south, they had indeed formed ruling dynasties around the Nyanza in the centuries after AD 1200. Thereafter, they adopted Bantu speech and were culturally absorbed by them.3 Speke, like many Europeans of his day who followed him to Africa, would find the Hima more physically attractive than the southern Bantu, with their thicker lips and flatter noses. Though this preference would be thought racist today, in the nineteenth century for an English gentleman to find any African woman attractive would have astonished most members of Speke’s class, unless they had spent time in Africa.
When comparing Speke’s published journal (Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile) with the book’s original proofs and manuscript, I found that many passages had either been changed in the published version or omitted from it. From now on, I shall quote in italics altered or omitted words and passages. Describing in his published Journal the two girls given to him by the Queen Mother, Speke represented them as ‘children’, saying that one, Kahala, was twelve, while the other was ‘a little older’. But in the manuscript the elder is clearly described as being ‘eighteen years or so’. The younger girl in the manuscript is too young ‘for present purposes’, which were plainly meant by the Queen Mother to be sexual. The late king, Sunna, had chosen Méri the elder girl as a wife, although he had died before consummating the marriage. Méri had then become a member of the Queen Mother’s household.
Speke fou
nd the girls alarmingly high-spirited but was assured by the Queen Mother that although ‘they were more difficult to break than a phunda, or donkey, when once tamed, [they] became the best of wives’.4 Two days later, Speke thanked the Queen Mother for ‘having charmed [his] house with such beautiful society’ and informed her that he had not found it necessary to chain his young women as she had advised him to do, since ‘cords of love [were] the only instruments white men knew the use of’.5
Although the Queen Mother plainly suspected that Speke did not know how to tame his young women, she had great faith in him as a confidential doctor. She explained that her periods ‘had eased since Bana [Speke] had doctored her’, and asked what she should do now. He recommended marriage to restore regularity. Her son, the kabaka, rather than miss out on intimate advice, also consulted Speke, ‘for he was extremely anxious of becoming as great a family man as his father, though at present there seemed to be no hope of it’. Speke advised him only to have intercourse with those wives who had just had their periods, ‘as the seed vessels were more sensitive then, and to refrain from over-indulgences, which destroy the appetite in early youth’. Having too much sex, explained Speke, would ‘increase their veins in size by over exertion, and thereby decrease their power’. It worried the king that his penis might not be the optimum size. Speke advised him not to worry since all sizes could do the job. But ‘M’tesa could not believe in a short stick being so good as a long stick, because the long one could reach so much farther, while the short one would only knock about the doorway.’ Mutesa was perplexed that a sexual expert like Speke should have no children of his own. Although Speke replied by quoting ‘the old adage that a rolling stone gathers no moss,’ Mutesa remained puzzled. What was to stop a virile man becoming a father on his travels?6
Speke certainly made no secret of finding the wives of courtiers attractive. On a buffalo-shoot he ‘commenced flirtations with M’tesa’s women, much to the surprise of everyone’. He also offered to carry several wives of courtiers across a stream piggyback fashion. The most beautiful one was especially eager to find out,
what the white man was like, [and] with an imploring face and naked breasts held out her hands in such a voluptuous, captivating manner that though [Speke] feared to draw attention by waiting any longer [to cross], could not resist compliance … ‘Woh, woh!’ said the Kamraviona ‘What wonders will happen next?’7
Speke found it wonderfully gratifying that most women at court were ‘charmed with the beautiful appearance of myself’. But to his grief, this was not how Méri – whom he described as ‘my beautiful Venus’ - saw him. Quite often she refused to speak to him, or go for walks, or do anything ‘but lie at full length all day long … lounging in the most indolent manner’. Provoked, he said, beyond endurance by her indifference, Speke ‘spent the next night in taming the silent shrew’.8 Though this sounds suspiciously like rape, it should be remembered that in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew the final proof of the success of Petruchio’s ‘taming’ of Kate was her ultimate willingness to go to bed with him, without being coerced. But whether Speke forced himself on Méri, or whether she consented, or whether indeed his taming involved sex at all, is beyond knowing. What is certain is that his feelings for the girl deepened; and by the end of the month when he was separated from her – while accompanying Mutesa on a lengthy hippo-hunt – he found himself dreaming of Méri at night, and to a lesser extent of Kahala, and ‘looking fondly forward to seeing what change would have been produced by this forcible separation of one week on those I loved, though they loved not me’.9
On his return in early May, Méri tried to persuade him to give her a goat as a gift – although really she meant to pass it on to her favourite nganga (witch doctor). Even when Speke had rumbled her, she kept on nagging for the goat. ‘Oh God! Was I then a henpecked husband?’ he complained. On learning that Méri had invited the nganga into their hut during his absence, a jealous Speke threatened to beat the man. At this point, Méri shattered him by begging to be beaten instead.
This touching appeal nearly drove my judgment from me, but as Méri showed neither love nor attachment for me … [and my] offers [were] indifferently accepted without grace, which broke my sleep and destroyed my rest… I therefore dismissed her, and gave her as a sister and free woman to Uledi … I then rushed out of the house with an overflowing heart and walked hurriedly about till after dark, when returning to my desolate abode, turned supperless into bed, but slept not one wink reflecting over the apparent cruelty of abandoning one, who showed so much maidenly modesty when first she came to me, to the uncertainties of this wicked world.10
So Speke, who has typically been represented as incapable of love, fell painfully for a young African woman, and was made wretched by her refusal to reciprocate. A week later, Méri came to see him, saying that she had been ill since their row, and asked, with tears in her eyes, to be taken back. Speke told her she had been very wrong ‘to fight with her lord’, to which she replied that ‘the only fighting she knew anything about was the fight of love’.11 But though Speke wanted to persuade himself that her unyielding behaviour had been ‘the fight of love’, he failed. She could only come back he decided, if she showed evidence of being emotionally involved. Sadly, what she told him next convinced him that the situation was hopeless. ‘Her luck was very great once,’ she explained. ‘She was Sunna’s wife, the N’yamasore’s [Queen Mother’s] maid, then his [Speke’s] wife; so she [had] never lived in a poor man’s house since she was a child; and now she wished to return [to Speke] so that she might die in the favours of a rich man.’.12 Unsentimental honesty was not at all what the romantic Speke had wanted to hear, and he was clearly incapable of considering things from the point of view of a young woman brought up in an African feudal society, who had offered to be his wife on terms she considered satisfactory.
Kahala and other young Baganda women. There is no known image of Méri.
Grieving over the loss of Méri (as he had wished her to be), he stopped visiting the Queen Mother, who rebuked him angrily for ignoring her after she had been considerate enough to have ‘given him such a charming damsel’. Speke noted in his journal that ‘she little thought as she was speaking [that] she was driving an arrow into my heart’.13 When he finally realised that he would never be close to Méri in the way he wanted, Speke gave the young woman some valedictory gifts:
In token I ever loved her and could do so now … a black blanket as a sign of mourning that I never could win her heart; a bundle of gundu [giraffe-hair ankle rings inter-woven with brass wire] in remembrance of her once having asked for them … and I [had] thought they would ill-become her pretty ankles. Lastly there was a packet of tobacco in proof of my forgiveness, though she had almost broken my heart; and for the future I only hoped she might live a life of happiness with people of her own colour as she did not like me because she did not know my language to understand me.14
Because Méri had described herself as Speke’s wife, and he had referred to himself as her husband, it seems likely that they were sexual partners, but whatever had passed between them, his disappointed love was clearly genuine – although given the language barrier, sexual attraction must always have been the major component. But the usual picture of Speke as a selfish and insensitive misogynist does not tally with his tender feelings for Méri, and with the fact that his sense of honour prevented him from continuing to treat her as ‘his wife’, as she would gladly have allowed him to do if, as she had wished, he had taken her back. With no experience of romantic love – in the European sense – Mutesa and the Queen Mother had expected Speke to use Méri for his pleasure regardless of her feelings. For the most part, later adventurers and settlers would have few moral qualms about exploiting African women. There is a rumour, which surfaces from time to time, that Speke impregnated Méri.15 While this is possible, the fact that they were together so short a time militates against it. Speke would leave Mengo in July about three months after he described ‘ta
ming’ his ‘shrew’ in April, so if she had been impregnated she would have known it by then, and would have had no reason not to tell him. His journal is remarkably unbuttoned in its manuscript version, and yet there is no mention of a pregnancy. But in the end there can be no certainty either way.
At first, in his anger at not being loved in the way he wanted, Speke handed Méri to Uledi and his wife, Mhmua, to be her keepers. Though he described her as ‘a free woman’ and ‘a sister to Mhmua’, the latter sometimes tied Méri to her wrist to stop her running away.16 A few weeks later, Speke evidently felt so uneasy about her situation that he offered to try ‘to marry her to one of Rumanika’s sons, a prince of her own breed’. But Méri rebuffed his well-meaning efforts.17
Until his disappointment in love, Speke had greatly enjoyed his privileged status at court, as well as his close relationships with individual Baganda from the king and his mother at the top, right down to pages and servants. In fact his enthusiastic participation in daily events, and his easy manner with African women, differentiated him from Burton, Baker, Grant and Livingstone, all of whom maintained (in their diaries at least) a much greater distance.18 But coinciding with his loss of Méri came a steadily increasing awareness of the darker side of Mutesa’s nature, which began to mar the pleasure he had once taken in being part of Baganda high society. On one occasion the king flew into a rage with a formerly favoured wife, whom Speke had always found charming. For nothing more wicked than offering her lord and master some fruit – when it had actually been the role of a particular court functionary to feed him – she was dragged away to be executed for this minor breach of etiquette ‘crying in the names of Kamraviona and Mzungu, for help and protection’. As the kabaka’s other wives clung to his knees, begging him to be merciful, the king began beating the condemned woman over the head with a stick. This was too much for Speke, who ‘rushed at the king, and staying his uplifted arm, demanded from him the woman’s life’. Well aware that he ‘ran imminent risk of losing [his] own life’, Speke was thankful when ‘the novelty of interference made the capricious tyrant smile, and the woman was instantly released’. A royal page who misinterpreted a message from Speke to the king was less fortunate and had his ears cut off for not listening more attentively.19 But far worse than any of this was the kabaka’s punishment of a wife who had run away from a cruel husband, and of the elderly man who had bravely given her shelter. Both were sentenced to be given food and water for several weeks, while they were ‘dismembered, bit by bit, as rations for the vultures, every day, until life was extinct’. What horrified Speke was Mutesa’s ‘total unconcern about the tragedy he had enacted’. As soon as the condemned man and woman had been ‘dragged away boisterously … to the drowning music of the milélé and drums’, the king turned cheerfully to Speke: ‘Now, then, for shooting Bana; let us look at your gun.’20
