by Tim Jeal
Tippu Tip.
The agreement was that Tippu Tip’s men would part company with Stanley after about 200 miles, and thereafter the explorer and his 146 followers, only 107 of whom were contracted men, would take their chances on their own. Inevitably, death by drowning, disease, starvation, and by African attacks would reduce their numbers by journey’s end. Before marching out of Nyangwe with Tippu Tip on 5 November 1876 into the Mitamba forest, Stanley wrote to a friend admitting that he feared he might share the fate of the explorer Mungo Park, who had been speared to death on the Niger.
But I will not go back … The unknown half of Africa lies before me. It is useless to imagine what it may contain … I cannot tell whether I shall be able to reveal it in person or it will be left to my dark followers. In three or four days we shall begin the great struggle with this mystery.5
For weeks, Stanley’s people and their Arab-Swahili escort struggled along the eastern bank of the great river, beneath the canopy of the tropical forest, sweating in the dark hothouse air. On this side of the river, it would be impossible for him to miss any eastward-flowing branch which the river might throw out towards the Nile via the Bahr el-Ghazal. Since the Lualaba seemed large enough to supply both the Nile and the Congo, Stanley still did not discount the possibility of such a branch existing: ‘It may be so, as there are more wonders in Africa than are dreamed of in the common philosophy of geography.’6 After two weeks spent hacking their way through the forest, his followers embarked upon the Lualaba itself, having recently made the gruesome discovery of charred human bones near recently extinguished cooking fires.7 But cannibals or not, Stanley was distressed to see men, women and children of the Wenya people running away whenever they caught sight of Tippu Tip’s men and his own.
In December, while still paddling due north, they were involved in a series of small skirmishes which Stanley foolishly dramatised as ‘fights’ in his despatches to the New York Herald.8 Two days after Christmas, Tippu Tip broke his agreement and returned to Nyangwe. He had just lost three of his wives to smallpox, and in a five-day period seven of his soldiers died of tropical ulcers and fever. Since they were now only 125 miles north of Nyangwe, rather than the 200 they had agreed to travel together, Stanley paid Tippu half the agreed sum.9 In order to persuade his entire party to embark in the twenty-three canoes he had just bought for them, Stanley had to get Tippu Tip to threaten to shoot them if they did not. Otherwise, most would have begged the Arab to take them back to Nyangwe – such was their terror of sailing on the river. And who can blame them? From its banks, they often heard the cry: “Niama, niama [meat, meat]’, and the inhabitants of one village tried to catch an entire boat’s crew in a large net. ‘They considered us as game to be trapped, shot, or bagged at sight,’ wrote Stanley. But he knew there was nothing he could do to allay the suspicions his presence provoked. The slave traders had seen to that. So, whenever aggressively pursued by canoes propelled by more paddlers than his own and therefore faster, he felt obliged to shoot rather than let his vessels be boarded.10
On 6 January, after travelling 500 miles due north from Nyangwe, they came to the first cataract in a chain of seven that extended for sixty miles. Now all his boats had to be taken out of the water and dragged overland past each one of these seven cataracts, most of which extended for several miles. The noise of the river crashing over rocks and funnelling through gorges was so loud that his men could not hear each other speak, even when standing side by side. Their progress along the falls took twenty-four days. Now at last the truth became apparent. Soon after passing the final cataract, Stanley realised that the river had turned sharply westwards.
Then, on 7 February 1877, for the very first time, he heard the river referred to as ‘Ikuta Yacongo’. This was an historic moment. Two years and two months into his extraordinary journey, Stanley had proved that the Lualaba was the Upper Congo and not the Nile. The Lualaba’s northward drive for a thousand miles from its source, where Livingstone had died, to the point where it turned decisively westwards would never again deceive geographers and explorers. But whether he would live to bring this news home in person, or ‘whether it would be left to [his] dark followers to reveal it’, was far from certain. He was still 850 miles from the Atlantic.11
Speke’s case was proved, and Burton’s and Livingstone’s had been destroyed. Stanley was glad for Speke’s memory and deplored how the RGS had turned against him after his death. But his deepest emotions were reserved for:
that old, brave explorer … [and] the terrible determination which [had] animated him … Poor Livingstone! I wish I had the power of some perfect master of the English language to describe what I feel about him.12
But had Stanley really unravelled the entire mystery that had baffled every generation since the ancients? When he had expressed his belief that the Kagera was probably ‘the parent of the Victoria [White] Nile’, had he meant to downgrade the importance of Speke’s outlet at Ripon Falls? In a despatch to the New York Herald dated August 1876, Stanley repeated the question originally posed by Speke: ‘What should be called the source of a river – a lake which receives the insignificant rivers flowing into it and discharges all by one great outlet, or the tributaries which the lake collects?’13 Stanley suggested that if the tributaries were favoured, it would be but one step further to see ‘sources’ in the moisture and vapour which the clouds absorb. So he gave his vote to Speke.
Speke had first seen the Kagera in 1861, when staying with King Rumanika, and had called it the Kitangule. The explorer knew that this important river formed a series of small lakes, and deduced that its origins lay in springs and in rain precipitated on the mountains of Rwanda. One evening, he glimpsed what he called ‘bold sky-scraping volcanic cones’ fifty miles to the west. Showing astonishing insight, he described these mountains as ‘the turning point of the central African watershed’, as indeed they are, along with the more northerly Ruwenzori Mountains.14
So what of the Kagera and its highland sources, which Speke had dismissed with his rhetorical question about the respective merits of ‘one great outlet [and] the tributaries which the lake collects’? It would not be until 1891 – when Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania were classified as constituent parts of German East Africa – that an Austrian ethnographer and explorer, Dr Oscar Baumann, traced what appeared to be the most southerly tributary of the Kagera, the Ruvubu, to a point in southern Burundi about fifty miles to the south of the northern tip of Tanganyika and twenty miles east of the lake. In 1935, Dr Burckhardt Waldecker, who had fled the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany, found a marginally more southerly source on nearby Mount Kikizi. But being further south was not the only quality required to gain the prize. In 1898, Dr Richard Kandt, a German physician, scientist and poet, had traced the main line of the Kagera – judged by volume of water – via its Rukarara tributary to Mount Bigugu, near the southern end of Lake Kivu. This spring was alleged to be thirty-six miles further from the Mediterranean than the Kikizi source – a tiny superiority given the Nile’s total length of just over 4,200 miles. But given the huge technical difficulty of calculating the length of such a long river, a definitive result will always elude geographers. A complex delta and the shifting channels in Lake Kyoga and the Sudd’s floodplain pose particular problems.15
During the last fifty years, the line of the Rukarara has been shown to extend a little further into the Nyungwe Forest than Kandt had demonstrated. But in a marshy area of many springs, it is hard to pick out an unassailable Kagera source. Although Neil McGrigor and his Anglo-New Zealand party claimed to have added another sixty miles to the Nile with the help of GPS in 2006, it should be noted that similar claims to have extended the river beyond Kandt’s source had been made in the 1960s on behalf of Father Stephan Bettentrup, a German priest living in Rwanda. Then, at the end of the last decade, a Japanese party from Waseda University also claimed to have outdistanced Kandt.16 In my opinion, to add a few miles to the shifting upper springs and streamlets of the
Rukarara does not dethrone Richard Kandt, let alone threaten the achievements of the Victorian explorers who entered Africa without maps, wheeled transport, or effective medicines, and yet solved the mystery of the entire central African watershed.
In 1875-76, when Stanley proved Speke right about Lake Victoria, the possibility had existed that a river flowing northwards into the southern end of Lake Albert might originate somewhere in the region of Lake Tanganyika (though unconnected with that lake) making it a convincing rival to the headwaters of the Kagera as the ultimate source. Indeed, such a river did exist. When Stanley had believed himself to be approaching Lake Albert in 1876, he had glimpsed a significant expanse of water, shortly before being chased away by Nyoro tribesmen. He had not known it at the time, but this was a small ‘undiscovered’ lake, linked to a larger one, together constituting the source of the Semliki river which flowed on northwards until entering the southern end of Lake Albert. Amazingly, the Semliki was not investigated in 1876, when Lake Albert was circumnavigated by Gordon’s temperamental lieutenant, Romolo Gessi.17 Eventually, it would fall to Stanley, in 1889, to map the Semliki and explore the two lakes – Edward and George – which were its sources.
Over a dozen years before the mapping of the Semliki, Stanley’s companion Frank Pocock had spotted something of great significance: ‘a fine mountain crowned with snow’. The two men and their party had been camped near Lake Edward. Unfortunately, Frank had been ill and had failed to mention the snow to Stanley, so a major discovery had to wait over a decade.18 Misty weather would prevent Baker, Gessi and Emin Pasha from seeing the Ruwenzori Mountains in 1864, 1876 and 1884 respectively. But in 1888 and 1889, Stanley and two of his officers, Dr Thomas Parke and Arthur Mounteney Jephson, all caught sight of the snow-capped Ruwenzoris, which they immediately linked to Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon. While tracing the course of the Semliki southwards towards its source, Stanley crossed almost sixty torrents flowing into this river from the foothills of the mountains. He recognised at once the mountains’ rain-making role and saw that melting snow, as well as precipitation, supplied the Nile via the Semliki and Albert. But the Semliki’s twin sources turned out to be on the same latitude as the northern shores of Lake Victoria, so although the river’s considerable volume made a very important contribution to the White Nile, it could not outrank the Kagera’s twin branches.
What militates most against the Kagera and its tributaries being considered the true source of the Nile – rather than the principal feeder of Lake Victoria – is that the Kagera’s outflow into Victoria is separated from Speke’s Ripon Falls by 120 miles of lake, and so cannot with justice be said to be part of a continuous river. So, where does all this leave Speke’s Nile source? In Stanley’s words, Lake Victoria and the Ripon Falls deserved ‘a higher title’ than could justly be applied to rival lakes or tributaries. Only from the Ripon Falls can the Nile be said to assume a definite course: flowing, at first, through shallow Lake Kyoga (which is more like a wide and overflowing river than a lake) then thundering over the Murchison Falls into Lake Albert, only to leave that lake a few miles away, effectively turning the narrow northern end of Albert into a river, which flows on, always to the north, through gorges and over cataracts to Dufile and Gondokoro. So once Stanley had ruled out the Lualaba as a contender, he really had solved the Nile mystery and had correctly awarded to Speke his posthumous prize.19 Yet though Stanley had succeeded brilliantly in his Nile quest, his own survival remained anything but certain.
On 11 February 1877, Stanley and his men were attacked with guns for the first time since they had embarked on the river. To watch ‘the smoke of gunpowder drifting away from native canoes’ was a novel and alarming experience. In the ensuing waterborne sniping battle, two of his men were killed and an unknown number of his opponents were struck down. The presence of firearms in the hands of the Congolese proved to Stanley that he had arrived at the furthest point on the river to which indirect Portuguese influence had penetrated from their trading stations near the coast. A few days later, Stanley and his followers were pursued by six canoes and shots were once again exchanged and casualties suffered.20
In mid-March 1877 a worse ordeal began when Stanley started downriver from the vast expanse of water that would be known for almost eighty years as Stanley Pool. He was about to ask for a level of commitment from his Wangwana porters that might reasonably have been asked of soldiers in war, but hardly from contracted civilians. Without such remarkable men, Burton, Speke, Grant and Stanley would have achieved little. As Stanley told a friend, he could not have travelled more than a few days’ journey ‘without the pluck and intrinsic goodness of 20 men’. Foremost among them were Uledi, Manwa Sera, Chowpereh, Wadi Safeni and Sarmini. His followers’ numbers had dwindled from 228 at Bagamoyo to 129. Fourteen lives had been lost in the four and a half months since leaving Nyangwe. None of them suspected that their worst ordeal was just beginning. The first rapids below the Pool reminded Stanley of ‘a strip of water blown over by a hurricane’. Yet smooth water could be deadly too. On 29 March, the steersman of the canoe in which Kalulu was travelling let his vessel drift into the fastest part of the river and condemned himself and his passengers ‘to glide over the treacherous calm surface like an arrow to doom’. The canoe was whirled around several times at the lip of a fall, before plunging down into the maelstrom below, drowning all six occupants, including Kalulu.21
Death of Kalulu.
On 12 April, Stanley and his crew, in their eleven-foot boat, found themselves descending another set of rapids, out of control.
As we began to feel that it was useless to contend with the current, a sudden terrible rumbling noise caused us to look below, and we saw the river almost heaved bodily upward, as if a volcano had burst under it … Once or twice we were flung scornfully aside, and spun around contemptuously as though we were too insignificant to be wrecked.22
Somehow they found the strength to keep paddling through the swirling, white water. On 3 June, Frank Pocock – the last of Stanley’s white companions – was drowned when his canoe capsized.23 Wadi Safeni, whose cool head had saved Stanley and his men on their first visit to Bumbireh, suffered a breakdown during this dreadful period and wandered into the bush to die.
When, on 9 August 1877, Stanley and his party stumbled into the Portuguese trading post that was furthest up the river, only 115 people could be counted, and as Stanley recorded, they were all ‘in a state of imminent starvation’. For several months, the locals had been refusing to sell them food. Only 108 men, women and children would return to Zanzibar – significantly less than half of the 228 who had set out. Their epic journey from Bagamoyo to the Atlantic coast had lasted 1,000 days. Stanley was the only one of the four Britons to survive. Although his hair had gone prematurely grey and he had lost one-third of his weight, he had retained an almost mystical self-belief.
This poor body of mine has suffered terribly [he wrote during the descent of the cataracts], it has been degraded, pained, wearied & sickened, and has well-nigh sunk under the task imposed on it, but this was but a small portion of myself. For my real self lay darkly encased, & was ever too haughty & soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily.24
Although the laurels for the discovery of the source had been shown at long last to belong to John Hanning Speke, it was inevitable, sixteen years after Speke’s discovery, that it would be upon Stanley’s unrivalled journey that public attention would focus. So the damage done by Richard Burton’s long-sustained belittlement of his travelling companion’s achievement would never be put right. It just might have been, if Burton had behaved honourably and made a statement at the RGS, or even written an honest letter to The Times, admitting that he had been completely wrong for nearly twenty years. But instead, he waited until 1881, and chose to bury his climb-down where nobody would see it, in a commentary on the travels of the Portuguese poet, Luis de Camoens. He wrote, almost as an inconsequential aside, and without naming Speke: �
��I am compelled formally to abandon a favourite theory that the Tanganyika drained into the Nile basin via the Lutanzige.’25 This admission was made six years after Stanley had solved the mystery. Speke’s biographer claims that Burton wrote a letter on his death-bed, in which he told Grant that every harsh word he had ever uttered against Speke was withdrawn. But, since Burton died of a heart attack in the night, this seems unlikely to have been true.26
Because Burton promoted himself as being more wicked than he really was in order to shock respectable people, and hinted at homosexual encounters as well as numerous heterosexual ones, and because he wrote savagely amusing letters, and made unexpurgated translations of the Kama Sutra of Vatsayana and the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, he remains a figure of fascination today – despite, as one scholar has recently put it, the last-mentioned work being ‘lurid and archaising’, and less readable than Edward Lane’s version of fifty years earlier.27 Burton is also remembered for criticising British racism in India – although he was a convinced supporter of the Raj – and for his deep and genuine understanding of Arab and Indian culture. But his many repellent epithets about Africans, such as ‘the quasi-gorillahood of the real “nigger”’ and his references to ‘their chimpanzee-like fingers’28 have been downplayed by most of his biographers, as has his ruthless destruction of Speke’s right to be remembered, despite his [Burton’s] very early realisation that his ‘subordinate’ was almost certainly right.
