by Tim Jeal
Before the militarised expeditions of the 1890s, the Nile explorers had been on a level playing field with the people whose territory they had risked their lives to investigate. They paid in trade goods for the right of passage through tribal lands, and on many occasions were detained against their will for many months at the whim of African chiefs. Speke was detained by Mutesa for five months, Baker by Kamrasi for ten, Livingstone by Kasembe for three. Their hosts could at any moment have ended their lives. This situation was typical of that more innocent period which preceded the two decades during which the land was wrested from its owners by force.
The memorably fatalistic Chief Commoro of the Latuka had shared his disconcerting ideas on the subject of theft with Samuel Baker in 1863:
Most people are bad; if they are strong they take from the weak. The good people are all weak; they are good because they are not strong enough to be bad.25
Undoubtedly, in the context of the Scramble for Africa, the Europeans were strong and took land and sovereignty from the weak in the name of high-sounding principles – some of which were genuine, such as the desire to end the slave trade, and others false and exploitative. Episodes of resistance and conquest would take place in parts of almost every African colony.26 Rulers like Kabarega, Mwanga and Prempeh of the Asante would be exiled. In most cases engagements would be small, continuing over several decades, with submission eventually occurring through a gradual process of unchallenged intrusion by small numbers of whites. Livingstone in a rare moment of pessimism wrote of the arrival of colonists as ‘a terrible necessity’, but still maintained that on people of British stock depended the ‘hopes of the world for liberty and progress’.27 Indeed most British imperial agents firmly believed that they were in Africa not only thanks to superior weaponry but also because they were, in their own estimation, the culturally superior representatives of an empire whose mission was to bring peace, prosperity and justice to less fortunate people. The moral inconsistency of occasionally having to kill people who resisted their ‘civilising mission’ did not dismay Sir Hesketh Bell, the first British Governor of Uganda, as he demonstrated when writing about some ‘wild’ Bagisu tribesmen in the east of the country:
I am sending two companies of the King’s African Rifles to make them [the Bagisu] realise that they must come into line with the rest of the Protectorate … Hardly a year passes without the need of punishing these wild tribes for the slaying of unarmed and peaceful traders, and nothing but a show of force will induce them to mend their ways.
Since the Bagisu had always felt free to kill intruders on their land, they might justifiably have asked why they should suddenly change their behaviour when they had signed no agreement with anyone and not been defeated in battle. But Bell knew he would only be able to bring peace to this large country and govern it if he managed to stamp out acts of violence against people of all races. For this task he had been given a budget fit only for running a few British parishes, a tiny military force and twenty civil servants and commissioners. With these laughable resources he not only had to punish Africans who killed traders but also take on slave traders, warlords and adventurers in search of easy money.28
Arthur Mounteney Jephson, Stanley’s favourite officer on the Emin Pasha Expedition, wrote in his diary several years before Uganda became a protectorate:
The ordinary native only grows just enough corn for the use of himself & his family; let him once see that what he grows has a very substantial value & he will cultivate more & be more hardworking & thrifty; he will not then be so ready to go to war with his neighbour … & the little petty wars which are the curse of Africa, will, with the coming of the railway & the consequent increase in trade, gradually cease.29
Men like Jephson, Mackay, Stanley and Mackinnon hoped that with the introduction of European agricultural methods by settlers, the soil would eventually yield enough for Africans to earn wages, which could one day be taxed to provide funds for railways, roads, hospitals and schools. Since missionaries were supposed to come to Africa ahead of the traders and settlers, the spiritual, as well as the material condition of Africans – so the theory went – would be improved. Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and Baker (a true warrior against the slave trade) all believed in this strategy for Africa’s progress.
In Britain between the 1850s and the 1890s the population had risen by 70 per cent thanks to medical advances and to clean water and modern sanitation; literacy had become almost universal and cheaper food had improved average diets. By the 1880s most homes contained a wealth of printed and illustrative material which earlier generations would have been amazed to see. Even if the transfer of such benefits to Africa turned out to be haphazard and slow, there would have been no doubt in the explorers’ minds that if future colonial authorities succeeded in crushing the Arab-Swahili slave trade, an incalculable benefit would have been conferred on millions.
Indeed, the British and French in their African colonies would do just that, and bring a brief era of relatively incorrupt government, with the rule of law and the benefits of modern medicine and hygiene enabling Africa’s population to increase from 129 million in 1900 to 300 million by the 1960s when most colonies gained their independence.30 This increase was highly desirable since low population densities had bedevilled Africa’s development for centuries. At the simplest level: a food surplus was worthless unless there were enough people living within a ten-mile radius wanting to exchange grain or flour for other goods. Also any large agricultural projects would be impossible to undertake without sufficient workers. The preeminent French historian, Fernand Braudel summed up the situation succinctly with his aphorism: ‘Civilisation is the daughter of numbers.’31
The post-Scramble colonies would be distinguished by genuine achievements and by some well-known disasters, such as the atrocities on the Congo in the 1890s, the massacre of the Hereros in German South West Africa and the British suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Where there had been sizeable white settler populations, such as in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, the transition to independence would be bloody. Elsewhere in Britain’s sub-Saharan colonies it would be peacefully achieved, with nothing resembling Portugal’s disastrous efforts to maintain its colonial rule. Colonialism lasted just long enough to destroy the belief of many Africans in the spirit world which had hitherto enforced standards and personal responsibility, but not long enough to replace indigenous beliefs with Western social ideals and education. Inevitably African self-belief was damaged.
At least 3,000 ethnic groups ended up as forty-seven nation-states on the African mainland due entirely to decisions made during the colonial period. Undoubtedly – as in Uganda and Nigeria – the colonial boundaries enabled ‘Big Men’ to use ethnic conflicts, and indeed to create them, in order to underpin their power. In the mid-1990s there were thirty-one civil wars in Africa, almost all of which had arisen as a direct result of badly drawn boundaries and incitement by African politicians. The Rwandan genocide was planned from the top in every detail. The number of wars is smaller today, with armed banditry having replaced larger disturbances, except in Eastern Congo and the Niger Delta.
The most testing problem for the countries through which the Nile flows will be deciding how the river’s water should be apportioned in future. Negotiations to reach an agreement have been ongoing for thirteen years and recently five of the equatorial states have come to their own agreement, excluding Egypt and the Sudan, which since the 1950s have claimed together in excess of 90 per cent of the water. At worst, there may be water wars in future on the banks of the Nile; but the mutual dependence of the seven nations on the river may yet compel cooperation as a matter of survival and usher in a more peaceful chapter in the history of the region.
The colonial period in Africa’s history (which lasted in most colonies for a mere seventy-five years) seems likely to be seen in future as merely one of many contenders – along with the Cold War, superpower sponsorship of dictators, AIDS, malaria, drought, corrupt lea
ders, incompetent governments, ethnic civil war, and an unfair international trade system – for the title of ‘principal cause’ for why fifty years of independence has proved so disappointing. John Iliffe, the leading expert on colonial and post-colonial East Africa, has said that there can be too much pessimism about the after-effects of empire: ‘To see colonialism as destroying tradition is to underestimate African resilience. To see it as merely an episode [in African history] is to underestimate how much industrial civilization offered twentieth century Africans.’ Certainly, not many urban Africans would wish to return to how things were in the 1880s.32
Today in America and Europe the press inevitably focuses on disasters, ignoring the size of Africa and the fact that many millions have remained untouched throughout their lives by violence and starvation. It was the same story, of peaceful places lying just adjacent to dangerous ones, when the Nile explorers experienced grim and violent events, only to travel a few miles further and find scenes of beauty and serenity. John Speke, after his long struggle with rapacious chiefs and every imaginable hardship and shortage, had entered Karagwe, west of Lake Victoria, and been overwhelmed by the beauty of the scenery, by the herds of healthy cattle and by the plentiful supplies of food. ‘We were treated like favoured guests by the chiefs of the place, who … brought presents, as soon as we arrived … The farther we went in this country, the better we liked it, as … the village chiefs were so civil that we could do as we liked.’33 Rumanika, the king of Karagwe, treated Speke and Grant to ‘greetings [which] were warm and affecting … Time flew like magic, the king’s mind was so quick and enquiring.’34
Livingstone, although appalled by the cruelties he encountered in Barotseland, was overwhelmed by the loveliness of immemorial village scenes.
How often have I beheld, in still mornings, scenes the very essence of beauty, and all bathed in a quiet air of delicious warmth! Yet the occasional slight motion imparted a pleasing sensation of coolness as of a fan. Green grassy meadows, the cattle feeding, the goats browsing, the kids skipping, the groups of herd boys with miniature bows, arrows and spears; the women wending their way to the river with watering pots poised jauntily on their heads … and old grey-headed fathers sitting on the ground, with staff in hand, listening to the morning gossip.35
Stanley, only days after being involved in fighting in which he had lost twenty-two people, found himself in ‘a most beautiful pastoral country’ close to Lake Victoria:
I was as gratified as though I possessed the wand of an enchanter … I seated myself apart on a grey rock … only my gun-bearer near me and the voices of the Wangwana came to me now and again faint by distance, and but for this, I might, as I sat there, have lost myself in the delusion that all the hideous past and beautiful present was a dream … I revelled undisturbed in the delicious smell of cattle and young grass … and from the hedged encircled villages there rose to my hearing the bleating of young calves and the lowing of cows … and I could see flocks of kids and goats and sheep with jealously watchful shepherd boys close by – the whole prospect so peaceful and idyllic that it made a strangely affecting impression on me.36
But lacking ‘the wand of an enchanter’ few people in the West are able to envision today’s Africa as an enchanted land, for all its natural beauty and variety and despite the humour, grace and extraordinary resilience of its people. African successes have never made headlines. The rich celebrities on television over the decades, nudging the public to open their pockets to help with some new African disaster, famine or genocide, are too imbedded in most minds for many in the West to believe that the process which the explorers set in train in the nineteenth century can deserve much celebration. It all ended like this, they say.
This attitude strikes me as unjust. The Nile explorers opened Africa to Western concern at a time when every year was bringing new devastation to ever larger areas of the continent. The courage and vision of this small group is not less praiseworthy because the next century did not bear out their hopes for the future of the regions they had revealed with so much difficulty and hardship. Nor have the ideals of nineteenth-century humanitarians lost their value because later governments in Europe and Africa did not live up to them.
APPENDIX
Fifty Years of Books on the Search for the Nile’s Source
In 1960 Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile was published and became an international bestseller. The story of the search for the source of the Nile is a compelling one and Moorehead’s skilful alternation of brisk biographical vignettes of the principal Nile explorers with brief accounts of the various journeys made his book eminently readable. Astonishingly, in the half-century since 1960, no attempt has been made to re-visit this unique story making detailed use of the wealth of new material – both published and in manuscript – that has accumulated during the intervening years. Christopher Ondaatje and Guy Yeoman wrote about the search in their books Journey to the Source of the Nile (1998) and Quest for the Secret Nile (2004), but in the context of their own motorised journeys to many of the key locations; and while both wrote illuminatingly about the Nile’s geography, neither of them attempted to redraw the characters and relationships of the original Nile explorers in the light of all the new information that has emerged since 1960.
Indeed, post-Moorehead, an astonishing eight biographies of Burton have been published, if one includes Mary Lovell’s double life of Burton and his wife, Isabel. There have been four lives of David Livingstone, six of Henry Stanley, one of Samuel Baker, one of Baker’s wife, Florence, one of Samuel and Florence, and one of John Hanning Speke. So a return to the Victorian Nile story seems long overdue.
Mary Lovell, in her life of both Burtons, The Rage to Live (1998), revealed new facts unknown to Alan Moorehead, most notably that Burton had secretly believed Speke to have been right about the source and had written to the RGS admitting as much. Alexander Maitland with his well-researched life of Speke (1971), and the American academic, W. B. Carnochan, with his slim, incisive volume entitled: The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile; or, Was John Hanning Speke a Cad? (2006) have together gone some way towards counteracting the ferociously negative slant which Isabel Burton – in her hugely influential two-volume biography, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (1893) – gave to all her surmises about Speke’s motives and character. Recently, Jon R. Godsall in The Tangled Web (2008) has done more than any previous Burton biographer to nail the many lies, inventions and distortions that had originally made their appearance in Burton’s and in Isabel Burton’s writings about Speke and his two journeys with her late husband.
John Speke is perhaps the most enigmatic Nile explorer. Even after I had read widely in the published literature, many questions about him still puzzled me. Had he really been suicidal when he first came to Africa as Burton claimed? Why did he and Burton fail to travel the relatively short distance from Ujiji to the Rusizi river when so much depended on it? Why did Burton hate Speke so intensely, given that he secretly agreed with his estimate of the importance of the Victoria Nyanza, and why had he not gone back with him to examine that lake when begged to do so? Because no early letters or diaries written by Speke have survived, I decided to read as many of his later communications as have been preserved in the National Library of Scotland, in particular his letters to and from his publisher. This led me to study the original manuscript of his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, and also the heavily edited proofs of that book. In this way I gleaned a large amount of brand-new biographical information from reading the many excised personal passages, which had been deemed unsuitable for publication by John Blackwood – such as Speke’s affecting love for one particular Bagandan woman, the sexual advice he gave to Kabaka Mutesa and to the kabaka’s mother, and his sympathetic view of the uninhibited sensuality of Bagandan society. All this contradicts the assertions made by many Burton biographers, including the excellent Fawn Brodie, about Speke being prim, censorious, and either sexless or a repressed homosexual.
Speke has been almost universally reviled for ruining the reputation of the British Vice-Consul at Khartoum, John Petherick, who Speke had expected to meet him with supplies and men near the northern borders of Buganda. However, the little-known diary of Petherick’s wife, Katherine, in the Wellcome Library, has shown me that the charges which Speke and Baker made against Petherick – especially that he had used forced labour and had shot Africans resisting capture – were true.
After the death of Quentin Keynes in 2003, his large collection of Burton’s papers and books was bought by the British Library. Although the collection’s most interesting letter books, containing Burton’s drafts and Speke’s replies, had been privately published by Keynes in 1999 for the bibliophiles of the exclusive Roxburghe Club, under the misleading title of The Search for the Source of the Nile, additional papers from Keynes’s collection, now in the BL, show the maverick Burton in an unexpected light. For instance they reveal that, while scoffing at the British establishment in public, in private he and Isabel wrote scores of letters in an energetic campaign to secure a knighthood for him.
Away from the world of Speke and Burton, the new material and arguments presented by me in my biographies of Livingstone (1973) and Stanley (2007) have made Moorehead’s portrayal of the former as a near saint and the latter as a brash and unprincipled condottiero seem too stereotypical to reflect their complex motives for committing themselves to the Nile quest. That Livingstone had failed as a conventional missionary, and as a father and husband, are not facts to be found in The White Nile, any more than is Stanley’s illegitimacy and his longing for an ideal father, which lay at the heart of his search for Livingstone. In researching Explorers of the Nile, I returned to Livingstone’s Unyanyembe diary and field books, inspired by the recent ‘imaging’ work of Dr Adrian Wisnicki on the original documents from which the explorer’s published Last Journals were transcribed. Stanley’s contribution to the Nile quest during its later years was second to none and no other explorer played a more important role in involving Britain in Uganda and East Africa. All this I discovered during my research for my biography.
