The Sources of the Nile

Lake Victoria

Last week I wrote about David Livingstone and his six vanished years in search of the source of the Nile.  In a comment, Annamaria Alfieri suggested that the enthusiasm for this particular venture was motivated by Britain’s concern to control Egypt and thus the Suez Canal.  No doubt that’s right.  But the issue goes back much further than that.  There is a Latin saying: “Caput Nili quaerere,” which means “searching for the Nile’s head”.  It was used when someone suggested doing something ridiculous or impossible.  It reminds me of our saying: “You might as well fly to the moon,” which has also been outdated by technology.

Nile Delta

Headwaters of the Blue Nile

Speaking of technology, last week I suggested that a couple of hours with GoogleEarth is all one needs nowadays to solve these exploration issues.  So I decided to try with the source of the Nile.  Well, it only takes about fifteen minutes.  (It’s fun to do, but don’t cheat.  Turn off all the borders, roads, photos and the like or it will take you on an obvious tour down the river.)  

Start at the mouth in Cairo and work upstream from there.  It’s pretty obvious up to Khartoum in Sudan and then there’s a problem.  The river splits into two major tributaries, the White Nile and the Blue Nile.  The Blue, which actually carries the majority of water into the main river as well as the fertile silt, wends its way from Lake Tana in the highlands of Ethiopia.  So is that the source?  No, the definition seems to be that the source is the furthest connected waterway from the mouth.  The White Nile is longer, so follow it south through a huge swampy area in southern Sudan. (Yes, Sudan is like Botswana; very dry except where it’s wet.)   Then it crosses into Uganda and once more splits.  The Albert Nile empties from the lakes of the Great Rift Valley while the White Nile heads east and then south.  It exits from Lake Kayoga, which in turn is fed from Lake Victoria.  And that huge East African lake is to all intents and purposes the source of the Nile.  But, of course, one could argue that the longest river flowing into Lake Victoria is actually the source.  In 1934 a German explorer traced the Kagera river back to the hills of Burundi, and as recently as 2006 a British and New Zealand party claimed a spot in Rwanda as the actual source (i.e. that their source was further from Lake Vic than the German’s).  And that wasn’t easy.  The 2006 team traveled 4000 miles in 80 days and one member of the party was killed by rebels. 

Dhows on Aswan Dam

But it was the connection between a great lake and the Nile that the seventeenth century explorers sought.  A nice, safe water supply for the river, and plenty of accolades at home.

John Hanning Speke

In 1856 John Hanning Speke teamed up with Richard Burton (fresh from his trip to Mecca disguised as an Arab pilgrim) and set out in search of the source of the Nile.  It was a strange partnership; the men already disliked each other and had very different personalities – Burton flamboyant and Speke retiring.  Their earlier trip together had seen them both badly injured in Somalia.  My guess is that they went together because each was scared of the other discovering the source alone!  As with all of these explorations into “darkest” Africa, the trip was horrendous.  Both men became ill.  Speke went temporary blind and suffered greatly after trying to remove a beetle from his ear with a knife.  They discovered Lake Tanganyika, but Burton was too weak to continue.  Speke went on without him, discovered Lake Victoria, and declared it – correctly but with no real evidence – as the source of the Nile.

Richard Burton

Nile Catchment

He announced this publicly on returning to England, to Burton’s fury.  On a follow up expedition in 1860, he sailed the northern coast of Lake Victoria and found the Ripon Falls pouring water out of the lake.  Although he didn’t follow the water through Somalia, the evidence seemed conclusive.  But Burton was still pushing the Lake Tanganyika option.  (He wasn’t stupid, at one stage the Albert Nile was indeed fed from that lake, but it was blocked by volcanic activity in geological times.) Eventually a great debate was scheduled between the men before the geographical section of the British Association in Bath on 18 September 1864.  The day before, Speke went bird hunting and, climbing a wall with a cocked shotgun, killed himself.  There were rumors of suicide, but the wound – below the armpit – made that very unlikely.

The matter rested in limbo until our friend Henry Stanley of Livingstone fame confirmed Speke’s discovery in 1875.

Michael – Thursday.  

Not Quite Cape to Cairo

Rhodes straddling Africa

At the end of the nineteenth century, Cecil John Rhodes envisaged a solid block of British territory running from Cape Town in South Africa to Cairo in Egypt and linked by a railway line – the Cape to Cairo railway.  Of course, the dream never became reality, and now much more serious problems than a plethora of different railway gauges beset a concept that would require a route through nine or ten independent countries.  Still, it is possible to travel a long way by rail if you’re willing to put up with corrupt border posts and warm to middling hostilities between the countries along the way.  Wikipedia claims that only the section across Sudan is missing.  Perhaps one needs to switch to Camel Gauge for that part of the route.

The proposed line and colonies

I’ve done the section from Johannesburg to Victoria Falls by rail through Botswana, and that is now a regular tourist route.  There is even a very high class tourist train which undertakes that journey, but then it turns around and comes back.  My only experience on more northern African trains was in the early sixties. 

After a particularly disturbing period in South Africa, my parents decided to emigrate and, unwilling to leave Africa immediately (we eventually ended in Australia but that’s another story), my father accepted the headship of the mathematics department of the University of East Africa at Nairobi.  We moved there in 1960 just after Kenya’s independence from Britain, and lived there until 1964.  During that time my mother and I explored the wonderful wildlife areas of East Africa in her long wheel base series II Land Rover -christened Brontosaurus - while my father proved mathematical theorems.

My mother, Teda, with Bronto

We also drove down from Nairobi to Johannesburg and back twice, quite an undertaking for a woman with a teenage son too young to share the driving on the 5,000 mile journey.  But my mother was like that.  As long as she had her Bronto and Africa, she was fine.  And, of course, I loved it!  We had some adventures, but somehow we always got through … except once.  Driving back to Nairobi in 1962, we hit a wet season which was extraordinary.  All the roads were unpaved, of course, and, as one approached Lake Tanganyika, they deteriorated into sticky clay.  As we headed into southern Tanganyika (as it was then), we found ourselves skidding through ruts and passing a variety of bogged down vehicles, forlornly awaiting rescue.  Eventually we made it to a town near Lake Tanganyika, and adjourned to the local hotel for food and news of the way ahead.

It was not encouraging.  The roads along the lake – not highways at the best of times – had deteriorated into swamps.  We would need to backtrack a long way and then head through the center of the country to try to get through.  Eventually another plan was suggested.  There was a goods train that ran through the town and would travel the whole way up the lake and across to Mwanza on Lake Victoria.  There we would be on the doorstep of the Serengeti and out of the mud.

I’m sure that nowadays a variety of regulations ranging from safety and health issues to red-tape formalities requiring multiple costly signatures would prevent such an adventure.  Then, a few calls from the hotel manager to the station master and the next day the Land Rover was nicely settled on a flatbed truck and we were off. 

It was three days and two nights before we reached Mwanza.  And this was only a goods train so we had to ride in the vehicle.  Our view was from the Land Rover windows as we headed north through the sodden landscape, the lake unfortunately out of sight.  Luckily we were prepared for camping with food and a bed which spread across the back of the vehicle, but when the train stopped at a station, there would be a rush to the toilets.  The train driver knew about us, and waited till the station master waved the all-clear when we were back aboard.  Until the last morning.  Unbeknownst to us, the driver had changed overnight and the new driver was not aware of his unusual cargo.  At the first station in the morning, we emerged from the facilities relieved, only to watch the train and our vehicle pulling out of the station.  Only the quick thinking of the station master in switching the signals saved the day.

Mwanza today

When we reached Mwanza, we checked into the Victoria Hotel and enjoyed baths and cooked food before continuing the trip in a more conventional way.

And Bronto?  After that her tires didn’t leave the road again until she sailed for Australia…

Michael - Thursday.