by Tim Jeal
Speke and Grant present Rumanika with a rhinoceros’ head.
Speke and Grant celebrated Christmas at Rumanika’s court with his athletic sons and amazingly fat daughters, who were force-fed with milk and beef-juice until they became almost spherical, as was the fashion for women at court. Just as the crinoline in Europe demonstrated that a ‘lady’ did not work, these princesses were showing that they too led ornamental lives and had parents who could afford to feed them prodigiously. In exchange for showing one of the princesses his bare arm, Speke persuaded this young woman, who ‘was unable to stand except on all fours’, to allow him to measure her. The circumference of her upper arm was an amazing two feet, and that of her thigh almost three feet. Her rolls of flesh made him think of gigantic puddings.52
Early in the New Year of 1862, the explorers received news which, wrote Speke, ‘drove us half wild with delight for we fully believed Mr Petherick was indeed on his road up the Nile, endeavouring to meet us’. The members of a diplomatic mission, sent by Rumanika some months earlier to Bunyoro (to the north of Buganda), had just returned, bringing news that foreigners in boats had arrived in Gani, north-east of Bunyoro. These foreigners had apparently been driven off to the north. Because Speke was convinced by this intelligence that Petherick and his party had just failed to get through, he wrote the Welshman a letter of encouragement, which was taken north by Baraka, Uledi and a small bodyguard provided by Rumanika. On 7 January an Indian ivory trader called Juma arrived in Karagwe with news that King Mutesa of Buganda was sending some officers to greet Speke and Grant and escort him back to his kingdom.
Just when their final push towards the source of the Nile seemed to be beginning, Grant’s health threatened his participation. His right leg, above the knee, had become stiff, swollen and alarmingly inflamed. He could neither walk nor leave his hut. The intense pain was only eased by his making incisions to release the fluid. Yet fresh abscesses would form within days. In his desperate situation, he was ready to try any cure suggested by the locals, including a cow-dung poultice and having a paste like gunpowder rubbed into the cuts. One theory was that he had been bitten by a snake when sleeping. It seems more likely that he was suffering from a bacterial infection of the deep tissues, which today would be treated with antibiotics. Although Grant did not know it, months of suffering lay ahead while his immune system rallied to fight the infection.53 So when, on 10 January, Maula, a royal officer from Buganda, strode into Rumanika’s palace enclosure, followed by a smartly dressed escort of men, women and boys, and announced that Kabaka Mutesa was eager to see the white men, the uncomplaining Grant had to be left behind. He seemed content with Speke’s assurances that they would be re-united as soon as his leg improved. Rumanika had warned both men that Mutesa never allowed sick people to enter his country.
As Speke and his men followed Maula across a swampy plain towards the deep and strongly flowing Kagera river, he sensed that what he had been told about the Kagera on his first visit to the Nyanza had been right – namely that this was the lake’s principal feeder and that it rose far to the west in the Mountains of the Moon.54 This feeling was not entirely intuitive, since in June 1858 Snay bin Amir had told him that he had ‘found it emanating from Urundi, a district of the Mountains of the Moon’.55 In fact it originated well to the south of the Ruwenzoris (Mountains of the Moon) from two distinct sources in remote highland regions of Rwanda (close to Lake Kivu) and Burundi (close to Lake Tanganyika), but was, nonetheless the Victoria Nyanza’s main provider.
Speke wrote in his journal at the start of his march to Buganda: ‘I am perfectly sure … that before very long I [shall] settle the great Nile problem for ever.’ But this would depend entirely upon how he fared in Buganda, where, unknown to him, the kabaka had just sacrificed over 400 people in a vast ritual massacre to celebrate the coming of the white man. Kabaka Mutesa possessed the largest army in central Africa and was ruler of a kingdom that had been centralised and socially stratified since the fifteenth century. Rumanika warned Speke that Mutesa hated Bunyoro and its king, Kamrasi, and therefore never let anyone leave his country travelling in a northerly direction. This would make following any river north from Buganda extremely dangerous. In any case, Speke knew that he would be taking his life in his hands by placing himself in the power of an unpredictable feudal autocrat. But he had never lacked courage, as he was about to show many times during his long sojourn in Buganda.56
NINE
As Refulgent as the Sun
During Speke’s six-week march to Buganda, as he came closer to the Nyanza, he and his men had to wade chest deep across a succession of swampy valleys where the water’s surface was only broken by large termite mounds, each topped with its own euphorbia candelabra tree. Towards the end of January, for the first time on this journey, he caught a glimpse of the glittering Nyanza from a place called Ukara; but neither on this occasion, nor when he came closer still on 7 February, did he choose to visit the lakeside itself to check whether the water seemed to be continuous. Certainly, he was restricted by the orders of his royal escort, but this lack of scientific thoroughness would come to haunt him later. Possibly he took it for granted that the lake was one immense inland sea because everyone he met said that it was.1
In late January, after sending messengers to the kabaka to learn his wishes, Maula – who, unknown to the explorer, was Mutesa’s chief spy and torturer – told Speke that it would be ten days or more before they would be able to continue their journey and in the meantime he meant to visit friends. While he was gone, local villagers subjected Speke to two days and nights of ‘drumming, singing, screaming, yelling and dancing’. In their own eyes, they were frightening away the devil – aka the ghostly-looking white man – though Speke gave no indication that he made the connection. After several days of this hubbub, he was delighted to receive an unexpected visit from N’yamgundu, the brother of the dowager queen of Buganda. This nobleman promised to return at sunrise to escort him and his followers to Mutesa’s palace.
When N’yamgundu failed to turn up early next morning, Speke ordered Bombay to strike his tent and begin the march. Bombay objected on the excellent grounds that without N’yamgundu, they had nobody to guide them. Frustrated and disappointed, Speke shouted: ‘Never mind; obey my orders and strike the tent.’ When Bombay refused, Speke pulled it down over his head. ‘On this,’ wrote Speke, ‘Bombay flew into a passion, abusing the men who were helping me, as there were fires and powder boxes under the tent.’ But Speke was beyond reason. Recalling all the insults, delays, untruths, disloyalties, thefts and losses he had endured without venting his fury, Speke’s self-control finally cracked. ‘If I choose to blow-up my property,’ he roared, ‘that is my look-out; and if you don’t do your duty I will blow you up also.’ Bombay still refused to obey him, so Speke delivered three sharp punches to his head. Bombay squared up as if about to fight back, but changed his mind and did not lay a finger on his attacker. Showing amazing self-restraint, he simply declared that he would no longer serve him as caravan leader. When Speke offered Bombay’s job to Nasib, the older of his two indispensable interpreters, he declined it. Instead, in Speke’s words, ‘the good old man made Bombay give in’.
Speke later rationalised the bludgeoning he had administered by saying that he could not have ‘degraded’ Bombay by allowing an inferior officer to strike him for disobeying a direct order from his leader. But really, Speke had behaved outrageously and knew it – especially since he respected Bombay more than any other man in his employ. ‘It was the first and last time I had ever occasion to lose my dignity by striking a blow with my own hands.’2 It is some mitigation of the offence that virtually every other European explorer of Africa handed out thrashings from time to time in order to preserve a semblance of discipline – even Dr Livingstone. The endless vexations of African travel, and the hypersensitivity caused by repeated attacks of malaria, could sting the most patient of men into violent over-reaction.
While this row had been
going on, N’yamgundu unexpectedly arrived and the caravan moved off soon afterwards. Two days later, several of the kabaka’s shaven-headed pages turned up carrying three sticks representing the three charms or medicines, which Mutesa hoped the white man would give him. The first was a potion to free him from his dreams of a deceased relative; the second was a charm to improve his erections and his potency; and the third a charm to enable him to keep his subjects in awe of him. Though daunted by these outlandish requests, Speke’s confidence was boosted when a royal officer joined the caravan as it reached the northern shores of the lake and told Speke that ‘the king was in a nervous state of excitement, always asking after [him]’.3 While the explorer’s principal interest still lay in locating the northern outlet of the Nyanza, he was also gripped by the drama of arriving at a unique feudal court and meeting a king whose ancestors had been monarchs since the fifteenth century.
As he came closer to the royal palace, Buganda itself began to charm him. ‘Up and down we went on again, through this wonderful country, surprisingly rich in grass, cultivation and trees.’ All the watercourses were bridged now with poles or palm trunks. Because the lake brought rain all the year round, the hills were as green as English downs, though larger, and their tops were grazed by long-horned cattle rather than sheep. Through banana plantations and woods, Speke caught tantalising glimpses of his shimmering lake.
On 18 February, the caravan was at last close to the kabaka’s palace. ‘It was a magnificent sight,’ enthused Speke in his journal. ‘A whole hill was covered with gigantic huts, such as I had never seen in Africa before.’ Indeed they were fifty-feet-tall conical structures, bound onto cane frames which were covered with tightly woven reeds. Speke had hoped to be summoned at once, but to his dismay was shown into a small and dirty hut to await the kabaka’s pleasure. N’yamgundu explained gently that a levée could not take place till the following day because it had started to rain.
Speke began the manuscript of his book Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile with a first sentence that would be deleted by his publisher:
Our motto being: ‘Evil to him who evils thinks,’ the reader of these pages must be prepared to see and understand the negroes of Africa in their natural, primitive, or naked state; a state in which our forefathers lived before the forced state of civilization subverted it.
The road to the kabaka’s palace.
John Blackwood advised that this account of a ‘forced’ civilisation ‘subverting’ a more desirable and ‘natural’ way of life, should be replaced with a banal passage in which Speke could suggest that tribal faults and excesses might be viewed compassionately because Africans had been excluded from the Christian dispensation that gave Europeans their moral compass.4 As will become apparent, the omitted sentence reflected his true feelings.
But to begin with, to gain respect, he planned to claim that he was a royal prince in his own country and therefore the kabaka’s social equal. Personal vanity in part explains this pretence, though practical considerations were also involved. To enter a self-contained world – which had remained, despite the arrival of Arab slave traders two decades before, almost exactly as it had been four centuries earlier – offered Speke, as this world’s first white visitor, an extraordinary opportunity. As the first of his race ever to be seen by the kabaka and his courtiers, Speke knew he would seem a marvel – and this would not only be personally gratifying, but would also make it easier for him to gain the kabaka’s support for his Nile mission. Or so he hoped. But the charm of his novelty might be lost were he to allow himself to be outshone or humiliated by the kabaka. So he gave much thought to the figure he ought to cut when marching from his humble hut to the royal enclosure where his audience was scheduled to take place the following day: 20 February 1862.
The Union Flag was carried in front of him by his kirangozi, while, just behind him, a twelve-man guard of honour, dressed in red flannel cloaks and carrying their arms sloped, followed. The rest of his people came next, each carrying a present. The little procession was led past huts ‘thatched as neatly as so many heads dressed by a London barber, and fenced all round with the common Uganda tiger-grass’. In one nearby court, musicians were playing on large nine-stringed harps, like the Nubian tambira, and on immense ceremonial drums. Within a separate enclosure lived the namasole, or queen-dowager, with Mutesa’s three or four hundred wives, many of whom stood chatting as the little procession went by. In the next fenced court, Speke was presented to courtiers of high dignity: the katikiro, or prime minister, the kamraviona (properly kamalabyonna) or commander-in-chief; the kangaawo and the ppookino (‘Mr Pokino’ and ‘Colonel Congow’ to Speke), who were governors of provinces; as well as meeting the admiral-of-the-fleet, the first- and second-class executioners, the commissioner in charge of tombs, and the royal brewer. The kabaka’s cabinet of senior advisers, the lukiiko, ‘wore neat bark cloaks resembling the best yellow corduroy cloth … and over that, a patchwork of small antelope skins, which were sewn together as well as any English glovers could have pieced them’.
Mutesa’s musicians.
Then, just when an audience with the kabaka seemed imminent, Speke was asked to sit on the ground and wait outside in the sun, as Arab traders were obliged to do. ‘I felt,’ recalled Speke, ‘that if I did not stand up for my social position at once, I should be treated with contempt … and thus lose the vantage ground of appearing rather as a prince than a trader.’ So he turned on his heel and stalked off in the direction of his hut, while his men remained sitting on the ground, in a state of terror lest he be killed. But something very different happened. Several courtiers dashed after him, fell upon their knees, and implored him to return at once, since the king would not eat until he had seen him. But Speke turned his back on them and entered his hut as if mortally offended. Soon other courtiers arrived, humbly informing him that the king wished to be respectful and that Speke would be allowed to bring his own chair to the audience, ‘although such a seat was exclusively the attribute of the king’. Speke kept them waiting for his decision, while he smoked his pipe and drank a cup of coffee.
He found the kabaka waiting for him in his ‘state hut’, surrounded by numerous squatting courtiers and by some of his wives:
The king, a good-looking, well-figured, tall young man of twenty-five, was sitting on a red blanket spread upon a square platform of royal grass … The hair of his head was cut short, excepting on the top, where it was combed up into a high ridge, running from stem to stern like a cockscomb. On his neck was a very neat ornament – a large ring of beautifully worked small beads, forming elegant patterns by their various colours … On every finger and every toe he had alternate brass and copper rings; and above the ankles, halfway up to the calf, a stocking of very pretty beads. Everything was light, neat, and elegant in its way; not a fault could be found with the taste of his ‘getting-up’.
When Speke was permitted to sit opposite the monarch, he wanted to open a conversation, but thought better of it on observing that no courtier dared speak, or even lift his head for fear of being accused of eyeing the royal wives. ‘So the king and myself sat staring at one another for full [sic] an hour,’ without exchanging a single word. Eventually, the king commanded Maula to ask Speke ‘if [he] had seen him’. ‘Yes, for full [sic] one hour,’ replied the explorer, which, when translated, cannot have pleased the kabaka, who had expected a fulsome tribute to his good looks and magnificence. So he made no offer of food and walked away in his most formal manner, imitating the strides of a lion – a gait which had been affected by Bugandan kings for many generations. Speke’s porters were awed, but Speke thought it made Mutesa look unintentionally ridiculous, though not quite as silly as his own men who were shuffling away like frightened geese.
An hour later he and Mutesa met again and spoke to one another – a difficult procedure involving Bombay translating his words into Kiswahili, then Nasib rendering them into Luganda, and finally, Maula conveying them directly to the king, �
��for it was considered indecorous to transmit any message to his majesty except through the medium of one of his officers’. The kabaka wanted to know what messages had been sent by Rumanika, and after being told, turned to Speke and asked him again, with great intensity, whether he had seen him. This time Speke made up for his earlier tactlessness and told the kabaka he was ‘very beautiful, as refulgent as the sun, with hair like the wool of a black sheep, and legs that move as gracefully as a lion’s’.5
Before Speke could mention his plans for exploration, the king asked whether he would show him some of his guns. So Speke’s followers laid out the firearms brought as presents, including a Whitworth’s rifle – in Speke’s opinion ‘the best shooting gun in the world’ – and a revolver, three carbines, three sword-bayonets and several boxes of ammunition and gun-caps. Mutesa ‘appeared quite confused with the various wonders as he handled them’, and sat poring over his presents until the light began to fail. The four rich silk cloths, ten bundles of rare beads, several sets of cutlery, an iron chair and a gold chronometer, received less attention. Speke probably saw no irony in the fact that the first white visitor’s most valuable presents conferred no peaceful arts, but rather the capacity to kill more effectively than the kabaka had hitherto dreamed of.6
Three days later, after meetings on each of the preceding days, the king summoned Speke and asked him to shoot the four cows that were walking about the court. Having brought no weapon, he borrowed the revolver he had given to the kabaka, and succeeded in killing all four with five rapidly fired shots. ‘Great applause followed this wonderful feat.’ But what followed showed Mutesa in a darker light. The king loaded one of the carbines Speke had given him, and handing it ‘full-cock to a page, told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court; which no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success with a look of glee’. A horrified Speke observed in his journal: ‘There appeared no curiosity to know what individual human being the urchin had deprived of life.’7 It would not be long before Speke began to see,