Indian Ocean, north of Zanzibar-photo courtesy of Geoffrey Clarfield

 During the 19th century the search for the origin of the Nile River was to Victorian England (and the rest of the Western world) what the space race and putting a man on the moon was to the Anglosphere in the 20th century. The (mostly) men who made this attempt had names like John Hanning Speke, Richard (later Sir) Burton, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley (of the I presume fame) and so many others.

All of them kept diaries. All of them wrote best selling books about their adventures and all of them became world famous household names during the Victorian era. Today they are remembered as the ‘explorers’ who discovered the Nile.

All of them were affected by Social Darwinism and its prequels, and in various ways believed that the white man was biologically superior to Africans and Asians and most of them assumed the natural superiority of Christianity.

Sir Richard Burton was one of the exceptions as in his writings he hinted that Islam was the equal of Christianity. He wrote nothing in public about the Jews and was eventually made a knight by Queen Victoria. Had she had access to his private writings about Jews and Judaism she and her advisors may well have had second thoughts about giving the man what the British call his ‘K,’ or knighthood.

In this article I would like to give the background history to Burton’s ultimately unsuccessful bid to discover the source of the Nile and perhaps some of the scapegoating he fell into due to his social eclipse after his failure, for it is always easy to find a scapegoat when things go wrong.

I have seen the Nile from the bridges of Cairo in Egypt. I have seen it from a boat on Lake Tana in Ethiopia. I have stood near to where John Hanning Speke first sighted Lake Victoria (Nyanza) and declared it to be the source of the White Nile on July 30, 1858, 168 years ago, two years before the start of the Civil War.

I have read about the Nile since I heard my first Bible story about Moses and the Exodus, his birth and near miraculous survival in a bulrush cradle snatched from the Nile by a Pharaonic princess. Its geology, archaeology, its history and the ethnography and music of its peoples comprise a dazzling mosaic of human diversity.

And so, every year when I visit East Africa (and I have just returned from ‘Safari’) I read something substantial about the river and its exploration. This winter I read the fine book about the search for the source of the Nile by American National Geographic writer Candice Milliard.

Milliard took five years to author the book, and it has become a best seller. River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (2022) is a non fiction retelling of the search for the source of the Nile which was largely carried out by Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, with the indispensable assistance of the former slave Sidi Mubarak Bombay.

With Milliard, Bombay ‘returns to history’ in this professionally written re-examination of this quest following in the literary footsteps of Tim Jeal’s Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (2012), and the writings of the Norwegian geographer Terje Tvedt. Then of course there is the chronicler of the Blue and White Nile, Alan Moorehead who wrote two books with those names in the early 1960s.

It is reassuring to know that despite the fact that I am a big fan of the history, archaeology and ethnography of the people of the Nile public interest in this history does not wane across the generations, as Milliard’s book was declared by the Washington Post as its Best Book of the Year. Goodreads gave it its choice award, and the book was a New York Times best seller.

Decades ago, the BBC produced a multi part dramatic recreation of the quest of Burton and Speke. I saw it when it first came on air and I have purchased a boot legged DVD of the shows online as the BBC has not yet seen fit to re release it. This is because it was honest and politically incorrect showing Burton and Speke, warts, and all, with their deep Victorian prejudices towards non-European peoples.

Burton believed that humankind had multiple origins and therefore by implication, some were superior to others. Speke had succumbed to the Hamitic Hypothesis which argued that lighter skinned people had brought civilization to Africa. For a fascinating history of this idea, it is truly worthwhile to read Michael Robinson’s book, The Lost White........

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