Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (21 page)

Both men enjoyed hunting, especially when their quarry was as dangerous as a rhinoceros. But events would make them more risk averse. Very conscious of the need to provide large amounts of meat, Speke went out one moonlit night, with a man behind him holding a second rifle for emergencies, and managed to hit a large rhinoceros bull, and then ‘brought him round with a roar, exactly to the best position I could wish for receiving a second shot’. But when reaching for his second gun, Speke found that his gun-bearer had scrambled up a tree. Providentially for Speke, the rhinoceros unexpectedly ‘turned right about and shuffled away’. When Speke managed to kill a second rhino, his Wangwana failed to reach the carcase ahead of local Wagogo villagers and were forced to compete with them for cuts of meat.

A more savage, filthy, disgusting, but at the same time grotesque scene cannot be conceived. All fell to work armed with swords, spears, knives and hatchets – cutting and slashing, thumping and bawling, fighting and tumbling and wrestling up to their knees in filth and blood in the middle of the carcase. When a tempting morsel fell to the possession of any one, a stronger neighbour would seize and bear off the prize in triumph.
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On 7 January 1861, when not far from Kazeh, Speke and Grant were electrified to hear that Manwa Sera, the Nyamwezi ruler, who was at war with the Unyanyembe Arabs, was approaching their camp with thirty armed followers. Speke ordered the remaining Baluchis to fix bayonets, and told all the porters who possessed guns to fetch them. On seeing this show of arms, Manwa Sera’s men drew back, and he himself entered Speke’s camp, attended only by a small bodyguard. The young king said he had heard that Speke was short of porters and offered to assist him if he would accompany him to Kazeh and then mediate on his behalf with the Arabs. Manwa Sera described how he had tried to levy a tax on all merchandise that entered his country, and had consequently been attacked by the Arabs, who had forced him to live like a fugitive and had replaced him with a puppet. But he had not surrendered. Speke ‘felt very much for him’ and thought him ‘the very picture of a captain of the banditti of the romances’. Manwa Sera spontaneously offered to drop the tax if the Arabs would recognise him rather than the pretender, so Speke could see no reason why Snay bin Amir and his compatriots would not want to oblige the exiled ruler rather than go on fighting. However, soon after Speke’s and Grant’s arrival in Kazeh on 23 January, Snay and the other Arabs turned down the offer of mediation and attacked Manwa Sera with 400 men. The Nyamwezi king proved a superior tactician and routed the Arabs, killing Snay in the process. The survivors, on returning to Kazeh, begged Speke to invite Manwa Sera into Kazeh for a conference, so they could murder him. Naturally, Speke rejected their request.
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At Kazeh, Speke and Grant faced a crisis. All but two of their hundred Nyamwezi porters had recently deserted, as had all
twenty-five Baluchis. One of the Hottentots was dead and five others so sickly that they would have to be sent to the coast. About sixty Wangwana were still with them, as were Bombay, Baraka, Uledi and Rahan. Sheikh Said bin Salim was too sick to go on, due to an old illness which Speke implied was syphilis. ‘It was a sad misfortune as the men had great confidence in him.’
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Luckily, the Indian merchant Musa Mzuri, with whom Speke would have travelled to Uganda if Burton had not prevented him, agreed to help him find porters for the next and crucial leg of his journey. There being none to be had in Unyanyembe thanks to the fighting, Musa travelled north to Rungua and returned with a disappointing thirty-nine men, 130 having deserted him on the way back due to their fear of Manwa Sera. Although Speke felt ‘thrown on his beam-ends’, he marched north on 16 March 1861 with the hundred or so men he had left. The months ahead were to pose the greatest test he had ever faced.

Musa, upon whom Speke depended, had been an opium addict for forty years but there was nothing wrong with his business acumen – he was charging Speke 400 per cent more for trade goods than he would have had to pay for the same items at the coast. He lived surrounded by his wives and by 300 slaves and servants, most of them Tutsis from Rwanda, who tended his orchards, vegetable gardens and his herd of cattle, besides acting as porters on his ivory trading expeditions.
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According to Musa, all would be well when the explorers reached the court of his friend King Rumanika of Karagwe. But this monarch was 300 miles away to the north and the territory of numerous chiefs would have to be crossed
en route.
Whether Speke would be able to keep his porters with him and pay the dues demanded by these African petty-rulers was a question he was in no position to answer. He had been warned that he would never get through Usui since Chief Suwarora was so extortionate in his demands that he would ‘tear him to pieces’.

After only a couple of days’ travelling, the caravan reached Ukumbi where the villagers ‘flew about brandishing their spears and pulling their bows in the most grotesque attitudes, alarming
some of my porters so much that they threw down their loads and bolted’.
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Most of these porters had been suffering severe bouts of fever every tenth day, which usually lasted from two to five days. Grant, who was ill himself, was jealous of Speke, ‘who had been so long in Africa [that he] was not subject to them’. But Speke had other worries. He had just learned that the Watuta – Ngoni (Zulu) mercenaries employed by the Arabs -were plundering the country all around.
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In this dangerous situation, Speke was immensely relieved when Musa’s men (though without Musa himself) unexpectedly arrived at his camp with 300 porters. Speke now sent to Kazeh for the rest of his people, including Bombay – who had succeeded the Sheikh as
cafilah-bashi
– ordering them to come on north with the supplies that they had been forced to leave behind for want of porters. But just when he should have been able to advance, news broke that the Watuta, who were renowned for their ferocity, had surrounded Rungua and were blocking the road to Karagwe and Buganda, as part of their strategy to contain Manwa Sera’s Nyamwezi followers. Worse still, Musa’s porters suddenly announced to Speke that they would not be allowed to travel with him for more than two marches because of the war.
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So Speke now had no alternative but to march back to Kazeh to try to sort things out with Musa, and then confront the Arabs and demand that they stop using the Watuta against Manwa Sera. He failed to change Musa’s mind about the porters, but did extract a promise that he would come with him to Karagwe, as soon as he was feeling better. He looked horribly ill, despite dosing himself with ‘what he described as his training pills – small dried buds of roses with alternate bits of sugar candy’. Musa died a few days later of the combined effects of fever and his long addiction to opium. So Speke had lost the only merchant he trusted.

More bad news swiftly followed. Chief Suwarora, the first important ruler on the road to the north, was building a line of thorn
bomas
(hedges) to defend his frontier and promised ‘to kill every coast-man, who dared attempt to enter Usui’. ‘My
heart was ready to sink as I turned into bed,’ wrote Speke in his journal, ‘and I was driven to think of abandoning everybody not strong enough to go on with me carrying a load.’ The Cape Hottentots were certainly too ill for load-carrying. Two had already died, and the rest were yellow with jaundice, so Speke sent them to the coast to save their lives.

After his reluctant return to Kazeh, the Arabs surprised Speke by begging him once again to negotiate on their behalf with Manwa Sera, since they were being ruined by the fighting, which had trapped their ivory in Ugogo, where the porters were starving to death. Though Speke was enraged with Abdulla and Muhinna, the leading Arabs at Kazeh, for continuing to employ the Watuta, he agreed ‘to write out all the articles of a treaty of peace’, with sanctions against them if they broke their word to Manwa Sera. Although he and Grant detested Muhinna, who had just refused to stop beating his chained female slaves, Speke still felt he had no alternative but to try to end the war in his own interests, as well as theirs.
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So he sent Baraka to locate Manwa Sera and bring his emissaries to Kazeh. Baraka achieved this miracle within a few days. But the negotiations foundered on the question of how much land should be restored to the African ruler. So, despite Speke’s best efforts, he left Kazeh having failed to create peace in the area through which he would now be travelling. In fact, just before he marched, he heard that Manwa Sera was recruiting Wagogo and Wasukuma warriors in order to renew the struggle.

Speke was distressed to be travelling without Musa and his porters, but he felt he could wait no longer, and ignored Bombay and Baraka who both said he that he was misguided not to wait until the Arabs and their brutal mercenaries could gain a permanent advantage over Manwa Sera. Bucked by his acquisition of an experienced
kirangozi,
Speke told Baraka and Bombay about ‘the perseverance and success of Columbus, who, though opposed by his sailors had still gone on and triumphed’.
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At Ukuni, just north of Kazeh, Speke’s shortage of porters obliged him to leave behind Grant and Bombay with thirty men
and the bulk of the expedition’s supplies, while he and Baraka went north with just over sixty men, intending to return when enough new porters could be found.
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Between July and September the two explorers were separated, while Speke faced a succession of rapacious chiefs and headmen without the reassurance of Grant’s phlegmatic presence. Speke gave instructions to his new
kirangozi
to avoid all the chiefs on the road ahead, so he would not have to make ruinous
hongo
payments. But the man promptly led him to the
boma
(protected village) of Mfumbi, a sub-chief in Sorombo. Not only did Mfumbi ask for cloth and beads for himself, but insisted that the explorer should visit the head chief, Makaka, who lived ten miles to the west, and longed to see his first white man. Speke tried to send Baraka with a present, but of course that would not do at all. Chiefs, who had suffered losses due to the war – and all claimed they had – were not going to pass up an unrepeatable opportunity to use this white man and his possessions to bolster their depleted resources.
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Makaka immediately demanded a silk cloak embroidered with gold lace, of a kind Speke was determined to keep for King Rumanika of Karagwe and Kabaka Mutesa of Buganda. So to avoid giving away such an expensive garment, Speke was obliged to pay out many yards of inferior cloth of the most useful kind for purchasing food.

The incompetent
kirangozi
now had the gall to explain that Mfumbi and Makaka had pretended to be chiefs but were actually ‘mere officers who had to pay tribute to Suwarora’. Before learning this, Speke had agreed a massive payment in cloth, and had also consented to give the ‘mere officer’ a ‘royal salute’, in order to be released by him. ‘I never felt so degraded as when I complied,’ he admitted. Makaka thought the volley had been fired too slowly and shouted: ‘Now fire again … be quick, be quick … We could spear you all whilst you are loading.’ In Speke’s tent, Makaka sat in his chair and stained the seat with the grease which he and his fellow tribesmen wore. He put on Speke’s slippers, asked to be given his bulls-eye lantern, and demanded Lucifer matches. Speke felt almost
angry enough to murder the man, but realised that if he harmed him every chief in the country would become his enemy. In his present predicament, force was not an option – only patience and a stubborn determination not to be robbed of everything. Nevertheless, the perpetual worry made Speke ‘feel quite sick’. He felt worse when Baraka told him that Makaka had intimated that his superior chief, Suwarora, had captured an entire Arab caravan and would kill every member of it if the Watuta or any other strangers came any closer. Speke laughed at Baraka ‘for being such a fool’ as to believe such tales. ‘Makaka only wishes to keep us here to frighten away the Watuta … Suwarora by this time knows I am coming and he will be just as anxious to have us in Usui as Makaka is to have us here, and he cannot hurt us as Rumanika is over him.’

Yet logic had no impact on Speke’s porters, who were just as scared of the Watuta as was Makaka. When Speke appealed to them to march north, they refused, and nothing he could say would change their minds. Speke had no alternative but to return to Kazeh yet again to try to recruit men there. Two and a half months of effort had amounted to absolutely nothing, except the fruitless expenditure of a mass of supplies. Yet giving up never entered his mind.

By the time Speke reached Grant’s camp, he was suffering from a cough so bad that he ‘could not lie [down] or sleep on either side’. While climbing a hill, he ‘blew and grunted like a broken-winded horse’.
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Ill though he was, he had to press on with his search for porters or admit that he would never reach Uganda. But in Kazeh, he found that nobody would hire men to him while the war was still going on. A small exception was made by Abdulla, Musa Mzuri’s son, who loaned him two guides, Bui and Nasib, ‘both of whom knew all the chiefs and languages up to and including Uganda’. These men promised to accompany Bombay to Usui and to return with enough porters to enable Speke and Grant to go north together. So Speke marched back to Ukuni again and after a few days spent with Grant, marched north again to secure the porters in Usui.

After Baraka and his previously loyal Wangwana porters had let him down, Speke had begun to think that the only way to reach Uganda would be to build a raft on the lake’s southern shore. But because his two new guides gave him renewed hope of succeeding by land, he abandoned the raft project. The Wangwana were also given fresh courage when a message unexpectedly arrived from Suwarora urging Speke to come to see him. Unfortunately, at this very moment Bui and Nasib heard that another local chief, Lumeresi, wanted to see their white man. Speke was determined to avoid going anywhere near another local chief, and ordered his
kirangozi
and his two new guides to steal past Lumeresi’s village by night. But Bui and Nasib flatly refused to risk offending this ‘savage chief’ by attempting to bypass him. Their timidity infected the Wangwana, who once again became fearful and defeatist, leaving Speke all but helpless.