Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (62 page)

Obviously a railway would have to be built from Mombasa on the coast to Lake Victoria. This had been realised even in the 1880s. The Masai might have thwarted the building of the railway when it was stretching across the northern part of their grazing grounds, but thanks to British caution and to an incident known as the Kedong massacre, they decided to be cautious too. In a violent clash with a Kikuyu railway workers’ caravan and their Swahili porters in November 1895, the Masai killed nearly 600 men. An outraged Scottish trader and former employee of the British Imperial East Africa Company, Andrew Dick, who had happened to be encamped nearby, went with two French travellers and attacked the victors, shooting a hundred dead before he too was killed. He was very likely unaware that the caravan had been attacked in response to the rape of several Masai girls. But the predominant feeling of the famous Masai
laibon,
or religious leader, Lenana, was not anger but shock that three men had been able to kill so many of his warriors.
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The Uganda Railway, which William Mackinnon had dreamed of constructing, was built a few years after his death, between
1896 and 1901, and would eventually reduce the cost of transporting Ugandan cotton to the coast from a staggering £200 per tonne to one per cent of that.
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Its purpose was also to secure the headwaters of the Nile once and for all against all comers. Africans in the bush called the railway ‘the iron snake from the coast’, as if they intuitively understood that as well as bringing goods to the interior, it would suck resources, goods and people away from the periphery into the towns. When it proved impossible to persuade Africans to work on the railway (known as the ‘Lunatic Line’ because of its steep gradients) the British government remained determined to get it built somehow. With no concern for the long-term consequences, Lord Salisbury and his colleagues decided to risk altering the balance of East Africa’s population by introducing the 1896 Emigration Amendment Act which would permit a massive influx of Indian labourers and their families.

Forty thousand of them built the railway, laying 582 miles of track, constructing 162 bridges, digging 326 culverts and erecting 41 stations. Over a hundred were eaten by two lions – the famous man-eaters of Tsavo – which were shot after several anxious weeks by the chief engineer, J. H. Patterson, a tall, moustachioed young Englishman, whose diary describes the men’s refusal to go on working and his own desperation as he lay in the dark, ‘hearing the lions crunching the bones of their victims’. Unable to see the predators, he could hear them purring in thick undergrowth as they ‘licked the skin off, so as to get the fresh blood’.
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Eventually Patterson shot both lions, to the great joy of the work gangs. The Indians went on to prosper in business – so much so that in the post-independence era, they would be discriminated against in Kenya and expelled from Uganda as an entire community by Idi Amin.
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Britain took in 30,000 Ugandan Asians in the 1970s with a further 10,000 being accepted by various European countries and by the USA and Canada.

While the Indians had become the businessmen of East Africa, causing tensions in the wider community as well as creating employment and prosperity, the other great unintended
consequence of the railway was its immense £5.5 million cost to the British taxpayer. Could any of this money be recouped for the Treasury? With Africans reluctant to sell their labour, economic growth and taxes could not be expected to come from their labour for many years. The solution chosen by the colonial authorities was to encourage white settlers to come out and start farming. They could then be taxed and would bring new spending power to the country. Kenya with its elevated Rift Valley – the White Highlands – was considered more suitable for European settlement than Uganda and other equatorial countries, so large numbers were expected to arrive. They did not. Although by 1914 only 5,500 settlers had come (and by 1923 10,000), both the Masai and the Kikuyu would be dispossessed of about 60 per cent of their land. It would be this more than anything else which, as the historian Piers Brendon has put it, ‘kindled a slow-burning anger that would eventually burst into flame’.
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If Uganda had not contained the source of the Nile, it would have lost all its value for Lord Salisbury, and there would have been no Protectorate. In that event there would have been no need for Britain to create Kenya Colony and build the Uganda Railway. It was to pay for the Lunatic Line that white settlers had been summoned, and if there had been no settlers, ultimately there would have been no Mau Mau rebellion and no brutal suppression of it. Before that, the colony’s administration had been caught for decades in a political stalemate – with the settlers’ opposition to all political change making it impossible for the civil servants to push on with Kenya’s development.
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Yet, despite the Uganda railway’s unintended legacy, an independent Kenya would become one of Africa’s most successful states, surviving not thanks to oil or diamonds, but through the intelligence, work ethic, education and entrepreneurial skills of its people.
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CODA

Lacking the Wand of an Enchanter

In less than a quarter of a century, a small group of exceptionally brave explorers and their remarkable African porters, guides, translators and servants had solved the greatest geographical mystery on earth, covering many thousands of miles in the process, mainly on foot. They had risked their lives repeatedly, had been detained for months at a time by chiefs and kings, and had survived by judging when best to be long-suffering and when assertive. Rarely, when exploring, had they found themselves in a position to impose their will. Their joint efforts lifted the veil on one of the planet’s last great puzzles.

The cost in human lives had been very high, as Stanley’s great trans-Africa journey illustrates. Of the 228 people who set out from Zanzibar, exactly half lost their lives.
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Of the four Europeans, he was the only survivor. The vast majority of deaths had been suffered by the far more numerous Wangwana. ‘The execution & fulfilment of all plans, and designs,’ Stanley told a friend: ‘was due to the pluck and intrinsic goodness of 20 men … Take these 20 out and I could not have proceeded beyond a few days journey.’
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Among these had been Manwa Sera and Chowpereh, who had both been with Livingstone on his last journey. With him too had been Uledi, whom Stanley valued more than any other captain on that same great 1874-77 journey.

The indispensable nature of the services of the leading Wangwana captains and carriers becomes obvious when the famous journeys they made possible are listed. Uledi had also been with Stanley on his Livingstone search and with Speke and Grant between 1860 and 1863. Sidi Mubarak Bombay had been with Burton and Speke in 1857-59, then with Speke and Grant several years later, and with Stanley on his Livingstone search.
Susi had been with Livingstone since 1863. With Chowpereh, Susi led the men who brought their master’s body to the coast in 1873. He then served with Stanley on the Congo between 1879 and 1884, and was put in charge of constructing the first trading station at Leopoldville. Dualla, Stanley’s great diplomat on the same expedition, would later become Lugard’s most valued African caravan leader in the 1890s. Some of these men lived long enough to retire, as Bombay would do in 1885, on a Royal Geographical Society pension, but they were the lucky ones, outnumbered by those who died while travelling.

Of the principal European actors in the Nile search, only David Livingstone died in Africa. But Samuel and Florence Baker came as close to death as is possible without actually dying, thanks to pressing on across swampy, mosquito-infested country having exhausted their quinine. On one occasion Stanley entered the tunnel of light now popularly associated with near-death experiences. Richard Burton suffered so severely from malaria that he was unable to walk for the best part of a year; Speke endured an agonising illness with symptoms like acute hydrophobia, as well as bouts of fever, temporary blindness and a permanent loss of hearing in one ear. For nine months, Grant was immobilised by tropical leg ulcers, and Farquhar and Shaw, Stanley’s two companions on the Livingstone search, died from complications of malaria. The Pocock brothers and Frederick Barker, on Stanley’s second journey, died respectively from smallpox, drowning and malaria.

Livingstone could easily have died several years earlier than he did – and in the same violent manner in which the murdered British explorers Mungo Park and Richard Lander had met their end – but the spears hurled at
him
missed by inches. Less fortunate were Burton and Speke, who both received serious stab wounds at the hands of Somali tribesmen. European travellers were not infrequently murdered by Africans at this time. Between 1845 and 1865, the French naval officer Lieutenant Maizan, the German scientist Albrecht Roscher, and his compatriot Baron Klaus von der Decken were all killed by East African tribesmen. Stanley’s
friend Ernest Linant de Bellefonds was murdered by the Bari in 1876, two of Mackay’s missionary colleagues in 1878, and two British Army officers, Frederick Carter and Thomas Cadenhead, were killed with sixty of their followers by Mirambo’s men in 1880. Five years later, Bishop James Hannington and his followers were stabbed to death on the orders of Mwanga, the
kabaka
of Buganda, and soon after that, Emin Pasha was murdered by the warlord Kibonge. The Nile explorers might easily have shared the same fate as these unfortunate travellers.

Despite their obvious merits, Speke and Livingstone received no reward at all from the British state for their contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Grant was awarded a beggarly Companionship of the Bath, Baker was knighted and Stanley, who finally explained the geography of the entire central watershed, received the same honour many years after his geographical triumphs were over. Burton also received a knighthood thanks to his aristocratic wife’s tireless campaigning. As
his
reward for a campaign that had ended in a single morning of mechanised slaughter, Major-General Sir Horatio Kitchener was made a baron and was voted the astonishing sum of £30,000 by Parliament.

Because the explorers arrived first in the interior before other whites, to be followed soon afterwards by the missionaries, and then by imperial agents, is it fair to say that the Scramble for Africa was a single seamless process? In one sense linkage is self-evident, since exploration was the essential precursor to later white rule and settlement. But what had the Nile explorers actually
wanted
to happen to Africa after they had penetrated and mapped so much of it? Such a question is not easy to answer because, with the exception of Richard Burton (who dismissed African colonies as unworkable because he considered the inhabitants of the ‘Dark Continent’ too primitive to absorb European culture), some of the others, though in favour of creating colonies, changed their views over time.
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A case in point is Samuel Baker who was the explorer most directly responsible for extending the Sudan to the south with such appalling future
consequences. In 1889, he performed a complete
volte face
and said that Britain should have nothing more to do with Equatoria and Uganda and should not occupy either because tropical Africa would always be a drain on the British taxpayer. Needless to say this late opinion was not listened to.
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David Livingstone, whose opinions and theories would influence the British general public more than those of all the other Nile explorers combined, began by doubting whether large-scale contact with whites would ever do anything but harm to Africans. ‘If natives are not elevated by contact with Europeans,’ he wrote, ‘they are sure to be deteriorated. It is with pain I have observed that all the tribes I have seen lately [in Botswana and Cape Colony] are undergoing the latter process.’
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He refused to condemn polygamy, saying that it could not be considered adultery. Livingstone understood at once that many wives were needed to produce the large families essential for chiefly power.
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He also realised that because individuals were not allowed (under threat of accusations of witchcraft) to build up grain surpluses for their personal use, the tribe was better placed to feed everyone in a famine than would have been the case if grain had been privately, rather than communally owned. Yet, as a missionary, Livingstone had been obliged to rule out the possibility of leaving Africans to their own devices. His God-given duty, as he saw it, had been to save the souls of as many people as possible.

So between 1849 and 1851, he made three journeys to the far north of Botswana in an attempt to find an untouched tribe whose members might, he hoped, be more receptive to Jesus’ teachings than those living close to the Boers. But to his horror he found during the early 1850s, that even the remotest tribes on the Zambezi had been visited by Portuguese slave traders, or their African agents, the Mambari. Indeed members of Livingstone’s favourite tribe, the Kololo, turned out to have sold men and women to the Mambari in exchange for cloth, guns and stolen cattle.
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It now seemed very unlikely that he would find any uncorrupted tribes along the Zambezi. In these distressing
circumstances, Livingstone concluded that only widespread European intrusion would have any chance of effecting a moral change.

His position was a painfully ironic one. He had come in search of an untouched people, but having found them corrupted was now about to advocate even more contact with outsiders. But unless the Kololo were enabled to sell their animal skins, beeswax, resins and ivory to the kind of traders who would not expect to be paid with slaves for the factory goods the tribes craved, the slave trade and the gun-frontier would continue to spread on like wildfire. Livingstone believed that only ‘commerce and Christianity’, and in the end colonies, could prevent this disaster. He was convinced that chiefs would never abandon their customary rights to enslave captives taken from neighbouring tribes until they could
see
proof of the material superiority of European society to their own. Only the appearance of metal-hulled steamships and machinery seemed likely to create a crisis of confidence for powerful African chiefs.
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Livingstone’s earlier sympathy for African customs made it harder for him to think like this.