John Hanning Speke (1827–1864)

"Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile" is an exhaustive account of John Hanning Speke's exploration of central Africa during the late 1850's. His account of his actual visit to Lake Victoria-- the whole point of the journey's effort to prove that the Nile originates from the lake-- makes up only about 10 pages of the tome. The rest is filled his incredible efforts to get there and away as he crisscrossed Uganda visiting with kings who had never seen a white man before. There is a ton of interesting ethnographic information about the people he met on his journey -- though some parts get a bit repetitive as Speke was essentially "trapped" by king after king and spends much of his time getting robbed, giving away his goods and sending his men to argue with the King for better living quarters and food. Nonetheless, the book is really interesting overall and a great look at how society functioned in central Africa during this time period.… (mehr)

Writer Philip Gourevitch has chosen to discuss John Hanning Speke’s The Discovery of the Source of the Nile on FiveBooks  as one of the top five on his subject - Rwanda, saying that:


“…Speke, a 19th century Victorian explorer, talks about the flat-nosed, flat-lipped negro, on the one hand, and then waxes euphoric about the kind of superior, Aryan-looking Ethiopic types. It’s almost like a zoology about human beings – and it became incredibly influential. It became, in many ways, the underpinning of all the theories that were used by the Belgians to divide Rwanda, when they ruled it as a colony in the 20th century. And it came to influence these Rwandan peasants in the hills as they killed their neighbours in 1994…”


The full interview is available here: http://five-books.com/interviews/philip-gourevitch… (mehr)