Explorers of the Nile

The quest to find the sources of the Nile River consumed mid-19^th Century Britain. It ticked off a whole bunch of cultural and psychological boxes for the Victorians: Adventure in far-flung, exotic places; obsession with geography; the delicious thrill of white men descending into a savage world (with certain carnal possibilities to be hinted at but never explicitly stated); the sense of a civilizing Christian mission.

Tim Jeal’s “Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure” is a highly-readable account of that quest, full of vivid characters whose nearly mad determination and resilience prised open the great geographical mystery of the age.

Jeal takes the part of John Hanning Speke, Richard Francis Burton’s junior partner who actually did locate the Nile’s source correctly. Burton’s swashbuckling dark charisma can’t change the fact that he was wrong about the source and a mean-spirited churl in his feud with Speke.

Anyway, the book is well worth the read.

I particularly appreciated Jeal’s judicious conclusions about the ultimate impact of the “opening” of Africa. Much turbulent and tragic history can be laid on “the legacy of colonialism,” and believe me, I heard it all at the University of California, Santa Cruz (People’s Republic of…). As usual, the thicker your ideological lens, the more distorted your view of history becomes.

It is all well and good to condemn Victorian imperialism for its paternalistic (at best) bigotry, its blithe drawing of lines on maps to dictate the fates of peoples. Have at it; it’s all legit. But it’s also incomplete.

The early explorers and most of the colonial administrators in British Africa sincerely believed their mission would benefit Africans.

Per Jeal, these men…

“… hoped that with the introduction of European agricultural methods by settlers, the soil would eventually yield enough for Africans to earn wages, which could one day be taxed to provide funds for railways, roads, hospitals and schools. Since missionaries were supposed to come to Africa ahead of the traders and settlers, the spiritual and material condition of Africans — so the theory went — would be improved. Livingstone, Stanley, Speke and Baker (a true warrior against the slave trade) all believed in this strategy for Africa’s progress.”

And the British delivered, at least for a while. The brutal slave trade was widely suppressed and relative peace was established in vast areas that had seen little enough of it. Between 1900 and the 1960s liberation movements, the population of Africa more than doubled.

Of course, there were horrific European abuses, including the Belgian Congo and the Germans’ genocidal war on the Herero in Southwest Africa. And the British and the French were none-too-gentle with rebels. And certainly the Scramble for Africa became a rather sordid effort to extract resources and exploit peoples.

But colonialism left the infrastructure for progress, much of which was squandered by corrupt potentates and false liberators like Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

As is true with all aspects of frontier history, it is not a simple story and Jeal is right to cry foul at the perception that the legacy of failed states, corruption and rampant disease can be laid at the feet of the explorers who set the modern history of Africa in train.

 “The Nile explorers opened Africa to Western concern at a time when every year was bringing new devastation to ever larger areas of the continent. The courage and vision of this small group is not less praiseworthy because the next century did not bear out their hopes for the future of the regions they had revealed with so much difficulty and hardship. Nor have the ideals of nineteenth-century humanitarians lost their value because later governments in Europe and in Africa did not live up to them.”