Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (24 page)

He found the
kabaka
waiting for him in his ‘state hut’, surrounded by numerous squatting courtiers and by some of his wives:

The king, a good-looking, well-figured, tall young man of twenty-five, was sitting on a red blanket spread upon a square platform of royal grass … The hair of his head was cut short, excepting on the top, where it was combed up into a high ridge, running from stem to stern like a cockscomb. On his neck was a very neat ornament – a large ring of beautifully worked small beads, forming elegant patterns by their various colours … On every finger and every toe he had alternate brass and copper rings; and above the ankles, halfway up to the calf, a stocking of very pretty beads. Everything was light, neat, and elegant in its way; not a fault could be found with the taste of his ‘getting-up’.

When Speke was permitted to sit opposite the monarch, he wanted to open a conversation, but thought better of it on observing that no courtier dared speak, or even lift his head for fear of being accused of eyeing the royal wives. ‘So the king and myself sat staring at one another for full [sic] an hour,’ without exchanging a single word. Eventually, the king commanded Maula to ask Speke ‘if [he] had seen him’. ‘Yes, for full [sic] one hour,’ replied the explorer, which, when translated, cannot have pleased the
kabaka,
who had expected a fulsome tribute to his good looks and magnificence. So he made no offer of food and walked away in his most formal manner, imitating the strides of a lion – a gait
which had been affected by Bugandan kings for many generations. Speke’s porters were awed, but Speke thought it made Mutesa look unintentionally ridiculous, though not quite as silly as his own men who were shuffling away like frightened geese.

An hour later he and Mutesa met again and spoke to one another – a difficult procedure involving Bombay translating his words into Kiswahili, then Nasib rendering them into Luganda, and finally, Maula conveying them directly to the king, ‘for it was considered indecorous to transmit any message to his majesty except through the medium of one of his officers’. The
kabaka
wanted to know what messages had been sent by Rumanika, and after being told, turned to Speke and asked him again, with great intensity, whether he had
seen
him. This time Speke made up for his earlier tactlessness and told the
kabaka
he was ‘very beautiful, as refulgent as the sun, with hair like the wool of a black sheep, and legs that move as gracefully as a lion’s’.
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Before Speke could mention his plans for exploration, the king asked whether he would show him some of his guns. So Speke’s followers laid out the firearms brought as presents, including a Whitworth’s rifle – in Speke’s opinion ‘the best shooting gun in the world’ – and a revolver, three carbines, three sword-bayonets and several boxes of ammunition and gun-caps. Mutesa ‘appeared quite confused with the various wonders as he handled them’, and sat poring over his presents until the light began to fail. The four rich silk cloths, ten bundles of rare beads, several sets of cutlery, an iron chair and a gold chronometer, received less attention. Speke probably saw no irony in the fact that the first white visitor’s most valuable presents conferred no peaceful arts, but rather the capacity to kill more effectively than the
kabaka
had hitherto dreamed of.
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Three days later, after meetings on each of the preceding days, the king summoned Speke and asked him to shoot the four cows that were walking about the court. Having brought no weapon, he borrowed the revolver he had given to the
kabaka,
and succeeded in killing all four with five rapidly fired shots. ‘Great applause followed this
wonderful
feat.’ But what
followed showed Mutesa in a darker light. The king loaded one of the carbines Speke had given him, and handing it ‘full-cock to a page, told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court; which no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success with a look of glee’. A horrified Speke observed in his journal: ‘There appeared no curiosity to know what individual human being the urchin had deprived of life.’
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It would not be long before Speke began to see,

nearly every day … one, two or three of the wretched palace women, led away to execution, tied by the hand, and dragged along by one of the bodyguard, crying out as she went to premature death, ‘Hai Minangé!’ [‘O my lord!’] at the top of her voice in utmost despair.

This was indeed a world of extraordinary ambivalence. While Baganda society worked better administratively than any other he had seen in Africa – with courtyards kept clean, hunger unknown and plantations well cared for – the other side of the coin was that people lived in fear lest for some trivial offence, they might be handed over to one of Mutesa’s executioners to be bludgeoned to death or decapitated.
⁸

Speke, by contrast, was treated with courtesy and rarely felt in danger, though he soon realised that he was getting nowhere with his plans to enlist the
kabaka
’s assistance. Even when Mutesa agreed to send an officer by boat to the Kagera river to collect Grant, and to send another officer to Gani, where it was believed that Petherick was detained, Speke doubted whether a channel of communication with Petherick would actually be established. The plain fact was that Mutesa wished to keep Speke with him for as long as possible, and did not want him to leave in order to search for the Nyanza’s outlet. Speke hoped that if he could lure Mutesa away from the palace on an elephant-hunting trip, he would have a better opportunity to explain his plans to him man to man. So he showed the
kabaka
how to aim and fire from the shoulder, simply so that the monarch would want him to teach him how to shoot elephant and rhinoceros in the countryside. When Mutesa was feverishly eager to set out with him, the explorer refused to play ball unless the
kabaka
agreed
to ‘open the road outwards’. Grudgingly, he consented ‘to call all his travelling men of experience together’ so that Speke could show them a map and explain where he wished to go. This was to the place where Petherick was reputed to be held up.

Contriving a meeting with Petherick had become an obsession with Speke since it seemed to guarantee him a safe return down the Nile. But though a consultation with the ‘travelling men’ took place, afterwards Mutesa would not hear of Speke going anywhere with them.
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But the explorer did not give up, and was delighted to be permitted to call on the
namasole
(whom he called the Queen Mother). He hoped to make her his ally in his struggle to get the
kabaka
to back his exploring aims.

In the first few years of Mutesa’s reign, the Prime Minister and the Queen Mother had ruled the country, allowing the young
kabaka
little influence, but after several years of apprenticeship Mutesa had wrested control from them. Yet his mother still wielded considerable influence, which Speke hoped to exploit. Having heard that the Queen Mother suffered from various medical complaints, he brought his medicine chest with him, as well as presents of copper wire, blue egg beads and sixteen cubits of chintz. He guessed that the woman who greeted him had been good-looking before she became fat, and supposed she must be about forty-five. For a while Speke sat close to her, drinking ‘the best
pombé
[beer] in Uganda’ and smoking his pipe while she smoked hers. Quite soon, she dismissed the musicians and all but three of her
wakungu
(courtiers), and put on a
déolé,
so he could admire her in it. Then she leaned closer to him and begged his aid. Her liver, she said, was sending shooting pains all over her body, and she was often disturbed by dreams of her late husband, Sunna. Could her visitor cure her? Speke said that only by marrying again would she escape her dreams of her late husband. As for her physical ailments, he needed to see her tongue, feel her pulse and touch her sides. Her
wakunga
insisted that she could not be examined without the king’s permission, but she dismissed their interference robustly: ‘Bosh! I will show my body to the Mzungu.’ They were then ordered to close their
eyes while she disrobed and lay prostrate. Speke examined her, and prescribed two quinine pills and told her to drink less
pombé.
Right from this first meeting, he seems to have charmed her. Despite the cumbersome arrangement of communicating via two interpreters, she told him he must visit her again, ‘for she liked him … she could not say how much’.
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Over the next fortnight Speke succeeded in making the
kabaka
and his mother furiously jealous of one another, but this did not result in his being given a hut within the palace grounds, nor did Mutesa promise that any serious efforts would be made to reach Petherick at Gani, nor even that Speke might soon be allowed to visit the lake’s outlet. Yet the explorer was flattered when the king dressed himself in
dhoti
trousers in order to look more like him, and his success with the Queen Mother and various women at court was another source of pride.
¹¹
So much so that when the departure of Mutesa’s men for Gani (without Speke) seemed imminent, the explorer warned Petherick in an unintentionally comical letter, that: ‘The game I am now playing will oblige you to drop your dignity for the moment and to look on me as your superior officer.’ Petherick was told not to bring a uniform because Speke did not have one with him.
¹²
Clearly, Speke did not want anyone to undermine Mutesa’s and the Queen Mother’s conception of him as a man of high rank and importance in his own country.

Unless Speke had by now started to find daily life at Mengo so diverting, the
kabaka
’s refusal to help him locate either Petherick or the lake’s outflow would have depressed him horribly. Nor were his spirits about to take a plunge. Suddenly, just when most required, a brand new source of happiness transformed his life at court. To his amazement, Speke found himself in love.

TEN

An Arrow into the Heart

Six weeks after his arrival at the royal palace on Mengo Hill, Speke was sitting chatting to the Queen Mother when one of her courtiers asked him what colour his children would be if he married a black woman. Speke did not record his answer, but in another passage deleted from his published journal, he described the Queen Mother, ‘making a significant gesture by holding her two fists to her breasts, signifying a young budding virgin’.
¹
Then ‘with roars of laughter [she asked Speke if he] would like to be her son-in-law, for she had some beautiful daughters’. The courtiers told Speke matter-of-factly that when the ‘daughters’ arrived and ‘the marriage came off’, he might need ‘to chain the fair one … until she became used to [him]’.
²

Three days later, when Speke called on the Queen Mother, she immediately produced two ‘Wahuma’ girls for him to take back to his hut. Speke believed that the paler-skinned and straighter-nosed Wahuma (Hima) originally came from Ethiopia, and that many centuries before his arrival at the Nyanza, they had risen to power over the darker Bantu already settled in Buganda, Karagwe and Rwanda. Although it was true that the Hima had come from the north, they were members of a Luwo clan originally from southern Sudan, rather than from Ethiopia. But after moving south, they had indeed formed ruling dynasties around the Nyanza in the centuries after
AD
1200. Thereafter, they adopted Bantu speech and were culturally absorbed by them.
³
Speke, like many Europeans of his day who followed him to Africa, would find the Hima more physically attractive than the southern Bantu, with their thicker lips and flatter noses. Though this preference would be thought racist today, in the nineteenth century for an English gentleman to find any African
woman attractive would have astonished most members of Speke’s class, unless they had spent time in Africa.

When comparing Speke’s published journal
(Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile)
with the book’s original proofs and manuscript, I found that many passages had either been changed in the published version or omitted from it. From now on, I shall quote in italics altered or omitted words and passages. Describing in his published
Journal
the two girls given to him by the Queen Mother, Speke represented them as ‘children’, saying that one, Kahala, was twelve, while the other was ‘a little older’. But in the manuscript the elder is clearly described as being
‘eighteen years or so’.
The younger girl in the manuscript is too young
‘for present purposes’,
which were plainly meant by the Queen Mother to be sexual. The late king, Sunna, had chosen Méri the elder girl as a wife, although he had died before consummating the marriage. Méri had then become a member of the Queen Mother’s household.

Speke found the girls alarmingly high-spirited but was assured by the Queen Mother that although ‘they were more difficult to break than a phunda, or donkey, when once tamed, [they] became the best of wives’.
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Two days later, Speke thanked the Queen Mother for ‘having charmed [his] house with such beautiful society’ and informed her that he had not found it necessary to chain his young women as she had advised him to do, since ‘cords of love [were] the only instruments white men knew the use of’.
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Although the Queen Mother plainly suspected that Speke did not know how to tame his young women, she had great faith in him as a confidential doctor. She explained that her periods
‘had eased since Bana
[Speke]
had doctored her’,
and asked what she should do now. He recommended marriage to restore regularity. Her son, the
kabaka,
rather than miss out on intimate advice, also consulted Speke,
‘for he was extremely anxious of becoming as great a family man as his father, though at present there seemed to be no hope of it’.
Speke advised him only to have intercourse with those wives who had just had their periods,
‘as the seed vessels were more sensitive then, and to refrain from over-indulgences, which destroy the appetite in early youth’.
Having too much sex, explained Speke, would
‘increase their veins in size by over exertion, and thereby decrease their power’.
It worried the king that his penis might not be the optimum size. Speke advised him not to worry since all sizes could do the job. But
‘M’tesa could not believe in a short stick being so good as a long stick, because the long one could reach so much farther, while the short one would only knock about the doorway.’
Mutesa was perplexed that a sexual expert like Speke should have no children of his own. Although Speke replied by quoting
‘the old adage that a rolling stone gathers no moss,’
Mutesa remained puzzled. What was to stop a virile man becoming a father on his travels?
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