Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure Read Free

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 gaitwhich 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’. 5
    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. 6
    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 whatfollowed 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.’ 7 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