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

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 agreedto ‘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. 9 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 theireyes 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’. 10
    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