MY JOURNEY TO THE SOURCE OF THE NILE
Among the world’s great rivers, the Nile is king. At about 4,100 miles, it is the world’s longest, and was the birthplace of Egyptian civilisation. It brings life and greenery to the barren desert – ‘the gift of the Nile’, in the words of ancient Greek historian Herodotus – and long before the rule of the pharaohs, in prehistory, its valley was the route by which our earliest ancestors migrated from their origins in east Africa and spread out across the globe.
Last but not least, it has been the subject of a captivating and age-old mystery: where exactly is its source? In the ancient world, an extraordinary range of individuals were curious to locate it: Alexander the Great and Herodotus from Greece, Cyrus and Cambyses from Persia, and Julius Caesar and Nero from Rome. The Romans even had a proverb, Caput Nili quaerere, which literally translated as ‘to search for the head of the Nile’, but was applied metaphorically to mean to attempt the impossible; to cry for the moon.
No definitive progress was made towards solving the riddle, however, until the Victorian era, when explorers such as Sir Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke and David Livingstone set off in search of it. In 1862, Speke claimed, in a telegram to the Royal Geographical Society, finally to have ‘settled’ the mystery of the Nile’s source. He claimed that it was Lake Victoria – an enormous body of water, which, as the first European to see it, he had named. His claim generated a notorious controversy with his former co-explorer Burton, who favoured Lake Tanganyika, but Lake Victoria eventually became the consensus view. Even today, however, the true source of the Nile remains elusive.
In the 1990s, I too became mesmerised by the subject. I read practically everything that had been written by the explorers about the labyrinthine network of rivers and lakes that, at long last, become the Nile near Khartoum in Sudan, where the White Nile joins the Blue Nile. Then I realised I would have to do some exploring of my own. I would have to stand on the banks of those rivers, lakes and waterfalls to see for myself the direction of the currents and the forces that shaped the mighty river, and fi t them into my own mental jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to ‘settle’ the Nile in a personal way.
I embarked on an extraordinary journey across Africa, from Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean, to Lake Tanganyika, Lake Albert and Lake Victoria, which I circumnavigated on foot. The result was my book, Journey To The Source Of The Nile, which was published with an Introduction by Lord Selborne, the president of the Royal Geographical Society.
And what I discovered was remarkable. One of my photographs in the book shows a plaque above the Ripon Falls at the northern end of Lake Victoria, which overlooks the point at which the Victoria Nile begins its outflow from the lake towards its faroff delta in Egypt. The plaque carries the following words in honour of Speke’s discovery: ‘This spot marks the place from where the Nile starts its long journey to the Mediterranean Sea through central and northern Uganda, Sudan and Egypt.’
That this really is the source of the Nile is an appealing notion. And yet the statement underplays a key fact about Lake Victoria: it is a reservoir fed by other rivers. The lake’s main feeder river, located on its western edge, is the Kagera, which itself has two main tributaries: the Ruvyironza, which rises at Mount Kikizi in Burundi, and the Nyabarongo, which rises at Mount Bigugu in Rwanda.
Either of these springs has a better claim to be the source of the Nile than Lake Victoria. The spring on Kikizi is the furthest south, whereas the spring on Bigugu lies furthest from the Mediterranean in river miles: 4,238 miles to be precise; 36 miles further than Kikizi.
Although Speke in due course came across the Kagera River on his second expedition, he did not give it much attention in his Journal Of The Discovery Of The Source Of The Nile. Clearly he must have realised that this new discovery would raise a serious question mark over his claim for Lake Victoria as the source. For the Kagera is a significant river, as I saw for myself while crossing it in 1996. Indeed, the Kagera is much wider than the Victoria Nile after the Ripon Falls, though lacking its swiftness and cataracts.
But the mystery doesn’t end there. Following the river north from Lake Victoria to Lake Albert, on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, throws up a further complication. After leaving Lake Victoria, the Victoria Nile flows for 300 miles until it reaches the Murchison Falls, and eventually flows into the northeast corner of Lake Albert – a difficult spot to reach not only because of the river but also because of the hostile local inhabitants.
We got there on foot with the help of two ‘friendly’ hired guides and entered a small village harbour with painted fishing boats and a few fishermen. When I asked them the name of the river they replied as expected: ‘the Victoria Nile’. But when I pointed at the sun glistening on yet another river about 400 yards away, flowing out of the lake to the north, they replied: ‘the Albert Nile’.
‘Not the Victoria Nile?’
‘No. The Albert or White Nile.’
Then I realised for the first time what is not generally understood. The Victoria Nile does flow into Lake Albert, but it does not flow directly out again, into the White Nile. It first mixes with the much more saline waters of Lake Albert.
And most of the water in Lake Albert – as much as 85 per cent – comes not from the Victoria Nile (and ultimately from the Kagera River) but rather from another big river, the Semliki, which joins Lake Albert at its southernmost point. The Semliki River flows from La ke Edwa rd, through the western edge of the great Ituri Rainforest in Zaire (now Congo), augmented by streams from the northern slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains. Thus, these remote peaks are just as important a source of Nile water as is Lake Victoria.
In fact, scientists now know that Lake Tanganikya, too, was at one time a source of Nile water, as claimed by Burton and Livingstone – although not during the 19th century, but millions of years ago. There is much still to learn about the geological history of the Nile, but there seem to have been five major incarnations of the river over the last six million years: the Eonile (the oldest), the Paleonile, the Protonile, the Prenile and the Neonile (with deposits indistinguishable from those of the present river). During the Eonile period, Lake Tanganyika actually drained northwards into the river, until the eruption of the Virunga volcanoes blocked the river’s course in Rwanda. The Eonile was therefore much lengthier than the present Nile, with its headwaters as far south as northern Zambia.
Such volcanic activity was part of the massive plate-tectonic activity between Africa and Asia that created the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, which includes Lake Tanganyika, and the uplift of the Tibetan plateau in Asia. By around five million years ago, the Rift Valley was fully formed, and there were also climatic changes, which produced savannah.
Crucially, it was in this savannah that two features of modern humans evolved: an ability to walk upright, followed much later by a massive expansion in brain capacity. By about 1.8 million years ago, four new species of hominin had appeared in East Africa, many of which were discovered during the mid-20th century by Louis and Mary Leakey, in Olduvai Gorge in the Rift Valley. In other words, the evolution of our ancestors may have been triggered by the same geophysical events that formed the present headwaters of the Nile.
So, although the 19th-century obsession with determining the geographical sources of the Nile may now be part of history, the search for the source has acquired a fresh dimension, of which I was only partly aware when I published my book.
This would surely have greatly surprised the Victorian explorers, who probably never imagined Africa as the cradle of the human race. If both the source of the Nile and the origins of humankind can be said to owe their existence to the formation of the Rift Valley, then European explorers did not ‘discover’ this part of Africa; they merely returned to the land of their first ancestors.
Journey To The Source Of The Nile, by Christopher Ondaatje, is published by HarperCollins, priced £20.
Last but not least, it has been the subject of a captivating and age-old mystery: where exactly is its source? In the ancient world, an extraordinary range of individuals were curious to locate it: Alexander the Great and Herodotus from Greece, Cyrus and Cambyses from Persia, and Julius Caesar and Nero from Rome. The Romans even had a proverb, Caput Nili quaerere, which literally translated as ‘to search for the head of the Nile’, but was applied metaphorically to mean to attempt the impossible; to cry for the moon.
No definitive progress was made towards solving the riddle, however, until the Victorian era, when explorers such as Sir Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke and David Livingstone set off in search of it. In 1862, Speke claimed, in a telegram to the Royal Geographical Society, finally to have ‘settled’ the mystery of the Nile’s source. He claimed that it was Lake Victoria – an enormous body of water, which, as the first European to see it, he had named. His claim generated a notorious controversy with his former co-explorer Burton, who favoured Lake Tanganyika, but Lake Victoria eventually became the consensus view. Even today, however, the true source of the Nile remains elusive.
In the 1990s, I too became mesmerised by the subject. I read practically everything that had been written by the explorers about the labyrinthine network of rivers and lakes that, at long last, become the Nile near Khartoum in Sudan, where the White Nile joins the Blue Nile. Then I realised I would have to do some exploring of my own. I would have to stand on the banks of those rivers, lakes and waterfalls to see for myself the direction of the currents and the forces that shaped the mighty river, and fi t them into my own mental jigsaw puzzle. I wanted to ‘settle’ the Nile in a personal way.
I embarked on an extraordinary journey across Africa, from Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean, to Lake Tanganyika, Lake Albert and Lake Victoria, which I circumnavigated on foot. The result was my book, Journey To The Source Of The Nile, which was published with an Introduction by Lord Selborne, the president of the Royal Geographical Society.
And what I discovered was remarkable. One of my photographs in the book shows a plaque above the Ripon Falls at the northern end of Lake Victoria, which overlooks the point at which the Victoria Nile begins its outflow from the lake towards its faroff delta in Egypt. The plaque carries the following words in honour of Speke’s discovery: ‘This spot marks the place from where the Nile starts its long journey to the Mediterranean Sea through central and northern Uganda, Sudan and Egypt.’
That this really is the source of the Nile is an appealing notion. And yet the statement underplays a key fact about Lake Victoria: it is a reservoir fed by other rivers. The lake’s main feeder river, located on its western edge, is the Kagera, which itself has two main tributaries: the Ruvyironza, which rises at Mount Kikizi in Burundi, and the Nyabarongo, which rises at Mount Bigugu in Rwanda.
Either of these springs has a better claim to be the source of the Nile than Lake Victoria. The spring on Kikizi is the furthest south, whereas the spring on Bigugu lies furthest from the Mediterranean in river miles: 4,238 miles to be precise; 36 miles further than Kikizi.
Although Speke in due course came across the Kagera River on his second expedition, he did not give it much attention in his Journal Of The Discovery Of The Source Of The Nile. Clearly he must have realised that this new discovery would raise a serious question mark over his claim for Lake Victoria as the source. For the Kagera is a significant river, as I saw for myself while crossing it in 1996. Indeed, the Kagera is much wider than the Victoria Nile after the Ripon Falls, though lacking its swiftness and cataracts.
But the mystery doesn’t end there. Following the river north from Lake Victoria to Lake Albert, on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, throws up a further complication. After leaving Lake Victoria, the Victoria Nile flows for 300 miles until it reaches the Murchison Falls, and eventually flows into the northeast corner of Lake Albert – a difficult spot to reach not only because of the river but also because of the hostile local inhabitants.
We got there on foot with the help of two ‘friendly’ hired guides and entered a small village harbour with painted fishing boats and a few fishermen. When I asked them the name of the river they replied as expected: ‘the Victoria Nile’. But when I pointed at the sun glistening on yet another river about 400 yards away, flowing out of the lake to the north, they replied: ‘the Albert Nile’.
‘Not the Victoria Nile?’
‘No. The Albert or White Nile.’
Then I realised for the first time what is not generally understood. The Victoria Nile does flow into Lake Albert, but it does not flow directly out again, into the White Nile. It first mixes with the much more saline waters of Lake Albert.
And most of the water in Lake Albert – as much as 85 per cent – comes not from the Victoria Nile (and ultimately from the Kagera River) but rather from another big river, the Semliki, which joins Lake Albert at its southernmost point. The Semliki River flows from La ke Edwa rd, through the western edge of the great Ituri Rainforest in Zaire (now Congo), augmented by streams from the northern slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains. Thus, these remote peaks are just as important a source of Nile water as is Lake Victoria.
In fact, scientists now know that Lake Tanganikya, too, was at one time a source of Nile water, as claimed by Burton and Livingstone – although not during the 19th century, but millions of years ago. There is much still to learn about the geological history of the Nile, but there seem to have been five major incarnations of the river over the last six million years: the Eonile (the oldest), the Paleonile, the Protonile, the Prenile and the Neonile (with deposits indistinguishable from those of the present river). During the Eonile period, Lake Tanganyika actually drained northwards into the river, until the eruption of the Virunga volcanoes blocked the river’s course in Rwanda. The Eonile was therefore much lengthier than the present Nile, with its headwaters as far south as northern Zambia.
Such volcanic activity was part of the massive plate-tectonic activity between Africa and Asia that created the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, which includes Lake Tanganyika, and the uplift of the Tibetan plateau in Asia. By around five million years ago, the Rift Valley was fully formed, and there were also climatic changes, which produced savannah.
Crucially, it was in this savannah that two features of modern humans evolved: an ability to walk upright, followed much later by a massive expansion in brain capacity. By about 1.8 million years ago, four new species of hominin had appeared in East Africa, many of which were discovered during the mid-20th century by Louis and Mary Leakey, in Olduvai Gorge in the Rift Valley. In other words, the evolution of our ancestors may have been triggered by the same geophysical events that formed the present headwaters of the Nile.
So, although the 19th-century obsession with determining the geographical sources of the Nile may now be part of history, the search for the source has acquired a fresh dimension, of which I was only partly aware when I published my book.
This would surely have greatly surprised the Victorian explorers, who probably never imagined Africa as the cradle of the human race. If both the source of the Nile and the origins of humankind can be said to owe their existence to the formation of the Rift Valley, then European explorers did not ‘discover’ this part of Africa; they merely returned to the land of their first ancestors.
Journey To The Source Of The Nile, by Christopher Ondaatje, is published by HarperCollins, priced £20.