The Discovery of the Source of the Nile

"One of the books that I find most interesting – although only partly about Rwanda – is a book by John Hanning Speke, called The Discovery of the Source of the Nile . He was a 19th-century, Royal Geographical Society-sponsored explorer of Central Africa. Largely in direct competition with Richard Burton, he was vying for the big European explorer prize of discovering the source of the Nile. And that source is now understood to be a little trickle somewhere in the hills of Rwanda. Among Rwanda’s many fascinations is that it’s the only country in Africa , with the exception of Burundi perhaps, that exists entirely in its pre-colonial borders. There was this pre-colonial kingdom called Rwanda that had real cohesion as a proto-nation state that didn’t get all carved up in colonialism. And Rwandans are very proud of the fact that they avoided the slave trade, they kept the traders out. The country is surrounded by Swahili but it doesn’t speak Swahili. And it was known as a very insular, impenetrable place. Speke tried to get in and so at some point did Stanley. But Speke basically parked on the border of what would now be Tanzania and he cooked up a Victorian racial theory about the people of the place. That these two groups – the Bantu Hutus and the Nilotic Tutsis were two distinct tribes and the group that became known to us as the Tutsis or the Nilotics were, in fact, descended from the lost tribes of Israel. This was Speke’s terrible contribution. It was known as the Hamitic hypothesis, because it’s named after Ham, Noah’s son, which is something that you also find in the American South – the slave-owning racist theory there also involved all sorts of ideas about Ham as the original black man. Because how are you supposed to account for what was really a human sub-species as far as they were concerned? It’s just incredible to read Speke’s book because he talks about the flat-nosed, flat-lipped negro, on the one hand, and then waxes euphoric about the kind of superior, Aryan-looking Ethiopic types. It’s almost like a zoology about human beings – and it became incredibly influential. It became, in many ways, the underpinning of all the theories that were used by the Belgians to divide Rwanda, when they ruled it as a colony in the 20th century. And it came to influence these Rwandan peasants in the hills as they killed their neighbours in 1994. Even if they’d never heard of John Hanning Speke, they had internalised a huge amount of what is at the core of it. The book also has the virtue of being a pretty good read."