RIEKO LO TEKO
Brain is mightier than brawn
SWAHILI is an East African Bantu language that has been greatly influenced by Arabic; its very name comes from the Arabic sawīhilī (meaning “of the coast”). Swahili has always been a lingua franca, enabling people with different native tongues and different origins to come together, to communicate, and especially to trade. In the nineteenth century, Swahili-speakers had to find a new word to describe the increasing number of European traders who were appearing on the shores of East Africa. It did not occur to them to choose an obvious word linking the Europeans to their color, because in their eyes, the odd-looking strangers could be anything from white to pink, red, or brown, depending on how much time they spent in the sun. Instead, the Swahili-speakers coined the word wazungu (mzungu in the singular) to describe the newcomers as “people who move around.”
The East African coast had welcomed many foreigners long before the first Europeans arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. Attracted by the lucrative profits to be made in gold and ivory from the African continent, Arabs traded along the coast as early as two centuries before the Christian era. Commerce with India came later, around the seventh century, and then in 1414 a huge fleet of sixty-two Chinese trading galleons and 190 support ships under the command of Zheng He crossed the Indian Ocean and landed on the African coast.1 Fourteenth-century Chinese maps show the East African coast in great detail, suggesting that they had been sending trading missions to the region for some time before Zheng He’s armada arrived. This trade with both the Arabs and the Chinese disproves the myth that Africa—the “Dark Continent”—had little or no contact with the outside world until it was “opened up” by Europeans.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century, just as the Luo were leaving their cradleland in Sudan and migrating south up the Nile valley toward Uganda, the Portuguese landed on East African shores. On July 8, 1497, just five years after Columbus set sail for the New World, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama departed from Lisbon with a small fleet of four ships. Like Columbus, he hoped to find a sea route to the spices and other riches of the Orient. Da Gama, however, chose to sail east around the southern cape of Africa—a longer and much more challenging task than crossing the Atlantic. As he sailed into the Indian Ocean, da Gama was entering unknown territory, where no white-skinned European had yet traveled. By the time da Gama’s fleet reached Mombasa on the east coast of Africa, the Arabs—who dominated trade in the Indian Ocean—were waiting for him. They launched a seaborne attack to cut the Portuguese anchor ropes. Da Gama retreated and sailed farther north to Malindi (Melinde), where he finally found a friendly sultan. The association between the Portuguese and the town lasted almost two hundred years; the Church of St. Francis Xavier was built during da Gama’s visit, and the building survives to this day as one of the oldest churches on the continent.
Da Gama signed a trade agreement with the local rulers in Malindi, which heralded the onset of European involvement in East Africa. Two years later, in 1500, the Portuguese sacked Mombasa in retaliation for the earlier snub and established a series of trading posts and forts along the coast, including the construction of Fort Jesus in Mombasa in 1593. By skillfully manipulating the rivalries between Malindi and Mombasa and other independently governed towns on the coast, the Portuguese successfully dominated much of the coastal trade in the region for a century.
Trade between East Africa and the rest of the world continued to flourish; Indian cotton, Chinese porcelain, and metalwork from the Middle East were traded for slaves, ivory, and gold. However, several environmental factors in sub-Saharan Africa inhibited trade and travel. The prevalence of the tsetse fly (which carries the parasite that causes trypanosomiasis, affecting both humans and animals) in large areas of highland savannah severely limited the use of pack animals for transporting goods. Unlike other parts of coastal Africa, East Africa has no large rivers running inland and the highland tributaries are too shallow and fast-flowing for the extended use of boats and canoes. As a result, any exploration or trade inland relied on human porterage. Before the British built a railway at the beginning of the twentieth century, the only route inland from the coast to Lake Victoria was a meandering track through dense tropical jungle; a return trip could take as much as six or seven months. Food had to be purchased or hunted en route, tolls paid to ensure safe passage, and the loads were limited to what could be carried by human porters—effectively no more than about sixty-five pounds. Therefore the trade to and from the interior mostly involved items of high value and low weight: rare skins, ivory, copper and gold, glass beads, cotton textiles, and, in later years, tobacco, guns, and liquor. Slaves were also traded, and they had the additional advantage of being able to walk.
Ever since the Spanish opened up the New World at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the European nations had been on an imperialist binge around the globe. But given the difficulties of accessing the interior, they paid scant attention to East Africa—at least at the beginning. The Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas in the 1500s was soon emulated by Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. India and other Asian countries became absorbed by the burgeoning European empires, which sought new spheres of influence around the world, and sources of raw materials to fuel the rapid industrialization back home. Only in the late nineteenth century, after they had carved up most of the rest of the world, did Europeans turn their attention to the division and colonization of Africa.
After the Portuguese left the East African coast for good in 1720, bloody and bowed by repeated conflicts with local rulers and the Arabs, the sultan of Oman became the undisputed ruler of the coastal region. However, he proved ineffectual, appointing governors from rival families in Pate, Mombasa, and Zanzibar who soon began to fight among themselves. In 1822 the new ruler of Oman, Seyyid Sa’id, finally sent a fleet of heavily armed warships to subdue the querulous city-states. The Mazruis in Mombasa had no defense except for their puny muskets and the massive stone walls of Fort Jesus. At the time, two British survey ships, HMS Leven and HMS Barracouta, were on a Royal Navy mission to survey the east coast of Africa. The Mazrui chief pleaded with Captain Fitzwilliam Owen to make Mombasa a British protectorate and defend them against the sultan’s fleet. In return for British protection, the Mazrui agreed to assist the British in ridding East Africa of the scourge of slavery.2 With imagination and foresight, Owen realized what Britain could achieve in this part of Africa. On February 7, 1824, the Royal Navy hoisted the Union Flag over Fort Jesus; it was the start of Britain’s domination of East Africa, which would last for the next 140 years.
The European exploration of the interior of East Africa began in earnest in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In early 1844, Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German Protestant missionary and accomplished linguist, arrived in Zanzibar. His ambition was to link the east and west coasts of Africa with a chain of Christian missions. He soon moved on to Mombasa with his wife, Rosine, and their newborn daughter; tragically, both mother and child soon died of malaria. In spite of his deep depression from this shocking introduction to the privations of nineteenth-century Africa, he persevered and moved inland to establish his first mission on higher ground at Rabai. But his spirits did not fully recover until the arrival of a Swiss Lutheran missionary, Johannes Rebmann. Together they became known, not for their missionary work, nor for their translation of the Bible into Kiswahili (the name of the language in Swahili), but for their expeditions into the interior.
Together, Krapf and Rebmann became the first Europeans to see the snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro in 1848, and then Mount Kenya the following year. (Krapf recorded it originally as Kenia, which he learned from the indigenous tribes who live around the mountain.) The local Embu people told Krapf that they did not climb high on the mountain because of the intense cold and that “white matter” rolled down the mountains with a loud noise. Noting that the rivers on the slopes of Mount Kenya flowed continuously, unlike other rivers in the area, which dried up after the rainy season had ended, Krapf and Rebmann deduced that glaciers existed on these equatorial mountains—a correct deduction that was initially greeted with derision by the scientific community.3
From information gleaned on their travels, Johannes Rebmann also co-created the “slug map”—an ambitious but ultimately misleading representation of East Africa, showing a single huge lake in the center of Kenya. The map, which was presented to the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1855, did much to stimulate further interest in the region, as armchair travelers who had never set foot in Africa argued fiercely about Krapf and Rebmann’s findings.
The travels of Krapf and Rebmann pioneered the early exploration of East Africa, but their travels only highlighted how little was known of the African interior and other adventurers soon followed. Next into the region were the British explorers Richard Burton and John Speke, eager to find the great lakes which were said to exist in the center of the continent and to locate the source of the White Nile. Burton and Speke mounted their expedition in 1856, a year after the “slug map” came to London. Like Krapf and Rebmann before them, they found the travel arduous, and both men fell ill from a variety of tropical diseases. In 1858 Speke sighted a vast lake, which he named after the British queen, and claimed it to be the source of the Nile. This infuriated Burton, who was too ill to travel at the time and who considered the matter still unresolved. This very public quarrel between two of Britain’s greatest explorers only generated even more interest among geographers back home, encouraging others who were keen to either confirm or disprove Speke’s claims.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, finding the exact location of the headwaters of the White Nile had taken on an importance that is difficult to comprehend today. It resulted not only from the excitement of exploring a continent hitherto unknown, but also from the British government’s obsession with gaining strategic control over large parts of the world. East Africa became even more important in 1858, when the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez started work on a canal to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The British considered this French-backed project to be a threat to their geopolitical and financial interests in the region, even though the canal was intended to be open to all nations. They instigated a revolt among the workers, bringing the construction to a halt.4 Despite these setbacks, the canal opened to shipping in November 1869, and it played an important role in speeding up the European colonization of East Africa by offering a quicker route to the Indian Ocean.
Even before the Suez Canal was opened, David Livingstone, the Scottish medical missionary and explorer, began his own search for the headwaters of the Nile. Livingstone had worked in South Africa since 1840, but now in January 1866 he arrived in Zanzibar to mount his first expedition in East Africa. He believed the source of the Nile was farther south than the great lakes; assembling a team of freed slaves, he set off inland and reached Lake Malawi in early August. However, his mission was not a great success; one by one, his porters deserted him, and most of his supplies and all of his medicines were stolen. Livingstone then traveled north through difficult swampy terrain toward Lake Tanganyika, but with his health declining, he had to join a group of slave traders to stay alive. Livingstone was ill for most of the last four years of his life, suffering pneumonia, cholera, and tropical ulcers on his feet.
Livingstone was appalled by the scale and barbarity of the slave trade in East Africa, which had continued despite Captain Owen’s attempts to contain it more than forty years previously. His reports back to England referred to what he called the “great open sore of the world”:
To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility.… We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead.… We came upon a man dead from starvation.… The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.5
Slavery was not new in Africa, where the use of forced labor goes back more than five thousand years. The Egyptian king Sneferu recorded in the third century BCE that he had attacked neighboring Nubia and brought back 7,000 black slaves and 200,000 head of cattle.6 The Arabs too traded extensively in human labor, and although the Prophet Muhammad laid down precise rules about the ownership of unbelievers, the Qur’an does not explicitly forbid human bondage.
Elikia M’Bokolo, a renowned Congolese historian, has written passionately about this international crime from the perspective of an African:
The African continent was bled of its human resources via all possible routes. Across the Sahara, through the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean ports and across the Atlantic. At least ten centuries of slavery for the benefit of the Muslim countries (from the ninth to the nineteenth). Then more than four centuries (from the end of the fifteenth to the nineteenth) of a regular slave trade to build the Americas and the prosperity of the Christian states of Europe. The figures, even where hotly disputed, make your head spin. Four million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another four million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as nine million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and eleven to twenty million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.7
Even by the end of the nineteenth century, an estimated fifty thousand slaves still passed through the slave-trading center of Zanzibar every year; from here, they were bound for the markets of Turkey, Arabia, India, and Persia. The Arab traders in East Africa had a reputation for being more brutal than the Europeans and made less effort to keep their slaves from dying. It has been estimated that for every five Africans taken prisoner in the continental interior, perhaps only one reached the slave markets in the Middle East, while the rest died en route. Nor could the Arab slave traders have been quite so successful without the assistance of the Africans themselves. Since it was easier to buy slaves brought to the coast than to hunt them down and capture them inland, the Arabs relied heavily on Africans, and especially the Kamba people, who lived between the coast and the central highlands in Kenya, to act as middlemen and organize huge caravans to bring slaves and ivory from the interior.8
The Luhya people of western Kenya also helped the traders. Their leader, Nabong’o Shiundu, was particularly keen to find allies who could help him build his power in the region, and he became notorious for capturing other Africans, including Luo, and selling them to the Arab slave traders.9 The island of Zanzibar and the nearby port of Kilwa on the mainland became the largest African shipping points for the trade, and as demand continued, Arab slavers penetrated farther and farther inland, even as far as Uganda and Congo, in search of new sources of slaves. Eventually in 1873 the British forced the ruler of Zanzibar to close his slave market and to forbid the export of slaves from the regions under his control. (Enforcing this rule was not easy, and even as late as the 1970s the United Nations received complaints of a thriving trade in black slaves from East Africa.)
Leo Odera described some of the personal encounters that his Luo ancestors had with the slave traders:
It used to be very common in this part of the world. It caused chaos and whole families would move on to evade the traders. Many years back when my family was still in Busoga in Uganda, the slave traders took many people, including Chwanya, one of my ancestors. The family did not expect him to return and they even held a mock funeral to mourn his passing. However, his son Onyango Rabala followed the Arabs. Onyango found them feasting by the lake and with the slaves in chains in a dhow. The slavers were cooking a long way from the water because of the danger from crocodiles, so Onyango swam up to the boat and pushed it into the lake—and it had all their weapons on board too! In Dholuo, we have a saying: rieko lo teko—brain is mightier than brawn. The Arabs ran away too frightened to retaliate, and Onyango rescued his father and two other slaves chained to him. When he returned, there was a great taboo because he had been mourned as dead and there were many rituals to be performed. He had to sleep in the granary for three days and eventually his second wife took him back.
Meanwhile, David Livingstone was still on his quest to find the source of the White Nile; however, by 1870 his reports back to London had ceased and the journalist Henry Morton Stanley was sent by the New York Herald newspaper to find the missing explorer; he arrived in Zanzibar in March 1871. Stanley was a Welshman, born in Denbigh; his father was either John Rowlands, the town drunk, who later died from delirium tremens, or James Vaughan, a married lawyer from London and a regular customer of Stanley’s mother—a nineteen-year-old prostitute. The baby’s name was entered into the birth register of St. Hilary’s Church as “John Rowlands, bastard,” and Stanley spent his life trying to live down the shame of being born illegitimate. As a five-year-old, he was given up to a workhouse; when he was released at seventeen, he fled Wales for America, where he changed his name in an attempt to erase his past. Stanley landed in New Orleans in 1858, and during the American Civil War he fought for the Confederacy before being taken prisoner, whereupon he changed sides and fought for the Union. He covered the Indian Wars as a journalist and gained a reputation for taking on risky assignments, but the thought of going to Africa terrified him. He called it an “eternal, feverish region” and had nightmares about what he might experience—even contemplating suicide.
Nevertheless, he assembled one of the biggest expeditions ever to set out from Zanzibar; his party was so large that he divided it into five separate caravans and staggered their departure to avoid attack and robbery. Hearing rumors in Zanzibar that a white man had been seen in the region of Ujiji, about 750 miles inland, he set off for the interior at the end of March with some 190 men, armed guards, and a guide carrying the American flag. On July 4, 1871, Stanley sent his first dispatch back to New York from Unyanyembe district, in modern-day Tanzania, in the form of a five-thousand-word letter. The resulting piece, which filled the front page of the Herald, quoted Stanley’s letter extensively, and ended with a promise from the journalist:
Our explorer says (July 4):—“If the Doctor is at Ujiji, in one month more and I will see him, then the race for home will begin”; but that “until I hear more of him, or see the long-absent old man face to face, I bid farewell. But wherever he is be sure I shall not give up on the chase.” Good words these from a trusty man.10
In one of the great encounters in history, Stanley found Livingstone in Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, on November 10, 1871. Stanley greeted the explorer with the now famous words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” to which Livingstone apparently responded, “Yes, and I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.” There is no direct record of this exchange—Stanley tore the pages describing this encounter out of his diary, and Livingstone does not mention these words in his own account. However, they do appear in the first description of the meeting, published in the New York Times, dated July 2, 1872:
I noticed in the center of a group of Arabs, strongly contrasting their sun-burned faces, a hale-looking, gray-bearded white man, wearing a naval cap, with a faded gold band, and a red woolen shirt, preserving a calmness of exterior before the Arabs. I enquired, “DR. LIVINGSTONE, I presume?”
He, smiling, answered yes.11
Stanley urged the missionary to return to the coast with him, but Livingstone was determined not to leave until his task—that of finding the source of the Nile—was complete. However, it was not to be; Livingstone died in Zambia, in the village of Ilala, on May 1, 1873, from a combination of malaria and internal bleeding caused by dysentery. Two of Livingstone’s loyal servants buried his heart at the foot of a nearby tree. Then they dried and wrapped his body and carried it back with his papers and instruments to the island of Zanzibar—a trip that took them nine months to complete. In April 1874 Livingstone’s remains reached England by ship, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London.
Henry Stanley was inspired by the expeditions of Livingstone and others, and in 1874 the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London partnered to finance a return trip. He had several objectives: first, to circumnavigate Lake Victoria and confirm Speke’s claim that it was a single body of water and the source of the White Nile; second, to finish Livingstone’s work of mapping the Lualaba River, which Livingstone thought might be the Nile itself; and finally and most ambitiously of all, to traverse the continent from east to west and thereby trace the course of the river Congo to the Atlantic. In circumnavigating Lake Victoria, he almost certainly became the first European to make direct contact with the Luo of western Kenya.
The challenge that Stanley set himself can hardly be overstated, even considering the extraordinary precedents set by other explorers. His preparations back in England for the expedition were hopelessly rushed, and he later wrote: “Two weeks were allowed me for purchasing boats—a yawl, a gig, and a barge—for giving orders for pontoons, and purchasing equipment, guns, ammunition, rope, saddles, medical stores, and provisions; for making investments in gifts for native chiefs; for obtaining scientific instruments, stationery, &c., &c.”12 Stanley left for Zanzibar on September 21, 1874.
By this time, the Luo had long finished their great migration. Rapidly increasing their population throughout the nineteenth century, the clans had spread both north and south of the Winam Gulf. Although other tribes lived in the area, the Luo were the dominant group, having very effectively assimilated many of the indigenous people into their tribe. In Alego, to the north of the Gulf, the descendants of the great leaders Owiny and Kishodi were still living in K’ogelo; Obong’o, (3) great-grandfather to President Obama, had left Alego some forty years before to establish a new subclan in the less crowded Kendu Bay area of south Nyanza. By 1874 his three sons, Obama, Opiyo, and Aguk, were in their prime and their families were well established on the southern shore of Winam Gulf.
Back on the coast, Stanley left Zanzibar on November 12, 1874, for the mainland and began his remarkable trek across Africa, with his porters carrying his boats in sections overland to Lake Victoria. This first stage of his expedition took 103 days and his pedometer recorded a distance of 715 miles through dense equatorial jungle. When the expedition eventually reached Kagehyi on the southeastern shore of Lake Victoria, their first task was to assemble their boats. The biggest vessel in his fleet was a steam-powered sailing sloop, the Lady Alice, which had been carried from Zanzibar in four parts. On March 8, 1875, Stanley wrote in his diary:
At 1 p.m. after vainly endeavouring to persuade Kaduma Chief of Kagehyi to accompany me as a guide as far as Ururi, I sailed from Kagehyi with 10 stout sailors of the Expedition in the Lady Alice, a cedar boat 24 feet long and 6 feet wide which we have carried in sections from the Coast for the purpose of exploring the Lakes of Central Africa. The men were rather downhearted and rowed reluctantly, as we have had many a grievous prophecy that we shall all drown in the Lake, or die at the hands of some of the ferocious people living on the shores of the Nyanza.13
In little more than two weeks, the expedition had sailed up the east coast of the lake and Stanley was approaching Luoland. At this point, his main concern was hippos in the water—they are still considered to be one of the most dangerous animals in Africa. On March 22, he stopped at what he called Bridge Island and wrote:
The island is covered with mangrove trees, whose branches extend far into the water, under which our boat might be screened by their deep shade.… From the summit of the island which is easy of access we obtained a fine view of lofty Ugingo Island and the tall steep mountains of Ugeyeya with the level plain of Wagansu and Wigassi.
From this point onward, Stanley was off the coast of Nyanza—Luoland. He wanted to go ashore to learn the names of some of the villages, but a large gathering of men carrying spears caused him to think better of it. A small, unpopulated island a safe distance away seemed a wiser choice to spend the night. Two days later, on March 24, the group landed at a place Stanley called Muiwanda, and he negotiated with the people to bring food to them:
We anchored within an arrow’s flight from the shore and began to persuade the natives to bring food to us, by holding out a bunch of beads.… Finally trade was opened, and while trading for food I found the people very friendly and disposed to answer all my questions. They spoke the language of Usoga with a slight dialectic difference. Neither men nor women wore anything, save a kirtle of grass, or plantain leaves which the latter wore. Men had extracted two front teeth of lower jaw, had bracelets of iron rings, rings above elbows and in ears. Shaved their heads in eccentric fashion …
The Usoga people (now known as the Wasoga) result from intermarriage between the Luo and the Luhya. (The Luhya remove two lower teeth as an initiation, unlike the Luo’s six.)
Stanley’s map of Lake Victoria shows that he completely missed the extent of Winam Gulf, assuming instead that the narrow entrance to this large bay was only the mouth of a small river. Three days later, on March 27, Stanley made contact with another group, this time on the northern side of Winam Gulf:
They came to repeat the request of Kamoydah, the King [to come ashore], but we begged to be excused from moving from our present safe anchorage, the waves were rough, the wind was strong. They begged, they implored and all but threatened. Three more canoes now came up loaded with men, and these added their united voices to invite us on the part of the King to his shore. Finding us still obstinate, they laid hands on the boat, and their insolence increased almost to fighting pitch.
The following day, they had another couple of unsettling encounters with the locals:
In the morning while sailing close to the shore we were stoned by the people. Two great rocks came near to crushing the boat’s sides, but a few revolver shots stopped that game. Arriving between the islands of Bugeyeya and Uvuma, we had the misfortune to come across a nest of Lake pirates who make navigation impossible for the Waganda. Ignorant of their character we allowed 13 canoes to range alongside and commenced a friendly conversation with them, but I was soon informed of their character when they made an indiscriminate rush upon the boat. Again I beat them off with my revolver, and having got them a little distance off opened fire with my elephant rifle—with which I smashed three canoes, and killed four men. We continued on our way hence immediately to the Napoleon Channel, and after a look at the great river outflowing northward [the Victoria Nile at the Ripon Falls], sailed to Marida where we rested secure and comfortable.
Stanley’s violent confrontation with the locals was an inauspicious start to British involvement in western Kenya, and back in Britain, people were beginning to be outspokenly critical of his actions. In his later years, Stanley was obliged to defend himself against the charge that his African expeditions had been marked by cruelty and gratuitous violence; he argued that “the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision.”14 In many ways, Henry Stanley was an enigma. From his writings, it is clear that he had a benevolent attitude toward many of the Africans he traveled with, to whom he owed both his success and survival on the continent. This included Kalulu, his boy servant who loyally stayed with Stanley from 1882 to 1887—Stanley even wrote a children’s book about Kalulu’s life, and dedicated it to the end of slavery.15 On the other hand, he was capable of using excessive violence, racial abuse, and condescending language toward Africans. He was, essentially, a man of his time.
Stanley succeeded in circumnavigating Lake Victoria, a voyage that took him two months, before heading west to trace the course of the river Congo to the Atlantic. He eventually reached a Portuguese outpost at the mouth of the river in August 1877, 999 days after leaving Zanzibar. Crossing central Africa was a remarkable feat, and of the 359 people who started on the expedition, only 108 survived. Stanley’s three British companions, Frederick Barker and Francis and Edward Pocock, all died during the expedition, as did his trusted servant, Kalulu.
Stanley’s expedition resolved the long-standing question of whether Lake Victoria really was the source of the Nile (something the Arabs had long known); the lake is clearly shown on a twelfth-century map drawn by the cartographer Al Idrisi. (Strictly speaking, Lake Victoria is only a feeder lake to the Nile; the true source of the Nile is the Luvironza [or Ruvyironza], which is the longest river to flow into Lake Victoria, and which bubbles up from high ground in the mountains of Burundi.) Although the lake is not quite as impressive as depicted on the “slug map,” it is still a vast body of water with a surface area of 26,600 square miles—making it bigger than the state of West Virginia and the second-largest freshwater lake in the world, after Lake Superior.
By 1880 a new imperialism was beginning to emerge among the industrialized nations. Germany, the United States, Belgium, Italy, and, for the first time, an Asian power, Japan, were all beginning to compete for what little “unclaimed space” remained in the world. As the rivalry among colonizing nations reached new heights, the nations with established empires—primarily Great Britain and France—consolidated their territorial gains. Technology too began to have an effect: the Suez Canal was now open and modern steamships could sail from Europe to East Africa in a fraction of the time previously required to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. The railway and the telegraph were revolutionizing transport and communication on land, and new advances in medicines to treat tropical diseases—especially quinine as an effective treatment for malaria—now allowed vast regions of the tropics to be accessed more safely by Europeans. The time was ripe for the biggest land grab in history.
The division of Africa—the last continent to be carved up by the European nations—was essentially a product of this “new imperialism.” Prior to 1880, the colonial possessions of European nations in Africa were relatively modest and were mainly limited to the coastal areas, leaving almost all the interior still independent. By 1900, almost all of Africa had been placed under the administration of various European nations.
Colonial powers had been particularly slow to establish a real presence in East Africa, which is no surprise considering the privations experienced by the early missionaries and explorers and the lack of easy river access to the interior. Furthermore, the reports of Krapf and Burton suggested that the East African region consisting of modern Kenya and northern Tanzania was ill-suited to peaceful infiltration, since this was the province of the Maasai and other warring tribes, through whose land even the armed caravans of the Arab traders feared to travel.
The first traders from overseas who were interested in neither slaves nor ivory had been American merchants from ports in New England and New York. By 1805, forty-eight trading ships from Salem, Massachusetts, were reported to have sailed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, and the first American vessel is believed to have reached Zanzibar in 1817. The United States dominated the East African trade until the Civil War, when the country lost its preeminent trading position to British, German, and Indian traders. However, trade in the region was generally slow, and by the middle of the nineteenth century East Africa was still a backwater.
Livingstone’s emotional reports about the Arab slave trade, which touched the public mood back home, provided the great stimulus in Victorian Britain to opening up East Africa. In particular, his last journey to Africa and his subsequent death in 1873 fired the imagination of missionaries to come and work in Africa. In the mid-1870s, Anglican missionaries began establishing new mission stations deep in the interior. A missionary who arrived with a few dozen porters to establish a mission in a native village had to set up what amounted to a small independent state, where he was recognized as a kind of chief by the other local headmen.16 By 1885 most of the nearly three hundred Europeans living in East Africa were Catholic or Anglican missionaries.17 Initially they won few converts. Islam had long been established on the coast, and the Arab traders had helped bring it into the interior. After 1880, however, Christian missionaries made significant inroads in the Buganda region, and by the end of the century Christianity was beginning to spread quickly throughout the region.
Around the middle part of the nineteenth century, the perceived wisdom in London held that African territories were too expensive to run and the potential yields too low to make a profit. As Europe’s foremost imperial power, Britain was keen to maintain an influence in the region, but it was not really interested in exercising any real power.18 Instead, Britain had three priorities on the continent, none of which required direct governance: closing the slave trade with the Middle East, encouraging the expansion of Christianity, and allowing legitimate trade to flourish. Missionaries tried to encourage British merchants and ship owners to establish a commercial presence in East Africa, but the response was mostly limited to Scottish entrepreneurs inspired by their countryman David Livingstone. William Mackinnon, a Glaswegian ship owner and member of the Free Church of Scotland, was one such businessman; he started out in life as a grocer’s assistant and rose to become one of the wealthiest men in Britain, running vessels from his British India Steam Navigation Company to and from Zanzibar from 1872 onward.
Up until the 1880s, 80 percent of the African continent remained under traditional and local control, with foreign interests confined almost entirely to the coastal areas. Then in 1885, in one of the most cynical and avaricious moves ever undertaken by colonial powers, outsiders superimposed a new map of the continent over more than a thousand indigenous cultures and regions. This unseemly scramble by European nations to seize vast areas of the continent—most of which was still largely unknown to them—would bring far-reaching consequences for every single individual living in Africa.