River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

Competition over power, land, resources, and Christian converts fueled European interest in Africa. Expeditions not only helped explorers become famous, they also helped their countries of origin gain dominance over other European countries. In this way, the drive for exploration was intertwined with the political and economic ambitions of European empires. 

Burton’s expedition is one example. Early expeditions to find the White Nile’s source tried to cross overland from Egypt, but disease, local peoples, and numerous other physical hardships defeated all these expeditions. The Royal Geographic Society and its explorers shifted their attention to starting expeditions on the eastern coast of Africa. The British government pushed hard for Burton to start in Somaliland, located in the Horn of Africa, because it was of strategic interest to the British. Control over Somaliland would allow the British to access the critical Bombay, India to Suez Canal, Egypt trade route. By using Somaliland rather than the more common routes, the British could avoid paying taxes to the Arab and Ottoman empires whose land they traditionally crossed. As part of the expedition, the British government expected Burton and his team to explore and map Somaliland, helping them gain control over the territory and thus furthering the dominance of the British empire.

Western colonialism also rewrote the history of the African continent and the European expeditions themselves. During the Napoleonic Wars, French scholars “were charged with appropriating everything they could unearth from the tombs or pry from the ground, attempting to assert French sovereignty over Egypt’s ancient culture” (2). The French were not the only European empire to appropriate other cultures’ artifacts. European powers sought artifacts to prove their own dominance over other European powers and local cultures. By claiming ownership of the artifacts, they also claimed ownership over the people and land, which enabled them to extract resources (human, land, and minerals) in large quantities from the continent.

Europeans also ignored the fact that the African continent had been inhabited for millennia. They left maps blank to show unchartered territory, yet during explorations of this so-called empty land, explorers came across either physical remains of ancient cultures and/or living ones. Rather than asking locals about the resources and land, Europeans drew their own conclusions, some of which were wrong, as was the case for whether the hinterland had one lake or several lakes that fed into the Nile River.

Explorers also renamed items in the landscape. Speke represents a particularly obvious example of this. He renamed Lake Nyanza to Lake Victoria in honor of the British queen. Not all explorers approved of this practice. Burton found this practice both preposterous and presumptuous. He wrote “My views…about retaining native nomenclature have ever been fixed, and of the strongest […] nothing can be so absurd as to impose English names on any part, but especially upon places in the remote interior parts of Africa” (215).

Finally, European explorers and their governments tried to rewrite the history of expeditions by leaving out the non-European explorers who supported them. Millard notes that the Royal Geographic Society only began trying to change this practice in 2009. However, the damage has been done, as many westerners still believe that Europeans alone mapped the world. Millard focuses on the story of Bombay in the hopes of helping to rectify this wrong, while also acknowledging the less savory political ambitions that helped fuel expeditions.