The Blood Libel and the Search for the Origins of the Nile
Indian Ocean, north of Zanzibar-photo courtesy of Geoffrey Clarfield
During the 19th century the search for the origin of the Nile River was to Victorian England (and the rest of the Western world) what the space race and putting a man on the moon was to the Anglosphere in the 20th century. The (mostly) men who made this attempt had names like John Hanning Speke, Richard (later Sir) Burton, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley (of the I presume fame) and so many others.
All of them kept diaries. All of them wrote best selling books about their adventures and all of them became world famous household names during the Victorian era. Today they are remembered as the ‘explorers’ who discovered the Nile.
All of them were affected by Social Darwinism and its prequels, and in various ways believed that the white man was biologically superior to Africans and Asians and most of them assumed the natural superiority of Christianity.
Sir Richard Burton was one of the exceptions as in his writings he hinted that Islam was the equal of Christianity. He wrote nothing in public about the Jews and was eventually made a knight by Queen Victoria. Had she had access to his private writings about Jews and Judaism she and her advisors may well have had second thoughts about giving the man what the British call his ‘K,’ or knighthood.
In this article I would like to give the background history to Burton’s ultimately unsuccessful bid to discover the source of the Nile and perhaps some of the scapegoating he fell into due to his social eclipse after his failure, for it is always easy to find a scapegoat when things go wrong.
I have seen the Nile from the bridges of Cairo in Egypt. I have seen it from a boat on Lake Tana in Ethiopia. I have stood near to where John Hanning Speke first sighted Lake Victoria (Nyanza) and declared it to be the source of the White Nile on July 30, 1858, 168 years ago, two years before the start of the Civil War.
I have read about the Nile since I heard my first Bible story about Moses and the Exodus, his birth and near miraculous survival in a bulrush cradle snatched from the Nile by a Pharaonic princess. Its geology, archaeology, its history and the ethnography and music of its peoples comprise a dazzling mosaic of human diversity.
And so, every year when I visit East Africa (and I have just returned from ‘Safari’) I read something substantial about the river and its exploration. This winter I read the fine book about the search for the source of the Nile by American National Geographic writer Candice Milliard.
Milliard took five years to author the book, and it has become a best seller. River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (2022) is a non fiction retelling of the search for the source of the Nile which was largely carried out by Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, with the indispensable assistance of the former slave Sidi Mubarak Bombay.
With Milliard, Bombay ‘returns to history’ in this professionally written re-examination of this quest following in the literary footsteps of Tim Jeal’s Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (2012), and the writings of the Norwegian geographer Terje Tvedt. Then of course there is the chronicler of the Blue and White Nile, Alan Moorehead who wrote two books with those names in the early 1960s.
It is reassuring to know that despite the fact that I am a big fan of the history, archaeology and ethnography of the people of the Nile public interest in this history does not wane across the generations, as Milliard’s book was declared by the Washington Post as its Best Book of the Year. Goodreads gave it its choice award, and the book was a New York Times best seller.
Decades ago, the BBC produced a multi part dramatic recreation of the quest of Burton and Speke. I saw it when it first came on air and I have purchased a boot legged DVD of the shows online as the BBC has not yet seen fit to re release it. This is because it was honest and politically incorrect showing Burton and Speke, warts, and all, with their deep Victorian prejudices towards non-European peoples.
Burton believed that humankind had multiple origins and therefore by implication, some were superior to others. Speke had succumbed to the Hamitic Hypothesis which argued that lighter skinned people had brought civilization to Africa. For a fascinating history of this idea, it is truly worthwhile to read Michael Robinson’s book, The Lost White Tribe: Explorers, Scientists, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (2016).
It was the vestiges of this hypothesis that was the partial cause of the Rwandese and Hutu massacres during the 1990s as the Belgian colonialists believed the Tutsi were “Hamitic” and therefore deserved to rule. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Anyone who is able and willing to read the numerous primary sources (including Burton and Speke’s own and lengthy accounts of their expeditions) as well as letters, Royal Geographical reports and a growing secondary literature is to be commended, and Milliard is an engaging writer.
Here is the story in its essence. By the second half of the 19th century, the Royal Navy, the colonial enterprise, and the industrial revolution made Great Britain the most powerful entity in the modern world. Their colonies, protectorates, and other lands that they ruled over were immense and growing.
The aristocrats, industrialists and rising middle classes of the time were possessed by an ideology of “Muscular Christianity” which simply speaking, assumed that British religion and its way of life were what the French would later call a “civilizing mission” that entitled them to rule the world.
All of this was linked organically with a British lead in science, technology, and exploration. And exploration led to empire, for by the late 1800s Britain ruled both Egypt and the Sudan and was soon to colonize what later became Uganda and Kenya (and then inherited by conquest Tanzania, after wresting it from the Germans during WWI.)
The mostly classically trained men who directed the Royal Geographical Society had read their Herodotus and wistfully felt that the final, empirical and scientific discovery of the source of the Nile would be the geographic and scientific discovery of the century (They were almost right, but it was Darwin’s innocuous book that became the most transformative piece of 19th century science). At the time the public followed the quest with the zeal of Americans during the sixties who witnessed the first astronauts land on the moon.
These expeditions of exploration were often underfunded as was Burton and Speke’s expedition to find the “Mountains of the Moon” and the source of the Nile. And so there was room for terrible suffering and heroics which made these and earlier authors like missionary explorer David Livingstone, the rock stars of their time.
Book publishers stood to make much money from the sale of these travellers’ tales and in the case of Speke, they hired a first-rate editor that turned his terse notes into polished prose.
You could not find two more contrary social types than Burton and Speke. Speke was an aristocrat born and raised on a landed estate, a tough, gifted hunter and naturalist who had established a sound reputation in the Indian army and as a Himalayan explorer. He was tall and fair, soft spoken but had an exaggerated sense of his own self importance.
Burton on the other hand, was from the middle to upper middle classes. He was raised on the continent, looked at Britain as a foreign country, could attain fluency in a foreign language in a few weeks and spoke scores of them fluently.
He was historically minded, scholarly, ethnographic in his interests, a great swordsman, and a fearsome debater. He was instrumental in the founding of what later became Britain’s first anthropological societies, and he had a curious but academic interest in pornography which was often the topic of discussion at his club of fellow voyeurs called the Cannibal Club.
In Victorian England Burton was the consummate outsider who gained fame through his phenomenal exploits, the most colorful being his pilgrimage to Mecca disguised as an Arabic speaking Afghan doctor. I have read the first of the two volumes, and it is marvelous. It made him famous.
Speke and Burton first tried to get to the African source of the White Nile via Somalia. However, instead of moving west with the annual caravan from Berbera to Harrar in southern Ethiopia, Burton decided to go it alone. Once the caravan left the now deserted beach of Berbera his party was attacked by up to two hundred Somali raiders who killed one of Burton’s team and drove him away in the middle of the night.
They then captured Speke and speared him both before and during captivity. He only escaped when another group of Somali raiders raided the first raiders. Speke was miraculously saved by some Somali women that he and Burton had given shelter to just a few days earlier.
After then returning to England as failures, they both fought in the Crimean war and to make a long story short, were later given a second chance at the Nile by the Royal Geographical society except that they would move west and north from the island of Zanzibar.
How each of the authors have described their trials and tribulations is an exercise in comparative literature (and worth the time) but suffice it to say their porters often deserted them, they often ran out of supplies, they were set upon by insects and suffered from malaria and other terrible infections.
So much of their journey inland was conducted when the two of them would be moved by hammock by their remaining Swahili speaking porters due to illness. Lucky for them their guide Sidi Bombay was honest, loyal, and diplomatic. Without him they could have been murdered or died of disease.
The first climax of the tale comes when recovering on the shores of Lake Tanganyika (where I lived and worked for a year and a half) and which Burton hoped was the source of the White Nile, the younger and now healthier Speke suggested he go north and explore a large lake which local Arab traders suggested may feed the Nile. After an excruciating trip north Speke and his team found themselves on the shores of Lake Victoria (Nyanza). Speke, based on little evidence declared it to be the source of the White Nile.
When he returned to their camp at Lake Tanganyika Burton demanded the proof that Speke could not give him but thought that it may indeed be the source of the White Nile. They then returned to the coast. Burton did not dismiss Speke’s claim but thought it needed more investigation.
Speke left early for Britain and the two men agreed not to go public with their findings until they were both reunited in London. Speke, who harbored all sorts of real and imagined resentments against Burton, went public, became the darling of the Royal Geographical Society, was promised his own follow up expedition and published his own memoir which became a best seller. He was now the toast of the town.
Burton was furious when he came home to discover that the public was on Speke’s side. He was young, patriotic, loyal, tall, fair. Burton was perceived as older, more of a has been who had missed his chance, as well as an outsider who dabbled in tabooed subjects.
As the feud between the two progressed they were set to debate the source of the Nile at a major scientific conference in Bath. The soft-spoken Speke feared the sharp tongue of Burton. He retreated to his family estate for a morning of hunting on the day of the debate where he accidentally shot himself. The wound was fatal. None of this helped Burton’s reputation for the exploration community now had its young Achilles to idolize.
Speke was vindicated, the maps were drawn, medals given and not surprisingly by 1900 Britain was in firm control of Uganda, what was soon to become Kenya as well as the Sudan and Egypt. Simply put, Speke and Burton and their fellow explorers had either advertently or inadvertently paved the way for Empire.
History has not been kind to Speke. Writers and historians do not like his character, and he was vis a vis Burton, an injustice collector par excellence. Burton whose star had fallen in the 19th century has had a renaissance of interest in his life and work during the 20th and 21st century with its preferences for social misfits and anti heroes.
(Burton, although a servant of empire and India was ambivalent about the “civilizing mission of the West.” He was either a deist or agnostic and as a fluent speaker of Arabic and student of the Koran, sympathetic to Islam.)
And Victorian “horror of horrors” the at the time perception of the asexual Speke has been shattered by evidence that he had a child with his Ugandan mistress while at the court of the King of Uganda (and yes Speke pretended to be a Royal when he was dealing with the king). As for sex, Speke now appears as even more conventional and 19th century.
Many biographies and books have been written about Burton, and the authors are usually sympathetic towards him, for in modern terms he is more “interesting” and atypical of his time, whereas Speke was the living caricature of the muscular Victorian Christian (mistress and all), naming Nyanza Lake, Lake Victoria.
The last full biography of Speke was penned in 1972, and a recent book that mentions him has included the word “Cad” in its title. He is the kind of historical person that Monty Python would enjoy taking down.
Burton survived financially as an author and a low status consul in the British consular service. One of his favorite postings was Damascus. There he took an interest in the Jewish community whose members not too many years before, had been accused by a Catholic priest of stealing and killing Christians and using their blood in Jewish rituals. This calumny goes back to the Middle Ages and is called the Blood Libel. It is a well known and fabricated invention of anti Semites.
In Milliard’s book she only mentions that Burton’s provocative side insured that he would not finish his term as consul in Syria. She writes:
After some pleading on (his wife) Isabel’s part, he was appointed consul in Damascus, where he was thrilled to be back in the Middle East. By the summer of 1871, however his anger and bitterness, this time directed at the Jewish people of Syria, once again rose to destroy any hope he had and he was forced out.
When I read this part of Milliard’s book I was taken aback. Twenty years earlier the Jews of Syria had been publicly accused of the blood libel. It took no less than the personal intervention of Sir Moses Montefiore to prevent the Ottoman authorities of the time to take this calumny seriously.
Yet not only did Burton believe it, but he ended up writing two articles about perceived universal Jewish calumny. In his unpublished during his lifetime, article The Jew the Gypsy and El Islam he argued that most of the persecution of the Jewish people through the last two thousand years was because of the truth of such accusations. In another unpublished piece he wrote that the Sephardim (oriental jews) still practised human sacrifice in some form.
I have read the first essay carefully and I am not surprised that Burton’s wife made sure that it was not published while they were both alive, but manuscripts and books have a life of their own and you can now download it from the Internet.
If you want a proper history of the Blood Libel, it is worth reading the Polish born Catholic writer and America based academic Magda Teter’s book, Blood Libel, On the Trail of an Anti-Semitic Myth (Harvard University Press, 2020). I saw no mention of it in the bibliography of Milliard’s book.
Nevertheless, despite the anti Semitism and racism that underlie the work of Burton and Speke, after more than a century and half they remain intriguing Victorian overachievers who were engaged in a colossal 19th century feud that made them famous about who discovered what first.
Nineteenth century Europe was a place where medieval attitudes towards Jews were changing and there was growing tolerance in the air.
On the other hand, large swathes from all classes and countries were refashioning anti Semitism in the language of scientific racism which Burton endorsed. Let us quote the great explorer Sir Richard Burton himself:
“The negro is a born servile – not a servant. […] The so‐called civilization of the negro is from without; he cannot find it within.”
Burton, 1893
It is not surprising then that one of Burton’s many biographers titled her book The Devil Drives (Fawn M. Brodie in 1969). Burton is still worth reading as he was eyewitness to so much of daily life and mores in the nonindustrial world of the 19th century. His fundamental hatred of Jews, supported by pseudo history and pseudo science would have made him feel right at home in Germany during the 1930s.
Burton was clearly on the wrong side of morality in his profound disdain for Africans and Jews. As well, his amoral and self publicized atheism contributed to his shock value during Victorian times.
Today, to see Burton as the great moral failure that he was we need to consider him from the perspective of a quote by his French counterpart the poet Charles Baudelaire (as Burton was raised and educated first in France and only then as an adult in England). In The Generous Gambler, Baudelaire writes:
“As for me, if I may say so, I do not believe in God, but I do believe in the Devil.”
Milliard takes a keen dislike to Speke in her book. She is so captivated by Burton that she seems reluctant to state boldly that as an educated and worldly man of his time, he should have known better. He was fundamentally and preposterously morally bankrupt. And he reminds me of his contemporary, Richard Wagner.
Milliard should have stated this clearly, best seller or not, National Geographic, Washington Post, and the New York Times, not withstanding.
I wonder what Magda Teter might say; that today there should be no room for sympathy for the devil.