Chapter 51At the Sources of the White NileAN DEN QUELLEN DES WEISSEN NIL
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Early the next day I travelled toward Port Florence on the Victoria Nyanza.
It was a wonderful ride across the high plateau. On both sides herds of antelope, zebra, gazelle. But it all seemed tame and small to me against my latest, great experience. And yet I now had a little of the feeling of the rider over Lake Constance1. I had, after all, come across it, across the monstrous thing, but really that was the greatest wonder of all.
The Victoria Nyanza with its luxurious saloon steamer seemed to me an immeasurable lake fringed with mountains; and Entebbe with its beautiful bungalows and tropical parks — it all seemed to me very tame and conventional. Only from the garden of the English Consulate General had one a full view, not only over the glorious shores but also over the “island of death2” lying opposite, the isle died out through sleeping sickness. The last women had recently been led away from there, the last mangroves, the home-thicket of the tsetse fly, the disease-bringer, shaved off. I painted a large study of the richly coloured, luminous picture.
The island of death looks like the island of the blessed. Entebbe, by the way, is thoroughly licked over by civilization. In all the shops one sees postcards of sleeping-sickness patients in every stage!
Then we went on to Jinje. That too is a flourishing place with countless villa quarters and downright glorious bungalows. Besides that it has one small sight, at which our elegant ship's captain had our tea served to us — on great slabs of rock in the middle of the water — the sources of the Nile3! I have painted them; they are very “pretty” and remind me vividly of the Rhine falls at Schaffhausen.
But perhaps it is only “civilization” that has spoiled them for me. —
And then we went on to Campala, the capital of Uganda, that is, only to its harbour. We have still two hours of rickshaw to ride there. A Uganda Negro, “prince Joseph,” came to fetch me. I had written to the Resident, who sent him out to me. Guided by him I saw all the curiosities of this “city of seven hills,” which really is very curious and singular.
Above all we visited the young, eleven-year-old4 “Kabaka” (king) in his palace in the style of the country, surrounded by the finest royal bast mats. He has an English tutor, and his living and sleeping rooms are furnished in a solid middle-class, comfortable, European way. Unfortunately he was himself away on a journey into the immeasurably great interior. The drum house in the palace court was likewise surrounded by the finest matwork. Drum-sound and matwork are the strongest peculiarity of these Uganda Negroes licked over by Arab culture, and besides that perhaps “barkcloth,” the fabric prepared from tree-bark fibres, out of which their “kamzu,” their Arab shirt, is woven.
Prince Joseph, a delicious cicerone, took me also into the “house of estates,” in which a session was just then being held. The ministers present there, in their long, flowing white shirts, reminded me of old Romans in the toga. They promised me, thanks to Joseph's interpreting, that they would visit me at the Tempio, for which, however, I am waiting to this day. Then one of the ministers took me along to show me his house. It had two storeys. Above, everything was hung with Arab gold embroideries, and in the bedroom stood an enormous European double bed. The minister's wife was at that time at the Christian church. The missionaries have worked hard in Uganda. The famous grass cathedral5, however, had recently burned down.
Now we went to the grave of the famous “Mthese6,” the grandfather of the young Kabaka. The way was long, past nothing but mat-surrounded single kraals, thickly planted round with bananas. Bananas are, after all, the chief yielding plants of the country. Through unsurveyable banana fields, in which scattered kraals lie everywhere, we had come to Campala.
“The whole land is of this kind,” Prince Joseph told me, “bananas and kraals, kraals and bananas, scattered over wide mountains and valleys.” The high, pointed grass kraal, the grave of Mthese the Cruel, looks, up on the height at the horizon, exactly like a pyramid.
When I had arrived up there, I marvelled at the wonderfully fine royal matwork that spanned the court. Inside it seemed quite dark. Only slowly could the eye distinguish the separate things. All at once I felt myself violently held back by the lower hem of my skirt. Now I saw it — old women, on all fours, who were bidding me halt7. These were the female relatives still living in the grave house. Tiger and panther skins lay over the grave; behind it there bristled spears and shields. Mthese was still faithful to the belief of his fathers. But his son next door had a Christian grave. The young Kabaka is even said to be a very good Christian. The Christian grave beside that of the blood-thirsty heathen Mthese seemed to me somewhat lacking in style.
In the Resident's garden I painted an evening lighting as well. He told me much of Roosevelt's visit8 and of their lion hunts together.
The Resident himself is one of the best living lion hunters, and he has whole albums of all the beasts he has shot.
Only late in the evening did I come on board. In the night the luxury steamer went back to Port Florence. There I strolled about for a couple of hours. It seemed to me a wretched and wild place.
And then I sat again in the train that was to bring me back via Voi and Nairobi to Mombasa.
I was still dragging along in my hand luggage the remainder of Dr. Förster's tinned provisions, but did not get through them at all, however zealously I worked at it! As everywhere in Uganda, they had granted me a whole first-class compartment for my second-class ticket; it was a quite comfortable way of travelling.
Most interesting of all to me were the gatherings of peoples at the stations. The stark-naked Kavirondos9 delighted me most. Like antique statues the women, when, their black “amphoras” on their heads, they strode with dignity beside the railway line to market. These wholly naked Kavirondos are said to be the most moral of all the Negro tribes. Countless tribes are represented at the stations. They come out of curiosity. But in ten years civilization will have triumphed here too. The beginning has indeed been made. I saw many who had folded their earlobes, dragged down ten centimetres and split, in which for the most part a coloured piece of wood the size of a thaler is displayed after the Swahili fashion, back up over the ear like rubber bands. It looked abominable. But that was the first sign of the new time. Then there were others who wore balloon caps. Still others had even pulled underpants over their shell-adorned legs. That was lamentable. Luckily the shell strings and blue glass beads peeped roguishly and betrayingly out of all the cracks and ends.
The most “civilized” of all, though, was surely a wholly naked Kavirondo woman who, while the train stood still, carefully and bashfully covered the bare little feet of her infant, most unaccountably clothed in a little shirt. I fear that among these savages civilization has a grateful public. Hung about entirely like Indian idols were the Kiukiu women. One's heart bleeds at the thought of their future refinement.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the rider over Lake Constance — The horseman of Gustav Schwab's ballad, who crosses the frozen lake in the snow without knowing what is under him — and drops dead of horror when they tell him on the far shore. Der Reiter und der Bodensee (1826) is one of the most memorized poems in German, and she reaches for it at exactly the right moment: the danger of the lion desert, invisible while she was in it, arrives all at once now that she is safely past. But she takes the ballad's turn away from it. The rider dies of the knowledge; she calls the crossing the greatest wonder of all — and, three paragraphs on, finds the sources of the Nile merely “pretty.”
- ↑island of death — Not a legend: the British had just emptied the lake's islands and shore by force, at the end of an epidemic that killed something like a quarter of a million people in Uganda. Sleeping sickness broke out around the northern lake about 1900 and swept the Busoga shore and the islands. Between 1907 and 1909 the protectorate moved the entire population off the islands and cleared a belt along the shore, burning the lakeside bush that harboured the tsetse — an evacuation on a scale rarely attempted anywhere. Hence her “last women led away” and “last mangroves shaved off,” four or five years on, and hence an emptied paradise in view from the government garden. The fly does not cause the disease, as she has it, but carries the parasite that does.
- ↑the sources of the Nile — The Ripon Falls at Jinja, where the lake spills north into the White Nile — the goal three generations of explorers died looking for, and drowned under a dam in 1954. Speke stood here on 28 July 1862 and named the falls for the president of the Royal Geographical Society, settling the question that had run from Ptolemy to Burton; Stanley, Baker and Livingstone all bent their lives around it. Fifty years later the shipping company serves tea on the rocks. And the joke turns twice: the falls she found merely “pretty” were submerged in 1954 by the Owen Falls Dam, so her painting records something no traveller can go and be disappointed by now.
- ↑eleven-year-old — Daudi Chwa II was fifteen when she saw his palace — one of the few points where her memory and the record part company. Made kabaka as an infant in 1897, when the British deposed and exiled his father, Daudi Chwa was born in August 1896 and came of age only in 1914; a regency of three Christian chiefs governed Buganda meanwhile, which is why she is shown the palace and not the king. Everything else she reports is exact — the English tutor, the European furniture, the Christian upbringing. Only the age is off, and by four years.
- ↑grass cathedral — The great thatched cathedral on Namirembe hill, struck by lightning and burned in 1910 — a second clock in this chapter, pointing the same way as the rest of the voyage. The Anglican mission had raised one huge grass-and-reed cathedral after another on Namirembe since 1890, each in turn lost to storm or fire; the one destroyed by lightning in 1910 held some four thousand people and was famous throughout Europe as the largest thatched building in the world. War delayed its brick successor until 1919. “Recently burned down,” from a traveller of December 1911, fits precisely — and so does what she does not say: nothing yet stood in its place.
- ↑Mthese — Mutesa I, kabaka of Buganda until 1884, and the tombs at Kasubi — a building that has outlived her, burned, and been raised again. Her spelling is kept. Mutesa received Speke in 1862 and Stanley in 1875, and it was Stanley's published appeal on his behalf that brought the missionaries whose hard work she notes a paragraph earlier; that he was also the grandfather of the boy on the throne she has just visited is exactly right. The domed grass house he had built as a palace became his tomb, and the burial place of four kabakas after him. It burned to the ground in March 2010, twenty-six years after it was made a monument and nine after UNESCO listed it, and was rebuilt in the old way, with the old materials, and reopened in 2023.
- ↑old women, on all fours, who were bidding me halt — Not decrepitude and not deference: the widows of the kabakas are the tomb's appointed guardians, and the line she had crossed is the one no stranger may cross. Behind the barkcloth curtain at Kasubi lies the kibira, the “forest,” where the kings are actually buried and which only the widows, the royal sister and a few clan officials may enter. Descendants of those women live in the huts around the courtyard and keep the tombs to this day — the office survived the 2010 fire and the rebuilding. So the hands at her hem were an institution doing its work, and the “old women on all fours” of her sentence were, in the room she had walked into, the authorities.
- ↑Roosevelt's visit — Theodore Roosevelt had come through barely two years before, on the shooting expedition that filled the Smithsonian. Leaving the White House in 1909, Roosevelt went straight to East Africa with his son and a party of naturalists, worked south to north from Mombasa through the Kavirondo country and Uganda, and came down the Nile to Khartoum in March 1910. The expedition took some eleven thousand animal specimens, lions prominent among them, and the account of it sold enormously. She rides the same railway, meets the same Resident and hears the hunt told again — a European traveller's Africa was a remarkably small room.
- ↑Kavirondos — A colonial catch-all, long since dropped, for the Luo and Luhya peoples of the gulf at Kisumu — and “the most moral because the most naked” was a stock saying of the age. The name came from outside and covered two quite unrelated peoples, one Nilotic and one Bantu, who never used it of themselves; Kenya's maps kept it into the 1940s. The compliment she repeats was a favourite of missionaries and travellers alike, who explained that clothing had brought immorality with it and that the unclothed were therefore chaste — a formula that let Europeans admire what they were in the same breath dressing. Roosevelt's party had passed the same platforms and written the same sentence.