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These journeys – called in Arabic safaris - grew bigger and more complex with rise of the slaving empire of Zanzibar, the scarlet flag of the sultan at the head of the caravans sent out proclaiming his dominions over a huge area that none but a few of his servants would ever see. Yet still the caravans wound their way inexorably in and out, from Zanzibar to Lake Victoria, escorting slaves or leaving them dying by the roadside, porters staggering under the great tusks of ivory or bundles of silks they carried. Europeans, in their first explorations, changed little except the paraphernalia – their porters carried extra boxes of muskets and guns, or even cannon, for ‘pacifying’ villages and chiefdoms as they passed through, flanked by special regiments of guards recruited from Zanzibar before setting off. Zanzibar remained the jumping off point for safaris to the mainland – the place where merchants must be haggled with, porters and guards engaged, officials called upon, safe passages secured and bribes paid. Europeans who wished to set off into the wide, free spaces of the mainland had first to endure days, weeks, even months of sweating, jostling and complaining in the stifling heat of Zanzibar’s Stone Town. The best known figure in this slow procession inward from Zanzibar became David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer and missionary who became so famously lost that Henry Morton Stanley was dispatched by the New York Times to find him. Livingstone spent his life searching for the one thing he never found – the source of the Nile River, the question of which engaged the hearts and minds of Victorian society for decades. The honour finally went to the much lesser-known John Hanning Speke, a hazy character eclipsed for the most part by his more famous sometime travelling companion, Oriental linguist and explorer Richard Burton. Travelling thousands of miles inland at the head of a huge train of porters, sometimes so incapacitated they had to be carried on litters, Burton and Speke managed to be the first Europeans to look upon Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria. During the course of their safari, an insect crawled into Speke’s ear and rendered him deaf, Burton was racked by fever and almost blind, and the two men were barely on speaking terms by the time they returned home. Speke later died in a mysterious shooting accident hours before he was due to debate publicly with Burton as to the true origin of the source of the Nile. The source of the mysterious ‘fever’ that racked every European explorer on safari and even killed a few was the anopheles mosquito, not recognised as the source of malaria until 1898. The chills and cramps that the travellers complained of incessantly came from drinking polluted water, which was not boiled before drinking until well into the twentieth century. Flannel underwear and thick tweed, accompanied by one or two felt hats and a thick, quilted spine pad, were considered the only appropriate dress for exploring south of the equator, where temperatures rose into the hundreds for weeks at a time. Speke found it, but it was left to Henry Morton Stanley to prove the source of the Nile. He also found time to locate the absent Dr Livingstone - on the banks of Lake Tanganyika at Ujiji, after a journey inland from Zanzibar lasting more than a year. Stanley was not a man to travel light – on his first journey, in 1871, he took over 400 porter loads of supplies, including four porters who only carried brandy, wine and vinegar, and 22 who carried, in pieces, two boats, to be reassembled when a lake was reached. Finally came his huge bathtub, carried a thousand miles inland from the coast on the heads of Africans. Nor was Stanley one to pass gently through a slice of untouched Africa – vigorous fighting at all times was the order of the day, a trail of corpses and burnt villages was left in his wake only to enhance his reputation further, both at home and in his new-found domain. Then as now, image was everything. Headmen and porters’ leaders wore special headdresses to identify themselves; drums were beaten, muskets fired and flutes were played to announce the safari’s arrival. Europeans, when marching into a village or a new chief’s domain, wore full dress uniform, complete with swords, or in the case of early explorer Samuel Baker, full highland dress including a kilt and a tam o’shanter. Fortnum and Mason delicacies were eked out carefully until the last tin of foie gras was gone. |
