Europeans and Their Distorted "Discoveries"
By Daniel Karanja,
New Bedford, MA , FEBRUARY 19
We read in our school text books about the various Europeans who “discovered” this or that geographical feature such as Mount Kenya, Lake Victoria and so on. Sometimes this even extends to the discovery of some tribe. For those who are bothered by the utter nonsense of such claims but never had the time or the material to counter them, this article is for you.

No matter how one defines the term “discover”, many of those claims have more to do with the racial superiority complexes of the previous centuries than reality.

The term discover when used in this context usually refers to bringing out into the open something previously unknown. It implies that since the outside world (what we refer today as the Western world) was not aware of the existence of something, the first person who announced its existence was the discoverer.

 By that definition, quite a few books credit Burton and Speke with Lake Tanganyika’s discovery, Speke with Lake Victoria, Teleki with Lake Turkana and so on. For the sake of argument, let us accept that definition for the rest of this article and we will see how incorrect nearly all of the accepted discoveries are. It is one thing to say James Cook discovered Australia and quite another to say that Joseph Thompson discovered Lake Baringo or that John Speke discovered Lake Victoria.

The discovery of Lake Baringo according to many books including some editions of the The Encyclopaedia Britannica is credited to Joseph Thompson in the early 1880’s. However, we know that the missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf during his stay in East Africa heard about the lake in the 1840’s and 50’s from African long distance traders.

He also heard about another much bigger lake further North called “amburu”. These reports together with maps would be published many decades before 1884. Consider the Church Missionary Intelligencer, the magazine of the CMS that in 1860 printed one of these maps. In this particular map, there is a rather large lake north of Mount Kenya with the name Baringo clearly indicated next to it.  

In the December 11th 1883 edition of the Humburgischer Correspondent which carried a report from Gustav Fischer, there are clear references to lakes Baringo and Turkana. With regard to Lake Baringo, what then was Joseph Thompson’s achievement other than perhaps being the first European to see it?.

If that is not enough proof of prior knowledge of Lakes Baringo and Turkana, check out the published work of Rev. Thomas Wakefield in 1870 and his companion Rev. Charles New in 1873. In great detail, both men wrote about the human and physical geography of what became Kenya after interacting with intrepid Swahili traders who made careers criss-crossing the interior for commerce.

In the case of Rev. Wakefield, he wrote a very interesting and long article in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in the year 1870 in which he credits Sadi bin Ahedi, a Swahili man from Gazi near Mombasa with the source of the information.

This article is remarkable for the detailed information it provides about the people and geography of Kenya long before Joseph Thompson’s journey. In it and the accompanying map are Lakes Baringo, Naivasha, Nakuru and of course Lake Turkana. The information on Lake Turkana is especially very accurate in describing its shape, location and dimensions.

  Since the article was published in 1870, this was a good 14 years before Thompson’s visit and subsequent “discoveries”. Many books on the geography of East Africa associate Count Samuel Teleki with Lake Turkana’s discovery and Thompson with Lake Baringo. However the accompanying maps below prove not only prior knowledge of the geography of our country before the Europeans arrived but also the publication of this information in Europe.

Even if the Encyclopaedia Britannica could not credit the Swahili trader named in the article with these discoveries, why wouldn’t they credit Rev. Wakefield or better yet Dr. Krapf?  For the same reason, Samuel Teleki ‘s (usually referred to as the discoverer of lake Turkana) major achievement was in simply being the first European to see lake Turkana. 

Another interesting discovery is that of Lake Tanganyika. As a result of the various reports reaching the early missionaries at Mombasa of large water bodies further inland, one of these missionaries called Jacob Earhart drew up a map in an attempt to document these reports. In this map published in the mid 1850’s, Earhart combines lakes Malawi, Tanganyika and Victoria into one vast curiously shaped lake (as depicted in Figure 3 below).

But this confusion only existed in Europe and only due the lack of semi-thorough study. When Burton and Speke went to confirm the presence of this large lake and made enquiries at Tabora, an Arab trader at Tabora remarked casually that the depiction on Burton’s map was wrong and that there were in fact many distinct lakes.

Therefore Burton and Speke were travelling to a lake whose precise location was well known far and wide and even had a name. So who really discovered Lake Tanganyika? Was it the Africans who had seen it there all along for centuries and fished and travelled on it? Was it the Arab traders who took the lake for granted, used it for transportation, traded on its shores and shared this information with anyone who cared to know? Or lastly, was it Burton and Speke in 1858?

It is interesting to note that even Africans who lived in those days found such claims absurd. Take for instance the animal commonly known in English as Thomson's gazelle which was named obviously named after their “discoverer” Joseph Thompson.  Later on after Thompsons’ travels and around 1890, Frederick Lugard was walking to Uganda accompanied by amongst others, a remarkable young Somali called Dualla Idris.

They saw many of these gazelle’s and when Lugard happened to point out to Dualla that it had only been recently discovered, Dualla found such a statement incredulous considering that the antelope was well known in East Africa and the various tribes had names for it.
        
Figure 1. This map published in the Church Missionary Intelligencer magazine in 1860 shows the recent “discoveries” by Europeans. The blue line shows the Burton and Speke expedition while the red line shows some of the travels of Rebmann and Dr. Krapf.

Note the presence of a lake named Baringo just north of Mount Kenya long before any European travelled anywhere near it. Another interesting feature in the map is the complete absence of Lake Malawi whose existence was known at the time. In fact it appears on many maps drawn before 1860.

Figure 2. This is part of the map accompanying Rev Wakefiled's article published in 1870. Long before any Euopean set foot in these lands, it shows in great detail many of the places and people of Kenya such as Suvucha (Subukia), Leikipia (Laikipia), Lumbwa, Njemps, Lake Naivasha, Lake Baringo and Lorian. The distances and relative locations are obviously incorrect but other than that everything else is very correct.

Figure 3. This map summarizing the “discoveries” of Dr. Krapf, Rev. Rebmann and Rev. Erhadt was published in 1878 in the book “Through the Dark Continent” by Henry M. Stanley (In case you ever wondered, he is the one to blame for the phrase “Dark Continent”). It clearly shows Lake “Zamburu” (Turkana) way in the middle of nowhere but in the correct approximate shape and location. As for Lake Baringo, the location is a little off but the name is unmistakable.

Figure 4. On the left is a portion of an 1808 map of Eastern Africa and on the right is a similar section from a map dated 1829. On both, Lake Malawi is clearly shown; many decades before the arrival of David Livingstone in Africa. This two prove prior knowledge in Europe of the presence of Lake Malawi, why then is Livingstone sometimes referred to as the “discoverer” of the lake? It is quite probable that he was not even the first European to see it because there are a number of references to a lake of significant magnitude going back to the Portuguese era.

For comments , email the writer at Dkaranja@ajabumedia.com