Improving on Ptolemy
M. R. D. Foot
Two good books quite different in style cover two aspects of the same subject: the profound, continuing ignorance of western Europeans about that long-standing geo- grapher's puzzle, the source of the Nile. Ptolemy, who lived under Hadrian, knew — but how on earth did he know? — that the Nile issued from two great lakes in east central Africa; for many centuries after Ptolemy's death, nothing certain was estab- lished. John Udal, who went from New College, Oxford into the Sudan civil service, has written an admirable piece of history. He opens with a series of explorers of the upper Nile valley, from the Jewish David Reubeni who set out in 1504 (and was much mistrusted even in his lifetime) down to the Swiss J. M. L. Burckhardt who dis- covered Abu Simbel in 1813 and died of dysentery, aged only 32, four years later. He then places these men in their historical context, by laying out the various kingdoms and sheikhdoms through which they had passed, and moves on to the conquest of the Sudan in 1820-21 by Mohammed Ali Pasha, the viceroy of Egypt under the Ottoman sultan at Constantinople. He describes with feeling as well as under- standing 'the imposition of draconian and brutal military rule on a loose association of reasonably pacific Arab peoples', from which the Turks got none of the benefits for which they had hoped. Atrocity did not much increase their gains even in slaves.
He concludes with a summary of the achievements of the explorers, most of them British, who settled — it was thought — in 1862 what the sources of the Nile really were; and proposes a further volume to carry the history of the Sudan up to the end of the 19th century.
It is bad luck for Mr Udal that his splen- didly scholarly book comes out at the same time as one intended for a more popular market, which will attract a great many people with Christmas book-tokens to spend. Christopher Ondaatje, born and brought up in Ceylon, has written a magnif- icently illustrated book on the sources of the Nile, in which he confutes Speke, the supposed final discoverer of them. Two years ago, with four Tanzanian compan- ions, he set off from Zanzibar to follow as nearly as he could the footsteps of the great explorers of the 1860s and '70s: Bur- ton, Speke, Grant, Samuel Baker and his wife Florence (whom he had bought in a slave market on the Danube), Livingstone and Stanley. Ondaatje's party did not have to travel on foot or by donkey (Baker used to ride a bullock), but had two four-wheel- drive Land Rovers, camp equipment and a radio receiver, as well as more or less met- alled roads to drive along — 'my own jour- ney was simplicity itself by comparison' but there were troubles enough on the edge of fierce tribal conflicts; at least Ondaatje avoided coming under fire. And he did establish that each of the lakes Speke picked on as the Nile's final sources has a river flowing into it, as well as the Nile flowing out: more work yet to be done.
He has some sharp remarks about past colonial policies and some interesting sug- gestions about cosmology: may it have been the shifting of tectonic plates which gave rise to the Olduvai gorge and the sites of the great East African lakes that gave mankind its first chance to establish itself as a dominant species?
Previous page
