Candice Millard - River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

One of the first lessons I learned while working at National Geographic was that no writer tells a story alone. For this book, as with every book I have written, I have had the benefit of extraordinarily knowledgeable and generous advisers, people who have volunteered their time and expertise to guide me through a multitude of complicated subjects. After working on this book for five years, I have more people to thank than I could hope to include in these pages, but I will do my best.

Among the many experts I consulted for this book, no one has left a more lasting mark than Donald Young. A highly respected authority on Richard Burton, Don is the author of the exhaustively researched masters thesis The Selected Correspondence of Sir Richard Burton as well as the fascinating and beautifully bound book The Search for the Source of the Nile, both of which were indispensable sources for me as I began my research. Having lived in East Africa for the great majority of his life, Don also has an immense knowledge of and respect for the regions land, its people, and its history. He helped me to plan and carry out a research trip that began in Kenya, his adopted home, and continued to Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and Uganda, making it possible for me to follow the path that Burton, Speke, and Bombay had taken more than 150 years earlier. Even after I returned to the United States, Don continued to help me at every turn, connecting me with historians and archivists in East Africa, answering questions, and reading my manuscript. He has become not only an admired and valued adviser but a lifelong friend.

I am also deeply indebted to one of the worlds greatest paleoanthropologists, Donald Johanson, who introduced me to Don Young. I first met Donald more than twenty years ago in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, while on a research trip for National Geographic. He had just completed another dig, working near the site where years earlier he had discovered Lucy, one of the most complete skeletons of Australopithecus afarensis. It was a day I will never forget, both because I was meeting a legendary scientist, and because it was the beginning of a long and cherished friendship.

When I returned to East Africa to research this book in the spring of 2020, I had the great good fortune to meet a number of exceptionally knowledgeable experts on the region and its history. In Zanzibar, I worked with Said Suleiman Mohammed, a local historian who gave me a detailed historical tour of the island, from the building that once housed the British consulate, where Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke sought help from Hamerton and Rigby; to the ruins of the sultans once majestic palace; to the wrenching museum built on the grounds of the market where Sidi Mubarak Bombay and countless others were sold into slavery. I am also grateful for the help of Professor K. S. Khamis, head of the Zanzibar National Archives and author of A Brief History of Zanzibar, whose work helped me to understand the many changes that took place over hundreds of years on this singular archipelago.

In mainland Tanzania, I met Kelvin Ngowi, conservator of antiquities for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism at the Dr. Livingstone Memorial Museum in Ujiji Kigoma. Ngowi recounted for me the story of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanleys famous meeting on the banks of Lake Tanganyika, a meeting that Sidi Mubarak Bombay not only witnessed but helped make possible. Ngowi also took me to the path, lined with stately mango trees, that for hundreds of years led thousands of enslaved people out of Ujiji on their desperate, forced journey to the coast.

In Uganda, nearly as awe-inspiring as watching the Nile as it rushes from the Nyanza was visiting the kingdom of Buganda, which held on to much of its autonomy even after Uganda won its independence. While there, I met with Nalinnya Carol, the executive director of the Buganda Heritage & Tourism Board, and Bugandan guides Herbert Ssewajje and Ndawla Fred. They explained the kingdoms current accomplishments and challenges as well as its rich history and took me to see the palace of King Mutesa I, who met Speke and Bombay. While in Buganda, I also benefited from spending time with Taga Nuwagaba, author and illustrator of Totems of Uganda. Taga spent years tracking down the totems of each cultural group in Uganda, of which there are fifty-two in Buganda alone, meticulously researching his subjects, explaining the animals themselves and telling their stories, and drawing breathtaking illustrations of each totem, from the gray-crowned crane to the drop-tail ant.

In Kampala, I met with the distinguished professor of politics and anthropology Dr. Mahmood Mamdani, who is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and was then also director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research. Dr. Mamdani, an expert on the study of African history and politics and the intersection of politics and culture, is the author of a number of brilliant and thought-provoking books, including When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda and, most recently, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. He was kind enough to invite me to his office to discuss his work and the lives of Sidis who are still living in India. For introducing us, I would like to thank our mutual friend, the biographer Deborah Baker. I am also grateful to Dr. Mamdani for introducing me to the extraordinary work of the poet Ranjit Hoskote. Ranjits poem Sidi Mubarak Bombay, which he generously allowed me to excerpt for the epigraph of this book, is everything I hoped to say about Bombay and more, set in only a few wrenching, breathtakingly beautiful lines. The poem is part of Ranjits gorgeous new book, Hunchprose.

Early in my research, I also made several trips to the United Kingdom to work in some of the worlds finest archives. My first stop was the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, home to a treasure trove of letters, journals, notes, and sketchbooks, especially those of Speke and his later travel companion, James Grant. In the librarys Archives & Manuscript Collections, I would like to thank curators Alison Metcalfe and Kirsty McHugh as well as special collections assistant Jamie McIntosh. I am also grateful for the help of Claire Wotherspoon on the Manuscripts Reference Team at the vaunted British Library in London; Jonathan Smith, archivist and modern manuscript cataloguer at Trinity College Library, Cambridge; Nancy Charley, archivist for the Royal Asiatic Society; Chris Day at the National Archives of the United Kingdom; Judith Coles at the Bath Medical Museum; and Jane Sparrow-Niang, author of Bath and the Nile Explorers and volunteer at the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution.

Among the most valuable and fascinating of the archives I visited while in England was the library at the Royal Geographical Society, without whose extensive and carefully curated collection I could not have written this book. I am grateful to everyone who protects this archive and makes it accessible to researchers, but in particular I would like to thank Julie Carrington and Jan Turner, who answered my many queries and requests not just while I was in their library but for years before and after, as I wrote to them from thousands of miles away. I am also very thankful to Professor Felix Driver of the department of geography at the Royal Holloway University of London. Professor Driver, along with Dr. Lowri Jones, is the author of the Hidden Histories of Exploration exhibit at the Royal Geographical Society, a groundbreaking and important study of the porters and guides who made possible so many of the famed expeditions that the Society sponsored. Professor Driver also generously sent me a copy of his book about the exhibit.