Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-white-nile-tim-jeal"
The Nile Explorers
The "White Nile", by the Australian-born British writer Alan Moorehead, was published in 1960, and was followed two years later by “The Blue Nile”; both about the feverish attempts of legendary British explorers to discover the sources of the great, mysterious river with the ever-recurring seasonal flow through some of the driest desert land known on Earth, sustaining the life of millions, while its origins remained unknown for millennia. I read them in the early sixties, enthralled by the real-life adventures that far surpassed anything one could imagine in fiction. Burton, Speke, Grant, Baker, Livingstone, Stanley were either just names to me, or else I knew of them in a different context, for instance Richard Burton as the translator of the Arabian Nights tales and all around bad boy of the Victorian era. They, along with many others, all colorful individually and in the context of their relationships with each other, were the main protagonists who, with iron determination in the face of untold hardship, traveled step by arduous step into the heart of a continent completely unknown at that time to Europeans. Each and every one of these men was fascinating, with rivalries, ambitions, courage or lack of it, behaving honorably or deviously at times, pushing deeper and deeper into the “dark continent”. Each one deserves a book of his own, and many were written, first and foremost by the protagonists themselves who, returning to “civilization”, described in great detail the hardships suffered and triumphs achieved. Later, scholarly works, biographies, novels were written by others devoted to the era. Alan Moorehead took on this narrative and wrote what I still think is the definitive work on the subject.
When I read “The White Nile”, the idea of going to Africa myself, of actually setting foot on ground where Speke and Burton walked, was not even a fantasy: I had simply not imagined it as a possibility. The terrain covered by these nineteenth century explorers might as well have been on a different planet. But it so happened that in the late eighties and early nineties I was fortunate enough to go on several trips to Africa, spent time in Egypt and what is now Kenya and Tanzania – some of the very places the explorers traveled through long before they became nation states. The history of Africa from the first explorations that led eventually to the colonization of most of the continent by the end of the nineteenth century, and then in turn the gradual emergence of independent African countries in the second half of the twentieth is a subject well known to all who are interested in social history, politics, or geography. By the time I traveled to Kenya and Tanzania, they had been longstanding members of the international community and the British tradition lived on only in a few outposts in cities like Nairobi where the Muthaiga Club and the Norfolk Hotel still had traces of the Happy Valley era of the British presence. The home of Karen Blixen – better known to me at the time as the author of “Out of Africa”: Isak Dinesen – existed as a museum. These small touches of the past quickly disappeared as soon as one left the city. Once out in the astonishing landscape of Eastern Africa, on the savannahs with their endless vistas, the forests, the lakes teaming with wildlife, the hardships and difficulties the original explorers sustained were a constant presence in one’s thoughts. Arriving at Lake Victoria brought back the description of John Hanning Speke’s first view of it: as a miraculous vision of something merely imagined by Europeans until the moment he laid eyes on it. The thought of following well-traveled routes through this terrain a mere hundred or so years after the explorers mapped it was a constant delighted wonderment during the time spent there. On another trip in a boat going up the Nile – against all logic, up meaning south – there were the memories of the Moorehead book again and one remembered the catastrophic difficulties of such a journey involved a relatively short time ago.
Both before and after these trips I did a lot of reading about the terrain, the people, the history. “The White Nile” was not included in this syllabus, but throughout the additional reading and the trips themselves, it loomed large. It was one of those books I was planning to eventually reread. Another 20 years passed. The part of Africa I traveled in, including Egypt, had yet another colossal, historic upheaval, with the presence of religious fanatics increasing, and no end in sight as I write. Traveling there had become an act of courage instead of intellectual discovery and pleasure. I kept thinking of “The White Nile”, “The Blue Nile”, and how rapidly nowadays the known world turns on its head, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst – and at all times, living in the midst of “history” one cannot begin to imagine the long-term results of events.
In 2011, I read of the publication of a book, “Explorers of the Nile” by Tim Jeal. Excellent reviews compared it to the Alan Moorehead books, some of them even favorably. It covers the same period as “The White Nile” does, the explorations between circa 1850 and 1880, and the colonization following in its wake. I got around to reading Tim Jeal’s book only recently and I found it interesting – how could it be otherwise? It is data-filled, much fuller of direct quotations from the writings of the explorers themselves, and in possession of documentation that had emerged since Alan Moorehead wrote his books. He has an additional fifty years of history at his disposal, so he writes much more extensively about the consequences of colonization. He pays a lot more attention to the vast cast of subsidiary characters, the local helpers and hinderers – Arab and African -- of the obsessed Europeans who certainly couldn’t have accomplished what they did had they not had help. But “Explorers of the Nile” does not have the magic touch, the narrative gift ofAlan Moorehead, the irresistible momentum I remembered, my unwillingness to put the book down; that in spite of being a thoroughly researched factual tale, it did read like a novel.
In the last chapter of his book, Tim Jeal writes a considerable amount comparing "Explorers of the Nile" to "The White Nile", pointing out differences, needless to say, in the favor of his own book. As I said, there is a vast amount of literature on the subject of African exploring, and both books quote many of those sources in their bibliography. However, the author Tim Jeal clearly aims to supplant is Alan Moorehead, so of course, as soon as I finished “Explorers”, I went to fulfill the long standing promise I had made to myself and reread the “The White Nile”. For me, there is no question: the winner, and still champion, is Alan Moorehead, who did not disappoint after all these years, and still had the same effect on me, with the added pleasure of having physically been present at some of the terrain he writes about. If I were to recommend one author to someone becoming interested in that particular era, it would be Alan Moorehead.
When I read “The White Nile”, the idea of going to Africa myself, of actually setting foot on ground where Speke and Burton walked, was not even a fantasy: I had simply not imagined it as a possibility. The terrain covered by these nineteenth century explorers might as well have been on a different planet. But it so happened that in the late eighties and early nineties I was fortunate enough to go on several trips to Africa, spent time in Egypt and what is now Kenya and Tanzania – some of the very places the explorers traveled through long before they became nation states. The history of Africa from the first explorations that led eventually to the colonization of most of the continent by the end of the nineteenth century, and then in turn the gradual emergence of independent African countries in the second half of the twentieth is a subject well known to all who are interested in social history, politics, or geography. By the time I traveled to Kenya and Tanzania, they had been longstanding members of the international community and the British tradition lived on only in a few outposts in cities like Nairobi where the Muthaiga Club and the Norfolk Hotel still had traces of the Happy Valley era of the British presence. The home of Karen Blixen – better known to me at the time as the author of “Out of Africa”: Isak Dinesen – existed as a museum. These small touches of the past quickly disappeared as soon as one left the city. Once out in the astonishing landscape of Eastern Africa, on the savannahs with their endless vistas, the forests, the lakes teaming with wildlife, the hardships and difficulties the original explorers sustained were a constant presence in one’s thoughts. Arriving at Lake Victoria brought back the description of John Hanning Speke’s first view of it: as a miraculous vision of something merely imagined by Europeans until the moment he laid eyes on it. The thought of following well-traveled routes through this terrain a mere hundred or so years after the explorers mapped it was a constant delighted wonderment during the time spent there. On another trip in a boat going up the Nile – against all logic, up meaning south – there were the memories of the Moorehead book again and one remembered the catastrophic difficulties of such a journey involved a relatively short time ago.
Both before and after these trips I did a lot of reading about the terrain, the people, the history. “The White Nile” was not included in this syllabus, but throughout the additional reading and the trips themselves, it loomed large. It was one of those books I was planning to eventually reread. Another 20 years passed. The part of Africa I traveled in, including Egypt, had yet another colossal, historic upheaval, with the presence of religious fanatics increasing, and no end in sight as I write. Traveling there had become an act of courage instead of intellectual discovery and pleasure. I kept thinking of “The White Nile”, “The Blue Nile”, and how rapidly nowadays the known world turns on its head, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst – and at all times, living in the midst of “history” one cannot begin to imagine the long-term results of events.
In 2011, I read of the publication of a book, “Explorers of the Nile” by Tim Jeal. Excellent reviews compared it to the Alan Moorehead books, some of them even favorably. It covers the same period as “The White Nile” does, the explorations between circa 1850 and 1880, and the colonization following in its wake. I got around to reading Tim Jeal’s book only recently and I found it interesting – how could it be otherwise? It is data-filled, much fuller of direct quotations from the writings of the explorers themselves, and in possession of documentation that had emerged since Alan Moorehead wrote his books. He has an additional fifty years of history at his disposal, so he writes much more extensively about the consequences of colonization. He pays a lot more attention to the vast cast of subsidiary characters, the local helpers and hinderers – Arab and African -- of the obsessed Europeans who certainly couldn’t have accomplished what they did had they not had help. But “Explorers of the Nile” does not have the magic touch, the narrative gift ofAlan Moorehead, the irresistible momentum I remembered, my unwillingness to put the book down; that in spite of being a thoroughly researched factual tale, it did read like a novel.
In the last chapter of his book, Tim Jeal writes a considerable amount comparing "Explorers of the Nile" to "The White Nile", pointing out differences, needless to say, in the favor of his own book. As I said, there is a vast amount of literature on the subject of African exploring, and both books quote many of those sources in their bibliography. However, the author Tim Jeal clearly aims to supplant is Alan Moorehead, so of course, as soon as I finished “Explorers”, I went to fulfill the long standing promise I had made to myself and reread the “The White Nile”. For me, there is no question: the winner, and still champion, is Alan Moorehead, who did not disappoint after all these years, and still had the same effect on me, with the added pleasure of having physically been present at some of the terrain he writes about. If I were to recommend one author to someone becoming interested in that particular era, it would be Alan Moorehead.
