Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > The White Nile > Status Update

"'Selim said to me, "I see the Doctor, sir. Oh what an old man!"...So I did that which I thought was most dignified. I pushed back the crowds, and...walked down a living avenue of people, until I came in front of..."the white man"...and said, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"'...This then is the story...which has been more frequently recalled than any other single event in African exploration" (108-9).

"[Baker's] books were much more than adventure stories and his journeys had an importance that went far beyond their popular interest. He had imported something quite new into the Central African scene; he had made it comprehensible. He formed a kind of bridge between the original myths and legends and the reality of what was actually to be found in the country" (94).

"Baker is a kind of fulcrum in African exploration. He stands in the centre of all theories, emotions & moral attitudes, never deviating too far one way or the other...he is a practical, down-to-earth man, who knows precisely what he wants & where he is going to go. One feels with him...things will calm down in the end & everyone will come round to his sober & sensible way of thinking" (76).

"...Burton & Speke together had been to the northern end of Lake Tanganyika...& although they had not actually seen the Rusizi River, they had satisfied themselves...that it flowed into the lake & thus could not possibly be the Nile. Burton had felt 'sick at heart' at the time. But now...he felt much better. He simply reversed his previous decision & made the Rusizi flow the other way" (69-70).

"The king...now loaded one of the carbines I had given him with his own hands, and giving it full-cock to a page, told him to go out and shoot a man in the outer court: which was no sooner accomplished than the little urchin returned to announce his success, with a look of glee such as one would see in the face of a boy who had robbed a bird's nest, caught a trout, or done any other boyish trick" (51).

"...in Central Africa it was the fate of such people to remain in a state of arrested development...the light of human ambition was extinguished, the villages stayed chained to the Stone Age, &...life revolved in an endless ant-like cycle of crude customs...Every new generation gave way to the same passive fatalistic acceptance of things as they were, & reason was suffocated by habit & superstition" (40).

"By 1860 three separate kingdoms were established, Bunyoro in the north, Buganda in the centre & Karagwe to the south, on the western shore of the lake [Victoria]...these three little states had a certain coherency in the midst of a wilderness of utter barbarity; they formed...a tiny capsule of semi-civilization in the centre of the continent, and the outside world knew hardly anything at all about them" (39).

"These scenes are very beautiful, & yet there is a mysterious[ness]...about the lake [Victoria]. One feels here...the primitiveness of Africa, its overwhelming multiplicity in emptiness. At dusk the water tends to become still...& yet it conjures up notions of...witchcraft & superstition, of plotting & of ambushes in the dark, & all this is made worse because there is no definite object for one's fear" (32).

"And here, in almost a haphazard way, there occurred the beginning of a chain of incidents which was to set this journey apart from all others in Central Africa and lead on through endless bitterness and tragedy to the solution of the problem of the Nile...Speke wanted to go off and investigate the reports they had heard from the Arabs of the 'N'yanza'...Burton willingly let him go" (30).

"Burton, despite the plethora of books that have been written either by or about him, still remains beyond the range of ordinary definition. Above all else he was a romantic and an Arabist; he belongs decidedly to that small perennial group of English men and women who are born with something lacking in their lives; a hunger, a nostalgia, that can be set at rest only in the deserts of the East" (14).